Category Archives: conservatism

Trump and the’Awful Grace of God’

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“The Lord has raised him up!” Some conservatives made this argument for Trump and I’m beginning to believe they were right, but not in the way they had in mind. Conservatives have the very important responsibility for emphasizing boundaries and restraint in any tribe but when that emphasis becomes extreme, “balance” will be forthcoming from “the gods.”  Now they have Donald Trump who is the poster child for poor boundarys and he is putting fundamental “proprieties” of our country in jeopardy, best illustrated with this egregious connection with Russia.  Conservatives are being “hoisted on their own petard.”   Lord help us.  (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/flynn-held-multiple-calls-with-russian-envoy_us_58792072e4b09281d0eaaaf1?y4gb5h6z14c7rjm7vi)

Conservatives in America are facing a “come to Jesus moment” as is our entire country.  A “Come to Jesus meeting” is a popular expression of a moment when truth is becoming impossible to hide from, when truth is even about to “bitch slap” somebody.  And like all humans, Conservatives are averse to this invasion of reality and are doing everything in their power to undermine Truth’s insidious, persistent effort to “out” them.  “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.” (T. S. Eliot)

But a “Come to Jesus” moment is also relevant to Christians as it is to all spiritual traditions from time to time.  But for evangelical Christians in particular, who have hitched their wagon to Trump, this poses a real problem as in their mind set they have no need to “come to Jesus” because He is already leading them and in fact has led them to back Trump to “Make America Great Again.”  In their mind, there is no need to “come to Jesus” for they already have Him and under his leadership one can make no mistakes.

But this naive belief of evangelicals deserves the scrutiny of meta cognition, alluded to by the Apostle Paul when he told them that the Spirit of God should be allowed to penetrate into the hidden recesses of the heart and is a “discerner of the thoughts and intents the heart.”  Being a Christian does not give one a perfect perspective as it does not eradicate what Paul called the “old man” or “the flesh.”  The Spirit of God, if it is allowed to daunt the tyranny of the ego, can show an individual just how much spiritual impulses are subject to hijacking by this aforementioned “flesh.”  Speaking from experience, it is stunning to suddenly realize just how much one’s spirituality has been “all about me” and in fact has little or nothing to do with spirituality, or in this context, with “God” or “Jesus.”  It is just because we never escape our basic malady of being “human” with an innate tendency to twist everything about life in a self-serving manner.  This always give rise to what Sartre called “bad faith” and then offers the popular press and stand-up comedians plenty of material to ridicule any spiritual enterprise.  The resulting criticism is often over the top  but the tenor of it is well deserved.

Yes, Donald Trump is a god-send but “god-sends” are often painful as they are an assault on the tyranny of this ego and the experience is crushing.  Disillusionment is so painful that we will use any self-deception to avoid this moment described by Aeschylus as “the awful grace of God.”  Or as W. H. Auden worded it, “When Truth met him, and held out her hand, he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”  The evangelical leadership is particularly vulnerable here as if they allow reality to set in, as it must be doing by now, they might have to do the very thing that Donald Trump cannot do, admit that, “I made a mistake.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spirituality in Cultural Captivity

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When working on a Master’s thesis in history at the University of Arkansas in the 1980’s, I focused on American religion, specifically the fundamentalist Christian response to the influence of modernity in the late 19th century.  One book I stumbled across me was entitled, “Churches in Cultural Captivity” by John Eighmy which described how the Southern Baptists had unwittingly been “captured” by their culture, disobeying one of their basic maxims, “To be in the world, but not of the world.”

Any spiritual tradition faces the peril of enculturation as any spiritual truth has to be conveyed through human contrivances like ritual, art, and language.  The essence of spirituality is a dimension of the human experience which is ineffable and therefore not accessible through these or any other cultural contrivances.  These contrivances are but pointers to the spiritual dimension of life but immediately they are likely to fall prey to people who will take them literally, who will not allow these symbols to make any ingress into the depths of the heart where they can be meaningful.  Language, for example, will never get beyond conceptual formulations, words and phrases (i.e. jargon) which rattle around in the cavern of the mind and have all the value of what the Apostle Paul called a “sounding brass and a tinkling symbol.”  Or, to borrow from comedian Jerry Seinfield, they will amount to, “Yada, yada, yada.”

Often these sterile thoughts and ideas rattling around “up there” might contain great value.  But if they are only ideas, devoid of any engagement with a heart that is connected to a body, they will only be dogma and usually will serve the purpose of satisfying some cultural dictate.  One simple cultural dictate is simply to fit into the comfortable confines of the tribe which in my case meant “getting saved” and becoming a Christian.  Furthermore, these sterile ideas will likely gain power to the point that they make the individual extremely amenable to the prevailing sentiments, values, and more ways of the prevailing cultural milieu.  Thus, early in my spiritual life, it was definite that women should be submissive to their husbands and stay in the home, that blacks were inferior to whites and should be kept “separate but equal” with not so much emphasis on that “equal” part, that everyone who did not subscribe to our biblically correct view of the world was likely to spend eternity in hell.  For, when spiritual truth is only conceptual, i.e. “the letter of the law”, there will be no internal discernment and one is likely to be innocently imbibing what the Apostle Paul called “the wisdom of this world.”  This does not make these people “bad people” it just means they have been captivated by their culture and have not allowed the spiritual wisdom of their tradition to sink down from the head into the heart.

Spirituality of this fashion will always be very formulaic, legalistic, and judgmental.  This is a cognitive faith, one that is emphasizes thinking over the affective dimension of life, the phenomenon described by the Apostle Paul as “the letter of the law.”  These are the people who Jesus encountered in the person of the Pharisees and he immediately saw right into the “foul and ragged bone shop of their heart” and called them hypocrites.  That quotation was from the poet W. B Yeats who also noted, “Oh God, guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone.  They who sing a lasting song must think in the marrow bone.”  Yeats saw the dilemma of the “disembodied word” and those in whom their words have not become “enfleshed” are apt to practice great evil though always in the name of what is “good” or “godly.”  This is a matter of experiencing an integration between heart and mind so that we don’t merely talk a good game, but our behavior “speaks” a good game.  Or, as I heard Richard Rohr say one time, “Speak the gospel everywhere you go; and, if necessary use words.”

These “gospeleteers”, whose daily functioning draws from a mélange of rhetoric in their heads, can’t act for any purpose beyond themselves for they cannot see one.  They “have eyes to see, but see not; ears to hear, but hear not.”  These are not necessarily bad people.  They are merely people who have been enculturated too well and/or have never stumbled across a church or spiritual teacher who challenged their spiritual preconceptions, forcing an encounter with subterranean regions of their heart.  This makes me think of a fear that Ralph Waldo Emerson voiced in the 19th century, the fear of coming to the end of his life and realizing that he had not really lived his life at all.  Or, to put it in the words of Jesus, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and lose his own soul.”  Jesus was telling us that if we spend out whole life only skimming along on the surface of things, especially in the realm of spiritual things, we will have lived without every tapping into an authentic dimension of our own life.  He was saying, for example, that if we spend our whole life “christianized”, we will miss the point and experience of being a Christian.

Jesus was not and is not about fire insurance.  Jesus was about getting God “down from heaven” onto the earth, expressing his graciousness, kindness, and love as his Presence is woven into the very fabric of our being.  That will not leave us as some damn Christian geek running around bible-thumping and trying to make you see the world like he does.  Even more so it refers to the “working” out of an imminent deity that Jesus taught is within us already, as in when he reminded us, “the Kingdom is within.”

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A VERY NECESSARY CAVEAT:  I am using terminology from one particular spiritual tradition.  Remember, “the word is not the thing.”

 

S

Weighed in the Balances & Found Wanting

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King Belshazzar, the king of Babylon in the 6th century B.C, saw a writing on the wall one morning and eventually called the Hebrew prophet Daniel to interpret.  He must have been stung to hear Daniel announce his interpretation, “Thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting.”  This scripture is often used sermon material in evangelical circles to remind us that we have “been weighed” and found wanting.  And I think this is a useful thing to remember, for all of us from time to time feel the sting from reality which brings us face to face with our inconsistencies and duplicities, giving us the opportunity to humbly acknowledge that we were “posing” a little more than we thought.  And, speaking from experience, those who have a spiritual focus in their lives often need to endure this sting of, “The Spirit of God” and thus find the opportunity to acknowledge a dimension of what the Apostle Paul called, “the flesh” in our spiritual practice.  In modern parlance, we would call this the ego.  Of course, we also have at our disposal a contrivance I’ve used often, “Oh no.  I am right” and remain stuck in our self-serving view of the world; for, “How could it be wrong?  I’m a Christian.”  John Paul Sartre called this “bad faith.”

The Christian faith, especially those in the evangelical fold, are now staring face to face an opportunity to experience this “sting” as Donald Trump represents the phenomena of them being “weighed in the balances and found wanting.”  Never has a political leader embodied more fully the very antitheses of the teachings of Jesus than does Donald J. Trump, yet evangelical Christians have pledged their troth to him and one of their leaders, Jerry Falwell Jr, even likened him unto “King David.”  This support of Trump is an egregious illustration of the specious and hypocritical dimension that is often present in faith.

But a caveat is in order.  There is nothing that should be surprising to learn from time to time that our faith is “specious and hypocritical.”  For, “we hold this treasure in earthen vessels” as we are all very human regardless of how sincere we are in our spiritual commitment and therefore from time to time we must feel this “sting” and see how we have been deceived.  It is so easy to piously announce “The Lord has raised Trump up” or “the Lord is leading me to vote for him” but I have found personally that so many times when I’ve felt strongly that “the Lord is leading me” I would have to shortly thereafter realize—“Oh, that was only my ego leading me, not God.”   But it is really hard to admit “I am wrong” in our faith for our ego often is much more present than we care to admit. This duplicity that I have been, and am given to does not make me a “bad” human being but it does reveal just how human I am, just how much “the flesh” is present in my spirituality.  But it is so much easier to just brazenly continue on one’s path, refusing to admit having made a mistake, basking smugly in the delusion that “the Lord is leading.”  And it is no accident that the evangelicals have opted to cast their vote for a man who is characterologically incapable of admitting he made a mistake.

But the Christian tradition that I have lived in most of my life facilitated a simple “Christian persona” and when one’s identity is hidden beneath an ego-ridden persona, there is tremendous resistance to acknowledging this.  This persona is largely a fictional creation we have subscribed to about ourselves and about the world itself, a fictional creation comprised of conceptual formulations and ideas.  When one is only a persona, even if a “Christian” persona, he/she is an ideologue and is easy prey for a demonic figure like Trump who is keenly in touch with the dark side of the American psyche.  When one is an ideological Christian, he/she will be a slave to the “letter of the law” and not open to the nuances of life and scripture.  This facilitates succumbing to the clarion call of “Let’s Make American Great Again” which is merely code for, “Let’s turn back the clock to a time when ‘everything is done decently and in order.’”  In other words, to turn the clock back to a time when everything is static and nuance is verboten. And if you want to see where this phenomenon will lead to in the extreme, just Google the term, “Isis.”

This ideological faith brings to my mind a sonnet by John Masefield describing how the “tiger mind” so desperately contrives to create a world that is consistent with its world-view, an endeavor which in the area of faith leads ultimately to the discovery that the God one is worshipping is only a projection of his/her own ego.  Now let me confess.  When this dawns on you, it will rattle your cage; and even worse, it will make you aware that you will be subject to “cage rattling” for the rest of your life!

How many ways, how many different times
The tiger mind has clutched at what it sought,
Only to prove supposed virtues crimes,
The imagined godhead but a form of thought.
How many restless brains have wrought and schemed,
Padding their cage, or built, or brought to law,
Made in outlasting brass the something dreamed,
Only to prove themselves the things held in awe.

 

 

 

Thoughts about the Election 2016

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This election yesterday which will bring Donald Trump to the Presidency of my country in January has taught me so much, not just about my country but about myself.  This is because I now pay attention much better, not only to what happens “out there” in my world but what happens “in here” in my subjective experience.  No longer do I have the luxury of merely coasting by on my convenient set of preconceptions.

The American people have clearly voted for a more conservative direction in our country, politically and culturally.  Their insistence on a return to conservative values was so emphatic that they were even willing to vote for a candidate that most of them did not like, many of whom even found it embarrassing to vote for him.  And I feel passionately that a conservative presence in any culture is needed; but it is sad that the Republican Party could not come up with a candidate who represented their values and didn’t bring Trump’s unsavory qualities to the table.

Furthermore, this election was an affirmation about a certain way of looking at the world, a worldview with very certain and rigid boundaries best illustrated with Trump’s brazen declaration to “build a wall” to keep out the Mexicans and even to make Mexico pay for it.  This “building of walls” is a metaphor for the whole emphasis of the Trumpian message to “Make American Great Again,” meaning to turn back the clock to the time when boundaries were very definite and “everybody” knew their place.  Yes, “Negroes”, women, homosexuals, foreigners of all stripes, and all expressions of diversity were frowned upon or persecuted.

When the basic assumptions that formulate the template through which we view the world are threatened, it is a very human response to want to revert to what has worked in the past to diminish or eliminate this threat.  This is true on an individual and a collective level.  But sometimes this need for the security of the “tried and true” of yesteryear can become too great and we will succumb to the temptation of making,  “for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”  (W. H. Auden)  Life is inherently dynamic and with the dynamic flow of this spiritual process there is always some risk involved.  Without willingness to take risks, to change, we have retreated to a sterile and moribund world which leaves us bereft of spirit, existing only as the walking dead.

The Delusional World of Trump Continues

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I just finished my morning foray into the mad world of Donald Trump and was not even taken aback to see that he is now focusing on the mental instability of Hillary Clinton.  This is just further illustration of how completely out of touch with reality he is; for, if he paid any attention to the feedback that he is getting from friend and foe he would realize that he should not touch the subject of anyone’s else’s “mental instability.”

But this is the problem with narcissism, especially when that mental illness has reached the stage of malignancy it has with him.  For in that state of madness, one is impervious to feedback from the outside.  One then finds himself comfortably ensconced in a delusional system and inevitably will have constructed himself a social world consisting of people who will help him maintain his lunacy as they too live in a version of the same delusional system.  Theologian Paul Tillich described this as “an empty world of self-relatedness”, a pristine world comprised of people who march lock-stepped to the beat of the same demonic drummer.

I speak from experience.  As noted before in this venue, I grew up in a context of delusional narcissism in which I learned that I was one of God’s “special” and “chosen people who had the truth; and, yes, others perhaps had the truth also but no one had it like we did!  And I’m not free of this poison yet and will never be completely as it always tempts me to bask in the safety of my present day mind-set and dismiss any and all those see the world differently.  But when the Grace of God has intervened and one has “named the demon” the demon can no longer work its tyranny in your heart with the same degree of abandonment.  Yes, I still catch myself taking myself too seriously…in this venue and in the whole of my life…but then “reality” chides me and I am reminded again that I’m only a finite perspective in a world of other perspectives.  I don’t have “the” Truth though I now feel that I am in the loving hands of the Truth and therefore don’t have to be so damn “right” any more.

And this is often quite uncomfortable.  For in my heart’s core I still have that childhood desperation for “certainty” but am learning to live without it, learning that this is what faith is about.  And, yes, this is faith in God…though that is a long story…but it also is a newly found faith in myself as I’m discovering that the certainty which used to offer comfort was specious at best and was predicated upon a denial of my human vulnerability.

Trump has a god-like power over many people in my country.  His message preys on reptilian-brain fears which are readily assuaged by his promise that he is gonna “Make America Great Again.”  He knows that he can say and do anything he wants to and his followers will stay with him for they are hapless before his demonic falderal.  Last fall he even declared publicly that he could shoot someone dead in the streets of New York City “and my poll numbers will still go up.”  The very next day his poll numbers spiked.  He offers a delusional hope and when desperate people have imbibed of this nectar it is usually impossible to take it from them.

And many evangelical Christians are drinking the kool-aid with relish, disregarding the advice of one of their own spokesmen, Chuck Swindoll, who posed the question of Trump, “Where is the basic thread of human decency?”  It is not there but many evangelicals, terrified by the reality of the modern world, are willing to sell their soul for the specious hope of a “strong-man” who will turn back the clock and restore our country to the “good old days.”  They fail to realize that these “good old days,” that I remember well, were the days when blacks knew their place, women knew their place, gender diversity did not even exist, and those Communists occupied the place that “Muslims” occupy in our present day mindset.  The “good old days” required rigid demarcation between “us” and “them” which is best illustrated by Trump’s promise today to “build that wall.”  “Walls” and boundaries are necessary for life.  But when they are emphasized to the neglect of openness and inclusiveness they are destructive, destructive of the world outside but also of those that are inside the “safe” confines of those boundaries.  As W. H. Auden noted, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

Mitt Romney, “Profile in Courage”

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I never thought I’d be singing the praises of Mitt Romney but I doff my hat to him for having the courage to succinctly and eloquently articulate to his Republican party and to the American people why Donald Trump is a danger to us all.

Trump is a scary person.  Any bully who disregards common courtesy and civility, “rules of the playground,” is frightening and I recall as a child learning to avoid them.  For persons like him have severe boundary problems and will stop at nothing to get what they want.  We have watched the rest of the Republican candidates this year cower before him, fearful to challenge him, knowing he would respond with painfully personal insults.  Now that it is too late, two of the candidates have come out swinging; but it is apparently too little too late for base of the Republican Party has been enthralled by this psychopath and will not listen to the carefully reasoned argument of someone like Romney.

But Romney displayed statesmanship yesterday.  He knew that he was opening himself up to ridicule and sure enough Trump delivered.  Romney often looked very foolish and inept in 2012 when campaigning took him out of the comfort of the corporate boardroom and exposed a social and occasional verbal awkwardness.  But Romney appears to have a spiritual valor that most of his party does not have and dared to make the only formal, carefully reasoned explanation of why Trump is so dangerous.  It makes me think of the famous line from W. B. Yeats, “The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.”  (“When love begins to sicken and decay/It useth an enforced ceremony/There are no tricks in plain and simple faith/But hollow men, like horses hot at hand/Make gallant show, and promise of their mettle.” Shakespeare)

Being raised in the American South, as a fundamentalist Baptist, I have a faint residual disregard for the Mormon faith.  But, in fairness to myself, it is faint!  But Romney demonstrated real faith yesterday in that he “put some skin in the game” and risked his ego.  I don’t care if he is a snake-handler or a Rastafarian, that is more courage than I’ve seen in any American politician this year, including those who are obnoxiously, ostentatiously “Christian.”

What is Going on with Evangelical Christians???

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Donald Trump continues to give my clinical mind plenty of “stuff” to play with though much of what he does and so is very scary for the sake of my country. One thing that staggers my imagination is how that he is handily winning the evangelical Christian vote over a much more egregiously Christian candidate, Ted Cruz, and in spite of stances and statements which are anti-thetical to everything Christians stand for. It is as if evangelical Christians have said, “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.” He can so or do anything and his numbers will continue to rise. In fact several months ago, he brazenly declared that he could stand in the streets of New York city and shoot somebody and “my numbers would still go up.” And even with that contemptuous observation about his constituency, he numbers continued to rise!

Two significant evangelical pastors have endorsed him. Jerry Falwell Jr, the son of the founder of the Moral Majority and the present founder of Liberty University, declared Trump an “outstanding Christian” as he endorsed him at Liberty University and then proceeded to listen to Trump use expressions like “What the hell” several times in his speech before the student body. I was thirty years old before I used that expression! And the pastor of First Baptist of Dallas, Robert Jeffress, endorsed him early in the campaign but did not cover his awkwardness real well. When Trump opened his arms to embrace the pastor, I remember noting that the pastor looked like a girl at the high school prom who was forced to embrace a disgusting football jock who she found repulsive.

But I think I understand why the Christian constituency is willing to overlook basic teachings of their faith and support such an unsavory man. Early in the campaign I was listening to one of Trump’s speeches on TV and had to share with my wife, “Wow, I understand why he is so popular! I want to give him at ‘atta boy.'” For his populist fervor and rhetoric appealed so readily to memories of my past when his simplistic solution to complex problemsappealed to me. “Make America Great Again” appeals to me still on some unconscious level though my reptilian brain is now countered by self-reflection.

Several evangelical voices have dared to confront their “family” and pose the question, “What about simple decency?” For example, Trump has publicly made fun for one of his critics for having a physical deformity, a physical deformity similar to what Jesus described as a “withered hand.” (This man’s entire arm was “withered”.) And on another occasion, he ridiculed a Fox commentator who is disabled from the waist down for not being able to stand on his own two feet. I was, and still am horrified with these two events. And evangelical Christians merely overlook it! And, furthermore, Trump has repeatedly revealed on TV that he has incestuous thoughts about his beautiful daughter but we never hear anything about that…other than Trevor Noah!

I can just imagine what other countries are thinking now as they witness this spectacle. And, the amusement and horror are justified as this phenomena does reveal something about our character, not just that of the Republican party.

The Pleasure of Being a Victim

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In my country there currently a rise of “victimhood,” best illustrated by the current standoff in Burns, Oregon by right-wing armed extremists.  These men have succumbed to the siren call of politicians on the far right who routinely appeal to a profound sense of alienation and despair in the hearts of the disenfranchised often who happen to be “low-information voters.”  One of the most popular pieces of red-meat these politicians toss out there is, “President Obama is coming to take your guns.”  And related to this fear is the fear of “government/Presidential over reach” which is the suspicion that the government is intruding too far into individual freedoms.

I grew up in this madness, though the version I lived through never led to anything like we are witnessing today.  My father was the patriarch in my early life and he often brought home right-wing fears that evoked fears that were already in my youthful heart as I was discovering that life was capricious all too often.  But dad never would have participated in an armed insurrection.  And another factor in my life was hyper-conservative fundamentalist Christianity which presented me with a “loving” God who was always ready to pinch the heads off of any miscreant and that the world was a really bad place, merely a temporary abode we must endure before we go to heaven and pluck on harps and fawn over Jesus for quatrillions of years.  In my study of religious history, this style of religion is termed “the religion of the dispossessed.”  And my family roots, as well as denominational roots, stemmed from the post-Civil War era when Southerners were first dealing with the alienation that comes from having one’s life wrenched from them by some invading force.

But fear is just a fundamental dimension of human experience.  Human culture is a contrivance that has evolved to help us deal with this fear…usually by completely avoiding it…but also by providing adaptations that allow us to invest in the common good and realize that in spite of the fact that life is transitory and capricious it is a worthwhile and important endeavor.  And I think that religion, and other expressions of faith, can provide a helpful accommodation, but only if we can avoid the challenge of using our accommodation only to escape of the vulnerability that is intrinsic to the human experience.

I have fear, often a lot of it, usually in the form of anxiety.  But for some reason, I can now cope with it more effectively than when I was a child and so without the need for stockpiles of guns and ammunition, belief in an absent Despotic Deity, or even bowing before my country’s true God—consumerism.  So, what does this get me?  Well, if I take it down to MacDonald’s in the morning and lie about my age, and given them a dollar, they will give me a senior cup of coffee.  I don’t think there is anything to “get” other than the simple pleasure of life, the beauty of this world and being here to experience it and be able to handle my frustration that it will not last long enough to satisfy the demands of my ego.

But, this approach denies me the great delight and satisfaction of victim hood, knowing that “they” are always out there to get me, mistreat me, and shame me.  It was so ego-rewarding back then to know that my tribe was a “band of brothers” beleaguered by forces greater than I/we could control but that “we” were together in our faith and knew firmly that we were believing and doing the right thing.  And if anyone should challenge our belief system, we would merely rely on the comforting premise, “We are right, and they are wrong.”  And we knew this because God was leading us.  And armed men in Oregon have the same comfort today, knowing they are “right” and they are willing even to die and to kill because if their convictions.

But this emphasis on “being right” and certainty of having acquired this status always stems from a deep-seated lack of security and feeling of “wrongness”.  This existential doubt is buried deep in the unconscious and, of course, those driven by those subterranean forces never will consider its influence in the choices they make.  To consider these “influences” that are beyond the grasp of consciousness would require a knowledge of the mystery of life, feelings of not being as much in control as once thought, existential doubt all of which lead ultimately to a need of faith.

These feelings of powerlessness often evoke an expression of physical power often in the form of overt aggression.  The pain felt within has to find expression and inevitably leads to acting out, a phenomena vividly illustrated by anthropologist Rene Girard in his classic book, “Violence and the Sacred.”

(New York Times article related to the above:  The delight of victimhood—http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/opinion/sunday/the-real-victims-of-victimhood.html)

 

 

Why Donald Trump Appeals to Me

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Well, at least on some level!.  When I listen to him speak, on some level I too want to say, “Atta boy! You tell’em.”  Many times when I watch him speak I find that deep-seated resonance with his arrogant certainty as he resurrects a ghost from my past when certainty was available and comforted my young soul which was beginning to come to grips with the capricious world I found myself ensconced in.  Trump promises to take us back to yesteryear when “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” was assured to all of us who would simply affirm our faith in “the way things are” and not dare to question the specious nature of that status quo.

My country, and humankind, are now wrestling with a new world that is burgeoning all around us but is very scary as it deprives some of us of the certainties that we have imbibed of for all of our life. It is much simpler to “hunker down” and passionately repeat the bromides that we grew up with, disregarding their lunacy, and taking comfort with like-minded souls who happen to be just like ourselves.  There is no room for “difference” and in fact there is fear of “difference,” thus the frequent demand of extremist groups for “purity” not realizing that “purity” and “danger” go hand in hand.  See anthropologist Mary Douglas’ book, “Purity and Danger.”

Hyper-conservatives always emphasis purity because they believe Truth is an objective fact, readily available to human reason.  They fail to consider that those who disagree with them also employ “reason,” dismissing “their” use of reason as faulty.  They cannot dare to consider that their reason too is “faulty” as it is human nature to reason in such a way that his/her prejudices and biases are confirmed.  It would be too scary to consider this possibility…and might even require humility and faith, two qualities that are difficult or even impossible for ideological extremists.

 

 

The “God Complex” and Dr. Ben Carson

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When a young man, I stumbled across an evangelical self-help book about “the god-complex” and recognized then that it pertained to me.  To summarize, this term refers to someone who responds to deep-seated feelings of being out of control with the over-compensation of trying to control his world, sometimes by defining his world so narrowly that the remaining tiny fiefdom is easily manageable.. And though I am now four decades further in my life’s journey, that complex remains with me in some residual form.  Without it I must fear the primordial chaos which teases all human hearts would be overwhelming.

This term “god complex” is merely a version of what clinical jargon labels “ego structure.”  And all of us have an ego structure without which chaos would ensue and we would be non-functional, or our functional ability would be marred by glaring demonstrations of subtle pathology.  And, if you happen to be religious and cursed with what neurologists might call an hyper-active “god-spot,” the “god complex” will  be present in you for others to see, though the arrogance that this complex affords you will not allow you to see it yourself.  But the resulting “bad faith” is exquisitely delightful!

And that brings me to Dr. Ben Carson, who is currently in 2nd place in the polls for the Republican nomination for President in my country.  And though he is an accomplished neurosurgeon and, I think,  a very nice human being, he has a history of saying things that demonstrate a radical lack of self-reflection.  And his “flaws” could be described more harshly but I’m going to let someone who went to medical school with him do that:

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/21/ben_carsons_dangerous_god_complex_the_commencement_speech_i_wont_soon_forget_partner/

Now as customary, my “tee-hee” muscle wants to get flexed here!  But really, my first response is sadness to see how that such an intelligent and accomplished man can be so hampered by background, cultural influences that he would deign to take some of the stances he has taken.  And though he is responsible for himself, I want to blame his ultra-conservative religion (Seventh Day Adventist) for his radical inability to use this brilliant mind of his to utilize the self-reflective skill that lies dormant in that neo-cortex that he “knows” so much about.  But the real culprit is even deeper for ideology which threatens all religion often tyrannizes many conservative Christians.