Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The “mental illness” explanation for suffering is today the cultural norm, and those remaining critics of the megamachine’s destructive impact are now, unlike the 1960s and 1970s, pushed far to the margins of society.
– Bruce E. Levine, The U.S Disconnecting and Numbing Epidemic
Looking at the hideous demigod of fascism, Adolf Hitler, or at his present-day caricature Donald Trump, who is often compared to him…we find many remarkable characteristic similarities: relentless self-hypnotising mendacity, mistrust bordering on paranoia, devious opportunism, a deep streak of cruelty, limitless grandiosity, unhinged impulsivity, crushing disdain for the weak.
– Gabor Maté, We Each Have a Nazi In Us: the psychological roots of authoritarianism
With [Kamala] Harris, it sounds like we will get Cheney’s foreign policy, AIPAC’s Middle East policy, Goldman Sachs’ economic policy, and Exxon’s climate policy.
– Jeffrey St. Clair, Notes from a Phoney Campaign: Catfight in Philly
I’m convinced that benumbing, banal, NPR-fed liberal reality, which now, in the person of DNC-sanctified Democratic candidate Kamala Harris has expanded to be able to comfortably bless all the major policies the Republicans already bless, can be challenged. But due its depleted energetic condition, meaningful challenge from the “left”can come only if it regains lost spiritual energy, a natural resource, universally available and infinitely renewable. The stark fact is, without it there’s no opposition. There’s no place to stand to counter neoliberal totality, the “can-do” optimism of the environmental science professor who spoke on climate action at The Other Side last night, no feisty radical in the audience willing to endure the scorn of the rest and churlishly, damningly, persist stating the obvious – if you read your Counterpunch – contraries.
Even starker – without it, the energy that is getting successfully deployed – also “spiritual,” or at least “god-like”in a way – is the insane, demonic energy driving neoliberalism such that it cannot stop its headlong apocalyptic feeding frenzy, its divisiveness and its heedlessness. With what can such a force be met except the other kind of energy that unifies?
One way the depletion can be staunched is to stay tuned to news sources like Counterpunch and Scheerpost. In a recent essay published on Counterpunch, Bruce Levine points to the rise in substance use and other means of disconnecting and “numbing out”among all ages and social groups in America. By now we all can testify, the aroma of burning pot is everywhere. One doesn’t need to be paranoically suspicious to imagine the personalities we meet – especially those seeming remarkably well-adjusted in such stressful times – have likely been softened by some substance that casts a rosier glow on life, or by screen dependency or, for the lucky, sufficient affluence, a secure professional niche and a well-honed capacity for denial. The cause of the drive to disconnect (which dissipates spiritual energy rather than tapping into it), Levine suggests, is the growth of the “megamachine,” that which, under the logic of capitalism, has led to the erosion of those communal ties that make us human. Without a dream to oppose it, the process of dehumanization proceeds unchecked. We, who are supposed to dream, seemingly have not enough energy for the task.
Besides being something it’s easy to feel hopeless about, might it also be sinful to thus allow the forces of dehumanization to continue without opposition? It’s not as if we’ve lacked for prophets to warn us where this is going. Levine gives us a list of early 20th century thinkers (i.e., Erich Fromm, Lewis Mumford, Ivan Illich, Jane Jacobs, E.F. Schumacher, Wendell Berry, etc.) who sounded alarm bells, devoted themselves to finding and to building “nooks and crannies” where dehumanization had not taken hold. During the 1960’s counterculture actually became popular, but that opposition, too, failed to produce, out of disaffected white young people, a lasting counterculture.
To last, a counterculture would have needed a basis in soul-depth, once provided via collective myth, to both inspirethe masses and indict the powerful. Shared myth releases people from individualist isolation and joins them with a dream of the better, juster, kinder world. By extension, it joins individuals with their better, braver, heart-based selves, each one prepared to defend the common good – the dream – no matter what the cost. Liberal enlightenment thinking, in casting out metaphysical reality, bore a profound unnoticed cost that liberal reality thus far cannot compensate for: in vanquishing the concept of sin it eliminated the means to participate in mythic inclusivity and through participation, to escape disabling existential isolation. That is, release from sin opens upon the reality of the all-inclusive oneness. Without sin, isolation is impregnable, the spiritual, imaginative reality inaccessible (except via psychodelics) for most people. Why? Because now we could believe evil was something apart from ourselves, not intrinsic to our humanity. No longer understanding how close and inextricable is the reality of evil, the door to the inexhaustible supply of creative energy – love – is lost to us.
Thus, those of us still harboring hope for humanity to check the march into machinehood, might actually ask ourselves, in a hopeful way: What if that kernel of sin is there, in each good, earnest, right-thinking pink-pussy-hat wearing liberal breast that does not, cannot know the energizing truth of all-is-connected?
This leads me to suggest a powerful challenge can be made to the seeming alternativeless inevitability of benign and tolerant liberal reality by all individuals endowed with a soul, who will, once more, as religion once did, treat soulreality as real. The best hope for the dream of the common good may lie in men and women willing to take the risk of healing the psychic wounds inflicted by civilization upon all its children. Only thus can the spiritual/creative energy that has been allowed to atrophy be regained. Only the energy of untameable hearts is sufficient to challenge enthroned demonic energies in a population more characterized by obedience than independence, wills servile to the collective will of insanely rich Moloch-energized robots.
In an article recently published in The Guardian, trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté makes a comparison between Hitler and Trump based upon their both being survivors of childhood trauma at the hands of rigidly authoritarian fathers. The characteristics he names are not, then, attributes of particular, unusually grotesque personalities, but can be assumed to be on the spectrum of trauma-induced behavior, at the other end from trauma’s better-known effects – substance abuse, mental illness, etc. Is it possible then that, with trauma being more or less universal, recapitulation of the dynamic between trauma victim and others is inevitable in all relationships, making the ground of the interpersonal the location of the “battleground” between the megamachine and humanity?
Humbly, I submit this to be so, and thus offer the marriage conflict as a locus for peace activism that otherwise might be frustrated by today’s logistical and myth-impaired impossibilities. It may just be that peace on the domestic front may be more powerful in its ripple effects as well, for it demands individuals participate in mythic, soul-level understandings, without which the conflict cannot be seen through to the higher, more inclusive unity. That is, unlike large-scale conflicts, that activate the rational brain, intimate ones awaken the soul slumbering passively in banal liberal reality.
The relationship begun “in love,” positive projections fully intact, leading the partners to utter impossible vows of love unto death, will, in certain dissatisfied, adventurous souls enter stormy seas, trust no longer simple, the object of love turned menacing and intolerable. In people committed to love’s mystery over maintaining personal comfort zones, here will be the workshop base for rehumanization, for soul reclamation. The storms will be understood to have less to do with a “mismatch,” or “irreconcilability,” and more with the truth of trauma that love wants revealed so healing can occur.
I must stay with that faith now as it faces a heavy barrage from unwanted, seemingly nullifying personal revelations. As Orin enters therapy for PTSD, as the fierce defenses starts to dissolve, I must see my part in both the miracle of our partnership that produced the mid-life wonder of our Cafe in Utica, and my complicity in allowing the wounds to the soul that were – perhaps inextricably – part of the miracle, go untended. In our liberal society, trauma wounds, the particular madness that comes out in relationships, in excruciating kinds of battling and wound infliction, tempts one to zero sum thinking; either I leave or I’m a sucker for pain. Love’s instructions are different. To restore the authority of the human heart in liberal reality demands neither resignation to misery, nor flight from it, but surrender to the soul’s process of healing, to rescuing souls one at a time.
The necessary program is re-education in the rights and the needs of the voiceless, defenseless soul! Liberal reality gives us to understand real insanity is in putting up with unnecessary pain, in not taking the relief that’s available! True enough, when abuse becomes physical, another solution may be too late. But if we’re not dealing with an actual threat of harm, what then? Imaginations castrated in liberal reality leave us with no way to understand either trauma or human depth! Never are we asked to see the way through such relational impasses in mutuality, the long view, the faith view that tells us in the area of love we are Pre-K at best, the view that knows your injury is a human problem, in some part mine as well. Never are we educated to see the problem as a problem of our threatened humanity. Inasmuch as we accept the solutions offered by “reason,” grief counselors and lawyers, Big Pharma and the DNC, or believe in finding solutions that mean climate change is fixable that just happen to allow us to keep our job, the more we move in bad faith, further from the core of what makes us human, which is our souls.
Back in the 1980’s Orin and I began the inner work – including 12-step recovery groups, the men’s mythopoetic movement, and years of intensive psychotherapy – that led to the marvelous creation of our Cafe (2002) and its arts-dedicated offshoot (2007) in Utica. In building these countercultural establishments in upstate NY backwaters Orin and I relied pretty much solely on each other, on our shared conviction in the insanity of Empire and call to be in opposition to it.
Now our preoccupations were perforce with the “real-world” pragmatic concerns of keeping a business open every day, week after week, month after month. We had no book to tell us how, at the same time, the work of releasing oneself from the legacy of trauma could and must continue. The never-finished-spiritual “birthing” process, along with such projects as replacing the leaky roof on our house, and other kinds of involvements, got postponed. The Cafe demanded our time, our labor, both of our very different energies. Orin’s near-supernatural can-do energy, perfection in all things coffee and Cafe-related, his mesmerizing, NYC-big personality that gets away with liberal droppings of “f-bombs,” gave the Cafe its pugnacious sparkle. Less evident but real were the “self-hypnotizing” mendacity, massive mistrust, grandiosity, and impulsivity that were inextricable – like in R.L. Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde – from that attractive energy. Though there was no time for the inner work anymore, I was complicit in this, the way we framed our lives within the safety of the Cafe’s very real blessing.
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At the last Board meeting for The Other Side, as we spoke about PR matters, the subject of physical posters for events, to which I am committed, tedious though it is, came up – consensus among younger members seemed to see them as a pointless anachronism. In this age of wowie social media, why bother? Behind this talk, I caught glimpse of a larger issue. It caused me to make up a word: “maladaption.” The truth is, the Cafe and The Other Side were direct offshoots of Orin’s and my incapacity to adapt to the assumptions of bourgeois liberal reality, the defining malady we shared. In Utica, at the time we started the Cafe, 2002, there were fewer and fewer human-made public spaces that could contradict the burgeoning mall, chain store obliteration of place. Channels in which our energies – his and mine- could be expressed in our local community did not exist so we created them. The building of these “channels” was propelled by spiritual energy released through trauma work we had already done; they were the precise reason all of these young friends were attracted to us and our establishments in the first place.
Being young, they must navigate themselves through the culture freshly; we did not/do not do that “for them.” But their healthy skepticism as to what is being asked of them to “fit,” to make a living inside a dehumanizing “megamachine” reality ought to be developing now. As they take their anti-depressants, or enjoy the relief of a few drinks or a few tokes, they can at the same time be aware of what is making us stressed and sick, which is our very social reality, the environmental air we breathe that infects at every level, including within souls in committed relationships. Where we commit the task will be, sooner or later, to allow trauma to be revealed so love can do its healing work.
The realization that ones’ depression, one’s distress, one’s failure to happily go with the liberal mainstream – assumed to be one’s personal problem – is due to the dehumanizing context – is both a liberation and a calling. The soul feels seen, instead of forever marginalized, but it makes clear one will have to make one’s own “channels,” or one’s true energy and expression will have no way to manifest in bourgeois reality. Even to make protest, protest has to risk more. It must risk being independent creative agents who choose to sacrifice freedom in order to “rehumanize” in place and within the closest and most constraining human relationships, the very obligations from which liberal reality frees us.
When souls must keep their own traumatized condition secret from themselves, the devil is happy. If we do not take up the soul’s project, which is healing work and communal work, there will be more Trumps, more fascists rising to the top, more unleashing of violence and brutality on the part of individuals driven by the magnified energy of the terrified. To meet the different demands of love in our time depends on each soul’s winning its authorization through direct acquaintanceship with its trauma. So the trauma is carried, but cannot overflow its bounds, each human vessel creates itself by means of art. Imaginations, now in chains, are the sole means of exit from the trending dehumanization, the love we barely know the least thing about, endorsement of and needed energy for breaking them.
