Due to the consolidation of
wealth and privilege into fewer and fewer hands, thus requiring escalating
amounts of officially mandated surveillance and brutality to maintain social
order, the natural trajectory of unregulated capitalism tends towards hyper-authoritarian
excess, even towards fascism. Moreover, by the standards of capitalist
ideology, and exacerbated by the rigged nature of economic and social
arrangements -- large segments of society are deemed losers, and, resultantly,
will grow restive, if scapegoats aren't invented to mitigate a sense of
humiliation and displace rage. Accordingly, rightist demagogic fictions can
seize the psyches of large segments of the general public: immigrant
interlopers wreck the economy; minority layabouts suck-up public funds; gays
and women, possessed of dubious morality, destroy the nation's moral fabric;
lefties are driven to challenge the system, but only because of their spite,
borne of jealousy.
The "purer" the
form of capitalism the faster the rise of fascism. There is a dark and bitter
grace to this: Fascism is the deranged agency that sends the capitalist machine
into systemic runaway, thus the system crashes and burns -- and out of its
ashes and debris…a more humane system can come into being.
Although the yearning for
freedom is inborn, as is the case with the development of any skill or talent,
one must open oneself to its promise by discipline and practice. Otherwise,
attempts at exercising freedom -- free will's dance with resistant and changing
circumstance -- can be an ugly sight to behold.
Experiencing freedom
involves risk, imagination, and discipline. In contrast, choosing between
purchasing a bag of Cheetos or a bag of Doritos … amounts to not quite the same
thing. Resisting the call to freedom leaves an individual empty, and bag after
bag of salted snack food will not sate the hollow ache within when one chooses
the benumbing safety of culturally proffered palliatives over living out the
truth of one's being.
A thousand text messages
will never replace a single kiss…because a kiss conjures both the soul's
numinosity and brings earthly complications -- the stuff of freedom.
When your heart aches, you
are experiencing or being beckoned towards your destiny. Depending on the
choices that you make, you can become waylaid at a fast food drive-thru or risk
the road towards freedom that unfurls before you.
Hint: The excessive heft
acquired by your hindquarters will begin to shrink as you begin a long distance
trek in the direction of freedom.
What forces unloose titanic
appetites…devoid of reason and restraint? Why is more than you can ever need
never enough?
How is it that a trillion
dollars can be spent on military weaponry, but the collective psyche of this
nation continues to be gripped by nebulous fear?
Expressed in mythopoeic
lexicon: The appetite of a Titan (e.g., the limit-devoid greed and empty appetite
of late capitalism) will grow so random and ravenous that he will devour his
own young, while his presence will cause the young to construct Icarusian
wings…but an (infantilized by the internalization of consumerist impulsiveness)
adult-child of the corporate state can never devour enough sky, thus put enough
distance between himself and his own titanic need to escape earthly
circumstance…until his wings of wax are undone by the steadfast sun, and he is
returned to the inhuman eternity of the sea's briny womb (e.g., languishing in
the media hologram, avoiding the implications of personal destiny-denied and
global-wide ecocide).
The appetite of the earth is
insatiable. Life must live on death. To become fully human, one must make peace
with this fact by an acceptance of limits, by drawing lines of demarcation
between necessity and titanic want.
Storytellers, poets,
novelists i.e, myth makers have told this ageless tale of woe and warning for
millenia. To ignore the admonition above amounts to insertion of your name into
the following list: Tantalus, Midas, Lady Macbeth, George Babbitt, Captain
Ahab, Gatsby, Cthulhu, Fred C. Dobbs, Marquise de Merteuil, Patrick Bateman,
Mr. Burns, Gollem, the denizens of both Goldman Sachs and your local mall's
food court…Ignore the warning and insert your name here: ________________ .
One needs one's emptiness
every bit as much as one has the need to be "fulfilled." How so?
Because room is required within so that new awareness can grow. Therefore, love
your inner, empty places. It is the method that you live your way into the
future.
From time to time, I have
been asked, how does one cope with the ever increasing "complexity"
of our age. Short answer: It would be ill-advised to become adapted to a
madhouse.
Instead, attempt to view
complexity as future compost. At this stage, a song of grief is as resonate as
a song of ebullience... Rot ensures renewal; the future is compost and compost
is the future. Thus: Rejoice in the reek. Mortification restores our humanity,
turning us away from the tyranny of unchecked proliferation. It bestows us with
the ability to love our limits.
In this, it is synonymous
with grace.
In a nation defined by vast
wealth disparity and the deprivation it causes others on the planet, by means
of impoverished lives and ecological devastation, taking more than one's share
contributes to the vast harm done. The corporate food industry wrought epidemic
of obesity in the U.S.
There is a need in both the
besieged psyche of an individual and its societal analog -- in our own case, in
the collective psyche of a declining nation -- to worship and fear phantoms and
view flesh and blood as phantasmal. As a culture, for example, we elevate celebrity
culture to cultic status while ignoring the suffering of the poor; the
teabagger crowd is accepted as a legitimate political movement, not as
corporate state Astroturf; that there exist people known as Islamo-Fascists;
and the acceptance as fact by all too many the noxious corporate media fiction
that the energies of the Occupy Wall Street movement have faded -- but the
outcomes of the overpriced theatrical artifice of U.S. election cycles
represents the democratic expression of the political will of a free people.
Phantoms arrive in the
psyche when one refuses life's ongoing invitation to commune with flesh and
blood beings; to engage the rigors of insightful thought; to know both the
agony and the release of heart-opening engagement and falsity-cleaving insight.
Apropos: "The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering." --Carl Jung
As we are surrounded by
gibbering, imploring media phantoms, our hunger to regain a resonate
relationship with the world at large grows…yet the corporate state proffers
drive thru window cuisine. We give them our life blood -- and, in return, we
settle for an evening at Applebees. And the plundering class insist we are
privileged to be offered this…that our plight could be worse…we could spend our
hours languishing in one of their foreign sweatshops.
As the one percent has
acquired their grotesquely bloated assets, large segments of the American
middle and laboring classes have acquired larger and larger amounts of excess
body fat. As corporate executives have sweetened their salaries with limitless
perks and multimillion dollar bonuses, their workforce has sucked down copious
portions of high fructose-based soft drinks and obesity-engendered disease has
increased accordingly.
"Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or "primitives," or of course, disguised as psychopathology.
That's what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast." -- James Hillman
To the mind of a child,
his/her parent's view of the world constitutes the very architecture of their
psyche. The world carries the imprimatur of their parents' face. A child's
character begins to develop when he/she begins to compare what they carry
within, forged by paternal admonition and action, to their experiences outside
the home. If the child remains in a passive position, then his/her personal
destiny becomes arrested. This is the poisoned apple proffered to the dormant
beauty within us all. Conversely, we must accept the small, hidden aspects of
our character (our helpful dwarves) that dwell in a deep forests within, far
from the cold castles of paternal expectation, to be able to awaken to hidden
potential.
Life in an authoritarian
state, which is paternalistic by nature, arrests the psyche's drive to
self-awareness; it puts one to sleep with infantilizing bribes -- e.g., all the
bright and shiny things of the consumer state -- as it manipulates by means of
coercive fear -- e.g., the looming dragons of poverty and police state
intimidation.
"In Freud's time we felt oppressed in the family, in sexual situations, in our crazy hysterical conversion symptoms, and where we felt oppressed, there was the repressed. Where do we feel that thick kind of oppression today? In institutions--hospitals, universities, businesses; in public buildings, in filling out forms, in traffic…" --James Hillman
There exist few viable
alternatives within the present political set-up to address the degradations
inflicted by the corporate state and the machinery of duopoly in place to
maintain the systems reach and power -- and there will not arrive a mainstream
prince to confront the vain usurpers and slay the institutional dragons who
cling to power in the present era. This is an unpleasant truth, but it is true
nevertheless. The sooner one faces this reality: the hopelessly corrupt nature
of the present system -- the closer we, collectively, move towards the creation
of alternative arrangements when the current one collapses from its own
corruption.
Poets of previous
generations warned that one's soul could be lost in blind pursuit of vaults of
riches and limitless knowledge. It is difficult not to laugh in derision or
weep in anguish for a people who sell their soul for access to the contents of
a convenience store. Addiction to fattening food speaks of our inner emptiness;
so called Reality Television relates to our hunger for social engagement and
communion; the images that haunt the corporate state media hologram attract us
because we long for the images that rise from the soul.
In timeless stories, such as
Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, the awakening kiss of a princely figure should
not be misapprehended with gender-based overtones of exclusively male power and
dominance. Instead, the symbolic prince should be read as -- the possibility
that unfolds as one's true calling when one awakens to one's circumstance. In
our time, this timeless tale plays out as: The ongoing challenge we have been
given to face and struggle against the life-devouring, institutional dragons of
corporate state governance.
Of course, there will never
arrive a tacked-on, Disneyesque "happily ever after" ending. There is
no distant kingdom of the mind that exists beyond the reach of harm or
corruption. If there were, new stories would cease to unfold. By this method,
this world beckons us to live out our own unique tale.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet,
lyricist and philosopher bard living in New
York City
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