The Middle Eastern world, it is exploding Tempers flaring, guns are loading.
... Our enemy is tagged, or so we're told. He is a member of a group, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, or a resident of a state such as Iran or Syria, or he can be a secular insurgent. And if none of the tags fit, he's just a plain terrorist. Assuming I got the list right, why then are the words 'culture' and 'religion' missing from this list? There are some people talking of 'clash of civilizations', but the majority of talk uses the tags above. With this in mind, I thought I'd talk about (reveal, as it were) the underlying psychology that I've been aware of all along and which has proven operative. I've skirted this discussion because virtually everything about psychology is or can be contested, thus any such discussion also invites such a torrent of conflicting views that eventually gets everyone's head spinning with nothing accomplished. Yet, and the reason I'm sitting here writing this, is that the psychology and analysis I've been aware of has proven quite correct. Two specific Jungian concepts I'm mindful of are the collective unconscious and the archetypes; abstract and mystical, they lurk underneath man's symbols and tags and very much apply to a deeper understanding of what's going on in the world in general and the ME specifically. This stuff is not a secret, it's in books, but it's evidentially escaped the attention of our Great Decider, who doesn't like books, and our information supply, biased as it is. Thus the average person who can use this information isn't getting it. Having said it's in books, the collection of Jung's work can be found at http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/bscwj.html Over the years, in an effort to come to terms with understanding man's inhumanity to man, I have indulged in studying Jung's work. I did this because preliminary research convinced me that his intellect could fill my need. Last week I completed digesting his last work, an autobiography entitled "Memories, dreams, reflections", which I felt was required reading because it capped his life's work and I expected that, if he was going to renounce or question any of his earlier work, this would be the place for it. That didn't happen. Instead this volume is an easier reading summary of some of his more significant work, less the depth of the preceding volumes, which the hyper-curious would need to read first. Needless to say, I am no Carl Jung, so what I'm about to say is merely one student's attempt at conveying two concepts he devoted considerable time and effort to describe. That is, I can only scratch the surface and hope it's either useful in it's own right or inspires the reader to dig deeper. Okay, onto the 'meat'. First comes the nature of 'self' as consisting of conscious and unconscious components, and that unconscious is, by definition, unknown (for if it were known, it would be conscious). The conscious, briefly, is the ego. But it's the unconscious that is more important right now. The unconscious can be further sub-divided, the operative part for this discussion has to do with the collective unconscious, which by definition is shared (as opposed to the personal unconscious, which belongs to the individual). To put the collective/shared part in perspective, imagine a mountain range, with common foothills, some shared plateaus, and some peaks that jut upwards. Imagine the foothills as attributes shared by all mankind, the plateaus as major cultures (belief systems) that have evolved over time, and the peaks as further progressions into even more localized belief systems. Of course there are no physical mountains, this is just for perspective. The companion perspective is that these mountains are not made of dirt and rocks, but archetypes. What's an archetype? It's an image. As programmers, we relate to the concept of base classes, templates from which we shape applications. Archetypes perform a similar function in that they may be thought of as "base images" added to the psyche at birth - with or without knowledge of the individual (this is important). These images are not binary, nor pictures, but more like impressions. Some archetypes are primordial and easy to see, such as the mother image, the warrior, and the God image. These archetypes are universal (the foothills). Others are shaped by advancing civilization in a more localized, cultural way (the plateaus and peaks) over very long periods of time. When babies are born, they come with these impressions built-in. This is how archetypes are passed from generation to generation. Thus, say, the Chinese and Vietnamese are different cultures at the peak, but at the plateau share being oriental. Similarly, the Iranian and Palestinian who never met nonetheless share imagery (archetypes) of Arabic/Muslim cultural adaptation over millennia. This is why a Chinese may not understand a Vietnamese, but is much closer to that understanding than, say, of the European or African. How does this apply to current events? Well, consider that we failed to see any sense of "brotherhood" lurking beneath our Korean and Vietnam crusades, and now we fail again to see it in the ME. While we're busy tagging and killing card/gun carrying members of Al Queda and Hezbollah and declaring entire states (Iran, Syria, etc.) our enemy, we are quite oblivious to the real ties that bind: the imagery stored in archetypes of the collective unconscious. These archetypes are first primordial and then cultural, but not national. National boundaries are a peripheral invention. Again, the collective spirit within the Iraqi insurgent has much more in common with what we think is a friendly Saudi then we realize because they are, in effect, "connected at the brain". This is also true of the Israeli and his representatives ('soldiers' as I see them) who have infiltrated the American political system and influenced our foreign policy first by blowing the significance of ME affairs totally out of proportion, and then by launching a war to bring the area under control. These concepts also help to explain why replacements for enemy leaders pop-up out of nowhere and are in no short supply. In our culture, leaders are school trained over many years to understand and conform with ever-expanding complex principles of our society. Enemy leaders, on the other hand, are more likely to come from prison then college. As we know, people in prison, and especially less humane foreign prisons, don't spend their time discussing physics or global warming; instead they dwell and rile over far more 'primitive' matters, such as their God and the Koran, which at once is their most basic shared belief system and that which is being challenged. The high note, the important part, is that adherents to the enemies point of view isn't passed on through book-learning or even education of any kind, it's born into them vis a vis impressions that are archetypes in their collective unconscious. So, yes, in the end, and in the grandest sense, we are experiencing a clash of civilizations, but we're not seeing it that way. While we're busy compartmentalizing our enemy into groups such as Iran, Hezbollah et al, we're doing so at the expense of missing the real connection: shared imagery. Consider: we're told some countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sudan are on our side, and other countries such as Iran and Syria are our enemy. Do you see how this divide and conquer compartmentalization would be used - but how it doesn't fit? Stated differently: the enemy lives not only in Syria, but in Saudi Arabia as well. We are not fighting any given group or state, we're fighting a culture, and that culture is inbred at a very primitive level. And this particular culture has over a billion people and it spans the globe. Why do I think this so important that I'm writing this instead of doing work that I really need to do? Because the trajectory of events (more fighting, Big Event, more fighting, Big Event, etc.) is poised to threaten and harm us all. As the Iraq gambit disintegrates, our enemy is becoming emboldened and gearing up to take on their core problems with us: the forced injection of Israel into their world, the plight of the Palestinians which resulted from that injection, and America, the invader and occupier of two countries and supplier of armaments to Israel. This turn of events, the loss of control in Iraq, happened quietly. Nobody can pinpoint the exact date when the mission failed, but it did fail. Iraq may be in chaos today, but it's their chaos, their way of saying they will decide their destiny for themselves. The side-consequence, the emboldenment, is more far-reaching and now it's on the table. This emboldenment was not ignored or unexpected. It's why Israel didn't waste a minute grabbing the first pretext that came along to launch a pre-emptive war, to stop it from growing into a tidal wave. It's not going to work. The enemy is drawing from vast numbers, and the more that are killed, the more volunteers that show up. How could smart people not see this? Enter the archetypes. The way out of this is to reconcile the opposing forces, but this cannot happen so long as one of the opposing forces is pulling our strings. How much more plainer can I say that we must purge our gov't and media of neocon influence? It's a hellova challenge, but this war is worse and getting worser. Bill _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
