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March 12, 2020 from KingsleyDennis Website
it does not kill,
but it keeps you
from living.'
We therefore expect that a range of freedoms are our basic human rights.
We consider ourselves as 'free' and independent individuals. And ever since the rise of complex societies we've been trying our hardest to eliminate uncertain and unknown fears. It was always a relief to know where our fears were coming from, so we could confront them.
Usually they turned out to be not so scary (vampire-like) than we had thought or imagined them to be.
When we could see, and perhaps touch them, the darkness surrounding the fear would disappear. Sometimes we would get an 'aha' feeling, and a we'd let out a huge sigh. That would make things better.
Once you can see
something, you are better placed to do something about it. Fear, and
potential dangers, used to be a lot more familiar to us; but that
was when the world was smaller, and our neighborhoods were a place
of home and belonging.
The modern world has done little to extinguish the presence of existential threats - in fact, if anything, they have increased...
We no longer have only natural disasters to worry us, we also have the,
It's now a cornucopia of possible death on nearly every street corner; and quite literally in our schools, in our homes, and very definitely in our own heads...
As Craig Brown notes, with a touch of parody:
As I have discussed in previous articles, and in my recent book Healing the Wounded Mind, a mass psychosis spreads its traumatic virus through permeating a fear pandemic within our daily lives.
Such 'modern fears' seem to have an almost civilized agenda, where they attempt to make life with fear livable.
This is what Thomas Mathiesen refers to as a 'silent silencing' in that,
Risks are considered as calculable dangers where we at least have some capacity to calculate their potential.
But modern fears are that which we can neither predict nor fully escape from because they flirt too close to our dark fantasies. Whereas risks can be seen as explosions, emanating from without, our fears are the implosions that erupt from within.
The trauma of the Wounded Mind perpetuates this struggle within us between a sense of self and some 'other' external, almost alien, agency.
The German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote that,
The result is that there remains a lifelong struggle between the individual self and those over-whelming strong powers external to us; or unnatural to us.
Fromm noted that we succumb to powers outside of ourselves through being blinded to our inner restraints, compulsions, and fears, which undermine our real power.
Fromm made an interesting observation in that the human being,
Our modern psychosis has turned fear into its own commodity marketplace, and like any good marketplace it requires consumers. And consumers are better at consuming if they are given a valid need.
This logic tells us then that fear is planted in as many of us as possible in order to have a need to safeguard against it. It's somewhat akin to saying that so many people are diet-obsessed because our media tells us how important it is to be thin.
French sociologist Hugues Lagrange, in his study of fear, came to term as 'derivative fear' that which guides much of our modern behavior.
It is this type of fear, I suggest, that is endemic to the Wounded Mind and is seeded into us through our media and social institutions.
This haunting, lingering type of fear is more intangible, invisible, and hence cannot be quantified or reasonably assessed by us.
Any person who has internalized the sense emotions of derivative fear will be more willing to respond as if to threat even in the absence of a genuine threat.
Such behavior is
self-propelled and is exactly what the collective psychosis wants.
These morals teach us that being weak means exclusion, exile, being outcast - the evicted person from Big Brother walks out to a barrage of boos.
There is nothing quite so caustic as public humiliation...
We no longer need our town square stocks and rotting vegetables to throw:
And all this is trauma-food for the collective Wounded Mind.
The shadows dance upon
the wall of
Plato's cave, and we sit entranced
and in fear of our false-weaknesses.
And yet the intangible, lurking fear remains - shadowy and yet ever-present...
This type of fear not only seeps deep down into us, it also reminds us that our real fear is being incapable of escaping our own condition of being afraid. In many cases, this lingering internal fear has forced us to give permission for external actors to intervene in our private lives.
We are fear-driven to give away our power to others, which is exactly what the Wounded Mind wants:
As film-maker Adam Curtis said:
We are offered our 'new securities' in the form of unfreedoms.
In other words, we have
opened the door and allowed the wolf to enter as a guest...
This almost sounds like a bygone relic...
The idea of privacy has undergone a modern upheaval.
The internal and individual Wounded Mind of old has been transformed into a collective and public confessional.
We lived for centuries with the medieval sense of confession; that is, an intimate, confidential whisper to the priest or through the tortured confession ripped out of us in hidden retreats.
Now we are treated to public confessions bordering on self-advertising.
These behaviors and attitudes are part of the collective psychosis that wishes to share, spread, and influence others into joining this public pseudo-cathartic process.
Technologies that allow such public confessionals merely reflect the human condition.
Such technologies are not
so much intruding within us rather than showing externally that
which we normally keep hidden. Physical, social and psychical
exposure is now a part of the general collective mind.
A rational mindset was brought to bear, according to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman,
This 'unchallenged order'
needs an obedient collective mindset, and the Wounded Mind -
complete with its traumas - is the ideal material with which to
manage this.
It is this compliant agreement that sustains authority:
It also works through seduction by the arousal of our desires and supply of our satisfactions.
As philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy observes,
To all intents and purposes, modern life has become dependent upon surveillance; and it is also an addictive dependency.
Once we have it, we feel it is not enough and we need more, until we come to the point where we realize we cannot do without it because we have created our own psychological state of feeling afraid.
Earlier dystopic visions of in/security, notably from Orwell (1984) and Huxley (Brave New World), regarded such cultures as being more solidified.
Security and power/control regimes were well-positioned and intimidating. Or, in Huxley's case, they were engrained within our compelling pleasures.
Today, our in/securities
and regimes of power and control are fluid, uncertain, non-visible,
and constantly on the move; they adapt, re-position, and
re-configure themselves.
We are haunted by a continually propagandized realm of unknowns; by a threatening menace that we are told is everywhere within a thousand faces.
These intangible 'floating' threats are often cleverly packaged by our societal propaganda agencies into 'knowns' such as named terrorist organizations or stereotyped into ethnic groups.
In other words, the 'usual suspects' are rolled out, each time with a different name or toy-like acronym.
In return, 'we the people' often define ourselves against such threats as a way of being seen as apart from them:
And this has become the
public face of our collective Wounded Mind. It fears - and thus we
must fear.
These are either,
Our public collective mindset is further conditioned with feelings of insecurity that are instilled by politicians and the media, and sustained by urban fortification, technological surveillance, and economic vulnerability.
Our modern dense urban enclaves are now filling up with gated communities, privately patrolled neighborhoods, and security zones.
We are more and more living alongside visible and invisible walls, barricades, watchtowers and enclosures - all aggressively guarded by a burgeoning force of armed security.
The Wounded Mind wishes
to make us all feel vulnerable and wounded in some way.
His defence tried to convince the court that his only motive was the job well done. That is, to do the best he could for his superiors, as he would any job. He alleged that he had no personal interest or grudges against the people and could not stomach the sight of murder.
He was merely acting out orders, providing loyal service to his superiors, and the death of millions was its collateral damage.
Let us think on this for a moment:
Here we have only to refer to the infamous Stanley Milgram experiments to realize that we would do almost anything if a person in a white coat told us to. [i]
We have been quite
thoroughly socially conditioned to accept and submit to various
displays of power.
It is as a form of artificial conditioning. [ii]
The concept of justice in such modern societies is then replaced by the overt necessity for order and stability. This is then reinforced through fear strategies to establish and maintain a required need for security Not to have a trusted structure of security would suggest the alternative of chaos and disorder.
Within complex social systems the threat of chaos - and thus the loss of social privileges - is usually enough to gain support for restrictive security measures. To achieve this, there has been a subtle and ingenious - yet devastating - maneuver to acclimatize and desensitize people to acts of inhumanity.
The psychosis is not only prevalent within those who are corrupt and dangerous, or those people who hold great power.
It is also widespread
within the 'nice people' who work in the offices, or the lab
technicians, the clerks - and, of course, the owners, directors, and
stockholders - all the people who not only uphold but also willing
implement our bureaucratic forms of social management.
Erich Fromm, in his highly regarded work The Fear of Freedom, recognized that a hugely influential, almost secret, power was being exercised over the whole of society in a way that has influenced our social mindset.
He wrote that,
And it is this illusion,
I argue, that is being sustained and developed by the traumatized
Wounded Mind. The result is that we have entered into a collective
psychological crisis.
The frustrating contradiction here is that we can, and do, have individual agency - if we can act from our own minds.
To achieve this, we must
separate our sense of genuine self from the programmed social self
that acts as our personality -
our mask. We need to 'wake up' and
see the way in which our lives have been, and continue to be,
manipulated and programmed.
The only real and genuine freedom must be through exorcising fear from within us:
Until we do so, we remain
living within an unreal world - a world that is a tyranny against
human consciousness.
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