We are ploughing ahead in this series. If you want to understand why this series is call the Marvelization of Man, then skip back to blog 1: here.
Long story short, if there are going to be Marvelous Men, there are also going to be ordinary men, awful men, and god awful terrible men. And this is what we are really exploring, the underside of Marvelous.
So, here we go, taking a deep dive into the workings of the most disgusting, vile, horrid creatures to be found on planet Earth: The Totalitarian Leader!
What follows is from Joost Meerloo’s book, Rape of the Mind, published in 1956. To read more about Joost, backtrack to this blog, here.
The leaders of Totalitaria are the strangest men in the state. These men are, like all other men, unique in their mental structure, and consequently we cannot make any blanket psychiatric diagnosis of the mental illness which motivates their behaviour.
But we can make some generalizations which will help us toward some understanding of the totalitarian leader. Obviously, for example, he suffers from an overwhelming need to control other human beings and to exert unlimited power, and this in itself is a psychological aberration, often rooted in deep-seated feelings of anxiety, humiliation, and inferiority. The ideologies such men propound are only used as tactical and strategical devices through which they hope to reach their final goal of complete domination over other men. This domination may help them compensate for pathological fears and feelings of unworthiness, as we can conclude from the psychological study of some modern dictators.
Fortunately, we do not have to rely on a purely hypothetical picture of the psychopathology of the totalitarian dictator. Dr. G. M. Gilbert, who studied some of the leaders of Nazi Germany during the Nuremberg trials, has given us a useful insight into their twisted minds, useful especially because it reveals to us something about the mutual interaction between the totalitarian leader and those who want to be led by him.
Hitler's suicide made a clinical investigation of his character structure impossible, but Dr. Gilbert heard many eyewitness reports of Hitler's behaviour from his friends and collaborators, and these present a fantastic picture of Nazism's prime mover. Hitler was known among his intimates as the carpet-eater, because he often threw himself on the floor in a kicking and screaming fit like an epileptic rage. From such reports, Dr. Gilbert was able to deduce something about the roots of the pathological behaviour displayed by this morbid "genius."
Hitler's paranoid hostility against the Jew was partly related to his unresolved parental conflicts; the Jews probably symbolized for him the hated drunken father who mistreated Hitler and his mother when the future Fuhrer was still a child. Hitler's obsessive thinking, his furious fanaticism, his insistence on maintaining the purity of "Aryan blood," and his ultimate mania to destroy himself and the world were obviously the results of a sick psyche.
As early as 1923, nearly ten years before he seized power, Hitler was convinced that he would one day rule the world, and he spent time designing monuments of victory, eternalizing his glory, to be erected all over the European continent when the day of victory arrived. This delusional preoccupation continued until the end of his life; in the midst of the war he created, which led him to defeat and death, Hitler continued revising and improving his architectural plans.
Nazi dictator Number Two, Hermann Goering, who committed suicide to escape the hangman, had a different psychological structure. His pathologically aggressive drivers were encouraged by the archaic military tradition of the German Junker class, to which his family belonged. From early childhood he had been compulsively and overtly aggressive. He was an autocratic and a corrupt cynic, grasping the Nazi-created opportunity to achieve purely personal gain. His contempt for the "common people" was unbounded; this was a man who had literally no sense of moral values.
Quite different again was Rudolf Hess, the man of passive yet fanatical doglike devotion, living, as it were, by proxy through the mind of his Fuhrer. His inner mental weakness made it easier for him to live through means of a proxy than through his own personality, and drove him to become the shadow of a seemingly strong man, from whom he could borrow strength. The Nazi ideology have this frustrated boy the illusion of blood identification with the glorious German race. After his wild flight to England, Hess showed obvious psychotic traits; his delusions of persecution, hysterical attacks, and periods of amnesia are among the well-known clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.
Still another type was Hans Frank, the devil's advocate, the prototype of the overambitious latent homosexual, easily seduced into political adventure, even when this was in conflict with the remnants of his conscience. For unlike Goering, Frank was capable of distinguishing between right and wrong.
Dr. Gilbert also tells us something about General Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler's Chief of Staff, who became the submissive, automatic mouthpiece of the Fuhrer, mixing military honor and personal ambition in the service of his own unimportance.
Of a different quality is the S.S. Colonel, Hoess, the murderer of millions in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. A pathological character structure is obvious in this case. All his life, Hoess had been a lonely, withdrawn, schizoid personality, without any conscience, wallowing in his own hostile and destructive fantasies. Alone and bereft of human attachments, he was intuitively sought out by Himmler for this most savage of all the Nazi jobs. He was a useful instrument for the committing of the most bestial deeds.
Unfortunately, we have no clear psychiatric picture yet of the Russian dictator Stalin. There have been several reports that during the last years of his life he had a tremendous persecution phobia and lived in constant terror that he would become the victim of his own purges.
Psychological analysis of these men shows clearly that a pathological culture -- a mad world - can be built by certain impressive psychoneurotic types. The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of their behaviour. They are compelled not by ideological belief,no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind,but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures.
The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy - the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.
A clear example of this can be seen in the way the Nazi leaders defended themselves through continuous self-justification and exculpation when they were brought before the bar at the Nuremberg trials. These murderers were aggrieved and hurt by the accusations brought against them; they were the very picture of injured innocence.
Any form of leadership, if unchecked by controls, may gradually turn into dictatorship. Being a leader, carrying great power and responsibility for other people's lives, is a monumental test for the human psyche. The weak leader is the man who cannot meet it, who simply abdicates his responsibility. The dictator is the man who replaces the existing standards of justice and morality by more and more private prestige, by more and more power, and eventually isolates himself more and more from the rest of humanity. His suspicion grows, his isolation grows, and the vicious circle leading to a paranoid attitude begins to develop.
The dictator is not only a sick man, he is also a cruel opportunist. He sees no value in any other person and feels no gratitude for any help he may have received. He is suspicious and dishonest and believes that his personal ends justify any means he may use to achieve them. Peculiarly enough, every tyrant still searches for some self-justification. Without such a soothing device for his own conscience, he cannot live.
His attitude toward other people is manipulative; to him, they are merely tools for the advancement of his own interests. He rejects the conception of doubt, of internal contradictions, of man's inborn ambivalence. He denies the psychological fact that man grows to maturity through groping, through trial and error, through the interplay of contrasting feelings. Because he will not permit himself to grope, to learn through trial and error, the dictator can never become a mature person. But whether he acknowledges them or not, he has internal conflicts, he suffers somewhere from internal confusion. These inner "weaknesses" he tries to repress sternly; if they were to come to the surface, they might interfere with the achievement of his goals. Yet, in the attacks of rage his weakening strength is evident.
It is because the dictator is afraid, albeit unconsciously, of his own internal contradictions, that he is afraid of the same internal contradictions of his fellow men. He must purge and purge, terrorize and terrorize in order to still his own raging inner drives. He must kill every doubter, destroy every person who makes a mistake, imprison everyone who cannot be proved to be utterly single-minded. In Totalitaria, the latent aggression and savagery in man are cultivate by the dictator to such a degree that they can explode into mass criminal actions shown by Hitler's persecution of minorities. Ultimately, the country shows a real pathology, an utter dominance of destructive and self-destructive tendencies.
Introduction: Reminder Why We Need Strong Super Hero Movies
I found a great article on Harrison Ford in Esquire where the writer Ryan asks Harrison what he thinks the point of stories are for people. Harrison answers:
“I guess the point is, these stories we see—movies, novels—we look for ourselves in these characters and these stories,” I say, rebooting.
He nods. “We look for ourselves, and we look for useful information to help us navigate our fucking lives and the world that we’re living in,” he says. “We don’t realize we’re looking for that. But we’re looking to pull out of a fantasy something that’s useful to us. And what’s useful to us is to emotionally participate in things outside of our own lives.”
-- Esquire | Harrison Ford Has Stories to Tell |Yeah, Indiana Jones is back. But enough with the legend stuff. We spent two days in L.A. with Ford—in his airplane hangar, at his house—drinking bourbon and talking about what really matters in life. By Ryan D'Agostino | PUBLISHED: MAY 31, 2023
Hans Solo & His Poached Egg | Music: Poached Egg by The Namby Pamby
To understand the animation of Hans Solo and his poached eggs you need to read the article in Esquire. In short, Harrison Ford is a super hero archetype actor. He’s acted in Star Wars (no date needed!), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Blade Runner (1982), Witness (1985), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Working Girl (1988), Presumed Innocent (1990), Patriot Games (1992), The Fugitive (1993), Clear and Present Danger (1994), Air Force One (1997), and Marvel movies as the President of the United States, and more.
Harrison knows better than most why we like and need stories in our lives. He’s acted in a bunch of them after all where it is his job to depict Arches of Consciousness. That is what stories and movies are all about. And as Arches of Consciousness, every arch has a light side and a shadow side. Just as human beings do and this is because we get to decide what side of an archetype we act upon. Our super hero movies and modern stories, just like ancient myths, depict what happens to human beings when they choose to act on one side of an arch or the other in constantly changing situations, which is the position we all find ourselves in as conscious living beings throughout our lives.
Arches of Consciousness | Music: Stream Of Consciousness — Coherent Energy
Stories are short cuts to consequences, karma. And karma is nothing more than the consequences of conscious choices made by human beings. Stories show us what might happen when we choose to act using one side or another side of an Arch of Consciousness or if we only choose to act using a very narrow spectrum of our full conscious capabilities.
The Indoctrination Barrage
So let’s get back to the meat of consciousness and why we need to pay attention and use our minds critically every moment of every day. We need to do this work of critical thinking, which is how we work out our consciousness, to stay healthy and free. We need to work out our minds just like we need to work out our bodies to stay healthy and live a long life.
Here is the next section of Joost A. M. Meerloo’s landmark book The Rape of the Mind, Chapter 5: The Indoctrination Barrage, beginning on page 71.
The continual intrusion into our minds of the hammering noises of arguments an propaganda can lead to two kinds of reactions. It may lead to apathy and indifference, the I-don't-care reaction, or to a more intensified desire to study and to understand. Unfortunately, the first reaction is the more popular one. The flight from study and awareness is much too common in a world that throws too many confusing pictures to the individual. For the sake of our democracy, based on freedom and individualism, we have to bring ourselves back to study again and again. Otherwise, we can become easy victims of a well-planned verbal attack on our minds and consciences.
We Don’t Need No Education | Music: We Don’t Need No Education — Regent Street
We cannot be enough aware of the continual coercion of our senses and minds, the continual suggestive attacks which may pass through the intellectual barriers of insight. Repetition and Pavlovian conditioningexhaust the individual and may seduce him ultimately to accept a truth he himself initially defied and scorned.
Pavlovian Conditioning | Music: The Chain (cover) — Marvel Years
The totalitarians are very ingenious in arousing latent guilt in us by repeating over and over againhow criminally the Western World has acted toward innocent and peaceful people. The totalitarians may attack our identification with our leaders by ridiculing them, making use of every man's latent critical attitude toward all leaders. Sometimes they use the strategy of boredom to lull the people to sleep. They would like the entire Western world to fall into a hypnotic sleep under the illusion of peaceful coexistence. In a more refined strategy, they would like to have us cut all our ties of loyalty with the past, away from relatives and parents. The more you have forsaken them and their so-called outmoded concepts, the better you will cooperate with those who want to take mental possession of you.Every political strategy that aims toward arousing fear and suspicion tends to isolate the insecure individual until he surrenders to those forces that seem to him stronger than his former friends.
And last but not least, let us not forget that in the battle of arguments those with the best and most forceful strategy tend to win. The totalitarians organize intensive dialectical training for their subjects lest their doubts get the better of them. They try to do the same thing to the rest of the world in a less obtrusive way.
We have to learn to encounter the totalitarians' exhausting barrage of words with better training and better understanding. If we try to escape from these problems of mental defense or deny their complications, the cold war will gradually be lost to the slow encroachment of words -- and more words.
I’m GOD | Music: I’m God (Best Part Looped) — Crystalline
Concluding Thoughts
Resist, resist, resist the I-don’t-care reaction! Push yourself to learn, study, and understand. Run, don’t walk, towards the more intensified desire to study and to understand reaction that Joost A. M. Meerloo talks about. This is the only way we stay free. This is the only way we survive as a species on planet Earth because do you really think demigods like Trump, Putin, and the others really care about your freedoms, about your economic security, about the planet. If you really think they do, well, you’ve been successfully indoctrinated and are riding the barge to the end of the world
Archetypal Animations
Images made on Genolve AI image generation options.
Feature Archetypal Animation
Music: The Baroque Ball (From “Cruella”) [Instrumental] — Roxane Genot
This is part 2 of the blog series: The Marvelization of Man
Morbius
I began this series talking about Marvel’s reboot of Morbius who is a character created in 1971 by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane. Morbius is a “Living Vampire.”
As a child, Morbius suffers from a disease that cripples him and makes him frail and weak. There are others like him; all will die young. But young Morbius is a smart kid and becomes a doctor. He finds a cure for his illness. And you guessed it, the cure comes from the genes of vampire bats.
Marvel hoped for another BIG blockbuster after the smashing hit of Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). This movie earned $1.1915 billion US dollars. Morbius debuts in 2022 with a production budget of $75 million dollars but it only earns $163 million worldwide, with only $74 million dollars earned domestically, as reported by Forbes.
In short, Morbius was a great disappointment both financially and critically. Many critics said the plot was not well-structured.
While this may be true, I think Marvel also missed the mark of what Morbius’ character embodies. All movie character are symbols. This is why we like them. They remind of us of ourselves in some deep fundamental, eternal, and mysterious way.
Magic of Symbols in Storytelling
Marvel, and every other marvelous entertainment universe, draws on these symbols each time they tell us a story. The stories we watch today are not that much different than the stories the ancient Greeks and Romans enjoyed.
Indeed, the stories arcs are virtually identical in nature, scope, and meaning. Stories such as Prometheus and the Stolen Fire, Orpheus and Sisyphus, or Echo and Narcissus have just as much relevance to 21st Century humans as they did for ancient Greeks and Romans. These types of stories crystalize unique aspects of what it means to be human. They harness and embody specific patterns of human behavior that we all recognize and can relate to. They center such patterns in specific characters who become the hero, ruler, everybody’s man, trickster, femme fatale, tragic hero, warrior, sage, knight-errant, and many more patterns of behavior we all relate to or have experienced.
These patterns of human behavior have been well observed and commented on since ancient times. Plato called these recognizable patterns of human behavior Forms. His philosophies on Forms create the foundation of Modern Western philosophy. What he meant by Forms is that there are pre-existing ideals or templates all humans access and use to navigate life as a conscious being.
Carl Jung dedicated his life to understanding the secret life of the human mind and called these often unconscious patterns of behavior primordial images or archetypes.
Archetypes are everywhere and influence more than 99% of human behavior. Most of us remain unaware of the energizing patterns that influence our lives in a myriad of ways every day. Archetypes inspire us, guide us, possess us, rule us, and live through us every day.
This is why our favorite movies and stories depend on characters who are possessed by and living out a powerful archetype. Pamela Buckle Henning writes for writers and actors of the stage:
Archetypal patterns are an unintended, unconscious presence in human life. Archetypes are primordial patterns that operate within the psyche of every individual. They also operate within groups of people. When people gather together for any purpose, they can become unwittingly entrained in archetypal dramas. -- STAGES, SKILLS, AND STEPS OF ARCHETYPAL
PATTERN ANALYSIS by Pamela Buckle Henning
Bottom line, archetypes are fundamental to telling a powerful story, one that lots of people will want to see and pay to go see. The most powerful stories have characters, both good and bad, who speak to and meet our collective unconscious. Characters and stories that get at and illuminate something that everyone feels but can’t seem to put their finger on or name.
Vampires Are Archetype of Narcs
As a vampire, Morbius embodies the narcissistic archetype.
The myth of Echo and Narcissus warns about the danger of narcissism as the beautiful wood nymph Echo falls in love with the young and very handsome human man Narcissus who sadly loves himself more than anybody or anything else. This causes Echo to disappear becoming a tree in her forest while Narcissus stares at himself in pond. He stares so long, he becomes a tree rooted to the bank.
There are other many other aspects of the narcissist archetype, but the most recognizable one is that these are people obsessed with their own self-importance and status. In Jungian terms, these are people possessed by and fascinated with all the negative aspects of the ruler archetype.
Narcissists personify the negative aspects of the ruler archetype in that they desire power and control, see themselves as fit and entitled to rule and see others as inferior subjects. They fear losing their power and use multiple strategies to maintain it. -- Narcissism and Archetypes - Children of Narcissists
These are fearful rulers who are afraid of being overthrown. Their paranoia grows so intense and overbearing that it corrupts and cripples all good qualities and instincts they would otherwise possess. This corruption essential rips the wholeness of their psyche, leaving a gap for the shadow to jump in.
According to Jung’s interpretation of the Shadow Archetype, the shadow contains all the sex and life instincts. It is created as the conscious mind grows in relation to its culture where conscious survival compels an individual to repress ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts, and shortcomings in an effort to adapt and conform to cultural norms and expectations.
It is this side of a fearful ruler’s mind that takes over filling him with every negative, shadowy, repressed idea, instinct, or impulse he has ever had. Suddenly, this feeble, frighten man is transformed into a monster and becomes a Ruthless Ruler.
Narcissistic Descent
Narcissists descend to dark interior places inside themselves. In the darkness of their own Shadow, they lose the ability to regulate and balance their own emotions, even to power their own psyche (ability to think and focus). They have essentially split themselves in half and can no longer self-regulate. They feel constantly empty and void inside, which feeds their fear and widens the gap between their Good Self and their Bad Self.
Soon they must pick a side. It does not matter which side they choose. They have split themselves into two opposing parts, which leaves them psychically starving. The food they crave is attention. This is energy for the psyche, and a starving psyche will do anything to get it, which sets them off on their ruthless pursuit to control everyone and everything.
The best supply of psychic energy for a Narc is watching or causing another person’s pain. To a Narcissist, watching someone suffer is like a vampire feeding on another person’s blood to survive. For Narcs, human pain and suffering is psychic blood.
Back in the 70s when Morbius was created, he was an appropriate evolution of the original Dracula imagined by Irish author Bram Stoker back in 1897 who then captured the evolution of corrupted, evil ruler archetype for his time.
The 1970s was a time of unabashed proliferation of narcissism. No longer did a person need to be rich and famous to be a Narc, but now you could be poor and weak, a common man or ordinary woman. Narcissism invaded American society with a vengeance, partly due to unregulated capitalism. In fact, being a Narc was good for business.
So, Roy Thomas and Gil Kane captured the changing psychological landscape that everyone was encountering in the 70s with Morbius, who was a conflicted vampire. He wanted to do the right thing, but his vampire mind proves more powerful than his human mind, which is very much like a narcissistic mind craving attention, power, glory.
The superhero-villain was a very compelling archetype then and remains one now. It plays off the idea that it takes a monster to destroy a monster.
Narcissism: Humans Who Feed on Other Human’s Pain
Narcissists must feed on another human being’s pain and trauma to live. Narcissists are hollowed out human beings with extremely weak psychological coping abilities. In fact, they really don’t have them at all, at least not the healthy kind. Because of this, they are very emotionally damaged human beings.
They manage their inner pain and inner hell by making other people feel the pain and suffering they are too afraid to feel inside themselves. So they project their pain, their suffering, and their inner hell on everyone else.
Narcs strange psychological math is: “I get rid of my pain by making you feel pain. In their mind, relationships are based on dominance and submission.” — Dr. Les Carter, Surviving Narcissism
What Do Narcissists Gain By Your Trauma Bond?
Narcs feed off of your pain and enjoy abusing and crushing others to get their narcissistic high, also known as supply. Sounds a lot like drinking blood, doesn’t it?
And that’s exactly what it is, only psychic, emotional, spiritual blood. The 70s were a great time for Narcs to thrive, so enter a Marvel superhero specifically created to deal with them… because the old adage is correct: You need a monster to kill a monster!
And that is what Mordius becomes by trying to cure his disability with vampire genes; he becomes a monster, but he doesn’t want to kill his fellow humans unless he has to kill them. Then, he doesn’t mind and is pretty darn good at doing it. He even kills his childhood friend who goes off the rails with all these new powers of this cure of the childhood disease that they share.
Bram’s vampire, Dracula, is immediately recognizable around the world as this evil, fantom fiend who is already dead but keeps waking up to feed on the living.
He is of course a fictional character; however, Bram drew inspiration for this particular type of evil from a historical figure who was widely known back in his day for his thirst for blood.
This man was Vlad the Impaler. His real name was Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia. His father was Vlad II Dracul (or Vlad the Dragon) who was a prominent member of the Order of Dracul (also known as the Order of the Dragon).
The Vlads lived during the 1400s, which is a really tough time to be alive and running a minor kingdom sandwiched between two big empires fighting all the time as well as minor kingdom squabbles. The two great empires Wallachia sits between are the Holy Roman Empire (not to be confused with the Roman Empire) and the Ottoman Empire. In addition to these great machines of human will, are a bunch of minor states and kingdoms trying to grow bigger and pledging allegiance to one or the other empire so they might be rescued if they are invaded by a hostile force.
Young Vlad III is taken hostage by the Ottoman Empire as a child with his brother to make sure his father keeps his pledge of allegiance to Mehmed the Conqueror the man who conqueres Constantinople thereby ending the Byzantine Empire.
It is during this time as a prisoner that Vlad III learns the torture tactics that will earn him his name. Vlad III employs these horrific tactics in service to Pope Pius II who finances his efforts to take back his kingdom along with uphold the territories of christendom.
Vlad III employs his skills with such brutality, cruelty, and at a scale of magnitude never before imagined that he rightly earns his name Vlad the Impaler. He goes down in history as one of Europe’s most bloodthirsty evil fiends. And of course, his trail of blood sows fertile ground for Bram Stoker to create one of the most reviled, evil, bloodthirsty villains ever to be imagined and to enter popular culture’s collective imagination through Bram’s book.
Narcissism in the 1970s is proliferating rapidly. It is becoming a much more socially accepted, equal opportunity disease. In fact, if you do not have a bit of narcissism going on, it is hard to get ahead in business, in romance, and virtually everything we are told we should love and adore in our modern world.
This is where you get vamps like Morbius who really don’t want to drink human blood, but there’s this beast inside that must be fed. There is a flowering of vampire dramas in the 70s that mirrors the flowering of narcissism in world.
There are frustrated vampires who cannot find enough virgins to feed on (like Blood for Dracula) and there are racy. There are hungry female vampires (like Daughters of Darkness).
Andy Warhol’s Dracula – restored trailer
DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS TRAILER
There is the rise of black vampires like top-grossing Blacula (1972) and Ganja and Hess (1973) that will inspire Black horror movies like Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Spike Lee’s Da Blood of Jesus.
Blacula Official Trailer #1 – Thalmus Rasulala Movie (1972) HD
ANJA & HESS – Trailer
There is Vampire Circus (1972) starring David Prowse before he become Darth Vader. And there are the psychological vampires like Martin (1977), and the lonely vampire Nosferatu, The Vampyre (1979).
Vampire Circus (1972) Original Trailer [FHD|
Nosferatu The Vampyre (1979) – Trailer
There are vampires who drink the beauty of other humans so they stay eternally young, there are energy vampires, and Omega Man (1979) where vampirism is symbol of humanity’s continual hunger for progress leaving all but one man little more than nocturnal prowlers of blood. To get a real detailed breakdown of 70s Vamps, see 10 Vampire Movies From the ’70s You Probably Haven’t Seen (But Should)
The Omega Man (1971) Official Trailer – Charlton Heston Movie
By the 70s, narcissism had long since descended from the pedestals of popes, sultans, and kings. Narcissism now flourishes in wanton abundance among all of humanity and has continued to evolve ever since.
Marvel Got It Wrong
This is where Marvel got it wrong.
The Narcs who send chills down out backs now are much closer to Harry Potter’s Voldemort.
Lord Voldemort uses a wand to project his dark magic on his victims. A Narcs like Donald Trump simply uses his tongue (a bit like a wand but more like a snake). Modern Narc project their poison then take possession of a person’s mind sucking them dry, then filling them up with their Dark Thoughts. This is the magic of our time. People who come under the spell of an evil, vampire-like, magician like Voldemort (or Trump) are doomed to become empty vessels who do his bidding.
Today’s Narcs want to occupy your mind and fill your head with their thoughts. Narcs want you to believe they are omnipotent, but really they are parasites, viruses, feeble infections who need your mind to survive in this world.
Narcs are disgusting, degenerative, dying babies. And even Lord Voldemort is even 10 years behind the evolution of narcissism in our world.
Stranger Things nails it even closer to our collective truth:
Lord Venca, Number 1, the Mind Flayer!
Stranger Things | Vecna (001)
“When One kills, he doesn’t simply kill, he consumes. He takes everything from his victims. Everything they are and everything they ever will be.”
— Stranger Things and the Upside Down
So poor Morbius really needs to catch up to the crystalizing, consuming power of Narcissists in our Modern World.
Lord Vecna | Mind Flayer I AM Your Lord & King! I HAVE Come to Occupy Your Mind! — So you don’t have to!
Lackluster Nature of Transactional Archetypes
Every modern human being must navigate a slew of complicated social dynamics each and every day. We must navigate the social dynamics at work, home, hectic, even the gym. We are social creatures and maintaining strong community relationships influences our social health, mental health, physical health, and psychological health.
So, how do we psyche ourselves up to complete a hundred complicated tasks every day spanning work, home, and the day care center? How do we prepare ourselves psychologically for the hours of focused conscious attention needed to complete one task after another after another? How do we maintain our focus throughout the duration of the project? How do switch between the type of attention needed at work and that needed at home or in community?
Each and every human being does this sort of switching of focused conscious attention continuously throughout our day. We do it so much, we don’t even think about how we even do it, nor do we consider there is a psychological ecosystem sustaining the energy requirements needed to have a single thought, much less 10s of thousands of thoughts each day matched by 10s of billion of conscious and unconscious actions and reactions to our environment and changing circumstances.
So how do we do it: Maintain a Steady Stream of Conscious Thought?
Mind vs Matter | Music: Distractions Stract — Distraction
How do we pull out attention back to a difficult task when it wanders away?
Watered Down Archetypes
My beef with Marvel and Morbius is that more attention seems to be going into creating another blockbuster movie rather than architecting complex, relatable, and believable characters. Individuals with real flaws and real issues that resonate with our complicated, complex, hyped up, machine-like world.
Super heroes and archetypes should give us recognizable human patterns that we can empathize with and pretend to be if we find ourselves in a similar quandary or situation that requires us to dig a little deeper for those inner Super Powers (that we all have) to do something hard.
Marvel, by focusing on making blockbusters, follows a formula for success that waters down the characters into transactional beings. Instead of feasting on information-rich archetypal characters, we end up watching sad, sorry, distracted, transactional creatures trudge through unoriginal storylines and adventures.
The magic is gone.
Instead we are served up highly systematized, transactional characters, highly processed and mainstreamed into sugar coated, tiny packages labeled: This Is A Monster, This Is A Hero, This Is A Super Hero,This Is A Conflicted Hero.
Super Sweet Super Heroes | Music: It’s Gonna Be a Great Day — Fergal Flaherty
"Social dynamics boil down to the two main categories of relationships—transactional and transformational. The former often alienates leaders to their peers, while the latter builds strong, trusting relationships with peers, helping them to feel like their work matters and giving them a reason to care."
-- The Risks of Having Transactional Relationships with Your Peers; Leigh Bailey | April 11, 2023 | Blog | Executive Coaching | Leadership Development | Leadership Team Development | The Bailey Group
We are allowed to indulge as much as we want on all this filtered, strained, sifted, rarefied, clarified, in short highly refined stuff just as long as we don’t take it seriously! After all, come on man, these are comic book characters!
As we live in smaller and smaller cubby hole roles that are striped of responsibility and original thoughts, we feel the pressure pushing in on us to Hold the Mold no matter what. We assume lives of repetitive, homogeneity, but inside we are starved for meaning and purpose. We are starved for healthy, robust, vigorous ideas of what we might be… if only…
We are not suppose to formulate an answer to that. We are just suppose to go to work so e can go watch another Marvel movie when it comes out.
Too Much Watering CausesChronic Hypoxia of the Human Mind
The next blogs in this series will take a deeper dive into the transactional nature of our modern living and how this is creating a chronic hypoxia occurring in our minds. Simply said, we are being starved of information-rich, highly symbolic, nourishing ideas.
Man’s mind must breathe and its oxygen are ideas. Creating a chronic condition of dehydrated, highly processed, synthetic ideas deprives man’s mind of the air it needs to maintain a homeostasis capable of providing normal focus human conscious attention. is no longer possible.
In the body when hypoxia occurs, it is due to a lack of oxygen. In the mind when hypoxia occurs, it is due to a lack of nourishing, rich ideas that help root us to our tasks, to each other, and the Earth.
Failure to correct the current hypoxia of the modern mind will result in greater susceptibility to what A.M. Merloo, M.D., called the Rape of the Mind.
Born as Abraham MauritsMeerloo in The Hague, Netherlands, Meerloo came to United States in 1946, was naturalized in 1950, and resumed Dutch citizenship in 1972. Dr. Meerloo practiced psychiatry for over forty years. He did staff work in the Netherlands until 1942 under Nazioccupation, when he assumed the name Joost (instead of the more Jewish-sounding Abraham) to fool the occupying forces. In 1942 he fled to Belgium,[1] and from there he escaped to England (after barely eluding death at the hands of the Germans). He became a colonel and was chief of the Psychological Department of the Dutch Army-in-Exile in England.
After the war, he served as High Commissioner for Welfare in the Netherlands, and was an adviser to UNRRA and SHAEF. An American citizen since 1950, Dr. Meerloo was a member of the faculty at Columbia University and associate professor of psychiatry at the New York School of Psychiatry. He was the author of many books, including Rape of the Mind (a classic work on brainwashing), Conversation and Communication, and Hidden Communion.
He was the son of Bernard and Anna Frederika (Benjamins) Meerloo. He was the youngest of six children and the only one to escape his occupied country and survive the Holocaust.[2]
He married Elisabeth Johanna Kalf Den Haag, on May 16, 1928. The couple divorced on February 19, 1946. He subsequently married Louisa Betty "Loekie" Duits, a physical therapist, in New York City on May 7, 1948.
When one thinks of totalitarian states, Russia, China, Syria, Iran, and North Korea leap to mind. However, Joost explains in great detail the differences between overt thought control as practiced by torturers and subtle thought control.
Sneak Peak of the Marvelization of Man Series
Psychological Warfare as a Weapon of Terror
Every human communication can be either a report of straight facts or an attempt to suggest things and situations as they do not exist. Such distortion and perversion of facts strike at the core of human communication. The verbal battle against man's concept of truth and against his mind seems to be ceaseless. For example, if I can instil in eventual future enemies fear and terror and the suggestion of impending defeat, even before they are willing to fight, my battle is already half won. -- Merloo, M.D., called the Rape of the Mind.
Conversation From Previous Post
The Great Archetype – Das Grosse Urbild
This is the end of a conversation I had with a friend about this first blog in this series. He shared with me this fascinating video about the Great Archetype that produced in me a great feeling and passion, which I suppose the the purpose of the Great Archetype. Below is my attempt to communicate this feeling to my friend
Thank you for sharing this. If you shared it to me previously, I did not recognize its importance then. But now, I can comprehend its significance! This is important. I'm going to have to digest it slowly as the visuals are stunning but knock me off course from reading the translations, which I know I need to read to fully understand.
From the Vimeo description, I am getting the jest that this is Christ Consciousness, Divine Consciousness, Cosmic Consciousness.
It is that thing man glimpses but cannot seem to grasp.
But of course not... there is nothing there to grasp... it is a state of mind beyond 2-dimensional thinking.
There are those among us, and who have come before, us who have gotten there (to Divine Consciousness), and even more importantly, they have come back to share this knowledge with us, but human consciousness as it is now is in a terrible mire.
This is where we are now. It is a divisive stage of consciousness... that is thinking... for it only knows how to cut and divide, sort and calculate, and put into order everything it cuts into bits and pieces, but thinking does not know how to put it back together again in the unified whole it was before the scissors of thought got to it.
We may not make it out of the mess we have made by ourselves using thought that only divides creating amazing and terrible things like the atom bomb, which this past week, some humans somberly remembered was 75 years since "at 5:29 a.m. (MST) on July 16, 1945, the world's first atomic bomb detonated in the New Mexican desert, releasing a level of destructive power ..."
And it will soon be 75 years, since man took that awesome power and dropped it on Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, August 6 and 9.
The events that Christopher Nolan has profoundly produced to remind us about in Oppenheimer, but I fear sadly due the Marvelization of Man, we (most of humanity) will not truly comprehend where we are at as a species on this planet.
I think Nolan duly points out that it does not matter that it is in the US where this terrible magic is cracked... people all over the world were cracking the code and figuring it out.... it was just a matter of time until humans figured it out.
Oppenheimer understood this and created an incubator to do it faster so that the Allied forces could win the wars against powers that had condensed into pure evil; powers rolling across the world stage like bulldozers achieving some of the most gruesome levels of destruction humans had yet achieved at that point in time remembered now as WWII.
Now, we can do even more hideous things to each other and we are doing so...
Now we hold the keys to our collective demise for destruction comes in all sorts of flavors--nuclear war, climate change, autocracies, and Marvelous Worlds full of capitalistic wonders that will dull us all down into one long droning wail of mediocrity very soon... and that is because ... we all agreed a long, long time ago... that only some people will be allowed to sit on top of functional hierarchies, which are the systems of power that rule the world as we know it now.
But we have all conveniently forgotten that all people are susceptible to the corrupting power of their own thinking!
And functional hierarchies are the most easily corrupted things we have created as conscious creatures. They are all around us like Trump Enterprises, Elon Musk, and the list is long of failed or failing corporations. The list is even longer of failed of failing states. The ones impacting us now are known as Russia, North Korea, and who knows, maybe even China maybe be in the running to rattle the nuclear rattle we hold in our tiny human hands in tantrums of ultimate self-hatred and self-destruction.
Some people I know put the USA, Great Britain, and all of Europe in this list too. I wrote a big blog about this...... I was pretty pissed because it is only in states that allow for free thought that we might still find the cure to our disease.
The kind of mega disaster that individuals like Christ and others tried to save us from... but still... most of us run directly into the flame of ignorance rather than grow up as we were meant to do from the very beginning...
And I do think God is woman
Now, I have diverged...lol...
Archetypal Animations
All images, except for Feature Animation, use Midjourney AI to create the animations…that is until I ran out of credits. Following are the songs that enliven them.
This is the first blog in a series discussing the Marvelization of Man’s Mind.
Morbius
After watching Morbius, I felt flat and bloated like I had just downed a Family Sized Package of Cheetos too fast.
MORBIUS – Official Trailer (HD)
Don’t get me wrong, I loved Morbius’ origin story!
The movie is well acted, well executed, and has superb special effects… just as we have come to expect from a Marvelous Marvel Movie… or should I say, just as we have been conditioned to expect?
Perhaps that’s it, Marvel Movies are entirely predictable. In the past 20 some years, they have become perfectly formulated to meet popular tastes. Because of this, we know what to expect, when to expect it, and how to expect it.
Marvel Movies run on well worn tracks of success. Yes, a few have been busts, but on average, Marvel Movies make $715 million dollars per movie with at least half of this gross-income, which means it goes right into the pockets of Robert Iger, CEO, and the Disney-Marvel Cinematic Universe. This has been the case since 2009 when Disney brought Marvel Cinematic Universe from Ronald Perelman who formerly use to pocket the bucks.
The Marvelous Marvel formula has evolved to include hooks and lures about how each newly rendered Marvel character retrieved from the Marvel vault and brought to life on screen will met up and team up with other recently revived Marvel characters for the next Marvelous Marvel movie.
Heck, soon the different Disney universes and their characters might begin meeting up with Marvel, or ever perhaps as, Marvel characters to fight off the bad guys.
Perhaps like this super cool new chic: Tinker Bell Die Hard Predator Ape?
Don’t Mess With the Tinker Bell Die Hard Predator Ape! | These blended characters are all owned by Disney!
Hell YEAH… this might actually BE interesting!
Marvel Characters Are Archetypes
We adore Marvel characters because they are archetypes. They speak to things deep inside of all of us: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Stuff that is really, really hard to speak to each other about in our overly average, highly regimented, very repetitive work, work, and more work worlds.
Mostly we don’t talk to each other about this stuff. It is so much safer (and let’s face it, it is so much easier) to be superficial with each other.
That’s what the movies are made for! Right?!
Movies give us an emotional release and a little freedom from all that stuff pent up and building up inside of us. The stuff we don’t or can’t talk to each other about, at least not on the deepest levels where our wounds usually lay. These are deep interior layers that we can seldom reach without self-expression that can lead to self-realization, if we allow it.
This is what archetypes partly do for us. They help illuminate things inside of us that are vague, mysterious, troubling, or even exhilarating. But things that are hard to put our finger on because they are inside of us and we can’t see them with our eyes. We can only feel them or try not to feel them when they bother us too much.
Archetypes are mental models that give shape and perspective on the shadowy, nebulous, unsettling, fuzzy states and feelings that can overtake us. They do a lot more than this, but for the purposes of this blog I’ll stick to how archetypes provide man with mental models on how to handle and act to feelings rising inside of him and all around him in other people.
Ever since Marvel’s founding in 1939 by Martin Goodman, which was then known as Timely Comics, the characters have been giving shape to man’s collective shadowy feelings and showing us possibilities on how to channel and handle our dim, indistinct inner worlds in our shared outer world.
In 1951, Timely Comics became known as Atlas Comics. It is not until June 1961 that it transforms into the franchise we know it today as Marvel with the launch of The Fantastic Four.
Ever since its beginning, Marvel characters were created to meet a moment. They emerged from the fabric of that time and in the spaces of what was happening in the country or world at that moment. Their creators invented characters who could met the demands and uncertainty of the times in which they were created.
I am sure each creator imbued their characters with the super powers everyone needed at that moment to survive mental through the demands, threats, and catastrophes of the times. That is what archetypes do. They provide strong mental images combined with stories that imbue inspiration, hope, and courage into the hearts and minds of real people who need to meet real life challenges as they navigate the ups and downs of life.
CharacterDate Created Creator(s)
Sub-Mariner | 1939 (Build up to WII)| Bill Everett
Human Torch | 1939 (Build up toWWII) | Carl Burgos
Angel | 1939 (Build up to WWII) | Paul Gustavson
Masked Raider | 1939 (WWII & shifting economics) | Al Anders
Phantom Reporter | 1940 (WWII & shifting economics)| Robert O. Erisman, Sam Cooper
Black Widow | 1940 (WWII & shifting economics such as women working to build war machines and bombs) | George Kapitan, Harry Gahle
Vision | 1940 (Intensification of WWII)| Joe Simon, Jack Kirby
Captain America | 1940 (Intensification of WWII)| Joe Simon, Jack Kirby
Black Marvel | 1941 (Intensification of WWII) | Al Gabriele
Uranian Boy | 1950 (First atomic bomb drop 1945) | Stan Lee, Russ Heath
The Fantastic Four | 1961 (It's the 60s and its Stan and Jack!) | Stan Lee, Jack Kirby
The Hulk | 1962 (It's the 60s and its Stan and Jack!)| Stan Lee, Jack Kirby
Red She Hulk | 1962 (It's the 60s and its Stan and Jack!) | Stan Lee, Jack Kirby
Thor | 1962 (It's the 60s and its Stan and Jack!)| Stan Lee, Jack Kirby
Spider-Man | 1962 (It's the 60s and its Stan and Steve this time)| Stan Lee, Steve Ditko
Iron Man | 1963 (Cuban missile crisis 1962)| Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Don Heck
Doctor Strange | 1963 (Cuban missile crisis 1962) | Stan Lee, Steve Ditko
Black Panther | 1966 (Civil Rights Act sign 1965) | Stan Lee, Jack Kirby
-- See full timeline at Wiki
I think you get the idea.
So, What’s Wrong With A Little Marvel Time?!
There is nothing wrong with a little Marvel time.
The issue is much more subtle and pervasive than that. It is not so much that we go to the movies to watch great, big, spectacular dramas that take our minds off our worries or give us a joyful jolt of non-reality.
The issue is rather what we are not seeing when we go to the movies, especially the really BIG blockbuster ones that are highly formulated and super monetized to capture our time and attention.
These blockbuster cash cows act like somewhat steamrollers crushing the competition and funneling more and more money into the pockets of billionaires who own mega conglomerates that control the content and production of multiple franchises and merchandise.
And guess what the mega billionaires want you to do?
They want you to go to see more of their movies and buy more of their merchandise so they make more money.
And we do exactly that… and each time we do, they grow even bigger!
If you’re wondering why Marvel movies all look alike, it’s because of us. It is the way we are choosing to consume them.
I recently learned more about this from Terry Gross’ interview with Lucas Shaw, who is in charge of Media and Entertainment at Bloomberg and writes the Screentime newsletter. He’s the one who made me aware of how much content Disney owns!
But there are a lot of other big Media-Entertainment Titans operating out there too and all of them want to get inside our heads and tickle away some our money that we make working highly automated jobs that require at least 8 hours of our days, 5 days a week.
Sadly, despite popular opinions, most of us do not work in our Dream Jobs! Indeed, most of us must go through the motions 8 hours days doing very boring, tedious, monotonous work. So who wouldn’t want to break free and escape into a Marvelous Marvel movie when it comes out?
But that might be exactly what the super rich want us to feel and react. They can make money from lots of bored people who need to escape from their dreary, mind-numbing, mechanical lives with a Fantastic New Movie!
And, hey wait, you can also escape and feel just like the movie characters feel by buying this splashy new watch or this brand new fancy car or this mouthwatering, very pricey dress. And of course you need the latest technology to go along with all this! You want to look modern don’t you?
All these fancy, enjoyable costly things are there to help you escape from your boredom and ease your burden of living highly repetitive, unvarying, humdrum modern lives.
Lucas Shaw tells Terry Gross how the movie-TV-streaming business is becoming one super long ad promoting consumerism, capitalism, and merchandising by the new Titans of Industry.
SHAW: You know, Barry Diller, I feel like, has been declaring the death of Hollywood for a long time now, so I do take what he says with a little grain of salt. But he's right that the growth of Amazon and Apple, which I would say are now two of the six major studios in town - you know, they've replaced some of the other ones that have been consolidated in the deals that we've talked about - entertainment is not their primary business. And it speaks to maybe the lesser value of traditional film and television in broader culture, where it - so does the fact that YouTube is now bigger than any TV network, that if you - that TikTok is as popular as any streaming service.
You know, film and TV doesn't have the same stranglehold on culture and on youth that it used to. And it's - if I were running one of these traditional media and entertainment companies - running Warner Bros. Discovery, running Disney - it would certainly scare me that two of our biggest competitors don't care about making money from film and TV in the same way because it means that the stakes are lower. The approach is going to be different. And entertainment is just a means of selling something else - in Amazon's case, you know, diapers or books or whatever it is; in Apple's case, phones and other devices. -- FreshAir, July 20, 2023
So my take away from this conversation is that the purpose of movies, TV shows, and streaming platforms are increasingly veering towards a focus on how to keep viewing audiences glued to a particular station-conglomerate, so it can make more money–be that ads, subscriptions, or the super cool merchandise they make, create, and sell.
The Hollowing Out Effect of Money
This hyper-focus on making more money is a major force in hollowing out many Marvel characters. You can read about the reasons why 16 actors are talking about quitting or leaving the Marvel Cinematic Universe here.
The Marvel universe seems to be becoming more one-dimensional and cartoonish as the focus on making another blockbuster and capturing the vast majority of the market take precedence over story. This focus on money has a watering down effect on the characters, making them feel less real, less vibrant, and less inspiring.
They are losing their numinosity, which is what archetypes hold for us. Numinous content gives our lives meaning, content, and purpose. Without numinosity in our lives, we feel drab, automatic, and mechanical.
But maybe the mechanization of man is one of the very objectives these new Titans of Industry seek to create inside of us.
If we are continually feeling unimportant, unremarkable, and unnecessary in keeping the clogs of industry running in the world, then we need to compensate for our super small roles in society.
How else can we wake up each morning and go out to do our boring, repetitive jobs?
So a good Marvel Movie is a great antidote to not feeling like a machine!
But, don’t get too caught up in the marvelousness of a Marvel movie! That would be going too far in our highly mechanized modern world.
If you do happen to believe Marvel characters are real and you look up to them and draw hope and courage from then (like any good archetype should do), then you will get laughed at because we are not really suppose to identify with them anymore. They are simply entertainment.
We watch them, then we get up the next day and go back to work to make some money so we can go watch the next amazing Marvel movie coming out soon because there was that little teaser at the end!
Another troubling result of the Marvelizationof Man is that Marvel movies are impacting how other movies are made or even more importantly, NOT BEING MADE.
With great big, super blockbusters with BIG special effects (like Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar), more and more people only go to theaters to see these on the silver screen. They don’t show up for the “other movies” being made and trying to survive in an increasingly one-dimensional entertainment universe.
Basically, every studio wants a piece of the action in this “shared universe” business.
But it’s hard to argue that any of them have been as successful as Marvel has.
Kevin Feige’s ambitious plan (which resulted in him being named President of Marvel Studios and reporting directly to Disney CEO Bob Iger) has fundamentally changed the way film studios approach properties. Certainly, a creative idea which allows for iteration upon iteration, sequel after sequel after spinoff after prequel, to be produced is appealing to every studio executive. -- The Marvelization of Movies | / FILM TALKIES
This effect is drying up the field of creativity for the creation, production, and life of other types of movies that deal with difficult but really important stuff such as Women Talking:
The women of an isolated religious community grapple with reconciling their reality with their faith. Though the backstory, we see a community of women come together to figure out how they might move forward together to build a better world for themselves and their children. Stay and fight or leave. They will not do nothing.— Official synopsis
WOMEN TALKING | Official Trailer
Or like the Fabelmans:
Growing up in post-World War II era Arizona, young Sammy Fabelman aspires to become a filmmaker as he reaches adolescence, but soon discovers a shattering family secret and explores how the power of films can help him see the truth.
It is lpLoosely based on Spielberg's childhood growing up in post-World War II era Arizona, from age seven to eighteen, a young man named Sammy Fabelman discovers a shattering family secret, and explores how the power of movies help us see the truth about each other and ourselves. —Toronto International Film Festival
He also encounters antisemitism and bullying, which is a very important issue that deserves far more airtime in our current culture and polictical climate.
The Fabelmans | Official Trailer [HD]
Or going back even further to the time of radio like Suspense: Report From A Dead Planet
Report From a Dead Planet – Suspense | A spaceship lands on a beautiful world and finds that all the inhabitants have vanished.
Another thing that struck me while watching Morbius is that really talented actors are playing pretty superficial, very simplified characters.
Matt Smith for example is the villain in Morbius. He is great as the villain, but his performance leaves me feeling empty. He is a really talented actor! Why don’t I feel more from his performance in Morbius?
Because I’m not supposed to?!
His super villain in Morbius is pretty vanilla compared to his roles in Season 1 and 2 of The Crown, The Last Night in Soho, and my all time favorite The Doctor of Doctor Who.
Also, Jared Leto who plays Morbius struck me as a super talented actor as well. I haven’t seen him before. He does a great job playing Morbius. In fact, he imbue more life into Morbius than the role allows.
Tarantino previously said that he would not want to direct a movie for Marvel Studios for the simple reason he is “not a hired hand.’ As someone planning to direct just ten movies in his career, and with only one of those to make up the number, it is probably not surprising that the Pulp Fiction helmer would want to concentrate on his own ideas. When it comes to the MCU, the director says that the franchise does not contain any “movie stars” as the characters are all people want to see. He said:
“Part of the Marvel-ization of Hollywood is… you have all these actors who have become famous playing these characters, but they’re not movie stars. Right? Captain America is the star. Or Thor is the star. I mean, I’m not the first person to say that. I think that’s been said a zillion times, you know, but it’s like, you know, it’s these franchise characters that become a star.” -- Quentin Tarantino Says Marvel Actors Are 'Not Movie Stars'
BY
ANTHONY LUND
PUBLISHED NOV 22, 2022
Quentin Tarantino has been vocal about his feelings regarding the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it looks like he isn't quite done yet.
So What?
I will still watch Marvel movies.
But I will seek out and watch more different movies that leave an impression in my psyche and make me think about the world in ways I might not have before.
I will continue to gravitate to movies where BIG ideas are explored rather than BIG action but increasingly hallow characters dance across the screen.
I want something that satisfies my imagination and feeds my psyche, because feeling alive and not like small cog in a BIG machine is important to me, and only I can change my perspective and the way I feel about things.
Stories and movies feed my imagination so I can feed and grow my soul.
Stay tuned for this series because I am going to go deeper into the effects and impacts of living in our super consumerism society on man’s mind.
For now, maybe the Oppenheimer-Barbie movies will provide a reprieve from the Marvelization of Man’s Mind.
Introducing Atomic Barbie | The New Super Hero We Didn’t Know We Need!
Archetypal Animations
I made all images with Genolve using AI generated images, specifically Midjourney, this time. So I am just listing the songs used in the above animations.
Feature Archetypal Animation: Nowhere but Up | [3] Break the Chain 4:53
WYR GEMI – Predator | Music for Tinker Bell Die Hard Predator Ape!
On April 25, 2023, Carolyn Bryant Donham died in Westlake, Louisiana. She was 88 years old.
Sixty-eight years earlier, as a 21 year old girl, she accused the black teenager Emmett Tilll of whistling at her, grabbing her hand, and asking for a date. All of this except maybe the whistle (which could have been someone else, even someone white) was a lie, but her husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milam took it upon themselves to mete out justice, Jim Crow justice, justice laced with hate and loathing.
With Carolyn in the car, Roy and Milam broke into Emmett’s uncle’s house, kidnapped him, then beat, shot, and lynched Emmett beyond recognition. They threw his broken body into the Tallahatchie River where it would not be found for days.
The year was 1955. Because of the bravery of Emmett Till’s mother who insisted on an open casket funeral, the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi ignited the spark for the Civil Rights Movement, which would crash across America trying to washout hate.
But hate is a mighty sticky thing. It clings to craggy rocks inside the mind that are full of grievances, grumbles, and grudges. White people cling to hate in order to feel important,in command, and confident about their place in the world. Having seizing power centuries earlier, White people have created tremendous systems of inequality and injustice. And now, White people cling to these corrupted systems for dear life!
They do so because they don’t know if they really can stand on their own two feet. They really don’t know if they can make it in the world where everyone has equal rights, equal opportunities, and true equity. White people are afraid of their own incompetence, ineptitude, and inadequacy. I am White. I know.
I also know hiding behind a wall of seething hate makes people feel powerful for a minute, but that feeling is fleeting. And hate is a very heavy thing. Hate drags people down into Pits of Ignorance. These are very deep, very dark, and very nightmarish place inside every human being, except we are too scared to look.
Notes for Book
But that’s the cure! Looking!! That is the only way to vanquish the haunting ghost of hate. Looking and confronting your own Pit of Hate, is the only way not to be controlled by hate. A person has to face it, to own it, and eat it. It is part of being a conscious being.
If you are human, you are processing all sorts of awful feelings and emotions that are in direct competition for your conscious attention. The only way not to get sucked in to one hole or another is to keep both opposites, both sides of yourself, within your gaze of conscious awareness.
Justice is a very important element in digesting consciousness and growing a stronger psychological-spiritual body over time.
This undated photo shows Emmett Louis Till, who was kidnapped, tortured and killed in the Mississippi Delta in August 1955 after witnesses claimed he whistled at a white woman working in a store. ( File / AP Photo ) | Photo from The Take Away, May 1, 2023
No, there won’t. They last person involved in his murder has died.
This is the woman responsible for telling the lie that got Emmett Till killed.
I only learned about Carolyn Bryant Donham’s death yesterday (about a week after she died). I was wrestling with a section in my book about hate. I heard about her death on the Take Away while taking a break trying to do a refresh of my muddled mind.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry was speaking with with Timothy B. Tyson who is the author of The Blood of Emmett Till and senior research scholar at Duke University. She was also speaking with Keith Beauchamp who is an award-winning filmmaker behind the documentary “The Untold Story of Emmett Till” and producer of the movie “Till” about what Bryant’s death means in the quest for justice in Emmett Till’s murder.
Side note: I am so disappointed with NPR for cancelling this show. We are living through times of unprecedented violence, ignorance, and hate. To survive such times, we need diverse voices. Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry through this show provides such a voice. It is a significant lost on the landscape of sanity, truth, and recovery from the fatal infection of hate.
This 1955 file photo shows Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman who accused Black teenager Emmett Till of making improper advances before he was lynched. (Gene Herrick, File/AP Photo) | Photo from The Take Away, May 1, 2023
The Take Away — Emmett Till
Melissa Harris-Perry recounts the events of that fateful day in 1955.
On August 28th, 1955, two adult white men, Roy Bryant and JW Milam, kidnapped 14-year-old Emmett Till at gunpoint from his uncle's home in Money, Mississippi. It was the middle of the night. Bryant and Milam beat and shot Emmett. They used barbed wire to tie a cotton jean fan to his neck, and they threw him into the river. When Mamie Till-Mobley received her son's remains, the child was disfigured beyond recognition.
She made a choice so vulnerable and courageous; it altered the course of history. At her insistence, for five days, Emmett's mutilated body lay in an open casket. More than 50,000 people visited the Southside Chicago Church where he lay and millions more saw the shocking photos of the brutalized Boy in Jet Magazine. All bore witness to the stomach-churning realities of Bryant and Milam's racist violence.
"When people saw what had happened to my son, men stood up who had never stood up before. People became vocal who had never vocalized before. Emmett's death was the opening of the Civil Rights Movement. He was the sacrificial lamb of the movement." -- Mamie Till-Mobley
Melissa Harris-Perry: Her steel-spined courage launched a movement for justice, but Mamie Till-Mobley never received even a modicum of accountability for the murder of her son. In 1955, an all-white Mississippi jury refused to convict the killers, and in 1956, Look Magazine paid the men $4,000 to print their confession to the murder. Throughout it all, there was a third co-conspirator, Carolyn Bryant now Carolyn Bryant Donham. It was Mrs. Bryant who told her husband and brother-in-law that Emmett Till whistled at her. It was Mrs. Bryant who told the 1955 Mississippi jury that Emmett physically accosted and sexually propositioned her.
It was Mrs. Bryant, who during the trial, brought her own young sons to the courthouse, dressed in their Sunday best. It's Mrs. Carolyn Bryant captured in a Black and white photo who stands with her head thrown back in laughter, embracing her husband Roy at the end of that farce of a trial. It's a photo that still haunts my dreams and my waking. Late last week, Carolyn Bryant now Carolyn Bryant Donham died at the age of 88 while in hospice care. Joining me now is Tim Tyson, senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and author of The Blood of Emmett Till. Tim, welcome to The Takeaway.
You can read or listen to the entire interview here.
My Take Away of The Take Away
I zeroed in on a point in their conversation about how jovial and happy the defendants were when a white jury found Roy and Milam Not Guilty.
Several months after their acquittal, the two men with the help of their defense attorney sold their story to Look Magazine where they admit their guilt. They get even more recognition and celebration by vast swaths of the White Community bathing in racism and hate.
I had to find a picture of these jubilant hate-filled white people. I did. It is very jarring. They are so young, so jubilant, so ignorant (and happy of it). What is even more jarring is that Carol’s sister-in-law, Juanita, looked a lot like me when I was that age.
With that recognition, I immediately realized that if had I grown up in a community infused with hate and racism, I could have easily been that girl smiling so brightly in the courtroom knowing they had all just gotten away with murder.
This recognition of how easily I could have been her is frightening. It elicits a deep and profound feeling of disgust and self-loathing inside myself. I want to condemn her and them, but I know I need to be honest about my own ignorance and hate.
So how do I do that?
The first step is recognizing that hate lives inside of me. It lies in wait like a sleeping dog ready to jump up and bite anything that threatens me, rejects me, injures me, makes me feel bad about myself, threatens my family, threatens my livelihood, threatens my beliefs.
Hate lives inside all of us. If you are a human being who thinks, you are creating hate. It is a natural byproduct of thinking, just like pooping and peeing are natural byproducts of eating. We all produce it just by being human and thinking.
Thinking is division. Thinking is cutting the world up into smaller and smaller pieces to understand it, predicate it, and make it feel safer for us to exist. But when you split the world into pieces in an effort to control it, you always get opposites. We name these opposites Good and Bad, or you might know them as Us and Other (the Evil Other).
So, I recognized myself in the picture of Carolyn and her sister-in-law laughing in court. And then, I found this picture of Carolyn. This picture captures her hate. I see it in the rigid tilt of her head, the stiffness of her shoulders, the hardness of her face, and mostly, I see it in her coldpinpoint, hard eyes.
Woman whose accusation led to the lynching of Emmett Till has died at 88, coroner says | Image from CNN report on Carol’s death
When a person is calculating hate, their eyes narrow like slits. The pupils grow smaller and hard like bowling balls. Their glare hardens like ice picks. They are calculating how to kill you.
This the glare I see in this picture. It glare people recognize all over the world. When you see this glare, you should run!
Another source about Carolyn and the murder of Emmet Till is accounted by American Experience: Getting Away With Murder.
It turns out that Roy, Carolyn, J. W. Milam, and Juanita were poor, really poor!
American Experience recounts:
Carolyn Bryant, the daughter of a plantation manager and a nurse, hailed from Indianola, Mississippi, the nucleus of the segregationist and supremacist white Citizens' Councils. A high school dropout, she won two beauty contests and married Roy Bryant, an ex-soldier.
The couple ran a small grocery, Bryant's Grocery & Meat Market, that sold provisions to black sharecroppers and their children. The store was located at one end of the main street in the tiny town of Money, the heart of the cotton-growing Mississippi Delta. They had two sons and lived in two small rooms in the back of the store.
To earn extra cash, Roy worked as a trucker with his half-brother J. W. Milam, an imposing man of six-feet-two inches, weighing 235 pounds. Milam prided himself on knowing how to "handle" blacks. He had served in World War II and received combat medals.
On the evening of August 24, 1955, Emmett Till went with his cousins and some friends to Bryant's Grocery for refreshments after picking cotton in the hot sun. The boys went into the store one or two at a time to buy soda pop or bubble gum. Emmett walked in and bought two cents' worth of bubble gum. Though exactly what happened next is unconfirmed. She stormed out of the store. The kids outside said she was going to get a pistol. Frightened, Emmett and his group left. -- American Experience
Their collective act of violent hate made them popular! In fact, it made them celebrities for a minute.
Some reporters talked about Roy and Carolyn's "handsome looks" and J. W.'s tall stature and big cigars. They even alluded to Carolyn as "Roy Bryant's most attractive wife" and a "crossroads Marilyn Monroe." -- American Experience: Getting Away With Murder.
She is pretty in this photo. The hate is not in her eyes. She looks soft and like a doll, which how women had to look back then. Even though women had won the right to vote several decades earlier, misogyny still ruled and ran rampant just like racism. Carolyn knew being pretty was her only asset.
During the trial, the families arrived with their sons dressed in their Sunday best, Roy and J.W. in starched white shirts while their wives donned cotton dresses. Many whites in the surrounding counties showed up to watch the show. They brought their children, picnic baskets and ice cream cones. Meanwhile, African American spectators were relegated to the back and looked on in fear.
Carolyn testified under oath, but outside the presence of the jury, that Emmett said "ugly remarks" to her before whistling. -- American Experience: Getting Away With Murder.
Making up her lie about Emmett Till lifted Carolyn above her station in life, which was a pretty poor station with very few prospects, despite being pretty.
She hadn’t even graduated from high school. Her biggest accomplishments up til this time was winning two beauty contests and marrying Roy, then popping out two babies all before turning 21.
But suddenly, she was popular! Really popular! Hate had made her Great! She was getting noticed and being showered with so much love by others harboring and clinging on to hate, which was most White people in the South just like her.
Now, fast-forward to May 3, 2023. Have we changed very much since this horrible crime?
Young protestors during the Birmingham Campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, May 1963. The movement, which called for the integration of African Americans, was organized by Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Shuttlesworth amongst others. (Photo by Frank Rockstroh/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) | From 1A; May 2, 2023
Emmett Till’s death ignited the Civil Rights Movement. And a little less than 10 years after his brutal murder, it would be written into law through the civil rights act of 1964.
But not before a lot of pain and suffering occurred as recalled in this interview on 1A.
“Hate was popular,” Jeff Drew tells Jen White in an interview about The Birmingham movement, 60 years later produced by 1A. “What we were trying to do and continue to try to do is bring awareness that everyone is important. Every human being is important.”
On May 2, 1963, hundreds of school-age kids in Birmingham, Alabama, woke up with a plan.
Through coded messages broadcast by local radio DJs, they were given the signal to leave the classroom and meet at the park for a peaceful protest against segregation in the city.
“My mother said, ‘I’m sending you to school, don’t get in any trouble’,” said Janice Kelsey, who was a 16-year-old high school student in Birmingham at the time. “I was going to school. I just wasn’t going to stay.”
Jeff Drew also participated in the Children’s March. His parents were involved in the Birmingham movement for civil rights and hosted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in their home.
“You cannot imagine the joy of being on one of those buses on your way to jail,” said Drew. “We were nearly dying to participate.”
Janice Kelsey and Jeff Drew joined us at the Carver Theater in Birmingham last month for a community conversation on the fight for civil rights then and now. Their actions as students in the spring of 1963 brought national attention—and a new momentum—to the civil rights movement, support for which had been waning as more adults were jailed and reluctant to be arrested.
Civil rights leaders, including James Bevel, recruited young people to participate in a peaceful demonstration on May 2, 1963 in what became known as the Children’s Crusade. Hundreds of kids were arrested by police for parading without a permit. Images of police dogs and firehoses being used on students in the city highlighted the injustices in Birmingham and prompted President John F. Kennedy to express support for federal civil rights legislation.
On our trip to Birmingham, we also spoke to the next generation of activists. Ashley M. Jones is a Birmingham native and the Poet Laureate of Alabama. At 32 years old, Jones is the state’s youngest-ever poet laureate and the first person of color to hold the position. Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin also joined us to talk about how the city’s past informs his role today.
This conversation was recorded in April as part of our Remaking America collaboration with six public radio stations around the country, including WBHM. Remaking America is funded in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
And, 59 years after the Civil Rights Act, White Americans are still rolling in raging pools of hate. Hate is still immensely popular, so popular, people are making tons of money selling it to all the grumpy people holding onto grudges and hurts and who need to take a daily swim in their pool of hate to feel better about themselves!
We have lots of new celebrities helping to spread and celebrate hate. Here are three who have recently been in the news. But there are tons more! We are literally being drown them.
The Donald, The Rupert, The Tuckered-out Carlson — Drawing by me
America has a huge problem with hate. We love it so much we want to tear our country in two again. The Civil War really did not end on April 9, 1865. It lives inside the minds of people who are swimming in their private pools of hate.
But, we don’t have to worry… collective hate is running rampant all over the world.
Hate remains really popular everywhere!
Collective Hate
So, let’s tackle Collective Hate.
We all know what it is. Collective Hate is when one group of people dreams about crushing another group of people because it makes them feel powerful (for a minute, this kind of power is fleeting too).
When a group of people full of hate actually act on their hate-filled fantasies, they act like fanatical freaks. That’s because they are… because they have drained the humanity from their being, leaving nothing but a husk that looks human but acts like raging monster crushing, killing, stealing everything from the people they hate.
Collective hate is visceral. It is so toxic it drives the people infected by it mad. Mad humans infected by hate will do the most vicious, brutal, savage things like Roy and Milam did to Emmett Till. Mad, hate-filled humans act in barbaric, fiendish, heinous, hideous ways. It’s an epidemic on Earth right now.
Let’s delve into how hate wraps around a person’s heart and mind to steadily squeeze the humanity out of them.
Carolyn Bryant’s Story (or More Aptly Her Great Disappointment)
Now, there is no way I can possibly know what Carolyn was thinking or feeling that terrible day, but let’s suppose, she was feeling a little bit sorry for herself and unhappy about her life. She was a beautiful woman. She knew she was a beautiful woman.
If only things had gone a little bit different 90 years earlier, which is when the Civil War ended (April 9, 1865), she would probably, no: most certainly, she would be living a completely different life right now! (Hate always happens in the Now)
Why instead of being the daughter of a plantation manager and a nurse from Indianola, Mississippi, Carolyn Bryant might instead be a beautiful, beguiling Southern belle like Miss Scarlett O’Hara! But, if only for one tiny, little glitch, that snatched her wonderful, beautiful life away like Gone With the Wind!
Of course the wind that blew her dream life away was that the Confederate lost the Civil War.
Scarlett O’Hara’s best lines (Gone with the Wind)
Because of this glitch, she was condemned to run a small grocery, Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, selling provisions to black sharecroppers and their children. She took turns with her sister-in-law, Juanita, watching their children and tending the store while their husband’s drove trucks to make extra money because they were all very poor.
The store was located at one end of the main street in the tiny town of Money, the heart of the cotton-growing Mississippi Delta. And also right next to Indianola, Mississippi, which was the nucleus of the segregationist and supremacist white Citizens' Councils.
Carolyn was a high school dropout, she won two beauty contests and married Roy Bryant, an ex-soldier. They had two sons and lived in two small rooms in the back of the store.
-- American Experience: Getting Away With Murder
This was not the life she was supposed to live. She was sure of that! And this made her mad, and more than a little bit grumpy as well as resentful.
These feelings are the perfect ingredients for hate to take root and grow. Combine her personal grievances with the steady drum beat of the Southern Segregationist and White Supremacists constantly spreading their toxic thinking far and wide and polluting the collective swimming pool of human connections that everyone needs to survive, Carolyn Bryant was the perfect instrument of hate.
She bought into the thinking that White people are suppose to give the orders and be in control. She bought into the feeling of being deeply wronged that White people couldn’t stack the social decks in their favor they way they used to do. She bought into the fantasy of yearning for and bringing back the old way of life in the deep South.
Carolyn Bryant was the perfect poster girl for Southern Hate.
Crash Course on Cognitive Dissonance
Segregationist and White Supremacists use cracks between reality and people’s dreams/fantasies to break social bonds. One of the things they work hard to increase in the hearts and minds of hurting humans is cognitive dissonance.
In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things.[1] According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent.[1][2] The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.[1][2][3]
Coping with the nuances of contradictory ideas or experiences is mentally stressful. It requires energy and effort to sit with those seemingly opposite things that all seem true. Festinger argued that some people would inevitably resolve the dissonance by blindly believing whatever they wanted to believe.[4] -- Wikipedia: Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive Dissonance in Politics
Cognitive dissonance theory might suggest that since votes are an expression of preference or beliefs, even the act of voting might cause someone to defend the actions of the candidate for whom they voted,[72][self-published source?] and if the decision was close then the effects of cognitive dissonance should be greater.
This effect was studied over the 6 presidential elections of the United States between 1972 and 1996,[73] and it was found that the opinion differential between the candidates changed more before and after the election than the opinion differential of non-voters. In addition, elections where the voter had a favorable attitude toward both candidates, making the choice more difficult, had the opinion differential of the candidates change more dramatically than those who only had a favorable opinion of one candidate. What wasn't studied were the cognitive dissonance effects in cases where the person had unfavorable attitudes toward both candidates. The 2016 U.S. election held historically high unfavorable ratings for both candidates.[74]
After the 2020 election, which Joe Biden won, supporters of former President Donald Trumpquestioned the results, citing voter fraud. This continued even after such claims were dismissed by numerous state and federal judges, election officials, governors, and government agencies as false.[75] This was described as an example of Trump supporters suffering cognitive dissonance.[76]
Cognitive Dissonance in Self-perception Theory
In Self-perception: An alternative interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena (1967), the social psychologist Daryl Bem proposed the self-perception theory whereby people do not think much about their attitudes, even when engaged in a conflict with another person. The Theory of Self-perception proposes that people develop attitudes by observing their own behaviour, and concludes that their attitudes caused the behaviour observed by self-perception; especially true when internal cues either are ambiguous or weak. Therefore, the person is in the same position as an observer who must rely upon external cues to infer their inner state of mind. Self-perception theory proposes that people adopt attitudes without access to their states of mood and cognition.[81]
As such, the experimental subjects of the Festinger and Carlsmith study (Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance, 1959) inferred their mental attitudes from their own behaviour. When the subject-participants were asked: "Did you find the task interesting?", the participants decided that they must have found the task interesting, because that is what they told the questioner. Their replies suggested that the participants who were paid twenty dollars had an external incentive to adopt that positive attitude, and likely perceived the twenty dollars as the reason for saying the task was interesting, rather than saying the task actually was interesting.[82][81]
The theory of self-perception (Bem) and the theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger) make identical predictions, but only the theory of cognitive dissonance predicts the presence of unpleasant arousal, of psychological distress, which were verified in laboratory experiments.[83][84]
In The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: A Current Perspective[85] (Aronson, Berkowitz, 1969), Elliot Aronson linked cognitive dissonance to the self-concept: That mental stress arises when the conflicts among cognitions threatens the person's positive self-image. This reinterpretation of the original Festinger and Carlsmith study, using the induced-compliance paradigm, proposed that the dissonance was between the cognitions "I am an honest person." and "I lied about finding the task interesting."[85]
The study Cognitive Dissonance: Private Ratiocination or Public Spectacle?[86] (Tedeschi, Schlenker, etc. 1971) reported that maintaining cognitive consistency, rather than protecting a private self-concept, is how a person protects their public self-image.[86]Moreover, the results reported in the study I'm No Longer Torn After Choice: How Explicit Choices Implicitly Shape Preferences of Odors (2010) contradict such an explanation, by showing the occurrence of revaluation of material items, after the person chose and decided, even after having forgotten the choice.[87]
There’s a lot more to cognitive dissonance, but I digress and I am sure you see how this is a very handy tool in sowing fields and polluting rivers full of hate.
Now let’s get back to hate mongers and how they used cognitive dissonance to grow huge toxic waste pits of fetid, stinking hate. That is because hate is a natural malodorous waste product of thinking. A normal healthy human being is supposed to poop it out, not eat it. But that is what hate mongers know how to do. They know how to make people eat their own shit.
Here’s How Hitler Did It — Hitler’s Ignis Fatuus
Let’s define Ignis Fatuus so you know what I’m talking about:
Ignis Fatuus is a mid 16th century word. It originate from modern Latin speakers amd literally means ‘foolish fire’ (because of its erratic movement). It has evolved to mean: something deceptive or deluding.
This definition and images come from Oxford Languages Dictionary. I kind of like Foolish Fire! And I think men like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Putin (some of the biggest killers) like it too! It's like possessing the power of Dark Magic, knowing how to get people to believe Foolish Pipe Dreams... stuff men like Hitler can say, knowing he will never, ever deliver on the promises he is making to the masses. They are illusions, delusions, nightmares cloaked by glitter and sickening charm.
So back to Hitler’s ignis fatuus. He was part of a great body of people who just suffered a huge lost. This big lost was due partly to a style of self-inflated vanity, stubbornness, snobbishness, and stupidity corrupting the German hierarchy, which led to a massive miscalculation that lost the war.
All Quiet on the Western Front | Official Teaser | Netflix
The war Germany lost was WWI. And they were punished by the victors, and rightly so, but like Carolyn Bryant and lots of White people who used to make lots of money using slave labor, some of the German people were sore losers.
Among these sore losers was Hitler.
Let me be very clear, not everyone who experiences trauma or crisis ends up becoming a sore loser. In fact, the vast majority of people do not, many even grow stronger and get even better at accepting and assimilating reality.
But there is also a percentage who don’t grow or can’t grow. This is who I am talking about here, Germans who could not accept and assimilate that they were wrong, they lost, they needed to change.
Among this group of sore losers is Hitler: a roguish, impish, and deceitfully deluded man as well as brash and brazen. He captivates just enough sore losers to gain some traction. One he got a little power, he leveraged it to get more.
Then, many more Germans flocked to him like some new, exciting lover. Not all, of course, many Germans were afraid and for good reason.
Hitler understood all this, and manipulate everyone to leverage even more power. One way he galvanized public support was creating a good foil/a scape goat. Hitler attacked the Jews and mongrels. He was going to make the world pure again.
This fantasy was the cornerstone of his convoluted ignis fatuss and the disaffected Germans fell for it–hook, line, and sinker.
Adolf Hitler came to power with the goal of establishing a new racial order in Europe dominated by the German “master race. -- United State Holocaust Memorial Museum -- 9/20/19
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis believed that the world was divided into distinct races. According to the Nazis, each race had its own traits. These ... -- Nazi Racism | Holocaust Encyclopedia -- 12/15/22
Hitler’s Plans for the World if He Won
Adolf Hitler Speech in 1935
Stalin’s Ignis Fatuus
Stalin’s ignis fatuus is similar, but he rode to power on the back of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, a wave that was sweeping across the world. It was a backlash to rapid industrialization and the ridiculous amount of power and wealth landing up in the hands of a very few; the rich, evil capitalists! See a pattern here?
Stalin carefully calculated his chances to take control of this great wave. When his chance came, he took it with tremendous ruthlessness–killing every rival in his party without mercy.
His passion for control mutated him into one of the world’s biggest control freaks. Russia still suffers to this very day from the devastation Stalin wrought. He is the very reason why Putin now controls Russia. Putin is imitating Stalin to a tee. Putin is pushing his foolish vision of a Great Russia once again on his poor, demoralized, broken, diminished people. They are so because Stalin killed so freaken many enlightened, differently thinking Russians.
Stalin's “revolution from above” sought to build socialism by means of forced collectivization and industrialization, programs that entailed tremendous human ... -- Library of Congress
Starting in the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin launched a series of five-year plans intended to transform the Soviet Union from a peasant society into an industrial ... -- History Channel
Terrifying Story Of Joseph Stalin’s Rise to Power
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6nqKu6heAs
A Day in The Life of a Dictator: Joseph Stalin
"Once he decided to attain absolute power, he would never relinquish it," observes Alexandre Allilouiev, nephew of Joseph Stalin. "He was a monster." In order to achieve his goals, Stalin set about re-imaging the vast empire in his own image, which included the extermination of all those who dared oppose or refused to adhere to his ideology. The film follows the activities of Stalin on November 24, 1938 - a crucial day that set in motion the end of his Great Purge. -- A Day in the Life of a Dictator: Joseph Stalin
He believes he's been chosen by providence to create the ideal socialist, communists society. To do this, he must destroy everything to recreate it. He puts into action a scientific, systematic plan to purge unwanted peoples of Russia. - A Day in the Life of a Dictator: Joseph Stalin
Pol Pot’s Ignis Fatuus
Another brutal killer who cloaked his ugly shit under the same auspices of the Russian Revolution, the backlash to a rapidly changing, globalized world. Lots of people longed to go back to the old ways, the old life, the idealized past. And, this is what Pol Pot sold bundled up with with a lot of hate.
The Khmer Rouge, organized by Pol Pot in the Cambodian jungle in the 1960s, advocated a radical Communist revolution that would wipe out Western influences in Cambodia and set up a solely agrarian society. -- History Channel -- Jan 7
Pol Pot wished to create a state focused on their rural idyll, with all citizens pledging loyalty in a way which prohibited all ... -- Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
Pol Pot's objective was to construct a classless, communal and self-sufficient Kampuchea, unspoiled by foreign influences, intellectualism and ... -- Alpha History -- 9/12/20
In 1960, a small group of Cambodians, led by Saloth Sar (later known as Pol Pot) and Nuon Chea, secretly formed the Communist Party of Kampuchea. -- United State Holocaust Memorial Museum
The party's aim was to establish a classless communist state based on a rural agrarian economy and a complete rejection of the free market and ... -- Al Jazeera -- 2/3/12
World’s Most Murderous Dictator Pol Pot
Mao Zedong’s Ignis Fatuus
Moa Zedong also rode the Red Wave. He also sold an idealized, backwards looking China who would vanquish all the evil Capitalists and live happily ever after! Xi Jinping is riding on the back of Mao now.
Mao and his communist supporters had been fighting against what they claimed was a corrupt and decadent Nationalist government in China since the 1920s. Despite massive U.S. support for the Nationalist regime, Mao’s forces were victorious in 1949 and drove the Nationalist government onto the island of Taiwan. In September, with cannons firing salutes and ceremonial flags waving, Mao announced the victory of communism in China and vowed to establish the constitutional and governmental framework to protect the “people’s revolution.” -- Mao Zedong outlines the new Chinese government
Cultural Revolution: Mao believed that this would ultimately create a new society where there was no gap between urban and rural, laborers and intellectuals. What are some of the ... -- University of Washington
Communism, Capitalism, and Democracy in China: Mao wanted to eliminate capitalism and its emphasis on property rights, profits, and free-market competition. He followed the ideas of Karl Marx, who envisioned ... -- Constitutional Rights Foundation
Moa Zedong was willing to kill to make his dream a reality. He was willing to kill lots of people, and he did.
Why Mao Zedong Was The Most Brutal Tyrant
Putin’s Ignis Fatuus
Let’s play a different game with Putin! Let’s pretend he had an ideal childhood and experienced lots of love growing up and was surrounded by peace-loving, Earth-loving Russians. Perhaps the descendants of people Stalin was trying to kill but missed. This Putin is a happy, pot-smoking hippy!
Young Putin | 1967 Peace Rally on the Red Square
Yes! Before Putin was a KGB agent and mass murder, he was a happy, happy hippy!
What nice eyes this young, happy, hippy Putin has!
If only we could have this Putin back!
But sadly yes, this is a deepfake. It is made with AI. I saw an interview with the man who is making AI deep fakes, but he’s hiding, so I can’t share it.
Collective Hate
Collective Hate rises from inside each and every individual. It is the collective accounting of grievances and wrongsevery civilizations harbors, especially if they have been around for a long time. All civilizations go up and go down; the stock market goes up and down; all people’s lives go up and down; all living beings experience ups and downs… that is called being alive.
Hate attempts to grab hold of only one side of the wave. Haters only want to exist on the up part of the wave (the up and up, we’re going up, we’re on the rise).
But in order to do this, reality must be split into Good and Evil. Hate mongers step into the Good Fairy Bubble and spew the Evil they have cut off from themselves on everyone else.
They know the ordinary man and women are afraid of their own shadows. Of course they know this because most modern societies and civilizations teach people to be afraid of their own shadows!
Hate-filled fear mongers tap into this pervasive fear and anxiety that plagues pretty much ever human living in a civilization. They tell people how unfair the world is treating them. They get them really good and frighten about all the things coming to ‘get them like the boogeyman‘, and then tell them that the Evil Others did this to them. Then they tell them that they better fight like Hell to keep their lives the way they want it and get their fair share.
Really, what hate-filled fear mongers are really doing is getting people to eat their own shit. If there are people who don’t do as they are told, and if the hate-filled fear monger has power, the disobedient people are killed.
“Do as you are told or else!” — the hate-filled fear monger cries
This is a tale as old as time, which for human beings living in civilizations is about 5,000 years that when all this hate and fear and more hate and more fear really started to grow. You’ll have to read my book on why this is so.
But in the meantime, do we really want to live a world ruled by Shitty Ideas and Foolish Fires?!
I found this song entirely by accident. I love putting together ugly images with beautiful music. And this one matched better than I could ever have intended!
Lyrics by Musixmatch
You always do this stuff We’ll never be enough You were floating in the life We were floating in the life It’s in your eyes [Hate lives in the eyes]
You think that’s not fun, the day is done With no other feelings Just why are your eyes not shining in lights? [Hate shuts down life… the shining lights of life] There’s more than one meaning Just get what you want, but again you got numb, [Greed feds Hate] It’s because of freaking illusion [Hate grows in Foolish Fantasies, delusions, and illusions] That life is not fiction, the sense in the description of love, [Life is wiggly… it goes up and down… fiction tries to make life all up all the time… that’s a lie] It’s an awful conclusion [No one likes to admit they have to poop and pee, but it is true — the origins of Shame another great catalyst of Hate]
You could always turn it back [Yes, turning back is always such a great idea! Look where we are as a world in the year 2023! It’s so Great!! Let’s do more turning backwards!] Get another heart attack [Let’s see… there is the Putin heart attack, Xi Jinping heart attack, Trump heart attack… should I go on?!!!] We roll! We’ll find ourselves in love
Oh fuck… [Yep… we are pretty much fucked as a species due to our propensity to engage in Foolish Fantasies]
It is a few days after Halloween, and monsters seem to fit the season and the times we live in right now.
A few days before Halloween, I heard an interview on It’s Been A Minute called Our Undying Cultural Obsession with Vampires. And this got me thinking about monsters and how they are made.
It is she who said monsters are made. Think Frankenstein, definitely constructed by a human.
And we do this all the time…in our heads simply repeating the stories we tell ourselves that create indelible images, which we then project onto the world we live in. Or better said, the world we wish we lived in.
The Planet We Made
Cover of Time Magazine : The Planet We Made — The Planet We Need — Social Sculpture…How We Can All Participate in Protecting and Seeing Earth Anew — Artwork by Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson is an Icelandic–Danishartist known for sculptured and large-scale installation art that employ elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience. He designed the cover of Time this month to highlight our collective climate crisis that will affect and impact everyone on Earth. Rich or poor, everyone will pay a huge price for further dithering and delaying on taking immediate action Now.
Olafur tells Time to create the effect on TIME’s cover, he employed a technique called after imaging. By following the instructions on the cover, when the page changes, your eyes re-imagine our overheated planet in the healthy vibrant greens and blues we, the human race, were born into and began our journey as a species through time.
The Monsters We Make
This same elusive after imaging takes place inside our minds. The images that get stored inside our minds are created by the stories we tell ourselves and the images we consume as ordinary citizens.
These images, let’s call them cultural images, are stored in our minds as belief systems. Beliefs are vastly more complicated images than the one created by Olafur Eliasson for the cover of TIME. However, compared to reality, beliefs are pathetic and paltry.
Belief systems tend to leave far more outside (the evil other) than inside (the person who sees the the world like you do). All of us adopt and cultivate belief systems. They help us know who we can trust. And, they help us survive by acting as short cuts to reality.
By popping your beliefs into a situation, you can just get down to action. Or really reaction to a situation because beliefs allow you to skip the work of hard thinking, critical analysis, and feeling into what you are actually experiencing.
Systems of belief are informed by the families we grow up in, the cultures we live in, and the religions we participate in (or do not participate in). Systems of belief are further evolved and informed by friends, peers, teachers, clubs, politics, and media, among many other sources.
Whether you accept the stories and images imparted to you through these systems, whether you believe them or you don’t believe them, beliefs about how the world is or isn’t are formed and held in the mind very much like the phantom image Olafur Eliasson created on the cover of TIME.
Each and every belief are things you have choose to accept, to believe, and to store in your head. You choose to believe the things you think are true or what you don’t believe or believe to be not true, regardless of whether they are empirically true or not true.
Once you commit to a belief (in other words you swallow an idea hook, line, and sinker), it creates an indelible image of how the world is, which gets overlay onto everything you do and everyone around you. Very much like the elusive image Olafur Eliasson made for the November 2022 cover of TIME. You put them there, and then you project them on the world.
Beliefs are more likes wishes, fears, and desires. They accord with more how we want the world to be rather than how it really is. Our wish/fear/wants live inside our minds and are projected on the world every moment of our lives. They hoover and cling to everything and everyone we come into contact with like a ghostly aura. Depending on what our projected system of beliefs tells us we should believe about a person or a thing that comes into our narrow bandwidth of focused conscious attention, aligns our actions and behavior in the world.
This rather simple ability has oversized implications–some good, some bad. It is an ability that we take for granted as human beings. Our ability to create systems of beliefs is a form of ignorance (ig–nor–ance, what we choose not to see) and it has gotten the better of us. It is what allows us to turn ordinary human beings into monsters or our world into a wasteland.
Kendra R. Parker explains our creation of and fascination with monsters this way:
When Dracula appeared in the 19th century, there was all of this fear, the English were preoccupied with borders, boundaries and nationalism. Between like 1881 and 1900 there was an increase in the number of non-English Jewish people. There was this xenophobia, this fear of Jewish people, this sort of threat of external colonization. And so these fears about the threatening outsider, who is going to come in and disturb the national pure body, finds its way into Bram Stoker's Dracula.
And if we come to the United States in 1898, we have newspaper images popping up out of North Carolina that depict Black men as vampires because there was this fear of Black men. There's this fear of black men being in politics and so that if you got black political power, then they're going to take over and destroy white women and all of that. And so you've got all of this propaganda.
And there are two images in particular. One is called "The Vampire that Hovers Over North Carolina." It appears in 1898, and it's a Black male vampire coming out of a ballot box. And there's another image that same time period in North Carolina where you got vampires coming out of the grave to vote and they're Black. And so there's this fear that if you let these monsters vote, they will take over and destroy our way of life.
When we use our system of beliefs to turn other human beings into monsters, it is ourselves who become the monster. When hate becomes our fuel, then the transformation is complete. The monster has been made.
It is a way of being in the world that leads to Hell. It is the path of destruction, of mayhem, and of death.
It is a way of being in the world that may begin by being suspicious, distrustful, and skeptical. But it can quickly eclipse who you think you are and make you into a person who takes pleasure in being cynical, ghoulish, grisly, and grotesque.
Such a journey is often summed up by the popular phrase —Take The Red Pill. This means a person that falls down a rabbit hole. They start out innocently following juicy breadcrumbs of gossip and plausibly outrageous happens that grow ever more implausible. But once you get hooked on these toxic breadcrumbs carefully left behind by Master Manipulators who are experts in making the implausible sound plausible. Indeed, the Truth that you are willing to die for.
Accused Pelosi Attacker Told Police He Was On A ‘Suicide Mission’
How To Make of a Monster
Step 1) Chop the world into absolutely good and absolutely evil, then choose a role to play in this absolute drama (it goes without saying that whatever side you play on… that is the righteous side, the good guys, the side that is going to slay absolute evil)
Step 2) Select a Mask for the role you will play in the absolute drama to rid the world of absolute evil (make sure you are the Super Hero of your story and everyone else is the bad guy)
Step 3) Strap Your Mask Tightly To Your Face So It Doesn’t Slip or Fall Off (you don’t want anyone to see you are merely human like the people and other living beings you are dehumanizing)
Step 4) Cut Up Bits and Pieces from the World and Other Stories, Then Mash Them Into Your Mask So You Become Unrecognizable Like Camouflage (it doesn’t matter if the bits and pieces make sense anymore, you are creating your super hero version of yourself!)
Step 5) Add Lots of Layers to Your Mask, Be Sure to Use Lots of Devilish Deceit and Deception, More Camouflage to Help You Better Play Your Role (God forbid anyone recognize that you’re really human behind your Fake Persona)
Step 6) Distort, Deform, and Mangle Your Mask to Create Fantastic New Levels of Distractions and Illusions, Even More Camouflage… Fighting Evil Isn’t for Sissies (this will draw others to you — your followers, your zombie army)
Step 7) Forget You Are Wearing A Mask: Now You Are A Monster
Image From: Metaflesh by Evan J. Peterson
I have not read this book, Metaflesh. But, the image of the cover is captivating. To me, it perfectly captures how we can turn ourselves into monsters using any system of belief, any one at all. In the land of make believe, nothing is sacred. Once we slip down a rabbit holes inside our minds, the inner Hellish landscape allows us to endlessly violently project onto others what we cannot admit to ourselves that we are.
This is a book review of Metaflesh from where I got the image:
Metaflesh is written by Evan J. Peterson, author of The PrEP Diaries: A Safe(r) Sex Memoir and DragStar!, the world’s first drag performer role-playing game. Metaflesh is a book of verse and prose from the point of view of Frankenstein’s Monster. The reflections are inspired not only by Mary Shelley’s seminal work (double entendre fully intended) but also by the pop culture descendants of her novel. Sources include a wide variety of Frankenstein/mad scientist movies and song lyrics. The book also contains themes of Jewish folklore, queer culture, camp, and a lot of David Cronenberg-style body horror. The book covers the gamut of the Monster’s experiences through over a century of movies and songs, and portrays the Monster as both gender-fluid and a sort of chimerical film critic, reviewing portrayals of their self through lyric poetry and flash fiction.
This is an ingenious book of metafiction. Just as Dr. Frankenstein cut up different people and stitched the bits together, Peterson cut up and reassembled his sources, turning them into something greater than the sum of their parts. Borrowing from William S. Burroughs cut-up technique, he splices together Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with F.T. Marinetti’s Manifesto del Futurismo (Futurist Manifesto) and with J. G. Ballard’s essay, “Why I want to F*ck Ronald Reagan.” He apostrophizes the sexually explicit films of avant-garde queer Canadian creator Bruce LaBruce and doesn’t forget to include General Mills’ Frankenberry breakfast cereal or select lines from Mommy Dearest and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The combined imagery of classical Greek mythology, white supremacy, drag queens, Judaism, and zombie erotica do not merge into a hot mess but meld together into a deliciously readable book.
This literary retrospective is sad, funny, quirky, surgically precise, and captivating. I was never bored and didn’t skip through parts. I tore through my first reading at speed and have been taking my time through subsequent readings. The only spot which slows me down, pulling me to a frowning halt, is a simile in the poem, “His Name is In Me”: “gross as the tallest savage.” Although I’m aware that white supremacist imagery is intentionally used throughout the book—punching up, not down—the use of the word “savage” feels out of place here. It is a racial slur used against Black and Indigenous peoples and stands out awkwardly in a poem strongly based in Judaic imagery. If it is a slur used against Jews, I am unaware, but this is my only quibble with the entire book. -- Book Review: Metaflesh by Evan J. Peterson
Someone OnceTold Me
Someone once told me that my blog The StoryTelling Species Series was just a story. He really just wanted to put it down and elevate himself because we were having a very strong disagreement about COVID. I knew he was wrong, but could not explain to him why he was so wrong then.
Now I can. I knew it is the stories we tell ourselves that make us into heroes or villains, good or evil, saints or monsters. Now I know how it happens inside our minds.
Given how susceptible we are to believe our own stories and lies about ourselves, it is best to give all other people the benefit of the doubt and trust they are not the monster you are afraid of… the one that lives inside of you. It is best just be human and to recognize that we have a little bit of good and a little bit of bad inside of us.
It is when we hang onto the evil inside of us and refuse to let go of it that we make ourselves into monsters and turn Earth into Hell. Trust that reality is far more interesting than the stories we tell ourselves about our selves and others.
Trust that you belong here and now with everyone else and that together we can heal ourselves. This is something we can only do together. And if we heal, Earth heals and our burning hot planet may once again shine in its brilliant, beautiful, life sustaining blues and greens!
In the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, my brother-in-law was heard telling his son, “I can’t wait for the shooting and killing to begin.”
I don’t share this to expose what a despicable man he is (although after spending 2.5 weeks with him after attending a memorial service for my sister-in-law who lost her battle to breast cancer, he showed me just how repugnant, wretched, beastly, and hate-filled he has become as a sorry excuse for a man. I am video blogging about the good, the bad, and the ugly in myBig Sky Series).
Rather I share this sad sentiment to shine light on the reality that the 309,000 people living in the US who do not believe in the Big Lie and do not believe violence is justified to overturn an election whose results they don’t like probably know someone who does.
The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats have been tracking insurrectionist sentiments in U.S. adults, most recently in surveys in June. We have found that 47 million American adults – nearly 1 in 5 – agree with the statement that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” Of those, 21 million also agree that “use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency.”
Why should we be paying attention to this when there are so many other Big Problems such as Climate Change, poverty, and disease that need our time and attention. Because the ramifications of the United States of American falling prey to autocratic, authoritarian, dictatorial rule are huge. And as a democracy, we have never been nearer to such an outcome since the Civil War.
Here is what Timothy Snyder, Yale history professor, predicts would happen if a Trump 2024 coup that is carefully being architected right now through our legal systems and then shored up with new legislation restricting voting rights and further bolstered by installing more compliant men and women at state and local levels who are willing to do as the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger refused to do when Trumped asked him to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss in Georgia.
Yale history professor Timothy Snyder predicts the horrific aftermath of a Trump coup in 2024
If Trump runs in 2024, he will lose the popular vote. If corrupt GOP state legislators install Trump as President, the United States will quickly and catastrophically cease to exist. That's what Yale history professor Timothy Snyder says in the latest issue of his "Thinking About" newsletter.
“In a situation where he is installed as president after losing an election, Mr. Trump would vainly try to control what will quickly cease to be the United States. His allies who wish to destroy the state will be the only winners. The precise scenario of the collapse of the United States is impossible to predict, but some of the following is likely to happen, and quickly.
Tens of millions of people protest. Paramilitaries on both sides emerge. Violence leads to fake and real stories of deaths, and to revenge. Police and armed forces will know neither whom they should obey nor whom they should arrest. With traditional authority broken, those wearing uniforms and bearing arms will become partisans, take sides, and start shooting one another. Governors will look for exit strategies for their states. Americans will rush to parts of the disintegrating country they find safer, in a process that looks increasingly like ethnic cleansing. The stock market and then the economy will crash. The dollar will cease to be the world currency.”
Snyder is the author of the short book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Read Mark Frauenfelder's full article for highlights from this book. It sounds frightening like Margret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale!
It would perhaps be easier if the 47 million people who believe the election was stolen, and especially the 21 million who are ready to take violent action to right their misperceived wrong, lived in a single state like Texas, and then let that state secede from the union like the South wanted to do during the Civil War. But that is not our shared reality. We are interwoven and connected to the 47 million American adults who believe the election was stolen from Trump and cross paths with the 21 million adults who are willing to use violence to get their way.
They are our brothers (or brother-in-laws), sisters, uncles, aunts, parents, children, and friends. So what do we do?
We stay informed. We find was to stay sane as my Big Sky Seriesis video blogging about. We endure the uncertainty and the extreme discomfort, anxiety, and fear that goes with it. And despite it all, we find ways to restore our sense of faith in people that at our centers, we are capable of heroic acts of kindness, goodness, and unselfishness as demonstrated just yesterday when Los Angeles police officers risked their lives to pull a pilot from his crashed plane seconds before a commuter train crashed into it.
What follows is a curation of some of the reporting on Jan 6 one year later and what has been learned as well as what remains a threat. It is by no means a comprehensive list. For example, I have made a conscious decision not to highlight “news” sources touting the Big Lie even as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) pulls the oldest trick days after marking this sad day in American history. It is a standard go to trick in the authoritarian’s playbook, which is pretend the other side is doing exactly what you are doing.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) office knocked Democrats over “the left’s Big Lie” — which it pegged as the belief that “there is some evil anti-voting conspiracy sweeping America” — as Democrats look to push for federal voting rights legislation.
A memo from the minority leader’s office on Sunday predicts that Democrats will “try to use fake hysteria to break the Senate and silence millions of Americans’ voices so they can take over elections and ram through their radical agenda,” likely referring to calls by many Democrats to abolish the filibuster in the Senate to pass voting rights reforms.
I have roughly laid out the information below by news sources, begining with a compelling interview with Evan Osonos about the building of a Right-Wing media empire just in time for the 2024 election.
FreshAir Reporting
Second Archetypal Animation | Purveyors of Rage
Building of a Right-Wing Media Empire to CancelCancel Culture
Purveyors of Rage Culture | Music: Madvillain – The Illest Villains – Madvillainy
Fresh Air Interview with EVAN OSNOS who wrote about Dan Bongino in the New Yorker about how he is building a right-wing media empire just in time for the 2024 election--how to cancel cancel culture.
A Several Things That Grabbed My Attention:
When Evan Osnos asked Bongino for an interview, Bongino refused stating, “Why should I want to talk to the enemy.”
Bongino calls face masks mouth diapers and face burkas. While Bongino is vaccinated himself, he tells his followers to remain unvaccinated. When asked about this, he doesn’t see the connection to his vaccination status and continued health versus his followers deaths because they listened to him, remained unvaccinated, caught COVID, and died.
His fellow secret service agents said, “It’s like there are 2 Bonginos; the one who was a secret service agent and the one he is now.” He plays into the suspicion conservatives have that government is not working for us–the common man and woman in America with conservative values.
Bongino made the link between war and the battlefield with politics and differences between parties. He has been very successful in marrying the idea that violence and politics go together. He wrapped himself very tightly around Donald Trump that helped his growing business rise exponentially. He is better at tapping into rage than Alex Jones and others doing the same. Rush died. FoxNews and Matt Drudge are grappling with intense competition on the right for the spotlight.
He has a lot of gun related advertisers and survivalist businesses as well as Omaha steaks and sleep products. Guns and survivalist thinking are phenomena confined to the right. He promotes the idea that elections are rigged and are not to be trusted. He grew up during the time of the NRA dominance and embraces the idea and term the NRA promoted about having a combat mindset.
It is important to understand why we are at the moment we are now, which is arguably worst than one year ago.
Vast Intelligence, Operational Failures Traced as Root of Capitol Riot |A bipartisan team of Senate lawmakers has spent months studying contributory elements to the deadly Jan. 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol and laid out their findings in a 95-page report Tuesday. | Courthouse News Service, June 8, 2021
“A sprawling, fascinating journey through the dawning decades of the 21st century . . . through acute observation, extensive interviewing and dogged research, Osnos weaves an intricate tapestry that gradually reveals how Americans experienced the last two decades.”
―Lizabeth Cohen, The Washington Post
“One of the books of the year . . . Wildland by The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos draws the backstory to America’s rage through deep reporting and ‘thousands of hours of conversations’ in three places he lived before D.C.”
―Axios
“Osnos offers the most personal and the most powerful description yet of a country ‘so far out of balance that it [has] lost its center of gravity’ . . . My hope is that everyone who reads this great book will be enraged enough to redouble their efforts to undo the damage the greedy have wrought, and to take back America for its decent citizens, once and for all.”
―Charles Kaiser, The Guardian
“Visionary in scope, compassionate in procedure, Wildland brilliantly transmutes our national chaos into absorbing narrative order. Evan Osnos has penned a definitive portrait of what we have allowed ourselves to become: a nation reaping the harvest that long negligence has sown.”
―Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies
Day of Rage
6 month NYT Visual Investigation
This is a six-month Times investigation that has synchronized and mapped out thousands of videos and police radio communications from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, providing the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.
Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol | NYT Visual Investigations 6,344,823 views, Jul 1, 2021
This is a 40-minute documentary about January 6, 2021. It was produced by The New York Time’s Visual Investigations team that synchronized and mapped thousands of videos of the U.S. Capitol riot to provide the most complete picture to date of what happened on Jan. 6 — and why. It was a massive effort that occurred over six months and involved resources from across the Times newsroom. The Visual Investigation team went to court to unseal police body camera footage, scoured law enforcement radio communications and interviewed witnesses.
7 Basic Characteristics Every Democracy Needs| The Advertiser Mirror, March 2, 2021 | (1) Civil liability, (2) Democratic values, (3) Guarantee of rights and common welfare, (4) Decentralized democracy, (5) Political participation, (6) Constitutional principle, (7) Democratic models
‘American democracy will continue to be tested’: Peril author Robert Costa on Trump, the big lie and 2024 | Interview by David Smith in Washington | A Trump 2024 sign seen at a vendor’s table during an anti-vaccine, anti-mask mandate rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, last month. Photograph: Paul Weaver/Sopa Images/Rex/Shutterstock | The Guardian, Sep 26, 2021
Arkansas school apologizes for political news summaries in yearbook | By Joseph Wilkinson, May 25, 2021 | Daily News | “The yearbook from Lincoln Junior High in Bentonville, in the state’s northwest corner, falsely but confidently read, “President Trump WAS NOT impeached” under a photo of the former president, according to photos obtained by local CBS affiliate KFSM.”
Chaos in Washington as Trump supporters storm Capitol| Tuesday, Jan 11, 2022 | Israel Hayom — This is where we stand | US President Trump tweets: These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots.
The Dan Bongino Show | iHeart | He’s a former Secret Service Agent, former NYPD officer, and New York Times best-selling author. Join Dan Bongino each weekday as he tackles the hottest political issues, debunking both liberal and Republican establishment rhetoric. [Note:He is a former Secret Service Agent and NYPD officer…he is not so much debunking Republican establishment rhetoric as wrapping it and building a new authoritarian narrative to pave the way for Trump’s glorious return.]
Top Fox hosts lobbied Trump to act on Jan. 6, texts show | By David Bauder, December 15, 2021 | AP | “The revelation that Fox News Channel personalities sent text messages to the White House during the Jan. 6 insurrection is another example of how the network’s stars sought to influence then-President Donald Trump instead of simply reporting or commenting on him. Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade all texted advice to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, as a mob of pro-Donald Trump loyalists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, vice chair of the congressional committee probing the riot.”
Peril is a book by American journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa about the last days of Donald Trump’s presidency, as well as the presidential transition and early presidency of Joe Biden. The book was published on September 21, 2021, by Simon & Schuster.
“The book details how Mr. Trump’s presidency essentially collapsed in his final months in office, particularly after his election loss and the start of his campaign to deny the results.” — Michael S. Schmidt, The New York Times
“The clear theme of Peril is not a rehash or account of what transpired over the past year or so. It is a waving red flag designed to warn the electorate and chattering class that this story is far from over.”—Mediaite
Marketplace Tech Description: One year after the assault on the Capitol, more police departments have deployed artificial intelligence programs for surveillance.
In the weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, law enforcement agencies and internet sleuths identified hundreds of people who stormed the U.S. Capitol. Many were later arrested or faced consequences at their jobs or in their communities.
Authorities used a variety of technologies to speed up that process, which was needed because there were millions of images, videos, messages, social media posts and bits of location data to parse.
Anjana Susarla is professor of responsible artificial intelligence and information systems at Michigan State University and has been studying the role that tech, especially image recognition, is playing in the ongoing search for suspects. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Amanpour and Company Reporting
Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun
“Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun,” Reports Barton Gellman of The Atlantic | Amanpour and Company 166,157 views, Dec 10, 2021
Overview: Barton Gellman was among the journalists who predicted in 2020 that President Trump would not admit defeat if he lost the presidential election. Now, in a cover story for The Atlantic, Gellman says the former president is in an even better position to seize power. He speaks with Hari Sreenivasan about why he believes democracy will be on trial in the 2024 presidential election. Originally aired on December 10, 2021.
PBS NewsHour & WAMU Reporting
January 6 Was A Shot Across the Bow | It is a Harbinger
Jan. 6 attack was a ‘warning shot’ and likely a ‘harbinger,’ experts say. Here’s why 9,706 views, Jan 6, 2022
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barton Gellman says the Republican party is increasingly unwilling to accept defeat and, in fact, is "prepared to win by sacrificing the essential elements of democracy." His new Atlantic article is 'Trump's Next Coup Has Already Begun.'
Third Archetypal Animation | As The End of Democracy Draws Near
As The End of Democracy Draws Near | Music: American Democracy: The Endgame of the Human Race by Noam Chomsky (Available on Spotify) [Also see a Dec. 30, 2021 Interview with Noam Chomsky on Rising Fascism in U.S., Class Warfare & the Climate Emergency | Noam Chomsky warns the Republican Party is “marching” the world to destruction by ignoring the climate emergency while embracing proto-fascism at home. Chomsky talks about the January 6 insurrection, how neoliberalism is a form of class warfare and how President Biden’s climate plans fall short of what is needed.
The Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol affected many people — residents, elected officials and their staff, journalists, and the police who were called in to protect them.
WAMU's Naomi Starobin and Gabe Bullard put together this montage of the voices of some of these people who talked about the events of that day and how it impacted them.
America Interrupted
This is the full episode of the PBS NewsHour for Jan. 7, 2022. At minute 23:30, Judy introduced a podcast she and three amazing women reporters witnessed and reported on live while the insurrection unfolded. Lisa Desjardins was inside the Capitol as the rioters invaded and had to hide. She tells about her experience inside the Capitol that day. Amna Nawaz was previously a war correspondent and has parachuted into dangerous places to report on them. She was outside of the Capitol as the rioters invaded and interviewed them in real time. She said the force and energy was just as violent and vitriolic as any of the places she reported during her days as a foreign correspondent reporting on wars. Yamiche Alcindor was at the White House as the day unfolded reporting on what Trump was not doing as the carnage at the Capitol unfolded.
The Jan. 6 insurrection, 1 year later | PBS NewsHour presents 7,241 views, Premiered 4 hours ago
Description: Congress is still investigating the people and organizations linked to the Jan. 6 attack — the most violent assault on the U.S. Capitol since the British attack during the war of 1812. The PBS NewsHour looked back at what happened that day, the lasting impacts on those who survived, where the investigations stand, and the broader effects on American politics, culture and democracy itself.
Fourth Archetypal Animation | Carnage at the Capitol
For months, my colleagues and I at the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats have been tracking insurrectionist sentiments in U.S. adults, most recently in surveys in June. We have found that 47 million American adults – nearly 1 in 5 – agree with the statement that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” Of those, 21 million also agree that “use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency.”
"In the year since the insurrection that reverberated around the world, Trump’s stranglehold on Republicans has seemingly become stronger, not weaker. Graham was soon back on the golf course with him; McCarthy was soon kissing the ring at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Many leaders of the party have set about changing the narrative of the insurrection to portray it as a heroic last stand – a new “lost cause”.
(…)
"Trump was the first president in American history to inspire an attempted coup. After a rally where the defeated incumbent urged supporters to “fight like hell”, the angry mob laid siege to the US Capitol to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory."
"Five people died, scores of police were beaten and bloodied and there was about $1.5m in damage in the first major attack on the Capitol since the war of 1812. More than 700 people have been charged in one of the biggest criminal investigations in American history."
(…)
"Today the loudest voices in the Republican party belong to the extremists. For them, Trump’s “big lie” that the election was stolen from him due to voter fraud, rendering Biden an illegitimate president, goes hand in hand with the lie that the insurrection was a morally justified crusade, an righteous endeavor to save democracy, not destroy it."
"Trump himself perpetuates this through a regular barrage of interviews, rallies and emailed statements since he was barred from Twitter. Notably he has sought to lionize Ashli Babbitt, who was shot dead during the riot, as a martyr."
"Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congresswoman, has cast rioters currently held in detention in a similar light. In November she visit a Washington jail’s so-called “patriot wing” and complained the inmates were enduring “inhumane” conditions because of their political beliefs."
"Other pro-Trump Republicans in the House echo these messages – one referred to the Capitol attack as a “normal tourist visit” – or do little to contradict them. Some Republican senators are evidently more uncomfortable with the web of deceit and urge the party to look forward to the next election. But again only a small minority are willing to take Trump on directly."
Even in the early moments of the insurrection, Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley suggested former President Donald Trump would need to take some responsibility for goading on his supporters.
One year later, he joins Here & Now's Peter O'Dowd to reflect on Jan. 6 and how history will view that day.
This segment aired on January 6, 2022.
“It is kind of like a NeoCivil War still going on today. It really is all hands on deck to save democracy and the right to vote today.“
"Rep. Peter Welch (VT-D) joins Here & Now's Scott Tong to reflect on trying to flee angry rioters in the Capitol building on this day last year, and what the legacy of that insurrection is today."
"Capitol police told us to get on the floor and put on our gas masks. Then, I heard a shot from the floor below us. There was an immense sense of peril."
Plays clip of Danny Rodriguez accused of tasing Officer Fanone who breaks down crying saying he couldn't believe how stupid he was he thought he was going to be a hero.
New FBI Video Shows Interrogation Of Jan. 6 Defendant Accused Of Tasing Officer 240,380 views, Nov 30, 2021
It started with 'The Big Lie." Many argue that led directly to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th last year.
Over the last twelve months, hundreds have been arrested and charged in connection with the insurrection, including nearly a dozen from New England and six from Massachusetts.
But that's just a fraction of those who breached the Capitol that day. And as investigations - both by law enforcement and Congress continue - it has become clear that there was coordination, planning, at least by and for some of the participants, behind that breach.
We talk more about accountability, and what the future may hold for extremism locally and nationally with Joan Donovan, Research Director at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy and Andrew Lelling, former US Attorney for Massachusetts under the Trump Administration. Lelling coordinated with the U.S. Attorney's office in the District of Columbia on prosecutions.
The legacy of the Jan. 6 committee … and what’s still left to do 1,200 views, Premiered Jan 6, 2022
Description: One year after the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, the House select committee’s investigation into what happened that day is far from over. Much of the committee’s work has been behind closed doors, but the bipartisan group of lawmakers plan to enter a more public phase in 2022. This week, Kyle Cheney joins Ryan Lizza to answer a big question: What has the Jan. 6 committee accomplished so far?
Margaret Atwood Sounds the Alarm on Authoritarianism | Amanpour and Company 58,856 views, Dec 29, 2021
Description of Interview: President Biden has promised to face down authoritarianism and defend democracy – something Margaret Atwood sees as surprisingly fragile. The author is renowned around the world for her dystopian novels, including "The Handmaid’s Tale." In her latest project she takes a turn, with a focus on utopian ideals and how we might do better. It’s all part of a new online learning experience on Disco called "Practical Utopias: An Exploration of the Possible." Originally aired on December 7, 2021.
“Did you ever imagine when you wrote the Handmaids Tale that this amount of reality would shape up decades later.”
Is Trump Laying the Groundwork for a Coup in 2024? Bill Moyers Weighs In | Amanpour and Company 79,722 views, Jan 5, 2022
Description of Interview: Clashing ideologies about the meaning of democracy in America are no less harrowing than the events of January 6. Journalist Bill Moyers, a 30-time Emmy Award winner, shares his views and concerns in the new PBS documentary "Preserving Democracy," airing tomorrow. Moyers speaks with Hari Sreenivasan alongside historian Kathleen Belew – who also appears in the film – about the insurrection and the danger of a recurrence. Originally aired on January 5, 2022.
Ronan Farrow: Who Were the Rioters on Jan. 6th? | Amanpour and Company 1,327,162 views, Feb 10, 2021
Description of Interview: In the Trump impeachment trial, a key element of the prosecution's case is a dramatic video taken at the Capitol during the insurrection. Who were the actual faces in the crowd? Ronan Farrow has profiled three different rioters to learn more about their backgrounds. All three have been arrested and now face criminal charges. One made threats on Farrow's life. Michel Martin speaks with the reporter about his investigation. Originally aired on February 10, 2021.
Jason Stanley Warns: “America Is Now in Fascism’s Legal Phase” | Amanpour and Company 76,730 views, Jan 6, 2022
Description of Interview: Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley sees January 6, 2021 as part of a history of fascist impulses in American politics. This is the focus of his book "How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them." His latest article in The Guardian is titled “America is now in fascism’s legal phase.” Stanley speaks with Michel Martin about what he calls an “extremely critical moment” for democracy around the world. Originally aired on January 6, 2021.
A New Study Shows Us the Single Biggest Motivation for the Jan. 6 Rioters | Amanpour and Company 881,468 views, May 6, 2021
Description of Interview: A new study on the January 6 Capitol insurrection finds that of the nearly 400 rioters arrested or charged, 93% are white and 86% are male. Michel Martin speaks to the study’s principal investigator, Professor Robert Pape, to discuss these findings and some surprising revelations about the attackers and their motives. Originally aired on May 6, 2021.
Jason Stanley: Did This 2 Min. Video Help Incite the Jan. 6 Rioters? | Amanpour and Company 1,111,612 views, Feb 12, 2021
Description of Interview: As former president Donald Trump's second impeachment trial enters its third day, the question remains whether his words or actions incited the January 6 assault on the Capitol. But little attention has been paid to a video that was shown that same day, at the January 6 "March to Save America" rally in Washington, D.C. Jason Stanley, a scholar of fascist propaganda, claims that this short video -- shown immediately after Rudy Giuliani left the stage, prior to the attack on the Capitol -- was full of themes and tactics that threaten liberal democracy. Stanley breaks the video down with Hari Sreenivasan and elaborates on its role in the violence that took place on that infamous day. Originally aired on February 11, 2021.
“Red Flags Everywhere:” Why Did the FBI Dismiss Jan. 6 Warnings? | Amanpour and Company 110,875 views, Nov 10, 2021
Description of Interview: "Presidents are not kings, and the plaintiff is not president." These were the words of a U.S. Federal judge rejecting former President Donald Trump's request to withhold records about the January 6th insurrection. The ruling will give a bipartisan house committee access to hundreds of pages of documents from the Trump White House. The committee also has issued 10 new subpoenas to former Trump officials. The Washington Post has conducted its own extensive investigation called "The Attack: Before, During and After." It included more than 75 journalists and interviews with over 230 people. Here is Michel Martin speaking with Post reporters Amy Gardner and Aaron Davis about the cascade of warnings received before January 6th. Originally aired on November 10, 2021.
"We often hear that, unlike in fledgling democracies, America's institutions are strong. But, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man." If people abuse them, attack them, disregard them, they will slowly collapse."
Also, keep an eye out for Fareed Zakaria’s latest special on CNN: The Fight to Save American Democracy. It provides a deep dive into the rise of totalitarian, authoritative, and fascist regimes that follow surprisingly similar recognizable patterns to grab power and control thereby crushing previously democratic societies like Hitler did in 1930’s Germany. The parallels are terrifying. This special will be available at the link above on Jan 16, 2022.
Fareed Zakaria fears American democracy could be in peril 293,953 views, Dec 1, 2019
Fareed: Democracy is decaying worldwide 130,539 views, Feb 25, 2018
Fareed Zakaria: This is how Republicans keep their power 716,275 views, Sep 27, 2020
Is democracy safe for the world? — with Fareed Zakaria (1998) | THINK TANK 2,718 views, Dec 13, 2020
Fareed Zakaria: Is this the Worst of Times? | The Agenda 50,996 views, Jun 15, 2021
The Future of American Democracy 1,221 views, Jan 20, 2021
Description: Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md., 8th District) talks about the year since the Jan. 6 insurrection, which he writes about in his new book, Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. Virginia Delegate Marcus Simon (D-53rd District) previews the legislative session, and the strategy for Democrats in a Republican-controlled House.
Power of Denialism
Denialism Is A Dangerous Virus | The Daily Show
January 6th: Did It Even Happen?! (Spoiler: Yes) feat. Chris Hayes & Jordan Klepper | The Daily Show | 587,715 views, Jan 3, 2022
“Don’t Look Up!”
DON’T LOOK UP | Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence | Official Trailer | Netflix 14,080,063 views, Nov 16, 2021
Description: Based on real events that haven’t happened - yet. Don’t Look Up in select theaters December 10 and on Netflix December 24. DON’T LOOK UP tells the story of two low-level astronomers who must go on a giant media tour to warn mankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth. Written and Directed by Adam McKay.
This awesome movie with an all star cast (better watch out conspiracy theory believers (that’s you QAnon, Deep staters, False flagers operations, “Stolen election” conspiracy theory, Illuminati believers, etc.) totally captures humans ability to ignore and deny reality and facts in pursuit of selfish, egotistical, self-obsessed, money-grubbing, miserly, opportunistic, self-absorbed interests. Did I miss an adjective here?
Where Do We Go From Here?
Paul Solman explores Political polarization prompts efforts to bridge the gap through shared experiences 4,427 views, Jan 10, 2022
This was such a hopeful and inspiring segment in the face of so much depressing realization of the forces at work in this moment and the terrible odds the U.S. has it to make it as a democratic nation beyond 2024.
Description: PBS NewsHour spent much of last week trying to examine what still divides our country and the deep polarization that preceded the Jan. 6 riots. Now, Paul Solman looks at multiple efforts to bridge those major political and cultural fissures in the U.S., beginning with smaller steps forward.
Is There Room for Redemption in Our Cancel Culture? | Amanpour and Company 3,914 views, Jan 7, 2022
Description of Interview: Loretta J. Ross is a visiting professor at Smith College whose teaching focuses on white supremacy in the age of Trump. Ross speaks with Michel Martin about January 6 as a possible opportunity for reflection and healing. Originally aired on January 6, 2022
I wanted to link you, my readers who have made it this far down, to Christiane Amanpour’s January 7, 2022 episode, but it is only available to view on your local PBS station. In this episode Christiane with Doris Kearns Goodwin and Timothy Snyder; Loretta J. Ross speaks with Michel Martin on whether January 6 provides an opportunity for reflection and healing.
Here is the link to Christiane’s interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin and Timothy Snyder that really hits it out of the park as far as what are the take away lessons from Jan. 6, 2022 and things to pay close attention to in the years leading up to the next US Presidential Election in 2024. Will this fragile democracy make it? Listen and learn for you are part of the answer.
I was also looking for Christiane’s interview with the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu who died in the early days of this dawning year. Christiane’s Jan 7, 2022 episode was a recollection of interviews she had done that spoke to the actions and ramifications of the events of Jan 6, 2021. I have not found a link to her interview, but I found this one on the Dalai Lama’s Finding Joy and Happiness station on YouTube. It speaks to the same spirit that Christiane had recognized and was illuminating with her interview with Desmond Tutu.
Finding Joy and Happiness | 207,835 views, Jul 1, 2021
Description: His Holiness the Dalai Lama reunites online with Archbishop Desmond Tutu from his residence in Dharamsala, HP, India on June 24, 2021, on the occasion of the release of their new movie "Mission: Joy - Finding Happiness in Troubled Times". For more info please see https://missionjoy.org/
We have so much to learn from these two Holy men who stand outside of the self-destructive forces of modern Western Civilization that seems hell bent on standing in a circle and annihilating the world in a mutual massacre of scapegoats. It doesn’t matter what side you stand on when the massacre of scapegoats begins the world is at the beginning of the end for the human race for we have evolved technologies too powerful for our primitive, puny minds to handle with the compassion, understanding, and care necessary to use them anymore.
What is our collective fate? I have no idea, but I am certain each and every person is casting their votes in the ever unfolding moment. We do it in their hearts and minds. We do it in the thoughts we think. We do it even more loudly in the actions we take.
As the old saying goes, “Actions speak louder than words.”
Recently, as I have been struggling to understand and survive my husband’s toxic family structure long poisoned by his mother’s narcissistic personality disorder, I ran across this truth in a video by clinical psychologist Dr. Ramani who is a leading expert on Narcissistic Abuse, Psychopathy, and Sociopathy. She counsel her patients who are mainly the victims of narcissists, psychopaths, and sociopaths that their words and what they say they will do is always in direction opposition to what they do. It is the very same issue that all of us must heed now in our struggle to save our democracy and this is because our current most dominant system of consciousness, Western Civilization, rewards people who are narcissists, psychopaths, and sociopaths.
We have the power to create a more perfect union, but this creative process is on-going and must be lived with as much consciousness of ourselves and our own inner, hidden motives as possible. Without that, without conscious growth as an individual, we are doomed to live out our fate, which is our own unconsciousness projected out onto others.
Sources for schema above include (beginning from bottom to top, except when repeated from same source):
Ideapod | The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely
Jungian Genealogy, by Iona Miller | Embracing Shadow | “If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of all evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is, his shadow, does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc.“ ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 423.
Jungian Archetypes: Personalities of Our Unconscious | Jungian archetypes refer to underlying forms or the personalities from which symbols such as The Mother, The Child, The Trickster, or The Shadow emerge.
Remember that you are a beautiful conscious being! Let your light shine today. When you are fully connected to who you are deep down at the center of your being, your actions will align with life and you will be a creative force for change rather than a destructive force.
Image Source: Soldier/submachine gun by WikiImages | Pixabay | Deutsch • Member since Dec. 13, 2011 Dead man by soumen82hazra on Pixabay | English • Member since April 24, 2020 Gild Walking with Teddy Bear by reyerbaby on Pixabay | lisa runnels • Age 59 • magee/united states • Member since Jan. 13, 2012
Image Source: 7 Basic Characteristics Every Democracy Needs| The Advertiser Mirror, March 2, 2021 | (1) Civil liability, (2) Democratic values, (3) Guarantee of rights and common welfare, (4) Decentralized democracy, (5) Political participation, (6) Constitutional principle, (7) Democratic models
40 Thieves – The Work Of A Craftsman | The Noam Chomsky Music Project 25 views, Dec 3, 2021
Second Archetypal Animation | Purveyors of Rage Culture
Images from Pixabay: Red monster by GregMontani Greg Montani • Age 46 • Bayern • Member since May 11, 2015 Green Scream by DaModernDaVinci Shaun • Perth/Australia • Member since Dec. 15, 2018 • #947 Man Eating Hand by Sammy-Sander Sam Williams • Italy • Member since Nov. 8, 2018
Third Archetypal Animation | As The End of Democracy Draws Near
Pixabay Images: Sinking Statue of Liberty by PhotoMIX-Company Photo Mix • Europe • Member since Oct. 21, 2015
Chaos in Washington as Trump supporters storm Capitol| Tuesday, Jan 11, 2022 | Israel Hayom — This is where we stand | US President Trump tweets: These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots.
Fourth Archetypal Animation | Carnage at the Capitol
Images from Pixabay: Watching the World Fall Apart by Alexas_Fotos Here and now, unfortunately, ends my journey on Pixabay • but it continues on Pexels.com/under the same name • Member since Jan. 6, 2015
... I was pretty pissed because it is only in states that allow for free thought that we might still find the cure to our disease.
