The Mask of Wotan

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Jung's influence has been keenly felt among screenwriters, novelists, and 'literati' who often speak of a "character's shadow", one of several "archetypes", a mirror image of what writers call the "higher self".

Related to Jung is the work of Russian folk tale expert, Vladimir Propp, who thought of "archetypes" as "masks" deliberately worn by "characters". Masks are worn in both stories and in life for one of two purposes or both: to reveal and/or to hide.

In most cases a benign public mask is worn to hide facets of the personality with which the character has not yet made peace. It is a mistake, however, to equate "the shadow self" with evil. It is merely the hidden self —the object of one's search for oneself. All "quest" stories are symbolic of this process.

In both Propp and Jung, the idea is to peel away this "social facade", this "mask". The metaphor "peel away”, however; suggests that the process is an easy one but that is rarely the case. Masks are the gestalt of one's various defense mechanisms and unconscious anxieties. "Peeling them away" reveals an "authentic self" that is often difficult to reach and more difficult to confront or deal with. Throughout the 50's existentialists and other "beatniks" talked about getting down to one's "real self". Jung believed that this “real self” was the source of vitality and creativity lurking behind a "neurotic shield" —a mask!

Jung was influenced by numerous mystical religions and Taoism where terms like "inner room", "the great void," the "realm of essence," the source of things", the "Id", the "Creative Unconscious" are common.

The biggest obstacle to objective truth is one's own self image or "mask". We are inclined to believe whatever is consistent with whatever belief system makes us feel good about ourselves. In America, an entire political party espouses what was once called “supply side” economics but now more often referred to as “trickle down” theory.

The theory is discounted by almost every reputable economist upon abundant objective and verifiable data. That this theory continues to be popular suggests that it's appeal does not lie in objective truth. “Trickle down” economics is most surely a convenient rationalization of an increasingly self-absorbed life style catered to by the mass media. Has modern America become a culture premised upon mass denial?

In 1936, Jung was trying to figure out what was happening in Germany —just as many are trying to understand what is happening in America today. Jung wrote an essay called "Wotan" and in it, he tried to understand developments under Hitler, in terms of the mythology of the god Odin, a.k.a. the Germanic god Wotan. Jung wrote: "We have seen him come to life in the German Youth Movement." I am not sure what "gods" have come to life in America —but I am more inclined to characterize them as fallen demigods, if not demons. Gods or Demons, they are but manifestations of the human personality. There may be a "Wotan" in all of us.

A “mask” is but the smiley face we show the world; it's origin is the lie that we tell ourselves. I recently watched a PBS documentary about a Japanese sergeant who "supervised" British and Australian POW's in Southeast Asia during WWII. Though he had been convicted of war crimes in connection with the treatment of the POW's, the man —some 55 years after the fact —still denied that thousands of POWs had been literally worked and starved to death under his supervision. He denied that he had beaten many of them himself with wire whips.

There is an old saying that the truth will set you free. But here was a man who by his denial had made himself prisoner to the lie —his own lie. In Jungian terms, his life --premised as it was upon the falsehood that he told himself --was "inauthentic".

Dr. Gustav Gilbert, the American psychologist at Nuremberg, came to some conclusions based on his experiences keeping Nazi war criminals alive until final sentencing could be carried out. He said that he had come to understand the nature of "evil". Evil, he said, was an utter lack of empathy. I might add: that empathy with another is only possible if one has come to terms with one's own "shadow", one's own "source of creativity", one's own humanity. One who cannot see humanity in him/herself or in another is a Nazi in spirit; and “Nazism” typifies what Jung would have called the "inauthentic" life, a life lived upon lies and denial. A life lived behind a false mask.

---

---

The Mask of Wotan

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Jung's influence has been keenly felt among screenwriters, novelists, and 'literati' who often speak of a "character's shadow", one of several "archetypes", a mirror image of what writers call the "higher self".

Related to Jung is the work of Russian folk tale expert, Vladimir Propp, who thought of "archetypes" as "masks" deliberately worn by "characters". Masks are worn in both stories and in life for one of two purposes or both: to reveal and/or to hide.

In most cases a benign public mask is worn to hide facets of the personality with which the character has not yet made peace. It is a mistake, however, to equate "the shadow self" with evil. It is merely the hidden self —the object of one's search for oneself. All "quest" stories are symbolic of this process.

In both Propp and Jung, the idea is to peel away this "social facade", this "mask". The metaphor "peel away”, however; suggests that the process is an easy one but that is rarely the case. Masks are the gestalt of one's various defense mechanisms and unconscious anxieties. "Peeling them away" reveals an "authentic self" that is often difficult to reach and more difficult to confront or deal with. Throughout the 50's existentialists and other "beatniks" talked about getting down to one's "real self". Jung believed that this “real self” was the source of vitality and creativity lurking behind a "neurotic shield" —a mask!

Jung was influenced by numerous mystical religions and Taoism where terms like "inner room", "the great void," the "realm of essence," the source of things", the "It", the "Creative Unconscious" are common.

The biggest obstacle to objective truth is one's own self image or "mask". We are inclined to believe whatever is consistent with whatever belief system makes us feel good about ourselves. In America, an entire political party espouses what was once called “supply side” economics but now more often referred to as “trickle down” theory.

The theory is discounted by almost every reputable economist upon abundant objective and verifiable data. That this theory continues to be popular suggests that it's appeal does not lie in objective truth. “Trickle down” economics is most surely a convenient rationalization of an increasingly self-absorbed life style catered to by the mass media. Has modern America become a culture premised upon mass denial?

In 1936, Jung was trying to figure out what was happening in Germany —just as many are trying to understand what is happening in America today. Jung wrote an essay called "Wotan" and in it, he tried to understand developments under Hitler, in terms of the mythology of the god Odin, a.k.a. the Germanic god Wotan. Jung wrote: "We have seen him come to life in the German Youth Movement." I am not sure what "gods" have come to life in America —but I am more inclined to characterize them as fallen demigods, if not demons. Gods or Demons, they are but manifestations of the human personality. There may be a "Wotan" in all of us.

A “mask” is but the smiley face we show the world; it's origin is the lie that we tell ourselves. I recently watched a PBS documentary about a Japanese sergeant who "supervised" British and Australian POW's in Southeast Asia during WWII. Though he had been convicted of war crimes in connection with the treatment of the POW's, the man —some 55 years after the fact —still denied that thousands of POWs had been literally worked and starved to death under his supervision. He denied that he had beaten many of them himself with wire whips.

There is an old saying that the truth will set you free. But here was a man who by his denial had made himself prisoner to the lie —his own lie. In Jungian terms, his life --premised as it was upon the falsehood that he told himself --was "inauthentic".

Dr. Gustav Gilbert, the American psychologist at Nuremberg, came to some conclusions based on his experiences keeping Nazi war criminals alive until final sentencing could be carried out. He said that he had come to understand the nature of "evil". Evil, he said, was an utter lack of empathy. I might add: that empathy with another is only possible if one has come to terms with one's own "shadow", one's own "source of creativity", one's own humanity. One who cannot see humanity in him/herself or in another is a Nazi in spirit; and “Nazism” typifies what Jung would have called the "inauthentic" life, a life lived upon lies and denial. A life lived behind a false mask. ..

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Why do 'Tea Baggers' and Republicans make such good l'il Nazis?

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Research repeatedly confirms that Republicans are naturally inclined to exhibit authoritarian personality traits. The research leading to this conclusion is extensive. It was Carl Jung, in his 'The Undiscovered Self' who said that about thirty percent of every population was certifiably psychopathic.

The survival of civilization, he maintains, depends on individual awareness of both the conscious and unconscious aspects of the human psyche. The exploration of the unconscious, in particular, leads to self-knowledge and with it recognition of the duality of human nature --its potential for evil as well as for good. Jung believed that it is this self-knowledge that enables the individual to resist the collective power of mass society and the state and to cope with their possible threats.

--Princeton University Press, Review:The Undiscovered Self, C.G. Jung

Dr. Gustav Gilbert, who had been tasked with keeping Nazi war criminals alive until they could be hanged, concluded that his 'clients' had a defining characteristic in common: all, he said, 'lacked empathy'. Later, Hannah Arendt, founder of the New School for Sociological Studies in New York, coined a phrase to describe what she had observed of "Adolph Eichmann at this trial: 'the banality of evil'.

Jung believed that it was important for the individual to resist the "collective power of mass society". Some of the more recent research is surveyed by John Dean in his "Conservatives Without Consciences". Essentially, conservatives are 'authoritarian' types and tend to sort themselves into strong leaders (fuhrers) and eager, non-questioning followers (good l'il Nazis). I suspect that it is this personality and the various 'props' required of it that results in Republicans having more night mares and 'night terrors' than do normal people.

Liberals and progressives, by contrast, are often independent, creative, original. An 'ENTP' type is one of several types identified by the Jung Personality Test, similar to the Myers/Brigg test. ENTP, specifically, is described thus: "Inventor". Enthusiastic interest in everything and always sensitive to possibilities. Non-conformist and innovative."

This kind of personality will not produce good, unquestioning follower-conspirators! This kind of person does not make a good li'l Nazi. The GOP, by contrast, is over run by good li'l Nazis, eager to click their heels and carry out orders from on high, specifically, the GOP national headquarters and the 'johns' who purchase the GOP on K-street in DC.

The 'tea bagger' movement is the 'enemy within', the anti-democratic, pro-fascist brownshirts who may have already destroyed the US ideal of a free and democratic republic --something that we have most certainly NOT seen since the rise of Ronald Reagan.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, however, came to Carter’s defense on Wednesday. “Jimmy Carter tells the truth about some, not all, but some of the rabid rage against President Obama,” Olbermann stated, “and is thus the recipient of the automatic blowback from those whose livelihoods depend on enabling the ragers to tell themselves it is not racism that they feel.”

In introducing the segment, Olbermann claimed that he could offer “at least 37? cases that he believes “prove President Carter to be correct.” He also noted that Rush Limbaugh had attacked Carter’s statements by saying “Jimmy Carter is the nation‘s hemorrhoid” — and retorted, “”Well, I got to defer to him here, the nation‘s asshole would know about the nation‘s hemorrhoid.”

Some of Olbermann’s examples seem fairly indisputable, like a poster used at tea party demonstrations that depicts Obama as an Africa witch doctor, or Limbaugh’s claim that Obama has made it okay for black kids to beat up a white kid on a school bus.

--Olbermann: 37 racist incidents prove Carter is right

Download video via RawReplay.com

Already losers, a now desperate GOP has made a Faustian bargain with bigots. It is significant that the so-called GOP 'leadership' has yet to issue a tepid reproach, let alone a strongly worded condemnation of a movement that is 1) un-American 2) bigoted 3) made of liars to a person!

Until the GOP leadership steps forward and condemns the 'tea bagger movement', I remain confirmed that the 'tea bagger' movement is encouraged by the highest ranking members of the GOP embittered by the legion of failures chalked up by their party since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.

We have a right NOT to be intimidated!'

If we are attacked, we will fight back and have a right to do so! Violence must be met by an organized, effective and appropriate response. Tea baggers, having shown the world the face of bigotry, should just crawl back under their slimy rocks. They have very nearly undone the gains we thought we made in the sixties. They have rolled back the clock.

Encouraged by the GOP, bigoted liars like Rush Limbaugh, and, even worse, the hypocrites daring to spew this venom from the pulpit, the GOP resorts to form --encouraging ugly mobs to disrupt legal democratic town hall meetings. I urge that legal town hall meetings be defended by arms and armor. Enough is enough. The Democrats have a right to meet and they have a right to defend themselves against felony violence. They have a right to oppose and defend against a gang of would-be felons!

Also see:

• A Spiritual Mind Movie
• Edward R. Murruow: Why the Fairness Doctrine Must be Restored
• It's the Hypocrisy, the Financial Collapse, the War Crimes
  
• How the US Became a Vassal State of China
  
• Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes
  
• The US Army Document That Proves the US is the World's Number One Sponsor of World Terrorism
• Dissecting the Scrambled Brains of the GOP
  
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization
  [w/LINKS]
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization [PDF]
• How the GOP Pays Off its 'Base' of Elites
  

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Carl Jung, George Bush, and 'White Heat' ---the Psychopathic 'Will to Power' and World War

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

No one has yet made a psychopathic killer criminal movie quite like 'White Heat', a 1949 classic starring James Cagney. The unlikely parallel was George W. Bush whom many feared would reprise Cagney's searing, most memorable performance. For as long as Bush occupied the Oval Office, anyone could imagine George Bush as Cody Jarrett, figuratively climbing on board a nuke, declaring himself to be on top of the world before blowing it all up!

Monsters from the ID

As Bush occupied the Oval Office, monsters from his id made themselves at home. Typically thin-skinned, Bush became unhinged amid the chance that he might plunge the world into a world war the external projection of his internal struggle against demons of his own creation, the spawn of his twisted id.
In the movies, this dynamic was embodied in Cagney's portrayal of Cody Jarrett, whom reviewers called an 'incendiary, disturbed gang leader '. Jarrett, like Bush, became an archetype, a Wotan, literally, the 'monster from the id', Bush's id, the collective worst impulses of mankind made flesh.

As in the movie, 'White Heat', primitive forces threatened to drive Bush in a Hegelian dialectic to an inexorable and iconic apocalypse. In 'White Heat' the process resulted in one of moviedom's most memorable and most disturbing scenes. It has been described as apocalyptic, a word that describes Bush's 'adventure', his war of naked aggression against Iraq, a war in which some 1.6 million people have died by his hand.

White Heat is, of course, the movie that gave us "Top of the world, Ma!", as iconic a Hollywood misquote as "Play it again, Sam" and "We don't need no steenking badges." That cry caps the climactic gunfight showdown between Cody and an army of T-men atop a natural-gas refinery, and the famous fireball explosion that follows may be Cody himself finally spontaneously combusting, not just the timely immolation of all those volatile fluids beneath him. By that point in the story, Cody is pure uncorked id. Whether doing away with witnesses at his gang's train robbery in the opening scenes, or taking cool pride in the casual comeuppance he gives his ambitious lieutenant Big Ed (Steve Cochran) — who has been helping himself to something on the side with Cody's sexy, vulgar wife and mob moll, Verna (Virginia Mayo) — Cody is a force of nature, as efficient and cold-blooded as a forest fire. Not even the government men, who track Cody with sophisticated postwar technology, can stop him. Instead, it's the human element that brings about Cody's Greek tragedy downfall. He risks a trusting friendship with Vic Pardo, a worshipful crook he meets in prison. Pardo, though, is actually Hank Fallon (Edmond O'Brien), a "copper" who infiltrates gangs by posing as a criminal. When Cody catches on to "Pardo's" betrayal, he almost weeps, a staggering moment of pathos that inflates Cagney's character to three dimensions, guaranteeing that we'll remember him long after the movie has ended.

But it's Ma herself who really makes Cody Jarrett more than just another homicidal thug. Played with chilling mother-love by Margaret Wycherly, Cody's devoted mom is as amoral as any killer on the screen. When middle-aged Cody sits on Ma's lap for love and comfort before one of his crippling headaches, we witness a dynamic that's just steps away from Hitchcock's Psycho eleven years later. In a prison chow hall, Cody snaps when he hears that Ma has died, and Cagney draws out Cody's berserk grief into an animal wail that doesn't stop as he barrels crazed through prison guards who drop before him like straw men. When the big moment comes, Cody's exclamation to the heavens before his apocalyptic finale is as inevitable as Oedipus's own fate, but with a kablooey that 1949 audiences may have felt was not just dramatic, but outright atomic. The gangster genre would never be the same old same old again.

...
When the big moment comes, Cody's exclamation to the heavens before his apocalyptic finale is as inevitable as Oedipus's own fate, but with a kablooey that 1949 audiences may have felt was not just dramatic, but outright atomic. The gangster genre would never be the same old same old again.

--Mark Bourne, White Heat

Wotan Awakened

In 1936, Jung tried to describe what was happening in Germany —as many now try to understand what is happening in America. In his essay, "Wotan", Jung described developments in terms of the mythology of the god Odin, a.k.a. the Germanic god Wotan. Jung wrote: "We have seen him come to life in the German Youth Movement."

We were even beginning to regard war between civilized nations as a fable, thinking that such an absurdity would become less and less possible in our rational, internationally organized world. And what came after the war was a veritable witches’ Sabbath. Everywhere fantastic revolutions, violent alterations of the map, reversions in politics to medieval or even antique prototypes, totalitarian states that engulf their neighbours and outdo all previous theocracies in their absolutist claims, persecutions of Christians and Jews, wholesale political murder, and finally we have witnessed a light-hearted piratical raid on a peaceful, half-civilized people.

--Carl Gustav Jung, Wotan

It is not 'Gods' who came to life in America but, rather, demons loosed upon an unsuspecting world. Gods or demons, they are but manifestations of the human personality.
Bush shares his 'demons' with a demographic represented in Germany by the Nazi party, in America by the Ku Klux Klan, the radical right, the GOP.

The banks are not to blame. There is a generalized contraction of credit in the non-bank financial system where structured finance has blown up and taken half of Wall Street with it. It's the end of an era. Here's how economist Henry C. K. Liu sums it up in his "Open Letter to World Leaders attending the November 15 White House Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy":

"Neoliberal economists in the last three decades have denied the possibility of a replay of the worldwide destructiveness of the Great Depression that followed the collapse of the speculative bubble created by unfettered US financial markets of the 'Roaring Twenties'. They fooled themselves into thinking that false prosperity built on debt could be sustainable with monetary indulgence. Now history is repeating itself, this time with a new, more lethal virus that has infested deregulated global financial markets with 'innovative' debt securitization, structured finance and maverick banking operations flooded with excess liquidity released by accommodative central banks. A massive structure of phantom wealth was built on the quicksand of debt manipulation. This debt bubble finally imploded in July 2007 and is now threatening to bring down the entire global financial system to cause an economic meltdown unless enlightened political leadership adopts coordinated corrective measures on a global scale."

Rome is burning. It's time to stop tinkering with a failed system and move on to "Plan B" before it's too late. 

--Mike Whitney, This Is Not A Normal Recession: Moving on to Plan B

The GOP threatens to uncork the evil genie, to summon up the Norse 'god' Wotan, to lift the restraints upon every person's very worst motives, impulses and desires. There are good reasons for the restraints imposed by the 'superego'. Without them, people like Cody Jarrett, George W. Bush, Adolph Hitler, Pol Pot, and Augusto Pinochet would kill us all in a global conflagration. It is easy enough to imagine Bush, still seeking his father's approval, perhaps competing with him for Bar's attention, climbing upon the pinnacle of his industry's icon --the oil refinery. It is easy enough to imagine Bush screaming from atop a refinery tower: "Top of the world, Ma! Top of the world".

Dr. Gustav Gilbert, the American psychologist at the war crimes trial of Nazis at Nuremberg concluded that 'evil' was the 'utter lack of empathy'. I might add: empathy with another is possible only if one has come to terms with one's own "shadow", one's own "source of creativity", one's own humanity. One who cannot see humanity in either self or others is a Nazi in spirit, a person lacking 'empathy', a person lacking the ability to see him/herself in another place, time, or body. Those who may be described as Gilbert described 'Nazis' are what Jung would call 'inauthentic'; they live lives hidden behind masks.

Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. And if you gaze into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

Bush Rejected by Peers

A rejection by peers is mythical. Many so-called primitive tribes make a ritual of ostracizing a member who has breached the most sacred shibboleths.  Jung and Joseph Campbell would have had much to say about the fact that some world leaders simply refused to shake Bush's hand. Some even looked away. Bush himself ducked and overtly dodged Angela Merkel.

Bush was shunned by peers. In some Eastern cultures, the loss of their respect might have required a ritual suicide. More recently, Japanese and British commanders were expected to shoot themselves.

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Jung: Resisting the 'New World Order '

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

It is said of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung [1875 - 1961] that he was 'prophetic of today’s ongoing debate about religion and science' as well as a much older debate about the 'individual' and the 'state'. Today --the GOP has demagogued religion while Bush, the party's flag bearer, has thrown in with 'state absolutists' --Friedrich Hegel, Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler and Pol Pot.

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

--Carl Jung

Those words put Carl Jung in opposition to a cult of cruelty and torture that has apparently assumed political control in the United States. It is ironic that a nation said to have been founded upon the principles of the enlightenment should find itself, under Bush's rule, categorized with regimes historically associated with 'collectivism' and 'totalitarianism.

Growing up in West Texas, among both radical 'John Birchers' and fundamentalist Christians, it is less surprising to me that the GOP, a party that often says of itself that it opposes 'big government' should, during the regime of George W. Bush, align itself with the forces of state oppression and incipient totalitarianism and that it should do so while brandishing the flag.

In this broad belt of unconsciousness, which is immune to conscious criticism and control, we stand defenseless, open to all kinds of influences and psychic infections. As with all dangers, we can guard against the risk of psychic infection only when we know that is attacking, and how, where and when the attack will come.

Since self-knowledge is a matter of getting to know the individual, facts and theories are of very little help in this respect. For the more a theory lays claims to universal validity, the less capable it is of doing justice to the individual facts.

Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; that is to say, it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean. This mean is quite valid, though it need not necessarily occur in reality.

--Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

In "The Undiscovered Self", Jung foresaw a great crisis arising from the forces of 'collectivism' on the one hand and those that celebrate the inherent value of the individual on the other. It is a dialectic that few could have imagined might reach a zenith in a Bush regime, from which nothing special was expected, a regime that held out only the promise of oppressive dullness --not oppresssion itself, a regime characterized by standard GOP conventionality and mediocrity.

Little was expected of Bush who delivered even less in every area but one. Bush marshaled the powerful forces of state propaganda, fear, and 'group think' to forge a totalitarian collective from among his aggressive, authoritarian, intolerant and elitist base! In the wake of 911, even strong 'individualists' found it easier to just go along with the 'mass think' that blamed Islam, Europe [France, in particular] for crimes that we now know were perpetrated by the Bush regime itself. Hitler had been similarly successful in the wake of the Reichstag Fire.

Jung argued the future of civilization was literally dependent upon the ability of the individual to resist the collective forces that are found in every society. Jung's prescription consisted of individuals 'gaining an awareness and understanding' of one's own sub-conscious, in other words, “the undiscovered self'.

Resistance to the organized mass can be affected only by the man who is well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.'

--Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, [p. 60]

One should not be surprised that Bush benefited most from the 'collectivist instinct' found in the 'religious right', a movement which typifies 'group think' and the suppression of individual reason, creativity, originality, or non-conformity of any type.

He [Jung] distinguishes between religion which expresses a subjective relationship to certain metaphysical factors and a creed which merely gives expression to a collective belief. Religion is understood in the broad sense, including the relationship of the individual to the metaphysical and the world of dreams, feelings and intuitions.

Science, on the other hand, is the rationalistic, statistical and theoretical part of understanding. Self-knowledge, according to Jung, cannot be achieved by abandoning either of these facets.

--Review, Carl Jung's The Undiscovered Self

In America, the 'religious' instinct is that of the 'group'. It has very little in common with the individual's quest for enlightenment or spirituality. Thus, the process by which individuals acquire knowledge of Jung's 'undiscovered self' is antithetical to 'ideological fanaticism' observed to be rampant and intolerant throughout Bush's America.

Only when individuals embrace the dual nature of the human psyche --the existence of good as well as its capacity for evil --that individuals may cope with the dangers and threats posed by those in power or by what Jung has called 'the sum total of individuals' i.e, the modern 'mass society'. It is not only totalitarian regimes but society itself, by way of the 'science' of 'demographics' that reduces the individual to the individual only as he/she is a part of the 'mass'.

Modern propaganda reaches individuals enclosed in the mass, yet it also aims at a crowd, but only as a body composed of individuals. What does this mean? First of all, that the individual is never considered as an individual, but always in terms of what he has in common with others, such as his motivations, his feelings, or his myths. He is reduced to an average; and except for a small percentage, action based on averages will be effectual.'

...

'In this broad belt of unconsciousness, which is immune to conscious criticism and control, we stand defenseless, open to all kinds of influences and psychic infections. As with al dangers, we can guard against the risk of psychic infection only when we know that is attacking, and how, where and when the attack will come. Since self-knowledge is a matter of getting to known the individual facts, theories help very little in this respect. For the more a theory lays claims to universal validity, the less capable it is of doing justice to the individual facts. Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; that is to say, it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean. This mean is quite valid, though it need not necessarily occur in reality.

--Propaganda: On the Formation of Man’s Attitudes[p.6]

Jung defies summary. It is better that you read him for yourself. However, some general conclusions are possible. Jung writes that 'Separation from his instinctual nature' impels the 'conflict between conscious and unconscious', between 'knowledge and faith' [Jung, op cit., p. 81] It is easy enough to find this 'symptom' in Bush's America bombarded as it is by unprecedented 'mass media' and equally unprecedented pressures to conform.

These 'pressures' to conform have always been identifiable, opposed as they were by Henry David Thoreau who chose --at Walden pond --to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Others known for their creative resistances to 'mass think' include Mark Twain and later Lenny Bruce, the 'beatniks', hippies, and Viet Nam war resisters. 'Howl' by Allen Ginsberg is a latter day movement's very anthem of 'resistance' as was the earlier 'Song of Myself' by Walt Whitman in which it is written:

'I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

--Walt Whitman

“Here we must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd?'

--Jung, op cit, p.88

Given the oppressive nature of Bush's evil regime, the 'mass think' inherent in 'mass media', the mind-numbing sameness of American suburbs, it is difficult to find the paths sought so heroically by Whitman, Ginsberg, et al.

We can recognize our prejudices and illusions only when, from a broader psychological knowledge of ourselves and others, we are prepared to doubt the absolute rightness of our assumptions and compare them carefully and conscientiously with the objective facts.

--Jung, op cit,p. 102

The same thing was said much earlier by Oliver Cromwell to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650

I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

The GOP, tragically, will never admit of being wrong. Therefore, as long as the GOP is allowed power of any sort, the state is made dysfunctional and the 'debate' made meaningless.

The future of mankind is in doubt. As long as the state presumes to exercise 'absolute power', individuals are robbed of the freedom required to lead meaningful lives.

In this challenging and provocative work, Dr. Carl Jung—one of history’s greatest minds—argues that civilization’s future depends on our ability as individuals to resist the collective forces of society. Only by gaining an awareness and understanding of one’s unconscious mind and true, inner nature—“the undiscovered self”—can we as individuals acquire the self-knowledge that is antithetical to ideological fanaticism. But this requires that we face our fear of the duality of the human psyche—the existence of good and the capacity for evil in every individual. In this seminal book, Jung compellingly argues that only then can we begin to cope with the dangers posed by mass society—“the sum total of individuals”—and resist the potential threats posed by those in power.

--Penquin Review of Jung's 'The Undiscovered Self'

Jung on Meaningful Lives

At last, in response to uninformed 'labelers', practitioners of stupid ad hominem fallacies: Jung was NOT a Nazi. Jung, in fact, wound up on the Nazi 'blacklist' probably because he denounced precisely whatever it is that defines a 'Nazi'.

As early as 1918, Jung knew something unfavorable was arising within Germany. His words of the "blond beast stirring in its subterranean prison...threatening us with an outbreak that will have devastating consequences" (Jung, 1947, as cited in Welsh, Hannah, & Briner, 1947) serve as an early warning of what was to come. Just ten years later, he wrote on how each person is unconsciously worse when acting within a crowd rather than individually. Jung warned the world that the larger an organization becomes, the more the people are prone to immorality and blind ignorance (Jung, 1947, as cited in Welsh, Hannah, & Briner, 1947).

In 1933, in a lecture given in Cologne, Germany (at the same period in history when others accused him of Nazi-sympathy), Jung leveled a full blown warning about people as a collective suffocating the individual, leaving those in the crowd anonymous, irresponsible, and dangerous. Jung implied that Hitler (and Nazism) was the inevitable cause of such collectivenes. Four years later, in 1937, Jung spoke at Yale University in the United States, relaying his belief that the movement seen in Germany was explained by a fear of neighboring countries supposedly possessed by devilish leaders. In stating that no one can recognize their own unconscious underpinnings, the possibility that Germany was projecting their own condition upon their International neighbors was evident (Jung, 1947, as cited in Welsh, Hannah, & Briner, 1947). This fear leads to the nationalistic duty to have the biggest guns and the strongest army.

In 1940, most of these words were published in German but were quickly suppressed. As a result of Jung's views about Germany and particularly Adolf Hitler, he ended up on the Nazi "blacklist" (Jung, 1947, as cited in Welsh, Hannah, & Briner, 1947). When France was later invaded, the Gestapo destroyed Jung's French translations as well. In no uncertain terms, Jung's writings and lectures served as a warning for the conflict to come. As well, Jung's own words opposed the accusations of Nazi sympathy and anti-Semitism. It would seem then, in light of the above, that the answer to the question of Nazi sympathy and anti-Semitism is fairly clear.

--Jung's Own Words

Additional resources

• The Undiscovered Self
• Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

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How the Ship of State Became the Ship of Fools

The US has caught a nasty virus the symptom of which is running punditry. It's like cruise ship diarrhea without the satisfaction at the end of ordeal or even panic. Some quick notes: Barack Obama is the most shallow, non-descript, boring politician to ever come down the pike --an intellectual lightweight whose soul has been coached out of him by media consultants. In Barack Obama, I find the vacuous echoes of Ronald Reagan, a previous lightweight who had mastered the art of reading buzzwords off a cue card. My skin crawls.

I have stopped listening to what passes for debate these days. It's become a matter of stringing meaningless platitudes together such that they sound like real human speech. Or is it a Japanese robot?

More quick notes: I wish John Edwards were uglier. Hillary Clinton is damaged goods. Ron Paul, still a Republican, has many more scales to shed before he can change his repitil..uh...Republican skin.

God help us --the only intelligent politician in the field is Dennis Kucinich who has only a snow ball's chance in hell of ever becoming President. It's our loss. Watching Democrats is akin to medieval debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

I am sick to death of tedious debates about the conduct of the war of aggression against the people of Iraq. The "conduct" of the war is not the issue. Why we continue to stay is! Why we haven't impeached, tried, removed and imprisoned George W. Bush is! Why a grand jury has not been convened to investigate the GOP crime syndicate is! Why corporations rule the US government is! The validity of the electoral process is! Why bother going through the motions until paper trails are mandated at the polls?

I am sick to death of Congress kowtowing to a President who has the support of little more than 25 percent of the American people. Carl Jung predicted our malaise in 1957 in his "The Undiscovered Self", decrying "...apocalyptic images of universal destruction" brought on by WWII and an atomic age ushered in when the United States dropped weapons of mass destruction on two cities in Japan. In its wake, Jung was fearful that 40 percent of the population —called a "mentally stable stratum" —might not be able to keep the lid on mass psychosis; it might be unable to restrain the spread of "dangerous tendencies", presumably: fascism, fanaticism, militarism, and intolerance. Jung seems to have been less concerned with external threats. The more dangerous tendencies he feared were home grown. There are some real issues to be addressed but all have taken a back seat to punditry.

The theme of collapse seems to have reverberated around the world, now manifesting its symptoms in the scientific community’s latest dramatic reports on global warming, the issue of Peak Oil coming further out of the closet — being discussed openly in mainstream media, and the bursting of the US housing bubble that now finds 1 out of every 264 homes in the nation facing foreclosure as each day the value of the dollar decreases and the value of precious metals soars.

--The Cycle of Time

In the meantime, Democrats have failed to challenge Bush's exploitation of the ultimate strawman: terrorism. Bush owns the issue of "terrorism" even if he had to make it all up. As long as Democrats buy into the paradigm, they have no place from which to launch a counter-attack. Democrats too easily conferred legitimacy upon an illegitimate usurper, credibility when, in fact, Bush lied about everything. They are now paying the price for having played Bush's game. The spectre of terrorism has been of greater benefit to Bush than "real" terrorists who share with O.J.'s "real killers" all the characteristics of a phantom menace.

Political rhetoric is just more of the same when, in fact, nothing is the same. How could the Democrats have missed the sea change that has taken place, the fundamental challenges to Constitutional government? What are the implications? Simply, the Bush junta has challenged not only the Constitution but almost 1,000 years of progress. Principles mouthed by Bush simply fly in the face of the Magna Carta, the English Petition of Right, the Mayflower Compact, The Virginia Declaration of Rights, The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, The Nuremberg Principles, and every US Supreme Court decision that has upheld the right of persons to be free of arbitary rule, to be secure in their homes, to be free of unreasonable arrest in the absence of probable cause that a crime has been committed.

Significantly, totalitarian states have their philosophical roots in Hegelianism, a straight road to both Nazism and Stalinism. There is, by contrast, another road that runs straight from Magna Carta to our own Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.

If the Magna Carta is not the birth certificate of Democracy, it is the death certificate of despotism. It spells out for the first time the fundamental principle that the law is not simply the whim of the king. The law is an independent power unto itself. And the King could be brought to book for violating it!"

—Simon Schama, History of Britain

Bush's demogoguery is an issue and the Democrats should be on the offensive. Instead, most members of Congress lined up behind what Gore Vidal called an "un-American" administration.

Instead of bullshit and platitudes from Obama --nonsense talk about attacking Pakistan, Barack should have been screaming about America's enemies inside the White House --George W. Bush and his every supporter. Do the Democrats get it? Have they not understood what Bush has done? Is Congress without a clue?

The Constitution itself is explicit when it establishes the sovereignty of the people. But, if that were not enough to dispel notions of the "state as absolute", a Bill of Rights was insisted upon and ratified by the people. In the 1960's, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas believed the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights to be absolute —beyond the power of Congress or the executive to modify or infringe in any way. We could use someone like Douglas today. As his friend Tommy Corcoran pointed out, Douglas had "wanted the Presidency worse than Don Quixote wanted Dulcinea" and Franklin Roosevelt believed that Douglas would have been the strongest running mate in 1944. It was Democratic bosses who persuaded Roosevelt to pick Harry Truman instead. Oh well! "To err is Truman!"

Democratic "opposition" to Bush seems less naive than irrelevant, locked into the GOP paradigm when Democrats should be forcing a defensive GOP to debate on Democratic turf, on Democratic issues, indeed, the very future of Democracy in America. Tragically, the Democrats will get suckered into debating the "conduct" of a war that should never have begun, a war that is itself a crime, a war that has, in fact, no good end, a war that is, in fact, lost!

Democrats are in danger of blowing the last chance they will ever have to forge a new and better future. It's become a cliche that the Chinese character for "crisis", literally translated, means "dangerous opportunity". If the Democrats fail to make the most of this opportunity, the people of the US will be no better off, nothing will have been gained for the ordeal we have suffered, nothing true, lasting or valid will have been affirmed. What a waste if this should all turn out to be the most irrelevant presidential debate in this nation's history!

And now for something completely different:

Additional resources

• Purpose and Effect of the Preamble to the Consitution
• US Military Investigates Multiple Alleged Massacre Incidents
• Senator Feinstein Warns Against the Bush Administration's Efforts to Vastly Expand Executive Power
• US faces third charge of killing Iraqi civilians
  
• UN panel issued a stinging report of US torture policies
• Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws
• Now We Know How A Dictator Can Game The Presidency
• Evesdropping on America

Discoveries

• Herbie Hancock & Tony Williams
• The Phantom Planet
• Mesa of Lost Women
• Doctor Who - Rose

The Existentialist Cowboy

Conservative Lies
Indict Bush
Why Conservatives Hate America
GOP Crime Syndicate
Iraq

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