15:29 - What is our true history?
Current mood: contemplative
This is an excellent video made for an even better book. The ending of the video is no joke. If we do not enlighten ourselves to the true history of the world and ourselves, we may indeed be soon living in a world of darkness.
War, rumors of war, corrupt governments run by psychopaths, phony terrorism, burgeoning police states...but is that all we have to worry about? What if there was something to put it all in context? Or rather, what if there is something else we are missing, something that is beyond the control of even the political and corporate elite; something that is driving them to attempt to herd the global population to an ever finer order of control...
Being deployed, I don't get to keep up to date on the news issues of the day very well. I can catch a few minutes of random cable news shows at the chow hall or word of mouth news about the Presidential campaigns but unfortunately, this is never enough. I did find in this week's Stars and Stripes newspaper (the Sept. 9th issue) an interesting news article though. Gleaned from the Washington Post the article is regarding a federal judge who ruled against the nation of Iran and awarded $2.6 billion to the families of the Marines killed in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. In the decision, Judge Lamberth ruled that Iran was "legally responsible" for the 1983 Hizbollah attack in Lebanon. Iran apparently didn't contest the charges.
From nearly the first day of boot camp I was taught that this attack was a terrorist act. Perhaps it was, but since it was directed against a military target the distinction is a little less clear cut. As a Marine I am considered a lawful combatant under the Geneva Conventions. This fact is stated on the back of my military ID card. As well were all the Marines who were killed in the tragic attack. The family members were compensated by the Marine's servicemember's life insurance policies but I can understand why the families want more. The commanders on the ground in Beirut did not equip the Marines with the necessary rules of engagement to properly defend themselves. However, the timing of the claim and the defendant is still worth a closer look. Iran is definitely not the only state sponsor of Hizbollah, not to mention that nearly twenty-four years after the attack makes the timing quite suspicious. Perhaps this is an innocent reaction from families still grieving or possibly another indictment to pile on Iran to justify a future war.
It's no secret that support for the global war on terror is slipping among the American people. It's always been difficult for the administration to show progress, but what they have done a good job at is to find new targets and enemies to fight. Many politicians, on both sides of the aisle, have misused the term "terrorist" to describe the individuals (or groups) that attack the US armed forces. But the fact is that when someone shoots at me (a legal combatant) or tries to use a roadside bomb (IED) against me while I'm on patrol they are not a terrorist. They become enemy combatants the moment they target other legal combatants. You can call them insurgents, anti-Iraqi forces, anti-occupation forces, freedom fighters, or Ali Baba (our most easily translated term for bad guys) but "terrorist" is not the correct term.
There is probably more than one reason why these people refer to enemy combatants as terrorists. It could be simply because they don't know better and don't understand that the word means something quite specific. Perhaps it's because it is accepted vernacular now and since we're waging a "war on terror" that would make "terrorist" the logical moniker for the enemy. Or maybe there is a more sinister reason. Could it be that the politicians and mainstream media (and occasionally military officials) knowingly misrepresent the enemy in Iraq to achieve a political aim? If I were attacked by a terrorist while in Iraq, then that must mean that terrorists are in Iraq, which means it was a perfectly wise and logical decision to invade Iraq, right? Now more than ever the neo-cons need to justify their actions and agenda to the American public. A clever bit of language manipulation, most likely not caught onto by the majority of unconcerned Americans, to achieve a political end. Don't forget that since the Sept. 11th attacks there is nothing an American hates more than a terrorist.
I won't say that I know why the term terrorist is so easily affixed to so many legal combatants but maybe we should be more careful in how we use the term. Words still mean things.
September 19, 2007
Philip Martin [send him mail] is an infantry Marine serving his second combat tour in the al Anbar Province of Iraq.
Missouri: Police Threaten, Detain Motorist for Parking After Hours
A St. George, Missouri police officer is caught on tape threatening to invent charges to arrest a motorist for parking after hours.
A motorist who refused to discuss his personal business with a St. George, Missouri police officer was threatened with arrest last Friday. Brett Darrow, 20, no stranger to unconventional encounters with police, caught a St. George Police Sergeant James Kuehnlein stating that he had the power to invent charges that would put Darrow behind bars. Update: Sergeant Kuehnlein was placed on unpaid leave Monday pending an investigation.
"Try and talk back... to me again," yelled Sergeant Kuehnlein. "I bet I could say you resisted arrest or something. You want to come up with something? I come up with nine things."
The incident began at around 2am. Darrow was to meet a friend who was working late and was going to pick him up. Darrow headed toward a 24-hour commuter parking lot in an unincorporated part of Saint Louis County in his 1997 Nissan Maxima. He put on his turn signal and entered the lot which, aside from Kuehnlein's cruiser, was essentially vacant.
After stopping the car, the police officer approached and began questioning Darrow about what he was doing. When Darrow declined to discuss his personal business, the police sergeant exploded. Although the video clearly shows Darrow driving properly and using his turn signal, the police officer insisted that Darrow had broken the law.
"Oh, while you were coming towards me you were swerving back and forth within the roadway," Sergeant Kuehnlein said. "I might give you a ticket for that. You want me to come up with some more? When you turned in, you failed to use your turn signal, your right turn signal."
Without the video, Darrow tells TheNewspaper that he would have stood no chance disproving the officer's word in court. Twenty-eight percent of the St. George municipal budget comes from traffic citations. Darrow wonders how many of the tickets were legitimate.
"Looking into this guys eyes, he was crazy," Darrow said. "I was really scared he was going to assault me. I just wonder how many other people have been arrested on these charges."
After ordering Darrow against the car and searching him, Sergeant Kuehnlein released the motorist.
Joe Quinn Signs of the Times Wed, 01 Aug 2007 16:39 EDT
Cute, cuddly, harmless-looking, liberal Barack Obama. Now there's a guy to get the U.S. back on track! If he can just 'win' the primary (s)election process, and then the (s)election process after that, what's it called...oh yeah, the (p)residential (s)elections, he'll bring an end to the mindless massacring of innocent civilians for profit that has come to define the "war on terror", and the American people need never again be stirred out of their mind-numbing complacency by stories of small brown children being decapitated by a brave American teenager with a .50 caliber machine gun.
I mean, Viet-nam and My Lai was containable, it was successfully pitched as an "American tragedy", but this Iraq business is getting out of hand! After all, the harsh realities of war 'over there' are meant to stay 'over there', not ooze out of the carefully manipulated American daily broadsheets and into the fragile mind of the average American.
So Obama's the man to fix it all, right? He'll stop the Republican rot! Or am I missing something?
"Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama yesterday attempted to refute claims that he was soft on national security by promising he would send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists - even without permission from that country's government.
[Remember the "without permission from that country's government" bit]
Standing in front of a Stars and Stripes flag, Mr Obama said: "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again... If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."
The problem you see, and Obama knows it, is that being a 'liberal' just doesn't cut it anymore, in fact, it never did. Liberals are just not "presidential", and even Obama, the Muslim "son of a Kenya goat herder" (or not), knows that if you want to be the POTUS, you've gotta get your hands dirty, preferably with the blood of innocent people - especially if they're Pakistani Muslims.
Now, it may well be true that a significant majority of ordinary Americans have turned against the war in Iraq and are beginning to think that letting Bush send their wired, trigger-happy, hormone-laden-beef-fed "life's a first person shooter video game" teenage sons to liberate the oldest culture on earth, was perhaps not such a good idea, but Obama knows something that the American people don't: what the American people think and want just doesn't cut it anymore, it never did. In fact, the American people are kind of irrelevant, especially if you're trying to be next in line to the White House.
No indeed, forget about the plebs, the surest way to a fat chair in the Oval Office is to repeat, word for word, what the Neocons and their Zionist masters say, because they're the ones who define the nuances of U.S. foreign policy these days and whether a sovereign nation needs to be 'freedomified', or if a swift bunker buster enema would be more effective to eradicate the scourge of a few bearded jihadis who nevertheless threaten the lives of freedom-loving people everywhere and also "attacked us on 9/11".
So that's exactly what Obama did yesterday; he just said what arch Neoconservative Bill Kristol said two weeks ago:
A Fox host then cited a new report that "al Qaeda ... is running from Iraq, apparently to Pakistan" and asked "did this report come out on purpose so that we will have the right ... to go after Pakistan now?"
Kristol responded, "I think the president's going to have to take military action there over the next few weeks or months. ... Bush has to disrupt that sanctuary."
"I think, frankly, we won't even tell Musharraf," Kirstol continued. "We'll do what we have to do in Western Pakistan and Musharraf can say, 'Hey, they didn't tell me.'"
And what exactly is thing that Kristol and Obama feel that they have to do in Western Pakistan? According to Seth Jones, a South Asia specialist at the RAND Institute such an attack "would lead to major riots throughout Pakistan and the Arab world, and it would lead to certainly a major insurgency against US forces."
Now, call me a muck-raker if you like (just not 'the son of a Kenya goat-herder'), but isn't it a strange coincidence that Obama voiced more or less the exact same policy on Pakistan as "Bush adviser" and architect of the Iraq bloodbath, Bill Kristol did more than two weeks ago and that this policy simply serves the agenda of a certain illegal Middle Eastern statelet to create the 'justification' to wipe it's Arab enemies from the map? What does that tell us about where the real power lies in the U.S. today?
There are those who suggest that most U.S. politicians are entirely beholden to the Ziocons and their assorted Israel lobby groups because, at one time or another, they all have been photographed 'in flagrante' with anything from a 'Washington madam' to Republican Congressman Mark Foley. I tend to agree, not because I'm a cynic, but because it's very probably true.
Incidentally, Obama's speech, was allegedly:
"designed to shore up his credentials as a potential commander-in-chief by backing a pre-emptive military action which even President Bush has so far refused to order"
which is just more evidence that America really is totally and utterly screwed (to use the vernacular), because while the entire world hates Bush and his handlers and recognises them as the psychopathic child-killers that they are, the sadly accurate consensus in the clinically insane world of American politics is that the only way any potential 'selectees' like Obama or Hillary are gonna secure the Presidency after Bush's 8 years of bloodletting, is not to call for an end to war (as the American people want) but to upstage Bush in terms of murderous rampaging, and to do it according to the Ziocons' script. And it appears that the formerly liberal democrat Obama isn't about to shrink from the task.
Let's talk today about programs - also called buffers and "the Predator's Mind - and how we get them and how they affect us throughout our lives unless and until we learn about them, examine them, and deal with them cognitively.
Starting with some basics:
As an infant develops, the nature of its moment-by-moment experiences of its inner world and the world around it changes in terms of intensity (affect/emotion). During relatively quiet periods of low affective intensity, the infant absorbs all kinds of information about its environment - cognitive learning. This type of learning does not have a major impact on the infants motivational system.
At other times, the infant has periods of high affect intensity. These are usually related to experiences of need or wish for pleasure or comfort, or a wish/need to get away from something due to fear or pain.
These periods of peak affect intensity involve the developing infant in an intense learning experience about its relations to itself and others (including the world at large), and these are the experiences that lay down heavily emotion-laden memory circuits in the developing brain that can become very problematical "programs" or manifestations of the "Predator's Mind" in later life.
The emotion-laden memory structures in the brain formed under peak affect states are the foundation of the motivational systems of the individual - what the individual considers to be important for survival, how to obtain what is needed for that survival and how to avoid what is painful or threatening to survival.
Obviously, the most "ideal" concept of the self and other that an infant can have is a "perfect, nurturing other and a perfect, satisfied self" and such images form in the infant's mind as a result of satisfying experiences.
Frustrating or painful experiences, on the other hand, form a concept of a depriving or abusive other and a needy, helpless self.
This induces great stress on the organism.
An infant whose caregiver is generally attentive and nurturing CAN internalize images of a sadistic, depriving "world out there and others in it" because of experiences of temporary frustration or deprivation.
At the same time, an infant whose caregiver is generally neglectful or abusive may have accidental satisfying experiences at the right moments that can lead to an internal image of a loving, nurturing world and others in it.
But, in general, because of the duration of the developmental period, it could be said that an infant will have a preponderance of one type or another experience and there can be compensation for the bad experiences that ameliorates them, though even that depends on the genetic nature of the individual.
Now, let's consider the "many I problem" of the ancient tradition, known in modern psychological parlance as "identity diffusion."
Identity diffusion refers to a person who has a psychological structure characterized by the fragmentation rather than integration of the internal representations of the self and others.
Most people suffer from identity diffusion to one extent or another because they have had varying kinds of positive or negative experiences during periods of high affect intensity as infants (or later in life). This problem is the focus of Martha Stout's book "The Myth of Sanity" where she talks about dissociation and how people do it when they are children as a sort of defense mechanism, and then as they do it, it gets to be a sort of habit.
A person can dissociate at any time in their life when they are going through a rough period that puts a lot of strain on their emotions and thinking - the neurological structures. Thing is, once you do it, it becomes easier to do it the next time and the next and next... It sort of lays down a "track" that is easier and easier to follow. It can be thought of as similar to carbon tracks in a distributor of a gas engine that cause mis-firing of the spark plugs.
Watching television, movies, reading, (yes!), pornography, video games, whatever, are all common ways of dissociating or dealing with stress. Remember, stress can be caused by the conflict of drives vs reality.
Identity diffusion becomes a problem when it is persistent. It can then lead to pervasive feelings of a lack of values or goals or a "central self." This means that the person is going through life without consistent beliefs, values, goals; they do not have a clear sense of direction, a clear sense of self, and what is meaningful for them is determined solely by the situation in which they find themselves. They are like weather vanes, whichever way the wind is blowing, they spin and go with it. If they are with a group that does this or that, they do it mindlessly because that is what everyone else is doing.
I think that all of you can easily see that identity diffusion manifests to one extent or another in just about everybody. In most people, it is mild and most of what is inside them is somewhat integrated, though certainly it is still composed of thousands of automatic programs.
Now, let's take a deeper look at Primitive Defense Mechanisms, otherwise known as programs, buffers or "the predator's mind."
Defense mechanisms are the ways we learn to deal with stress or conflict as we develop from infancy to adulthood. Very often, they are formed by automatic brain functions that activate in response to stress.
Some stresses are caused by conflicts between our drives, our emotions, and the "real world." One of the most basic is the early stresses that a child may experience when they are hungry (drive) and do not get fed. Or, they are cold or too hot, or in pain and there is no relief forthcoming.
Later on, a child may want a cookie (drive) and is told "no, not until after dinner," and while the child is not suffering from painful hunger, there is a drive for the cookie that is denied. How does the child learn to cope with this stress of denial? However the child copes, that is called the defense mechanism and it can be either primitive (infantile - the child feels threatened and begins to scream and cry as an infant would) or adaptive (the child is growing up and learns to wait until after dinner for the cookie.)
So, a person grows up with all kinds of competing pressures both from inside and outside; pressures from the emotional states and related drives, the constraints of the reality "out there", and even internalized constraints when the child has already learned that this or that is not okay and controls his emotions or drives (or tries to) even though they are in conflict. (Child wants cookie, knows that eating one before dinner is bad, gets into battle with self about whether or not to snitch it... decides that the stress of snitching is greater than the stress of denial and does not take cookie.)
In short, as a person grows up in a more or less normal way, they move from primitive defense systems against stresses to more mature defense systems. They become flexible and interactive with their reality and can use reason, humor, subjugation of drives for long term benefits (including peaceful coexistence with others, like mother who will not be happy if they snitch cookie before dinner), sublimation and so on.
However, in many, if not MOST, people, there are still some primitive defense mechanisms that get "stuck" in their psyche because they were imprinted at moments of great emotional susceptibility. (Or imprint vulnerability, as discussed in the Wave, though we are not talking about that specifically right now.)
You can always recognize a Primitive Defense Mechanism by its rigidity and inflexibility - the fact that it does not adapt to the REAL situation at hand - and that it divides the world into black and white.
These types of programs originate in the very earliest years of a person's life, mainly the first year, and are a result of the infant attempting to cope with stresses that arise in its interaction with external reality.
Primitive defenses organize themselves around the simplest structure which is "feels good, is good / feels bad, is bad." That's all the infant really can know in its limited state of cognition.
So, a primitive defense mechanism is when a person continues to organize things in this way: black and white, good and bad, and so on.
Another aspect of the primitive defense mechanism is that the infant - being an infant - has no concept of itself. It is helpless and totally dependent on someone else to meet its needs.
So, the infant learns about itself in relation to how the world out there interacts with itself. If it feels bad and there is no relief for this suffering, it comes to perceive the world and itself as "bad". This induces tremendous stress on the organism.
BUT, and here's the biggie: the human instinctive substratum is biologically set up to DEFEND the organism. If the infant is having bad experiences that impact on the brain, putting repeated and concerted pressure on some neurological structures saying "bad, bad, pain, misery, suffering," etc... stressing the coping mechanisms via pain, suffering, unhappiness, etc, the brain will, at a certain point, collapse and go into defense mode.
A split occurs.
In other words, severe or prolonged stress causes a mental breakdown and this is a protective mechanism of the human biological brain.
It is theorized that when this happens, it is due to the fact that the brain has no other means of avoiding actual physical damage to its cells due to fatigue or nervous stress induced by the intense "coping action".
The human brain is constantly adapting itself reflexively to changes in the environment and it seems that this is just one of its defense mechanisms against stress.
The brain basically revolts against abnormal prolongation of stress that impacts any cortical area that is in a state of pathological excitation.
Much human behavior is the result of the conditioned behavior patterns implanted in the brain during childhood. People learn to behave this way or that way (positively or negatively) in the presence of all kinds of stimuli, specific or general. Some of these neurological structures can persist almost unmodified, but most of them (except in extreme cases that I will come to), grow and change with added input and the individual becomes able to adapt the the actual environment.
Much of what is known about this mechanism comes from Pavlov's research. And, the fact is, human brains are not that much different from dog brains in certain respects.
Pavlov showed that the nervous system of a dog could develop extraordinary powers of discrimination in creating its "programs" of responses. A dog can be made to salivate at a tone of 500 vibrations per minute (food signal) but NOT at the rate of 490 or 510.
Human beings are no less complex in their ability to unconsciously create such neurological structures (programs) of responses.
Negative conditioned responses are as important as positive conditioned responses since civilization requires that we learn how to control our drives almost automatically.
Emotional attitudes also become both positively and negatively conditioned: one can learn automatic revulsion against certain types of persons, behavior, etc as well as automatic attraction. If these programs are based on incorrect information, as they often are, there is a problem! If a person is programmed by an intense experience to respond positively to people wearing blue hats, a psychopath wearing a blue hat will also attract them to their great harm.
But, getting back to the issue of splitting of the personality.
When the brain is stressed (and this can come about in many ways) to a maximal extent, there comes a point of what Pavlov called "trans-marginal inhibition." That is, the stress pushes the brain to the breaking point and the brain takes protective measures to inhibit further damage.
This process takes place in stages.
1. Equivalent phase: this is comparable to reports of normal people who are in a period of intense fatigue due to stress (as in wartime), who say that they reached a point whre there was no difference in their reaction to important or trivial experiences. The brain is so exhausted that it is just trying to chug along keep going, but doesn't have enough energy to distinguish between anything.
If the stress continues, you then come to:
2. The Paradoxical phase: This is where weak stimuli or trivial things can provoke more response than a strong stimuli or an important thing. The reason for this is that the strong stimuli only increases inhibition (the shutting down of reactions) while the weak stimulus can produce a response in the brain that is not inhibitory.
If the stress continues:
3,. Ultra-paradoxical: Positive responses suddenly switch to negative and negative to positive. This is something similar to hysteria. An adult in such a state is abnormally suggestible and the most wildly improbable suggestions or ideas can be accepted as fact.
And so it is that, in such states of internal hysteria, an infant can reverse everything, split, go into a state of Identity Diffusion that, because of the extreme affect (emotional state), becomes more or less permanent.
I suspect that you can also guess that such programs can be one time things. A child can have one seriously negative event in a life that consists of mostly positive events, and have a serious primitive defense mechanism (program) that pretty much sticks for life - or until they discover it and seek the way to undo it.
In any event, when the infant splits, the brain seeks to protect an idealized segment of the individual's psyche or internal world from the aggression of the stress. The separation will be maintained at the expense of the psyche. There is no integrating that "dissociated part" with the rest of the self-images the child forms throughout life. Whenever something triggers that particular part of the brain, some stress that is similar, something perceived as a threat to survival, that program will run and all the learning and cognitive skills of the individual be damned.
Next problem with this type of splitting: since the brain has done this as a protective maneuver, has more or less "sealed off" the sanctum of this idealized psychic self, that program is not amenable to successful cognitive processing of the external reality, nor is it capable of accurately reading internal processes, including emotions.
This is effectively what happens when we say that the intellect usurps the energy of the emotional center.
This split off internal idealized self that is "good" (defined that way for survival), when activated, takes charge of the system and imposes itself (it is very strong because of the extreme stress and emotion that went into forming it) on the individual's perceptions of the world.
And, since it is formed at a primitive level of the psyche, it has the earmarks of a Primitive Defense Mechanism: feels good, is good / feels bad, is bad; black / white; self good; other evil; and so on.
BUT, that doesn't mean that this primitive defense mechanism has any rationality to it! Opinions are strong, but not stable. Things are good or bad, but what is good or bad depends on the immediate circumstances.
If the person feels that someone close has 'dissed' him in some way, something that activates his "helpless and hopeless" feeling as an infant, that formerly close person will be relegated to the "black list" and everything about him or her that was formerly perceived as good, will now be perceived as bad. Patience will be viewed as weakness, lack of action; strength will be seen as aggressiveness; kindness as weakness, and so on.
This "good / bad" primitive defense mechanism can totally influence the person's mood. A single frustration that triggers the program can make everything in the world "out there" seem bleak, uninspiring, going nowhere, against the person who is, of course, long-suffering and only seeking the ideal of love, peace, safety, beauty, etc etc.
So, the clue that one is running an infantile program (that is, one inculcated in infancy) is that it reveals this "good / bad" categorization of everything, and that there is little flexibility in dealing with the reality of the moment. Under the influence of such a program, the individual is not able to appreciate the subtle shades of a situation or to tolerate ambiguity. This leads to distortions in perceptions since the external reality is filtered through - made to conform to - the rigid and primitive internal structure of an infant.
Now, everyone has some of these infantile programs - or traces of them - that get triggered now and again. It's only when the person continues to use this type of primitive defense mechanism as the PRIMARY defense as an adult that there is a serious problem. That can be termed a "personality disorder."
We have witnessed manifestations of this a few times here on the forum and in QFS. That is, when a primitively organized individual is confronted with something displeasing or threatening, the "threatening object" (person, idea, group, whatever), is placed in the "all bad" category where it is safely segregated from anything with a good connotation.
This is how such disordered people contain their anxiety, the stress of what they perceive as a threat to their survival. (They want something, need something, it is denied, and that is a threat to survival). But obviously, as we have witnessed numerous times, it is at the expense of successful adaptation which could lead to a fulfilling life for that unhappy person.
Now, here's the kicker: if the displeasing feeling is coming from within the self - if the self finds that there is rage or anger or hate or jealousy or pettiness or whatever is considered negative - when a person is operating from the primitive defense mechanism, that feeling must be denied as part of the self and will be experienced as coming from "out there."
We have seen that also. A person will be questioned about their unilateral assertions and this is perceived as a threat to their survival (their entire structure is organized around black and white, remember), and their fear or anger comes up a bit, but this gets diverted because those feelings cannot be tolerated due to the neurological construct laid down in infancy, and the Primitive Survival Defense program kicks in.
That is, at the moment the person is in active primitive defense mechanism mode, even if some other part of their brain is feeling angry or hurt or whatever, that other part of the brain is dissociated and those impulses, feelings, thoughts, are denied, personal relationship with them is suppressed, and they are projected onto someone else.
That is: splitting can be a primitive form of projection when the denied part of the self is experienced as coming from an external object (person, group, whatever.)
There are other primitive defense mechanisms that stem from a split internal organization:
Projective Identification: this is an unconscious tendency to both induce in another what is being projected, AND to attempt to control the other person who is perceived as manifesting those characteristics that the split person is projecting.
That is, a person who cannot tolerate their own feelings of rage and aggression will unconsciously provoke and frustrate their target in subtle and no-so-subtle ways that will lead the target to actually FEEL the emotions that the split person is denying in themselves.
In this way, the split person can have the satisfaction of the expression of such emotions in a non-threatening way because it "doesn't belong to them," and they are, in a sense, "in control" of the manifestation.
This is an important clue to dealing with manipulation. If you know your own machine, if you have worked through your own stuff, and are certain of your own feelings in a given situation, you can pay close attention to shifts in your own state that are induced by the manipulative person and understand that what you are being manipulated to feel is what the manipulator is denying in themselves and cannot accept. This can give you data about their internal world.
Now, keep in mind that a person who operates out of the primitive defense mechanism as a primary mode, DOES have alternating awareness of the different sides of their internal conflict, but denial (and splitting) allows them to tolerate the state of affairs without anxiety. They can deny this for this moment, deny that for that moment. Etc. They do not have CO-consciousness of the contradictory material.
In any event, getting back to more normal manifestations of the problem. If there is a strong primitive defense mechanism laid down in the psyche, it can organize itself around a "belief center" of the brain, and the core belief can be "I'm worthless, helpless, bad," but this has to be projected onto external objects (the brain defending its survival) which leaves the person in a habitual condition of expecting aggression or hurt from the outside world.
If a person has MULTIPLE un-integrated self-object programs like this, each of which determines the person's subjective experience in myriads of situations, at any given moment, then the person's internal world is a series of discontinuous experiences and that person will have great difficulty committing to relationships, meaningful work, goals, values, etc.
Finally, there is another situation in which an individual operates from a primitive defense mechanism: the experience of infatuation, powerful sexual attraction, "falling in love", etc, wherein the "other," no matter what the circumstances, is experienced as "all good."
This type of regression explains why otherwise mature individuals are capable of extreme and irrational thoughts and actions under the influence of drives and primitive defense mechanisms.
Now, there's another interesting thing about this. Pavlov noted that when one small cortical area in a dog's brain reached a state of pathological inertia and excitation, (it was at maximal stress and shutdown), it would generate odd stereotypical movements like shaking or repeated scratching or pawing of something. He concluded that if this cerebral condition could affect movement, it might also affect thought, stereotypically, and could thus account for certain obsessions in human thinking.
Pavlov also learned that these small areas of the brain were subject to the equivalent, paradoxical, and ultra-paradoxical phases of abnormal activity which he had previously thought only applied to larger areas of the brain. Pavlov thought, in fact, that what is called projection and introjection - when a persistent fear or desire is projected outwards or inwards - is a physiological manifestation of localized cerebral inhibition.
Pavlov found that some dogs of a stable temperament were more than usually prone to develop these "limited pathological points" in the cortex when at the point of breaking down under stress. New behavior patterns would be the result such as a compulsive and repetitive pawing or some form of physical debilitation. Once acquired by a dog of stable temperament, patterns of this sort were extremely difficult to eradicate. This may be the way a more stable person reacts to such stress: instead of splitting psychically, they instead develop some sort of external, physical action that releases the stress.
During WW II, quite a few studies were done of shell-shocked patients in hospitals in England. Some of these patients had reached this state of cerebral shut-down and it manifested in gross and uncoordinated, yet regular, jerking and writhing movements which were accompanied by temporary loss of speech, or a stammer or explosive talking.
The parallels between these patients and Pavlov's dogs subjected to stresses should be obvious.
That is to say, these abnormal mental states may be succeeded in human beings as in Pavlov's dogs, by "dynamic stereotypy" - a new functional system in the brain is formed which requires increasingly less work by the nervous system to maintain it just as learning to drive requires increasingly less focus once one has done it for awhile.
The repetitive pattern of movements or thoughts that are formed under these kinds of stressful conditions (and in some people, there are truly extremely stressful conditions in their infancy) do not yield easily to treatment.
But then, in these cases, we are talking about only a statistically small sample.
Nevertheless, Pavlov's findings that severe focal excitation on one area of a dog's brain can cause profound reflex inhibition of other areas of the brain might be a key to the problems of programs, buffers and the Predator's Mind. In a normal person, time and other experiences can disperse the abnormal neurological structure to some extent, but in certain genetically susceptible individuals, it can become a core structure.
But keep in mind that even if one deals with programs and essentially "deprograms" the self from these kinds of abnormal states, sensitivity to what brought about the nervous disruption can persist a very long time in a latent state. Events will remind the person of the "program," and they will have to struggle with it to some extent again and again for some period of time before it is entirely extinct. (And I have no certainty that total extinction ever occurs!)
For those who stayed to the end, thanks! Enjoy some vids if you're still here
and...
Currently
listening
:
Guero
By
Beck
Release date: 21 March, 2005
I just finished reading Palestine by Joe Sacco. Using the comic form the author investigates just what it is like to be a Palestinian living in Palestine. His reporting was first serilized in comic books in 1993, and it is now collected together in one trade paperback.
I found that the graphic or sequential art form worked very well to communicate the abject horror of living under those conditions. Sacco walks a very fine line here in delivering such difficult and unwanted material. He writes himself into his narrative and at times he can come accross as a bit narcississitc. But he has taken on a tough job very few others have attempted and he pulls it off. He, of course, was criticized for not giving enough of the Jewish side of the equation, to which he basically replied that the Jewish side was already well represented.
The book certainly helped me to empathize with the Palestinians. His investigation was completed back in '93, and I can't imagine anyone still living in those conditions - only much worse - 14 years later.
In an interview with January magazine he comments about his revisitng the area:
And how did the situation there compare to the last time you were there?
It was just a lot harder, a lot more violent. You know, life's pretty bad, pretty rough in certain parts. It's very different in different parts of the Occupied Territories. Where I was was a refugee camp called Rafah, which is on the southern border of Gaza, with Egypt. And there were a lot of house demolitions going on there, and there are just some sort of spooky parts of the town because they're basically under fire, or in zones where there's a lot of bullets flying around at different times, so it was just a different sort of feeling from where I was before, where I could just sort of travel, get in a taxi and go anywhere. Getting down to Rafah was hard. You know, there are checkpoints, and you can get trapped there. There's only one road out, basically. And if it's closed for three days or four days, you're stuck there. In the first intifada I was kind of going from one place to another, sort of doing a little tour. In this case I just wanted to be in one place, much like the Gorazde book, I feel it was a better way of doing it, get to know some people well.
Edward Said wrote in the introduction, "With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco."
If you want an idea of what life is like for the Palestinians I can't recommend the book enough. Better than a documentary film.
From the same interview quoted above:
So you feel like the book is just sort of a byproduct, incidentally, of your curiosity?
Not incidental, but I want to produce something, and I plan to do something. The major factor is that I'm just interested, I want to see. And then -- yeah -- I want to do something. What can I do? I'm a cartoonist. So I'll just do that. I'm not the kind who goes to demonstrations or anything like that. I'm just doing my bit, my very limited bit.
contemplative
aggravated
amused
