DRACONIAN UTOPIA: Tavistock Roots
The Uninvited States of America, by Iona Miller
The Long Crisis & the Tavistock Agenda
Corporate * Military * Government * Intelligence * Media * Science * Psychiatry * Finance
"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution." --Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961
"The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by and elite, unrestrained by traditional values." --Zbigniew Brzezinsky, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era, 1970 
DRACONIAN UTOPIA: The Twisted Root
The character of mighty oaks and dense forests are holographically contained in their tiny seeds. On the Tavistock family tree, there are many intertwined twisted roots, many divergent branches each with their own agendas, and many strange fruits. All of them lead to interesting tangents, wild connections, and fantastic conclusions.
The twisted roots enmesh those from occult influences, to intelligence operations, to outright greed but always involve power and control over the world we experience. Most of what Tavistock does takes place underground, covertly by a scientific dictatorship.
Forms of cultural hegemony include psychological, spiritual, emotional, political, social, military, economic, medical and intellectual oppression and domination. Certain research projects are suppressed by dogmatic science. Like any ideology, Tavistock asks us to believe its deceptive promises and refrain from questions about what they don't tell. They control the highs and lows of our expectations and the controlled demolition of the economy. To think otherwise may be painfully naive.
We don't expect them to manufacture ideologies and enemies to mobilize the masses. We don't expect them to engage in covert dirty tricks, secretly foment revolutions or use deceptive diplomacy to execute a secret social and esoteric agenda. We don't expect them to actively work against our health and welfare, destroying the food chain, good water and good earth, and good air, not to mention developing biological weapons.
We don't expect them to engineer arrested development and family breakdown. We don't expect them to use 'planning theory' and pop culture to foster alienation and dysfunction. We don't expect them to poison the well of global society in their undeclared war on humanity. We must learn to see through what they do as coercion, using their esoteric techniques of crisis creation and management. Their initial project -- Operation Research on military management techniques -- was turned on civilians.
Tavistock is an immersive process, a transnational inter-agency collaboration, whose 'research' is best evaluated by its real-world phenomena -- the cumulative effects of machinations, trendspotting, memes, and propaganda. They look at effects, then find the causes to produce them. They begin with solutions and find the problems they solve. They create media and products to satisfy needs that don't yet exist. They shape the world by shaping opinion.
Even 'sanitized,' their programs have global repercussions. In quantum information theory, if all records of an event are decorrelated from it, then by definition there is no way to know whether this event has ever happened. This situation is indistinguishable from its not having happened. Talk about 'dark matters.'
Correlates at the social scale are obvious: history is fed through multiple feedback loops, censored and manufactured, redacting the most important covert forces in play. Most agents of influence, involved in strategic formulation of complex ill-structured problems, are unaware their contributions are twisted.
R&D is disguised as simple program context, objectives, content and futures. An inventory of program policy objectives is mapped onto program activities (projects). How these activities contribute to achieving policy objectives is analyzed. Limitations are identified as well as scope of future action needed to fulfill program objectives. The process is fractally reiterated at every scale throughout all domains of the cultural landscape.
Posthegemony is not a class struggle but a "struggle to produce class," and maintain an elite class. Class war is created. This is how and why we were Neoconned. No traditional myth is as untruthful as the modern myth of progress -- the fiction that life can be altered at will. Paradoxically, the human imagination arguably can be blamed for the worst crimes of our era.
Analogous to nature's holographic projection, Tavistock uses constructive and destructive interference patterns to manifest its virtual multidimensional imagery. Metaphorically, as in physics and perturbation theory, probability is only cancelled out by 'renormalization.' Tavistock operates like a 'normalizing constant.' They constrain the sum over all classes, of all cultural potentials (nested overlapping divergences) to 1 -- globalization. They make their programs the most probable and authoritatively call that 'normal.'
Political Philosopher John Gray attacks humanism as a worldview in which volition and morality are an illusion. He portrays humanity as a ravenous species engaged in wiping out other forms of life. His view is that universal human rights are not an ideal constitution for a single regime throughout the world, but a set of minimum standards for peaceful coexistence among regimes that will always remain different. In the course of pursuing the utopian ideal of a world without evil, entire societies have been destroyed.
"The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge. The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge -- not even in the long run." (John Gray, Heresies)
Cryptocracy refers to a type of government where the real leaders are hidden. A fake government may appear to be in charge and not know themselves that they are not in charge. It can also be used when referring to similar arrangements in institutions, organizations, orders, sects and cults. Tavistock and its subsidiaries and de facto offshoots are such institutions. Tavistock is the rudder on the pirate ship of state, not only steering but manipulating delusionary and inappropriate foreign and domestic policy.
The occult is one of the keys to world events. Reality is also defined by geopolitics. Like nature, history is cyclic. Corporate feudalism has replaced democracy as the new elitist rule. Drug companies are now as powerful as banks and oil. Corporations compete with nation-states and international mafia-style crime rings, employing the gambits of straw-dogs, smokescreens, hypnotized patsies, manufactured demons and false flags. In this world, nothing is ever as it seems. The best laid plans for utopia have diverted us from confronting geopolitical realities while masking consequences. False pretenses are used to execute plans serving manufactured ambition with quasi-religious zeal.
Taking a cue from the history of the British East India Company, Tavistock created the drug-culture of the 60s by flooding the country with drugs to undermine the peace movement and traditional family. Narco-capitalism is one of the less advertised features of globalization, likely to grow larger in the economic downturn. In the past, drugs have financed what nations could not or would not do. Iran/Contra and Air America are two examples that likely continue in other forms.
The anti-drug crusade is ritual combat masking a deeper level of profound collusion and profiteering by intelligence groups, money-laundering transnational banksters, urban guerillas, and terrorists. The futile global crusade continues, despite evidence that it is driven by the same forces that promoted and exploited it.
Consensus is growing that the falsely so-called War on Drugs has failed, yet it is still imminently fundable as an industry. The double-bind is that we cannot afford to continue an absurd war on drugs, nor can we afford to stop. A collapse in drug prices would reduce yet another false bubble in both local and global economies.
The Tavistock strategy moved far beyond any institutional walls as it mutated and adapted full-spectrum dominance to every facet of life, controlling all elements of the psyops battlefield across the range of conflicts with the witting and unwitting help of NGOs, academia, science, government, medicine and military.
Arising from analysis of false consciousness and the ideology of capitalism "critical theory" is the umbrella term (from the Frankfurt School) for an array of theories in English-speaking acedemia. But the negative effects of hegemony lead to global instability. When meaning itself becomes unstable, sinister schemes take on a life of their own.
Society works by mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon responsibilities, threats and punishments. Social Contract Theory is a political and philosophical concept describing how people form states or maintain social order. This is the theoretical groundwork of democracy and republicanism.
We give up some autonomy to a government or other authority in order to receive or maintain social order through the rule of law with consent of the governed. Criminals abdicate their rights and society protects itself from such outlaws, theoretically.
The biggest criminals remain at large though politicians like to pretend they embody a moral consensus. Things really went askew when CIA colluded from the 1950s-70s with MKUltra spycologists to crack the code on consciousness, volition, memory and programming. They exploited psycho-chemical tools for studying the mindbrain with disregard for their human guinea pigs.
The utilitarian social contract and the civil rights it protects are neither "natural rights" nor permanently fixed. The contract itself is only a means to an end -- the benefit of all. It is only legitimate to the extent that it meets the general interest. When it fails, we renegotiate the terms with elections and legislation - a reflective equilibrium or a two-stage bargaining game with flesh and bones.
The Prisoner's Dilemma of game theory (originally framed at RAND in 1950 as a Cold War strategy) frames paradoxes in self-interest. There is a higher payoff in betrayal than cooperation. The iterated prisoner's dilemma has also been referred to as the "Peace-War Game."
If the contract leads to unwitting tyranny, it is void and the right to rebellion is legitimized. Inferred justification is no excuse. In terms of game theory, it isn't 'playing fair.' Strategy-set restricitons skew the game. The old game is made irrelevant by the noncooperative predatory game. There are unseen forces in play.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a classic example of a non-zero-sum game. The equilibrium in Prisoner's Dilemma is not the optimum solution. The enlightened self-interest of ethical philosophy doesn't have a chance. Risk is minimized by cooperation at the expense of individuation, of 'soul.' Illegal, immoral experiments are conducted daily in the name of national security and you are not exempt. Your compliance is manipulated with forced choices.
Although cooperation is ultimately exploited and extinguished, dynamic paths can "pseudo converge" in ways that allow partial cooperation to flourish for extended periods of time. Propaganda twists emotional involvement wrapped up in personal identity and sense of morality. Restricting information supports false beliefs and 'belief retention' blurs critical thinking. If the controllers are criminal, engaging in mass deception, the social contract is utterly broken. The deception is pretending that is not so.
Everywhere is Ground Zero
Many articles describe the psychosocial history of the Tavistock Institute and its draconian social-engineering agenda. But this one approaches it using Tavistock's own analytical frame for the psychosis of civilization. It uses the terminology and working model of the psyche of its pioneers, Freud and Jung. Both described the dynamic interplay of instincts, ego and the transpersonal.
Psyche or 'soul' is our innermost self, the seed of our being. Jung believed that, "... within the soul from its primordial beginnings there has been a desire for light and an irrepressible urge to rise out of the primal darkness. The longing for light is the longing for consciousness." Current research suggests that light within us is literal. German biophysicist Popp discovered the virtual photon master control system of cells, but that is another story, (see 'Photonic Human'). Soul is our ground zero - our essence, our personal zero point that connects us to the nurturing source of life.
James Hillman's 1997 'acorn theory' of the soul contends each individual has unique potential inside themselves, as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak tree. This unique energy of each soul is displayed in character over a lifetime, revealed in one's calling and emergent life's work -- their fruits.
The shamanic task is retrieving souls from the underworld. We might contend it is this soul that Tavistock undermines and sucks dry with its toxic collaborations. It seizes the soul and carries it down into the underworld -- the domain of plutocracy. This is where it breaks not only the social, but the therapeutic contract with its unsuspecting victims. It subverts their process to its own ends, stealing parts of individuals including their emergent self-narrative.. Even 'self-help' has been coopted.
Currently, DARPA is working hard to crack the brain's neural code and develop "haptic interface" for sustaining and augmenting human performance. But in its day, depth psychology retrieved the functional patterns of psychic dynamics. Yet it remains for each individual to make them consciously his or her own as it unfolds from within. In psychology, this is individuation; in philosophy it is the spiritual quest. To 'see the light,' we first have to separate from it by observing ourselves.
The first thing we notice in the 'examined life' is the conflicted duality of nature and man: light and darkness, good and evil, life and death. Jung (1961) said, "To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly; all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of life for better or worse."
Many psychic dynamics, (each with their clusters of behaviors, feelings, thoughts and beliefs), operate like specific trance states, creating a form of tunnel-vision or blinkered vision. They include sexual reductionism, subversion of sexuality, repression, narcissism, projection, fragmentation and integration, compensation, opposition and polarity, fixation, repetition compulsion, catharsis and more.
Jung stressed complexes, typology, mythology, dreams, individuation, transference, universal patterns, esoterics and the dynamic unconscious. Psychodrama retrieves myth and ritual. Politics and history is collective psychodrama. Ritual psychodrama is a mass metaprogramming technique that plays 24/7 in high definition. It's a cliche that 'television is the opiate of the masses.' But it is still also true of religion and an increasing variety of pharmaceuticals, not to mention a robust heroin epidemic.
Misdirection and cultural fads, such as 'The Secret' are also metaprograms. The real secret is you had better look somewhere else for the truth when your attention is misdirected. (see 'Intentionality') This doesn't imply there is no truth in the notion that "when many people share the same thought, that thought can have physical effects."
What if large groups are forced into the same thoughts? You are in a conditioned trance right now. Consensus reality is a trance state, your lifestyle is a trance state, your self-image, your social roles, your politics, your lovelife, your beliefs, even your dreams -- all conditioned by cultural forces manifesting through your subconscious.
A founder of neurobiology, [Rockefeller Prize winning] Changeux's writings include the classic Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind (1983); The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge (2004); Raison et Plaisir (1994), which investigates the "cerebral" origin of artistic creation and its enjoyment; and a collaboration with philosopher Paul Ricoeur (What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature and the Brain, 1998).
Jean-Pierre
> Changeux, a neuroscientist at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, told a meeting
> of the French national bioethics committee that advances in cerebral
> imagining make the scope for invasion of privacy immense. He said that
> although the equipment needed is still highly specialized, it will become
> commonplace and capable of being used at a distance. That will open the way
> for abuses such as invasion of personal liberty, control of behavior and
> brainwashing. Denis LeBihan, a researcher at the French Atomic Energy
> Commission, told the meeting that the use of imaging techniques has reached
> the stage where we can almost read people's thoughts.
http://www.raven1.net/nature1.htm
Direct-interface brain implants that merge with the substrate of the mind are on the immediate horizon. Our peripherals already constitute exocortical technology. The age of the cyborg is here. Some of us will be enhanced and others won't. Consumer-level cognitive enhancement and neuroprosthetics is the next wave, for good or ill. But it will change us.
If you aren't "in" the trance, you are "out" of society, stuck in a desire-lack gulag. Attention, trust, reputation and intimacy are in short supply. Subtle (covert) order undergirds the chaos of the 'reign of terror,' a phantom empire, whose latest buzzwords are, "Risk, Control, Trust." Self-organizing and self-directed behavior is much more likely in the government of the near-future. It gives new latitude to 'plausible deniability.'
'Open government' is emerging as Gov 2.0: "There is a growing tension between hierarchy and collaborative networks. Rewarding based on value produced, rather than how it is produced has interesting desultory effects on new tools and approaches. The accuracy and attribution of Web 2.0 tools must be improved for many government applications. Security requirements, fear of scrutiny, and need-to-know create a culture that inhibit the sharing of knowledge and best practices. Communication lines are blurring between department, agency, and national entities. Trust is a notion that's already deeply held by most government workers." Yet this government that 'trusts' itself doesn't trust its citizens at all.
Cultural theorist, Arthur Kroker, outlines a dehumanizing vector: "what we traditionally have meant by human perception, (vision, insight, ethical judgment, discriminating between reality and illusion) has been effectively shut down, almost surgically replaced by the virtual vision machine of the militarized imagination. We are suddenly rendered vulnerable to the new virtual myths about the supposedly hygienic character of posthuman warfare." Information warfare (PSYOPS; Agitprop; psychotronics) is bloodless but just as pernicious.
We live in a complex physical and social structure, historically located in space and time. Kroker suggests we develop filters against such psychic infiltration. He suggests that in radical crisis the individual must courageously refuse to assent to totalitarian power.
The destiny of individual freedom depends on maintaining critical ethical judgment and a clarity that can filter out propaganda and rebel against it. Too bad, even our rebellions are controlled. The 'story' must be continually upgraded to keep the 'audience' engaged.
The institutions and patterns of thought of the (military/industrial/academic) World-Machine have created an interconnecting set of world-wide problems of an ecological, economic and political nature. Machine-minded think tanks, even if they are thinking globally, can only see entropic decay through their own worldview. They cannot think out of the box, unless there is a fundamental paradigm shift that is reflected in the sciences, and likely foreseen in the arts.
The energy shortage, rise of food prices, scandals in government, and unwinable wars against ideas like ideologies and "terrorism" are the first harbingers of the approaching mega-crisis. There are two routes from here: The route of stagnation and eventual total collapse, and the route of flexibility and growth, which could lead to a golden age. Chaos Theory reveals both catastrophe (bifurcation) and renewal are likely inevitable.
Rather than the obsolete paradigm of a "world machine", we need to think in more organic terms of holistic self-organization ~ reorganization at a higher level -- as revealed in Chaos Theory, which demonstrates nature's own creative way of evolutionary assembly. All things are simply connected.
The Talking Cure
The 'cure' for society's ills depends upon who is framing the question and prescribing the remedy. Theories often reflect the personalities of their creators. Freud emphasized family metaphors and psychosexual healing against the backdrop of a war between the instincts for life and death. Jung favored connection to and emancipation from the mythic collective. Patterns and imitation of patterns are common to both theories, as are primacy of frustrations and fears.
The chaos of realities contains hidden consensual structure. Our perceptions are attracted to certain types of order. Yet myths underlie our perceptions of permanence, objective individualism, collectivism, and symbolic reality. Narcissism is destructive, alienating and self-defeating. Trance is a psychic black hole, a reality wormhole.
Breuer's "talking cure" preceded both Freud and Jung. Talking alone, personal and collective narrative, can change neural pathways in the brain. There is power in the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. They define our reality. (see 'Healing Tales')
The "talking cure" became the signature of the "Tavistock Method," and a blanket solution (with psychotropic drugs) to mental distress. The character-building method is self-questioning and psychiatric investigation. While therapy gives empathy a mirroring face, it also substitutes a surrogate parent with sanctimonious certitude for self-care and self-regulation.
When Tavistock pioneers began exploring the psyche, it was terra incognita. Now that once unknown ground is riddled with the twisted roots of Tavistock's insidious penetration and experimentation which has permeated the collective psyche. Modulating someone's internal state is a powerful form of control using the power of imagery. Conditioning replaces external constraint with internal compulsions on both essence and substance.
Today's experiential therapies and other panaceas arose from explorations at "the Tavi." They seem to have a positive effect on individuals and groups, but therapeutics became the new authority for authority -- the arbiter of legitimate and illegitimate thinking. There is no questioning it. Questioning it is 'crazy.'
One of Plato's tricks was "forbidding the question." His Republic is a blueprint for tyrannical systemic philosophical control. 'The Big Lie,' a hypnotic propaganda technique, is rooted in Plato's 'Noble Lie,' the myth knowingly told by the elite to maintain social control. The lie is different at the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels.
Perhaps the real expose lies not in the Tavistock history but in the methodology of institutionalized alienation. Much of it is Psychology 101, taken to unimaginable extremes, combined with inverted spirituality. There are too many details to cover here, particularly regarding directed-energy weapons and psychotronics (see 'Synthetic Telepathy'). But generally-speaking, the poison is the cure.
Name Your Poison
In Sept. 2009, h+ reported on neuro frontier designer drugs. In The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World, Zach Lynch summarizes, "Neurotechnology is the broad term for drugs, devices and diagnostics focused on the brain and nervous system," he says. "Neuroceuticals . . . have very low if any side effects, so that they may be used by healthy humans. There are three categories of neuroceuticals: cogniceuticals for memory, emoticeuticals for emotions, and sensoceuticals focused on sensory systems." http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/neuro/tweaking-your-neurons
The paradoxical Greek word "pharmakon" can be translated as 'drug,' which means both remedy and poison. In Plato's Pharmacy, Derrida traces its meanings in Plato's dialogues: remedy, poison (either the cure or the illness or its cause), philter, drug, recipe, charm, medicine, substance, spell, artificial color, and paint.
The alchemists also call their elixir or panacea both a cure and a poison, describing the dangers of the interactive field experience, including failure to recognize trance states. Derrida notes, "This pharmakon, this medicine, this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence." Tavistock 'paints' a picture of the world (simulacrum; textual trance) and we must embrace it.
Restricting the multiple meanings of a given word is a problem of translation, so we can call pharmakon either a remedy or a poison. Both a curative medicine and poison, it represents a fundamentally ambiguous binary opposition with no fixed identity or meaning. It is the medium in which opposites are opposed and the contradictory meanings in which they appear to play out. Opposites are identical in nature but different by degrees.
Plato said that "true philosophers make dying their profession," referring to the wisdom inherent in this process. What is natural and instinctual is allowed to die and transform. Where Freud saw a life/death struggle, Jung saw a death/rebirth mystery of cyclic passages and renewal.
Jung was distinctly Hermetic. The 'wounded-healer' learns how to heal others tending his or her own sickness unto death. The process of rebirth is the mythic enactment of "the one story" whose pattern is found in every narrative. Beneath the differences, the meaning -- having to do with the loss and recovery of identity -- does not change. The loss and regaining of identity is the framework of most literature, from which comes the hero with a thousand faces.
Freud exalted the fused instincts Eros and Thanatos as the root of drives -- eroticism and suffering, affirmation and negation. Culture takes place in between as they war with one another. Symptomatic sexuality is based in the Eros-Thanatos tension. Guilt arises from the irreversible tension between the two. Individuals caught between two stages of development, who do not hold clearly defined positions within their social system, feel marginal, excluded, without identity or influence.
As a transitional phase Thanatos is the gap between the former and future social position or magico-religious state, a liminal period of uncertainty, of virtual 'invisibility.' If the social condition is permanent, it means marginalization, disenfranchisement, 'Outsiderhood.' Liminal personae occupy an edge realm of potential for new ideas and concepts and so pose a threat to the establishment.
For the deeply oppressed to gain access to their objective interests they often must undergo liberating personal transformation. Those caught in such positions, including artists, have an unusually clear view on the social structure from which they are excluded. They carry the potential for critique of the norms that prevail within that structure. The threshold is a symbol of division between self and others.
Relationships and social status are negotiated at the threshold, one is either rejected from or welcomed to the other side. To gain admission and step over the threshold into someone else's space means to submit to the rules that are in force in that place Social organization decides whether we are included in or excluded from a social group. Political or religious reasons or social rank can account for the identification of a person with a certain group and space. At the threshold, one can also enter new territory.
As soon as the state of a person is subject to change, such as in the process of maturation or at the initiation into another social position or group, this person is detached from its former position in the social structure. Undergoing the process his or her structural attributes become temporarily ambiguous or neutralized, and finally re-emerges in cultural space. Liminals are betwixt and between the positions and roles assigned by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. Liminals and marginals at the frayed edge of society question, expose, critique and redefine the central values of culture.
In alchemy, the images of figurative death appear during the operation called mortificatio. This symbolic experience of death has to do with darkness, defeat, torture, mutilation, death, rotting, penance, and abstinence -- denial of the body. Emotionally it means the primitive, violent outbursts, resentments, and pleasure and power demands must die for the process of transmutation to occur. Paradoxically, we must make ourselves miserable to transform. Then the dark images change to positive ones of growth, resurrection and rebirth.
Fear is the primary agent of mortificatio. Moving toward the fear and pain--deepening it--brings one closer to the transformation. It feels like defeat and failure. Yet, to resist seems like madness--in fact, it induces madness. Those with near-death experiences tell us that to embrace death brings about deeper meaning and purpose in life.
What is natural and instinctual is allowed to die and transform when projections are withdrawn. In therapeutic journeys, ego death brings images of rotting corpses, decapitation, amputation, creeping, crawling worms and snakes, and particularly noxious odors like the stench of graves. It is a barefoot journey through a serpent-filled "Valley of the Shadow of Death."
Through "creative regression," the generic form of ego death, consciousness recycles, recursively bending back upon itself. The direction is a recapitulation of, a re-experiencing of sequences from earlier life, conception and birth experience, ancestral awareness, genetic and physiological recognitions, molecular and atomic perception, and quantum consciousness.
As consciousness explores and expands, ego dissolves. Pure consciousness, the fundamental luminosity, is the ground state of unborn form. The generic purpose of ego death is to liberate our embodied being, precipitating communion with and holographic re-patterning by the Whole. All forms finally dissolve into unconditioned consciousness of the ground state of pure creative potential.
Thus the psyche depicts the decay of outworn forms in preparation for new. It can be a voluntary death, giving up the old order for the sake of wholeness, the incorruptible body that grows from death. The infantile, personalistic ego is eclipsed. The journey to the land of the dead (collective unconscious) opens one to transpersonal life.
Life, Death, Love are the experiential nucleus of our existence. Ego-death emerges from activated Thanatos, raw, undifferentiated consciousness. This unformed consciousness -- which we often mistake for death -- is really the essence of our vitality and life force. It is the energy we can use to recreate ourselves in every instant of time. It reaches our awareness through dreams (Hypnos) and the flow of our imagination.
Never-satisfied Eros or libido is the force "which ensures the unity and cohesion of everything existing in the world." As Eros moves the warmth of life toward greater complexity, Thanatos personifies our unconscious cynicism. If Thanatos is entropy, Eros is complex adaptive systems. Thanatos is our mortality.
Both Jung and Freud recognized the latent archetypal "murderer and suicide" in us. Freud pointed out that "pathologizing" is a metaphorical language of the psyche, allowing it to deliteralize the events of our daily life. Psychopathologies had been considered trivial, but Freud showed that they contained a previously invisible depth of meaning. The nature of that meaning revealed the profound relationship of death to life. Dreams, symptoms, and afflictions became the inroads into the dark realm of the subconscious.
Freud resurrected the intimate symbolic connection between soul and death for Westerners. Eastern religions had never lost this connection. He showed how the perspectives of Hades and Thanatos dissolve the organic, social, and emotional aspects of human life. Fantasies of putrefaction, decay, sickness, compulsion, and suicidal impulses disclose this psychological perspective which seeks deepening. Freud ended his own life enraptured or fascinated with this train of thought.
Life is sustained by desire and self-preservation. Eros also personifies love of Psyche, love for the imaginal. The death drive destroys connections and eliminates tension. Aggression is a projection of the death drive. Freud's student Adler added the 'will to power' to primary drivers. Hermes collapses opposites by breaking boundaries, often on the faith-skepticism axis.
Mythic polarities include creation-apocalypse; nurturance-deprivation; achievement-failure; completion-fragmentation; affirmation-cynicism; acceptance-debilitation; hope-despair; reconciliation-polarization; wisdom-ignorance; celebration-betrayal; rebirth-death; questing-passivity, and intimacy-separation (Krippner). They are the black and white keys on the psychic organ. But this is more than a cognitive process but multidimensional oscillation across domains.
According to h+, "most brain functions can best be described as cooperative, synchronized activity of large, distributed ensembles of neurons, and a large part of this synchronized activity is of an oscillatory nature. These autorhythmic oscillatory properties of neurons in the central nervous system are a consequence of their electrochemical properties. The cooperative and oscillatory activities of these neurons can be seen as the basis for the timing of sensory-motor coordination and trance phenomena."
Meaning is created by interpretation through the play of opposites, including 'inside' and 'outside'. It hints at negative 'side effects' inherent in any intervention. In terms of 'healing,' remedy and poison are inseparable: because the pharmakon is artificial, because it comes from outside rather than from within, it is never simply beneficial. When it is not treating a disease, a psychotropic becomes dope.
Pharmakos, "human scapegoat" or "sacrificial slave" derives from the same root, but changing the scapegoat doesn't change anything real. Catharsis is the emotional release associated with talking about the underlying causes of a problem or seeing a dream.
Psychotherapy replaces the scapegoat with catharsis, a form of self-sacrifice, for purification and emotional purgation, particularly in relation to the projective contents of the Shadow. Archetypal and programmed biases residing in the self-image are "owned" consciously, transformed and relinquished. Transmodern scapegoating takes place in the virtuality - first-person shooter games.
Pharmakeus means druggist, poisoner and by extension, wizard, magician, trickster or sorcerer, initiator -- the shaman/healer. Shamanism is medicine for the imagination using tricks or techniques to alter perception. Whether transformation is induced through drugs, behavior modification, or emotive talk therapies, the purpose is to change perception of reality. The shaman/therapist is mediator of dreams, soul guide and consummate image-maker and interpreter.
Defense mechanisms include acting out, autistic fantasy, denial, devaluation, displacement, dissociation, idealization, intellectualization, isolation, passive aggression, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, repression, somatization, splitting, suppression, and undoing. The therapist handles them with bypassing, reassurance, distraction, confrontation, interpretation, or changing vantage point or scope.
The psychotherapeutic approach to healing essentially represents order (through chaos). The shamanic approach represents chaos, often including trance, drugs, adventure and spiritual power plays. These worldviews seem divided but the true nature of reality is dynamic interplay of chaos and order. Like yin and yang, they encompass one other, so there is flow between the two.
The shaman/therapist embodies and personifies both polarities with one foot in the natural and supernatural world. Traditionally, the shaman is involved in soul retrieval, returning a lost soul from the realm of the dead.
Healers help others find the doorways to the opportunities that crises can offer as traditional guiding models break down. The guiding myth of the shaman is that "personal power arises within." The blending of the traditional and the innovative, the mystical and scientific, the masculine and feminine elements in healing, could guide our culture towards a balanced approach to healing. By recognizing our boundaries, we could move beyond them. The action takes place in the unknown, beyond the boundary of the known.
But the trickster can also trap with control. The clever, opportunistic trickster is often a deceitful transformer who creates ambiguity, illusion and altered states. Also, by extension, we have the 'deliberate insincerity' of Big Pharma and the pharmacratic War on Terror and Drugs. The latest bitter pill in this category is "bailouts." At the fringe, UFO phenomena are trickster phenomena.
Guiding vision is another premise common to both camps. Jung wrote extensively how visionary experience affected his life and gave him a mandate for his work. The shamanic vision quest is the native model. These visions "work" because we are not separate from the universe, nature, each other, our bodies, or hidden aspects of ourselves. But again, vision can be impressed and exploited by interpretation and other means up to the scale of zeitgeist. Worldview is collective vision.
Brief Therapy Never Ends
When the "talking cure," lifelong analysis, became impractical, brief focal and serial psychotherapy was initiated at the Tavistock Clinic by Balint and Malan. The 'point of maximum pain' or the 'therapeutic metaphor' is the chosen dynamic focus. Thus Tavistock's abusive arc compulsively motivates us, playing on our fear and pain. Fragmentation (multiple states of being), dissolution and alienation are the result. We need a cultural de-frag.
In alchemy, I Ching and even chaos theory, psychological dissolution is the further breaking down of the artificial structures of the psyche by the immersion in the unconscious or irrational and rejected parts of our minds. It is an unconscious process in which our conscious mind allows the surfacing of previously buried emotions that conceal or distort our true nature. It results in a flowing presence that is free of inhibitions, prejudgments, and restrictive mental structures.
Tavistock is so woven into our fabric, it is a 'sideffect' of life. It's about power not health. A population stalled in a narcissistic, puerile condition is super-susceptible to authoritarian regimes. Humanity has been stuck in a selfish, self-centered adolescence by control of 1) environment, 2) food and water, 3) disease, 4) wars and disaster, 5) crime 6) human rights, 7) science and technology. Controlled conflict brings controlled 'progress.' Humanity needs to grow up.
Soft-core brainwashing is so subliminal most people don't recognize it. Nor do they recognize covert pressures hiding in plain sight. You can't really fight this hydra-headed monster and you can't flee the mindbenders 'No Exit' game with a geographic or mental escape. They want you to escape into the virtuality and leave the 'real' world to them. If you withdraw into the virtuality you are no longer a protagonist in the social setting. "Gamer" (2009) describes one such scenario:
"Set in the near future, a time when mind-control technology has taken society by storm. Humans control other humans in a mass-scale, multiplayer online game. Reclusive billionaire Ken Castle has created the controversial form of entertainment, "Slayers," a hugely popular game that allows millions to act out their innermost desires and fantasies -- online -- in front of a global audience. Gaming has evolved into a terrifying new dimension-mind control-manipulation-people playing people. At the center is Kable, the superstar and cult hero of "Slayers," the savage, ultra-violent first person shooter game. Kable is controlled by Simon, a young gamer with rock star status who continues to defy all odds by guiding Kable to victory each week. Taken from his family, imprisoned and forced to fight against his will, the modern day gladiator must survive long enough to escape the game to free his family, regain his identity and to save mankind from Castle's ruthless technology."
Like a bad relationship, we habitually need more 'therapy' with each disabling crisis. Tavistock is a 'strange attractor' in the global psychodynamic field. It has brought us all to the self-organizing state of criticality - the boundary of chaos and order.
But order and health are not synonymous. Not everyone can be forced down the linear road to conformity. Describing how entrainment occurs over time, strange attractors can also move us into the space of what could be. Health does not come from a highly ordered world.
Jung believed that in psychic dynamics, chaos is inevitable, so he tried to find patterns in the chaos, The most constructive approach is to impose very little order and let organization emerge on its own. Jung also thought secrets were poison and confession was the cure.
A state of criticality (SOC) is the governing dynamical mechanism in a large class of complex natural systems. All events are intrinsic to the system. Various kinds of systems can be engineered into a critical state, by fine-tuning the parameters. Kindling changes can lead to cascades of morphing dynamics, avalanches of consequences. Though the 'edge' can be a horizon of creativity, chain reactions and catastrophic collapse are also possible.
Instead of inhabiting the United States, we are plunged into the bizarro world of imposed trance-states -- the Uninvited States of America. Whether you are on the Left or the Right, you are played against one another in the social construction of reality (totalitarian environment) with indirect suggestion, political and religious cliches and milieu control.
You can cause fear of extinction and annihilation by forcing choice on a future existential path. Loss of biometric identifiers, self-reliance, house, job, credit cards, bank account, driver's license, spouse, family is for the most part equated with death -- or worse -- irrelevance. You must obey the doctrine or lose your personal identity which was created for you and will be stripped away. So don't question too much; just follow along.
You will continually have to fight for your liberation, for your civil and human rights. The oppressor does not tolerate resistance or dissent, peaceful or otherwise. And your right to self-defense and self-determination will repeatedly be undermined. The rhetoric about democracy is just that -- it has never been actualized.
In the culture at large, therapeutic authority has transformed personal and group relations in family, work, school, hospital, office, media, government and military. While it has taught us "better" communication, it has undermined traditional roles. Stories we consistently tell ourselves determine our reality.
Your reality is made of symbols weighted by metaphors. All communication is hypnotic. NLP demonstrates how even casual conversation can be loaded with sleight of mouth, cues, "embedded commands," suggestive language patterns. Parallel realities, triggers and anchors, time binds, illusory choice, submodalities, persuasion and psychological drivers can be manipulated.
The collective will of the people has been undercut with "shock and awe," frustration and demoralization. Tavistock first fed us illusions as stepping-stones before weaning us on disillusion, exemplified in lowered expectations and the current healthcare debates. Positive and negative reinforcement include "the takeaway," turning dreams into pipe dreams and mystical manipulation.
Even though its agenda has jumped the boundaries of its parent organization, Tavistock has seeded chaos leading to the death of an outworn post-industrial mindset, clearing the stage for a transmodern information society with a distinctly fascist tone.
Controlled chaos leads to submission. How we got into this double bind is a labyrinthine story involving psychiatry, fascism, Nazis, Communism, CIA, MI6, media, corporations, government and universities. It is the story of how we lost even the fantasy of democracy to corporate feudalism.
©2009 Iona Miller is a nonfiction writer for the academic and popular press, hypnotherapist (ACHE) and multimedia artist. She is a participant, not just commentator. Her conspirituality work is an omni-sensory fusion of intelligence, science-art, new physics and emergent paradigm shift, melding many social issues into a new view of society. She is interested in the effects of doctrines from religion, science, psychology, and the arts. Website: http://ionamiller.iwarp.com
What's New with My Subject?
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/943a_russell_lhl.html
HOW BERTRAND RUSSELl BECAME AN EVIL MAN
| This article is reprinted from the Fall, 1994 issue of FIDELIO Magazine. Footnotes for this section are at the bottom of this page. Footnotes for Sections 2 and 3 are on one separate page. http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/943b_russell_lhl-2.html http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/943c_russell_lhl-3.html http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/943b-c_footnotes-2-3.html http://www.schillerinstitute.org/new_viol/cybmindcontrol_js0400..html Bertrand Russell became an evil person because he was developed to become a representative of his family heritage. That heritage represents a philosophical type. In contrast to the Renaissance, of which Russell's family was an avowed enemy, all modern empiricism, including its existentialist and positivist derivatives, is based upon the same type of rejection of any principled distinction between mankind and the beasts. Thus, Russell's utopia were fairly named a "Brutish Empire." There was already the Seventeenth-Century bestiality of Bacon, Hobbes, Elias Ashmole, John Locke, et al. However, out of the salon of Venice's Abbot Antonio Conti, the single most important direct influence upon the culture of Eighteenth-Century England, was that radiated from salon member Ortes' writings. Ortes and his depraved British dupes, such as Adam Smith, Bentham, and Malthus, represent what is called radical empiricism, which is the same thing axiomatically as the Nineteenth-Century French radical positivism introduced by the circles of Abbot Moigno: LaPlace, Cauchy, Comte, et al. British radical empiricism, and its bastard child, French Restoration positivism, is, like philosophical liberalism generally, a rejection of the idea of any scientifically knowable distinction between man and the beasts. All liberalism rejects the existence of intelligible truth, on the same philosophical premises. The radical empiricism of the late Eighteenth Century carries this immorality of the liberals to the extreme, by reducing all apprehensions of human behavior to the mechanistic terms of a linear algebra modelled explicitly upon that of Galileo and Isaac Newton.85 That latter, radical transformation of the previously established empiricism of John Locke, et al., was the specific product of the influence of Conti's salon upon England, a radicalism infused directly through the work of Giammaria Ortes. Thus, all British radical empiricists, and their bastard French offspring the positivists, were bred to become what is recognizable today as behavioral psychologists, in one or another academic disguise. This includes not only the new pseudo-sciences of ethnology, anthropology, Wundt's psychology, and sociology introduced during the post-1814 French Restoration's Nineteenth Century. Through such forms as the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey in the United States, for example, this poisonous influence corrupted nearly every aspect of modern culture and education there. Through the ethnologists (anthropologists), the sociologists, the psychologists in the traditions of Wundt, the behaviorists generally, psychoanalysis, and institutions such as the "Frankfurt School" and London Tavistock Clinic and Tavistock Institute, humanity under the emerging world-empire of the U.N.O. is rapidly becoming a multicultural zoo of persons degraded to the status of "just another animal, like the rest." To understand the roots of this new form of ``Manchurian Candidate'' programmed terrorism, it is necessary to go back to World War II and the immediate postwar period, when there was a concerted effort launched, by the Frankfurt School and the London Tavistock Institute, to use the Marxist/Freudian perversion of psychology and other social sciences, as instruments for mass social control and brainwashing. The two pillars of the assault on the American intellectual tradition were cybernetics and the drug counterculture. "Physiology and psychology afford fields for scientific technique which still await development. Two great men, Pavlov and Freud, have laid the foundation. I do not accept the view that they are in any essential conflict, but what structure will be built on their foundations is still in doubt. I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called "education." Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.... It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.'' Russell and the "Lethal Chamber" Russell had been working on the concept of the scientific dictatorship for decades. In his 1931 book, The Scientific Outlook, he had devoted a chapter to ``Education in a Scientific Society.'' Here, he was equally blunt about his oligarchical totalitarian vision. Drawing the parallel to the two levels of education provided by the Jesuits, Russell asserted: "In like manner, the scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play.... All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called `co-operative,' i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them."
20 of 26 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Astonishingly ahead of its time, a Crystal Ball of the Future,
This review is from: The Impact of Science on Society (Paperback) The Impact of Science on Society, by Sir Bertrand Russell - a Nobel Prize in Literature, and son of Viscount Amberley, and grandson of the Duke of Bedford, who was Prime Minister for Queen Victoria - is a work astonishingly ahead of its time, for its 1952 publishing date. The most important is the so-called Lloyd Roberts Lecture, given at the Royal Society of Medicine, London, on Nov 29, 1949, included as the last chapter. overall book. This work should be required reading in education programs world-wide, as it crystalizes from a philosophical and rational point of view, world events from the past several hundred years, in view of better understanding today's world, and what is to follow suit next. Who better than Russell, demonstrating a very advanced ability in mental gymnastics, digesting entire libraries of literature in that process and laying out his analysis of the World, and Man's place in it, and the Future, in 140 pages? This is done entertainingly, fluidly for readers, with a personal touch. This work should be purchased and studied by all, because of the conclusions adopted by the elite of the world, of which the author and his audience were members. Everyone should understand that there is an urgency among the elite to create a One-World government, for various reasons. First, this is needed to contain nationalist and imperialist urges in various regions of the world by having a One-World Military. Secondly, the single government is required to curtail population growth, in face of limited agricultural production and resources. The author warns that if the West cannot achieve this in India, China, Russia, the free world will be overrun militarily, economically by those populations in the UK, USA and Europe from an over-populated Asia. I should note that Mao Tse Tung created a famine, in China, resulting in as many as 38 million (yes, 38!) casualties from starvation, in the 20 years following the publication of this book. Thirdly, raw materials (oil, copper, tin, uranium, etc.) will need to be rationed and controlled by a One-World government, as they are finite in quantity. In the past 5 years, oil has risen in multiples to over $100 per barrel, copper and resources have risen and mega-acquisitions from Asian and Russian government owned companies of Canadian and US producers, commonplace. Fourth, with Darwin on his side, and Malthus, Russell clarifies that the One World Government, will use scientific methods to cut down the population, to be carried out explicitly or behind the scenes, (if birth control is rejected for religious reasons), such as new twists on the Black Plague (Avian Flu, perhaps?), or contrived world conflicts r intentional waves of starvation on a global scale, (pp.129). Unchecked, population numbers destablize a science-based, prosperous and every-increasing good quality of life. Conversely, hungry citizens can cause recessions by only buying scarce and expensive food items, withholding consumption of other items from their discretionary income, pulling down the economy. Next, Russell warns against a USA that is export-only based, since it impoverishes the World. We've seen, accordingly, that the USA has shown astonishingly high import/export account deficits for the past 30 years, and the manufacturing sector is practically gone domestically, as the majority of products consumed in USA are now imported, distributing the wealth globally, as Russell recommends. As well, taming of natural urges and self-determination is necessary among school children on a massive scale (Ritalin ?), and violent nationalist propaganda banned in all schools. Russel also opposes fanatical creeds being shown to citizens (the Middle East ?) Russel underlines that either citizens submit to international authority (so-called Reason) or they will perish and die (pp.96.) As well, Russell believes that 95% of males and 70% of females are liekly to be sterilized, so that the elite can use "scientific breeding" (pp.66) mainly among the totalitarian governments who will misuse a science for their own purposes, mainly imperialistic. With non-elected governments, Russell suggests that scentific societies will impose a special diet and injections into the body of babies and children under 10 to shape their characters into the desired citizens that are needed. Through special preparing, rewarding, and manipulating psychological makeups of humans (through mental conditioning in schools) critiques of authority, or of those in power will be impossible, as will be non-desirable thoughts and behaviors. In sum, the author must be congratulated for holding back little if nothing at all to readers, and for giving them his sincere personal conclusions with a litany of explanations on how those were arrived at. | |||||||||
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