Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. (Wikipedia)
“Now I lay me down to sleep” are words I remember my parents helping me recite nightly. The meaning of these words has changed from a “faith” in an omnipresent/powerful Lord to understanding that I am a Lord! So, as I lay down to sleep, these words alert me to the importance of recording and analyzing my dreams. After recording and beginning to analyze a dream, I am up excited about how it provides a peak into what is unfolding in the World. Romanyshyn here describes this inner journey in the outer world, which questions this prayer’s logic – the soul is no longer in the individual but is a dynamically integrated World.
Early this morning I spent time skyping a colleague in discussing Romanyshyn’s book Wounded researcher: Research with soul in mind. We have differences in our thinking/feeling and are in the process of working these through to reach an understanding of how projects in our lives need to be researched. How does a wounded-researcher, which we all are, look backward tracking the threads in life forward into an outline, which forms the text in a project? I have been sensing how this process is unfolding in my 72 years and also how it is unfolding in my son Aaron (20) and in daughter Annah (18), both NDSU students. I cringe at the task ahead of them but I have been there, done it, and have moved on. Joseph Campbell suggesting that myth serves as mirror for the ego provides this 72 year-old with an interesting slant on the time remaining. Campbell clarifies for me that my present life is about right NOW – I have arrived and just need to get on with IT – Wow, what a liberating thought!
I continued reading and writing this morning but then started watching After Armageddon (Wikipedia) now playing on the History Channel. As I watched, I imagined that this was my family getting out of Fargo – so depressing and I started to think about buying guns! I expect to have a nightmare tonight and thought to pass this experience along to you – “misery loves company”. I now sense Adam Curtis’s Power of Nightmares is continuing into Part 4 – A Trumpian Nightmare! As Curtis reminds us, when politicians could no longer provide for our dreams, they turned to trying to protect us – they are now failing at this so what are we to do with them?
The Republican Party’s convention is over and Trump’s speech is now being assessed on the Morning Joe Show. What is being discussed is that Trump is “offering himself as the solution” to the problems he sees the U.S. mired in. This analysis and the clips played this morning support the thought that Trump sees himself as a “billionaire vigilante” flying in his Bat-helicopter to rescue of U.S. from overwhelming darkness. Trump sees himself as a dark knight rising.
Trump’s speech can also be viewed as reflecting a dictator complex, by stating that, “When I take the oath of office next year, I will remove crime from our streets” – how, of course, is a concern! We are reminded of the great dictator speech that has been fact-checked against Trump’s with startling similarities. How do you compare speeches?
In watching re-plays of Trump’s acceptance speech, one sees the central concern – that in offering himself as the solution to problems, Trump’s campaign comes down to his personality. The US electorate is being asked to put its faith in Father Trump, as he says “I am our voice” and “…in this race for the White House, I am the law and order candidate. No one knows the system better than me. [Grinning] Which is why, I alone, can fix it.” Donald through sheer will-power will change global capitalism (1616-present), which has been “exploiting & alienating” men and women for over 400 years – each year more effectively & efficiently. What do you think? Sounding like Marx & Engels Communist Manifesto? What does Marx say is the root cause of our problems?
As Marx suggests the root of our problem is us – our personalities and the masks we hide behind. In the last blog, An Air Kiss of Death, three parameters to psycho-analytically-analysis Trump’s personality were set – they are Trump as a black swan event, as an outsider, and as a trickster. It is expected that this analysis will assist one in better understanding what we would be in for in voting for Trump’s personality.
The Republican Party has completed the 3rd day of its convention and it continues to unfold as a TV reality show conforming to the design of “trickster Trump”. Each day has produced “unexpected events” that the media is grappling with on the morning-after-news. After day 1 it was Mrs. Trump’s plagiarism, after day 2 it was the “darkness”, after day 3 it was Ted Cruz’s non-endorsement of Trump and Trump’s air-kiss of Pence, and now we wait to see what we will wake-up to after this evening’s event – got you sitting on the edge does it, just like a 1950s soap show. All of this is upsetting to the mainstream media as Donald continues his domination of media coverage, which has been referred to as a “black swan event”.
In watching this unfold, there have been passing comments in the news coverage that have not and really cannot be deeply examined by the TV media coverage we have. One is Carl Jung’s Archetype the Trickster; another is Collin Wilson’s book The Outsider, where Wilson explores the “psyche” of the “outsider archetype” through the lives of many famous personality’s effect on society and visa versa. And then there is Nassim Taleb’s book “The Black Swan”, which can be applied to Trump and this convention as an unexpected black-swan events
Each of these ideas can be applied to Trump in an effort to uncover the real Donald Trump – will the real Donald Trump please stand-up? Tonight we should get a closer look at the “real Trump” as an outsider, a black swan event, and the trickster. What is of real concern is the kind of kool-aid to be served and will it be “a kiss of air-death”.
The Trickster Archetype is loose in America as 12 shot with 5 dead in Dallas.
What is your psychoanalytical analysis of American psychosis?
In Coyote’s Dream, Coyote and Raven, both Native American Indian Tricksters, tell the story that the light & dark sides of human nature are playing tricks on each other. This tells us that our psychoanalytic task is shadow work which includes an element of trickster work. Interesting work, excuse me, I hear a phone ringing…
For Independence Day Fannie and I drove to Detroit Lakes, had lunch overlooking the lake, took a stroll along the beach, drove around some lakes, and over to visit a couple that we knew were Republicans and remembering our last visit, we were not especially looking forward to this encounter. We quickly marked the territory and I was surprised that he was hesitantly against Trump and she seriously against Clinton. The mention of Sander’s name brought scorn to their faces and so the territory had been properly marked. I had gone to their cottage determined not to let things get out of hand as they had several years ago discussing politics.
To do this I entered their cottage with the intent to listen to what is important to them. In his 80’s, the fellow’s children in their 60’s and his grandchildren had all completed university degrees. He seemed to hold education in high regard, he had attended a university but had not gradated, deciding instead to start a business. He is successful and had passed the daily operation of his businesses to his children, but still kept involved. He said that if he had gotten his university degree it would have made no difference to the outcomes in his life. “If I had gotten a degree,” he said, “I would have gone on to become as successful being a GM or GE executive. Either way I would have reached the same point as now – I am perfectly happy with my life!” He spends his days golfing, reading fiction, and looking out over the lake – he seems set to meet his maker, whatever his level of consciousness.
However, he recently had a concern with one of his grandchildren in that after graduating with a university degree he was not properly employed in his field and was searching for something different. After his grandchild had not taken up his introduction to interview for a proper job, he indicate he was no longer taking an active interest in his grandchild’s occupational decision. In other words, his grandchild was not fulfilling the designated role his capitalistic education had planned for him.
I sensed that I was looking through a window into the interior of this unfolding experience. I took special notice of his comment on “being equally happy” with his life whether he had or had not received a university education. Either with or without a degree, he reasoned, he would have been equally well-off (happy) working as a capitalist either in his private business or for General Motors. He is saying that formal education would have made no difference in his monetary success (his happiness) and apparently no difference in his level of consciousness – one way or the other he would have lived his life equally successful in America’s capitalistic system.
As we drove home from the lakes, I realized that what we had just whiteness was Pinky’s logic on Globalization. Here is the first clip of Pinky addressing how globalization is the colonialization of the past, with the same objective to control others. Pinky says that “Military force is only the most obvious way to control. Maybe even more important is to dominate the areas that shape consciousness and define relationships: media, technology, law, education – we have to always appear to have progress, authority, and civilization itself on our side.” This hit me as I reflected on my 40+ years in higher education and specifically on some real pain I wrote about in Modern Times the University Factory Scene.
This second clip Defending globalization – A mission for the educated and the enlightened, describes the system producing our friend’s privileged stuff, his beautiful cottage, cars, and boats, a system which is invisible to him and as Mimi says concluding this clip, “there’s really no incentive for [him] to seriously want to examine any of this….”, to which Pinky concludes, “Someone told me fish can’t see water.” There is no use discussing any of this with our hosts, since swimming with awareness in the fish bowl of global capitalism takes a special kind of lens to see through the muck. However, even if one is able to grind such a lens, there is the daunting task of using it, getting out of the fish bowl, and then making a living to support one’s family. At the end of a future clip a university professor tries to explain this effort to his wife – this is me and this effort is committingclass treason, which we will address next. In the mean time realize that even friends of a state are not looking up!
SA Scherling
Transcript The Pinky Show presents: Defending Globalization …a mission for the educated and enlightened. Narrated by Pinky.
Mimi: Geez, those anti-globalization zealots are really out of control. I mean, I usually wouldn’t care but it’s scary how these people are just SO irrational…
Bunny: They just want someone to blame for their own miserable situations. Don’t worry – we’ll get it under control.
One of the most useful tools we have is what I like to call ‘the invisible hand of privilege’. Here, let me explain – if you look at this map, you’ll see all the nations of the world spread out in front of you as if they’re all equal. But what doesn’t show up on a map are relationships of power…
…and it’s power that makes the voice of a single privileged First Worlder ten times louder than the voice of a single Third Worlder!
For most First Worlders, concerns about globalization tend to be expressed as something like “Is my Sony flatscreen TV still going to be awesome if it’s built in Mexico?” A consumer mindset is not going to understand why people at the bottom of the food chain are pissed off. And honestly, that inability to understand is really good for you and me.
On this side, smugly self-assured First Worlders congratulate themselves on inventing and mastering a system they see as fair and efficient. Economics and business departments teach the theory and practice of global capitalism to the virtual exclusion of any alternatives. And for the most part the students are smart enough to know that going along with it all is both easier and more profitable…
Contrast this with the situation produced in the Third World. These people have to actually live the consequences of practices and policies imposed from the top down. No one who hasn’t experienced this first hand is going to have the perspectives or knowledge produced in such an environment. And in the end, we’re going to use this against them too.
Mimi: It’s kinda ironic how this privilege stuff ends up being basically invisible to those First Worlders who reap the most benefits from these relationships… I mean, there’s really no incentive for them to seriously want to examine any of this….
and the episode this week examined in documentary-motion-picture style how 6,000 Lakota Sioux Indians lead by Sitting Bull and Craze Horse killed 1,000 of General George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Calvary at the Little Big Horn sent by President Grant to kill them. The documentary left us with an inkling that Custer, a psychopathic killer, committed suicide with a bullet to his head of blonde hair blowing in the wind. Nothing was said about whether Custer was scalped – one sure hopes he was and that his scalp hangs outside a brave’s teepee as a reminder to the US DOD.
Custer’s attack was part of President Grant’s effort to bring the American Indians under control and it is a tragic example of cultural genocide that is said to have been Hitler’s model in exterminating the Jews. After Custer’s debacle, Grant’s Indian strategy was to massacre the buffalo, the livelihood of the Sioux Tribes. The herd of 6 million was exterminated to 250,000 – the Sioux had no options but to submit to the killing obsession of this pale-face tribe – the land of the brave and free? How many Indians were exterminated?
The following clips decided this morning they needed to be posted – on of all days when Americans celebrate their Independence – just how independent do you really think we are?
The recent Power of The Nightmare blog entry, our current nightmare, continues here with Curtis’s film All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (2011), where Curtis brings our nightmare up to the present but along a different but related thread-of-logic. Curtis uses Ayn Rand’s life and her successful novel Atlas Shrugged as a template to continue his psychoanalysis of the western civilization that began to emerge in the 1970s fueled by the “emergence of cybernetics – a mechanistic perspective of the natural world” made possible by the computer. The popular Hollywood movies The Matrix and TheTerminator dramatize the eventual result of Rand’s vision or as the title implies “all watched over by NSA’s machine of loving grace”. John Nash’s cold-war game-theory strategy presented in Curtis’s episode “Fuck your buddy” has become every politician and CEO’s mantra, “you are being fucked so get over it you jerk.”
As we saw in TheTrap film, Nash eventually came around to reject the selfish premises at the center of game-theory – not so Rand, dying alone in her pent-house tower as every selfish capitalist will. The bar scene from movie A Beautiful Mind movie on Nash’s life illustrates his “governing dynamic” suggesting that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) idea of the invisible hand, describing the “unintended social benefits of individual actions” needs revision. In this bar-scene Nash and four of is mathematician buddies are relaxing having beers when five co-eds walk in. One blonde stands out and all the guys fantasize about laying her. Nash visualizes the scene and realizes that if they all go for the blonde they will block each other and then turning to the other four girls will be shunned for being picked second. Nash explains this and proposes that they all go for different co-eds offending no one and thus all getting laid. Adam Smith needs revision he proposes “it is not doing only what is best for one’s self but also for one’s group.” Now we know why Republicans are not getting laid as much as Democrats.
Governing Dynamics: Ignore the Blonde
Another interesting theme in this film deals with Bill & Hilary Clinton, and, of course, Monaca Lewinsky. If Curtis’s nightmare and trap films have us thinking about the possibility of supporting Donald Trump who is causing havoc among Republicans, then this film All watched over causes one to fret about the prospect of voting for Hilary and getting Billy in the White House looking for another “blow job” and not from Hilary. I do not know which is more depressing and disgusting – Billy or Donny fucking in the White House. We do not really mind about this, however, it is important to remember what Billy did to the 1992 Democratic Party’s platform that he ran on – one has to wonder what Republicans were so upset about. Bill Clinton ran on the Democratic Party’s socially rich platform and after the election he was visited by Fed Chairman Allen Greenspan (friend and active member of Ayn Rand’s inner circle). Greenspan convinced Clinton to abandon the Democratic plan and adopt the Republican party position to cut taxes for businesses in order to stimulate economic activity. If Hilary wins this election she and Billy will be entering the White House under worse deficit condition than they enter in 1993.
This film’s story continues on through the 1997 collapse of the Southeast Asian Economic Miracle describing The World Bank’s bail out of US bank – just a prelude to the 2008 Crisis bail out, as capitalism systemic faults continue. The Peoples Republic of China was watching this unfold and quickly decided their economy needed to insulate its economy from US banking industry greed. They managed their exchange rate resulting in the flow of cheap good into the US, the flow of dollars to China, and China’s return purchase of US debt. Today China’s $1.5 trillion ownership of US debt gives it a significant seat the table. What is disturbing is that as recession of 2008 unfolded Obama selected Robert Rubin, a Wall Street insider, to be his Secretary of the Treasure – described as putting a fox in charge of the chicken coop.
Finally, when one looks at the enthusiasm of Bernie Sander’s young supporters, one is sad about the prospects of change and disappointed at what Obama was not able to accomplish. It is the dysfunction of our global political economic system that needs attention. The UK’s decision to leave the EC is in line with the continuing fuck-up of our politician. Can you imagine, 24 hours after the UK vote, their politicians are wondering if they can now re-vote the issue. PM David Cameron said no and left the room! This has ominous implication for Defending Globalization – a mission for the educated and enlightened – fish can’t see water and neither can politician – they both shit in the water they swim in.
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 had a dream last night of working with others to understand the “logic” of our global economic system. After recording the dream, I got up and turned on the TV to watch the morning news on UK’s EC vote to leave. My TV opened to this scene from the Matrix’s Power Plant of Neo becoming unplugged.
Then I watched the central issue being discussed on the Sunday Morning news shows globalization (This Week, Face the Nation). Pinky here presents the major sentiment felt by many – today’s globalization is yesterday’s colonization in different dress.
Next, I clicked on the The Matrix ‘Construct’ Scene with Morpheus introducing Neo to their program to hack into the Matrix, reinforcing many efforts to hack into our geo-polical-economic system.
Just now I re-watched the clip on Jung’s concept to synchronicity you will see throughout the clip Alice’s rabbit scampering about. Yesterday, I sent this clip to a friend of Alice falling into the rabbit hole suggesting the world is now falling into a deep hole. Then on this morning’s news shows there were several references to today’s World being in Wonderland.
Here then is the beginning of this dream’s amplification. What was interesting about Alice when she reached the bottom of the rabbit-hole, is that she had to take a pill to get tall to reach a key on the table and then another pill to get small in order to use it to unlock the door in order to get in. Humm…, what are the implications of such pills for the global economy? How is this related to the red-blue pill choice Neo is offered to either “continue living in a synthesized, fictional, computer-generated world or joining the real world to escape from the Matrix.” We certainly know that Neo’s choice leads to a very bloody confrontation – the revolution against machines.
The MSNBC Morning Joe show began today (6.17) with the issue “American’s moral responsibility in the Middle East?” It is sad to listen to this “so so shallow” uninformed dialogue which could have been an episode in Adam Curtis’s documentary The rise and fall of the tv journalist. Adam Curtis, here interviewed on the theme of his work, is a British BBC producer that I am now re-watching – his documentaries are accessible at the ThoughtMaybe site.
In many ways, Curtis’s work is all interrelated in examining British and American politicians’ efforts to save-the-world, bring its so-called “democratic freedom” to the rest of the world. However, the result continues to give us today’s nightmare unfolding in the Middle East and now most recently in Orlando Florida. This nightmare is self-inflicted from America’s and Britain’s long history of murder in the name of their manifest destinies,their false pursuit of miss-perceived exceptionalism. It is now coming full-circle, they have to accept their collective karma created with the “game-theory-strategy” of “Fuck your buddy”.
I started re-watching Curtis’s work which begins with the documentary The power of nightmares (2004) and presents the origins of what we now wake to every morning – reports on the nightmare of killing around the World. The Power of Nightmares documents the rise of the “politics-of-fear” we are now experiencing. Curtis asks this key question, “Is the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organized force of destruction – specifically in the form of al-Qaeda [now ISIS] – a myth perpetrated by politicians across the globe, but particularly by American neo-conservatives, in order to unite and justify empire?” The answer is YES and Curtis charts the rise of these groups giving one an enlightened view of what is going on inside the War on Terror – we have been and are still being terrorized by our own politicians and the media. Eisenhower’s caution at the end of his presidency was to beware of the industrial-militarycomplex – now we add media as Trump points out and is so apt at using for his own ends. The media, after all, are a corporation with a very limited view of their role in the World. Enjoy if one can such news.
The Power Of Nightmares: Part 1 Baby Its Cold Outside (2004)The first part of the series explains the origin of Islamism and Neo-Conservatism and draws the parallels between the two of their optimistic visions to change the world by force. It shows Egyptian civil servant Sayyid Qutb, depicted as the founder of modern Islamist thought, visiting the United States to learn about the education system, but becoming disgusted with what he saw as a corruption of morals and virtues in western society through consumerism. When he returns to Egypt, he is disturbed by the rampant westernization and becomes convinced that in order to save the culture, it must be completely restructured along the lines of Islamic law. He also becomes convinced that this can only be accomplished through the use of an elite vanguard to lead a revolution against the established order. Qutb becomes a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and, after being tortured in one of Nasser’s jails, is moved to state that western-influenced leaders can justly be killed for the sake of removing their corruption. Qutb is executed in 1966, but he influences the future mentor of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to start his own Islamist group. Inspired by the 1979 Iranian revolution, Zawahiri and his allies assassinate Egyptian president Anwar Al Sadat in 1981, in the hopes of starting their own revolution. The revolution does not materialise and Zawahiri comes to believe that the majority of Muslims have been corrupted not only by their western-inspired leaders, but Muslims themselves have been affected by jahiliyyah and thus both may be legitimate targets of violence if they do not join him. They continued to have the belief that a vanguard was necessary to rise up and overthrow the corrupt regime and replace with a pure Islamist state. At the same time in the United States, a group of disillusioned liberals, including Irving Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz, look to the political thinking of Leo Strauss after the perceived failure of President Johnson’s so-called “Great Society.” They come to the conclusion that the emphasis on individual liberty was the undoing of the plan. They envisioned restructuring America by uniting the American people against a common evil, and set about creating a mythical enemy. These factions, the Neo-Conservatives, came to power under the Reagan administration, with their allies Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and work to unite the United States in fear of the Soviet Union. The Neo-Conservatives allege the Soviet Union is not following the terms of disarmament between the two countries, and, with the investigation of “Team B”, they accumulate a case to prove this with dubious evidence and methods.
The Power of Nightmares Part 2 – The Phantom Victory: The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on 25 December 1979 gives a common cause to an extraordinary alliance of radical Islamists in Afghanistan and around the world and to the neo-conservatives in the United States, as a key battleground of the Cold War. As the United States provides funding and arms–including even Stinger missiles capable of shooting down Soviet helicopters–to Islamic Mujahideen fighters who would fire them, a young wealthy Saudi called Osama Bin Laden is among the many foreigners drawn to Afghanistan. When the Soviets eventually pull out and when the Eastern Bloc begins to collapse in the late 1980s, both groups falsely believe they are the primary architects of the defeat of the Soviet Union. Back in America, the Neo-Conservatives’ aspirations to continue to use the United States military power for further destruction of evils are thrown off track by the ascent of George H. W. Bush to the presidency, followed by the 1992 election of Bill Clinton leaving them out of power. The Neo-Conservatives, with their conservative Christian allies, organize to demonize Clinton throughout his presidency with various real and fabricated stories of corruption and immorality, but to their disappointment, the American people do not turn against Clinton. The Islamist attempts at revolution end in massive bloodshed, leaving the Islamists without popular support. Zawahiri and bin Laden flee to the sufficiently safe Afghanistan and declare a new strategy: to fight Western-inspired moral decay they must deal a blow to its source—the United States.
The Power Of Nightmares: Part 3 The Shadows In The Cave: The neoconservatives use the September 11 attacks, with al-Fadl’s description of al-Qaeda, to launch the War on Terror. The final part addresses the actual rise of al-Qaeda. Curtis argues that, after their failed revolutions, bin Laden and Zawahiri had little or no popular support, let alone a serious complex organization of terrorists, and were dependent on independent operatives to carry out their new call for jihad. However, the film argues that in order to prosecute bin Laden in absentia for the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, U.S. prosecutors had to prove that he is the head of a criminal organization responsible for the bombings. They find a former associate of bin Laden, Jamal al-Fadl, and pay him to testify that bin Laden is the head of a massive terrorist organization called “al-Qaeda”. With the September 11 attacks, neoconservatives in the new Republican administration of George W. Bush use this invented concept of an organization to justify another crusade against a new enemy, culminating in the launch of the War on Terror. After the American invasion of Afghanistan fails to uproot the alleged terrorist organization, the Bush administration focuses inwards, searching unsuccessfully for terrorist sleeper cells in America. In 2003, they extend the War on Terror to a war on generally perceived evils with the invasion of Iraq. The ideas and tactics also spread to the United Kingdom, where Tony Blair uses the threat of terrorism to give him a new moral authority. The repercussions of the neoconservative strategy are also explored, with an investigation of indefinitely-detained terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay, many allegedly taken on the word of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance without actual investigation on the part of the United States military, and other forms of “preemption” against non-existent and unlikely threats made simply on the grounds that the parties involved had the potential to become a threat. Curtis specifically attempts to allay fears of a dirty bomb attack and concludes by reassuring viewers that politicians will eventually have to concede that some threats are exaggerated and others have no foundation in reality. He says, “In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power.” [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GB8m6nNWpMA]
This nightmare is real as it now mutates, manifesting itself in the political reality show of Donald Trump. What is most frightening is that I now see a rationale justifying voting for Trump. Understanding Curtis’s thesis on power, this politician-created-nightmare, encourages one to vote for Trump who is increasingly opposed by politicians of all stripes. Is this a vote to awaken us? – a very big maybe. However, only by establishing term limits, eliminating career-politicians, and installing public-financing will we awaken from this nightmare. Sweet dreams – indeed!
The next documentary continuing this line of thinking in The Trap (2007) also presented in three segments and addresses the question of “what is happening to our dream of freedom?” Curtis asks the viewer to step “back and look at what freedom actually means in the West today.” We quickly realize that it is a strange and limited kind of freedom with “the United States and its empire self-describe fighting the Cold War for “individual freedom, yet it is still something that the leaders of our so-called democracies continually promise to give us. Abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempt to force freedom on to other people has led to more than just bloody mayhem, and this, in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain and most recently in Orlando Florida. Our government’s response has “dismantled long-standing laws that were designed to protect our individual freedom and civil liberties” (Curtis).
The Trap 1 – Fuck your Buddy! This first episode examines the rise of a mathematical model about human behavior called Game Theory developed during the Cold War, and the way in which its premises filtered into economic thought. The program traces the development of the theory with particular reference to the work of the mathematician John Nash, who constructed such models for which he won the Nobel Prize in economics. He invented games reflecting his beliefs about human behavior, including one he called “Fuck You Buddy,” in which the only way to win was to ruthlessly betray your playing partner. While these games were mathematically coherent, they only worked correctly when the players obeyed the ground rules that they should behave selfishly and try to outwit and betray their opponents. As the 1960s became the 70s, the theories of a Scottish psychiatrist R.D Laing and the models of Nash began to converge, producing a widespread popular belief that the state was purely and simply a mechanism of social control which calculatedly kept power out of the hands of the public. This episode shows how this belief allowed economic models that left no room for altruism to unrealistically look credible, and then how this went on to serve the free-market beliefs of Margaret Thatcher who believed that by dismantling as much of the British state as possible, a new form of ‘social equilibrium’ would be reached. This was a return to Nash’s work, in which the paradoxical claim was that if everyone was pursuing their own selfish interests, a “stable society” would result. But as the mathematically modeled society is run on cold scientific data—performance targets, quotas, and statistics—it is precisely this data in the information age, combined with the false belief that ruthless selfishness can provide stability and fair society, that has created “The Trap.”
The Trap 2 – The Lonely Robot The second episode follows on from the ideas introduced in the first to develop the themes further. What is revealed, as in the context of the current age, is that drugs such as Prozac and lists of psychological symptoms which might indicate anxiety or depression are being used to normalize behaviour and make humans behave more predictably, like machines. This is not presented as a conspiracy but as a logical outcome of the market-driven culture of self-diagnosis governed by check-lists based on every-day symptoms of human emotion.
The Trap 3 – We Will Force You to Be Free: The final part in this series focuses on the concepts of positive and negative liberty introduced in the 1950s by political theorist Isaiah Berlin. The episode briefly explains how negative liberty could be defined as freedom from coercion and positive liberty as the opportunity to strive to fulfill one’s potential. It is this outcome that summaries the entire series, contextualized both by the emergence and convergence of the ‘New Left’ (epitomized by the current age of individualism), with the right’s pursuit of “personal liberty” on a global scale with disastrous consequences.
Bitter Lake (2015) is the latest of Curtis’s work and takes a close look at the West’s fuck-up in Afghanistan. The U.S. still has 10,000 “freedom fighters” there.
Enjoy your summer at the lakes!
Bitter Lake (https://thoughtmaybe.com/bitter-lake/) (2015) Bitter Lake explores how the realpolitik of the West has converged on a mirror image of itself throughout the Middle-East over the past decades, and how the story of this has become so obfuscating and simplified that we, the public, have been left in a bewildered and confused state. The narrative traverses the United States, Britain, Russia and Saudi Arabia—but the country at the centre of reflection is Afghanistan. Because Afghanistan is the place that has confronted political figureheads across the West with the truth of their delusions—that they cannot understand what is going on any longer inside the systems they have built which do not account for the real world. Bitter Lake sets out to reveal the forces that over the past thirty years, rose up and commandeered those political systems into subservience, to which, as we see now, the highly destructive stories told by those in power, are inexorably bound to. The stories are not only half-truths, but they have monumental consequences in the real world.
Note: We are about to elect a President and the choice is stark – will Clinton continue to keep the US playing Obama’s low-key strategy, which would be quite different than Trump’s suggested approach of carpet bombing and possibly nuking the Middle East. Trump, is a trickster, and will next be put on our psychoanalytical couch and examined as we continue searching for a way out of Plato’s Cave.
Dialectic Analytical Man 