Resist the Crazy

Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive – it’s that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.

– Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

As things felt like they were spiraling out of control last week, as Americans and people around the world were inundated with endless videos of street violence in addition to reactionary calls to deploy the U.S. military to cities across the country, the temptation to lose control of one’s mental faculties and basic humanity was heightened.

I saw evidence of this all around me. There was a dark and vicious energy in the air, and it felt contagious.

The responses to the tweet above were encouraging and demonstrated many others sensed the same thing and were likewise troubled by it. The overall madness of last week reminded me of the months following Donald Trump’s election. In both cases, the worldview of large numbers of people was shaken to its core. I think the root cause of the breakdown in both instances was that many people’s model of what is “normal” was suddenly shattered.

For example, the idea of Donald Trump being elected president was so incomprehensible and concerning to so many, they completely lost it when he won. Likewise, images of American cities burning amidst widespread looting caused another group to crack. Neither group had fully come to grips with how broken and corrupt the U.S. economy and society had become, and that these sorts of things happen when states begin to fail.

The reaction to Trump being elected from many of those traumatized by it was to try to remove him at all costs, even if this meant spreading an outlandish Russiagate theory for three years straight. Likewise, the knee-jerk reaction from many to the riots was to send in the military to crush them. In both cases, those who had their comfort zones shattered responded by trying to make the uncomfortable situation go away as soon as possible. Nobody wanted to ask why.

Why was Trump elected? People are angry. Why did cities erupt into civil disobedience? People are angry. Lots of people are angry, but why? We should probably try to honestly answer that question sooner rather than later. There are a lot of very good reasons to be angry.

That being said, unless your life is in immediate danger, the best response to an event that shocks you to your core is to step back and take a deep breath.  You don’t have to like what’s happening, but you should consider what a productive or creative response to the situation might look like, as opposed to immediately resorting to an instant-gratification, emotionally charged, reptilian response. The response to a crisis is often worse than the crisis itself.

Someone mentioned to me that he tells all his friends: “you must stand guard at the door of your mind.” Great advice in general, but particularly necessary during times like these. This is also partly what it means to be more conscious, a topic I’ve written about extensively in recent years (see my series on Spiral Dynamics)

It’s never been more important for those who are somewhat conscious to remain that way, because just as consciousness can evolve, it can also devolve. Characteristic of an evolved consciousness is being able to acknowledge one’s own flaws and vulnerabilities. It means being aware of your more base instincts as a human, which means admitting that just as you have the capacity for love, compassion and generosity, you also have the capacity for hate, apathy and selfishness.

Being honest about this and attempting to confront it is key to evolving one’s consciousness, but ego tends to get in the way. The ego has an image it needs to maintain and protect, which ends up acting as a severe roadblock on the path to sustainable self-improvement. It affects and stifles everyone to varying degrees.

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

It’s important to understand that virtually everyone considers themselves a good person. That person on the complete opposite side of the political spectrum whom you detest, thinks of themselves as a righteous warrior fighting for all that’s good and just. Everyone sees themselves in this sort of way to a greater or lesser degree, but not everyone can be right. So we divide ourselves into tribes that reinforce our views of how right and great we are, and how bad everyone else is. This prevents us from seeing where other people are coming from, and it prevents us from uniting on the really big issues that affect us all.

Moreover, there are people who understand this about human nature and intentionally use it against us. A perfect summary of how this plays out every day via social media can be found in the following excerpt from a post recently published at The Prepared.

You should also remember that the split-screen effect means media types can tell whatever story they want to tell. As in the Venezuela clip above, there are some outlets who focus on the peaceful and joyful parts of the present protests, and others who focus purely on the violence and chaos.

All of this stuff—the beautiful and the ugly—is really happening and really matters, but you have to be extremely careful in using news reports to develop a sense of how much of what is happening where.

You need to be the guardian of your mind, and you need to recognize that people are constantly trying to push your consciousness into a fight or flight state where you’re malleable and easy to manipulate. There are times in life when fight or flight is appropriate to survive, but it’s not a healthy state of mind to resonate in over the course of an average day.

You can contribute to the crazy, or you can contribute in some other way.  A new world is on the horizon, but we need to be careful about how we go about building it. What the world desperately needs right now is more conscious people. From that well, a brighter future can be born.

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13 thoughts on “Resist the Crazy”

  1. Very good post, but I draw distinction with one section where you say:

    >It’s important to understand that virtually everyone considers themselves a good person. That person on the complete opposite side of the political spectrum whom you detest, thinks of themselves as a righteous warrior fighting for all that’s good and just. Everyone sees themselves in this sort of way to a greater or lesser degree, but not everyone can be right. So we divide ourselves into tribes that reinforce our views of how right and great we are, and how bad everyone else is.

    I’d argue that the more likely you are to consider yourself a “good person” the more likely you are to fall into the sort of myopic tribalism that you describe in your following sentences. Personally I don’t consider myself a “good person” (or a bad person) – just a person. I’m not fighting for what’s “good and just”. Just a person floating on the sea of sewage we call modern human society. Trying to navigate my way around the biggest and most intrusive chunks of garbage on my journey through life, making the most of it. Neither clinging to any tribal identity or caring much about those who foolishly do. In the big scheme of things we’re here for only the blink of an eye. We should all seek to enjoy it and make the most of our time here while it lasts instead of getting caught up in the artificially created drama that consumes so many.

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  2. I live one mile east of where George Floyd was killed and one kilometer SSE of the 3rd Precinct. I have seen the wolves of anger burn and loot. The next day I have seen the wolves of peace come together with brooms and pans to sweep up the destruction from the previous night.

    The wolves inside me are of one pack. They do not seek conflict or a fight. But they have stood guard, armed and ready through the nights to protect my home and the homes of my neighbors. And I have not stood alone as many of my neighbors have joined me.

    Calm is returning to my town, but the destruction is quite visible and it will be seen and remembered for a very long time.

    The senseless taking of a life by four armed police officers who continued to act with the intent to kill for nearly three minutes after the man’s heart had stopped beating has left it’s mark on not just my city of Minneapolis, but also the world. Time will tell as to how this event shapes humanity in the future. I have hope that it will improve.

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  3. Perhaps America has arrived at its’ Karma after all these years of looting the rest of the planet.
    May the real America arise from the rubble.

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    • With America, Australia, and South Africa, the proverbial Remus and Romulus crossed the ocean and stole the land. But the ‘real’ mythical twins didn’t steal someone else’s land. They were Italians who took a patch of dirt IN ITALY that no one else wanted. That’s a big difference. Nothing good can come of America or Australia or South Africa, because they began as a crime. I just didn’t know the horrible endgame would include endless relentless gaslighting and killer virus hoax to mask an economic and financial system collapse.

  4. Speaking of Spiral Dynamics, I encourage everybody to also check out Psychohistory. I believe the psychoclasses observed there are the same as the layers in Spiral Dynamics.

    That would mean that less abusive parenting is the way to get more people into a higher level of consciousness (and making them less reptile-brained). At least in the next generation.

    https://psychohistory.com/books/the-origins-of-war-in-child-abuse/

    Psychohistory also gives other great insights, like why some societies are able to advance more (less traumatiezed/higher psychoclass), how there’s political cycles, group fantasies, etc.

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  5. Too many people have for far too long been consuming narcotics in Western societies at all levels of responsibility and economic hierarchy. I think risk awareness was skewed in Big Finance and left us with 2007 as the second strike of 1998 and that Media, Politics, Law, Finance, Medicine are riddled with persons whose perceptions of Reality and morality have been distorted by mind-bending substances over many years. I would bet any MRI scan of their brains would show up distortions in cell structures and grey matter.

    People have been chemically-engineered to be Irrational and Impulsive.

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  6. It hasn’t been easy to chart a course through the insanity without choosing a side in all of the on-going ideological battles currently raging. So far, the only casualties have been several finger nails and multiple pints of Häagen-Dazs Pineapple Coconut Ice Cream.

    I think my low point was last weekend when the market was reaching new highs smack in the middle of simultaneous national crises. All thanks to several trillion of newly printed money from the Fed given to Wall Street. Talk about disconnects, even Alice in Wonderland made more sense. You know that this money injection will never be extracted, so goodbye deflation (lower prices) and hello hyper-inflation, or at least a long painful period of stagflation. “Would you like a pastry with your coffee today? Ok, that will be $21.50 at the window, thank you.”

    And as for the tragic death of George Floyd, why is it any different than every other form of injustice and destruction of life that occurred that day? Should I drop everything and march in the streets because the TV and newspapers turned on the searchlights and transformed his death into a media extravaganza? How many fell victim to the hysteria and became as Bob Dylan warned, “Only A Pawn In Their Game”?

    As for me, I fought back against the dark psychological influences by throwing myself headlong into some volunteer landscaping projects in my local community. And as always, completely ignoring anything produced by the corporate media or DC.

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  7. All this anger is just cause and effect. We’re widening inequality while promoting acrimony to keep attention away from bankers, and it’s working.

    Way too many Americans are willing participants in this game and I firmly believe they can only learn about this the hard way. They’ll have to experience major social upheaval before they even begin to ask whether or not being constantly upset with each other is worth it.

    Orwell wrote in 1984 that all the flag waving and marching was just sex gone bad, a way to steer peoples’ natural energy into something meaningless. We’ve done the same, except it’s the 24/7 red/blue game we’re playing, and instead of gathering in public for our Two Minutes Hate we just scowl at our phones and monitors while we read stories about how much the other team sucks. People have to want to rise above being sheep, and it’s clear they’re not ready to do that yet.

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    • Yes, indeed. You can also go to the thoroughly researched, transcribed and hyperlinked documentary that covers this evil brilliantly. In my opinion this is a MUST SEE documentary for everyone!

      It is split up in four pieces, the first part is about 20 some minutes so after that you can decide of you want to see the other parts as well:

      https://www.corbettreport.com/gates/

  8. I guess I have a different perspective on all this. For reasons that can be debated, the whole society is just more sensitive and easily upset now.

    Because this is nothing. The sixties and early seventies were MUCH MORE violent and radically revolutionary. I know. I was there.

    But don’t take my word for it. Read about what happened back then. A good place to start is here Days of Rage https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/

    The article is a fairly comprehensive review of the book. More than anything the book just fleshes out how NORMAL and BANAL all the radicalism, bombings, and the rest of the revolutionary palette was back then.

    People really thought that a revolution was right around the corner. I did. Of course I was a callow high school student easily influenced by the university students in my hometown, but a lot of them drank the koolaid too.

    I can’t resist teasing you a little with a few quotes from the article, to pique your interest:

    “People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.)

    “Recently, I had my head torn off by a book: Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, about the 1970s underground. It’s the most important book I’ve read in a year.”

    “Days of Rage is important, because this stuff is forgotten and it shouldn’t be. The 1970s underground wasn’t small. It was hundreds of people becoming urban guerrillas. Bombing buildings: the Pentagon, the Capitol, courthouses, restaurants, corporations. Robbing banks. Assassinating police. People really thought that revolution was imminent, and thought violence would bring it about.”

    “One thing that Burrough returns to in Days of Rage, over and over and over, is how forgotten so much of this stuff is. Puerto Rican separatists bombed NYC like 300 times, killed people, shot up Congress, tried to kill POTUS (Truman). Nobody remembers it.”

    “Also, people don’t want to remember how much leftist violence was actively supported by mainstream leftist infrastructure.”

    Perhaps that is the discomforting difference between the 70s and today. In the 70s the grown ups all acted like grown ups. Government officials didn’t coddle and encourage the little darlings to further act out their fantasies in the streets. They called out the national guard and had them arrested.

    Now local and state government, the Democratic party, and half the Republicans seem to want to get on the right side of history before it’s too late. They support all this.

    Why?

    I think I know. They can read the demographic statistics as well as anyone else. White people are slowly suiciding themselves, and crowds of immigrants and minorities are becoming the new majority politically.

    A politician always knows what side his bread is buttered on.

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