Month: July 2016

Trauma resides in genes, too.  It is easy to focus on the survivors of labor camps, but ordinary civilians enduring bombing and shelling quite easily get it too.  Here, they say nearly 15% percent of Cambodians nationally seem to have it.

One good quote:

The children of the traumatized have always carried their parents’
suffering under their skin. “For years it lay in an iron box buried so
deep inside me that I was never sure just what it was,” is how Helen
Epstein, the American daughter of survivors of Auschwitz and
Theresienstadt, began her book Children of the Holocaust,
which launched something of a children-of-survivors movement when it
came out in 1979. “I knew I carried slippery, combustible things more
secret than sex and more dangerous than any shadow or ghost.”

More:

Traditionally, psychiatrists have cited
family dynamics to explain the vicarious traumatization of the second
generation. Children may absorb parents’ psychic burdens as much by
osmosis as from stories. They infer unspeakable abuse and losses from
parental anxiety or harshness of tone or clinginess—parents whose own
families have been destroyed may be unwilling to let their children grow
up and leave them. Parents may tell children that their problems amount
to nothing compared with what they went
through, which has a certain truth to it, but is crushing nonetheless.
“Transgenerational transmission is when an older person unconsciously
externalizes his traumatized self onto a developing child’s
personality,” in the words of psychiatrist and psychohistorian Vamik
Volkan. “A child then becomes a reservoir for the unwanted, troublesome
parts of an older generation.” This, for decades, was the classic
psychoanalytic formulation of the child-of-survivors syndrome.

But researchers are increasingly painting a picture of a psychopathology so fundamental, so, well, biological, that efforts to talk it away can seem like trying to shoot guns into a continent, in Joseph Conrad’s unforgettable image from Heart of Darkness.
By far the most remarkable recent finding about this transmogrification
of the body is that some proportion of it can be reproduced in the next
generation. The children of survivors—a surprising number of them,
anyway—may be born less able to metabolize stress. They may be born more
susceptible to PTSD, a vulnerability expressed in their molecules,
neurons, cells, and genes.

After a
century of brutalization and slaughter of millions, the corporeal
dimension of trauma gives a startling twist to the maxim that history
repeats itself.

I am well read, but I am not aware of any theorist dealing in depth with the idea of traumatized societies, and what effects may linger.  That does not mean they don’t exist–the questions, for example, are obviously being raised here, without taking the to me now obvious step of looking back at our own history, extended beyond Holocaust survivors–but this seems like a very potentially productive avenue of inquiry.

And as I have noted before, the issue of Islamic child rearing, which does likely have at least some commonalities across cultures, might for many be an intrinsically traumatizing process.  It may be that male children never bond properly with their mothers.  It may be that the fathers beat their sons so much that they enter the world already disembodied in some ways.  I don’t know.

I was reading about Bataclan.  What was not reported at the time was that a number of people were taken to the second floor while the police were organizing a response, tortured, and presumably the tortures filmed and sent off on the internet, as recruiting propaganda.  Eyes were gouged out, male testicles were cut off and placed in the victims mouths, females were stabbed repeatedly in the vagina.

The psychopathic dissociation necessary for this sort of thing, especially in people raised in Western civilization, in France, even if my Muslim parents, can in my view only come from trauma of some sort.  Perhaps I am naive: perhaps indoctrination is sufficient to develop psycho killers.

Certainly, I think that when we spontaneously call such people “animals” that is quite accurate.  Lions, in killing and eating raw zebras on the savannah, feel no moral compunction.  They do not have internalized senses of the zebra other than that it is food for them.  They are not human, and we do not expect them to be human.  They worship no God, and make no vows before that God.

Likewise, those capable of such crimes worship no God, and make no claims before that God.  They act from utterly inhuman, primitive, atavistic instincts far behind the capacities we have developed for moral reasoning, and basic empathy.

If you were 20 in 1918, and had kids at 21, then they were 21 in 1940.  Traumatized fathers (and mothers, since the war was hard on the home front too) raised kids who were likewise traumatized.  Such fathers do not process emotions correctly.  They fly into rages over the smallest things.  They are often emotionally absent.  The one thing they are not, in most cases, is nurturing.  The collective trauma in Germany–and I mean clinical trauma–was likely a key factor in the rise of Nazism. 

Totalitarianism is a system well suited to people unable to form an independent sense of agency, of personal control.

And post World War 2 everybody emerged from the aftermath, from the bombings the atrocities, the famines, the mass death, with MORE trauma.  Germany did not recover emotionally overnight.  France did not recover emotionally overnight.

And these people had children, and these are the people now running Europe.  Angela Merkel was born in 1954, as was Francois Hollande.  They were born into a world which had recently been filled with smoke, the smell of gunpowder, screams, terror, death and ruin.  Everywhere ruin.

Trauma tends to push people into one of two directions: absolute slavishness and obsessive compliance, or into hypervigilence and continual fear and bouts of rage.

Here is my conjecture (I am not sure how to elevate it to an hypothesis): Europe, as a result of its scars, has become hypovigilent.  They are not scared enough.  They have not retained a healthy sense of boundaries, of national sanctity.  They are complacent.  This is perhaps the root psychology behind what I have termed Sybaritic Leftism.

It is an odd thing: nations go to war, but how do the members of those nations heal their wounds? I am increasingly persuaded that while personal healing is obviously extremely important, there is a meta-level in which nations, or groupings which are culturally uniform enough to be bonded together somehow, also need to process shared grief and shame and rage, and horror.

We are old enough as a species to begin speaking intelligently about these things, to begin acting in healthy and non-compulsive ways.  We do not need to simply watch the Iranians build ballistic missiles with only one possible purpose.  We do not need to pretend that “radical” Islam is always the exception, and pretend that the masses of military aged men that have been allowed in do not present an existential threat to the congenial ways of life the Europeans have evolved after millenia of development.

Now, I don’t have a mancrush on Trump.  It remains to be seen how he will govern.  But I think it is POSSIBLE he will consistently do the right things.  I did not feel that about McCain or Romney, Cruz, Rubio, or any of the others (except Rand Paul, who never really had a chance).

Here is a, to me, interesting heuristic: put different candidates in Yankee Stadium, surrounded by working class schlubs.  Look at Hillary, saying to her advisor “What do I SAY to these people?  Do I shake hands?  How does one act”?

Look at Ted Cruz.  He is gaming in his mind.  He is calculating.  He is trying to figure out what angle he needs to hit to get their votes.

Bernie Sanders belongs there.  I will grant him that.  But even he is sitting there, thinking: “I can save all these people from their Capitalistic enslavement.”

George W. Bush is in a private booth, coming out from time to time to wave to everyone.  He has no real interest in sitting with working class folks.

Obama is sitting there, acting like he belongs, but he and everyone else there knows he doesn’t.  He is socially clumsy.  His persona is a facade.  He is deeply uncomfortable, even as he tries to mimic their dialect.

Trump is having the time of his life.  He’s the center of attention.  There is beer (which he doesn’t drink, as I believe he doesn’t drink at all), there are hot dogs, it’s a good game.  Did you see that hit?  WOW, what a catch!!!  Man, check out the knockers on her–nudge, nudge, don’t tell Melania I said that. He belongs there.  He is the only one.

Edit: I can’t resist adding to this.  John Kerry won’t touch the idea at all.  No interest.

Al Gore soon finds himself sitting alone.  Nobody likes him.  He is wooden, disingenuous, and belongs in a library somewhere reading something dull and useless.

George H.W. Bush largely makes no impact.  It is obvious he likes the game, but he is only a hit with the aging veterans.  Everybody else acknowledges he is there, and focuses on the game.  He doesn’t stand out in any way.

Reagan, of course is a big hit.  He has everybody laughing almost continually.

Clinton belongs. He is not really working class, and not really a good human being–in my considered view he is awful and nasty–but he is a world class actor, and knows his part extremely well.  This is the big difference between him, and Obama and Hillary.  Honesty is the difference between him, and Trump and Reagan.

I have been pondering his six foundations of moral reasoning, as I think he calls them.  They are Liberty, Authority, Sanctity, Loyalty, Fairness and Care.  The more I think about it, the more I think these are NEEDS, what we might call meta-psychological needs.  A good society contains all of them, in a healthy balance, but of course societies do not exist.  Hence meta-psychological.

You can build Fascism out of Authority, Loyalty (Meine Ehre heisst Treue) and Sanctity.  The German nation needed to be purified.  Mother Russia needed to be purified.

In evaluating our border problem, Democrats bring to bear only concern for the well being of Mexicans, and a sense that they deserve their shot too.  Republicans–while not ignoring these concerns, in that none of us are calling for a stop or even change in our current immigration numbers, which are about 1.5 million immigration visas annually–add to this Sanctity (we love our nation, and want to keep it clean from unwanted infestations of crime, disease, and chronic dependents), and Loyalty (we want to look out for American workers first).

If we view these six as NEEDS, and not emotional factors in decision making, we must see them as we see animal instincts.  We are very skillful animals, in some respects, very competent animals. If they are instincts, then they will ALWAYS find ways to expression.  If you hate all political leaders, you will still find a guru in a book.  You will still have a code.

And it is an interesting game that people who value only Care and Fairness–Sybaritic Leftists–have to play.  They have to allow, for example, a latent need for Authority to creep in under another banner.  Their loyalty is to an ideology, but they don’t call it an ideology: they call it truth.  Their calls to eradicate racism are an appeal to Sanctity.  Etc.

It is always best to reject sainthood, and realize that if want to live a life free of emotion, you are only going to make the emotions negative, violent, and unconscious.  You make them worse.

To my mind, the classical Liberal mindset balances all six needs, and does so consciously and diligently.  Out of that balance, success: strong, stable, long lasting success, of the sort we have seen in our own nation, and have led other nations to as well.

Within Kum Nye there are three levels of relaxation.  I’ve likely mentioned this. The first is superficial (but still quite nourishing), where you just calm down.  It is what you feel after a good massage or a long bath.

The second is Kun Zhi, which if memory serves means in Tibetan “solid ground”.  This term makes sense to me now.  In your practice, it is like you are drifting slowly down in the water, and you reach bottom, and you stay there a long time.  It feels like the bottom.  It feels solid.  Then one day it dissolves and you keep going, and as it dissolves, you feel all the bad stuff, all the ego, all the darkness, all the evil, the hidden rages, the compulsions, the shit.

And of course they don’t disappear, but their work depends almost entirely on subterfuge, on hiding, on not being seen, on operating under the radar.  Once you can see them, you can name them, and you can dissolve them as they arise.  This capacity is, itself, the beginning of the capacity for conscious growth, for learning.

This is the third level, the one at which within this particular practice “meditation”, per se–concentration–becomes possible.  It is pointless until then, or largely so.

At some point the fatuousness of this world view becomes clear. They run into barriers, are forced to traverse obstacles, and their view gradually changes to a sense that the world is evil. Go look at the poster in Spencer’s to see what today’s kids are thinking about, or play some video games.

I would compare and contrast this with William James very interesting distinction between once-born and twice-born Christians. The first, in my terms, are naive. They think God will literally supply their wants and keep evil at bay. Evil does not concern them.

The twice-born, in contrast, have both a somewhat fatalistic world view which is quite accurate in terms of recognizing how fragile we and everything in our lives is; and a peace which comes from acceptance, from squaring what is, with Gods will. This belief is redemptive and absolutely safe, because it excludes nothing.

The issue today is that we have in the public domain no good redemptive practices and beliefs. Suffering has no meaning. A victim is permanently marked. It is not a transitional condition, but a part of public mythology.

I have obviously written extensively about the intellectual perversions which must precede moral perversions.  You get good kids feeling guilty about real crimes, but you neglect to mention that very few people committed most of the crimes, and you also neglect to mention that such crimes have been committed by all peoples against all peoples since, presumably, long before the beginning of recorded history, which itself began (in the West at least) with an account of a war, of slaves, of mass violence, of death, and of atrocities (although I don’t know how much was recorded).

I have, likely inappropriately, chosen to comment on some threads on Facebook posted by some very leftish friends of mine I have met at what I call my “hippy things” whenever discussing them with my kids, since Breathwork is certainly a bit out there.

And in this process it occurred to me that if we look at the issue strictly from a psychological perspective, if we bring in the idea of healthy emotionality, it is extremely UNhealthy to want to or feel the need to take responsibility for crimes you did not commit, could not have prevented, and cannot correct now even with apologies and grotesquely masochistic behavior.

I do not think it could be healthy to ask anyone else to act in an unhealthy way.  It seems a reasonable standard and goal that we all be happy coexisting.  The word for a compulsion to see others suffer for any reason is sadism.

The past is the past.  It is done.  It is in the present that ALL of us must live and make decisions.  I am not sure what the word is, but the compulsion to pretend as if the past is present, and can be expiated in the present, is certainly delusional and sick.  No healthy person would or could ask you to be sick with them.

Problems certainly need to be solved.  But if we reference specifically the problem of blacks in this country, they create most of their own problems, expecting white people to come along and fix them.  It remains my belief that if we stop treating them like children, stop allowing them to act like children, they will mature as a community, and bring forth their full contribution.

If we don’t give all the jobs to fucking robots.

I’ll give you a hint: it’s the same motherfucker who won’t let our bombers target ISIS oil tanker convoys headed for the Turkish border.

And it seems to me this will not happen until we put moral pressure on Muslims in general by NAMING them at the highest level, by asking their leaders at the highest level how and why they can accept and advocate the murder of innocents anywhere for any reason.

It is disgusting to me that people are so brainwashed that they can somehow reactively, reflexively, worry more about Muslims–many of whom are quite guilty–being blamed for this attack than feel rage at the crushed bodies of infants and their toys.

Until people recover their moral compass, we can’t ask any more of the Muslims themselves.  If we are confused, why should not they be?  And it is likely they are less confused: their faith readily commends the murder of anyone who is not a Muslim.  Our faith–Liberalism–abhors the murder of the innocent.