The fractured black box of the American Mind

I recall somewhere Sherman Alexie saying that all Native Americans are schizophrenic - anyone would be if their way of life, the memory of which is recent, so radically and maliciously had been altered. Perhaps we, as “white" America, mainstream, feel echoes of these emotions, sentiments - traumas - in that we, too, exist in a schizophrenic state. Yes, we fear losing our traditional way of life. Only, our way of life, which happens to be empire, is not sustainable. It places a heavy hand on the rest of the world, on its own castes and classes.  If climate change as a man-made threat is actually dire then faults for non-adoption of mitigation policies rests 100% with the United States, with us. Growth is needed for our system to work. Growth is needed for the overspill of wealth of the elite ruler-manager-crypto-fascist class to fall onto the masses.  

  

But we do not see this - blessed are the Americans who perhaps have an intact, non-schizophrenic mind: the earnest/ignorant believers for they shall inherit the task of performing in the uncertain world to come. Not understanding the US as an Empire, not having that awareness makes seemingly random events occur, reactions being processed through the fractured black box of the American mind.  If we do know more - if we can “see” a la They Live, with those glasses - what does that help.  The Earnest People will perform in the events to come.  Those Who Can See cannot help be perform with them. 

Mass mind effects of the Long Emergency

From a conversation between Chris Martenson and James Howard Kunstler on the Peak Prosperity Podcast: 

  

Chris Martenson: It's clear that the leaders - I called them the managers now - the managers of the country are really only serving the elites and the mega-corporations and everyone else can just go pound sand. That's what it appears to me based on actions. 

  

James Howard Kunstler: It's so transparent that they can't even hide it anymore. You really have to admire their gall and you really have to be mystified that the media, the New York Times, nobody is really reporting on that. And I don't think that's because they're afraid of being communists or anything, they just seem to be too dense to get it. 

  

CM:  You think? How can they be that dense? Come on. 

  

JHK:  Yeah, well of course. It's barely in the public discussion. Even in the non mainstream media people barely square that circle. I think the bottom line may be this: you and I and all observers in a Heisenbergian sense of physics we are failing to notice something about what is going on and that is that the mere observation of all this turmoil is making people so crazy that they’re having trouble observing all the turmoil.  I do think that the country is getting really, literally crazy. 

  

This easily reminds me of Upton Sinclair’s statement that, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”  We are all in this together, this state of “literal craziness”.  What defines the parameters of the strife we encounter? 

  

Another quote, a statement of Plutarch and the thing our media will not discuss: “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”  Our base economic situation not being discussed. 

Birds

Magpies attend to the murder house.
Crows crunch on church ruins.
Swallows spill secrets on empty split levels.
Wrens watch blood dry on Wall Street.

Whippoorwills pick bugs on bleachers below
The fighting Thunderbird and Eagle.
And me with my new flightless wings
Walk on into the cooling night.

Can we not help but to "grab as much as we can"?

My Occam's razor is genetics and evolution - are we not all sophisticated enough to accept at least the most basic parts of Richard Dawkins' argument - can we not accept that we must understand ourselves as natural things, as having one foot in nature and one foot in the world of purported rationality? What are the expectations when we feel our intellects have come to predominate? What happens when we feel that we in the situation we currently find ourselves in is due to rational choice? 

  

When we do feel that we stand firmly with both feet in the realm of the rational, when we turn our back on the idea that our natural half is the less important half, it is then we find ourselves unmoored, playing a Glass Bead Game, ignoring the evolutionary, ignoring the subconscious and The Shadow. 

  

We have evolved to see conditions satisfactory to passing on our genes. This is a condition that all enjoy in the United States.  But beyond wanting to pass on our genes we also have a predisposition to press our advantage - it is sound in passing practice to “grab as much as you can”.  How good it would be to admit this.  How good it would be to acknowledge that the way to a true rationality must go through an understanding of the subconscious.  Understand and revisit.

Life in Empire, the Shadow in Empire

Any lifestyle maybe the venue for transcendence - accidents occur. But the life that says yes to mysteries - how about controllable mysteries - is in one way saying yes to more life experience in general, perhaps a precondition to experience mysteries. Is my attachment to Christianity still coloring my vision? Or, moreso my attachment to the American way of life which I would say has a spiritual effect – is it dangerous when humans simply get what they want?

Do I still infer the idea that human souls are being cultivated for some spiritual entities consumption? Do I place too much importance on America – as though American souls are somehow more delectable? But, one thing that an analysis of the effect of this land on people shows is the reality of change within our population group, changes in perception - the creation of a Shadow – as the concreteness of a people's self narrative develops so too does the Shadow take on a more solid dark reality. There is an intractableness in this situation - we are incapable of seeing a very important aspect of ourselves - how much is this aspect one of a people living in an Empire?

I instantly thought of my idea of how people should clamour for an increase in their share of this Empire – is this a way to mobilize masses - is this mobilization a good thing? What is in my shadow that I feel the need to release mental bonds – how may I benefit from this and quickly answer that question - in the least I may say that with some cognizance comes and aesthetic - a way to live life that seems fuller, more whole, better. I understand what it is that I may expect, understanding limitations as a way to overcome limitations.

Today's protests and the conversations we are still not ready to have

How do people face the place we are in now, a place that is living in an Empire? How do people living in an Empire conceive of themselves? This takes place in the non-thinking realm of the subconscious.  This is the level in all of us, a deeper level, which de-facto at a remove from language (and therefore the delusion of Truth which language makes possible).  And this level, to me is the ultimate level: on a subconscious level we are acting as rationally as can be.

That different races within the central states of an Empire exist in difference with one another is painfully, deathfully evident. Injustices are being done to a race that is not ours and we abide it.  The protests-riots after George Floyd's murder represent a release of frustration that has been building for decades as white people have pushed their advantage while at the same time offering endless paeans to equality – there is not an endless font of money for all to approach equally to collect any sum that they dream about: it is a zero-sum resource meaning it is finite, that the more any person has the less another person or group may have. And our pesky and honest subconscious in alliance with evolution (at deterministic levels we cannot consciously admit) makes us take, take all we can because the more we have the better we might pass on our genes. 

Christianity has been repurposed to assuage our souls, seeing transgressions as ethereal. Initially Christianity had a non-zero view of the spiritual realm - equality possible in the afterlife. But old Christianity was very much existing in a zero-sum world, luxury only for a few in the physical world and which Christianity a necessarily had to operate within.

But we've all gone past that now in the United State-core of Empire. Prosperity gospels abound now - we all want "our share" which really means we want it all, we want the resources to out-compete other groups, other members of our own group – in that sense Floyd was symbolically all black people and Chauvin was symbolically White America - the look on Chauvin's face is emblematic of the whites' subconscious – being so matter-of-fact in how it gains advantage.

Out loud many white people decry this physical inequality, decry this violence. Others, out loud, and in opinions they keep to themselves accept this physical inequality. The former group while still indubitably following the dictates of the evolutionary-subconscious team feel compelled to act. They move forward into the realm of the conscious replete with assumptions and logical workarounds. Honestly of course some white people in this former group approach the selflessness of a white civil rights activist dying at the hands of racist whites in the 1960s, people like William Lewis Moore, Rev. Bruce Klunder, and white civil rights workers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner who were killed alongside their black ally James Chaney.

The other group of white people, the ones who accept the way things are, do not state explicitly their thoughts blaming black people for their own abhorrent situation.  They place themselves in a fantastically envisioned world pervaded by rationality where their absolute dependence on the structure of society to secure their advantage goes ignored.  Both groups of whites live in a state of delusion.

They are still unified in accepting the advantages though and changing this acceptance of the state of affairs requires that they receive less. Allowing black people to be truly equal partners in an Empire means a reduction in white people's income. And this is very difficult because, as I've stressed, evolution demands complete dominance and in the pseudo-rational conscious world we do not even have/use/permit the language of the subconscious to be spoken.

That voice now, if heard, if we could allow it and work with it - if we might get into a conversation with evolution and its commands, must come in the form of a questioning of Empire, our default states of existence, a state of existence that serves most of White America just fine, a state of affairs that still nonetheless is malleable, however being a state of affairs that must be acknowledged as being uber-entrenched. It will be painful to alter our relationship to this state of affairs - the method we are going forward with now, as it does not address this kind of pain, will likely not change the situation.

What new protocols are being considered? What new ways of interacting are going to be put in place? And what stories we will tell ourselves about why these protocols and ways of interacting do not create meaningful change?

My Geoscience education: reflection on good behavior by someone who did not utilize his degree

At times I am disgruntled when I reflect on my education - B.S. Geoscience, geology emphasis, Boise State University 2012.  Still I study geology but frustrated by the seemingly intentional cloud put up, a cloud of pomp, of professors being anointed as secret holders of information, the concealing clouds meant to hide, meant to be hiding worthy mysteries that you are supposed to be desirous of getting closer to.

And, so, I've just described what I usually - what perhaps most people usually - see as knowledge.  That cloud I described is my own fog of non-understanding that as a student I should desire breaking through because then I will be educated which is what all that time spent was meant to accomplish.  Once broken through I would see open roads - options.  I would see paths to income and further edification.

I saw classmates do it, make it through the mystical vapors = profs deferred to them, talked to them, laughed with them: that friendly chiding from the prof over the effort the student was putting in.  I caught glimpses though basic, easiest-to-see-through clouds.  I saw how it was important to work with a professor, helping them with their research.  I saw classmates completing research papers that their profs helped them with, guided them. 

A different life-path, if I was willing to travel, to relocate, geology would have meant more.  Still have it I suppose: I thought it would be nice to have a little notebook to carry with me esp. when backpacking or hiking, a little scrapbook with info on the areas I frequent.  So just went now to the garage and got my little 3.5"x 5.5" Moleskine notebook that I've had for years, the first 10 pages or so containing entries that I'll read sometime but not now - pages and pages empty though, ready for info.  Right now I'll jot some facts about the the Idaho Batholith, a structure so interesting, so integral to understanding the Sawtooth Mountains to the north of me, which I visit and gaze upon from atop Lucky Peak.

Yeah, I feel if I was all about heading to work in a mine I could have contacted those employers, tailored my time spend studying for my degree with an eye on that eventuality.  A better part of a decade downstream from those times, get something out of it still.  I feel I recognized good traits in people now and that in the past I did not have that full perceptual ability.  I'm working on it now.  Sure I've heard of "focus" but it was abstract hearing about that quality in others.  Now with my focusing I get ti and I get how it may be beneficial to me, if the ability to focus is in actuality a benefit to others.

It is that ability to "snap out of it" and think forward (positive) thinking thoughts - there it seems to slip back under the veil of abstraction but for me it is a real technique I practice concretely.  Especially when the thoughts do go negative (and this is with the primary purpose of minimizing/controlling/getting rid of negative thoughts) I ask what I want to work on with my writing.  As simple as that.  Or I think of my run plans for the the next day, for the week.

I guess it doesn't' matter if this is what others do or if this is solely a special adaptiation for myself.