Iraq Dead Line


Today I scan the headlines and I see that George Bush has concluded that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are "our destiny." Simultaneously I find myself faced with a few days when I won't be able to write anything, and so I am going to sit down and write spontaneously a series in "The Hypnotist" which doesn't purport to be about the professional field of practicing it, but more about learning to watch the workings of the unconscious. For example, how destiny flies on its own wings, while fate walks under the burden of what might have been.

Coming into the new century of the new millennium, it might have been our destiny, under wise leaders, to face the future as members of one planetary consciousness and be realistic about what we face. Our destiny was to use the power of the many for the good of all, so it involved realizing (as one of many examples) that we are not dependent on oil, but on old technology. We need new technology and we need to start from the concept and then engineer the new system which takes us into a positive future. For example, if we know we can develop an engine that runs on a clean chemical process, then we can charter a corporation ...

Oh ... wait. We can't form a corporation without competing with the immortal giants who now are our masters.

The corporations that were formed long ago and far away for what we needed were made immortal by a constitutional amendment designed to protect freed slaves from having their property taken away from them. What kind of twisted logic is that?

The corporation was already an individual back when it was chartered to perform something we needed done. A canal had to be built or a bridge had to be built or some great new enterprise undertaken, so money banded with money and the many spread the risk of the enterprise and shared the profits, which were of course regulated by the public in the same way as any project is bid according to projected costs and reasonable return. When the job was done the corporation was disbanded. The corporation was an individual in service to the society and its needs. We aligned ourselves with destiny by using the tools at our disposal, one of which was chartered corporations.

To realign with destiny, it is necessary to find the root of the alliance with her dark sister, fate. Evil is a corruption of the good, and using protections for poor people to justify a power grab by the super rich was certainly taking a good impulse and corrupting it. But because the corruption was not admitted to and corrected, it became so empowered it can no longer be addressed. It is institutionalized.

So skip ahead from the freeing of the slaves providing corporations with immortal personhood, something heretofore called God and worshiped for those exact virtues.

Skip to Ford Motor Company and Henry Ford deciding to cut the cost of his cars. Not so fast. It turns out that it was illegal for him to lower the price of his car when he was operating partially on capital invested by the Dodge Brothers, who had gone into competition with him. His position is that the purpose of a corporation is to make the best product for the lowest price.

He is sued by the Dodge Brothers because they say the corporation's purpose is maximum return of profit to the shareholder. So now things are turned on their head. Before, the purpose of the corporation was in the charter. The investors were allowed a reasonable return. Ford had no problem making money. He manipulated the drop in Ford stock and secretly bought it back. Nothing was produced in that but a lot of money was made. It sort of provided a glimpse of the future, and planted the seeds from which Enron inevitably grew as the pattern extended along its time line.

Now the purpose of the corporation is to go out and find treasure and return it to the investors, just like back in the good old days in Europe when they sent out Christopher Columbus and Magellan and De Soto and Coronado and the Beatles. The corporation ceases to be a tool for large scale projects, and, in some cases at least, becomes an extraction device to move wealth from the public to the private sector. Eisenhower warned the public that one aspect of this was particularly dangerous: the military industrial Congressional complex. (He deleted Congressional from the speech as given as a political decision, but it is obviously one leg of the stool.)

Now the axis of profiteering is so strong that even though we know continuing to burn oil will destroy the air, the oceans, and threatens to destroy the earth's ability to support intelligent life, that is preferable to disrupting the existing economic order. This may not threaten those who are in the administration and their supporters, but it does concern the other half, who are not waiting to be picked up by God and whisked off to a safe house for debriefing when earth becomes ground zero.

Clean engines are the destiny of those who design and build them. Gasoline that costs more than milk is the fate of those who are passive to corruption.

Fate is what happens when we make really stupid decisions and just can't go back and correct them because they have gotten too big to address. Nobody seriously thinks that there is a way to revoke the status of corporations, now. But there is no destiny if there is no shift, in law, back to the regulation of corporations so that we don't get another fiasco like Iraq. We're investing two trillion dollars and many thousands of lives on what is essentially a scheme to shift massive amounts of tax money to individual corporate investors in oil and battlefield services. Not only that, the blowback on us is the creation of a threat far more serious than ever existed before this business decision based on maximum return to investors from aggressive warfare to secure the biggest oil fields in the world outside Saudi Arabia.

Because somebody can think of a way to make a lot of money doesn't make it a good plan. Enron should have demonstrated that much.

Today I was watching CSPAN, and Lee Iacocca was promoting his new book on leadership. He's old, bless his heart, and had to lean in close to see his script. But his intelligence is very sharp, and one thing he was speaking on was choosing leadership. Iacocca said that one of the questions people should ask of somebody who wants to be leader of the free world is, "Who are your friends and associates?" I couldn't help but think that he was looking at Enron and Bush as conjoined twins. How can one not think of Enron when thinking of business built on a profit scheme instead of service to the public? The public was their cash cow and deregulation was their ponzi scheme. Their motto was, "There's no time like milking time." Mr. Bush is the personification of Enron, which was his primary backer and best friend among corporate individuals.

That is not destiny. This is the corruption of destiny into fate.

When I think about fate, its hard not to think about Fate Magazine, which I find is still publishing. I never really read the magazine much, but I found references to it in other reading. When I was working as a journalist, I was the go to guy when there was space that needed filling and nobody had any copy. I could turn out a humor piece or come up with something to fill the hole. One thing I would do was pick up the books from the Entertainment Department that nobody else wanted. I used them for an occasional column called, "The Bottom Shelf." One of these books was, "Phone Calls From the Dead." It referenced to Fate Magazine if my memory serves.

I quickly found that people do get phone calls from dead people, and that the place where the evidence (albeit based on single sources) can be found is back issues of Fate Magazine. So I gradually began to see that if you believe in what is at the edge of collectively agreed on reality, which is also known as borderline schizophrenic, you might publish the episode in Fate. It will presumably be presented as a respectable viewpoint, which incidentally entails pushing the idea that there is a controversy about the validity of what it stands against, i.e., multi sourced and critically examined evidence.

This is the same strategy employed by the Bush wing of the Republican Party.

Phone calls from the dead are, presumably, low level communications. Bush and his friends are on speakerphone with God, who only talks to them because their critical faculties have not evolved to the point of screening out the voices.

"Is that you Lord?"

"Yes."

"How do I know you aren't an affect of red wine with fish?"

"You have to just believe George."

"Like with Santa?"

"Exactly."

The mistake we made attacking a secular country in an unprovoked war of aggression is huge, but it is not a mistake to those who want to keep the oil flowing at any cost, instead of finding alternate technology and implementing it in a massive and unified change of course. If we can't stop now, and admit that substituting corporate policy for the public interest is not going to take us somewhere we want to go, there is no way out of it. That is what defines Fate. You know you're going the wrong way but you keep justifying it until you are delivered to your fate.

Destiny is something to be achieved through refusing to accept what is not objectively true as a basis for making decisions on how to move forward. The future is seen not as separate from the present, but as an extension of it along an incontrovertible line of logic. There is a benign indifference involved in Destiny as well as in Fate. Base decisions on one-sided evidence and the other side will blind side you sooner or later. That's fate. The advantage Destiny has over Fate is that she chooses from a high place, with an overview of the entire game. She isn't caught in being forced into one bad move after another by unconscious suggestions based on selective evidence.

I was going to link to a source discussing the difference between fate and destiny but there is nothing out there I agree with. They are used interchangeably. By way of pointing out the difference, I refer to Erich Neumann, who wrote about the difference between a psychic and a psychologist. The gist of it is that the child has natural psychic ability and can see the future. Somebody can stay in that immature state all their life and have brilliant psychic ability. The psychologist also sees the future but is aware that the reason it is visible is because there are patterns in the collective unconscious that play out in a predictable way.

A person with the mind of a child can see the patterns but is not conscious of them as such, and is thus involved in a magical realm. The person who leaves the realm of child's mind and develops the intellect learns to see the patterns and know them as patterns. For that person they are not unconscious patterns, and the focus isn't on telling somebody their future inside the pattern they occupy. It is giving them a sense of how to see the unconscious forces driving the patterns, and essentially giving them tools to get out from under a spell, or unconscious belief system.

The unfolding of the basic patterns, in Shakespeare, for example, is "fate" to somebody involved as a participant. But for the playwright, who fashioned the play, the patterns are visible. When the patterns are visible it is not fate to which one surrenders, but destiny with which one joins. While there is only one way for an unconscious pattern to end, there is, in consciousness of the pattern, opportunity to make choices in favor of a particular destiny. Einstein was one with his destiny, but he still had to do the math. If he had not risen to the occasion, a fate would have befallen him with the same inevitability as his destiny lifted him.

So on Memorial Day, when we look at all the people who died because of political policy, it is just moving further away into a national schizophrenic episode to say they all died for freedom. Some of them did die defending the homeland, or at least its ideals, but some of them died enforcing corrupt policy decisions. Bad policy is not our Destiny. It's just bad policy, with fateful consequences.

Posted: Mon - May 28, 2007 at 05:54 PM