Associations


This morning I found a good opinion piece by David Brooks, which is sort of unusual because I don't usually find Brooks very interesting. But this was an exceptionally good piece, centering on how people grow together in familial love. He makes the point that we don't really have meaning except in relationship to each other, and that politics are like religion; you are what the local reality dictates you will be.

This isn't a new idea, but it's one that needs to be refreshed sometimes. As I recall this was a central theme of the writings of Krishnamurti. He wrote about our having no meaning except in relationship, and so that would certainly explain why in Prescott Arizona, when the neighbors are Republicans just like they are Protestant, reality is not as important as is which team has the red, and which the blue, jerseys.

Of course it's no different in San Francisco, where proclaiming yourself a leftist is simply claiming that you can hold a conversation without saying things like, "Let's get'her done," and, "Hey, I just say what I'm thinking." There is a perception, and it is generally correct, that with more education you penetrate more through the covering of psychological warfare that surrounds gaining and exercising power. Without penetrating this layer of propaganda, there is just "fuck you," and, "no, my friend, fuck you."

For example, yesterday I was crossing Gurley on Whiskey Row in Prescott, and there were two skinny, long haired guys with tats and probably high, standing there with signs, "End the Occupation." And this other guy comes up and says, "Why do you want to end the occupation?"

I didn't hear more than that in passing, but I was half a block away when I heard a commotion ...

I have to stop here and figure out what to call these guys. They are country boys for sure, but they are in the outlaw class. That's it. There is an outlaw class that ascends from the sound of the Harley cams, urging Easy Rider into materialization as an archetypal figure. He ascends upward from men with long hair and beards and tats and guns and guitars, gaining in respectability as He moves up the economic spectrum, passing through employed craftsmen with one foot in the outlaw mythology and one among those who can pay for their skills, through professionals and working men on Harley choppers, living the myth of the cowboy outlaw. The myth runs through a spectrum everywhere, from prisons to armies to churches. The outlaw would make no sense, or rather the myth would make no sense, if he had no priest to bump up against, so to speak.

So these two boys were pig farm country, and ... I was half a block away when one of them unleashed a stream of profanity at the top of his lungs at the guy who asked, "Why do you want to end the occupation?" He was chasing him with the sign, yelling, "Fuck you!"

My thought when I saw the guys protesting the war was that I didn't particularly identify with them, because it's a look I don't affect. On the other hand I think the assessment from some quarters that this war will turn out to be the worst foreign policy blunder in American history is probably right. So asking why we should end the occupation was a pretty stupid thing to ask, like, "Why do you want to staunch the bleeding?"

The Brooks piece describes how we are shaped by our associations, so that if you grow up in New York you will most likely be liberal and if you grow up in Wyoming you will most likely be conservative. And in fact the political divide in this country is mostly between urban and rural. I remember when I was a kid and would have coffee with my dad in the mornings, at a small town cafe. There were always jokes about city people, in the form of stories told by rural men of the city feller's ignorance.

For example, there was the story of the man from Los Angeles who was taken deer hunting by a professional guide, and the man ended up shooting his horse, mistaking it for a deer. And there was the Californian who came back from quail hunting and had killed five woodpeckers. Conversely, in the city there is an arrogance toward the yokels who are obviously in from the sticks, and who don't understand the ways of the city. Sometimes when I'm in San Francisco's North Beach, or down around the wharf, I realize how differently I am treated if I have a camera or a t-shirt or hat that suggests I'm a tourist. Sometimes in Prescott I pick up on the projections associated with San Francisco.

I assumed that splitting my time between Prescott and San Francisco would give me a balanced point of view. On the one hand we have the world's oldest continuous rodeo and on the other we have the exotic erotic ball The more likely result is clinical schizophrenia with delusional episodes and underlying paranoia.

Speaking of mental illness, it has become fascinating to watch the actions of the United States in Iraq as the underlying justifications for our actions were exposed as false. But what is most fascinating about it is the playing through of the drama in George Bush's life of the power of cognitive dissonance. He made a mistake, and he had the option of admitting it or justifying himself, no matter what. He stood firm.

His standing firm in his justification for invading Iraq has at last transformed reality, and materialized Al Qaeda there, so that he can finally say that we are in Iraq fighting the group responsible for the 9-11 attacks. By God, there really is something to this observer created reality business!

"Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice." H.L. Mencken

On PBS today there was a program about cognitive dissonance, and why people often do not agree on even indisputable facts. Cognitive dissonance is the pain people suffer when their actions do not match their values. When one is experiencing dissonance the part of the brain that deals with logical thinking stops working, which is probably why it's so painful. The ego is in regression in the absence of a match between values and actions. And when the dissonance is resolved, the pleasure centers light up.

As I was driving along listening to this I thought, "Of course. You will move right or left depending on how you resolve the cognitive dissonance. Do you change the value and expand your behavioral possibilities, or do you keep the value and fight against sin? You might have the same behaviors but you suffer because you will not compromise the value. And what gets really interesting is looking at the relationship between political positions and whether or not you were physically punished when you were a child.

There is some evidence that if you are punished while being giving a suggestion, such as, "Don't you ever do that again," it constitutes something called "pain drug hypnosis." Reportedly such a suggestion can be so strong that a person will literally self-destruct rather than go against it. If that is the case, then we can see how people can become suicide bombers. "You do what I tell you," from the father, combined with a beating, will be a gift to the Prince when the son comes of age and the father authority is transferred to the state.

"He will do anything you ask. He's well trained."

"Good work. Let me give you the Medal of Freedom."

But I'm zig zagging, so to speak. The interesting thing about dissonance and its relationship to political ideology is that the pleasure centers light up when the dissonance is resolved. It doesn't matter in which direction it is resolved. If you hold the value, or boundary, and renounce your action as not belonging to you, but a dark stranger with whom you cannot associate in proper society, you resolve it. If you accept the dark stranger in yourself and loosen the restrictions on instinctual urges, you resolve the dissonance.

In both instances you have the pleasure, but in each it is associated with a different process. In the first process the value is the important thing and the behavior it contains becomes a sort of enemy to be overcome and even vanquished. Of course you can't do, but you can develop a lot of disease and war and crime and violence as the body retaliates against reason's dissociation from it. In he second process the value becomes less important and the freedom, or range of behaviors, increases.

This is an unfortunate consequence of having two brains and not thinking with both simultaneously. To think with both, there is a counterbalancing effect of the one with the other. As the value is released there is not just "nothing" there to guide behavior. Instinct works just fine in every other creature, and it actually has some advantages over values. One of them is that it is instantaneous, and does not require reference to anything outside itself. Like that country outlaw shaking his "Stop the Occupation Now" sign and screaming, "Fuck you!"

That's instinct without reference to an external system of behavioral norms, but does he care? He doesn't consider giving up his instinctual life moving up the social ladder. There is a price to be paid for moving into the civilization. This process reaches back to Gilgamesh and Inkidu. There is the King, or the corporation, and there is the animal man, or the outlaw. As I recall, Gilgamesh and Inkidu were parted, Inkidu went to the land of the dead. My memory (or the translation I once read) is that Gilgamesh did get the elixir of immortality, but he lost it over the side of the boat and couldn't get Inkidu back again.

So because they have pleasure associated with the resolution of the dissonance in a particular direction, people most likely identify themselves right or left. On the right they advocate strengthening the controls and restricting the instinctual rule, which is elevation of the masculine principle and dissociation of the feminine (earth, mater, matter, mother) principle. The matter has less power and the spirit, or reason, dominates. On the left they advocate individual liberty in matters of instinctual behavior, abortion, drug use, etc. The body, being materialized, is not considered under the rule of the masculine principle. On the left there is a fear and distrust of the tendency of the masculine toward trying to rule outside his realm, and thus setting up a defensive reaction from the feminine principle.

In the middle, there is a recognition that as in a good marriage, the feminine and masculine need to be in harmonious relationship in the individual. This in turn should reflect at the governing level. There is no animosity between them when each is in service to the other, but when this turns negative, you know it, because you hear the rag man's plaintive wails outside your window in the middle of the night.

When the right and left are in service to each other, it is the ego, in the center between them, which has to work all the time to maintain this relationship. So people who become enlightened don't have to give up the ego, they have to give up the youthful ego, which thinks it is the reason everything else exists, and identify instead with the larger self, in which the ego is a component. It is not the most powerful component. If the Self is forced to choose between the ego and the shadow it chooses the shadow and discards the ego, simply because the shadow contains more energy. The Self is making a simple choice for survival in such an instance.

Let me give a little better description of cognitive dissonance. It was demonstrated in a university experiment many years ago, in which college students were asked to go without food and water for a period of time, I think it was two days. There were different groups but in every case they were given some good reason to go without food and water for two days. It might be the value of the experiment to mankind, or it might be money, or academic credit. But one group was given no good reason to participate. They were given a kind of vague explanation of why they were doing it, and a little money but not enough to justify participation.

The expectation was that this last group would have to justify their behavior, and so would say they were not that hungry or thirsty anyway. This is exactly what happened, and not only that, when the fatty acids in the stomach were tested, these volunteers really weren't as hungry or thirsty as the others. Their bodies changed to justify their actions. The need to justify oneself reaches down into the cellular level.

Every time we do something that is not in line with our value system, we are forced to make a choice. We can choose to weaken the value system so that the behavior is permitted, or we can renounce the behavior as not ourselves, and be very bothered by it in other people, whose value system is weaker. "Oh well, it's probably inferior bloodlines."

Here again, there is a divide between those who want to impose a more rigid morality, and those who want freedom to do as they please so long as they are a Johnson in their relationships with the neighbors. And the reality is that the instinctual energies do have to be contained somewhat for society to function, but they also happen to be the only energy there is. It's like having a tiger for a friend. You can train it but you can't disrespect it.

The high minded morality doesn't produce any energy; it consumes energy. This is why Blake observed, "It did appear to reason that desire had been contained, but the devil's story was that the Christ fell, and set up his kingdom with what he stole from the abyss." You can take the energy from the body and use it to build castles in the sky, but there should be no confusion as to what the castles are made out of.

A logical way to look at the process of moving from containment to higher levels of freedom is that it is the way in which a child moves from the parents, or family, into a larger community. It's actually kind of a genius process, that you are forced to make a decision to break the value before you can expand your boundaries. This is in fact a potent symbol of the good mother in the psyche, in the form of the bear. She forces her cubs up a tree when she goes out to hunt and they are forbidden to come down. When she doesn't come back one day, they are forced to disobey or die. This frees them from dependence on the mother, through the act of breaking free from her dominance.

The doctor talking about cognitive dissonance mentioned the therapists who developed a profile of symptoms a person would have if they had been sexually molested and repressed it. They began to develop in their clients this model of symptoms and what they meant. They theorized that the actual memories were repressed, and they began to suggest this to the clients, sometimes children, who obediently began to remember the abuse.

Pretty soon they had ruined a lot of families by helping people remember how they were molested by their fathers. This was all done through suggestion, and the fact that all attraction has an erotic component, though the erotic component in family relationships is generally unconscious. It was once dominant, and was called endogamous. It was a system for cousin marriage when people lived in small groups. It was abandoned in favor of an exogamous dynamic, and went unconscious by the general route: it moved to divine right of kings and from there on into the unconscious. But it has a great deal of erotic energy, and a strong effect on the psyche. This can be easily accessed through suggestion.

The point the doctor made as I recall was that these people did not want to admit they had done all this damage because they made a mistake. They wanted to justify what they were doing, and there continues to be a great deal of material on sexual abuse of children which ignores the fact that the problem in abuse is not remembering it, but forgetting it. The mistake was so destructive to so many people they could not bring themselves to own it. He said if you make a mistake and you own it, no matter how bad it is, you tend to come out ahead.

Obviously if you own the mistake you are dealing with the dissonance. You admit your mistake, ask forgiveness, and move on. He also mentioned that one source of depression might be a continual preoccupation with little things. "Little things don't matter," he said. What I understood him to mean by that is, the process of resolving things should go on pretty much automatically most of the time, usually in the direction of:

"I will remember to be more considerate next time," or, "Screw him; he needs his ass kicked is what he needs." Or, the centrist position, "I need to pay closer attention."

Posted: Fri - July 20, 2007 at 11:40 AM