A psychologist asks: Have consumerism, suburbanization and a malevolent corporate-government partnership so beaten us down that we no longer have the will to save ourselves?
The last people I would turn to for help in remobilizing a demoralized population are mental health professionals — at least those who have not rebelled against their professional socialization. Much of the craft of relighting the pilot light requires talents that mental health professionals simply are not selected for nor are they trained in. Specifically, the talents required are a fearlessness around image, spontaneity, and definitely anti-authoritarianism. But these are not the traits that medical schools or graduate schools select for or encourage.
By Bruce E. Levine
Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?
Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?
What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?
Can anything be done to turn this around?
One of my favorite things about Planet Waves is that all but one of us works from home. My assistant Sarah works out of my studio, but she makes her own hours. My Planet Waves family is one of the most supportive groups of people I have ever known; and we do our best to be a positive force in one another’s lives. Thank you cousins!!!!
..I wanna dance around the same concept.., Half de Francis../. You boys are funny. “..I’ll jerk this chapter off, you jerk that one!” (I sincerely hope you have a sense of humor after that?.!?) ..One says, “Check THIS concept out!”, the other says, “..no, no,.. check ‘This’ concept out!?!”
I say, “Freakin’ integrate already!”
..One’s comin’ from a bit of Voodoo, and one’s findin’ the Mojo “‘,,..underlay..,,'” , around every corner. (It’s almost funny, how words, and minds, work.) (I Love reality.)
..Offensive? Don’t be so. Unnecessary. I’m not ‘There’. “Just havin’ a Good time, Loves!”
…….It comes down to folks understanding the actions they take within their own individual life-moments, and the integration of such moments into the grander collective of human souls,.. (that.. we can pontificate and gesticulate, at a later date!) 🙂
Rhymes and … Laughter!!!
Merry J
Kristyn C., I too enjoy Lutin’s words,.. I won’t take a “guess” with him but,. my take on the “collapse” is that each of *us* is going to have to evaluate our participatory action within the Macrocosm which is Our Microcosm,. As far as *we* generate the energy. ‘WE’ have the energy to generate the continuance, or the decline. I prefer to ‘run’ on engagement, of the vital nutrients that are needed by a system. ..but, I decline, recline,.. and let it run too the long, slow detriment of Choice.
One must make one’s choice,.. is it ‘here’, or ‘now’?
(Thanks for the lesson, man.)
You, keep on takin’ the choice you brew.. and keep on listening for the voices within’ the transmission!
Through the Ether!!
Jere
Half, I wasn’t saying the quote is validated by being from “god,” I’m just being a good reporter and saying that’s what the dude said god said. I don’t know Mr. Walsh and I can’t vouch for him personally. I have a friend who knows him, Brad Blanton (psychologist, Gestalt therapist and author of Radical Honesty), who has written a book or two with Neale. I asked him about Neale one day and Brad said he’s nuts; but then I should note that Brad thinks I’m nuts for doing astrology, and has encouraged me for years and years to get OUT of this work because he thinks it’s useless. Same basic thing you’re saying. He says that I’m basically using astrology as an excuse to say whatever, when I don’t need that crutch. What he doesn’t understand is astrology. To him it’s all the same pile of purportedly purported crap. We don’t live in a time when you can “use god as a literary device” and be taken seriously. We live in a time when you can “channel” god and be taken really, really seriously. Are there any CWG fans or detractors aware of whether Neale has said that god was a ‘literary device’ ex post facto?
Just to add that Lewis was subtle in addressing ‘divine truth’ type questions (that were really just a human theological take on his epoch) by inverting everything as dialogue between a senior and junior devils, tempter of human souls. An indirect (inverse) approach to the God issue was what allowed him to pull off the work – just.
Eric, in The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis used God as a literary device. He was able to do this credibly because he constructed plot and it involved caricature and humour – in other words, craft was demonstrated in detaching from any ‘literal’ connotations that would see Lewis as the mouthpiece of God.
The fact that somebody’s theory has great content and carries much intuitive validity does not automatically validate it – certainly not with God claims. You could easily see a certain prophet in a cave over 13 centuries ago, or Joseph Smith considerably nearer our time, as channelers. You could take an alternative model of ‘revelation’ from Jewish faith, which did not really allow the whole revelation to come from a single source – there is ‘dissent’ in the Tenach (look at Ecclesiastes and Job.)
The Cosmic Father Figure in the sky is a device that has been used to sucker the gullible for millennia and the corporate media players feed into this happily (for more on this see Free to Be Human:Intellectual Self Defence in an Age of Illusion – David Edwards.)
I don’t know if Walsch kept the proceeds of his book, film and DVD but I am fairly certain that any God that wished to nurture us all with life giving waters would not transport said water in a sieve. God-talk nowadays is a little bit like a child approaching mummy and saying “mummy, daddy said..” It just doesn’t wash.
Half, that’s an ad divinum attack. Do we need to question the source? Walsh signed his work and said he was channeling. It’s one of the most sensible and collective notions of God to have ever not been preached from a pulpit. That said, I am both a skeptic and a connoisseur of channeling. This one checks out with my bullshit sniffer, and I know exactly what he’s talking about.
agree with you Fe – OMFG.
Its true that nothing is really working, yet hardly anyone is doing anything about it. From my perspective, there are simply conditions that unacceptable yet that we tolerate because we’re either too beat down, or too tired from working all the time just to pay the exorbitant cost of everything from useless health insurance to school tuition to food or even just buying stupid crap because we think it will make us feel better.
I’m reading an interesting book right now – The Iconoclast – in which the author argues that Iconoclasts – people who can achieve what others say is impossible – think differently than other people. In particular, they:
-Don’t allow fear to distort perceptions
-Don’t fear social ridicule or failure
-Perceive things differently than other people – they either have self imposed or externally imposed conditions that allow their brains to perceive and respond to external stimuli in a way that over-rides the brain’s tendency to ecomomize energy and see things new and fresh everytime without ‘filling in the gaps’
We need some more of these Iconoclasts and I’m pretty sure Eric and some of the people who post here qualify.
It takes great energy to overcome the inertia of the pathway ruts of the brain, and to generate in oneself the spark to question, and to refuse to contribute to worn out structures and paradigms that don’t serve us anymore. There are tons of these:
Health Insurance/Health Care
Marriage
Public Schools
Factory Food
Consumerism and Consumer Debt
Eek its all a sham! LOL.
thank you dear Mystes! i am in excellent company then.
and of course mi mamá would love to meet You – i actually “introduced” you this trip. 😉
X:)X
cheers!
Immanuel Kant would turn in his grave! And Feuerbach would feint a slapstick hand to his own forehead.. Even C.S. Lewis would shudder – master craftsman that he was.
Such depictions of ‘God’ seem to encapsulate why we have ended up enslaved rather than emancipated. ‘God’ is in the collective, rather than the individual – that is, if you wish you and me and us to remain healthy – and democracy ever to be worthy of the name.
Have you seen the video presentation on “Sixth Sense” technology? Effort at making US the technology, rather than the technology making us.
google ‘ sixth sense technology’ – my computer is logging me off so no time here sorry!
“As I have said, this isn’t the first time your civilization has been at this brink,” God explains to Neale Walsh. “I want to repeat this, because it is vital that you hear this. Once before on your planet, the technology you developed was far greater than your ability to use it responsibly. You are approaching the same point in human history again. It is vitally important that you understand this. Your present technology is threatening to outstrip your ability to use it wisely. Your society is on the verge of becoming a product of your technology rather than your technology being a product of your society. When a society becomes a product of its own technology, it destroys itself.”
Eric, point taken too! What you say about the action part of the piece being crucial, is surely decisive.
To me this has to be proactive rather than reactive. What you experienced at Burning Man is the heart of the matter. We need to fashion new worlds (cyber or otherwise) that people can come to co-inhabit.
The concern is that without such model communities, people engaged in analysis will disempower themselves by becoming obsessed with what ISN’T working.
I’ll grant that dysfunction is a starting point for awareness, but many people get locked into that, as if mesmerised and therefore struggle to get to the action part – they make the world wrong as anaesthetic to their own sense of powerlessness.
For me, it is a fine line to tread. But it is much easier to see the walls closing in, than to see beyond the horizon – humans are myopic and we need to expand our vision rather than shrink it down.
Rather than view positive psychology as a species of ‘say it positively’ I’d say it is crucial for us to promote a “can do” rather than “can’t do” mentality. I especially love all your writing, horoscopes or otherwise, for that one prominent characteristic.
Here’s one sticking around, Alexander DeWitte
Half, point taken…yet I think what the writer is suggesting we consider is that, from his perspective, we may be past a no-return point.
I honor the use of language, narrative and concept to turn things into win-win. That’s my method of reading and writing astrology. You never read about the Foo Bird shitting on your head, and I am also not polyanna about my forecasts. *Note, those are the more popular kind of astrology.*
However, I think that we need to give a voice to despair, and not pathologize that, too. It is not only anger that has been moralized out of existence, but also the honest expression of fear and despair. Every form of sexual expression is gradually being moralized out of existence, except what goes on the cover of Cosmo. Much else besides. We need to be able to describe this phenomenon to one another without the need to do mental gyrations to “say it positively.” Yet if we do that — the action piece is crucial; and that is what the writer is getting at: there is paralysis going around, a kind of neurotoxic spell. And he is right.
We have a special situation on our hands when, in a world where the challenges of awakening have been documented by the Buddhists going back for millennia, we are being pounded with shut-down information/drugs/influences/patterns and having much that would naturally keep us tuned in and awake (such as sunshine, sex and human contact) taken away or made inaccessible constantly.
We may need a whole new psychological theory. And those who are awakening need to figure out how to stick together and support one another.
Mandy H.—–Your intuitions about ” no one is allowed to be angry about anything anymore” in the Mental Health field are spot on…..I used to work in that field and you would be surprised how the therapists and Psychiatrists would deride any expression of anger by a client as ” pathological”,…. wanting to slap the ever-popular diagnosis d` jour of ” Bi-Polar” on anyone showing even a smidge of anger/aggression……Ridiculous !!!
Congrats, Stormi, on having finally nailed thatthere PhD. Sounds like you did a splendid job in the commencement line as well.
Reminds me of my daughter’s phallus/rocket symbol on the crossbeam of her bike. Which meant she had two: one she rode to school, one she didn’t. Guess which…
And. Can I meet *your* mom?
xoxoxoxoxo
M
just a short story… i graduated this weekend and as most do, i decorated the top of my hat (so people can find you). along with my apple and stars, my mom slapped on a small sticker i had that said “wake the fuck up”. knowing this might ripple, i waited until the last minute (in line before entering commencement) to put it on. a few minutes later, a woman shorter than me comes around pointing “this one! this one!” and begins grabbing for my hat. another taller one gripping her clipboard also comes pointing at me, yelling at me to show her my hat. i do so and she starts berating me that that is “highly” offensive to “everyone” and to give her the sticker (as if i was 12). i took it off and told her no she couldn’t have it, and slapped it on the bag i was wearing under the gown (flashing the photographer standing by). she told me at least 3 times again, how “highly offensive” it was to “everyone”. i told her it was not offensive to everyone, that it was a political statement about consciousness. she spit and spat away from me after that, but it was interesting how offended SHE got. later in the ceremony, a student crossed the stage but was able to flash some kinda “jesus is lord” sign – which is apparently ok (along with the christian only prayers said at the beginning). it was also ok to put how another school “sucks” on your hat. i shoulda whipped out a sharpie and made the “highly offensive” F, an s – so as only to offend the “right” people.
so yea…Oh my fucking Goddess.
just a couple of thoughts – i think it’s important to remember that the mind control over the u.s. population began many decades ago and was carefully planned and thoughtfully executed, so it’s no wonder that it’s challenging for us to break out of it now… but also, it may be that there is more protest going on than we are being made aware of – remember how shabby the media coverage was of the unprecedented rallies before our invasion of iraq, and of the 2008 republican convention in chicago, just to name two – a friend of mine was playing music at the protests during the rnc and he said he’d never seen anything like it, never heard of anything like it since the late sixties early seventies… did anyone read about it in the new york times? i didn’t…
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Toddy — There was amazing coverage in the NYT of the casket procession up 7th avenue, in front of Madison Square Garden. Still, the F-15 protests are all but forgotten. Incredible, that.
Part of our issue involves MEMORY and AWARENESS OF THE PAST. It’s a little like that scene in One Hundred Years of Solitude where everyone gets amnesia and the tarot readers, instead of telling the future, tell people what already happened to them.
efc
I’m with Fe-the answer is an unequivocal yes. But I’m beyond the OMFG stage. I watched long and hard through the Bush years as some of the most intelligent and enlightened people in my circle raged at the t.v. and newspapers and did fuck-all…not even a letter to their congressional reps. The daily inanities always took precedence and continue to as far as I can tell. I left the U.S. in 2007, shortly after leaving an insane and abusive relationship. Everything I was fleeing was part of the same package. I saw the horrific realities in both the micro and macro aspects. What it involved was the willingness to look at the reality of everything I didn’t want to be true and realize it was. And then it took the supreme soul-wrenching sacrifice of leaving everything I was attached to behind and walking, head up and chin forward, into the unknown. For most, it would seem this is too much to bear. And so instead they shuffle through their lives with sorrow and rage as constant companions, inert.
jlo,
Best advice ever. . . .”utilize yourself”
Morgana S,
totally agree. . .rising from the ashes like a Phoenix is part of the process. One of my heroes is Nelson Mandela because of his ability/strength to not be completely broken. He and other heroes inspire those who reach bottom to rise up again, and again.
Fe,
Ditto to your observation . . this IS an initial phase of a Great Awakening.
Hey, if you want a way out.. (you’ll have to go in). Always, from a point of being. You.
You are the master of this universe. Your voice is intrepid too me. Utilize yourself. For purposes known too the Universe Alone. I will always stand with you, when you stand for yourself. I, will be there, with you, always.
You and I are One. ..Together we stand,… divided we.. come together!
I’m smilin’! Hope you can dig it!?!
Jere, still Lifin’ Love!
I’d say, it’s all about me. Where am I? Who the fuck are you?! Oh, you’re me. (What are we doing here, man?)
Then I’d say, “Well shit!!!, let’s smile, and see what that gets us,..”, and you’d say, “Fuck you, and your smiles, man!”, “..bigger fish than your crap!”. And, I’d say NO! “Listen!”. “This crap is being played out in my being, right now. It doesn’t feel good, to not be in touch with the instinctive humanity, the voice of “I Love You”.
“I need to Love Life, I need to Life Love”
(Really, the only sentence I wanted to get out was the last.)
Lifing Love!
Jere (..and, I Love You!)
Compromised? Comprised! (It’s getting late here in the UK!!)
I work in the field of mental health and my route into it, 15 years ago, was not conventional. The UK scene is undoubtedly different than the one in the USA – however, I suspect that core similarities around constraints upon the practitioner are inevitable.
Questions of professional competence and limitations aside, using the tenets of positive psychology, I wish to re-frame the initial question: /A psychologist asks: Have consumerism, suburbanization and a malevolent corporate-government partnership so beaten us down that we no longer have the will to save ourselves?/
This question is sick with the disease it purports to expose: Let’s rephrase it:/A psychologist asks: Have consumerism, suburbanization and a malevolent corporate-government partnership so beaten us down that we can no longer stomach the inauthenticity of such machinations and urgently now seek a better way?/
The WHOLE point is that determinism becomes self-replicating in the original question. Whereas, the second question makes clear that a different unction IS equally possible.
Positive psychology promotes autonomy, but negative psychology fosters dependency and despair (which cripple action and depress people).
When a psychologist fuels negative psychology, justified along the lines of some macro-theory of socio-political relations, you know you met a dumb psychologist (less because their psychology is bad than that they failed to spot the primitive psychological reflex indwelling simplistic social theory debates!)
Any psychologist wanting to venture into more complex social theories could do worse than read the work of Jurgen Habermas (such as Legitimation Crisis and The Theory of Communicative Action) as a means of engaging on a more sophisticated level of analysis than a simple false dichotomy between micro and macro theories of social reality.
Cause and effect relations within systems compromised of interfaced sub-systems, are rarely givens. Latitude remains even where proactive abuse seeks totalitarian exclusion of dissent – the nature of all systems is to resist this – and history bears out that totalitarianism never has quite as easy a time as our sci-fi scenarios, drenched in fear, would have us believe.
==============
In other words, the “solution” and the problem are intermingled.
Yes and no. Sort of.
Our structures (Saturn) are inherently flawed. Global economy. Private banking. Flawed. Pluto is putting the pressure on us to transform these structures, and if we don’t, they will collapse. (Which is exactly what *should* happen to a flawed structure.)
However, the abuser tells you there is no alternative to the structure. That you are trapped, that he controls you, that you have no options. Which I think most of us here know is bullshit. However, the alternative to the structure may mean our lives will change… a lot. Is that such a bad thing? If you fear change, then it’s Armageddon.
Krishnamurti spoke the secret: “I don’t really mind what happens.” You grok me?
I’ve been recently referred to a mental health professional through a combination of circumstances…
Third meeting in, the counsellor said ‘most anger issues focus on how the individual reacts to the circumstances that provoke the anger and how she / he manages that. ‘ IE..you’re not allowed to be angry at anything anymore – being angry at a justified cause is kind of somehow abnormal to mental health professionals… She then went on to say I can understand in your case that you have good reason to be angry … and it was kind of like a lightbulb going off in her head…
Next visit she wanted to discharge me….
Something occurred to me: I encountered this phenomenon first when dealing with the dioxin contamination in the dorms at SUNY New Paltz. I was just stunned that parents would leave their young sons and daughters in these contaminated buildings, questioning nothing. I had done a lot of campus organizing up to that point, and suddenly it seemed like I was on another planet. THE most important issue; not involving money but multigeneratinal health effects. Illnesses so bad you would not wish them on an enemy. Over and over — from then, until now — it seems impossible to get anyone but one or two people to even care; much less do anything.
Now, Lois Gibbs will tell you similar stories about Love Canal in the 1970s. Yet eventually in that scenario people did finally care (Lois and her neighbor took two EPA guys hostage one day, and that helped — it got Pres. Carter’s attention).
—–
There is a similar phenomenon in politics, which is made to be so base and disgusting that a healthy person cannot stand it; or the first thing that happens is that they’re corrupted. In politics, one is given the message: you cannot beat us, so you have to be like us, if you want to survive. That ‘like us’ is: it’s okay to play, as long as you’re only in this for yourself, or for other entities in it for themselves.
This situation has been intuitive to me for years; but I could not give a name to it. Early in the Bush administration, an article came out comparing his language to that of a an abuser: the phrasing and the psychological posture of the language. The MO was clear, which was to overwhelm people with inescapable negativity; to foment a feeling of futility so deep that there seems like no way out.
[here is that article…]
http://www.sommetinstitute.org/publication_itsthelanguage.html
This was five years into my astrology work and 10 years into my esoteric work, so I had some experience working with abuse victims and survivors. The psychology of this has always confounded me: people returning over and over to the person who abuses them the worst.
There never seems to be a way out, on the inside. The decision that leads to it is a deep one, and it seems to be made alone. The pattern that leads one back to the abuser or abusive environment is repetitive, and the abuser always promises to provide something that is not available anywhere else.
In other words, the “solution” and the problem are intermingled.
As I read this article, I was thinking: okay so this is the environment I’m writing my horoscopes into. This is the environment into which I am focusing empowering information about personal growth, sex, political awareness…and why it is, so often, that I feel like I’m tossing pennies down a well.
I am aware of individual movement. I hear every day from the people who are consciously growing and learning and making decisions; and yet many of them are more stuck than they will admit. They see the light somewhere, but when it comes time to make a move, it seems…well…dangerously confrontational. And any individual movement seems so far from anything that might coalesce into a collective decision. We have no concept of we. It almost seems like an indignity somehow, or an impossibility.
Our psychological descent into the Shadow is being played out on a national stage, and yet it’s so very personal. What strange times we live in.
I feel strongly that those of us who have been belted into awakening (yes, I suppose it’s accurate to call it abuse) can do others an amazing service by just letting them in, emotionally speaking, to view our “process.” I lived this out in microcosm during my cult experience and recovery.
Yes, I’ve seen that we do have to get that angry, that afraid, that beat down. Then some spark within us just rises up like a Phoenix from the ashes. Whether one rises up or not is completely up to that person. It’s necessary to get to a low point, sometimes, where *everything* is gone, so you can see what you’re really made of.
I don’t think everyone will be able to throw off the demoralization. Some who are abused do die at the hands of their tormentors, if they are unable to find that spark within themselves.
But I’ve also seen, so many times, what strong stuff we are made of.
This article ranks in the OMFG category.
Yes, I’d say so. Since we cannot believe either our eyes or ears, and too afraid to ask questions and too scared to go deeper because it hurts. This is an initial phase of a Great Awakening—knowing that we’ve been asleep.
Oh my fucking God.