Thor Among the Giants: Part II

Poor old Thor, thinking he was doing ordinary tasks, like drinking a tankard of beer or tussling with a little cat, only to find out later that everything was happening on a cosmic scale he was totally unprepared for. And like him, we assume our persistent emotional afflictions are purely personal small-scale stuff when really they are part of a fierce and terrible wailing, reverberating through the centuries from the grief of long-forgotten bones. We have forebears who did not live in happy, rustic villages, but in harsh climates, warm or cold, where survival was touch and go, and one deception or betrayal might mean survival for one family and death for another. Where the rich were owners not just of property but of people, free to dispose of them at their whim or sadistic pleasure. The butchery of humans against humans has been going on a long time now, and the wreckage is all around us and in us.

 Trauma is unavoidable. We live in a world where life maintains itself by destroying itself, where animals eat each other, where cold, hunger and death are part of the deal. But the trauma we humans create in war, in the workplace and the household is totally gratuitous. The long, frozen East European winter is unavoidable, but the siege of Mariupol was a human-made catastrophe, as was World War II, the war in Iraq, etc. And on the smaller, household scale, there is the constant, moment-by-moment uncalled-for violence and micro-violence we do to each other that Leonard Cohen described as:

            The homicidal bitching
           That goes down in every kitchen
            Over who’s to serve
            And who’s to eat.

 The trauma theory of mental health, superior as it is to the “brain dead” chemical imbalance theory that came before it, looks away from the wailing of the bones down the centuries and keeps us in the personal realm of the here and now, today. But you know what happens to those who ignore their own history...It’s not that the trauma theory is in any way wrong, it’s just incomplete. Not only do hurt people hurt people, but self-limited people limit people, who themselves become self-limited people, and so on, involuntarily down the generations. To discover what trauma is part of, what it is transmitting, we have to go cosmic and grapple with the Midgard Serpent of our collective pain.

 To take an example, the average European citizen of the early modern period would likely have been wrestling with an overwhelming sense of guilt and original sin, chastising themselves in even the littlest expression of joy or exuberance, fearing that it will bring them to the gates of Hell and eternal torment. That guilt passes on down to today, quite possibly to someone who has had little contact with the ins and outs of the Christian belief system, but nonetheless carries a conviction that at core there is something wrong with them, that they must work day and night to lift the spell of their unworthiness, and that accolades and praise are, for them empty words. The source of my pain may be in my childhood, but it is also in some seventeenth century preacher inveighing against things like the crime of dancing, or of feasting on the Sabbath. In powerful, if slightly obscure language, William Blake describes the process:

The caterpillar on the leaf
Reminds thee of thy mother’s grief.

 In vain-glory hatcht and nurst,
By double Spectres, self accurst,
My son! my son! thou treatest me
But as I have instructed thee.
On the shadows of the moon
Climbing thro' night's highest noon:
In time's ocean falling drown'd:
In aged ignorance profound,
Holy and cold, I clipp'd the wings
Of all sublunary things,
And in depths of my dungeons
Closed the father and the sons.

The lines, “In aged ignorance profound…” are accompanied by an illustration showing a bespectacled old man, looking rather like God the father, methodically clipping the wings of an angel or cherub with an enormous pair of scissors.

 Those wings are still clipped today, and these personal traumas comes in the societal context of alienation. That is the theory with which we can make sense of our persistent, resistant pain. The idea of alienation was thought up by Hegel, developed by Marx and revived by Herbert Marcuse in the nineteen sixties. Alienation is the problematic estrangement and separation of things that really should belong together, and Marx saw four kinds of alienation: of people from their work, people from one another, from their environment, and finally from themselves. When the bosses treat us as widgets of the workplace, it is hard for us to keep our full humanity intact; when personal relationships are dominated by status, power and keeping up appearances, we struggle to hold on to authenticity; when the planet has descended from being Mother Earth to a resource for widget-making and a dumping ground for the resultant toxins, we lose touch with our own Source; and finally, when all these alienations have taken place, it’s really hard to be a happy bunny we are lost from our own selves, estranged from our own joy and sense of what’s real. Quite a mess.

 Marx’s interest was political, and he saw the core alienation as being alienation from work, since work produces money and money – capital – keeps whoever the current ruling gangsters are in power. He believed that the proletariat – the working classes – would inevitably get sick of being alienated and oppressed all the time, rise up to improve their condition and eventually become rulers of themselves. This ultimate Utopian condition was so far off that to predict its final shape was futile, and he said, “I don’t write recipes for the cook-shops of the future.” But he was confident that capitalism was at its heart an unstable mechanism for human existence and that economic forces that today keep us in a state of unrest would eventually toss us onto the shore of a just and equitable society.  

 Fast forward to the 1960s however, with the Communist countries making a complete hash of the human rights thing, while capitalist countries seemed to be ticking along quite nicely. It was time for a Marxian revamp, and it came in Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, which did a re-set on alienation as well. Western industrial society, Marcuse said, has made life so comfortable for people, or at least a sufficient number of us, that we have sunk into a soporific stupor of consumer goods and consumable entertainments, no longer feeling an impulse to tear down the system and start anew. As the old song goes,

I’ve got the foreman’s job at last
So stick the red flag up your arse.

 If Marx said we have nothing to lose but our chains, Marcuse observes these chains have not gone away, they have become so softly padded that we barely notice them any more – but they do still restrict us, just as much as in a full-on totalitarian state. According to Marcuse, we are just as totalitarian as anywhere else, but we are controlled not by state-sponsored terror but by this soporific, one-dimensional state we have lulled ourselves into – which makes our system infinitely more effective and stable.

 Our consumerism and our entertainment industry create “false needs” like the need for name brand clothing, cars that go vroom vroom, shows with A-list celebrities, and so on. If Marcuse knew about cell phones, Apple watches, the internet, social media platforms, and smart toasters, his hair would have probably jumped out. All these things, he says, have so co-opted our minds and lulled us into a mental passivity or sleep that if they were suddenly taken away from us cold turkey, we would all go quietly – or perhaps noisily – mad. We are so far away from our real needs that we have no idea what they are, let alone how to fulfill them. And so here we are, trapped in a cotton candy hell, barely able to notice the real situation. Who knows? Maybe Siri has the answer.

 For Marcuse and Marx, the solutions came down to political revolution, but, as we have noticed, regime change generally leads to a new set of stooges taking over and wearing the crown for a while.  More interesting is the spiritual take on alienation. What if the engine of alienation is not the lust for status, sex, political power and lots and lots of money, but spiritual timidity? At a dinner party in 1725 William Blake remarked that Jesus Christ was the one true and only God. Then he added to his fellow dinner guest, “And so am I. And so are you.” Anyone who has taken a psychedelic might follow the overwhelming bigness of what he said. That bigness of who and what we are is far more terrifying than scary ghosts or hairy monsters, and the spiritual destiny that beckons is so intimidating that any person of this world might easily take a raincheck on it and say thanks, but I think I’ll stay in my little closed world a while longer.

 The level of trust that is required from ourselves and from those around us to create, as Eckhart Tolle calls it, a New Earth, is almost shocking and quite frightening. After the great contracture of denying our full selves, it makes sense to amuse ourselves with power, money, and the shiny toys of high status, just to stay safe from the destructive beauty of love. If we cannot step into our fullness, we are compelled to retreat into our smallness, whether that is the traumatized world of homicidal bitching or the candy cotton consumer paradise that tries to cover it over.

 The pinch of alienation gives us a clue to our real situation, as may the fact that we have half the world enslaved or starved in order to fulfill our cotton candy needs, and that we are turning our beautiful planet into a convection oven filled with microplastics. Like having a drinking problem, the next sip is not a big deal, and so on. In the context of this profound collective insanity, it now makes sense to us that our anxieties, depressions and compulsions won’t go away by an act of rationality or of will. Or by having a weekly conversation with a nice person who doesn’t criticize us the way mom and dad used to. The promise of therapy, especially cognitive behavioral therapy, is that we will become the CEO of our own lives and whip that depression into shape. We really think we can outrun Thought or wrestle down Old Age, but no, what we have taken as a personal blight is the reality of the collective situation staring us in the face and refusing to go away.

 What I took to be purely my problem is part of the cosmic problem of humanity trying to wake itself up before it destroys itself. We’re not only traumatized, we are alienated from our own selves. For some of us, the level of disquiet that creates will just be the background radiation of what it means to live in the regular world; but others, whether by accident, fate, or predisposed sensitivity, are more exposed to the full ramifications of the nightmare of modern history, and for them the pain will be persistent and hard to bear. They are the ones who will get a “mental health” diagnosis. In the personal realm they have a disorder; in the collective context they are carrying a larger share of the burden of history. For things to deeply change inside me I need to have a super-sized understanding of what is going on. Otherwise, I will be like Thor, perplexed and enraged that my best efforts are just not good enough.

 The condition we are in today is where our inner lives, with their harsh, unyielding critical voices, their sudden plumets of despair, and their unassuageable cravings, are like a picture of Dorian Grey, growing more and more monstrous in the attic, while the outer appearance of gleaming skyscrapers, sparkly consumer products purveyed by sexy happy people, all organized by celebrity politicians, gives a false version on the outside. Some people think they still have a shot at always living in sexy/happy/celebrity candy land, while others seem to be condemned to fester in the attic. As a collective, we need to face down the portrait of Dorian Grey and more fully humanize ourselves; there are no mental health conditions, there are only spiritual conditions, and we all have an innate capacity to find the beauty behind the mask.