Beaming Down from Dreamland without a Transporter Accident

Flaubert said that "writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful." Unless you're a leftist, in which case it is the opposite, resulting in a golden shower of tenurinary tracts from bladdering idiots who tell us it's raining.

While neuroscientists think of consciousness as the remembered present, there is another vital aspect of human consciousness which might be called the "unRemembered memory of the present," or what Bollas calls the "unThought known."

One of the reasons it is unremembered is that if we had to equally contend with the foreground and background of the present moment, we'd be too distracted to deal with the former. In reality, there can be no foreground in the absence of a background, and vice versa; conscious and unconscious are actually complementary, and in no way "opposites." They give rise to one another in a process of circular feedback.

This is why some people will give perfectly good money to a psychoanalyst in order to undertake a systematic exhumination of the background container of the present -- things we unconsciously recall but don't want to (or, more likely, that recall us), and that simply distort the moment and interfere with our happiness and fillfullment.

Just so, a collectivity is always more or less hindered by reminiscences that impede progress, and the more one believes oneself to be free of these irrational influences, the more influence they have. Hence, for example, the left's ubiquitous memories of paradise which they insist on imposing on the rest of us in the present. (Indeed, the general problem with Enlightenment rationalists is that they forget all about the endarkenment that operates outside linear logic.) Likewise, Islamists are haunted by unconscious recollections of which they are utterly blind and lacking in even a sliver of in-sight.

Without question, the larger part of memory -- the ocean, so to speak -- is not that which we recall, but that which recalls us. For example, every night we are "forgotten" by O, as we dissolve into the unconscious dreamworks, only to be re-collected and reconstituted in the morning. In this regard, it is somewhat analogous to being beamed down by the transporter each morning:

"A transporter is a fictional teleportation machine used in the Star Trek universe. Transporters convert a person or object into an energy pattern (a process called dematerialization), then 'beam' it to a target, where it is reconverted into matter (rematerialization). The term transporter accident is a catch-all term for when a person or object does not rematerialize correctly."

Indeed, perhaps you may have noticed that O is not (and could not be) entirely consistent in this regard -- that you might have had a little transporter accident overnight. It is as if the transporter left a few molecules out when it reassembled you in the morning.

Or to use a computer analogy, you're a little "buggy." One morning you wake up feeling this way, while the next morning you wake up feeling that way. Perhaps something is "missing," not some easily identifiable content, but again, more like the background context that would allow it all to make sense. Often the only "cure" is to go back to sleep and reboot. Sometimes death is perceived as the only way, hence, suicide.

Now, if there were seven days of creation, there must have been seven nights that were equally important -- perhaps we might even speak of the "seven dreams" of God, during which time the previous day's accomplishments were worked over and the next day's activities incubated.

The idea of the Creator having an "unconscious" has always appealed a bell in me. Since we are in his image, and a conscious mind is unthinkable in the absence of an unconscious mind, this must mean that God has some analogous dialectic. And in fact, I think Eckhart's distinction between God and Godhead speaks to this reality, as do the distinctions between Being and Beyond-Being, nirguna and saguna brahman, or the ain sof / keter of kabbalah. (One could also look at Father and Son in this way.) Kataphatic theology applies to God, whereas apophatic theology applies to Godhead. Again, neither one is "superior," since both are not only required but inevitable.

Anyway, according to Tomberg, "Just as the full reality of human life consists of days and nights -- of the bright day-consciousness and the dark sway of the unconscious (or subconsciousness or superconsciousness) -- so the full reality of humanity's biography, the history of mankind, consists of a day aspect and a night aspect. The day aspect comprises the account of the actuality of that which has become, and the night aspect embraces the activity of becoming."

Another way of saying it is that there is horizontal history and vertical history, both individually and collectively. Each involves a different kind of causation. Horizontal causation may be linear or non-linear, but it operates from past to future. Let us call this the "causality of the day."

But vertical history does not ultimately operate on the basis of mechanical causation. Rather, it is guided organically and teleonomically by a goal, or what is called finalism. (It is also guided by certain perennial archetypes, thus there is formal causation as well.)

For example, a patient might come into psychotherapy imagining that there is some event or experience in their past that is causing their present troubles. If they can just remember and identify what it was and bring it into the light, then the vexatious pattern that is imposing itself upon their psychic life will be drained of its potential to cause problems.

But it only works that way in the movies. This is because the thing they're looking for is not in the past but right here in the present. It is not "behind" but "below," influencing things from the bottom up.

Furthermore, it doesn't work in a mechanical way, nor is it like the fabled "pressure cooker" of instinctual energy that needs to be released. Rather, it has a goal and an agenda of which we are unaware. We want one thing but it obviously wants another -- something very specific, usually a certain kind of relationship, even (or especially) if it brings pain or frustration. Neuropsychoanalytic research suggests that it is not a figure of speech to say that the left brain doesn't know what the right brain is doing (or worse yet, knowing or being).

One of the reasons liberal solutions don't work is that they fail to take into consideration the nocturnal mission of history. And one of the reasons they fail to do so is that leftism in general consists of a stagnant memepool of the over- and undereducated -- or maternalistic elites (the dreaded "vaginocracy dentata") and the losers for whom they know what's best.

Furthermore, this pathological dance of losers creates a "night time" influence of its own, in that the solutions and programs enacted by the elites have inevitable unintended consequences that make the problems worse, thus creating a greater need for maternalistic elites (a perverse alliance of men with breasts and women without them, e.g., feminists).

This is why one is sometimes tempted, as is Rush Limbaugh, to think that the damage inflected by the left must be intentional. I don't generally believe this. Rather, I believe that the majority of leftists have good intentions, but are honestly blind to their self-defeating ideas.

As Thomas Sowell has noted, liberal policies are guided by feeling -- in particular, a self-deluding "compassion" -- not by thought. As such, they never take into account what he calls "phase II," or unintended consequences of their policies. This is because their idiot compassion blinds them to the system of destructive incentives a policy puts into place.

Looked at collectively, this pattern is entirely self-defeating, just like a codependent patient who constantly complains about her husband, unaware that her codependency -- her narcissistic rescue fantasies -- prop up and fuel her husband's bad behavior.

But there is a great side benefit ("secondary gain") to the codependency, as it allows the woman to 1) project a damaged or devalued part of herself into her husband, thereby distancing herself from her own psychic pain, 2) feel contempt for, and triumph over, the weak and devalued part of herself, and 3) elevate herself and feel morally superior to him.

Thus, we should not be surprised if we see in leftists the same pattern of projection, condescension, and sanctimony. Indeed, where would the left be without their projected fantasies of the weak and dominated woman, or the po' hepless negro?

It is quite striking how blacks can tolerate the utter contempt that liberal politicians and the MSM have for them. They are infantilized, held to lower standards, excused of behavior that would not be tolerated in others, and worse. Only on the left could lowlife thugs such as Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson run for president without provoking comment, much less deep soul-searching. It is not ironic. It is inevitable.

But it takes two to tango to a tangle of pathology, and it is always tempting to overpathologize the abuser and underpathologize the abused, when the dysfunctional system needs both parties in order to function as a national rescue party -- to party heartily (or in the end, heartlessly). Just as sadists with their preydar are on the prowl for masochists, masochists are always on the lookout for sadists, driven to find their dissing half.

It reminds me of something a caller mentioned yesterday on Dennis Prager: "Tell a loser he's a winner and he'll fight for you. Tell him he's a god, and he'll kill for you."