Reader Question: Half the Earth?

I’ll stick with noticing that when any of those mouths move, it’s lies.

The fear-greed continuum’s an amazing thing.

All the world’s political front wo\men afraid of honest work & greedy for bribes & access to inside info the better to leverage those bribes, “working for” plutocrats that are even more fearful & greedy, & both heads of that snake propagating fear & greed in the body politic what follows ’em around.

Was aware, but given the season, went ahead & got Suzanne Humphries book Dissolving Illusions – Disease, Vaccines, & the Forgotten History.

From the jump it is obvious that this vaccine approach to dominion has been on the stove a lonnnnng time…the so-called long game is indeed a thing, after all.

Also from the jump, another quote from that good ol’ Fabian socialist GB Shaw: “Doctors are just like other Englishmen: most of them have no honour & no conscience: what they commonly mistake for these is sentimentality & an intense dread of doing anything that everybody else does not do, or omitting to do anything that everybody else does.” ~ The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906)

*BUT*… that Humphries title, well… ::

“With the truth, one cannot live. To be able to live one needs illusions, not only outer illusions such as art, religion, philosophy, science and love afford, but inner illusions which first condition the outer”

“the neurotic symptom is a communication about truth: that the illusion that one is invulnerable is a lie.”

“By explaining the precise power that held groups together Freud could also show why groups did not fear danger. The members do not feel that they are alone with their own smallness and helplessness, as they have the powers of the hero-leader with whom they are identified. Natural narcissism-the feeling that the person next to you will die, but not you-is reinforced by trusting dependence on the leader’s power. No wonder that hundreds of thousands of men marched up from trenches in the face of blistering gunfire in World War I. They were partially self-hypnotised, so to speak. No wonder men imagine victories against impossible odds: don’t they have the omnipotent powers of the parental figure? Why are groups so blind and stupid?-men have always asked. Because they demand illusions, answered Freud, they “constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real.” And we know why. The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. illusion changes all this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way. Who transmits this illusion, if not the parents by imparting the macro-lie of the cultural causa-sui? The masses look to the leaders to give them just the untruth that they need; the leader continues the illusions that triumph over the castration complex and magnifies them into a truly heroic victory. Furthermore, he makes possible a new experience, the expression of forbidden impulses, secret wishes, and fantasies. In group behavior anything goes because the leader okays it. It is like being an omnipotent infant again, encouraged by the parent to indulge oneself plentifully, or like being in psychoanalytic therapy where the analyst doesn’t censure you for anything you feel or think. In the group each man seems an omnipotent hero who can give full vent to his appetites under the approving eye of the father. And so we understand the terrifying sadism of group activity.”

“This penetrating vocabulary of “initiatory acts,” “the infectiousness of the unconflicted person,” “priority magic,” and so on allows us to understand more subtly the dynamics of group sadism, the utter equanimity with which groups kill. It is not just that “father permits it” or “orders it.” It is more: the magical heroic transformation of the world and of oneself. This is the illusion that man craves, as Freud said, and that makes the central person so effective a vehicle for group emotion.”

“The defenses that form a person’s character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity. But he is also drawn precisely toward those things that make him anxious, as a way of skirting them masterfully, testing himself against them, controlling them by defying them. As Kierkegaard taught us, anxiety lures us on, becomes the spur to much of our energetic activity: we flirt with our own growth, but also dishonestly. This explains much of the friction in our lives. We enter symbiotic relationships in order to get the security we need, in order to get relief from our anxieties, our aloneness and helplessness; but these relationships also bind us, they enslave us even further because they support the lie we have fashioned. So we strain against them in order to be more free. The irony is that we do this straining uncritically, in a struggle within our own armor, as it were; and so we increase our drivenness, the second-hand quality of our struggle for freedom. Even in our flirtations with anxiety we are unconscious of our motives. We seek stress, we push our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair and not with despair itself. We do it with the stock market, with sports cars, with atomic missiles, with the success ladder in the corporation or the competition in the university. We do it in the prison of a dialogue with our own little family, by marrying against their wishes or choosing a way of life because they frown on it, and so on. Hence the complicated and second-hand quality of our entire drivenness. Even in our passions we are nursery children playing with toys that represent the real world. Even when these toys crash and cost us our lives or our sanity, we are cheated of the consolation that we were in the real world instead of the playpen of our fantasies. We still did not meet our doom on our own manly terms, in contest with objective reality. It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.”

“How does one transcend himself; how does he open himself to new possibility? By realizing the truth of his situation, by dispelling the lie of his character, by breaking his spirit out of its conditioned prison. The enemy, for Kierkegaard as for Freud, is the Oedipus complex. The child has built up strategies and techniques for keeping his self-esteem in the face of the terror of his situation. These techniques become an armor that hold the person prisoner. The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self-confidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap. In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live. Like Lear he must throw off all his “cultural lendings” and stand naked in the storm of life. Kierkegaard had no illusions about man’s urge to freedom. He knew how comfortable people were inside the prison of their character defenses. Like many prisoners they are comfortable in their limited and protected routines, and the idea of a parole into the wide world of chance, accident, and choice terrifies them. We have only to glance back at Kierkegaard’s confession in the epigraph to this chapter to see why. In the prison of one’s character one can pretend and feel that he is somebody, that the world is manageable, that there is a reason for one’s life, a ready justification for one’s action. To live automatically and uncritically is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the programmed cultural heroics-what we might call “prison heroism”: the smugness of the insiders who “know.”

“modern man is the victim of his own disillusionment; he has been disinherited by his own analytic strength.”

“What, actually, does it mean to be a tragic figure firmly in the grip of one’s daimon? It means to possess great talent, to relentlessly pursue the expression of that talent through the unswerving affirmation of the causa-sui project that alone gives it birth and form. One is consumed by what he must do to express his gift. The passion of his character becomes inseparable from his dogma. Jung says the same thing beautifully when he concludes that Freud “must himself be so profoundly affected by the power of Eros that he actually wished to elevate it into a dogma…like a religious numen.”
Eros is precisely the natural energy of the child’s organism that will not let him rest, that keeps propelling him forward in a driven way while he fashions the lie of his character-which ironically permits that very drivenness to continue, but now under the illusion of self-control.”

“The pervert {{expand it a bit; think about someone like Gates…}} is the clumsy artist trying desperately for a counter-illusion that preserves his individuality-but from within a limited talent and power: hence the fear of the sexual role, of being gobbled up by the woman, carried away by one’s own body, and so on. As F. H. Allen-an earlier follower of Rank-pointed out, the homosexual is often one who chooses a body like his own because of his terror of the difference of the woman, his lack of strength to support such a difference. In fact, we might say that the pervert represents a striving for individuality precisely because he does not feel individual at all and has little power to sustain an identity. Perversions represent an impoverished and ludicrous claim for a sharply defined personality by those least equipped by their early developmental training to exercise such a claim. If, as Rank says, perversions are a striving for freedom, we must add that they usually represent such a striving by those least equipped to be able to stand freedom. They flee the species slavery not out of strength but out of weakness, an inability to support the purely animal side of their nature. As we saw above, the childhood experience is crucial in developing a secure sense of one’s body, firm identification with the father, strong ego control over oneself, and dependable interpersonal skills. Only if one achieves these can he “do the species role” in a self-forgetful way, a way that does not threaten to submerge him with annihilation anxiety.”

“Let me hasten to assure the reader that I am not developing an apologia for traditional religion but only describing the impoverishment of the modern neurotic and some of the reasons for it. I want to give some background for understanding how centrally Rank himself stands in the tradition of Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Chesterton on the problem of faith and illusion or creative play. As we have learned from Huizinga and more recent writers like Josef Pieper and Harvey Cox, the only secure truth men have is that which they themselves create and dramatize; to live is to play at the meaning of life. The upshot of this whole tradition of thought is that it teaches us once and for all that childlike foolishness is the calling of mature men. Just this way Rank prescribed the cure for neurosis: as the “need for legitimate foolishness.”47 The problem of the union of religion, psychiatry, and social science is contained in this one formula.”

“And so,the question for the science of mental health must become an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that reflects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live? We will see the import of this at the close of this chapter, but right now we must remind ourselves that when we talk about the need for illusion we are not being cynical. True, there is a great deal of falseness and self-deception in the cultural causa-sui project, but there is also the necessity of this project. Man needs a “second” world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in. “Illusion” means creative play at its highest level. Cultural illusion is a necessary ideology of self-justification, a heroic dimension that is life itself to the symbolic animal. To lose the security of heroic cultural illusion is to die-that is what “deculturation” of primitives means and what it does. It kills them or reduces them to the animal level of chronic fighting and fornication. Life becomes possible only in a continual alcoholic stupor. Many of the older American Indians were relieved when the Big Chiefs in Ottawa and Washington took control and prevented them from warring and feuding. It was a relief from the constant anxiety of death for their loved ones, if not for themselves. But they also knew, with a heavy heart, that this eclipse of their traditional hero-systems at the same time left them as good as dead.”

That last one, while importantly descriptive, is also too neatly & tidily constrained (as is the calculation that illusion is an absolute necessity in every human life since it is fundamental in\to most human lives).

Anyway, this collection comes from a keyword search – “illusion” – of quotes from Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death.

All roads lead to Romeo, Romeo wherefore art thou, Romeo? But for a very solid compilation rallied round the central thesis that explains contorted humanimal, Becker’s work is a significant efficiency. Read it & weep – or beep-beep, if you’re more a roadrunner type.

There is also a decent docu film, Flight From Death – The Quest for Immortality that’s a worthwhile introduction to Becker’s work. Streams free on Amazon Prime.

A broader collection of Becker:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1895.Ernest_Becker

So sorry to hear you are out of work 8S. I’m going to be able to retire in December, just hanging on till then. I hope you continue to hang around here.