This blog addresses the last section of chapter 5 in Joost Merloo’s The Rape of the Mind.
Now we are getting into the nitty gritty stuff of why we need strong archetypal characters and stories, especially now. We need them because we live in a time chock full of improbable characters playing as if they are super heroes, but really they are just playing insidious tricks on our minds so they can get our money or get power.
And if they do get enough power, they are going to take everything from you (Yes, even if you supported them, especially if you supported them!)
And also as if we need even more examples of why we need to strengthen our minds against frauds and fakesters, just the other day, David Gura spoke with Zeke Faux of Bloomberg News and New Yorker staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar about the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried who is the disgraced founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
This part of the interview is exactly what Joost Merloo is writing about here and why I am highlighting in this blog: We are suckers for people with money. We are even worse suckers for people who pretend to have money!
Pay attention:
GURA: For people who haven't invested in crypto, haven't dabbled in this world, don't know Sam Bankman-Fried, don't know what FTX is, why is this story, why is this alleged fraud so important and such a big deal?
KOLHATKAR: This is an old story, to some extent. This is a story about, you know, an ostensible genius who happened to be very young, lauded by the press, you know, worshipped by Silicon Valley, who was allowed to go out and behave in, ultimately, a reckless way with other people's money while people turned and looked the other way. And, you know, lo and behold, things were not as they seemed. Something was seriously wrong, and it resulted in a, you know, terrible amount of pain and destruction and financial losses.
And this arc, this narrative arc, is something we see over and over again, particularly in sort of hot, new tech companies where you often have these young men who are just empowered to go out and behave recklessly while they try and grow their companies. And then, of course, we figure out afterwards that they were cutting corners or fraud occurred, and, you know, there's all sorts of pain and recrimination. And you don't have to care about crypto to care about the outcome and the question of whether justice is served in this case.
-- The fall of crypto | All Things Considered, NPR
The Enigma of Coexistence
Is it possible to coexist with a totalitarian system that never ceases to use its psychological artillery? Can a free democracy be strong enough to tolerate the parasitic intrusion of totalitarianism into its rights and freedoms? History tells us that many opposing and clashing ideologies have been able to coexist under a common law that assured tolerance and justice. The church no longer burns its apostates.
Before the opposites of totalitarianism and free democracy can coexist under the umbrella of supervising law and mutual good will, a great deal more of mutual understanding and tolerance will have to be built up. The actual cold war and psychological warfare certainly do not yet help toward this end.
To the totalitarian, the word "coexistence" has a different meaning than it has to us. The totalitarian may use it merely as a catch-word or an appeaser. The danger is that the concept of peaceful coexistence may become a disguise, dulling the awareness of inevitable interactions and so profiting the psychologically stronger party. Lenin spoke about the strategic breathing spell (peredyshka) that has to weaken the enemy. Too enthusiastic a peace movement may mean a superficial appeasement of problems. Such an appeal has to be studied and restudied, lest it result in a dangerous letdown of defences, which have to remain mobilized to face a ruthless enemy.
A tragic example of this is what happened to Khasoggi five years ago today.
Image from Morning Edition – NPR: Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. Five years on, there has been little accountability — and human rights groups say that has implications for free expression around the world. Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images
As I write this blog, today is five years since Jamal Khashoggi with murdered and mutilated. Rachel Treisman opens this segment saying:
Jamal Khashoggi — a Saudi dissident who lived in Virginia and wrote for the Washington Post — walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents for his upcoming marriage. He never came out.
Khashoggi, 59, was dismembered, and his remains have never been found.
U.S. intelligence later determined that a team of 15 Saudi agents had flown to Istanbul to carry out a "capture or kill" operation approved by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).
What strikes me as particularly pertinent to what Joost Meerloo is saying above is what Khashoggi’s friend and collegue Washington Post columnist David Ignatius says:
It's undeniable that there have been major changes in Saudi Arabia in the last five years, Ignatius notes.
For example: The government lifted a ban on women driving months before Khashoggi's death in 2018; now women "mix freely in Saudi society with men," including at music festivals. It stripped the "religious police" of their privileges, which led to many women no longer wearing the hijab in public.
Saudi Arabia and Israel have hinted they are open to establishing formal relations, which Ignatius says is something he never thought he'd see in his lifetime.
"It would be wrong not to credit those changes," Ignatius said. "What bothers me is that those changes have been implemented essentially by force ... We should understand that this is a modernizing dictator. And there's always the danger that citizens of Saudi Arabia could be thrown into prison if they disagree with him."
If you are interested in this topic, you should listen to the whole interview. It is only 3 minutes; time well spent to understand the complexities of our time and how what looks like a good thing or even a GREAT things, might be a very poisonous thing for our psychological reality.
Coexistence may mean a suffocating subordination much like that of prisoners coexisting with their jailers. At its best, it may imitate the intensive symbiotic or ever-parasitic relationship we can see among animals which need each other, or as we see it in the infant in its years of dependency upon its mother.
In order to coexist and to cooperate, one must have notions and comparable images of interaction, of a sameness of ideas, of a belonging-together, of an interdependence of the whole human race, in spite of the existence of racial and cultural differences. Otherwise the ideology backed by the greater military strength will strangle the weaker one.
Peaceful coexistence presupposes on BOTH sides a high understanding of the problems and complications of simple coexistence, of mutual agreement and limitations, of the diversity of personalities, and especially of the coexistence of contrasting and irreconcilable thoughts and feelings in every individual of the innate ambivalence of man. It demands an understanding of the rights of both the individual and the collectivity. Using coexistence as a catch-word, we may obscure the problems involved, and we may find that we use the word as a flag that covers gradual surrender to the stronger strategist.
Do you think the United States’ Congress has a high understanding of the problems and complications of coexistence? Given the recent fight over funding the US government and now Matt Gate’s stunt, it seems we need divine intervention to help guide us weaker minded souls in just remembering how to compromise and get along together.
Go to Your Corners | Music: Donkeys & Elephants by Somr
“In the majestic Halls of Congress, God ushers elephants to one corner and donkeys to another, bestowing upon them a much-deserved respite.“
Archetypal Animations
Images made on Genolve using AI with music for each animation as follows:
Feature Archetypal Animation
Music: The Greatest Showman (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) — Various Artists — The Greatest Show
"We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reaches such a pinnacle of clarity, imaging we have left all the phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal specters not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today, they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth, in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus and produces curious specimens for the doctor's consulting room or disorders the brain of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world." -- Carl G. Jung, Psychology & the East | Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 39
We are living in troubled times. Pick your issue. There are many, and each one is getting worst–accelerating climate change, accelerating economic hardships and global inequalities, rampant misinformation campaigns leading to real life misery and deaths. Adding insult to injury are deniers, fanatics, and maniac visionaries (each one with a different vision of how to save the world). Deniers flock to the manic visionaries. They amass in huge groups to the most charismatic ones; believing them when they say that only they possess the knowledge to save us from this mess. And, they are worshipped by their followers like Gods for they believe that their manic visionary (their savior) does indeed know the secrets to saving them, and they will blindly follow them anywhere, even if the destination is over a cliff.
DC Metropolitan Police Officer Jeffrey Smith took his own life after protecting the Capitol on January 6. His widow, Erin Smith, has a message for those who deny there was an insurrection. -- CNN
Denial of Reality Has Real Life Costs…There is a Price to Pay in Everything We Choose and Do, Especially When We Act Based Only on Beliefs
Huge groups of people have been swept up into the worlds of maniac visionaries where fantastic alternative realities have been created for their anxious and fearful followers to inhabit. Here, everyone is informed by their own “trusted news” sources (typically the maniac visionaries and his or her “parrots“). In these alternative worlds, followers soothe each other with testimonies about what they believe to be true, how misguided everyone else is in the world, and how they will fix the world when the world either “wakes up” from its delusion or they kill everyone off who does not “know” or believe what they “know” is true.
They tend to each others wounds after coming back to the group from another brawl with reality. The fight is endless because there are so many people who do not “know” what they “know“. And they “know” they are right because their maniac visionary tells them so.
Each and every day, they suit up and go out into the world for another battle with “the mainstream“, with “Big Pharma“, with “the government” (any government because they are all rotten to the core), with “experts of any kind“, with pretty much anyone who believes or knows something different from what they know.
Anti-Mask Protests Erupt At Tennessee School Board Meeting | 16,874 views | Aug 12, 2021
This is happening now! Are you terrified? I am.
Is this really how we want to be as a people, as a country, as a world? Do we really want to devolve into a bunch of fractured groups who are nursing on intolerance, bigotry, parochialism, partisanship, insularity, and fanaticism? This sort of food for the mind turns ordinary, good people into rabid animals. It transforms them into people who are ready to inflict terrible brutality on each other over wearing a mask?!!!
Currently, these groups are small and very fractured. But all of them are in a great deal of pain and fear. And most of them include people who are very, very angry and very vocal. These groups mainly exist developed modern countries. This is because for the majority of people living in developing countries, they know what reality is because they live it every day.
The people I am focusing on in this blog have become very comfortable with their lives and their comfort. They like things just the way they are (or used to be). They are terrified by all the changes and upheavals happening around them. It is very threatening their way of living. It is eroding their beautiful island of being comfortable. The real world is encroaching on their paradise, and they don’t like it, one bit. No one is going to tell them what to do in their promised land!
But the changes keep coming like relentless waves on a restless sea. They can’t understand what is causing all this mess. They only know they must resist because if they don’t, it means they will have to change and that might mean losing their promised land.
What we see playing out in real life, right now are groups of people who are afraid and have flocked to insufficient theories about what is going on and why it is happening to them. It is always about them because they have not yet grown their capacity to empathize with anyone else’s burden of reality. We all carry a burden of reality. That is what we are supposed to do. This is why we are here, now. These untethered groups are small and scattered now, but they won’t stay small. This thing is growing. This thing feeds on fear, anger, misery, hate, and it has ample food supply on both sides of the divide.
What is the true source of all this misery, fear and pain?
Stubborn Denial
Stubborn denial of what other people are experiencing and suffering through or enduring because of… (…climate change, racism, Jan. 6…or add your issue or event) is cruel and feeds The Thing between us.
Officer testimony on Capitol insurrection: ‘The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful’ 35,491 viewsJul 27, 2021
I want to highlight here what Officer Fanone said during his testimony to Congress about January 6, 2021. And about the denial of its brutality. He is specifically aiming his words at the Congressmen and women are perpetuating this false idea through cruel denial about what happened to him and his fellow officers that day. Men and women who fought to save our fragile system of democracy from a growing lunacysown by lies and false narrativescarefully crafted to fuel fear, mistrust, and general anxiety. The sowers of such destructive seeds prefer to live in an authoritarian, autocratic, despotic, dictatorial system.
“SO MANY OF THE PEOPLE I PUT MY LIFE AT RISK TO DEFEND ARE DOWNPLAYING OR OUTRIGHT DENYING WHAT HAPPENED. I FEEL LIKE I WENT TO HELL AND BACK TO PROTECT THEM AND THE PEOPLE IN THIS ROOM, BUT TOO MANY ARE NOW TELLING ME THAT HELL DOESN’T EXIST OR THAT HELL ACTUALLY WASN’T THAT BAD THE INDIFFERENCE SHOWN TO MY COLLEAGUES IS DISGRACEFUL!”
— Officer Fanone at January 6 Commission to Investigate What Happened & Who Is Responsible
The Right Means in the Hands of the Wrong Man…Will Lead to Ruin and Disaster
Circling back to Jung’s quote above, he continues saying:
"So it is better for Western man if he does not know too much about the secret insights of the Oriental sages to begin with , for, as I have said, it would be a case of the 'right means in the hands of the wrong man.' Instead of allowing himself to be convinces once more that the daemon is an illusion, he ought to experience once more the reality of this illusion. He should learn to acknowledge these psychic forces anew, and not wait until his moods, nervous states, and delusions make it clear in the most painful way that he is not the only master in his house."
The Cost of Denial & Feeding Your Mind with Misinformation
Two examples of people who believed misinformation about COVID-19 and got COVID and what happened to a little girl who is too young to get the vaccine and caught COVID because it is raging through the area where she lives among the unvaccinated.
Blake Bargatze told his parents told his parents “he was putting off receiving a COVID-19 vaccine because he felt uncertain about its possible side effects, WSB-TV in Atlanta reported.“
Senior Writer David Knowles writes, “He wanted to wait a few years to see, you know, if there’s any side effects or anything from it,” said Paul Nuclo, his stepfather. “As soon as he got in the hospital, though, he said he wished he had gotten the vaccine. Bargatze was the only member of his family who passed on getting vaccinated, Cheryl Nuclo, his mother, told Fox 5 Atlanta. Once hospitalized, however, he asked to be inoculated.”
The child, Ava Amira Rivera, tested positive for Covid-19, according to Amanda Callaway, a spokeswoman for Harris Health System. Callaway said Ava was having seizures and needed to be intubated but Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital, where she was first taken, does not offer pediatric services.
What Are the Top 10 Killers of the World?
Three examples above are real life tragedies, and yet, I know people who continue deny their realities as well as the reality of 4,320,728 people (including children) who have died from COVID-19 since the pandemic began a year and a half ago.
I don’t want to hear the ready list of top 10 killers around the world deniers pull out to prove they are right. I’ve heard too many times: “COVID is no worst than this or that disease.” This is a sorry-ass, lazy excuse made by individuals who no longer trust anyone but themselves and refuse daily to see the whole of reality playing out in front of them now!
We are 7.8 billion people in this world and growing. There are a lot of realities playing out each and every day. How can anyone believe “they know” the full of reality and “they are right” while everyone else is wrong? Only a fool takes such a stance due to their overwhelming ignorance and refusal to grow beyond it.
Let’s look at this list. You can click on each one to see the sources I am drawing upon:
Since the beginning of the pandemic, which too many people to this day believe it is a lie, a hoax, a trick by the ruling elite, 4.3 million people have died.
The actual death count is believed to be much, much higher because countries like Japan, India, Brazil, Portugal, Italy, Pakistan, Tunisia, Jakarta, Eastern Europe, Jerusalem, Mississippi, and I could go on, but I think you get the picture, their health systems and hospitals are collapsing. They are utterly overwhelmed and under resourced to care for the numbers of people coming for treatment and help. When a health system or hospital collapses, it is very hard to record the daily death toll and track new cases. Also, when a health system or hospital collapses, they lose the capacity to help people coming in due to a heart attack, a stroke, a car accident, diabetic shock, children who are starving, or other any other respiratory disease or crisis.
Death is going up across the board across all diseases and emergencies.
And you know why? Because hospitals are overwhelmed. Doctors and nurses are exhausted and demoralized because of deniers and those who have not been inside a hospital recently who are resisting reality.
In India alone, it is believed 4 million people could have died. This would double the current numbers of deaths worldwide due to COVID.
But still, I know people who continue to believe COVID is made up, COVID is a lie, COVID is a trick made up by demonic people who want to control us all. “Watch out!,” they cry, chant, and shout, “They’re coming to eat us all!”
Fanatics, Deniers, and Alt Reality
Deniers, political fanatics, and the “do gooders” out to save the world by making it more beautiful again continue to say COVID is a lie cooked up to control us. One of their most favorite chants is:
“Don’t trust anyone, especially experts!”
Scientists and doctors are high on their lists of people not to trust, but if you are going to not trust experts, then at least be consistent about your beliefs! Deniers and distrusters must also include any experts with whom they come into contact. This would include people who they do not personally know or have put their nose into what these “experts” know. And so, if you are among the deniers and distrusters of experts, you must add to your list: airline pilots, dentists,nurses, or anyone who has spent any amount of time studying a subject to gain expertise in it so they can help others.
If we cannot agree on simple fact that masks (even cloth masks) work to stop the spread of COVID-19, then how the hell are we going to come together to solve Climate Change?!!
Borrowing from Officer Fanone’s testimony: “Refusing to see the reality of the suffering of millions of people due to a global pandemic is a disgrace!”
Time to Wake Up
“Verily, I say unto thee, thous shalt by no means come out thence, until thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.” It is not a matter of indifference whether one calls something a “mania” or a “god”. To serve a manis is detestable and undignified, but to serve a god is full of meaning and promise because it is an act of submission to a higher, invisible, and spiritual being. The personification enable us to see the relative reality of the autonomous system, and not only makes it assimilation possible but also depotentiates (i.e, The action of a substance that reduces the effect of another substance). the daemonic forces of life. When the god is not acknowledged, egomania develops and out of this mania comes sickness. — Carl G. Jung | Psychology & the East | Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 40
Additional Relevant Materialson the Topics Explored Above
Two things I heard yesterday that are very germane to the ideas explored in this blog include:
A syringe is filled with a first dose of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine at a mobile vaccination clinic during a back to school event offering school supplies, Covid-19 vaccinations, face masks, and other resources for children and their families. | PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images
Few people want to be where we are now, but it feels like those who are vaccinated have reached a breaking point with those who aren’t.
The question now isn’t whether the anger some of us are feeling is valid, but what do we do with it? And how do we find a way forward when a difference in opinion costs lives?
Neil deGrasse Tyson Teaches Scientific Thinking and Communication | Official Trailer | MasterClass | 11,299,669 views | Oct 5, 2020
"One of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you're right but not enough about the subject to know you're wrong." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson
And then also, just for extra measure on these very complicated ideas about what’s going on now, here’s some Alan Watts:
The Illusion of MONEY, TIME & EGO – Alan Watts | 3,910,318 views | Sep 1, 2020
"Well, I have a sort of suggestion and that is this that before we decide either to save the planet or to destroy it we pause for a moment of silence. I don't mean that kind of grim silence which one observes when somebody says such and such a famous person has just died, and we'll observe a moment of silence in his honor and everybody frowns and thinks very serious thoughts that's not silence at all. I mean real silence in which we stop thinking and experience reality as reality is because after all if i talk all the time i can't hear what anyone else has to say." -- Alan Watts
The False Idea of Who You Are – Alan Watts | 394,064 views; Jun 8, 2021
"You see the problem is this we identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us. We have a certain number of actions that we define as voluntary we feel in control of those, and then over against that there is all those things that are involuntary. But the dividing line between these two is very arbitrary because for example when you move your hand you feel that you decide whether to open it or to close it. But then ask yourself how do you decide when you decide to open your hand do you first decide to decide you don't do you. You just decide and how do you do that, and if you don't know how you do it -- is it voluntary or involuntary? Let's consider breathing..." -- Alan Watts and the many veils of who we think we are
Finally, These Are Partial Posts about Conversations or Observations I’ve Had, Mostly with Myself, As I Try to Understand Deniers
August 5, 2021 at 1:30 p.m.
This is such an important concept needed so desperately now…
In responding to a post about the death of expertise:
“You have described something that has been deeply bothering me for sometime, and in the last few weeks, intensely as I have come to know a group of antivaxxers who fall into this category that “…their guess is as good as anyone else’s.
“So often when I see one of their posts bemoaning the growing public pressure they are getting from family, friends, workplace, local/state/federal governing bodies, I am tempted to ask: “Have you called your local hospital recently and asked if there are any COVID patients there?”
Post after post is about their tremendous confidence that this is a hoax contrived to control us all forevermore into some dystopian future. Each post also casts anyone who have followed the guidance of governing bodies and medical professionals as ignorant people who have fallen prey to the evil dictators who have devised this malevolent but utterly fake killer virus. “After all, one person said, we are surrounded by viruses everyday.” They express sorrow about how misunderstood they are but also ridicule for those who “take the jab”, seeming to imply anyone who does this is nothing more than minion for the evil empire plotting and scheming to take over the world.
They paint themselves as resistors to all authority. In trying to understand the logic of this by pointing out, “So if all authority figures must be doubted because you don’t know what they know yourself, then does this mean you should never again step on an airplane because the pilots are authorities in how to fly a plane?”
Airplane pilots have spent hundreds of hours learning how to handle all sorts of weather conditions and how they affect the aerodynamics of a plane. They have had to learn about all the machinery, how it works, how it all goes together, and what to do in an emergency. They have flown for thousands of hours to gain the experience to handle any situation. They have become an authority of how to fly a plane and keep everybody safe. But because they are now an authority, they must be doubted?
“It is the same from this group about doctors and nurses who are working themselves to the bone to save people dying from a novel virus racing through the human population. But, they too are thrown into the paint can and dipping their broad brush to explain reality casting them as surely simple minions of the evil empire seeking to take over us all.
“What happen to the ideal/idea that we live in complex systems consisting of lots of individuals… each one unique and different and valuable.”
These pro disease individuals shout, cry, and console each other with resist, resist, resist… because when this is all done, we will be the only ones left standing, then we will insert the Earth and bring in a more beautiful world.I have been shock and horrified at this circular logic for do they not realize that they too seek to take over and rule the world?
It is impossible to use logic or reason with individuals caught in the circular thinking… indeed, they are trapped inside spherical cow thinking and making themselves madder, more fearful, and more crazy everyday. Constant thinking is part of this all too human problem… most of us only think, which makes us scared and crazy.
“Thinking is a good servant but bad master.” — Alan Watts and Eastern Masters
Alan Watts
My friend Glenn responded to this post:
Glenn Gaasland: “The vaccine hestitancy is a peculiar kind of insanity, that can afflict even very clever and good people. It behaves very much like a virus. I know some good people who are somewhat afflicted by it. It seems to be a result of some mixture of a general distrust and disgust for governmental institutions and especially the medical industry + some concern about new kinds of experimental vaccines developed very fast + group identity issues + believing that the Covid virus is not so serious for others than the sick and elderly and that immunity by infection is a good alternative. The unusual nature of the Covid virus seems to play in, we are used to thinking of viruses behaving a certain way, yet this one behaves very unusually. Then this meets a very weak information ecology full of profeteerin mechanisms, a media culture that walked in the wrong direction almost a generation ago and has continued on this path, and it becomes a perfect storm of crazy. The fact that medical authorities communicate with the public somewhat like kindergarten teachers, and big pharma insists on making a profit instead of dropping their patents, plays right into the narrative. All the lies about the origin of the virus, including established scientific magazines ridiculing the lab-leak-hypothesis ( which seems the most likely origin ) was also a terrible blunder that enhanced the mistrust. Along with this, the pressure is growing, and the amount of data is growing, to make the anti-vax position less and less tenable and the need for general vaccination increasingly obvious.”
July 28 at 2:29 P.M.
This is a response to a comment on this post about Sagan studying social sciences a little more.
The implication I interpreted is that Sagan would probably revise this statement somewhat. I commented to this comment as follows:
“Please say more on this… or can you indicate reading material? A man named Peter who recently moved next door is a retired sociologist who taught about the Holocaust. Indeed, he survived it as a half Jewish boy living in Nazi occupied Europe. His father died having been sent to the concentration camps.He recently asked my husband and me if we knew how long it took after Hitler was elected for Nazism to rise and the brutality to begin. We did not know.
This Peter who survived Nazi Germany said, “Four months.”Now consider the United States of America and the testimony of four officers who defended the Capitol on 1/6/21. Can you imagine what would have happened if those rioters had gotten a hold of even one Congressman or woman who they considered the enemy?
They did not get ahold of a single one because the thin blue line of officers fighting for their lives held back 8,000 to 9,000 angry, mostly middle age white men from encountering them and creating safe passages so they could escape and hide.
“A thin, blue line… it is very Carl Sagany… the cosmos the the thin blue line that sustains all life on Earth. And, now we are that thin, blue line, if we can stop polluting our consciousness with racism, fascism, authoritarianism (just pick your ism) and clean our minds so we can treat each other with dignity and respect and compassion.”
This is Peter Stien’s book. It is a must read for anyone seeking to understand reality. He wrote this after 4 of his students came to him in tears after encountering another professor at Peter’s university who was a Holocaust denier.
Peter Stein | Friend and Neighbor | Survivor of the Holocaust | Professor of Sociology & Writer
July 28 at 1:31 P.M.
The first “anti-vaxxer” movement, which began as soon as the first vaccine was discovered and used, began in 1796. At this time, the British medical and scientific community of the early 1800s was known to be very cliquey and dominated by highly influential people. They didn’t like that a a country surgeon was promoting a safer alternative to dealing with small pox and mounted a blistering campaign against him (the man who observed that milk maids who had become infected with cow pox did not catch small pox). These jealous doctors blurred the boundaries between opinion and fact, which continues to this day. They were also in fear of losing their income and status.
Witness the United States of America where a lively anti-vaxxer community thrives and generates lots of money for persons dedicated to misinformation. Also, getting vaccinated against the newest virus that has evolved to infect people and has proven it is highly infectious and deadly has been weaponized as a partisan poisoned arrow. This partisan poisoned arrow and new love child for anti-vaxxers is of course COVID-19.
This article says, “Many of the arguments against vaccination that we see today stem from this period: the idea that Jenner had no qualifications, that vaccination could actually cause smallpox, syphilis, or any number of diseases, and that vaccination would affect the way the body worked by the introduction of material that was not meant to be there.”The reason many of these claims have pervaded is mostly because they are based on the tiniest grain of truth which, when taken out of context, can give them an air of veracity that isn’t deserved.”While it is true that Jenner didn’t have a formal qualification, that’s because he trained as a surgeon at a time when there were no degrees for surgeons.
According to Gower, in the early years of vaccination people were sometimes contracting other infectious diseases, or blood poisoning, as a result of vaccination but that was because it was not a sterile procedure at the time and there was a risk of contamination, which is not the case today.”
NPR did a segment on dirty needles recently, which are still very prevalent in the developing world and estimated to be the cause of death of 3 to 4 million people in the coming year.”The iconic photo of the two boys — one vaccinated against smallpox and one who hadn’t been vaccinated — was published in 1901, and taken by Dr Allan Warner at the Leicester Isolation Hospital.”
Who do you want to believe–someone spouting unsubstantiated opinions crafted to get you worked up, afraid, and angry OR someone who has dedicated years of their life studying things that make people seriously ill and how to stop or treat these deadly things (we call these people doctors, researchers, virologist)?
It is wrong, indeed downright evil, to conflate the work of doctors and virologists with the evil Pharma industry that wants to control us all (or insert your favorite evil doer of our time: the illuminati, Corporations, governments of all kinds… you can put anything in there to stoke up the fear factor that spices up your real intentions).
Or perhaps it is the evil Bill Gates who wants to plant a chip inside of you (or have you heard the one about he wants to grow inside of you so he never has to die… now we are tracking down the QAon poisoned pansy path of fear inducing fantastic fiction).
From a friend Jean on this post: Also great background context on the “anti-vaxers’…. Very interesting to me. I grew up GRATEFUL for ALL vaccinations… But I’ve actually MET people recently who started telling me, “oh you only need vitamins and you cannot get COVID-19”. Here’s a link to a DOCTOR who is one of the “influencers” around one of the many disinformation being spread re COVID-19.
“Americans’ growing interest in alternative medicine has helped turn suburban Chicago doctor Joseph Mercola into one of the most popular voices in natural health. So why does he have so many people riled up?” — Chicago, January 31, 2012
July 27 at 6:46 P.M.
A response to a friend:
I understand you speak of a reality little visible to the ordinary Western man and woman. It is a spiritual-psychic reality that is just as real as pooping, sleeping, and eating.
And also, so you do not misunderstand or underestimate me, I have and continue to pay close attention to the numbers, who is giving the numbers, and a whole lot of other things going on in this world. It is not within your ability to perceive or know what I have been paying attention to and what I have failed to perceive, or even worst what I have chosen to deny exists and have created an alternative reality to explain. Only I can do that, just as only you can do that for yourself. The words we use to share our experiences and our understandings of what we observe and what we have come to understand are woefully lacking, and even more so when we have not experienced a certain situation together and know without any doubt whatsoever the reality of what we have just experienced in this world.
The interview (with numbers) is not about Coronavirus and who has died, but rather use of dirty needles for all sorts of treatments for all sorts of life threatening diseases and conditions in the developing world. It is no less a tragic state of affairs than the number of children worldwide dying of starvation each year, while developed countries do a little but not enough to stop starvation in its tracks! We can do so, we choose as a massive collective of human beings not to do so.I also understand that we will not agree on the severity of this novel virus (known as COVID-19) that is marching its way throughout the human population across the world. The reality of what is happening Now will speak for itself as time goes by. However, this is not new. Being decimated by an invisible microbe has happened to the human species again and again. We have fallen victim to lots of deadly disease throughout time, I mean the whole of human history.I do not think you would deny how deadly Rabies is — low and behold, it is a virus. Nor do I think you would bother to debate how infectious and deadly Smallpox Variola major – specifically the malignant (flat or hemorrhagic type) has been to human beings. Dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF) is also a virus that does ugly things to the human body.
I had Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever earlier this summer. It made me really sick. It almost sent to me to the hospital. Of the spotted fevers (which are cause by another microbe, a bacteria), it is the most deadly. It can also cause long-term nasty effects on the human body if left untreated.I did not deny the reality of this disease. I sought medical treatment. I took the doxycycline even though it caused nasty side effects that I will not get into here because it would really gross most people out to describe what happened to me.
Coronavirus, yes, it is new; yes, it is making the world crazy; yes, too many of us have become obsessed with who is a trusted source of information and who is a lier. But the reality is, it is leaving hundreds of thousands of people without mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, and even children have died from it. To deny the reality of what these individuals have endured is to inflict a psychic wound on the people who have lost individuals the love. It is also taking a spiritual step onto the very same psychic-spiritual path that all the “lying politicians” and “lying people of any authority (I guess??!! — does this mean a pilot who flies the airplane you get on to go visit someone you care about cannot be trusted because he/she is an authority on flying, even though he has trained for hundreds of hours and knows about all sorts of conditions and how to handle them? Or, does this mean, you cannot trust a doctor who has spent years studying and learning about the human body and disease to become an authority on how to treat disease? If you are true to your beliefs, then you must be consistent all the way and not trust the farmer who sells you food to eat because you have not raised it yourself; you must not trust another person to dig a new well for water; you must not trust any other authority but yourself. This is a very lonely world to live in, at least, I think so.)” Yes, I whole-hearty agree there are power hungry people who have climbed the steps of power and authority who are willing to do anything to maintain their power, including lying to and killing their people. But to clump all people who have dedicated huge amounts of time to become an authority on something is a dangerous movement of thought.
You are not wrong to fight evil. We must all fight it when it rears its ugly head. However, it is my humble opinion that you don’t need to be lopsided and cruel to people who have lost their loved ones to this novel virus to make your point about the perils of our time and the need to wake up consciously and fight like hell.Indeed, I believe your point and fight would be much more powerful and potent by holding the reality that people are dying from COVID-19 in great numbers alongside the reality that children are dying of starvation in great numbers and we as massive collective let them die. This is evil. It is also possible to hold the reality that a little tiny virus is killing lots of people exceedingly fast alongside the reality that people are dying in huge numbers by by brutal government using brutal tactics. Holding these two realities does not lessen what you are speaking and calling people to action one little bit.
You are calling them to psychic illness and spiritual decay such as the hundreds of thousands of black and brown people in my country who have been lynched and brutalized for centuries. I am disgusted by segments of people in my country who project their psychic illnesses on others. It is a most insidious illness that is rearing its ugly head again such as the events (the REALITY) of January 6, 2021. I have blogged about this horrible day in depth when an estimated 9,000+ (mostly middle age white men clinging like tormented children having a tantrum to their belief in white supremacy) stormed the Capitol. These tourists (as Trump and most of the Republicans of my government) call them — gouged out eyes, severed fingers and toes, tasered officers at the base of their skulls (causing one to have a heart attack), hit them with sledgehammer, baseball bats, and even the American flag.
The civil war never ended… it went underground and grew in foul and malicious ways. It was carefully poked and prodded and stoked by evil men until it erupted in what I saw unfold not more than 9 miles from where I live. And almost the whole Republican party is denying the reality of that day… following Trumps lead who says the air was filled with love.
One of the officers testifying today when asked about how this particular statement Trump said made him feel said, “If that was love, then let’s all go down to mar a lago and share some of this love with that man.
“Yes — you are absolutely right… when you are facing a monster… and if you have a molecule of consciousness to chart a moral course forward… you have no choice but to fight it!!!!!!
This is the way of all life on Earth. This is reality, which does not lie, but fools will fall when they deny the rock of reality that human life has sprout out of.
Alan Watts says this much better. Don’t bother listening to that interview above… I only shared that as another and different tragedy playing out in our collective reality of now. Rather, if you can stomach it, listen to this talk. It’s one of Watt’s shortest. He even talks about the very same thing you are calling us to pay attention to… he even uses the analogy of the wasp and the bee who are locked in an eternal, mortal struggle against each other. And so too is man when evil rears its ugly head, it must be fought as well. But, Watts says because we are a conscious living being there is another level that must be kept in mind as we fight the endless war of good and evil.
Tribute to Carl Jung — 1961, Alan Watts
July 26 at 1:16 P.M.
On Living in Sin… and other terrible things we do to each other as human beings… this is my response to my friend who wrote this blog and posted something else that I responded to with a question:
“To be honest, I am not sure how fast I will get to your blog. This is a time of remembering; a time when 3 years ago my father died. I can not help but remember the events that played out and pay homage to the lost despair, and darkness I was flung into in the aftermath of this time, three years ago.Terrible people exist everywhere on this Earth — in high positions, like your terrible leader in India and previously in my country of the US with the devil disguised as Trump — and they exist in low places like the funky little nonprofit I worked for whose CEO fired me for being by my father’s side as he struggled for life for 10 days then died.
But frankly, that devil lives inside you and inside me and inside every single human being on this fragile planet. It is a disease as real as COVID-19. This human disease will probably guarantee that nothing will be accomplished in the next 9 years to mitigate Climate Change. This is the burden of consciousness and how we respond (or do not respond) to the problems of our times.
I will read your post, in time. I have always been illuminated by your insights and abilities to perceive things below the placid surface of being human; a surface of normality that we all like to pretend exists, but really we are vortexes of chaos in the world when we become blind to our own inner devil and demons.
I will leave instead this quote from Jung I found while looking for another that fits the current global situation:
“Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life…If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature…Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.” ― C.G. Jung, The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition
Garden of Eden and The Fall
Where did the term Toxic Positivity originate from? (This was asked by my friend Barry Kort)
My response:”It is as old as human beings being self-aware. It is a price we pay for being conscious and able to see inside ourselves and reflect on what we find there — the good, the bad, and the ugly.Most of us love to see the good in ourselves! You see it all the time on Facebook. “Look how productive I am!” “Look at this great thought I just had.” “Look at this great project I’m doing.” “Look what a good man, good woman I am.”
Owning our bad and ugly parts, well, that’s not so fun. I know hardly no one with whom I can have an honest conversation about the ugly thoughts and downright evil thoughts I have.
Toxic positivity is just a new word for a very old psychological coping mechanism — mainly denial and splitting. Below these “normal” methods of coping with stress, you descend into pathology. Here’s a great article on it:
"Zuckerman says that “toxic positivity, at its core, is an avoidance strategy used to push away and invalidate any internal discomfort.” But when you avoid your emotions, you actually cause more harm."
The situation you helped me with last year with Ecology for System’s Thinking that was a case of Toxic Positivity…. you know who I’m talking about. That person was doing great harm to me, and then blamed it all on me and my inability to be as “happy” and “positive” as he was. What a deep and dark well of unconsciousness resides inside this individual; indeed, resides inside each and every one of us… “Oh, but let’s not talk about that… let’s be positive and look on the bright side of things… we got Climate Change to solve and COVID to get through…”
We are headed for hell by ignoring the dark depths and failing to give comfort to each other when we encounter adversity and despair.”
“I think in our times today, especially on platforms like Facebook, we all believe ourselves to be physicists, we all reduce the complicated problems swirling around us to the simplest formulas, and we all preach our views to the void of obscurity and untenable realities… and so we have our overly simplified Now with solution makers that know little to nothing about what they are proclaiming will save the world and everybody in it. We might as well be living on a spherical cow.”
The spherical cow is a humorous metaphor for highly simplified scientific models of complex real life phenomena. Wikipedia
July 22 at 9:52 P.M.
“As the old Chinese master took us on footage if you ask any question you get thirty blows with my stick; if you don’t ask any question who get thirty blows just the same–in other words what the hell are you doing around defining yourself as a skilled and defining me as a teacher. In other words you have raised the problem.” — Alan Watts – Buddhism As Dialogue (Full) [around minute 19]
