New section to old blog: title, cell913,

First entry:

A renewed energy to the global 'malaise, from an old optimist

 Every day we read, listen to and converse about the multiple, existential tragedies, wars, plagues, fires, droughts, famines, rapes, murders, racism, sexism, ageism, loneliness, over-doses. In the course of our reflections and conversations, we often make reference to the names of various personages, corporate, academic, political, theatrical, punditry and even occasionally ecclesial. There are a few prominent ‘story lines’ into which our perceptions and attitudes can be clustered.

Among them are the ‘second-chance’ personal success stories, following a tragic and perhaps traumatic ‘fall.’ Another story line concerns the oracular voice-discovery of some women. Another concerns the dysfunction of many democracies. Another focuses on the depth and range of evidence disclosing an impending global climate disaster and the tepid work, in terms of impact, of those dedicated to ameliorate the impact. Another focuses on the number of billionaires newly created by global capitalism, while another focuses on the largest number of refugees and asylum-seekers in human history.  Another focuses on the impact of social media, especially among the young who are also seriously and demographically enmeshed in the opioid and fentanyl trafficking and mortalities. Another focuses on both/either the war in Ukraine and the war  in Gaza and the limp and fainting support for both Ukraine and Israelis/Palestinians. We must not overlook the rising tide of COVID and the foreshadowing of a ‘next’ pandemic along with the now-conventional perception that vaccines, as for the flu, will/have become the norm for reducing both the chance of infection and the severity of symptoms for those who succumb. Just today, former Secretary of Labour in the Clinton administration, Robert Reich, in his newsletter:

The suicide rate of 14.3 deaths per 100,000 Americans has reached its highest level since 1941, when America entered World War II.

This piece of data is in an essay entitled, ‘America’s anxiety disorder’. He continues, Maybe the widespread anxiety and depression along with the near record rate of suicide, should not be seen as personal disorders. Maybe they should be seen-in many cases, as rational responses to a society that’s becoming ever more disordered.

Reich references economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton from their book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism: the deaths of despair among whites would not have happened, or would not have been so severe, without the destruction of the white working class…’

Reich then adds, (I)n addition to providing more and better access to mental health care, and a suicide and crisis hotline, shouldn’t we try to make our society healthier?

At the close of several newscasts, recently, a good news segment attempts to offer a glimpse into a ‘feel-good’ antidote to the horror of the first twenty-eight minutes. Not inappropriately, these feel-good stories attempt to provide both hope for an audience drowning in both faux information, and excessive empirical data that begs both curation and exegesis, neither of which the majority of the audience is either educated nor patient enough to undertake. The forces that would ‘deconstruct’ the established institutional order , deploy billions of freely contributed dollars from donors who support their agenda, for the purpose of lining their own investment portfolios. Under the guise of capitalism, wearing a self-righteous heroic and superman hat of saviour from the hordes of socialists, and vermin and governments that would destroy the nation, the narcissistic, fascistic, tyrannical, autocratic ‘deconstructors’ will attempt to seduce individuals and groups into buying their ‘snake oil’ and have already formed unofficial, somewhat indetectable, and uber-dangerous cults, in the interests of advancing both their propaganda of saving the world from fascism and providing an ethnically pure white dominating race.

There are a number of foundational perceptual lenses into which all of this flows, and out of which only predictable outcomes will emerge. Literalism, empiricism, science, legal evidence, based also on literal, empirical scientific evidence, medical professions that not only rely on the literal and empirical but actually fertilize, nurture and harvest even deeper and more intense adherence, loyalty, commitment and even dominance of these methods. We have all become purveyors of, consumers of, and devotees to a gospel verging on a theology of the ‘outer life’…in the physical, natural (outdoors), academic, professional, career, family and even ecclesial worlds.

At the same time, the inner life, both of the individual and of the ‘soul’ of the world, have been not entirely, but inordinately undervalued if not actually subsumed into the many fogs of ‘the arts,’ the mystics,’ the ‘philosophers,’ the ‘poets,’ and the occasional therapeutic professional. Into this vortex, we all consume, through advertising on television and social media, extensive invites to try a pharmaceutical approach to whatever physical or psychic pain we might be suffering. And the pharma industry, along with the insurance companies, themselves, have a new and unprecedented strangle-hold on both the access to and the nature of much of the health care we engage with. The tension between the privatized/privatizing features of the health care system, (depending on the country) oscillates generally in the favourable direction of privatizing.

Similarly, social programs including pensions, food stamps, disability supports, family care supports, day-care supports, old age pensions, including health care itself, are on the radar of all those who seek to generate a for-profit universe that would necessarily be controlled and dominated by those considered to be ‘elite’ thinkers, elite experts, and elite winners based on the accumulation of wealth and power under the laissez-faire capitalist approach. The grudging and penurious and even denyingly resistant among some, to coming to a globally-designed, globally monitored and enforced, effective and pragmatic complex of solutions to the real and undeniable threat of extinction (at least for millions of human beings) perhaps serves those actors well in their personal resume-padding and career advancement. However, that approach enmeshes the rest of us in their personal, private, conspiratorial scheme, much the same way the government of South Africa enmeshed the black Africans, the Indians and others in their deliberate apartheid scheme to not only hold on to power but actually to expand their abusive power in order to accomplish their nefarious, narcissistic and fascist aims. And while the process in South Africa both preceded and followed the Third Reich, the cancer of white supremacy infected both schemes.

There comes a moment in each personal life, when one has to make hard decisions about how one is going to continue to live. Whether that means breaking off an employment contract, or a marriage contract, or a commitment to an academic program, or a seismic change in location, life-style, health-care responsibilities, or even belief systems. And while such moments are both extremely risky, both in their initial conception and inception, as well as in their execution, there is a quality of ‘it must be done’ to them. For some such moments are so dangerous that they refuse to acknowledge either their need or their possibility. For others, many of whom have gone through their own ‘existential moment’, they will understand intellectually and emotionally as well as psychically how important such moments are, for those who approach them honestly, authentically and courageously.

Whatever approaches might have been tried, to resolve some gordion knot or other, in the view of the protagonist, while perhaps partially working, have not succeeded in generating the perceived necessary changes. Such moments carry with them inherently both a death and a new birth…they are not able to be confined and contained in a simply right or wrong equation of morality, ethics, religion or especially public tolerance and acceptance and approval. Indeed, these moments, by their very nature, lie outside most of the normal parameters of morality, ethics, public tolerance and approval and fall somewhere into the category, in the public mind of ‘s/he has lost his/her mind, or ‘s/he has always seemed to be very stranger, different and with some kind of mental problems. And the ‘collateral damage’ (to borrow a war term) of such momentous decisions is very difficult both to predict and to prevent. Some might call the moment ‘fate’ while others might call it ‘madness’ or even a ‘mid-life crisis’ to use the reductionistic vernacular. And the ripples both of the consciousness and the conscience of the ‘moment’ will continue perhaps for the rest of their life.

One is never the same after the full impact of such moments has been experienced, both in the immediate and in the reverberations that follow throughout time. Such a tectonic shift in one’s personal psychic, emotional, intellectual, perceptual, ideational and even spiritual life is both unpredictable and unamendable to the various measuring instruments, legal, medical, academic, professional and even reputational. It becomes and remains in the category of a mystery, just as it was in its initial inception, and as it unfolded in its execution and as it continues in its various reverberations. And while various individuals, on personal career and family decisions, have taken this ‘road not taken’ (borrowing from Frost), and ‘it has made all the difference’, the model has application to the world soul, in the immediate period of history.

There are always many important beliefs, convictions, values, attitudes, perceptions and relationships that have to be aborted, left behind, re-considered, re-evaluated and over-turned. Comfort, that state to which we all seem hard-wired to strive to attain, is antithetical to such a moment of transformation. Indeed, the deconstructionists, currently stomping all over the political culture in America, are, in some, fostering a vicarious ‘seismic’ moment in the nation’s political history. Their pugilistic, venom-infested narcissism and hubris, however, renders their attempt to pull off a political coup, (nothing less will satisfy them!) malignant, inauthentic, perverted and lethal not only to the public interest, but also to the psychic wellness of the individuals so inculcated into their cult.

A more appropriate, politically astute, authentic, integrous and ultimately successful ‘moment’ comes out of South Africa, through the ANC (African National Congress) and their eventual military arm. The narrative of the costs, to person, to family and to tribal tradition, not to mention reads like a Greek tragedy, through the pen of one of the most prominent of the ‘freedom fighters’ Nelson Mandela in A Long Walk to Freedom.

Gandhi was over-taken by Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within, and inaugurated the passive-resistance model against  British rule in India. Mandela was inspired to pick up the fight, only on home turf, that had begun in the Anglo-Boer War near the turn of the twentieth century. One single piece of evidence, his disciplined preparation for, and writing of, final examinations for the LLB, the British legal degree, while in Robben Island, demonstrates not only his determination, but even more importantly, his unfailing and unflappable conviction, not of the courts, but of his own character, in hope and optimism, that he would some day be free to practice law in his own country.

It says here that it is not only the American social ethos that is imploding; the ethos of the whole of the human race is imploding all around us!

Of course, that will read and sound and be interpreted as catastrophizing, exaggeration, ‘off the charts unreasonable’ and even, by some demented!

The social, political, thought and cultural soil has been poisoned by a few unsustainable yet highly seductive myths:

All competition is good!

All pursuit of wealth and greed is good!

All systems, processes and the educational and training programs that support those two myths must be congruent with and emphatically supportive of those two myths.

The forced, if subtly designed and imposed, obeisance of millions of effectively trapped men and women, around the world, to unjust and unjustified wars, to political and ideological propaganda and manipulation, to poverty and starvation, to displacement and both refugee and asylum-seeker desperation, causing catatonic and tectonic upheavals among the political classes, all the while trying to breath in life-defying air (the euphemism of that word is no longer tolerable), find and drink clean water, eke out a subsistence existence through the work of their hands, and scratch out an education (many young girls completely excluded), like apartheid in South Africa, is no longer tolerable, sustainable, morally or ethically justified or justifiable…and like Nelson Mandela, we need an international cadre of Mandela’s, to rise up and push back.

The United Nations, if not reformed, needs to have the funds and the muscle to include clauses to permit and ensure enforcement in its both peace-keeping initiatives, as well as in its climate change targets.

The billionaires, renowned for secreting their bulging investments in off-shore, untaxed accounts, need to be brought to account.

The political class, along with the mass media organizations, need to reach an entente that dwarfs the recent Google-Canadian government deal of a meager $100 million in subsidies to the Canadian news outlets, really a drop in the bucket compared to the uncontested and uncontestable need of every citizen to be not only better informed, but socially and politically active.

The rules of war, including the ban on the development of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, chemical, biological and cyber as well as pharmacological need to be passed and committed to by governments of all nations, irrespective of their religion, their ethnicity, their economic and educational status and level.

The qualifications, including what was once known as a ‘social contract’ in France, of those seeking political office, need to be clearly detailed, and then the nation state, with its various over-sight institutions (not here envisaged as more law enforcement, but rather social and educational preparation) provides some guidance and some base line of expectations of a full appreciation of the needs and processes of the government itself, its history, and its rules of ‘engagement’ in the political battle.

The cyber world, for its part, must be reined in, much in the way the anti-trust laws reined in the out-of-control behemoths of the gilded age.

And, although these are only a few of the many Picasso-like pencil lines in a beginning to transform our own lives, there is one other significant and even dramatic shift in the public mind, perception, consciousness and expectations:

We have to agree that we are all suffering from both impotence (politically, civilly, and psychologically) from an unsustainable overload on what we have come to call our personal ego.

Reich is right that our personal ego is about to implode, universally. And in order to breathe the oxygen it needs, the perception of the tasks and the standards and the processes to achieve those standards has to be re-thought.

This space will continue to be dedicated to the thoughts, reflections, proposals, and especially the insights of people like James Hillman, in Revisioning Psychology, in pursuit of the recovery of the personal and the world soul…