It's the Dicks Who Are Infected and Deranged
In this essay, I develop and compare two diametric
views. One says that staying silent in
the face of an empire’s evil infects and deranges you, while the other claims the
opposite, namely, that if you speak up, you will be infected. Plenty of polemics to follow!
Launchpad quote
To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement--Philip K. Dick
The above quote could mean various things. A common interpretation is that lust for
power is seductive and leads to debauchery.
In any case, the quote could be said to have a deeper meaning, one that calls
for complacency. Why fight the Empire, if
you will become “infected?” Infection implies
an unpleasant state or worse, such as being crippled or disfigured. Who wants that? When you add the hard-hitting “derangement”--a
disturbed, broken state of mind--the message becomes unequivocal.
The Dick View
By taking the quote out of whatever original context was provided
by the writer, I express how most of us confront and interact with it. Among the scattery, chattery blizzards of
social media, Dick’s meme-worthy statement has been left to wander; and from that
drifting perch of isolated prominence, it boldly proclaims: Avoid a fight with imperial force on price
of your soul!
I will call this the Dick View. The people who follow it, then, are eponymous
Dicks.
Einstein isn’t a Dick, chooses to fight instead
Let’s compare the Dick view to something said by Albert
Einstein. When the great thinker left
Europe to escape fascism, he found himself appalled by a similar abomination in
the United States; namely, the undeniable, entrenched, intergenerational
scourge of vast, violent social and economic denigration, subjugation and
containment of Black people. That’s an
unwieldly sentence, for sure, and yet it hardly touches on the magnitude of
racism in the USA, a scourge whose history includes centuries of slavery going back
to 1619 [1].
In Einstein’s time, for instance, segregation was legal and ‘Jim
Crow’ laws effectively negated Black people’s fundamental rights. Lynchings occurred with impunity. Bullying was the norm, such as common, public use
of the N-word. The fact that White
people shouldn’t even say the word today indicates the ongoing, unspoken,
festering sickness in my country.
Feeling liberated from fascism, at first, but then increasingly
fraught, Einstein wrote: “The more I feel an America, the more this situation pains
me. I can escape the feelings of
complicity in it only by speaking out.”
Einstein, then, isn’t a Dick. He joined the NAACP and in other various ways
engaged in candid, vocal criticism. During
a commencement speech at Lincoln University, he orated:
The separation of the races is not a disease of the colored people, but a disease of the white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it [2].
The Einstein View
We can extract from the above an obverse to the Dicks. I’ll call it the Einstein view: If you don’t fight imperial evil, your
silence infects and deranges you.
By “silence” I reference someone in Einstein’s position who,
instead of speaking out to alleviate the “pain” from their “feelings of
complicity,” chooses to say and do nothing--to just go along.
This sort of silence is itself a form of complicity. Moreover, as I argue below, it is the first
step in a gravitational pull of darkness, which works to suck someone who is a ‘go-alonger’ deeper into the support of imperial evil.
An example of an imperial evil is “the separation of the races,” which
Einstein calls “a disease of the white people.”
I argue, as well, that the Einstein view aligns with a
viable theory of societal dynamics, which I call complicitous gravitation. In the summary section, I conclude what all
of us should already know: it is ethical
to speak out, or find some way to effectively protest even if, due to perilous circumstance,
it has to be more subtle than vocal.
The institutionalized racism in the USA is the central case
study. It is not, however, the only grave
iniquity at the judgement table. The
arguments below apply more generally, mutatis mutandis, to various
scenarios of silence and protest in regard to Big Lies and police-state
enforcement.
The Theory of Complicitous Gravitation (TCG)
Silence, as well as being a state of complicity, exerts a steady,
seductive effect on the mind, which tends to suck a person into a deceitful place
that fractures the psyche. I call this effect
complicitous gravitation.
People who choose silence will tend to slip deeper into an empire’s
grip, impelled by the dual forces discussed below. In the final stage, worship and obedience are
maximal and, as a result, the mind becomes infected and deranged. Hail, Caesar!
Two gravitational forces of TCG
Two forces combine to pull people deeper into partnership
with evil: temptation and
pain-avoidance. The carrot and the
stick.
1. The carrot is two-pronged: (a) a sense of relief that the system won’t
punish you for speaking out and (b) an admission ticket, namely, entry into the
bazaar of in-group opportunism.
The opportunity gained could be something relatively small,
such as a neighborhood summer job. Or it could be much more: a chance at government work, business deals or
power at the community, state or national level. For a woman, in-group status in the empire could
mean staying at home and being a housewife, joining the PTA, auxiliary social clubs,
etc.
(Sexism is an invariable trait of imperialism. The original Big Lie, which every ‘good
citizen’ most accept as a loyalty test, is that the freedom and potential of over
half the human species must be muzzled and hobbled for servitude toward the
other half).
In short, by selling out and staying quiet, you get a chance
to find a place in the empire’s hierarchal ladder of power and wealth. There is also a sense of relief, because you
have chosen to conform and obey, and so the police state and the social attack
dogs won’t bear down on you.
2. The stick,
ironically, comes from your own mind. Staying
silent creates a certain kind of psychological pain, which I call core tension. It is associated with conscience, but also other 'voices.'
The pain, this core tension, can increase to become unbearable. We humans tend to do what we can to get away
from pain, including the mental sort, such as guilt. But if you stay silent--if you don’t make the
choice that Einstein made, which is the honest route, to speak out--then you
have to deal with the pain coming from your heart another way: by suppressing it.
As the pain increases, due to your ongoing silence, suppression
gets harder and harder. In the end, to shut
down your own inner urgings--your heart, your conscience, your empathy, your
reason--drastic measures become necessary.
When this happens, suppression turns into repression: the construction of impassable, perverse psychic
walls in the mind. Your cognitive
filters fortify twisted modes of perception.
This dark transformation, in which evil is embraced as good,
is akin to selling your soul to Mephistopheles--or his proxy, the empire.
Core Tension
When you stay silent in the face of evil, you begin to
experience a certain kind of pain. It is
combination of negative valanced emotions--guilt, confusion, stress,
uneasiness, revulsion and so on--but not all of them need be present.
Core tension is similar to what psychologists call cognitive
dissonance, but it specifically involves major issues in morality, the ethical
standards and principles taught to us as children. An example is the Golden Rule, treat others
as you would be treated yourself. The
Golden Rule is a common sense expression of decency, dignity, equality, fairness
and balance.
Even if a person’s conscience is weak or nonexistent, they
can still feel core tension. To live as
if something is true when it is blatantly false--to embrace the illogical as
logical--is jarring and disorienting. It
unleashes an awful, compelling counter-reaction.
Living in fundamental contradiction can lead to confusion,
chaos and stress. After all, if you let
go of reason as a standard for one critical component of reality, where and
when is it not expendable?
A Malevolent Metamorphosis
Imagine someone in Einstein’s situation, who enters America and witnesses racism for the first time.
If such a person chooses silence, they are now within the outer
perimeter of a perilous psychological gravity, one that attempts to pull them
through four stages of complicity and disintegration:
1. Initial silence. Compartmentalize
and suppress core tension to deal with it later
2. Enduring silence. Turn
‘deal with it later’ into ‘deal with it much later.’ Long-term compartmentalization and continuous
suppress of core tension.
3. Solidified silence.
Initiate the process of turning
suppression into repression. Bury your
core tension down in a place where you can never feel it.
4. Orwellian silence.
Complete the transformation of the fractured the mind. Look at reality in a whole new way, one in
which evil is good and good is evil. Silence
erupts into vocal support. The empire
was right all along!
Suppression, compartmentalization and repression can be part
of a healthy emotional management--or not.
It depends on how these psychological tools are used and what structures
(cognitive filters) they help to shape.
It is, however, a terrible self-inflicted tragedy when we demand that
our own mind, through sheer stubborn force of will, twist itself into an ontological pretzel.
What is ‘Speaking up’?
As I’ve discussed in other essays, there are many ways to
speak up, that is, to protest or fight back [3]. Someone of Einstein’s stature, assured a job
at a prestigious university, is relatively free to be vocal. Moreover, his
voice will generally be heard.
Many immigrants have no such cachet. They very often need a job to support their
family. It might be very difficult for
them to directly protest without risk of expatriation, vagrancy or jail.
All of us, though, have access to some means of protest. Some are subtle, but they contribute to a social momentum that roils the ‘peaceful’ surface. A recent book by Angwin and Fields-Meyer
explores the idea of “collective stubbornness.” [ff]
An example of subtle ‘speaking out” is the Black porters who,
while maintaining their job, sent encouraging messages through their body
language. And of course many people,
Black and others, joined informal or secret social groups to fight segregation
(and before that, slavery). Church
membership is often a conduit to ‘good trouble,’ to quote John Lewis.
We aren’t all Einstein.
We won’t be invited to give a speech.
That doesn’t mean we must be silent.
We each have a choice: whether to
do something that is plausibly effective, something that honestly addresses the
concerns from both heart and mind, or to do nothing and become complicit, entering the gauntlet of the four stages.
A terrible price
The rest of this essay, at the risk of prolix, paints a
grotesque picture. I want to hammer home
the point that someone who twists their mind to the point where evil is seen as good is broken. They are both infected and
deranged. This occurs fully in in the last step
of the TCG model, where the mind flips to accept illogic as logic and
vice as virtue. To reach this point of malevolent metamorphosis is
to go from loathing what you see in front of your very eyes to embracing it
with ardor and obedience.
The essence of the Hyde-like flip is on par with that
classic, sardonic tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes:
The emperor is clearly wearing no clothes. But, wait!
Of course he is wearing clothes, the finest ones in the land! Long live the Emperor!
In terms of racism:
Black people are clearly being targeted by vicious,
brutal, wicked racism. But, wait! Of course they are not. It’s White people who are the victims here! Long live the Empire! Black people need to
be kept in their place, by whatever means!
To accept evil as good is to situate yourself within an
illogical wonderland of contradictions, a bizarre landscape of lies whose
essential purpose is itself absurd--to stymie and befuddle your own ability to
think.
I am going to discuss this tragic disfigurement from a
number of angles. These overlap and
mutually reinforce, which brings out the various tricks and traps of cruelty and
brutality that a person inflicts on their own psyche when they take the path of the devil's bargain.
Fracture
Suppose you are watching it unfold as Einstein did, arriving new to the scene. Day after day, event after event, blatant
evidence of evil mounts in the empire. Suppose someone chooses silent. Now imagine how they twist their conception of the world around in reverse, to see brazen
wickedness as good, despite the outcry of the facts, on and on ...
To perform such a ‘180’ requires setting up a triage system
for every bit of social information that flows into your mind. Bit by bit (double entendre intended), you bind
yourself in a harness of internal censors.
Maybe these censors are accessible at first, but they trend liminal and
finally unseen to the ego--the center of conscious awareness--while they go about the task of managing data and suppressing pain.
The force of the core tension from conscience, empathy, intuition and
reason builds as the sins of silence accumulate, prompting the need for more
mental machinery for greater suppression.
To function under so much pressure, a silent person eventually become an
actor all the time, weighed down by a duplicitous role. The duplicity becomes more automatic, evolving ways to compartmentalize
and suppress--until, as far as the surface level knows, none of the sort is going
on . All is just fine, both outside in the world and within the mind.
In terms more scientific, repetitive behavior digs ruts into
the neural network, the learning mechanism of the brain.. The more you hide, the deeper the dendritic ruts. This leads not only to entrenchment but deformation: the mind’s cognitive filters (or schemata) twist into convolutions so that they register illogic as logic.
At some point, the person, who now has fled thoroughly from truth
and justice, represses a huge chunk of who they are. Containment of this magnitude inflicts a state of psychological
fracture, an enforced degradation into total ignorance.
This ugly process is not like flipping a switch. To alter yourself so monstrously requires a
campaign of ceaseless and enormous self-attack.
Imagine tectonic forces so mighty they compress mud into rock, a surface
where nothing gets through. Suppression becomes
ignorance-based repression. An impermeable
mental wall locks aspects of your own psyche so far down that the surface is unable to reach them and they are no longer able to reach it with assessments of what is good, honest and true.
Joy-dampening
Along with fracture, the transition to Orwellian silence
deadens the ability to feel a special sort of joy. This occurs because those parts of the mind
responsible for causing core tension can also elicit positive passions--if they
are not beaten down and chained away in a psychic dungeon.
It can feel special to know and feel that you are challenging darkness and embracing the light; that you are speaking out for justice. The feeling can be exhilarating or simply a firm sense of deep-seated content.
Imagine it, a
sense of content that has nothing to do with how much money you
have, what kind of car you have, what you look like in comparison to the models paid presented by the beauty industry … It doesn't matter if you are in debt or socially scorned. This sort of content is independent of such external attempts to control you.
A harmonious mind is an exultant accomplishment
An honest relationship with yourself ushers in a wellspring of creativity and profundity. It seeks with honor through layers
of mind, its foyers, parlors and mezzanines. To flourish in this way, to treat yourself
with full-throated respect is world-changing.
There is, yes, grief and sorrow, in a hero’s journey. But the skill of emotional competence,
something we can learn and constantly enhance, allows the channeling of all
sort of emotions, in a quest for catharsis and sublimation, as well as the joy
and contentment they nurture.
In a way, your own soulmate [ff sus]. To ‘know thyself’ brings
knowledge--and knowledge is power. However,
if you deny yourself such joy and related wisdom, you deny yourself the ability to choose wisely; and you suffer a corresponding power loss.
Power loss: a bias
against knowledge
Our society tends to associate higher awareness, including
self-knowledge, with burden and woe.
It’s an old chestnut, represented in the Bible:
In much wisdom is much grief, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.
Anti-intellectualism serves Ignorance (short for ‘ignorance-based
government’). No dictator benefits from
a person who seeks an accord of reason, conscience, empathy and justice. Donald
Trump infamously said, “I love the poorly educated.”
Ignorance needs Big Lies.
It needs citizens who are driven by passions that they themselves do not
steer.
Of course, fear and hate are not necessarily bad. Their expression is part of a workable emotional
competence. [5 on hate]. But when a dictator cultivates them in others to manipulate, the goal is a vast and poignant loss of freedom. Those who accept such demagoguery into their heart assimilate, in consequence, into a mobilized
mass, an orchestrated march of swarm behavior, led by a conductor’s baton of propaganda
and rhetoric.
Disrespect and hate
The triad of self-inflicted curses--fracture, joy-dampening,
and power loss--conjoin into a searing accusation, which is the following: the choice of silence is a choice to hate
yourself.
These curses are results of a person basically telling their own heart to shut up. The person turns a blind ear, chokes out reason and light. Not
as an aberration, but with seamless persistence until,
crushed by the incessant, strangle-like effect, the light in them withers and snuffs.
Again, this heavy-handed interaction is devoid of fairness or decency. The goal is not only to annihilate the truth, but replace it with an impostor (say, the dictator's specious rationales). The silent person's conscience protests against such absurdity. So they begin to hate their own conscience, and all the other parts of your the mind that bring core tension.
One
part of your mind gaslights others, not even hearing them, saying irreality is reality. It gets away with this because it has the raw mental power to suppress and repress. It gets away with it 'because it can.'
A person spiraling down could stop the descent. They could speak up, like Einstein did. Some step back and do speak up. But others walk deeper into the fog of silence, a ‘comfortably numb' place.
As I explain below, however, the silence of complicitous
gravitation is not serene.
You can't tell a book by its cover--old adage
Tyrannizing yourself
To create and condemn your own truth assessments is a
violent act of stubborn will. You chop away
at your own daily awareness. It is a
brutal decree of might-makes-right. (If ego is thought of as
the conscious part of a person as they move through the world, then 'ego-makes-right').
Fracture. Joy
dampening. Power loss. Self-hate.
These add up to yet another frightful
status: self-tyranny. It is analogous, in its blunt cruel force, to
how a dictator beats down opposition, and hammers a dark, unforgiving message into
the minds of worshipful masses. A
silenced person fractures their own mind, putting up walls, while a dictator
puts up walls in society to establish an apartheid. Frighteningly, the internal mirrors the external.
In the final stages of complicitous gravitation (TCG), a fallen person commits something like an act of self-murder. They kill parts of themself, or try their best.
As well, they forget that by gong through the four stages, they erected something
fake, a façade of justice.
The situation calls to mind a quote from Macbeth:
Stars, hide your fires,
Let not light see my black and deep desires.
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
Macbeth intends to murder the king and take his place, but he doesn’t want his intentions revealed. However, There is a deeper symbolism. The separation of the eye and the hand could be seen to represent parts of mind. The eye, pretending to be the conscience, sees that the hand has dark intent, but pretends all is good (‘nothing to see here’) and so “winks” in sly arrangement.
Neither of the two parts of the mind--the eye or the hand--are a person’s legitimate conscience. That honest voice, the ‘better angel,’ has been buried. The fake conscience, however-- the ‘eye’--is part of the pretense that everything is okay and good. The intent of the hand is fine! Nothing evil to see here, even when the hand takes up the knife and stabs away.
Stage 4 of TCG, though, differs from Macbeth. Macbeth is still aware of his evil behavior
and intent. His mental trick--setting up
a false conscience to give the go ahead to evil deeds--might be more like stage
3 (initial phase of repression). Someone who has
fully undergone malevolent metamorphosis really believes, at the level of awareness,
that their evil deeds are good. They don't request that the stars hide their fires. The stars are already gone and forgotten. The transition has been made, beyond Macbeth's mindset, into an Orwellian state.
An Inner Dracula
There is another aspect of silence that I want to touch on
briefly, a sort of internal Dracula. The
fracturing of the mind, in addition to jailing away conscience and reason,
demands new and prejudiced ways to process information. Some part of the subconscious has to
make this work ; and for its laborious effort it demands a price. The illusion of peace on the surface, the
‘comfortably numb,' exacts its pound of cerebral flesh.
Running a shadow machinery of continuous deceit sucks up a lot of brain fuel, fuel that could have gone instead to noble pursuits and healthy flourishing. Such shadow machinery puts a vampiric warden in charge of how a silent person processes information. An inner vampire who sucks up mental fuel, to regulate how the person perceives, thinks and feels.
In Sum
A person who chooses silence when confronted with an evil
empire, despite the urgings of their heart, becomes infected and deranged.
The push to avoid guilt, confusion, shame, and illogic
(core tension) leads to a devil’s bargain. The result is grotesque changes to the psyche: fracture, joy-dampening, power loss, self-hate
and internal tyranny.
This shadow violence includes a kind of self-murder
or attempted murder, for the ego attempts to squeeze down and choke out a significant
part of what defines the whole of the person, aka their personality. As a result, aspects of the self wither. The way the brain processes information gets perversely
twisted, which requires an parasitic subconscious schemata centered on maintaining Big-Lie deceits. Conscious
awareness of what's going on gets shut own, something the ego not only condoned but facilitated. It lives afterward for the empire, bowing down, paying tribute, while seeking approval, opportunity and status.
Our understanding of the human brain, in the early 21st century, is
young. But we have learned that our brain
has different centers and, furthermore, that it coordinates across them. Our brain has such vast plasticity that it
can, if called, create two or more personalities, ‘alters,’
as with multiple personality disorder. We also know that if neurobiological links between
parts of the brain are physically cut, such as the corpus callosum, the parts can act
independently. As well, dreams show that
our brain will create worlds and people around the ‘I’ that we see as
who we are.
It is not an unfounded leap, then, to assert that when we
choose silence, as defined above, we initiate a gigantic disruptive process, one that is not only disordered but has malevolent effects in the mind. Silence attempts to kill core tension and in so
doing strangles crucial aspects of personality, diminishing a person perhaps forever.
On the other hand, we can seek an honest relationship with the mansions of our own mind. We can channel forth the ‘dark’ energies in healthy ways for ethical purposes, the result being great fonts meaning and catharsis [ff O.H.]
Speaking out against evil does not usher in a monolith of ‘woe and grief.’ Speaking out, rather, elicits and enlivens joy and contentment, a sort that is immeasurable. You cannot attain such lovely ways-of-being from money or social status. Honesty and justice, while 'looking in the mirror' result in a relationship with yourself that is priceless.
Finally, I want to reiterate and underscore that 'speaking out' does not require a person to get on a podium like Einstein. You can ‘speak out’ in many ways [4 Sus]. I’ll end with a koan-ish quote:
In art and dream, may you proceed with abandon. In life, may your proceed with balance and stealth -- Patti Smith
===========================
Born in '63, made it to 63. Never would have thought. I am grateful to the forces of fate.
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