HELL HAS NO HEROES! OR ARE WE GOING TO HELL IN A BASKET?

HELL HAS NO HEROES! OR ARE WE ALL GOING TO HELL IN A BASKET?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 2, 2014

A READER WRITES:

After watching Al Jazeera news coverage of South Sudan, Nigeria...viewing the Bang, Bang Club was hurtful and I...only viewing...yes, I am afraid we are no longer apart from the world and fear it enclosing "our" world.

I shudder, realizing the flattening of the world is more than the financial, how to interface with this new world...what is right and what is wrong?  Certainly the world is out of the control of the common man.

My sons fear every time they set foot on public transit.  One prefers to drive to work and the other rejoicing in that he has the option of riding his bike to work along the river road to a downtown engineering firm.

My other son drives to work, and has his own parking space.  He only uses mass transit to get around town when partying, then comes home by taxi.  Sometimes his "group" engage a limo when hitting the hilites like a symphony (to hear David Grant's latest arrangements) or Philip Glass's sponsored venues, and then bar hop.

Yet they live with the ever lurking fear of the unknown.  That and those dreadful gang actions now reaching their beloved Logan Square with the drive by shooting of an innocent woman just leaving the green grocer.

How do we adjust to what we push to the rear?

Thoughts please...and my friends wonder why I read?  And they wonder even more why I do not read what’s at the top of the best seller lists.

RW

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dear RW,

There is no answer for a mother’s anxiety.  It is part of being a mother, and we that have survived enjoying a long life have much to thank our mothers who worried about us when we worried not at all.

That said the distance between us is disappearing, not as much as we may think spatially, but emotionally and psychologically.

Violence happens.  Nearly everyone can site an isolated example of violence.  Yet, violence is far less a reality than commonly thought.  Violence has become a gauge that cable network news exploits for profit.

As psychologist Steven Pinker points out in "The Better Angels of Our Nature" (2014), violence across the globe is decreasing.

My reason for mentioning this is to point out the dangers of to heart corporate misdirection and to alert the reader to the need to be attentive.

We can no longer live as if our heads are buried in the sand, robotically, hypnotically, vicariously, and passively, which is common, a situation cable network news knows and exploits to its advantage.

We are not vulnerable to these dispositions because we are lazy, but because our senses have gravitated to the dullness of the sensational, macabre and the shocking.   It is our entertainment.

Talking heads and camera carriers -- in the pursuit of ratings -- go far and wide to give the most disturbing images the mind can wrestle with, as if what is being reported is the norm of a world going to hell in a basket.

The world has always been going to hell in a basket for certain souls in certain circumstances.  That is not going to change.  There is no safe haven.  Life was not meant to be a safe haven.

These pixel images brought into our homes are like throwing gasoline on the fire, for as real as they might be, little is likely to change for the victims in this drama, other than as props for broadcasters.

Tons of lies about Benghazi suggested cover-up, but Democrats are no guiltier than Republicans, as Republicans have used the same tactics when it suited them. 

Cable network news with Congress as ventriloquist continues to beat Benghazi to death.  Before we smile self-righteously, we mimic them with our own obsessive anxieties.

We worry when we fly if the pilot at the controls is senselessly drunk, schizophrenic or simply incompetent.  We don’t vote but we feel the people running the government are selling us down the river.  We wonder if the engineer at the helm on a passenger train may be hypnotically in a trance causing the train to derail killing several as was the case not so long ago, or to board a transport or cruise ship for fear the captain may not be at the wheel, as happened recently and the ship capsized trapping hundreds to watering graves. 

So, we are afraid to fly, take a train, get on the Interstate, or take a cruise for fear of some catastrophic event.  On balance, so obsessed, there is no time to live.   

Much of life is on faith, not necessarily religious faith, but faith in our leaders because we have faith in ourselves, and not the other way around.  

Yes, times are different.  These times have been brought on by all the factors that seemingly reduce our comfort zone and our spatial integrity.  To that realization, I say it is about time!  It is about time we join the rest of the world that has been facing terror and dread for years, and they have done nothing wrong.  They live day-to-day because that is all the life they are certain they have, be they in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, or Nigeria. 

Yet, strangely, even though that is the harsh reality, we seemingly cannot separate ourselves from our complacency.  We retreat into the fantasy world of American exceptionalism, wherever that means, and coast as if everything will turn out all right in the end.   It won't.  It hasn't nor should it if we are not at the controls.

We watch television listening to a stone face reporter telling us that 200 young women ages 16 to 18 were taken from their school in Nigeria by rebels, while we eat our dinner, and say, "Honey, pass the sugar."

Technology has anesthetized us to the horrors of that reality.  What do we do?  We retreat into drink or drugs, promiscuity or fantasy, become slaves to our iPhones or laptops, Game Boys or X-Boxes, texting or tweeting, while worrying about what we're gonna be or gonna have, careful not to embrace but rather flee from the nonsense in our heads.

Schopenhauer reduces life to "love and will."  My wonder is what he would make of the Internet, iPhones and television, and imagine it would be that reality has been reduced to a figment of our imagination because it does not touch our lives in any real way.

Reality does however touch hundreds of millions of lives.  But for Americans, reality is simply capital, capitalism capital to be exploited by cable network television with advertisers rushing to spend $ billions as sponsors to wet our appetites for the bizarre, the violent and the macabre, and we oblige as long as it doesn’t disturb our schedule.

Have you ever wondered why all the little people are shown as the face of violence, the face of victims and perpetrators, while the oligarchs or puppet masters to all this violence are off stage?

I saw that world of violence up close and personal as a young man while living in the lap of luxury, surrounded by pretty white people, while literally millions of beautiful black people were treated as the equivalent of slaves, and I nearly lost my mind over it, which was covered in my novel, A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA.

Someone wrote on Amazon, after reading the book, that she didn't see anything about apartheid. That is because she was looking for Hollywood's rendition of apartheid, the gore that would satisfy that appetite, not the subtle psychological destruction of the human spirit of people living in dread for fear that their little green books were not up to date, because if they weren’t, it was prison for them.  Now that is real terror! 

The reviewer could find no redeeming individuals in the story line with whom to identify.  In hell there are no heroes.

The good and bad were the same people in South Africa.  Confucius says, "Only the truly kind man knows how to love and how to hate." So true, for in our garbled world, it is a wonder if the mind and body and spirit speak to each other at all much less in the same voice.

Schopenhauer has an interesting perspective on violence.  He sees it in psycho-sexual terms in the drive to possess territory, persons, wealth, prestige, celebrity, or immortality.  These drives are euphemized in pontifications, as we are seeing from Vladimir Putin over the peaceful people of the Ukraine. 

Schopenhauer writes:

Sexual passion is the cause of war and the end of peace, the basis of what is serious, and the aim of the jest, the inexhaustible source of wit, the key to allusions, and the meaning of all mysterious hints...just because the profoundest seriousness lies at its foundation...But all this agrees with the fact that the sexual passion is the kernel of the will to live, and consequently the concentration of all desires; therefore in the text I have called the genital organs the focus of will. 

So, RW, the only way to fight fear, it would seem, is to embrace it, the only way to live in a world of reducing psychological boundaries is to embrace our anxieties, the only way to cope is not to worry about coping at all, but to carry a sense of peace and tranquility with you wherever you go, protected by the aura of love and will that knows even the most heinous acts is still done by a human being who has lost his radiance and his way for the failure of love and will.

Be always well,

Jim