Dreaming.....

Dear Mr. Levy, 
 
I have been following your writings for a while and was delighted to read your thoughts on the Modern Writers website. The groundbreaking originality of your thought makes your contribution to this site most welcome. 
 
I love Orwell's oft quoted,  
 
"[W]e are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." 
 
As if Iraq was not an ample demonstration of the truth of this concept, we now have the spectacle of the atrocity of a helpless Lebanon strangled to death by Israel and (make no mistake about it) the United States in front of the eyes of all the world in gross violation of international law. The events of past weeks are so startling and so atrocious that I am surprised the whole nation has not awakened - like the rest of the world. Reacting as a body to the destruction of Lebanon, our illustrious congress of the United States took the lead by unanimously voting to roll over in bed and set the alarm for this coming November.  
 
To digress… 
 
Some of my greatest insights have come from my attempts to examine my shadow - or the dark side of my nature. My wanderings through the Valley of the Shadow always give me the greatest insights into my true nature. Jean Genet I believe once echoed the Roman philosopher, Terence, who said "Nothing human is foreign to me." The famous Twentieth Century playwright's life certainly embodied this maxim. On its face one can be quick to assent until the fine print rears its head. What about the Auschwitz guard? The mass murderer? The sexual predator? Tom Delay? Unless we can understand the humanity of even the least of these, we cannot say we fully understand and accept Genet's thesis. I constantly find myself at odds with this thesis myself. One's natural (moral?) tendency, like the body's immune reaction to disease and foreign objects, is instinctively to reject such horrors. I believe that we must be counterintuitive, even to our own neurological hard-wiring and, like the occupant of Freud's couch, must go precisely where it is most difficult to go.  
 
I first encountered this in High School when discussing the Holocaust with fellow students in history class. Everyone called the Nazis inhuman monsters and said that their actions were impossible to explain even as mental illness. I saw it differently and argued that we had to realize that the behavior of the Nazis were the behavior of humans who were like us in every way. I felt that the only strategy to avoid the reoccurrence of such madness was to attempt to see in what ways we might just fall prey to the same crimes ourselves. Placing the Nazis outside the human realm was to force them to reoccur. Would that I had known at such a tender age the wisdom of Hannah Arendt or Carl Jung, my peers might not have trounced me so soundly on this subject. 
 
I often find the kind of behavior that I most roundly condemn is the very behavior that I am most prone to myself. For example, I am most often obsessed with achieving certainty. I hate making an assertion that I cannot back up with evidence from the most unimpeachable sources possible. I am disturbed by gray areas that cannot be defined or documented. My friends will tell you that I can become insufferable when I think I am right and someone else is wrong. I think that is why my two biggest nemeses: the fundamentalists and the neocons disturb me the most. These are two groups that have achieved what I most seek: certainty - the rock-solid, unimpeachable knowledge that they are right. The quality that I believe allows such belief in the face of the vicissitudes of the modern world is faith - something I do not completely understand outside of my analysis of faith as a mental pathology. The only way I can possibly understand faith is in the sense of - confidence - the confidence in myself, my emotional constitution and my rationality to somehow make sense of the universe and our human condition. I must admit that even this very restricted concept of faith is more often than not sorely tested by my experience in the world. 
 
Another area I have trouble understanding and identifying with is power - those who are obsessed with power - power of all sorts: political power, the power of violence and the power of the sexual predator. I have never been terribly interested in getting others to do what I wanted by any means other than by reason or perhaps the sweet seduction of moving an audience with a work of art. Hence I do not understand on any essential level those who would attempt to dominate others against their will. I guess you could say it is a cop out on my part that I have never sought to be in a position where I was even able to dominate others: capitalist boss, military commander, policeman, coach, therapist, tenured academic, etc. For me the most exhilarating enterprises I have been involved in are where creative people function in cooperative work to create something amazing. I would prefer to work as an artist, but failing that, I would much rather be a slave than a slave-master. There is less psychic or karmic damage being a slave - although the pay is usually not as good. I suppose if I had been suddenly thrust into a situation where I had been forced to play the slave master, to dominate and control others, I might have had a better understanding of the inherent humanness of such a nefarious enterprise. You see, I have always shunned such activities because my emotional temperament since adolescence (and probably before) has been unconsciously and intuitively anti-capitalist. Capitalism is, I believe, counterproductive to human development on an individual, collective and an ecological level. Riane Eisler calls it an example of the dominator model of social organization and it is clearly reaching the end of its tether in our New Amerikan Century. The only question is, how much damage will it do before it figuratively and literally runs out of gas.  
 
For the same reason I cannot understand the dominator model of human behavior, I have trouble understanding pedophilia. Professor Davis regards pedophilia and capitalism is intimately linked. This paradigm holds that children are not truly human and hence can be dealt with by those who would use them as property and as a wholly-other commodity. Apart from my completely failing to understand this commodification of another human being of whatever age, I also fail to understand the actual sexual arousal that occurs in the pedophile. I have read a lot of the psychological explanations for pedophilia. Until I can understand personally how such people can find children sexually attractive, I will continue to fail to understand this very deeply ingrained and apparently universal form of human dominator behavior. 
 
I do not know how familiar you are with the work of Walter A. Davis (Death's Dream Kingdom and An Evening With JohBinet Ramsey, etc.) I think the two of you would have a lot to talk about, being as how I think you both have grasped an important key to the maze we are currently dreaming in. Both you and Mr. Davis possess a unique, profound depth of feeling for the immense malaise of our time.  
 
No one goes to a therapist, doctor or healer, until one perceives symptoms that are beyond bearing. As political progressives who feel at odds with the whole government as well as the society at large, we have no lack of the symptoms of this disease. We seek not just a relief from these symptoms, but a more universal healing. You, Mr. Levy, have pointed out in another essay that George W. Bush could possibly be paradoxically a kind of Buddisatva, who, by so grotesquely embodying the symptoms of the disease we all suffer from, has become a curative agent to awaken the masses from their dogmatic slumber. I think the difference between the right and the left in this country is that the right merely wants their symptoms relieved while the left wants a truly universal healing. All feel the discomfort of sensing that we are in the slumber of the damned. All are turning fitfully in our collective coma. The right wants to return to the soft national security-blanket of self-righteous certainty and truth swathed in the palliatives fed them by their trusted leaders. The left would like to return to sleep but have heard too much, seen too much and cannot remain somnolent. We who have had this great discomforting vision must first shake ourselves fully awake. I have the feeling that you believe this awakening is sufficient to solve our problems. I feel this is only the start. We must cast off the last vestiges of the illusions about humanity, God and country we have been fed with our mother's milk. Walter Davis calls these the "guarantees." Not until we are able to separate ourselves from these illusions will we be capable of seeing unconditioned reality: "America is the greatest land on earth." "The record of human history is an uninterrupted linear progression toward the light." "People are basically good." "In order to become better human beings we must struggle to hide the things we don't like about our Self from both ourselves and others." "There is a Heaven and a Hell beyond death in which our precious personalities will survive" "Science and technology will ultimately save us."  
 
Tell me yours. 
 
I believe both you and Professor Davis have key insights to our awaking to our present reality and to the possibly of finding a successful strategy for healing that the fully-awakened may turn their efforts toward.  
 
"Au royaume des aveugles les borgnes sont rois." 
 
"In the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king."  
 
Why then are we who have awakened from the dream not kings in the way you would suggest at the end of your essay? Why are we not able to avoid the same pitfalls into which the Bushites are regularly falling? Are thinking that there is an Icaraian way out of this maze and that there is a possibility of Homo Sapiens species survival - just other examples of what Professor Davis would call "guarantees" or what you would call, in your good Buddhist fashion, "illusions"? Should we, like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, fold our arms in resignation and continue to wait with equal indifference for God(ot?) or Death, whichever comes first?  
 
Perhaps I have not yet shook myself fully awake, but I continue to posit strategies for the overthrow of these brutes that would presume to reign so absolutely over us. I seek a society of my fellows and would live in harmony with a cooperative model of a humane society. I work for a world where all the children of Gaia can help sustain this tiny blue marble on its perilous course through time and space. Are these also all illusions? And are we who seek such things still asleep? 
 
If you are not familiar with Dr. Davis' work, the essays on this site would be an excellent start. I would suggest beginning with  
 
"Bible Says, The Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism."  
Tuesday, 15 November 2005  
 
Dr, Jung, let me introduce you to Dr. Freud. I think the two of you might have a lot to say to each other. I just want to be there with my tape recorder. 
 
Peace and Light, 
 
Bob Boldt 

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