The Tea Party: Cancer in the American Psyche

Note to Readers: This is an excerpt from yesterday’s subscriber edition of Planet Waves. Judith Gayle will not be writing this week; her Political Waves column will resume next week. –efc

Wednesday night I had dinner with a friend who’s an experienced homeopath and teacher, helping me fill in some gaps in my studies. He was describing what homeopaths call the cancer miasm: that is, the whole thought form and energy pattern associated with the disease cancer. We Americans live in what may be the most carcinogenic society on Earth, and homeopathy proposes that this is as much about our mentality as it is about toxins in the food and water.

Even mainstream medical practitioners note that one thing many cancer patients have in common is the habit of suppressing their emotions, but homeopathy is describing something other than an individual state. And it is describing how individual states of mind are an aspect of the larger culture. My friend described the cancer miasm as being about a psyche gripped by intractable ideas; that is to say, a mind that will not budge. This is the essence of fundamentalism, a mode of thinking that currently has the United States Congress and thus the world economy by the throat. Everyone on the majority side in the House of Representatives pretty much agrees that any raising of additional revenue is out of the question, and that they’re going to cut benefits from people living on government pensions they paid into for decades.

Note that I am talking about a psychic state described by homeopathy and not conventional medicine; there is some relationship, and it’s not necessarily direct (though it can be). It influences everything from our politics and social behavior to our food production methods. We all struggle with the miasms of our whole society and our family, not just the individual ones we have. This is territory not embarked on by conventional medicine, which deals only in dose-response relationships and only rarely addresses mental or emotional states — or their effects. We happen to live in a carcinogenic society that produces cancer in nearly half of all people, but which struggles even more with the thought and behavior patterns of the cancer miasm.

Within the fundamentalist movement, there are fixed ideas about sex (don’t talk about it), abortion (murder in all instances), birth control (now also considered murder) and homosexuality (no way, Jose). All unions are bad, government is bad, taxes are bad, regulations are bad, and on and on, ad nauseam. Note carefully (it is not that hard to see) that nothing is being created except chaos. There is no plan to make, to build, to improve, to develop; the only goal is to control people (mainly through sex and private relationships) and eliminate the government’s role in the process of creating civilization. This philosophy of government is a disease process: cancer of the mind.

There is something — you might call it a spiritual presence — lacking at the center of people and organizations who think this way which leads the way to aggressive religiosity. The Grand Canyon is really 6,000 years old and there were dinosaurs around when Jesus was alive. Who cares about science? There’s no such thing as evolution. (Go figure!)

Like the often aggressive medical condition known as cancer, this mentality also facilitates aggression in general: multiple wars, a five-fold increase in prison population, numerous, ongoing accounts of police brutality (including the frequent abuse of Tasers) and so forth — and note that it seems to be ‘untreatable’ and out of control.

In the midst of all of this, there’s a rule that says absolutely no compromise. Do not bend. Never give in. Never flex. Have you wondered about this? Pres. Obama politely pointed it out in his speech Monday night — the part about compromise being a dirty word. We saw a lot of this operating in the days when Karl Rove was in the news. One of Rove’s most basic plays is never back down. The people currently holding Congress hostage are so convinced they’re right that they’re willing to let the whole economy crumble before they consider some other possibility.

I don’t think a majority of people think this way, but this style of thinking is certainly all the rage in politics right now. “If they budge on their position, they fear they will collapse,” my friend said of those gripped by the cancer miasm. “They reject all rational arguments in order to maintain their insanity.”

This condition has three main psychological roots. One is the compulsive need for control over themselves and their immediate environment. This extends into the environment as the desire to control others, but the real struggle is for self-control. That can be projected out into fantasies of total control over everyone and everything.

Second is the wobble factor: there is no stability to this type of psyche, and the prior characteristic is an attempt to compensate for this. With this comes the fear of being attacked, which would precipitate both lack of stability and loss of control. Intellectual process is replaced by superstition and belief in ‘out there’ notions.

Third is a lack of centeredness. There is no sense of the core of their being, of an inner reality. Everything gets pushed out to a rigid surface of the psyche — what Wilhelm Reich called personality armor. This leads to loss of sensitivity, loss of contact with the world, and a sense of isolation from people and from reality. It’s like having a thick shell that allows for no compassion or human sensitivity.

This condition describes many of the people we see in modern politics, as well as the people who support them. The crazy thing about the Tea Party movement is that it’s not really possible to discuss the issues. Everything comes from a predetermined place. The framework of the discussion is fixed far in advance and can never change, except to become more rigid. What people with this picture need is to develop some psychic mobility and a sense of flow — but that feels really dangerous.

But what about the rest of us? What about the people who don’t start this way, but who eventually fall for it? My friend described another energetic picture, described by one of the homeopathic remedies: that of being divided against oneself. It’s the way of thinking wherein, ‘this may be true, but that may also be true. Maybe there isn’t really a truth. Who knows?’ It’s not really possible to come to a conclusion; the truth does not really exist. Then the left and right sides go into battle, or as is often the case, the upper and the lower (mind versus body, for example).

This condition is described by another homeopathic concept — a remedy called Anacardium. It is made from a tropical plant; note that in homeopathy remedies have complex pictures that emerge over many years of use. The word means ‘without heart’. Anacardium tends to describe the majority of people who don’t want to commit to a position, who consider themselves middle of the road. It’s a lot like the situation of an abused child whose parent will not let them make any decisions, such as what clothes to wear. If they digress, they will be punished cruelly. So they behave well, but underneath that facade is the sense of being disgusted with themselves. That describes the weakened condition of the American public rather succinctly.

In a column Wednesday, Paul Krugman of The New York Times explained that the mentality killing the United States is not right-wing extremism. Rather, he proposes, “the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.”

He notes correctly that news reports portray a situation “in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.”

“What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing a careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on,” he said. “The ‘both sides are at fault’ people have to know better; if they refuse to say it, it’s out of some combination of fear and ego, of being unwilling to sacrifice their treasured pose of being above the fray.” He ends somewhat ominously: “It’s a terrible thing to watch, and our nation will pay the price.” What he is saying is that the pre-existing heartless middle of the road position makes us susceptible to fundamentalist abuse.

Let’s review the two concepts. The cancer miasm that infects fundamentalist politicians is about being overcommitted to one side and totally intransigent. In this state, flexibility is death — leading to death. The Anacardium position suffered by most voters (who cannot seem to discern good from evil, or who vote for the politicians who openly want to take away their privileges) is about refusing to commit to anything at all, lacking any confidence. It is the product of abuse, and subject to abuse and opportunistic disease (such as cancer). The two are a dangerous combination because those who are overcommitted will find it easy to push around the people who are not committed at all.