Friday Reflection: On the Delusion of Evil

We have a quote of the week (well, I think it's funny)—from the head of the World Wildlife Fund, a Super Bowl prediction:

"Bears would likely win any encounter in the wild, but that's only if they could catch the colts," said WWF's president and CEO Carter Roberts. "And there's always a chance that a bear wouldn't come out of hibernation, which would cause them to forfeit any match."

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Friday Reflection: Evil, Spelled Backward

The other day, in what I thought at the time was a very cleverly written piece, I declared that Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are "black-hearted, soul-dead, bloodsucking evil." This, I now feel, was a woeful error on my part.

Well, are they? If we asked their children or their wives, what answer would we get? And when we say they are evil, what power does that give them that they do not by nature have? What is the effect of such a statement?

When I turn within and answer these questions honestly, I realize how foolish I am. For to impute evil on another is not merely inaccurate, it is impractical. It gives him power that, superadded to the power he imagines that he has, forces him completely outside the realm of humanity; it makes him into a symbol rather than a man. Presidents can be impeached; their cronies can also be forced out of office; but a symbol, an idea, can only be brought down within the individual self. When we call another evil, we descend to the same image-making that makes a tyranny work. George Bush turned Osama and al Qaeda into symbols of Evil Incarnate, and thus justified one of the more hideous and misbegotten wars of our generation.

But it seems such a relentlessly inevitable conclusion, that these old and weak white men who are responsible for the needless death and disfigurement of hundreds of thousands of innocents, should be called Evil. Can there be any other reasonable conclusion? Yes: that they are sick—desperately ill, drained of feeling and of simple animal awareness. They are not living Satans, but merely failures, a few small and regressive steps in the evolutionary sphere. Great as their crimes may be, they are themselves just a few diseased men who need to be released from the bonds of power and given psychological treatment.

Thus, it is time for me to clearly admit my mistake, while it is still small. Yet there is another lesson in this, I feel, which may reach beyond my own personal weakness. As this year progresses and the election season heats up, we may wish to recall this lesson.

Be very careful how you choose your leaders: just one bad choice can be disastrous. One walking dead can open many graves. Leave the door to darkness ajar, and the light will waver. One diseased mind can spread much contagion, if it is allowed power or privilege. Anyone who tells you—no matter his party affiliation or national allegiance—that to lead is to hold power is not a leader, but an infestation.

What must we demand of a true leader? Above all, humility. Not humility before wealth or power or an external God of vengeance; but humility before Nature and before the people.

Another thing to seek in your leaders is clarity. This is the sense for truth that feels past the apparent and sees beyond the present. This is not the myopic vision of a corporate CEO and his five-year plan. No: clarity is the perspective that draws upon the insight of each part within the whole, and allows that synergy to become the lantern that guides the nation or the organization, rather than the distorted glare from a book of doctrine or a boardroom obsession.

This message will, of course, go unheeded in the mass media and the various institutions that aggrandize the superficial. But today it's just us, a few individuals meeting over an online connection in a remote corner of the blogosphere. We can scratch the surface, we can gaze past the spin.

To that end, it is my own personal practice to rely on the old Chinese oracle, the I Ching, to see what insight it may have for the moment. Here is the message I received on this very point of evil, leadership, and power:

PREPONDERANCE OF THE SMALL. Success.
Perseverance furthers.
Small things may be done; great things should not be done.
The flying bird brings the message:
It is not well to strive upward,
It is well to remain below.
Great good fortune.

Line 2: Six in the second place means:
She passes by her ancestor
And meets her ancestress.
He does not reach his prince
And meets the official.
No blame.

Line 4: Nine in the fourth place means:
No blame. He meets him without passing by.
Going brings danger. One must be on guard.
Do not act. Be constantly persevering.

"To strive upward" is to fall into the trap of power and the obsession with its symbols. The second line shows us how, when we run from belief to belief, from one figurehead to the next, we always fall short of what is truly a leader ("the prince") and are stuck again and again with "the official," the vapid institutional figurehead of power. Going thus, as the fourth line states, "brings danger."

The oracle's message on this point concludes with a ringing reminder to the voter, the citizen, to each unique individual whose inner leader is alive and intact: be on your guard; do not act with the crowd; persevere within yourself to reach a broader understanding that surpasses what you are told by a group pundit or an institutional lackey.

The true leader, both within the self and among the people, recognizes that it "is not well to strive upward, but to remain below." This is the same message that Lao Tzu offered leaders of his time, two and a half millennia past:

Like water is the Cosmic Consciousness:
It nourishes the depths of everything that lives.
It flows, it settles, it abides in low places.

Keep your home close to the earth,
Keep your thoughts direct and simple,
Keep judgment fair, and fluid in conflict,
Keep your government free of power,
And your personal affairs in harmony
With the life of Nature.

Drop the struggle, silence the demons,
And your natural self will be free.

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Mending the Dick Cheney Heart

In my transient passages through corporate America and my distant observations of corporate government, I am occasionally reminded of the oft-spoken lament of Commissioner Gordon of the Batman TV series (the old one with Adam West, one of the funniest shows ever on the tube). Contemplating the criminal genius of the Penguin, Riddler, or Joker, the Commissioner would mutter, "if only that mind could be used for good, and not evil..."

Take a look at some of the dramatis personae of our post-9/11 world, and you get the same impression. Dick Cheney: very smart guy. Saddam Hussein: also intellectually gifted. Don Rumsfeld: sharp as broken glass. I'm betting even Osama's pretty smart, though I don't know that much about him. Every one of them is, of course, black-hearted, soul-dead, bloodsucking evil.

These psychotic and murderous tyrants have one common trait: a tumor-like sense of supremacy that is based exclusively on their intellectual grasp of people and events. So when Time Magazine proclaimed earlier this month:

SCIENTISTS HAVE EXORCISED THE GHOST FROM THE MACHINE NOT because they are mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain.

I had to wonder what kind of a devil's bargain had been made, especially considering that there is another stream of research that tends toward a different, more holistic conclusion. If we are going to conceive of our brains as "machines," as Time Magazine would have it, or of our hearts as mechanical pumps, then cynical tyrants like Cheney and Hussein will continue to dominate us.

Now the brain is no more at fault in this than is my cat: the problem is a matter of perspective, or how we use (and abuse) the physico-psychological tools we are born with. To declare brain the King of Konsciousness is to misuse it, because then it is no longer an organic part of a living whole, but a separate and distant tyrant of the body. This is how every tyranny is started and perpetuated: through a declaration of supremacy—the same kind of supremacy-speak that says, "my country, right or wrong," and "dissent is treason."

So if we're going to rid the world of tyranny, we will have to clear it out wherever we find its ideological substrate. At the same time, we will have to affirm a more truly modern and quantum view of ourselves and the universe: that feeling is as valid as thought; that a poet can see reality as clearly as a physicist; and that the organic unity of being is a more practical metaphor on ourselves and the universe than some anatomical hierarchy. If we can reach for such an understanding, and teach it to our children, then science will be deepened; thought itself will be given the freedom that comes with equality; diplomacy will more frequently be considered over war; and tyrants, when they appear, will be easier to recognize and dispel.

Dick Cheney's heart is physically rotting not because of age, poor diet, or inadequate medical care: it is rotting from neglect, from a deeply cynical subjection. Demons are not born; they are made through the deviant belief in supremacy: one species' supremacy over Nature; one country's supremacy over the world; one man's supremacy over his nation; or one organ's supremacy over the bodily whole. If enough of us can overcome that belief, and keep those who are poisoned with it away from positions of leadership, then we may reach the day when Commissioner Gordon will never have to wonder again.

Inuit Goes Hawaii (and Geek Wednesday)

So Rummy went to Iraq one last time to meet with the troops. What did he say—"thanks for dying for me, and if you somehow survive, don't forget to check out my book tour"? Rummy also bravely faced the free press. You got it—Hannity. NewsHounds has the story and the capsule summary of the moment: "The state of American journalism may have reached a new low last night with Sean Hannity's softball interviews with Donald Rumsfeld recorded during their junket to Iraq."

Now over to the so-called left-wing media. I've weighed in with some opinion about gossip, here; and today in the Times, Richard Conniff gives a different opinion: gossip is natural and adaptive. Now you know why the mass media seems to be always striving for new lows of anti-journalism—why, it's natural and adaptive.

So maybe the guy's definition of gossip is different from mine; he appears to classify two people talking about a mutual friend's illness as gossip. I don't. But he's in the New York Times, and I'm in a dank corner of the blogosphere; case closed.

You youngs ones, are you looking for a great getaway destination for when you retire? Try Santa's place (for those of you without Times Select, it's also in the Nat-Geo for free): scientists predict it'll be all beaches and sea by 2040. According to the Times, this change is "partly" the result of global warming from greeenhouse gas emissions. Partly: let it not be said that the paper of record doesn't sweat the details. I wonder if Mr. Conniff would classify that as gossip.

Geek Wednesday

C-Net, still reeling from the tragic death of senior editor James Kim, has come out with a comprehensive review of the 109th Congress's tech legislation record, and it's not a fawning report by any stretch. Even in mourning, the geek press beats the MSM like a rented mule. What a bunch of pros these people at C-Net are. If you've never read it, check it out.

I've completed my first batch of reviews for the Webby Awards (in case you're wondering, this blog is not entered, because it costs $125 to throw one's hat into this ring). The best site I've seen so far is the United Nations Population Fund site, which features an excellent research tool on population trends and issues. This is worth noting, because population is or will be one of the two greatest issues and challenges to our survival as a species over the next century. Another good site I encountered in the Webby pile is Workplace Fairness's The Good, the Bad, the Wal-Mart, a truly balanced study of big box retail's underbelly.

Another great site I discovered today is the Digital Mozart Edition of the complete works. I also noted with some satisfaction that the site's host was groaning under the weight of the traffic raining down on it. 250 years old, and he still gets people excited...

For those of you who follow Geek Wednesday, you may know I've been having some serious trouble with Blogger Beta. Well, the geeks at Google appear to have been working on it; I've had no problems since the weekend. Give the boys from Stanford time, and they get it right. As for Microsoft, they had six friggin' years to upgrade their browser and I've been noticing that the popup blocker in IE 7 has been failing miserably. Yep, I checked the settings and everything—it's just failing, that's all. They can't even get a popup blocker on a browser to work, and they're asking me to put their new OS on my hard drive? Fugggedabbutit.

Meanwhile, for those of you who need some good bargain gear for the holidays, check out Powermax. You can get a refurb Intel MacBook for under $900. The Powermax refurbs come with the same warranty as Apple offers for new products, and with AppleCare (extended warranty) available as an upgrade. If you want a second Mac to haul around and don't care about having an Intel processor in it, you'll be able to get an iBook for less than $400 from these guys. Not bad.

I've also been looking at bargain notebook PCs lately, and haven't been able to pull the trigger. Here's what happened: my new company is so locked up in a bureaucratic paralysis of ineptitude when it comes to wiring new hires, that I've gone nearly two weeks without 9 to 5 connectivity (geeks, you have to empathize with this). That's right, no PC yet, and no access to a public or loaner machine either: it's hurry up and wait. So I figured I'd snap up a cheap Wintel laptop and at least have some appearance of computing normalcy on the job, even if I can't connect to their LAN. It's kind of difficult to work productively in IT without gear, you know.

So I looked at a sleek Gateway machine that was only $800 for an AMD Turion processor with 512MB of RAM. But then I checked my bank balance and asked myself why I'd buy a machine just to look like I belonged at a place that wasn't ready for me.

Well, then, you can imagine what happened: I turned the entire thing into an exercise in mindfulness. George Weinberg, the outstanding psychotherapist-writer, referred to this process as "the hunger ilusion." Even a temporary interruption of a longstanding habit can inspire growth, even transformation. So I had to begin by resisting the compulsion to hoist up my hard-earned for a second-string laptop: to do that, I finally realized, would be like the alcoholic who swears off Wild Turkey and then goes into the bathroom to drink the mouthwash. It was time to find out where the hunger illusion was leading me.

So I started off by spending some time in listening to others around me as they worked. After all, it's not as if I have any work to do there yet. The tapping of the keyboard—sometimes steady and smooth, sometimes disrupted by a silent pause or a sigh, followed by a frenetic clicking, crunching blur of activity—it was like listening to a mouth chewing something moist but hard. Close your eyes at your desk sometime, and just listen for a minute, and see what you make of it.

It reminded me that in the corporate setting, productivity is very much a solipsistic endeavor. It is as much impulse as it is awareness; consumption as it is delivery.

I also listened to how they spoke, these productive people in the office around me. Most of these folks are young, assertive, confident, and rapid in speech and manner. Many of them, to judge by their position, language, and demeanor, are most likely MBA's, or the equivalent. I heard the word "value" a lot, in terms like "value proposition" and "value exchange." I wondered whether these folks had really thought about value—what it is, or that there may be more to value than goods, services, or profit derived therefrom.

But corporations cannot learn this, for in spite of what the law may say, they are not people. But the real, individual people who work for the corporations and use their products and services, we can learn it and in turn teach it to the corporate person. We can show them what a person truly is, and what it is that a person values.

Friday Reflection: Stripping the Image, Revealing the Truth

The neurotic...though godlike in his imagination, still lacks the earthy self-confidence of a simple shepherd. The great positions to which he may rise, the fame he may acquire, will render him arrogant but will not bring him inner security. He still feels at bottom unwanted, is easily hurt, and needs incessant confirmation of his value. He may feel strong and significant as long as he wields power and influence and is supported by praise and deference. But all of these feelings of elation collapse easily when, in a strange environment, this support is lacking; when he incurs failure; or when he is by himself. The kingdom of heaven does not come through external gestures. —from "Neurotic Pride," in Neurosis and Human Growth

The author of our banner quote for the week and of the text quoted above was not writing about Bush in the Huffington Post yesterday; she was writing one of the seminal works of psychological literature, about 56 years ago.

Karen Horney (it's pronounced horn-eye, so any wise guys out there can just get over it) is, to my mind, the most lucid voice of the entire European psychoanalytical tradition—more so than Freud, Rank, Adler, or even Jung. Neurosis and Human Growth is her classic work, and aside from containing eerily accurate psychological profiles of the characters currently ruling us from Washington, the book presents a beautifully balanced perspective on the human psyche, its conflicts and their various paths of resolution—both the adaptive kind and...certain other approaches. In her description of what she calls "the expansive solution", Horney paints another profile of the Bushies:

When looking at the expansive types we get a picture of people who, in a streamlined way, are bent on self-glorification, on ambitious pursuits, on vindictive triumph, with the mastery of life through intelligence and will power as the means to actualize their idealized self.

She goes on to demonstrate how such people use their image to disguise their own weakness and depravity:

The first picture we get is the one-sided aspect of themselves which they pretend is their whole being in order to create a subjective feeling of unity. The rigidity with which they hang on to the expansive trends is not only owing to the compulsive character of these trends but also to the necessity to eliminate from awareness all traces of self-accusations, self-doubts, self-contempt. Only in this way can they maintain the subjective conviction of superiority and mastery.

It is this pride-fed image, this delusion of mastery, this monument made of shadows, that drives the despot, the tyrant, and the warlord. It is the job of a free people and a free press to tear away the image and reveal the rank core behind the glittering facade. This is what we try to do every day here at Daily rEvolution; it is what we ask our readers to do in the public square, the voting booth, and in every available venue of free expression and dissent.

It is also something that we all must do within ourselves. Now I am not imagining that we have despotic and tyrannical readers coming here; but I know from my own experience that the sales pitches and subliminal images of such predators as are currently ruling in Washington can penetrate the individual consciousness. It is, after all, a game played upon us every day by corporations, media companies, advertisers, and, of course, our government. These entities have the benefit of the utmost sophistication in their methods and means; they spend billions of dollars per year on this manipulation of the image within the human mind.

But there are ways to resist this insidious corporate game, and it begins with a turning within, a regular examination of the self for the residue of the corporate fraud. You don't have to delve deep into your subconscious mind, either: just pay attention to your normal daily life and the thoughts that are pointed at you from without, and those that arise from within.

Also, pay attention to habits of speech and action. For example, do you tend to describe yourself as a "we" in talking about work? I can recall interviewing an applicant for a claims job at an insurance company once. I was relating one of the company's core processes in handling claims, and the applicant said, "oh, we don't do it that way, we always did it..."

I allowed him to finish his point, but then asked (with a smile), "and just who do you mean by 'we'?" Of course, he meant his prior employer (which had laid him off weeks before). The point is, people fall into this trap continually: talking about their present and past employers, about a favorite baseball team, or about their church as if the group and its image defined all or part of themselves.

It happens, of course, in the nationalistic strain of political and media discourse, to a level of near-ubiquity. You hear the pundits saying, "We went into Iraq..." "We had a network of secret prisons in Europe..." "We are threatening to turn Teheran into a nuclear cinder..."

Well, the fact is that we did none of these things. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the criminals inhabitating 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue did them. We are not the American (or any other) government. As we saw in Tuesday's post, there's a new Senator from Virginia who can clearly see that we are not represented by the thieves and plunderers of the Bush administration. Let's join Senator Webb in that firm resolution.

I'm sure you can find other examples of this kind of insidious psychological image-peddling in your own personal experience. It has been my experience as a counseling psychotherapist that the mere recognition of such habits and back-of-the-mind ideas or impulses is roughly 80% of the process of freedom from them. Give it a try, and you may find yourself feeling lighter and more energized from the disburdenment of these long-held and rarely-questioned habits of mind and thought. This is the activity of what Horney calls "the real self" whenever it is allowed to escape the prison of the image.

The alternative is not very encouraging; for a life filled with falsehood also poisons the body cells of the person living the delusion. For our final excerpt from Horney's marvelous book, I would ask you to think of Dick Cheney:

His plans are often too expansive. He does not reckon with limitations. He over-rates his capacities. His pursuits may be too diversified, and therefore failures occur easily. Up to a point his resilience gives him a capacity to bounce, but on the other hand repeated failures...may also crush him altogether. The self-hate and self-contempt, successfully held in abeyance otherwise, may then operate in full force. He may go into depressions, psychotic episodes..., or through self-destructive urges, incur an accident or succumb to an illness.

I chose to close my own book on the metaphor of the Harry Potter stories with a simple, brief meditation on separating from the cult of the image:

Think of yourself again as energy: the ceaseless movement whose order and disposition define the seeming matter of your body, and indeed of all form. You breathe out your excess into the Whole from which you came and to which you will return; you gently inhale the nourishment of renewed life-force—what the Chinese refer to as "chi". You can feel waves of movement, as of water or wind, passing through you with each breath—gently dissolving what is manifest but only derivative, while the energetic core of your personal inner truth is gradually revealed and strengthened. You are not, after all, your race, your gender, your occupation, your material possessions, your marital or family status, your sexual orientation, your socio-economic class, your political, national, or religious affiliation; nor are you what the voice from a television says you are. All these ingrained self-images dissolve with every breath, as the life-force enters and moves through you—dispelling the false, peeling away the appearance, revealing the core and center of your being, whose inimitable perfection dances in joyful separation from the realms of pride, guilt, and opposition.

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Finally, one sorrowful note in followup to Wednesday's post on the disappearance of C-Net editor James Kim. As you may know by now, he died. It's a loss for technology, for journalism, and most of all for his family, whose lives he helped to save and whose safety he was trying to ensure when he went off into those woods. If you knew and admired Kim's work, as we did here, and would like to leave a note for his family, you can do it here.

Calling Townhall to Account

I posted a piece about neurosis and the corporate mindset to my Daily Kos diary. It is meant to open a thread on a theme that we intend to take up here over the coming weeks, about the infestation of a corporate consciousness into both our public and private lives.

Anyway, if you'd like to have a little fun to start the week, head over to the neocon punditry center, townhall.com, and take a look around. There are a number of mindless, pointless articles with the lamest possible headlines ("Cheney, Saudi King discuss trouble spots"; "Why Gays Cannot Be Pro-Choice"; "Bad Credit is a Way of Life--It Shouldn't Be!"); along with the obligatory picture of a Democrat looking shrill or silly. But, wouldn't you know, there is nothing of substance about what's going on in the world.

Such as any discussion of civil war in Iraq. Apparently, even the neocon press is beyond the point of questioning or denying that there is now a civil war in progress, although they probably still imagine that a civil war features a gray army and a blue army clashing on a broad meadow.

Nor is there any discussion of General Karpinski's comments about Rumsfeld's written endorsement of torture. I'm sure that once they awaken from the sting of the initial reports, they'll get all shrill and remind us that the General is merely recounting a memory of having seen such a document, and after all, Rummy's been sacked, so what's the point of hacking on about it?

I also couldn't find, even with their search engine, anything at townhall.com about the duration of this Iraq War--that it's lasted longer now than WWII. As Tony Snow would remind us, it's only a number.

The day of reckoning will come for all the war criminals in Washington. But we will also have to recall who in the media used their influence to endorse or disguise the crimes, for they are complicit in every useless, agonizing death. This is no longer a left wing-right wing / red state-blue state issue. The results from the polls three weeks ago showed us that. This is now an issue of a free people holding those people accountable, in both government and the media, who defaulted on a public trust. The next generation, and the one after that, are going to want to know what we were doing when the foul corporate windbags were playing the mouthpiece to tyrants and liars, and why we weren't able to stop them.

No one would dare expect government to be flawless; being responsible will do. And certainly no one would expect journalists to be perfect; to question and to seek truth would be plenty enough for us to accept. But a program of pathological lying, unquestioningly repeated and broadcast by a bought-and-paid media, comprises an attack on every citizen of a democracy.

This is why I disagree with Ms. Pelosi, and many Democrats, about impeachment. We need it--not so much to punish the criminals, but to expose them and their allies in the media; so that we will the more readily recognize them in time when they come back, telling us oily lies and conspiring in the deaths of half a million innocents, through fear-mongering cloaked in the sibilant whispers of a sacred arrogance.