When I hear someone say whatever they want, however they want, to whomever they want, with no thought for truth or accuracy or fairness, much less common human decency;
when I know that someone is speaking simply to create an effect or to gain an advantage,
I’m going to call it “Trumping” from now on.
Yesterday I spent an hour online with our cable and internet provider, trying to set up a land line (dinosaurus as that sounds, we live too far out of town for cell service to be safe as the only alternative) and when David got home he spent another hour with them online. Then he still had to go into a brick and mortar store this morning to finish the deal. Everything about the process was frustrating and time consuming. Nothing about it could possibly be considered progress, except that the company employed as few actual live people as possible.
I don’t really understand this. How can technology advance so rapidly while our ability to actually get something done reaches new lows? Is that progress? What is progess, anyway?
Is it having microwave ovens? (Which cook so fast we get impatient when it takes 2 minutes to boil water.)
Is it having high speed internet or cell phones or wifi ? (Where we connect ourselves to the whole world via increasingly tiny electronic devices while we tune out the living beings right next to us.)
I’m afraid each speedy new technological device only makes us more impatient with each living breathing moment, only takes us further from the here and now … Which would be OK — hoky here and now shit, who needs it? — except that our bodies, those mysteriously interconnected physical, mental and spiritual temples which we inhabit, call the here and now home. They can only go so fast for so long, before they start breaking down.
Modern times are stressful. In very weird ways. Because the shadow aspect of all the devices that are supposed to make our lives easier and faster and more fun is: they don’t. It just ain’t so. Nobody’s talking about it — it would be very bad for business indeed — but our devices actually complicate, frustrate, and impoverish our lives as much as they enrich them. They’re so fast and so necessary to our overall entertainment and trendiness that we rely on them more and more every day, but when they quit working, as they often do, they’re far too complicated to fix. And expensive? Squished bug guts! What families pay per month today for electronic technology is more than families paid twenty years ago for their mortgages. These wonderful things are not at all affordable. We just can’t live without them, so we buy them anyway. Which creates another chronic stress, called chronic poverty.
Robert Bly said once, while lecturing on the human shadow, that “for every technological advance there’s a necessary and corresponding spiritual loss.” If we don’t get better at managing all the products our peers can think of, ole Robert might just be proven right.
What’s worse than Trump himself?
How many people don’t have a clue –will never have a clue– that they only like him because he expresses the worst parts of themselves. The parts they keep hidden until someone like Trump comes along and gives them permission to act out
.
He really is the shadow of the USA.
He’s what you find when you turn over the “God Bless America!” rock.
There’s actually nothing more cunning than the human unconscious. That’s right, the unconscious. The things hidden in there are part of our psychological make-up, part of who we intrinsically are, but they want to, and generally can, remain completely hidden from our conscious minds.
Unfortunately, that does not mean we’re free of them. It just means that we can’t see them in ourselves, that we can only see them in other people.
Here’s the General Rule, Part I: if there are some things you just can’t stand to admit about yourself, if you just can’t face some of your own stuff, then you’re going to see your own stuff on someone else’s face.
Guaranteed. Intrinsic parts of your being are not just going to disappear because you’re too embarrassed to acknowledge them. In fact, the reverse actually happens. The longer you fail to acknowledge certain qualities in yourself, the more you’ll see those qualities in other people. And those other people will look more and more awful to you as time goes by.
Let’s say I’m acting like a monster: all pissed off for no discernible reason. Maybe I’m stomping around blaming what’s happening to me on someone else, even if it’s obvious that I caused the problem. Or maybe I’m muttering under my breath about how out of it someone else is, without being able to hear how out of it I sound.
Muttering monsters aren’t just stupid and vindictive. They can only hear in certain frequencies, and can hardly see at all out of those little glaring eyes set way back in their heads.
So when I’m in muttering monster mode I can’t really see or hear what I’m doing. I can’t stop to wonder where all this ill will is coming from, or what such a habit says about me, or make any effort to snap out of it, and I certainly don’t look for a solution to whatever problem I’m muttering about.
Hell, no. I just ‘blame on’ until I run out of steam. Like it’s OK. Like it doesn’t matter. Like it’s not important. And hey, it’s totally normal anyway. Everybody does it! If someone I wanted to impress came over I could cover up my muttering monster with a big ole smile.
Or, I could be one of those people who don’t actually do much of their own original muttering. Maybe I let talk show hosts do most of my muttering for me. Maybe I’m one of those people who tune in to certain stations just so they can gloat and cheer while someone else says really monstrous things. If that eternal belly aching, fault finding, fact twisting, finger pointing, shockingly unfair running down of those who deign to disagree with me is only coming from talk show hosts, then I’m not really a monster, am I? Just because I listen to those stations?
Yep. Afraid so. Muttering monsters aren’t that easy to disown. They’re just as pathetically desperate for attention as everything else in my shadow. In fact, muttering monsters are so pathetically desperate for attention that the better I get at pretending I don’t have any monstrous thoughts myself, the more monstrous everyone else will look.
Kind of explains why we hear so much ranting and raving over the airways, doesn’t it? Why it’s so easy for us to get all hot and bothered about what someone else is doing… why we’re so attracted to vicious speculation and hateful gossip… why we just can’t seem to get off of certain subjects…
General Rule, Part II: we dwell on what others are doing to keep from having to look at what we’re up to ourselves.
“Hate has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them, and in fact the delegation of a piece of one’s own identity to them… the hater longs for the object of his hatred.”–Vaclav Havel
“Some unconscious ideas in a human being are incapable of becoming conscious to him in the ordinary way, because they are strenuously disowned and resisted by the conscious self. From this point of view Freud can say that ‘the whole of psychoanalytic theory is in fact built up on the perception of the resistance exerted by the patient when we try to make him conscious of his unconscious.’ The dynamic relation between the unconscious and the conscious life is one of conflict, and psychoanalysis is from top to bottom a science of mental conflict.
The realm of the unconscious is established in the individual when he refuses to admit into his conscious life a purpose or desire which he has, and in doing so establishes in himself a psychic force opposed to his own idea. This rejection by the individual of a purpose or an idea, which nevertheless remains his, is repression. ‘The essence of repression lies simply in the function of rejecting or keeping something out of consciousness.’ Stated in more general terms, the essence of repression lies in the refusal of the human being to recognize the realities of his human nature.” –Norman O. Brown, in Life Against Death, The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, Wesleyan University Press, 1985, p.4.
It’s the beast up there on the stairs, the one in the background, the one we don’t want to invite to dinner, that causes most of our problems.
It’s 9:38 at night. My grandson will get here at 7:30 tomorrow morning, and I’m 63 years old now, which means I should be going to sleep, not sitting here typing on this goddam keyboard.
But I just watched The Fisher King, with Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges. An old movie, made when there were still push button phones and cassette tapes, produced and directed by Terry Gilliam, of Monty Python fame. A wonderful movie. And knowing what we know now about what happened to Robin Williams later, I’m not going to be able to go to sleep until I write about it. Because Robin Williams’ story is psych-textbook human shadow.
What is the exact opposite, what has to be pushed way down and hidden most of the time, for someone to be as absolutely, eye-poppingly, out of control, over the top funny, as Robin Williams so often was?
Great sadness.
What is the exact opposite of the kind of personal bravery that never hesitates to make a fool of itself in public?
Great fear of actually being a fool.
Where does the brilliantly white light of spot-on performance come from? The light that Robin Williams could turn on in roles as different from one another as the earnest scholar in Dead Poets Society and the genie in Aladdin?
Great black depths of despair.
Robin Williams’ suicide is not just incredibly sad. It’s a warning. Another giant red flag. Heath Ledger. Philip Seymour Hoffman. World events and local politics.
“Go-oooo-d Mor-nnning, Vi-et-nam!” Go-oooo-d mor-nnning all of us.
Being rich is not going to save us. Becoming famous is not going to save us. Even being as stupendously talented as Robin Williams was — which most of us obviously aren’t — is not going to save us.
The only thing that could possibly save the human race from destroying itself — and I have to say I’m not actually sure this is at all possible — would be starting to give honest, critical, out-in-the-open attention to what the hidden parts of us want and need. As much attention as we do to the exposed parts.
The beasts we can’t look right in the eye are the beasts that will kill us.
“The task of confronting the brutal, destructive elements of the shadow has become the inescapable destiny of our species: if we fail, we cannot hope to survive.” –Anthony Stevens, analytical psychologist
“Myth changes while custom remains constant; men continue to do what their fathers did before them, though the reasons on which their fathers acted have long been forgotten.
The history of religion is a long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason; to find a sound theory for an absurd practice.” –James Frazer, The Golden Bough
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable, and therefore not popular.” –Carl Jung
I live in Portland, Oregon. If you’ve watched any Portlandia, then you’ll already be aware that we have a fair number of people who lean to the left up here in my neck of the woods. (I love that show. Its creators manage to point out, in an amusing way, how much the far left is just like the far right. It’s always good to poke fun at oneself.)
As Jung was saying up there in the quote, we can’t get any wiser by throwing platitudes around, or by recycling every single plastic bag, or by being as “good” as we possibly can. That’s just not how human consciousness works.
We only get smarter in proportion to how much we can stand to examine the darkness in our own hearts. We’ll only get to where we can ‘see the light,’ by being willing to look into the darkness. Our own darkness. Not other people’s, or the other party’s, or those creeps who don’t recycle. But our own darkness.
“As long as we maintain that all the evil is out there, our ship, like Ahab’s, in on the course of destruction. When we acknowledge that the capacity for evil lives within us as well, we can make peace with our shadow, and our ship can sail safely.”–Andrew Bard Schmookler, analytical psychologist
We can be totally sincere and still do real damage to others — that’s what fanaticism is. Sincerity and integrity are not necessarily equals.
Tunnel vision is actually a complex. When we act out of a complex we think we already know what’s going on, so we react to whatever happens in the same old way. In fact, we can’t see anything else happening but what we already ‘think’ is happening, because we simply can’t pay attention to things which don’t fit into our complex. Tunnel vision produces distortions. It demands selective inattention.
And it tends to get hysterical when opposites or oppositions appear.
We don’t have to go around nurturing that terrible separateness and woundedness, overreacting to everything: opposite opinions, our past, our parents, or even our present.
We could choose to operate from an easier, more productive place where they allow at least two sides to every issue. We could make a game out of it. Pin the tail on the complex, maybe.
Will having Republicans in control of most branches of government (as they are now) prevent argument and deadlock? Not likely.
“In this world things can be settled with an either-or attitude only very rarely.” –Goethe
“Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.” –Voltaire
