Trump IS the system
I still wake up with a sense of grogginess and slight confusion most mornings.
I think it’s because sleeping on my side…
Usually the left side-
my neck and head are in the wrong position and my arm/shoulder get pinned for a number of hours.
My jaw on the left side also feels locked up and generally rebellious and masterfully surly in the pronounced alternate psychological plane of the hour of waking - realistically it’s because my TMJ, combined with the undescended tooth on the next-to-last back molar on the upper jaw continues to threaten being lost because of my receding gums causing sensitivity and irritation in that area -
But what really is it that we can define as a surreal experience?
Even the strangest dreams can be directed from a very truthful emotional, physical, or psychic remnant from either that day or from inner retribution screaming for acknowledgment.
I have always believed that all behavior and convictions come from some inner striving or subconscious need requiring acknowledgment.
This doesn’t mean the individual as the vessel of the behavior has any conscious awareness of where the need comes from. Behavior doesn’t require conscious individuation, but the individuation of the person is required to be a fully functional actor in his or her own existence.
It is an ongoingly complicated reality that we are living in a time which is insipidly complex - by that I mean to the common mind there is nothing worth paying attention to that isn’t already alluring to that which is recognizable to yourself in moral or aesthetic terms, which automatically resets to either childhood impressions or cultural touchstones within the last new influence that was acceptable to let into your mind and body…to be allowed to change you in feeling and movement through the world -
and in it, it requires more straining discernment
of what is reputable
of what is sane
of what is true
than we were ever really truly designed for
But we do have tools, and we do have tactics
So what happens when any one of us gets to a point where our closest friends no longer recognize us,
where our families have to decide what we mean to them,
and if we can no longer be with them?
What happens when we come to a point where nothing can be ascribed to our way of being, the way we show up in the world
every day
other than to simply say,
“He is living in hate”
?
What is hatred?
Is this something that anyone truly embodies, such a devastating concept to even elicit if truly drawn to its full depths and its final ends?
Was William James right about the “blooming buzzing confusion” on through to the practical adaptation to environments that he posited so effectively at the dawn of our inventing - or discovery - of human psychology?
Are we active in our environments, both internal and external?
Are our emotions a reaction to what is happening in our body, or a clarification of what is happening in the world around us - both?
It strikes me, in any sense, that it must be true on some granular psychic and emotional level
that we have been entering a new stage of childhood centered in global interconnectivity and informational mind exploration.
We are the only type of humans to be on earth with access to all information, media, and sharing with the majority of others that have ever existed.
This is a long term problem in any one lifetime, and a very instantaneous flash within all of human history.
Our brains and bodies developed over much longer timelines.
We are the experiment, us and our children’s children.
To decide what this means for us, and what happens to our planet while we are still here
Or if we will be allowed to stay here.
Some of us are not doing well with it.
It may be because they have suffered too greatly to be able to even acklowledge the responsibility.
But why are they punishing everyone else?
Some of us have a spirit of retribution, of a truly existential dread
That someone is coming for them
that the destitute are also the powerful
that the sexually deviant are coming for their children
and that they are not deviant
or that their children will become the sexually deviant
That differences in skin complexion is a godsend
because they reinforce in every way that this is so
and that money is everything
That you have to do it yourself
and that you made it on your own.
Noone can survive that way of being.
It’s self-reinforcing.
But it is what we have told ourselves,
all of us,
time and again.
But you have to resist it,
in small ways and large,
because it isn’t the way we want to be.
We don’t want to be machines.
We don’t want to be partial aliens,
and we don’t want to become savages
that rip others to pieces
because we’ve driven them into appearing as though
they are demons by our retribution-tinged minds.
To become estranged from reality,
because there are many realities one can live in,
but to be fully unhinged,
is to allow yourself to fully believe
that anyone else…
ANYONE
Isn’t as human as you are.
Even a murderer,
even a fiscal conservative,
even Martin Luther King, Jr.,
even a gay person,
even Albert Einstein,
even Rosa Luxembourg,
Even Reinhold Niebuhr,
Even Ronald Reagan,
Even Genghis Kahn,
and even an absent mother.
But we cannot allow the very system in which we are in to be controlled by a murderer.
We cannot allow ourselves to be blind to the concerted takeover
of the rule of law, however flawed that might be.
We will not be incarcerated
in our own bodies.
We WILL not voluntarily die
in mind
in voice
in action.
But if we do nothing now
then just being ourselves,
our beautifully flawed selves
in expression
in tears,
in clothing,
in loving whoever we choose to,
in allowing art to describe our most unknowable and uncomfortable versions of ourselves,
all of this
will become a crime.
The worst parts of humanity always are the most driven to insanity and power,
because that’s how they control and eliminate the rest of us.
They have to do it.
Do you know why?
Have you ever thought about it?
It probably doesn’t make any sense to you
And it shouldn’t, at least not to most of your way of being.
It’s only the part of you that feels trapped, misunderstood, and mechanically vindictive or obsessively defensive in want to take over
to drive the most selfish aspects of your psychology
into being
to be able to pronounce
that you’re here
and that you have a right to be here
at everyone else’s expense
because when faced with your own thoughts
your own mind
and your own full actions alone
you are not enough.
It is unbearable to be with yourself,
because you find yourself loathsome
and others are happier.
If this is not dealt with,
if it is not investigated and purged or cleansed,
with much help,
and you have money and access to power,
it is a dangerous cocktail.
Once you grab onto the reigns of capitalism,
our ongoing experiment in mechanizing Nature to our comfort,
the fate of our direction is poisoned.
These people are terrified in a totally unconscious manner
that if we are to get a hold of them
that we would do everything and anything
in a way that they secretly want to do to themselves
They have no love for themselves in their hearts,
how that occurred is for legions of psychologists and sociologists to debate and write about lavishly over cocktails, hopefully in future books that we’re allowed to write.
But these people, mostly men but having no inherent claim by gender or race or sexual orientation - as those are not claims to evil, only aspects of the individual - anyone can become what they hate with the right circumstances and the exact wrong acceptance of the worst allowances of their own behaviors…
they can only keep going if they destroy the rest of us in our fluorishing.
They won’t stop until it is done.
Let me say it again.
They WILL NOT STOP UNTIL WE ARE NO LONGER FREE.
It is ingrained inside of their inherent makeup, their insecurity in simply existing.
They can only get satisfaction from other people’s suffering,
on what Erich Fromm described in the “authoritarian personality” under the aspect of sadism, in the psychic sense - which does reflect sexually but is not strictly related to that in the overarching character of this personality -
of a child of the mind which submits and longs to be humiliated by this authoritarian leader.
I call this the new child of intolerant insurrection. It could also be called the scrambled child of violence against love.
I will include the full description of his thoughts on this quoted below, but I want to excerpt the antidote and the full way of being most of us are striving for in opposition to the authoritarian personality…and that is this:
“Love is the bond and the feeling of being one with the world while keeping one’s own independence and integrity. The loving individual is connected with the world. He is not frightened since the world is his home. He can lose himself because he is certain of himself.”
We must all fully recognize what this means, what is at stake, and what we truly want in the future to be able to live in love.
And what we are willing to sacrifice, who we are willing to bond with, to achieve it.
Because it is not gauranteed,
as long as these personalities still exist.
Full entry below:
Erich Fromm 1957
The Authoritarian Personality
First published: in Deutsche Universitätszeitung, Band 12 (Nr. 9, 1957), pp. 3-4;
Translated: by Florian Nadge
What do we mean by “authoritarian personality”? We usually see a clear difference between the individual who wants to rule, control, or restrain others and the individual who tends to submit, obey, or to be humiliated. To use a somewhat friendlier term, we might talk of the leader and his followers. As natural as the difference between the ruling and the ruled might — in many ways — be, we also have to admit that these two types, or as we can also say, these two forms of authoritarian personality are actually tightly bound together.
What they have in common, what defines the essence of the authoritarian personality is an inability: the inability to rely on one’s self, to be independent, to put it in other words: to endure freedom.
The opposite of the authoritarian character is the mature person: a person who does not need to cling to others because he actively embraces and grasps the world, the people, and the things around him. What does that mean? Children still need to cling. In their mother’s womb they are — in a physical sense — one with their mother. After birth, for several months and in many ways even for years, they remain — in a psychological sense — still a part of their mother. Children could not exist without the mother’s help. However, they grow and develop. They learn to walk, to talk, and find their way around the world which becomes their world. Children possess two skills, inherent to the individual, which they can develop: love and reason.
Love is the bond and the feeling of being one with the world while keeping one’s own independence and integrity. The loving individual is connected with the world. He is not frightened since the world is his home. He can lose himself because he is certain of himself.
Love means recognizing the world as an emotional experience. However, there is also another way of recognizing, understanding with the mind. We call this kind of understanding reason. It is different from Intelligence. Intelligence is using the mind to reach certain practical goals. A chimpanzee demonstrates intelligence when he sees a banana in front of his cage but cannot reach it with either one of the two sticks in his cage, then he joins both sticks and gets the banana. This is the intelligence of the animal, which is the same manipulating intelligence that we usually call understanding when talking of people. Reason is something else. Reason is the activity of the mind which attempts to get through the surface to reach the core of things, to grasp what really lies behind these things, what the forces and drives are that — themselves invisible — operate and determine the manifestations.
I have given this description of the mature, i.e. the loving and reasoning individual to better define the essence of the authoritarian personality. The authoritarian character has not reached maturity; he can neither love nor make use of reason. As a result, he is extremely alone which means that he is gripped by a deeply rooted fear. He needs to feel a bond, which requires neither love nor reason — and he finds it in the symbiotic relationship, in feeling-one with others; not by reserving his own identity, but rather by fusing, by destroying his own identity. The authoritarian character needs another person to fuse with because he cannot endure his own aloneness and fear.
But here we reach the boundaries of what both forms of the authoritarian character — the ruling and the ruled — have in common.
The passive-authoritarian, or in other words, the masochistic and submissive character aims — at least subconsciously — to become a part of a larger unit, a pendant, a particle, at least a small one, of this “great” person, this “great” institution, or this “great” idea. The person, institution, or idea may actually be significant, powerful, or just incredibly inflated by the individual believing in them. What is necessary, is that — in a subjective manner — the individual is convinced that “his” leader, party, state, or idea is all-powerful and supreme, that he himself is strong and great, that he is a part of something “greater.” The paradox of this passive form of the authoritarian character is: the individual belittles himself so that he can — as part of something greater — become great himself. The individual wants to receive commands, so that he does not have the necessity to make decisions and carry responsibility. This masochistic individual looking for dependency is in his depth frightened -often only subconsciously — a feeling of inferiority, powerlessness, aloneness. Because of this, he is looking for the “leader,” the great power, to feel safe and protected through participation and to overcome his own inferiority. Subconsciously, he feels his own powerlessness and needs the leader to control this feeling. This masochistic and submissive individual, who fears freedom and escapes into idolatry, is the person on which the authoritarian systems — Nazism and Stalinism — rest.
More difficult than understanding the passive-authoritarian, masochistic character is understanding the active-authoritarian, the sadistic character. To his followers he seems self-confident and powerful but yet he is as frightened and alone as the masochistic character. While the masochist feels strong because he is a small part of something greater, the sadist feels strong because he has incorporated others — if possible many others; he has devoured them, so to speak. The sadistic-authoritarian character is as dependent on the ruled as the masochistic -authoritarian character on the ruler. However the image is misleading. As long as he holds power, the leader appears — to himself and to others — strong and powerful. His powerlessness becomes only apparent when he has lost his power, when he can no longer devour others, when he is on his own.
When I speak of sadism as the active side of the authoritarian personality, many people may be surprised because sadism is usually understood as the tendency to torment and to cause pain. But actually, this is not the point of sadism. The different forms of sadism which we can observe have their root in a striving, which is to master and control another individual, to make him a helpless object of one’s will, to become his ruler, to dispose over him as one sees fit and without limitations. Humiliation and enslavement are just means to this purpose, and the most radical means to this is to make him suffer; as there is no greater power over a person than to make him suffer, to force him to endure pains without resistance.
The fact that both forms of the authoritarian personality can be traced back to one final common point — the symbiotic tendency — demonstrates why one can find both the sadistic and masochistic component in so many authoritarian personalities. Usually, only the objects differ. We all have heard of the family tyrant, who treats his wife and children in an sadistic manner but when he faces his superior in the office he becomes the submissive employee. Or to name a better known example: Hitler. He was driven by the desire to rule all, the German nation and finally the world, to make them powerless objects of his will. And still, this same man was extremely dependent; dependent on the masses’ applause, on his advisers’ approval, and on what he called the higher power of nature, history, and fate. He employed pseudo-religious formulations to express these ideas when for example he said: “the heaven stands above the nation, as one can fortunately mislead man, but not heaven.” However, the power that impressed Hitler more than history, god, or fate was nature. Contrary to the tendency of the last four hundred years to dominate nature, Hitler insisted that one can and should dominate man but never nature. In him, we find this characteristic mixture of sadistic and masochistic tendencies of an authoritarian personality: the nature is the great power which we have to submit to, but the living being is there to be dominated by us.
However, we can hardly close the topic of the authoritarian personality without talking about a problem that is cause for a lot of misunderstandings. When recognition of authority is masochism and its practice sadism, does that mean that all authority contains something pathological? This question fails to make a very significant distinction between rational and irrational authority. Rational authority is the recognition of authority based on critical evaluation of competences. When a student recognizes the teacher’s authority to know more than him, then this a reasonable evaluation of his competence. The same is the case, when I as the passenger of a ship recognize the authority of the captain to make the right and necessary decisions if in danger. Rational authority is not based on excluding my reason and critique but rather assumes it as a prerequisite. This does not make me small and the authority great but allows authority to be superior where and as long it possesses competence.
Irrational authority is different. It is based on emotional submission of my person to another person: I believe in him being right, not because he is, objectively speaking, competent nor because I rationally recognize his competence. In the bonds to the irrational authority, there exists a masochistic submission by making myself small and the authority great. I have to make it great, so that I can — as one of its particles — can also become great. The rational authority tends to negate itself, because the more I understand the smaller the distance to the authority becomes. The irrational authority tends to deepen and to prolong itself. The longer and the more dependent I am the weaker I will become and the more I will need to cling to the irrational authority and submit.
All the great dictatorial movements of our times were (and are) based on irrational authority. Its driving forces were the submissive individual’s feeling of powerlessness, fear, and admiration for the “leader.” All the great and fruitful cultures are founded on the existence of rational authority: on people, who are able to muster the given functions intellectually and socially and have therefore no need to appeal to irrational desires.
But I do not want to close without emphasizing that the individual’s goal must be to become his own authority; i.e. to have a consciousness in moral issues, conviction in questions of intellect, and fidelity in emotional matters. However, the individual can only have such an inner authority if he has matured enough to understand the world with reason and love. The development of these characteristics is the basis for one’s own authority and therefore the basis for political democracy.”