When working on the Black Swan Trump blog entry, I had an interesting experience and wrote: “I want to relate an “experience” I had with a real black swan bird on December 28, 2016 as I drove to Minneapolis. I stopped in Alexandria for lunch and took the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper to the table, turned it seems directly to the article A black swan, too far from home, met its end on Lake Harriet in Minneapolis. The report was about a black swan that had died when the ice formed on Lake Harriet. Bird watchers and the Wild Life Department had noticed the swan and were discussing attempts to rescue the bird from the danger of the cold weather. Saving the black swan was dangerous and in the mean time the swan disappeared most likely freezing and sinking in the lake.”
“I thought, as I was reading this news, that a synchronistic experience had occurred. Carl Jung proposes the idea of synchronicity to complement the idea of cause and effect and it is about the meanings of what appears to underlie certain events. I now wondered if Black SwanTrump is in danger of freezing to death“. What does it mean that Trump may freeze to death? Mr. Freeze says chill-out and shows us how it might be done – Trump is literally freezing everything around him. With Trump’s first Press Conference since becoming President-Elect, we continue seeing how he is “freezing himself to death”.
I was thinking to track Trump’s tweets and press conferences to see if we can witness Trump “freezing himself to death.” Then in the 1.15.17 SNL skit Donald Trump Press Conference Cold Open, it is predicted that Trump will have frozen himself to death in two months being replaces by VP Pence, when a worse nightmare would begin. This was a surprise. Let’s see if we can track this freeze.
Trump Full Press Conference as President-Elect (HD) | ABC News
Streamed live on Jan 11, 2017 Donald Trump held his first press conference as President-Elect from New York. President-elect Donald Trump announced that he will hand “complete and total control” of his vast business empire to his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and to Alan Weisselberg, a longtime Trump business executive, through a financial trust.
A previous DAMBlog Trump Ode to Joy, examined how Beethoven’s Ode to Joy has been used by central-control, authoritarian, leaders to represent their regimes – the suggestion is that we watch to see if Trump makes use this Beethoven’s music to celebrate his presidency. Many of the Blog entries going back over the last year have been about Trump and have his name in the title – they apply a learning theory to experiences life, reflect on it, apply theory, and actively write. We now see that our collective American experience will be daily our reality show to study.
In the Trump Ode to Joy Blog, Collin Wilson begins describing how to track one’s physic energy and manage it. This is important because the loss of physic energy can be dangerous and if we are not careful, destructive. The Ode essay has thematic music from Leonard Cohen and David Bowe and ends with Erich Fromm’s Psychology of Nationalism (1962) that we will be dive into going forward. All of the previous DAMBlogs are now part of our theoretical element in our learning approach of examining the complexity of globalization.
The rise of nationalism is a world-wide concern and understanding its psychology will be a prime interest! Trump with his nationalistic stance is a Black Swan Event as written about by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, The Black Swan. A black swan event is an event that most people missed coming which retrospectively is predicable. Examine the polling and commentary before the November 8th vote – few saw Trump winning, including V. Putin. However, afterwards we more clearly see what unfolded and this is what Taleb present in his book! His understanding is important because there are black swan events on the way and we need to see them coming.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb on What is a “Black Swan?”
I received Taleb’s book from family for a 2015 xmas present and began then to study it. When Trump was elected, the blog entry Trump Black Swan immediately began to unfold. Taleb’s thesis is very engaging and will begin to be addressed in this entry! In Taleb’s prolog he outlines a “chapters map” and writes: “The sequence of this book follows a simple logic; it flows from what can be labeled purely literary (in subject, and treatment) to what can be deemed entirely scientific (in subject, though not in treatment). Psychology will be mostly presented in Part One [nine chapters] and in the early part to Part Two; business and natural science will be dealt with mostly in the second half of Part Two and in Part Three. Part One, “Unberto Eco’s Antilibrary,” is mostly about how we perceive historical and current events and what distortions are present in such perceptions. Part Two, ‘We just Can’t Predict,” is about our errors in dealing with the future and the unadvertised limitation of some ‘sciences’ – and what to do about these limitations. Part Three, ‘Those Gray Swans of Etremistan,’ goes deeper into the topic of extreme events, explains how the bell curve (that great intellectual fraud) is generated, and reviews the ideas in the natural and social science loosely lumped under the label ‘complexity.’ Part Four, ‘The End,’ will be short.” Taleb’s end chapter “Amor Fati: How to become indestructible” has already been addressed in the DAMBlog Cyclops Trump Amor Fait. Taleb’s theoretical framework will continue unfolding as we examine the Trump Black Swan phenomenon going forward and below Taleb presents his The Black Swan idea.
Nassim Taleb – “The Black Swan”
I want to relate an experience I had with a black swan on December 28, 2016 as I drove to Minneapolis. I stopped in Alexandria for lunch and took the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper to the table, turned it seems directly to the article A black swan, too far from home, met its end on Lake Harriet in Minneapolis, which is about a black swan that died when the ice formed on Lake Harriet. Bird watchers and the Wild Life Department had noticed the swan and were discussing attempts to rescue the bird from the danger of dying in very cold weather. Saving the black swan was dangerous and in the mean time the swan disappeared most likely freezing and sinking in the lake.
I was working on this blog entry and thought as I was reading this news that a synchronistic experience had occurred. Carl Jung proposes the idea of synchronicity to complement the idea of cause and effect and it is about the meanings of what appears to underlie certain events. It now appears that Trump A Black Swan may be in danger of freezing to death. We will now be recording Trumps news conferences as he freezes himself to death. Aziz’s C. G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity is a detailed understanding of synchronicity and these clips present how it operates.
Synchronicity – Carl Jung
CG Jung on Synchronicity (Lecture by Stephan Hoeller)
1/12/2017 11:27 AM I am now watching the hearings for Defense and the CIA directors. An issue that needs doing is to study the team that Trump assembles. Here is another clip with Nassim on this ideas. What is important to note is in his analysis of Capitalism is its propensity for failure. We will return to in a later blog entry.
End Note: The video clip :”Synchronicity On the Spectrum of Mind and Matter” was Published on Apr 12, 2014 and here are the notes accompanying it.
“I have no doubt that the placing side by side of the points of view of a physicist and a psychologist will also prove to be a form of reflection.” Wolfgang Pauli
“Since physicists are the only people nowadays who would be able to deal with such a concept successfully, it is from a physicist that I hope to meet with critical understanding, although…the empirical basis seems to lie wholly in the realm of psychic phenomena.”
C. G. Jung
The concept of synchronicity was developed by the Nobel Laureate quantum physicist, Wolfgang Pauli and the Swiss psychiatrist C. Jung in the middle of the twentieth century. It stressed the empirical fact of meaningful coincidence—a special sense of coincidence of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or similar meaning. Synchronistic phenomena cannot in principle be associated with conceptions of causality, and thus the interconnection of meaningful coincident factors must be thought of as acausal. While such occurrences are improbable from the perspective of causality, they are not infrequent. How may such phenomena be noted and approached today? Both physics and psychology explore mind on a continuum with matter, and so operate at the conjunctions of the mental and material. As an emergent meeting in the No-Time of fundamental physics and the tensed Time of daily life, synchronicity moves toward meaning at intersections of the objective and subjective, met both in our experimental sciences and in our felt registers of experience.
Participants:
Harald Atmanspacher
Physicist, The Collegium Helveticum (ETH Zurich, Switzerland); Privatdozent for theoretical physics, University of Potsdam; Faculty, Parmenides Foundation Munich and the Zurich C.G. Jung Institute
Joseph Cambray
Jungian Analyst; past President of the International Association of Analytical Psychology
Edgar Choueiri
Professor of Applied Physics, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Associated Faculty, Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Program in Plasma Physics, Princeton University
Farzad Mahootian
Faculty of Liberal Studies, New York University; affiliated scholar, Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes, Arizona State University
Beverley Zabriskie
Jungian Analyst, a founding faculty member and past President of New York’s Jungian Psychoanalytic Association
Fargo’s High Plains Read weekly took two weeks off over the holidays and when I picked up a free copy of the last issue for 2016, I spent over an hour reading and sinking into its art work. Editor and co-owner John Strand’s editorial reviewed the papers origin in Grand Forks and move to Fargo after the 1997 flood. John is expecting that newly elected ND Governor Doug Burgum (REP) former Microsoft VP “will prove to be an incredibly capable governor”, however, he holds back from making any prediction about Donald Trump’s tenure, while writing that he tapped into the sentiment that political gridlock is unacceptable. He anxiously waits the New Year to unfold, as are we all!
The Gadfly, Ed Raymond’s column “From Lucy to Ellen” addresses the point that “sexual orientation is not a moral choice. It is something to which people awaken.” “Let’s Talk” Fay Seidler’s essay is about “dating someone who is transgender.” Several other interesting essays follow until we reached The Last Word The Roots of Republican Party Dishonor by Charlie Barber, which was an essay I studied. The feature The Power of Fake News focus is on fake news inside the Peace Garden State – North Dakota. This essay leads off with Death by Oil: Remember the Dakota 38 Sioux Indians who were hanged 154
HPR Cove
years ago in Minnesota. Britney Goodman’s Culture column is the Project Unack: Telling Stories, Creating Community, which is an exhibit at the Rourke Museum, funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities, which initiates dialogues in Fargo-Moorhead about the legacies of American War. Reading this issue was interspersed with sinking into the colorful art work illustrating the stories, directed by the other co-owner Raul Gomez. And then there are the many colorful designed ads pulling you in – paper is like a virtual walk down Broadway, stopping into the HoDo for mug of beer. Reading this issue was quite a holiday experience that can really only be had with a hard-copy of the paper in hand, but some flavor can be had online.
Ed’s , my Fargo Central High School teacher, column The Gadfly has always been my first read and now Barber’s The Last Word column is a second must read. The insert words in Charlie’s essay is that “Neither he nor the Republican Party which embraced him can continue to exercise power without responsibility. He is not the type to ‘shut up,’ but Mr. Trump is now going to have to ‘put up.’” Charlie then identifies the origin of our current predicament in writing that “Republican… must face accountability for their enthusiastic embrace of the narcissistic Tea Party Crew.”
In a stable nightly watch for me, The Rachel Maddow Show the other night interviewed Ezra Levin, co-author of the Indivisible Guide helping online, local, grassroots activists to organize resistance to the Trump agenda. Seems the democrats have learned a lesson from this narcissistic Tea Party Crew. It is going to be a hard-core political-porn reality show year – produced, directed, and staring The Donald.
Charlie builds his thesis in searching for the root of the Republican Party’s dishonor by tracing it back to the 19th Century Gospel of Greed. I am reminded of History Channel’s four part series The Men Who Built America. This an excellent series on the corporations built and run by John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford. These were challenging times, toughness in these corporations was ruthless, and some will maintain this was necessary. Charlie makes the point that this Gospel was “trumpeted by Ronald Reagan to its logical conclusion: self-worship and self-delusion.” On top of this he holds the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision responsible, it considers the corporation to be a person with full individual rights. Now we have the money behind the Koch brothers and Robert Murdoch in the game. How much money was spent in the 2016 election cycle? Lots! How much longer will we have put up with this bullshit? Term limits, public financing, and restricting elections to a few months needs to be.
Charlie next introduces 19th Century Englishman John Ruskin and suggests his Political Theory speaks to us today.
Charlie outlines Ruskin’s five great intellectual professions in the life of every nation: The Soldier’s profession to defend it; The Physician’s to keep it in health; The Pastor/Teacher to teach it; The Lawyer to enforce it; and the Merchant’s to provide for it. Not included as one of the civilized professions is that of the politician. Charlie makes a very interesting point in that by not including politicians Ruskin does not consider politicians as “uncivilized”, suggesting that those who do are “too lazy to use their God-given brains to exercise their own hard-won freedom to decide issues of right and wrong”. This is one dimensional thinking presented in Herbert Marcuse’s critical thinking work 100 years later 1964, which is being addressed in a forthcoming blog, Trump A One Dimensional Man.
Charlie then turns to begin the examination of the key issue, a psychology underlying politicians and their political parties with an interesting twist. Given that politicians and their parties “are about the acquisition and maintenance of power,” Charlie links their moral judgments on how “we perceive honor in the other walks of life,” like the five professions, stating that “One can only be an ethical politician if one is already an ethical soldier, doctor, lawyer, teacher, preacher or businessman and sticks to those moral principles during their life in politics”. The conclusion Charlie reaches is that knowing Trump’s unethical behavior as a businessman, there is no reason to expect he will be an ethical President . Charlie does not let the Democrats off the hook by saying they just put up Hillary “whose flaws, real and perceived, do not meet the test of ‘deplorable.’”
This essay, Charlie indicates, is the introduction for two previous essays published in the HPR: one on 10.26.16 and the other on 11.02.16, which is on line – Corporate worship and compromising the police profession. We are told to expect his line of inquiry to continue – I look forward to them! I really identified with Charlie’s realization that reality is unfolding and grasping its threads requires one to examine what one has experienced and hopefully written about and bring it forward. I have been doing this with my essays that HPR has published, The mathematics of faith, Kapitalism on the couch, Kapitalism its nature, Deep Jesus, US?, Modern times the university factory, Kapitalism’s concept of the self, A new depth ethics, The sane society- us? Hyperlinks have been added for the DAMBlog and just now looking back at them, I am seeing how did unfold and still are – Trickster Donald Trump, using the psychology of C.G. Jung, was sent to HPR before the election but was not accepted and so my account of the Trump’s saga, unfolds here next as Trump A Black Swan and Trump One Dimensional Man.
The one HPR essay of mine that is very personal is Modern times the university factory scene, which is my experience of being exploited and alienated by the University of Mary – Fargo – yes of all things a religious university. Here is the main point in that HPR essay and also I think Charlie’s view: “As business schools snuggle up to corporation, their ability to teach ethics is being questioned. Garten’s B-Schools: Only C+ in ethics, gives business schools a C+ grade in the teaching of ethics. He arrives at this grade by examining ethical failures of businesses like Enron. These corporations were and are managed by individuals taught ethics in our major school of business. Schumpeter’s The pedagogy of the privilege suggests that with business schools named after major business benefactors, with 50+% of universities board of regents holding corporate positions, and with many business school faculties earning handsome consulting fees, faculty members are not going to deeply examine the ethics of corporations.” So, what are the odds Trump will drain our Washington Swamp? Small like his hands!
Charlie, ends his essay by drawing a line for us to consider. His first two essays addressed the honor of a soldier and a policeman with the other professions to follow. The line being drawn is the traditional one between honorable and dishonorable – “death before dishonor.” The Soldier not to leave his post in battle; The Physician not to leave in a plague; The Teacher not to teach falsehood; The Lawyer not to countenance injustice; and the Merchant Trump “to get a better grip on what the gospel of greed and worship of corporations have done TO us, as well as for us.” Amen to a new depth ethics!
The Corporation Documentary I used in teaching management at the U of Mary and at Concordia College Moorhead. I think it played a part in finally not being ask to continue at Concordia and before that I told the U of Mary to shove it, quit, mailing the “university factory” essay to Mary’s President and Board of Directors, many were Nuns. Here is what I blogged about in confronting U of Mary, which also applies to Concordia also a religious institution: “The premise of secular education is to seek understanding and truth, not to preach dogma whether it comes from The Church or The Corporation. The challenge facing our schools is the disappearance of academic freedom , which is defined as, “the belief that the freedom of inquiry by students and faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy, and that scholars should have freedom to teach or communicate ideas or facts (including those that are inconvenient to external political groups or to authorities) without being targeted for repression, job loss, or imprisonment.” Both The Church and The Corporation have dogmas incompatible with institutions of higher education and when they form an alliance – it is an unholy alliance!
Concordia College recently named its new building The Offutt School of Business after big money donor Ron Offutt CEO of R.D. Offutt Equipment. Over 50% of the School’s Board are business persons. Both U of Mary and NDSU have business schools named for big donning CEOs and I expect their Boards have 50+% businesspersons.
Trump Death Before Dishonor – do not bet on it! Breaking news, Donald has asked me to ghost-write a Broadway play on his life – The Art of the Lie – a tragic comedy!
All watched over by machines of loving grace is a three-part Adam Curtis series that examines the idea of rationality and how it has and still is affecting civilization. Curtis’s approach, as always, identifies a thesis and builds a case supporting it. In building a case, Curtis looks at history and folds it about while moving it into the present. What intrigues me is seeing the threads he is weaving being continued forward into the current reality we are now immersed in. The title Trump watching over All with loving grace suggests that the Trump phenomenon is playing itself out in some aspect in each of the three parts of Curtis’s documentary. Watch these with this is mind, as the themes will surface in the upcoming blog entries. Watch for Leonard’s song playing as we see Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky gaze profoundly into each others loving eyes as they imagine her red lips surrounding his stiff cock. It was only one spot of Billy’s semen that caught him in this lie – “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms Lewinsky”. Trying to catch lying Trump is going to be very tricky – his new book should help us, “The art of the Lie.”
Enjoy The New Year! We start this year with Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne.
Part 1 — Love and Power Part one explores the myth that rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of stable world: They would bring about a new kind global capitalism free of risk and failure, without the boom and bust of the past, would abolish political power, and create a new kind of democracy mediated by technology and the Internet, where millions of people would be connected as nodes in cybernetic systems without hierarchy. This film explores how this myth came to be by following two groups that converged on the ideas. One is the small group of disciples around the novelist Ayn Rand in the 1950s who saw themselves as a prototype for a future society where everyone could follow their own selfish desires and that would somehow create a stable and equitable society. The other is the digital entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, many of whom were also disciples of Ayn Rand, that espoused grand visions of global utopia to be delivered by their technology. They believed that new computer networks would allow the creation of a society where everyone could follow their own desires, similarly somehow bringing a stable and equitable society. They were joined by Alan Greenspan who had also been a disciple of Ayn Rand, who became convinced that the computers were creating a new kind of stable capitalism.
Part 2 — The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts Part two shows how the modern scientific perspective of the natural world is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the reality of nature. It is based on mechanistic ideas that were projected on to the natural world in the 1950s by scientists: That nature is a giant cybernetic machine of order that sees humans, and everyone else on the planet, as merely cogs in that machine. In an age disillusioned with modern politics, these ideas began to take on a new appeal, as the “self-regulating ecosystem” model became the basis for the utopian vision of society where technocrats would provide new ways of governing without leaders or politics, along with global visions of connectivity analogous to the Gaia theory. These ideas emerged out of the hippie communes in the United States in the 1960s and from counter-culture computer scientists who believed that global webs of computers would liberate the world. But, at the very moment this was happening, the science of ecology discovered that the theory of the self-regulating ecosystem wasn’t true. Instead what was found was that nature is really dynamic and constantly changing in myriad ways. But it was too late, the dream of the self-organising network had already captured the imagination of the technologists and the wider culture, unwilling to revise “progress.”
Part 3 — The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey This episode looks at why popular culture finds this machine vision so beguiling. The film posits that it is perhaps as all past political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed, the retreat into machine-fantasies that say we have no control over our actions excuse and rationalise our failure. At the basis of the film is Bill Hamilton, a scientist. He claimed that human behaviour is guided by codes buried deep within us—a theory later popularised by Richard Dawkins as the so-called “selfish gene.” Fundamentally, these people claimed that individual human beings are really just machines whose only job is to make sure their genetic codes are passed on for eternity. This final part in the series sets out the challenge those claims, beginning in 2000 in the jungles of the Congo and Rwanda, where Hamilton is to espouse his dark theories. But all around him the Congo is being torn apart. The film then interweaves the two stories: The strange roots of Hamilton’s theories, and the history of the West’s tortured exploitation of the Congo in order to continue manufacturing the technology that keeps the West’s utopian ideas alive.
I am now listening to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, as Michael Lewis describes listening to his favorite music when he writes – this habit activates both sides of the brain. Heaven knows, I need all the help I can get? I woke the other day, 12.13.2016, with a dream feeling a serious dread about to happen! I quickly sat up, threw off the blanket, put my feet on the floor, stood up, slippers on walked out of the bedroom, trying to gain a sense of the real – I was determined to stop this move into depression. It took me several minutes to regain psychic energy and begin my move into the day. Colin Wilson describes this well as The High and the Low energy moment, especially as one wakes up. Colin suggests that normally there is a 1% lowering of energy as we wake-up; I know this loss well, however, I cannot remember ever feeling this level of lowered energy –this must have been over a -2% lowering.
I certainly do not want to experience Leonard Cohen’s loss of energy and set about, not like Leonard embracing Buddhism, by amplifying a series of my unfolding dreams, with what is going on in the world, what I am reading, what I am accessing from the World Wide Web, and what I am discussing with a few close friends. I think Leonard has this right, Everybody Knows, and in my experiment with life – IT needs to be amplified! Put on your headphones and crank up the volume – “everybody knows the dice are loaded”.
Okay, was not this right-brain input up-lifting? This experience is a natural high! However, if we soon hear that Trump has selected Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, in some capacity to represent his incoming administration, I suggest it might add to Michael Moore’s prediction that Trump may be our last US President.
To amplify Moore’s thesis, let us consider Slavoj Žižek – Ode to Joy commentary on those who have chosen Beethoven’s Ode to Joy to represent their country, state, and administration. In our future, is there an orange clock counting down?
If Trump in anyway makes reference to this music, we will need to careful considers Eric Fromm’s thesis in Escape from Freedom written in 1941 as WWII began. In Fromm’s appendix, a direct read of the psychological theory underlining his book, here is something for us to chew over: “… we have assumed that ideologies and culture in general are rooted in the social character; that the social character itself is molded by the mode of existence of a given society; and that in their turn the dominant character traits become productive forces shaping the social process. With regard to the problems of the spirit of Protestantism and capitalism, I have tired to show that the collapse of medieval society threatened the middle class; that this threat resulted in a feeling of powerless isolation and doubt; that this psychological change was responsible for the appeal of Luther’s and Calvin’s doctrines; that these doctrines intensified and stabilized the characterlogical changes; and that the character traits that thus developed then became productive process in the development of capitalism which in itself resulted from economic and political change” (324).
Fromm extends his analytical framework analyzing the rise of Protestantism and capitalism to the rise of Fascism’s ideology; we can extend this same analysis of the rise of Trumpism. A main topic on the Morning Joe Show, 12.16.2016, is comparing Trumpism to Fascism, however, Joe always has a problem thinking deeply analytically. Comparing Hitler and Trump, at this point, is analyzing circumstances underlying the rise of each, not to the end result – the Holocaust. However, stay tuned, buckle-up, and put on these ideological glasses, a disturbance is most likely on the way.
I will take up the thesis of Erich Fromm’s Psychology of Nationalism in future posts. Here is a beginning on the negative aspect of “nationalism”. As we listen to this, begin to apply Fromm’s analytical framework to our current circumstances. However, we need to keep our framework open to development. A question for us to ponder is what is the Psychology of Globalization? Colin Wilson, suggests that we need to focus on the High +1% increase in psychic energy, that we do have control over – it depends on how we instigate and manage our peak experiences!
Like a majority of Americans, I was expecting Donald Trump not to be elected President and was anticipating moving on to other blogging topics. However, like the SNL series on Trump, the nightmare continues. In the latest SNL Dec 4, “Classroom Cold Open” we see what is in our foreseeable future. Here we have President-elect Donald Trump (Alec Baldwin) interrupting a security briefing to retweet real people (Pete Davidson, Kyle Mooney, Bobby Moynihan). In two days my wife, Fannie, is leaving to visit her family in Taiwan, just as today’s Monday Morning Quarterbacking on what Trump has stirred up in China heats up. Is there no end to the anxiety that Trickster Trump can churn up? In the Trickster Trump blog post, recall that the Trickster is helped by The Magician(s) and if we lay out the ‘Journey of the Tarot: How major arcana mirrors the soul‘ might this give us a peek at what is coming?
I have been following several threaded discussions on the Trump Phenomenon. The MN Jung Association on 12.9.2016 hosted a lecture Godfather Death or How I started to worry and hate the election by Jungian Analyst John Desteian which is described as follows: “Since the beginning of the campaign, it became obvious that the 2016 election was going to generate significant emotional distress, no matter who was victorious. We know that emotions don’t exist for their own sake, but for the information, they tell us about our subjective inner world, and the world outside ourselves as well. This lecture will reflect on the multiple meanings of the emotional distress, from both directions, winners and losers, inner and outer, subjective and objective.”
At another site discussing Trump, I read this in part from a UK citizen: “There has been a shift since the first Obama election. Whatever the opposition to his presidency, it wasn’t expressed as a hope, or even expectation, that he had been telling lies, or that if so it didn’t matter. At least, if so I didn’t pick it up. (The question of his US citizenship was a fabrication from the start.) I think it would take a writer of Jonathan Swift’s calibre to adequately represent the current climate. It wouldn’t surprise me if such talent were to emerge in US America, still an immensely rich culture, & of which I know so little… I think this is an alternative version of another point made that ‘Perhaps Trump’s election has some part to play in making untruth explicit.’ Probably I’m straying beyond psychology, however (?)’’
Harking back to Central English classes, I went in search of Jonathan Swift and found his A Modest Proposal. Is it satirical foresight into Donald Trump’s Modest Proposal?
I have been watching Adam Curtis’s BBC documentaries for years and his latest one, Hyper Normalisation, re-cycles some of his past work with a new lens extending past contents into the present. In this documentary, Curtis traces our unfolding never-ending story 50 years back and bring it forward into Trump’s Tent. What will emerge from Trump’s Tent is what this Blog is now attempting to understand. Seems we need a logic to guide this effort. Remember, we are still searching for the mathematics behind reality. Get your notebook and pen ready, take some notes, and write a response! Share this Post. sas
Hyper Normalisation “wades through the culmination of forces that have driven this culture into mass uncertainty, confusion, spectacle, and simulation. Where events keep happening that seem crazy, inexplicable, and out of control—from Donald Trump to Brexit, to the War in Syria, mass immigration, the extreme disparity in wealth, and increasing bomb attacks in the West—this film shows a basis to not only why these chaotic events are happening, but also why we, as well as those in power, may not understand them. We have retreated into a simplified, and often a completely fake version of the world. And because it is reflected all around us, ubiquitous, we accept it as normal. This epic narrative of how we got here spans over 40 years, with an extraordinary cast of characters—the Assad dynasty, Donald Trump, Henry Kissinger, Patti Smith, early performance artists in New York, President Putin, Japanese gangsters, suicide bombers, Colonel Gaddafi and the Internet. HyperNormalisation weaves these historical narratives back together to show how today’s fake and hollow world was created and is sustained. This shows that a new kind of resistance must be imagined and actioned, as well as an unprecedented reawakening in a time where it matters like never before” (BBC Documentary).
The 2016 US Presidential Election is history and Donald J. Trump won! Many in the World did not “see” this coming and are now working through their shock. A classmate told us to take a breath, well it took me 11,520 of them, 24 hours worth, to process my initial conscious shock. And now I begin seeing that my unconscious was not only preparing me for what was to happen but is now helping me comprehend and most interestingly anticipate what might be unfolding. In using Jungian dream analysis (Jung: Dreams; Maloney: Meaning in dreams and dreaming) analyzing a series of dreams is important. Here is a peek into the flow of my dreams now unfolding with only an initial amplification from YouTube clips. The process of amplifying these dreams had already begun with my past Dialectic Analytical Man Blog posts listed here, however, still deeper amplification is needed and will emerge.
It explains how The Fool is the zero card and is guided by The Magician on his journey through the Major Arcana (greater secrets) or of all names the trump cards. So, here we have The Fool, Trump, being guided by A Magician moving systematically through the Arcana Cards on a Fool’s journey toward enlightenment, individuation, to The World – or in our investigation Trump’s journey to the presidency of the United States. May I suggest to really test our doors of perception, that we now lay-down the Major Arcana cards, then identify where Trump is on his Arcana Card journey, and then see if we can anticipate what is unfolding for The Donald, a Fool on his journey? It is important to remind ourselves that we are all Fools on a Journey guided by The Magician.
We are now beginning the process of Trump forming his Cabinet and everyone is trying to identify the Magician(s) helping Trump. And what will the Trump Cabinet look like? Below are the previous DAMB postings on Donald Trump and then follows is my dream series.
20161106 Dream: I was busy working with others on a quantitative computer model what was tracking the election. We had constructed several algorithm components simulating the election searching for insight into what was unfolding. Our model flags the state of North Carolina as a key state indicating the election’s outcome.
How algorithms shape our world – Kevin Slavin
20161110 Dream: I was taking videos/photos of an ancient Indian ceremony and realized that I had forgotten film to record the event and rushed to get it.
Dakota Access Pipeline Rally
Standing Rock: Thousands of Wild Buffalo Appear Out of Nowhere
20161111 Dream: I was at the ending of a banquet celebrating the work we had done together. At the front of the room was a structure of cubes, pyramids, spheres, an interlaced structure twisting together that one could actually walk into. It was a matrix within a matrix symbolizing what the group had been working on. The conference was coming to an end, people were now gathering at the front to tumble-down the structure, which I did not approve of and stood back to observe. The structure falls off the stage onto the auditorium floor that seems to be in my Agassiz grade school auditorium. I am reminded of this Kalacharkra Mandala similar to what had been constructed.
20161112 Dream: I saw myself being pulled up and through a wormhole in the sky – into another reality. I saw this as a tornado funnel from the outside and thought about two movie scenes, 2001’s Stargate, which I saw in 1968 and Interstellar’s wormhole seen in 2015. What is on the other side of our election?
20161115 Dream: I woke up with an intense feeling of anxiety and anger at what the American system of democracy is subjecting us to – I am unhappy! “Seneca on Anger – Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness” is a theme that began in the blog posting Cyclops Donald Trump – Amor Fati, where we looked at Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” – there he developed his views on “amor fati” adopted from Seneca.
20161118 Dream: The invisible hand concept of Adam Smith is thought. Noam Chomsky on Adam Smith & Invisible Hand is quite revealing and poses a challenge for us to carefully examine the economic thinking of those surrounding Trump. Does the team deeply understand the economics of globalization? What are we going to be watching for? It seems that for globalization to work we need to build bridges, not walls for capital and for labor to both freely move about. The biggest challenge to American jobs is coming not from globalization but from technology. We have got to get this correct, time in running out. I am concerned that Trump maybe constructing a Trump Borg that will turn on us all.
Noam Chomsky on Adam Smith
The Real Adam Smith: Ideas That Changed The World
“Published on Mar 28, 2016, The Real Adam Smith: A Personal Exploration by Johan Norberg, takes an intriguing, two-part look at Smith and the evolution and relevance of his ideas today, both economic and ethical. It’s difficult to imagine that a man who lived with horse-drawn carriages and sailing ships would foresee our massive 21st-century global market exchange, much less the relationship between markets and morality. But Adam Smith was no ordinary 18th-century figure. Considered the “father of modern economics,” Smith was first and foremost a moral philosopher. The revolutionary ideas he penned in The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, changed the world. Norberg explores Smith’s insights regarding free trade and the nature of wealth to the present, where they are thriving and driving the world’s economy. In the second hour, Ideas That Changed The World, Norberg traces Smith’s insights regarding the benefits of free trade and the nature of wealth to the present, where they are currently in operation. He talks with some of the most distinguished Adam Smith scholars, as well as leaders of some of the world’s most admired companies to discover how Smith’s ideas continue to be relevant and drive the global economy today” (Youtube).
Watching The Real Adam Smith confronts us with the enormity of global capitalism and deciding to turn this ship has to be carefully analyzed – is it the right decisions, many suggest that making correct decisions are now imperative and takes more thinking than can be gotten from leaving it to the market. The problems of global capitalism have been outlined and need to be more authentically placed under a microscope. Another classical economist writing 100 years after Smith is Karl Marx and despite the American fear of his ideas, he has an important microscopic lens we need to use. Richard Wolff presents insight into “how Capitalism is killing itself.”
Marxism 101: How Capitalism is Killing Itself with Dr. Richard Wolff // Empire_File022
We are now watching Trump build this management team and are anxious that it may be The Trump Borg? Seneca suggests we prepare for what is coming?
Trekspertise – A History of the Borg
20161122 Dream: Something jumped out at me. Yesterday, I received the current Nov. 28 / Dec 5 issue time The most influential Photos of all time plus A user’s guide to president Trump and fell asleep reading it. Then during the night I finished my re-reading Colin Wilson’s C.G. Jung – Lord of the underworld. I first started reading this book December 22, 1988 three months after arriving in Bejing to teach and finished reading it December 31, 1988 on New Year’s Eve. I have been searching these last few hours for what jumped at me and could not identify what it was. Then after brewing a pot of Taiwan coffee, I learned that Steve Bertoni has just published in Forbes his Exclusive Interview: How Jared Kushner Won Trump The White House. We have identified Trickster Trump’s Magician. However, what jumped out at me this morning is more significant!
I knew I needed to add a clip here of Colin’s many on YouTube and here I feel is what jumped out at me this morning. Colin ends his book on Jung stating, “Western man is in a position of a conductor who is unaware that he possesses an orchestra – or is only dimly and intermittently aware of it. Active imagination is a technique for becoming aware of the orchestra. This is ‘individuation‘. And it is clearly only a beginning. The next task is to develop a random collection of musicians into a great orchestra. This is the real task of the conductor. And this seems to be what Jung meant when he said, toward the end of his life, ‘Consciousnesses is the supreme arbiter'” (155). It is interesting that Wilson disagrees with Maslow in stating that one can bring about peak experiences – interesting project you think?
Colin Wilson on Peak Experience
What is now being discussed is the type of leader Trump will be – transactional, transformational or let’s explore – the synthetic leader. An early indication of Trump’s leadership and his depth will be his stand on the climate challenge facing Earth – his comprehension of what Robert Romanyshyn describes as the ‘Inner Journeys in the Outer World – Melting Polar Ice’. If Trump does not embrace the evidence of global warming and continues blaming it on the Chinese, I predict his legacy will be dismal!
Jung Platform presents Robert Romanyshyn ‘Inner Journeys in the Outer World – Melting Polar Ice’
In a past blog post, I addressed my friend and colleague Leo’s economic views and then in the Cyclops Donald Trump – Amor Fati and Why Donald Trump won and what is real I posted some of Leo’s email responses to my posts. I realized that Leo in responding to my past posts is like one of the four blind persons touching an elephant and each reporting a different experience on what he believes is a real elephant. In reading Leo’s reactions I imagine he is the blind fellow hanging on to the elephant’s tail and is about to have a large turd fall on his head. Here is Leo Smith and Steve Marx talking economics – “No Leo I do not want to work for you! Here is a towel clean yourself up! How clean is your lake today? Now, time for a ‘peak experience’… Wow, it seems I am coming to understanding Colin’s suggestion – the absurd good news of “peaking at will”.
Slowly we are trying to get back to a new normal – here is my attempt. I have put together a few video clips that I have been working with this year. They begin with Mandelbrot’s fractals the the math underlying Nassim Taleb’s book Black Swan. Then we relive election night with SNL and move into Sam Harris’s dismantling of Donald Trump on why he won the election, which is followed by his take on what the Democratic Left missed – not only what they missed but what the media missed. Then Jordan Peterson discusses tolerance and the potential facing the U.S. This is followed by David Harvey outlining a crisis of capitalism. Then Adam Curtis on Trump’s HyperNormalisation is a short clip from his full movie, which is followed by an Adam Curtis Interview – 16/10/2016 on his movie, which in turn speaks directly to the Americans now marching in the our streets looking for a new way forward. Then we have a blackboard presentation by Leo on how fractals work which is followed by Benoit Mandelbrot’s TED talk on fractals and the art of roughness. Following this is Nassim Taleb in conversation with David Cameron, which we could imagine it being with Donald Trump. Taleb then delivers a commencement speech at American University of Beirut 2016, sounding in places like Donald Trump. My next Blog post is Black Swan Trump.
Mandelbrot Ultra Hard zoom. 250 000 000 iterations
Tolerance as a vice | Jordan B. Peterson | Walrus Talks
Potential: Jordan Peterson at TEDxUofT
RSA ANIMATE: Crises of Capitalism
Hyper Normalisation wades through the culmination of forces that have driven this culture into mass uncertainty, confusion, spectacle and simulation. Where events keep happening that seem crazy, inexplicable and out of control—from Donald Trump to Brexit, to the War in Syria, mass immigration, extreme disparity in wealth, and increasing bomb attacks in the West—this film shows a basis to not only why these chaotic events are happening, but also why we, as well as those in power, may not understand them. We have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. And because it is reflected all around us, ubiquitous, we accept it as normal. This epic narrative of how we got here spans over 40 years, with an extraordinary cast of characters—the Assad dynasty, Donald Trump, Henry Kissinger, Patti Smith, early performance artists in New York, President Putin, Japanese gangsters, suicide bombers, Colonel Gaddafi and the Internet. HyperNormalisation weaves these historical narratives back together to show how today’s fake and hollow world was created and is sustained. This shows that a new kind of resistance must be imagined and actioned, as well as an unprecedented reawakening in a time where it matters like never before.
Trump’s HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis
Adam Curtis Interview – 16/10/2016 (New film: HyperNormalisation)
How Do Fractals Work? : Advanced Math
Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals and the art of roughness
David Cameron in conversation with Nassim Taleb
Taleb Delivers Commencement Speech at American University of Beirut 2016
Dialectic Analytical Man 