Moderates United

In “The Assault on Truth”, Jeffrey Masson detailed how Sigmund Freud early on stumbled upon nearly incontrovertible evidence that the sexual abuse of children–particularly young girls–was very common, even among Viennese elites.  He saw clearly the relationship between early unprocessed sexual trauma and hysteria, which had been his focal topic of interest.  He wrote a paper called the Aetiology of Hysteria (note how short the citation is) which he presented, and which was more or less greeted with silence.  No doubt many guilty men sat in the room.

Being fundamentally a vain and ambitious man, he realized, on some level (this is Freud we are talking about), that this work was a path to career suicide.  Thus, again on some level, he concluded that the patients must be fantasizing about such abuse, and we the modern Western world were eventually introduced to the idea that very small children have sexual fantasies about their parents, and not the converse.

Masson’s book was ground-breaking, and led in short order to a generalized awakening about the pervasiveness of child sexual abuse.  When it was published in 1984, the shocking revelations about a conspiracy in the Catholic Church to hide and protect pedophiles (as I have discussed, his role in covering up such crimes–and the discovery of his role–is likely why the last Pope resigned, in an historically unprecedented fashion) was years in the future. Altar boys were still being molested, and not believed when they reported their crimes.  This is not directly relevant to the point I’m about to make, but ponder that, and also ponder how in most of the world, there has been no such awakening.  It remains my strong belief that in the Arab world in particular, with its heinous and emotionally abusive segregation of and violence towards women, child sexual abuse must be endemic, both father-child, and brother-sister/cousin.

Here is the point I actually wanted to make: why not posit an inverse “Oedipal” dynamic?  Logically, if many children were in FACT sexually abused, were not many more simply looked at as sexual objects, in ways they could not understand, but readily felt?  What sort of introject is created when a parent expresses–perhaps unconsciously–sexual desire, but does not act on it?  Should we not have a name for what opposite sex parents feel when their children reach puberty and young adulthood?  Of course.  As a culture, we are imbeciles, primitives.  We feel and see almost nothing that matters.  We have iPads, but we do not understand love.

It is really a global tragedy that Freud both attained such influence, that he was clearly a genius, and that he abandoned nearly at the outset almost all of his most useful ideas.  My next post will be on Abreaction, which is a word I like the more I use it.

I am making progress.  I have said that a number of times, and it has been true.  I have had many, many, many miles to cover.  When I do things, I do them correctly and completely.

This week I have been noticing a “Gollum” voice and puzzling over it (to be clear, I am not hallucinating, but rather paying close attention to what I suppose I could call inner psychological moments.  I have a CD created by Paul Ekman on lie detection through what he calls “microexpressions”, which are facial expressions that for a split second betray true emotions, prior to being covered up.  There is an inner psychological process similar to this.)

As I analyze it, it occurs to me that it is an expression of self loathing IN TANDEM WITH a sense of some external perfection. Very early childhood wounds can create this emotion, but the mind needs reasons; and by mind I mean that mind/heart synthesis which in Hindi they call Mun.  It seeks reconciliation, and like water it flows by the easiest path, which quite often is not the correct path.  It does not necessarily, and in fact frequently does, describe truth.  Truth might be that your mother was a thoughtless uncaring bitch, but that is a hard truth to accept.

So your relatively Unconscious creates a perfection against which you have failed, and against which you will always fail.  You cannot hope to succeed, which means that you will never have to honestly explain your feelings of self hate.  The more Gollum hated himself, the more beautiful the Ring became.

And consider Sauron himself.  I have described evil as the inner acceptance of self hatred.  Can we say that power itself is the perfection against which such self loathing is measured?  That such people seek power precisely because they hate themselves unconsciously, and yet semi-consciously fight against this?  That they are in a conflict between justifying their existence and execrating themselves?  I think this gets at something very deep.

Remember, Sauron’s very existence–his soul, his self–was tied with the Ring, and hence the unrealizable ideal of perfection.  We have this common sense notion that, as Bruce Springsteen put it, (in what used to be one of my favorite songs) “Poor men want to be rich/ Rich men want to be king/ and the king ain’t satisfied ’til he rules everything.”  And at that, ruling everything would not be enough either, because in the end power was not actually the goal.  The justification of existence was, and the self loathing only increased in the process of doing all the evil things it takes to win and keep power.  The process is inherently contradictory.

In my own case, I have wondered what used to drive me to debate so hard and long on the internet.  I used to spend hours every day arguing with people, being insulted relentlessly (this is what leftists do: I state this clinically and as a matter of extensive empirical validation), and it seems to me it was simultaneously a desire to be abused, and a desire for power, both deriving from unprocessed emotions I have finally figured out how to process. That is why I can say this.

William James commented 100 or more years ago, that psychology really only has three tools: introspection, measurement, and a combination.  Clearly, when we want to generalize our own emotional processes, there is the risk that we projecting.  At the same time, many of us clearly share many life experiences, feel the same things, and this fact creates the possibility of connection.

Peace be upon you.

The attempt of people suffering from grotesque emotional wounds to maintain psychological stability in an unhealthy and ultimately self destructive way.

Can we call it what it is?  An Anschluss, without the anti-Semitism.  Austria was not what should have precipitated war.  The Rhineland was, particularly when combined with his audacity in stating his objectives openly.

Even I get a bit foggy, but most people have never been any other way.

Our sole national interest in this region is staying the hell away and avoiding a war.  If the Europeans want war, let THEM wage it.  Fucking assholes.  They want us to do their dirty work, but have never paid for any of it.  Our soldiers are too good for this shit.  Let Putin have the Crimea, and if Russia and Ukraine go to war, so be it.  If Putin wants to keep marching, then we can think about it, but from where I am sitting, he is reacting to what he no doubt perceives as a Western sponsored, anti-Russian coup in the Ukraine.

Put another way, we started this.  Why, I don’t know.  We don’t need anything over there.  It likely has something to do with the bankers who rule the world.

It would gratify me to see him put my financial plan into action.  He can do it.  Increasingly, I view the world through a prism of a fundamental conflict between the people of the world and the bankers, and the intermediaries through whom they act.

If someone can name me one strategic interest we have in the Ukraine beyond some amorphous concept like “credibility”, I will take this all back.  Hell: we elected Obama twice.  Why shouldn’t any right-thinking human being view us as a nation of gullible and weak imbeciles?  I do.

It’s a constant source of amazement to me how people will blame evil corporations for all our woes, then in the next breath call for more government of precisely the sort they just claimed the corporations had bought.  The situation is simple: large corporations buy politicians, then use the weapon of government to enrich themselves, not least by damaging competing small businesses.  Does anyone think Obamacare will hurt the Proctor and Gambles or GE’s–both of whom donated heavily to Obama–at all?  Of course not.  It will hurt small restaurants, mom and pop grocery stores, small retail franchises, car parts distributors, roofing companies, and EVERYONE WHO WORKS FOR THEM.  This is the plan, and voting Democrat does nothing but further it.  Yes, voting Republican has more or less amounted to the same thing over the past decade at least, but we are at least trying to change that.

The simplemindedness on display PARTICULARLY among allegedly educated people is breath-taking and jaw-dropping.

Aside from the constant intrusion of unwanted emotions and images, I think a core result of unprocessed trauma is a sensation of watching and not participating in life.  You can mouth the words, and do the things, but you’re not really there.

This is, I think, one of the reasons for self abusive behavior, whether through persistently bad decisions, irresponsibility, or outright self abuse, as through overeating, alcoholism, sexual addiction, drug abuse, or in extreme and literal cases, cutting and suicide attempts that are not serious: all of these, by bringing back pain, bring back a sense of presence.  You are once again a participant in at least  SOMETHING.

The hierarchy of spiritual development I have seen is relaxation, mindfulness, concentration.  But I think anyone who has experienced trauma cannot even achieve the first properly, without preliminary work.  What happens as you relax is the demons start to come out, you sense their advent, and pull back.  You have to deal with them first.

Let us call this stage purification, until I change my mind.  Preparation would also work.  Right-sizing, head straightening, delunaticism, Sanification, blending, mixing (light and dark): I’ll have to smoke on this a bit.  The best time might be the other side, which I think is approaching.

In what ways would the psychological/emotional lives of women be different if they never menstruated?  In what ways does it improve them, in what ways (beyond the obvious) does it lessen them, and what is interesting in this regard to speculate about (de Bono PMI)?

In what ways might human society have evolved differently if many if not most social orders (men) had not feared this process?

If the plane lost cabin pressure, and someone was at the controls–pilot or passenger–would not a rapid descent to lower altitudes be one of the first things they did?  One which was not “radar evading”, but oxygen preserving?  And again, if the electronics were scrambled and they either didn’t know where they were, or how to read the instruments (if the pilots lost consciousness and one or more passengers were trying to fly the thing) you would see both a rapid descent and an erratic trajectory that leads, ultimately, to a crash, either from losing fuel, or from misjudging altitude, all while trying to reach someplace safe.

And what if most but not all passengers were killed in the initial decompression?  Perhaps some remained conscious, but not those whose cell phones were called.  Or what if the survivors panicked and tried to broadcast relentlessly on a broken plane radio and forgot about their cell phones?  I read once about someone who died in a parachute jump because they gave him a left handed parachute, and all he thought to do was paw relentlessly where the pull cord would have been on a right handed parachute.  They could see the marks. 

If the plane was hijacked, it serves no purpose to fail to announce by whom and why.  No terror is achieved.  Even if it was a coordinated attack, and failed due to terrorist pilot error, there would be people who could anonymously announce their “success”.  This is their way of operating.  Nothing is achieved by mystery.

I listened to this interview on Eyes Wide Shut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inLfK535oxs

It occurred to me this morning I should likely find interviews with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but I tend congenitally to look more for background characters.  I tend to trust janitors more than CEO’s.

Be that as it may, she tried twice to share her view of what the movie was about, but I think the interviewers–as seemingly always happens with her in these interviews, which she warns them of at the outset–were more interested in her as a conduit to get to stories about the Master.

She says that in her view the essential scene is that in which Nicole Kidman admits to spending a pleasant day with Tom–Dr. Bill (and I will say that even I noticed the pervasive symbolism of the wallet, his badge of authenticity and importance, and money)–but still thinking about her Navy officer the whole time.

She was interrupted (it was a poor interview), but here is where I think she was going: we all of us are split in some ways between our social roles, our place, our mask, our persona, and our inner reality.  Kidman, there, was admitting to being simultaneously dutiful wife and what we would call a lustful slut.  She is saying, effectively, that women are just what Tom Cruise accused men of being.  They are no different.  Men have inner fantasy lives, and so too do women.  And these fantasy lives, even if they are not acted on, matter.

What both learned, what opened both of their eyes, is who they really were, how much larger and unconfined, and simultaneously vulnerable and free.  Fucking is what Kidman felt would finally close that circle, and complete some part of the process, put a stamp on it.

Alice starts the trip down the rabbit hole.  She admits to Dr. Bill her lust.  He in turn is startled to see expressed feelings he too has–he was clearly enjoying the attention of those two models, and it was unclear where it was going–but not fully brought into consciousness.  This is what women do better than men: feel consciously.  Cruise did not think about what he was doing at the party, but certainly it was inappropriate for a married man to be both flirting so aggressively, and consenting to receive such more or less open invitations to sex.

So we have the public, pious role, and the shadow licentiousness that rejects all limits–Kidman was willing to lose everything for a man she had never even spoken to (now: this is a fictional story line, and I can’t say how many women might actually feel this way, but the story comes from SOMEWHERE, and I have heard enough crazy stories to believe this may be how it actually works on strange, weird, inexplicable occasions).

Dr. Bill goes liminal.  He does eventually leave the gates of the city, to be received in another set of gates, but before that he meets someone whose ROLE is lust.  That is her point and purpose.  She is not trying to be someone else.  She is not split in any way, at least for the purposes of this analysis (prostitution is no doubt very emotionally demanding, and a profession likely largely populated by survivors of various forms of abuse).  Domino, as I have said, is the only person I like in this movie, other than Nick, who I will get to in a moment.

Domino represents a kind of way point, between role and the reality of lust.  Dr. Bill satisfies his role with her–he gives her money, as an attentive and responsible benefactor–but never fully meets his lust.  He does not integrate them, or even fully admit them.  Since he was quite prepared to spend the night out–based on his subsequent behavior, his primary concern was not with worrying his wife by staying out late–he could have slept with her, and in my opinion that may have been the honest thing to do.

But he doesn’t.  He meets his friend, whose eyes are to be shut by a blindfold, and who mediates the world of the orgy and the world of Dr. Bill’s role.  Nick goes into the party as himself.  He is the only one who does not wear a mask.  But his eyes are wide shut.  He cannot see, literally or figuratively, just what he has gotten himself into.

For his part, Dr. Bill, ironically, puts on a mask–symbolizing a role–where the role is the satisfaction of lust.  And as I have said, making sexual gratification a point and purpose also misses something.  Making it a role misunderstands its arbitrary nature.  Can this fundamental split be FULLY healed even within a carefully constructed ritual context?  I don’t know.  I don’t know.

Coming full circle–and the symbol of the magic circle plainly means something, and likely multiple somethings, in the childrens department store–Dr. Bill and Alice are left living in the liminal zone, processing it, while trying to fulfill the role of parents.  Alice, being more aware, sees that Dr. Bills experience has to be consummated, with her, within the space of both of their roles, and that for the time being everything will be OK.  I suspect they will get divorced later, though, as indeed Kidman and Cruise did.

I am thinking out loud, but there may be something here.  I will add that Davis, when asked if the filming was the first place she met Kubrick, said something like “Oh no.  I had lived in Britain at that point for several years.”  Now, I could live in Britain for decades and never meet anyone famous.  Implicit within that statement was the idea that she–as an attractive model “with great tits”–went to parties where people like Kubrick could be found.  What else that implies, I can’t say.

Here is a video of her singing what in 2007 was her latest single: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB6g66OYoKI

I put off seeing Eyes Wide Shut, because I knew I would react how I am reacting, and at that time, I was unsure how to make creative use of it.  Now I know how.  This is all good for me, even whatever nonsense I am writing.