Monthly Archives: November 2016

November 24, 2016 · 7:15 am

A Brief History of the Holidays

Can you believe it? Black Friday is here again (be careful out there!), Christmas jingles fill the airways, and our flagging economy gears up for another festive orgasm of high sales figures and disappointing profit-margins to honor material fixations in the cellophane guise of spiritual devotion.

Lest we forget the humbler origins of religious reverence amid the frenetic frenzy of instant need-gratification, here are some little-known facts about the history of the holiday season:

Did you know?

That our traditional Thanksgiving dinner actually dates back to Julius Caesar? Shakespeare immortalized his famous plea to Brutus, “Et tu…?”, though this is an historical inaccuracy. It was actually Brutus’ query to his slave, Wimpy, who not having et all day upon entering the senate cafeteria, responded: “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” Many historians believe this to be the basis of the modern pay-by-installment system whereby one signs one’s life over to the one percent for the privilege of sharing and maintaining its bounty.

At the time, hamburgers were a symbol of wealth and prosperity enjoyed only by a powerful minority; but they soon became so plentiful during the Pax Romana that rotting surfeits accrued. The putrid meat was tossed to crowds of starving citizens in annual celebrations in which they gave thanks to a violent and self-serving elite which allowed many of them to survive.

Did You Know?

That in an epicurean gala of “all the hamburgers you can eat”, Roman senators purged their spirits on specially reserved stone couches in great stadiums (the prototype of today’s luxury sky-boxes) to watch Lions eat Christians amid the dull, half-dozing revelry of inflated stomachs, mead-guzzling, and rude, noisome bodily emissions? The Lions still symbolize the old tradition, though somewhat less competitively today, and soda pop now eases the dispepsia of over-ingestion.

According to primary sources, as a result of crude meat preservation, bacteria-laden overages, and the unrestrained excesses of the senators: “There were not a bare spote of grounde in the near propinquity of the spirit-purge the size of a denarius wherein the Senators had not expunged some foule and variouse forme of excretium.“

Did you know?

That the tradition later re-emerged in the New World in more civilized form as Christian compensation spread its new gospel of love to a primitive, animal-like heathenry? Annual banquets were held — but this time, in accordance with the selfless creed devoted to the service of religious life. The copious bounties were shared freely with the rude race of primitives (once a year) in joyful anticipation of converting/exterminating them to relieve them of their natural dignity along with whatever else the emissaries deemed proper return for the divine sacrifice of having to depend on savages in the name of God.

Did you know?

That our modern Christmas began as a pagan ritual marking the winter solstice? The shortest day and the longest night of the year translated to the ancient mind as a symbol of bitter hardship and deep depression, and this primitive heritage underlies the high suicide rates which, for many, only add to the festivities of the holiday season (compensation for the fantastic history of a divine ego which is yet subject to natural law).

Outbursts of consumerism now replace the orgiastic sexual excesses of old; boozy office parties and the suggestive lure of kisses under the mistletoe stand today only as fading silhouettes of the naked debauchery of our ancestors and convince us that the lowest forms of sensual greed have been magically transformed into lofty intellectual pursuits through repression and the pretense of belief.

Did you know?

That the jolly old St. Nick our children dream so wistfully of on Christmas Eve evolved from the ancient Norse god, Nikolai of the Twelve Engorgements? The terrible gifts he proffered were enslavement, abuse, and exploitation in return for only the barest physical sustenance. He presided over the fate of humanity’s forgotten children whose self-serving progenitors’ nurturing instincts had been overcome by the blind pursuit of immediate personal gain. Fortunately, they only ever comprised about one percent of the population.

His tragic, innocent victims were later euphemized as cute helper “dwarfs” by a wise ruling elite determined to improve humanity’s condition whatever the cost to itself; though a small handful of backward-oriented, bitter, and disgruntled naysayers of contemporary culture propose that unconscious aspects of the original image have now morphed into the modern form of “managed mass deception” for the purposes of maintaining the run-away avarice of a wealthy, dissociated, and unregulated one percent.

Did You Know?

That no poor, pitiful unwitting beast of lower intelligence, human or animal, is off limits to the usury and exploitation beneath the carefully staged benign, even pleasant, subliminally-induced commercial images of corporate media-interests which trigger the Pavlov-like responses of sensual self-indulgence we’ve been conditioned to like automatons through the merest suggestion of the most transparent, pre-packaged advertisements?

Click here for a serious look at our modern predicament.

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November 17, 2016 · 1:26 pm

Psych-Standards for Public Office?

Legislative response to public outcries for the mental evaluation of our nation’s political leaders has finally arrived. Psychological standards for holding office are now being considered on both state and federal levels. After years of closed-door negotiations, an APA-backed proposal defining the depth and nature of testing procedures has been drafted.

A slip-tight majority approved an independent committee’s recommendation to hold the nation’s decision-makers to the minimal standards of “at least, say, a sanitation worker.” Only the slim-jim of a disgruntled populace decided the fate of the controversial bill first introduced by senator, Wares DeBiefe.

Angry phone calls, e-mails, texts, twitters, tooters, tweets, hooters, spoots, faxes, and floots from outraged citizens nationwide so overwhelmed Capitol electronic circuits that the overloads inadvertently set off alarms. Congressional members rushed head-long into the streets as in a jail-break.

When order was finally restored by the Federal Bureau of Instigation, the panic produced by what were later assessed as “projected fears of mass conspiracy” left lawmakers so shaken, even lunch was cancelled. “They’re not accustomed to immediate response outside physical threat and the denial reflex.” an inside source told Entertainment-For-Spite amid the chaos. 

“It was the perfect storm.” an anonymous aide explained after the dust settled. Congress finally reconvened — two weeks after the potential catastrophe which never happened had left the projected portent of emotional angst in the over-sensitive guilt complexes of the nation’s public servants. 

I spoke with Dr. Norm Gruupe, who will oversee the testing. “Many of the aging politicos familiar with the psychoanalytic theories of the Freudian era worried about phallic issues. What the old school conceived as a classic clinging to a patriarchal power-complex — a regressive, reverse weenis-envy with anxiety-induced erectile aberration compensated by premature verbal ejaculation — we now know to be of chemical causation correlated with the mediating mechanism of male menopause; age-related functional failure of the weenis itself, which modern medicines have cured…

“The younger members were more concerned with peer approval,” he continued, “and we took advantage of that as leverage for negotiation. We finally settled on the ‘good therapist/bad therapist’ tack and separated them into random groups to test responses. Fortunately, clear-headed reason prevailed, and much needed criteria for public service were approved  for consideration.” 

“I don’t think the old trickle-down psychology ever worked.” Dr. Gruupe mused. While his inside experience of the political process had increased his respect for corporate interests intent on abnegating legislative restraints altogether and just allowing each individual to “go for it” in an unregulated free market, the lure of political corruption still lurked. He rummaged in his head: “The each-for-himself capitalist approach, especially in light of federal uber-reach, might just be crazy enough to work in a real free market. Anywhoo…

“To appraise the situation, we sent out market-test questionnaires with yes/no boxes. These matched up only with random statistical patterns which showed no continuity. We knew then we had a formidable task ahead of us.”

When responses were required in essay form, Dr. Gruupe explained, they had to run them through computerized code-breaking sequences to determine their actual content. “Even our most experienced psychologists couldn’t make sense of them.” he said; though, he added, it was no surprise. “Their statements were so subtle and contradictory that we couldn’t leave the grunt-work to college psych majors as we do with the general public.”

Various testing procedures were applied to determine which might be the most effective in establishing criteria for service. “General assessment began with the IQ/Deceivement Test.” Dr. Gruupe said. “High verbal acuity conflicted with low meaning-scales under comprehensive analysis and,  in the end, we were forced to resort to the “Animal Metaphor Test” to arrive at a curve for evaluation.”

That test proved to be the most efficient for distinguishing motive intent in the incoherent catchword-designed articulations required for public deception. The Rorshach had resulted only in meaningless meanderings that left even test professionals confused and disoriented. Many were alarmed at the results.

Free association proved equally unproductive. “I could only describe their results as a strange hybrid of P.T. Barnum, Nietzsche, and Billy Graham.” Dr. Gruupe recalled. “The neurocognitive functions first appeared normal, but on further examination, analogical inconsistencies contrasted so starkly with any coherent parameters of organized thought that we were compelled to reject one exam after another and try more creative approaches…

“It was the appearance of neurocognitive normalcy that threw us off. Even our assessment team began to question their sanity. Think about it. They all aced the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.  Semantic and episodic memory scores were off the charts. They blew the lid off the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia, yet they were quite unable to answer a simple, direct question. We shit-canned the Ruff Figural Fluency; even considered the possibility that they may be an atavistic species of weird savant tuned to an upside-down world all their own.”

For a serious examination of the upside-down psychic world, click here.

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November 3, 2016 · 11:38 am

Knowledge and Understanding

“Centuries of spiritual idealism which sought to develop the soul have… convinced us that we have only to believe in it to achieve it – for those who can still believe. For those who can’t, a new ideal of material progress now discards the too-taxing task of looking inward as not worth the effort…  Ever more advanced technologies draw us further outside ourselves and into devices. Instant access and constant exposure to the subliminal effects of marketing and advertising cultivate unconscious emotions so paradoxical that what is meant to emancipate and connect also finds us dependent and alienated — our most personal and intimate needs indistinguishable from carefully instilled, pre-packed desires.” A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious.

That consciousness may be spiraling out of control and in danger of losing itself in its own subjectivity, is apparent when viewed from an historical perspective. Important though the sciences of the humanities may be for our education, it’s a mistake to confuse knowledge with understanding. Jung wrote in, Civilization In Transition:

“In view of the fact that, in principle, the positive advantages of knowledge work specifically to the disadvantage of understanding, the judgment resulting therefrom is likely to be something of a paradox. Judged scientifically, the individual is nothing but a unit which… could just as well be designated with a letter of the alphabet. For understanding, on the other hand, it is just the unique individual human being who, when stripped of all those conformities and regularities so dear to… the scientist, is the supreme and only real object of investigation.”

Why this is so is frighteningly evident today– not because of the recent advance of science itself but in our use of it. Unless you’re a politician, the people you know are mostly decent folks whose self-deceptions far outweigh any conscious ill-intent to others. But, magnify those seemingly insignificant projections times four billion and re-collectivize them according to ideology, and they morph into world catastrophes waiting to happen:

“Scientific education is based in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge and therefore imparts an unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role. The individual, however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality, the concrete man as opposed to the unreal ideal or “normal” man to whom scientific statements refer.“

That we all have such unrealistic, rational conceptions of ourselves could become clearer  — if we applied our scientific education to our own activities:

“What is more, most of the natural sciences try to represent the results of their investigations as though these had come into existence without man’s intervention, in such a way that the collaboration of the psyche… remains invisible… So, in this respect as well, science conveys a picture of the world in which a real human psyche appears to be excluded — the very antithesis of the “humanities“.”

As Jung explained, the paradox results from a psychic condition in which ego is possessed by one function.  This, he described as a new stage of consciousness. The unconscious functions formerly projected into the deity are introjected and felt as personal qualities. The result is an identification with intellect in which ego is “puffed up” or inflated: the self-fulfilling prophecy of the old biblical warning in modern guise.

“Under the influence of scientific assumptions, not only the psyche and the individual man and, indeed, all individual events… suffer a levelling down… a process of blurring that distorts the picture of reality into a conceptual average. We ought not to underestimate the psychological effect of the statistical world-picture: it thrusts aside the individual in favor of anonymous units that pile up into mass formations. Instead of the concrete individual, you have the names of organizations and, at the highest point, the abstract idea of the State as the principle of political reality.”

The current political reality has changed somewhat since Jung’s observations in 1957 — but their bases haven’t. Instead of “the State”, we might refer to vying ideologies paralyzed by conflicts of progression and regression that now find us at a standstill; an unconscious reality is in open rebellion.

“Instead of moral and mental differentiation of the individual, you have… the raising of the living standard. The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State [the ideology], which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in… an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself. The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision of how to live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed, as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses.“

(Next: Political Reality)

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