Hyper-Reality

“After the end of the Cold War with the dissolution of the USSR, some political commentators felt that a new term was needed to describe the United States’ position as the lone superpower. French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine popularized the term [hyperpower] in 1998…It has also been applied retroactively to dominant states of the past [such as] the Achaemenid Empire, the Tang Dynasty, the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Dutch Empire, and the British Empire. ‘We take institutions for granted but in fact have no idea where they come from’. Institutions are the rules that coordinate social behavior. Just as tribes are based on the deep-seated human instinct of looking out for one’s family and relatives, states depend on the human propensity to create and follow social rules… Dr. Francis ‘The End of History’ Fukuyama views societies as developing politically in several different ways…rather than marching along a single road to political development.”

Ron Suskind (2002): “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality…That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.”

“Twenty years and two [or more] trillion dollars later, our nation-building folly is ending in a catastrophe that could repeat 1979’s Iran hostage crisis on a massive scale…America’s humiliation plays out daily on screens around the globe…When the Afghan war is autopsied, the failure will belong to elites in the military, in the intelligence agencies, in the diplomatic corps, in academia and in think tanks and to politicians of both parties…It belongs to an entire leadership class. …The belief that we can ‘create our own reality’ is a vice that infects not only the US leadership elite, but modern man — Americans most of all, because ours is the most modern of nations…”

Ron Dreher: “The Bolsheviks thought they could create the New Soviet Man by radically changing the conditions of material life. Mao Zedong lived by the same lie, as did all communist regimes of the 20th century, which attempted to subjugate reality to theory…We have assumed that all peoples want individual freedom and share our vision of prosperity…The point was that liberal democracy is not the natural state of humankind, but is rather a mindset that emerges under certain conditions…Societies are not machines but gardens, ecosystems that are sensitive to particular histories and local conditions…Under the rule of elites who believed that what was good for the market was good for Americans, a hollowed-out middle class saw jobs go abroad, communities collapse and the superrich accumulate a greater proportion of national wealth than at any time since the Gilded Age…Liberal Democratic elites incentivize Americans to be hostile to each other on the basis of race. Their woke ideology is destroying law, medicine and academia…Rather than teaching the young resilience, our elites instruct them to weaponize victimhood to gain power. The [Democratic and Republican] leadership class…are presiding over the decline of America because they are more interested in preserving their own power and partisan convictions than in holding together this demoralized nation…In her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explored the conditions [such as] widespread loss of faith in institutional authority that could lead a country to embrace totalitarianism.”

“Erich Fromm explored humanity’s shifting relationship with freedom, with particular regard to the personal consequences of its absence. His special emphasis was the psychosocial conditions that facilitated the rise of Nazism. Fromm distinguishes between ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’. The former refers to emancipation from restrictions such as social conventions…the kind of freedom typified by the existentialism of Sartre but, on its own can be a destructive force unless accompanied by a creative element — ‘freedom to’ — the use of freedom to employ the total integrated personality in creative acts. This necessarily implies a true connectedness with others that goes beyond the superficial bonds of conventional social intercourse…’in the spontaneous realization of the self, man unites himself anew in the world’. In the process of being freed from authority, we are often left with feelings of hopelessness (likened to the process of the individuation of infants in the normal course of child development) that will not abate until we use our ‘freedom to’ and develop some form of replacement of the old order…a common substitute for exercising ‘freedom to’ or authenticity is to submit to an authoritarian system that replaces the old order with another of different external appearance but identical function for the individual: to eliminate uncertainty by prescribing what to think and how to act…A major chapter in his book [Escape from Freedom] deals with the development of Protestant theology, with a discussion of the work of Calvin and Luther. The collapse of an old social order and the rise of capital led to a more developed awareness that people could be separate autonomous beings and direct their own future rather than simply fulfilling a socioeconomic role. This in turn fed into a new conception of God that had to account for the new freedom while still providing some moral authority…Fromm’s interpretation of Mein Kampf suggests that Hitler’s authoritarian personality structure…made him an appealing prospect for an insecure middle class that needed some sense of pride and certainty.”

After September 11, 2001, “They” enacted the PATRIOT ACT, coming after PNAC, composed of the dumbest smartest guys in the room, Leo Strauss’s Neoconservatives (see BBC’s “The Power of Nightmares”) reported that a Pearl-Harboresque event would be required for a president to gain the political power to invade the Middle East and control the oil on the Great Chessboard of Eurasia.

“Psychohistory is an amalgam of psychology, history and related social sciences and the humanities. It examines the ‘why’ of history, especially the difference between the intention and actual behavior. Psychobiography, childhood, group dynamics, mechanisms of psychic defense, dreams, and creativity are primary areas of research…Its first academic use appeared in Erik Erikson’s book Young Man Luther (1958), where the author called for a discipline of ‘psycho-history’ to examine the impact of human character on history.” The emptiness that most fear to face, let alone name, at the core of the psyche; the ever-changing phantasm thrown up by the “monster of time,” that is to say, projected by our brains due to a latent Avidya, or lack of knowledge, which leads to Samskara, or constructive volitional activity, which leads to Vijnana, or consciousness. This process has been occurring so fast as to appear continuous to a child from the age of around 2 years.

Consciousness leads to Namarupa, or “name and form (constituent elements of mental and physical existence); Sadayatana, the six senses of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind); Sparsa, or contact; Vedana, or pain; Trsna, or thirst; Bhava, or coming to be; Jati, or being born; and Jaramarana — old age and death. This is a process “endlessly” repeated from thought to thought in the microcosm, and physical incarnation to physical incarnation in the macrocosm…but nothing is really happening. I like to call the Wheel of Life an infographic of Samsara (“flowing around,” the central conception of metempsychosis, transmigration of souls), which has at its hub a pig, bird and snake, symbolizing 1. ignorance of reality’s interconnectedness, thus a deluded conception of how to act in one’s self-interest, which conditions and is conditioned by 2. ego-based attachment/desire for things, and 3. aversion or anger. Under the influence of these three “poisons,” beings create karma (the law of cause and effect), as shown in the next layer of the wheel, a symbolic representation of cyclic existence, a seemingly endless round of births and deaths into and out of one body after another, in this, the Manusaya, and five other “realms” of existence. The animal realm is the only other one that we can see — there are four more that we cannot: those of the Devas or “gods,” the Asuras or demi-gods (“angels” and “demons”), the Preta or “hungry ghosts,” and the Naraka or denizens of Hell — which is subdivided according to everyone’s particular kink while in this human realm.

Physical and mental sensations, perceptions, apperceptions, recognitions, naming of things, then thoughts, words and deeds designed to achieve an ego’s ends are akin to a person in a dream acting in his personal interest vis-à-vis other people in the dream, without realizing that everyone and thing he encounters are phantoms in the imagination of a creator who is his capital ‘S’ Self…unless he “wakes up” and becomes lucid. The goal of life, one could say, is to realize the illusory nature of the ego, upon which one acts selflessly, naturally, to benefit society and the planet. Most religions and cultures believe in the Golden Rule, which dates at least to the 5th century BC. Belief in God is not necessary to endorse it — to quote the late, great Kurt Vonnegut, “I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.” Humanism is mainly associated with “a system of education and mode of inquiry” that developed in Renaissance Italy at the end of the Dark Ages, beginning with a revival in the study of classical antiquity, specifically, the humanities, which include moral philosophy. “Humanists sought to create a citizenry able to speak and write with eloquence and clarity, and thus capable of engaging in the civic life of their communities and persuading others to virtuous and prudent actions…to influence all of society.” There’s some gourmet food for thought.

Nicolas Pici: “Language invention and creative tropes and figures deployed for comic relief can help people assert their resilience in dark times.” Laughing is good, although I sometimes wonder about the therapeutic effects of laughing like Vonnegut at humanity’s seemingly suicidal stupidity, the cumulative effect of which makes us look no smarter than yeast in a petri dish… Jung wrote about the Shadow who doesn’t know and is unknown — the dark side of the personality — instinctive, irrational, and prone to psychological projection, in which a perceived personal inferiority is recognized as a perceived moral deficiency in another person or group, The Other. If everyone were taught this, they’d understand themselves and their society, and the world would be more wonderful by far, because the haters would stop hating on each other. The greedheads might even stop being greedy, and the sociopaths & psychopaths less pathological. Vote for me, and I’ll mandate public teaching of Jungian Theory in all social spheres, because character is destiny, and Time is running out.