Mimesis/Liminality/"Je Suis Charlie"/Catharsis-NLP Theater

[lunarmoth]

Just in time for Christmas:
http://www.sott.net/article/308409-Are- ... d-of-fluff?

[guruilla]

Are you sure all this is really happening, personally and collectively, guruilla? Could it be that on another, less imaginatively traumatic plane, people are going about life doing ordinary things and affirming simple ordinary values like kindness, generosity, friendship, solidarity, hope etc. -- not necessarily because they're duped into accepting an Us vs Them perspective, but because basic sanity and goodness are the default setting for humans -

This has little to do with crowds out there, and everything to do with a psycho-dynamic "in here."

There are no people "going about life doing ordinary things and affirming simple ordinary values like kindness, generosity, friendship, solidarity, hope," at least not without an underbelly of people going about life doing ordinary things and affirming simple ordinary values like cruelty, meanness, child abuse, hatred, and despair. The idea that "basic sanity and goodness are the default setting for humans" is just an idea; others believe that insanity and evil are the default setting. Both are simply opinions (IMO).

Women did not run home and kill their children, men didn't sleep with their moms, just because Clytemnestra or Oedipus acted it out on stage.

No, they were doing it anyway, and apparently the royal-dramas reflected that, since culture always reflects society (especially what is hidden).

As Joseph Rheingold says, “Most mothers do not murder or totally reject their children, but death pervades the relationship between mother and child.”33 These death fears become the basis for all later violence, both personal and social. Fay Weldon puts it succinctly: “Once you have children, you realize how wars start.”
http://psychohistory.com/books/the-orig ... -violence/

Those people marching for Charlie Hebdo were acting out a very confused ritual. I'm sure many of them knew it at the time, too. Marching in a demo does not mean one is instantly brainwashed for all time. People fall into trances and they also awaken from trances. They're victims of unconscious forces but then that's why we're all here.

Really?

The fears, anxieties and hypervigilance of traumatic stress sets off a cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters that disrupts hippocampal functioning, leaving memories to be stored as dissociated affective states or body memories that are incapable of being retrieved through normal hippocampal indexing. Van der Kolk believes that often these memories are dissociated because they were never really stored in consciousness in the first place. Moreover, the “lack of secure attachments may produce the most devastating effects,” he says, “because consistent external support appears to be a necessary condition in learning how to regulate internal affective states….Dissociation is a method of coping with inescapable stress [allowing] infants to enter into trance states and to ignore current sensory input…” As Eigen puts it in his book, The Psychotic Core, “The aggression perpetrated on the young in the name of upbringing is often tinged with or masks madness. Both parent and child live out this madness in a trancelike state akin to dreaming.” It is these early trance states that are repeated in the social trances of history.

The Emotional Life of Nations by Lloyd deMause
http://psychohistory.com/books/the-emot ... f-history/

And I disagree that Satan is easier to follow than Christ. It's a hell of a lot of work to "abandon ourselves to all our inclinations in defiance of morality and its prohibitions." I get exhausted just thinking about it.

It may be harder in the long, long run, because avoidance always lands us eventually where we most don't want to be. But in the short-term, obviously it is infinitely easier to give in to primal urges & desires than to stew in the agony and despair of powerlessness that giving into impulses allows us not to experience. Every time we are triggered and want to react in anger, coldness, contempt, hysteria, or whatever, that's satan ~ the mass-mind moving the soul from the outside, like a puppet on strings. "Following Christ" ~ individuation ~ means letting go of everything that holds us together as a social identity. It is absolutely the hardest thing there is to "do," because it can't be done by the social-alter self. It means going against our most deeply embedded programming, our instincts and desires, moving against the group-mind, not only externally but internally too. It means defying the internal persecutor or guardian, the satan-within, not by resisting, but by seeing "him" as ourselves.

The torture of a victim transforms the dangerous crowd into a public of ancient theater or of modern film, as captivated by the bloody spectacle as our contemporaries are by the horrors of Hollywood. When the spectators are satiated with that violence that Aristotle calls "cathartic" -- whether real or imaginary it matters little -- they all return peaceably to their homes to sleep the sleep of the just.

The word "catharsis" designated first of all the "purification" that the spilled blood procures in ritual sacrifices, which are deliberate repetitions of the process described in the Passion. In other words it is the satanic mechanism at work. This mechanism is also presupposed in the phenomenon of exorcism, which is the subject in the debate that gives Jesus the occasion to raise the question about the satanic expulsion of Satan.

(Girard) http://girardianlectionary.net/res/iss_ ... _32-38.htm

Children who cannot depend upon their caretaker to work through their daily fears have to “swallow down whole” their deadly abusers and store their abusive personalities in their brains, in a dissociated part of the right hemisphere’s amygdalan network, a persecutory personality termed an alter. . . . Even as a little child, Sarah blamed herself for her sexual abuse, then internalized and reenacted the abuse while feeling fused with the abuser.
...
It is this massive “false-alarm system” that leads to reenactments and then to restagings of trauma reenactments with new anxiety-reducing elements that is at the heart of social behavior in humans.
The Origins of War in Child Abuse by Lloyd deMause

[lunarmoth]

I was just responding to the hysteria of your humungous cut and paste. It felt like you were possessed by French critics all rattling the bars of their cages inside your brain at once. It's not that I believe wholeheartedly in 'human goodness' -- I just keep noticing it in daily life. I also feel there is a line between the masses and the elite psychoanalytic crowd that like to criminalize the collective unconscious when in reality an enormous amount of effort and money goes into developing new ways of pushing humans to insanity and violence.

A current example: the Toronto woman who for no reason went on a stabbing spree downtown the other day. Before she was arrested she sent an email asking for help http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canad ... ted-murder

"The email opens with a plea:
“Do you know any top professionals in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology, satellites?” it said. “Maybe Military. Maybe Government?
“Something has been happening to me and this is not my normal self and I would like to know who and why this is happening. There is either a single person or more responsible and who and why would be nice to know.”

She was looking for work when this happened. BTW,Name a high-paying job these days that is not about analysing, manipulating, controlling and herding human beings. From drugs to advertising to medicine to politics to sports, that's what experts are hired to do.

[lunarmoth]

I'm trying out snappy responses in italics and bold. See below.

As Joseph Rheingold says, “Most mothers do not murder or totally reject their children, but death pervades the relationship between mother and child.”33 These death fears become the basis for all later violence, both personal and social. Fay Weldon puts it succinctly: “Once you have children, you realize how wars start.”
http://psychohistory.com/books/the-orig ... -violence/

Death pervades life, guruilla, so it's not surprising the mother-child bond would be infected with it. Fay Weldon, by the way, is a feminist writer who is prone to satire and exaggeration.

And I disagree that Satan is easier to follow than Christ. It's a hell of a lot of work to "abandon ourselves to all our inclinations in defiance of morality and its prohibitions." I get exhausted just thinking about it.

It may be harder in the long, long run, because avoidance always lands us eventually where we most don't want to be. But in the short-term, obviously it is infinitely easier to give in to primal urges & desires than to stew in the agony and despair of powerlessness that giving into impulses allows us not to experience. Every time we are triggered and want to react in anger, coldness, contempt, hysteria, or whatever, that's satan ~ the mass-mind moving the soul from the outside, like a puppet on strings. "Following Christ" ~ individuation ~ means letting go of everything that holds us together as a social identity. It is absolutely the hardest thing there is to "do," because it can't be done by the social-alter self. It means going against our most deeply embedded programming, our instincts and desires, moving against the group-mind, not only externally but internally too. It means defying the internal persecutor or guardian, the satan-within, not by resisting, but by seeing "him" as ourselves.

Err.... I thought Christ advises his devotees to be simple and ordinary. But Satan tells us we are special.

The torture of a victim transforms the dangerous crowd into a public of ancient theater or of modern film, as captivated by the bloody spectacle as our contemporaries are by the horrors of Hollywood. When the spectators are satiated with that violence that Aristotle calls "cathartic" -- whether real or imaginary it matters little -- they all return peaceably to their homes to sleep the sleep of the just.

The word "catharsis" designated first of all the "purification" that the spilled blood procures in ritual sacrifices, which are deliberate repetitions of the process described in the Passion. In other words it is the satanic mechanism at work. This mechanism is also presupposed in the phenomenon of exorcism, which is the subject in the debate that gives Jesus the occasion to raise the question about the satanic expulsion of Satan.

(Girard) http://girardianlectionary.net/res/iss_ ... _32-38.htm

So you're saying theatre is satanic because it's related to exorcism? Well, drama is about CONFLICT. Conflict involves good vs evil. People went to theatre to confront their fears -- they saw their inner dramas performed on stage in concentrated form. Bloody spectacle was at a minimum in ancient Greece, because Hollywood had not been invented. So Greek plays are mostly long speeches, and very little action. Nobody was actually murdered on stage. Technicolour blood did not exist in those days and could not be squirted everywhere to satiate the evil hordes in the cheaper seats. I think Girard has eaten too many mushrooms. Have you experienced 'catharsis' after a great movie, e.g. The Lives of Others, which has absolutely nothing to do with blood lust, but leaves you feeling transformed in some deep way.

[quote]Children who cannot depend upon their caretaker to work through their daily fears have to “swallow down whole” their deadly abusers and store their abusive personalities in their brains, in a dissociated part of the right hemisphere’s amygdalan network, a persecutory personality termed an alter. . . .

By the way, I posted a photo of myself as a 3 year old child on Facebook a while ago. I just noticed yesterday the waving flag and low-rise outline of the military facility are quite clearly reflected on the hood of the car I'm standing on. You also can see the shape of the photographer, i.e. my father, who brought me there in 1954. Interesting that he did not photograph the buildings themselves -- or wasnt allowed to. You can swallow your abusers, store their personalities in your brains, or dialogue with them. Dialogue (drama) is the opposite of dissociation.

[lunarmoth]

Dieudonne advising his listeners not to vote in the upcoming elections since they are meaningless. Also, he jokes that he recently fasted for Ramadan (several months late) and scared his neighbour, but broke his fast after walking into the kitchen where his wife had just made Duck a la Maghreb. Who doesn't feel his pain?

[guruilla]

Girard-reader-quotes1.jpg

Girard-reader-quotes2.jpg

Girard-reader-quotes3.jpg

[Grizzly]

The above reminds me of, The dark triad ..

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad

The dark triad [1] is a group of three personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy.[2][3][4] Use of the term "dark" implies that people scoring high on these traits have malevolent qualities:

for whatever, reason.