In a postmodern world, facts are suspect and meaning is multifaceted and subject to manipulation even more than what is normal in the pre-postmodern world. Ideology (directed and stretched by pain-induced self interest) means more than analysis, that is, it diverts decision making, legislation and policy choices with its self-interest-driven bent.
Trump, as the first postmodern president, has ushered in the postmodern (PM) world where words don’t mean as much as they used to. Trump’s fake news is emblematic of how reality is relative, truth is a matter of opinion and everything is subject to argument according to one’s self-interest in this PM world.
Even facts are suspect if ideology indicates, like when Republicans deny climate change as they pay more for insurance due to climate-change-induced severe weather. Ideology is bent by the weight of emotional pain fueling instrumental strivings seeking money, fame and power; postmodern relativity of truth, morality and what is real. Sophistry is alive and well even more so in the postmodern zeitgeist.
The loosening of words and the loosening of the tyranny of representational identification (RI) can have salutary or deleterious effects on our individual and collective lives depending on the consciousness of who is using the words. RI removes us slightly, if not more so depending on the severity of the attachment malady, from experiencing the immediacy of life where the trekked territory can never be adequately represented or captured in maps. (See blogs dated 6/20/17 & 11/21/17 for specifics on RI and its etiology rooted in developmental psychology.)
Trump embraces the postmodern increased separation between words and what they represent because he can manipulate with it. This need and expectation for ubiquitous manipulation – because of always getting his way – is experience-built in a privileged, yet disempathic, childhood. Inadequate empathy in childhood fosters a low level of consciousness, low self esteem; a deeply injured insecure self which all combine to enlarge a myopic self-interest that emerges publicly, most often, as narcissism. His relentless silver spoon provided little growth opportunities that come with the normal slings and arrows of life that this spoon kept away.
The increased PM space between words and what they represent is a semantic crowbar prying lived experience (even) further from the words we use to describe it. Most often this crowbar is manipulated to manufacture information and point of view by the corporate owners of production seeking positive mass-media attention; most often settling for paid advertising
Trump is using and increasing the diluted power of words to obfuscate what he is doing, reducing the effectiveness of our government’s checks and balances to maximize his gluttonous intentions. Thankfully our checks and balances, especially including the media, seem to be holding and his name is Mueller. Perhaps the spurt of consciousness growth I discuss and advocate below is happening; that would be good.
Hopefully the Mueller investigation will take up the entire 4 years so that V.P. Pence does not gain access to the top job where his focused political skills would probably get a lot more of the right wing disempathic agenda accomplished. So much more than Trump’s endless dithering due to his triggered mind flitting here and there. The right wing agenda is to privatize everything, cut government programs and costs, limit voting of people with darker hues, and gut consumer protections favoring the 1% who own everything including government.
In contrast, when higher awareness – due to a more empathic upbringing and/or healing through psychotherapy and other curative modalities – greets increasing remove between words and what they represent in our fledgling postmodernism, a joyous freedom can be experienced. Words, when less rigid and more experienced as metaphor, tend to free us from their rigid hold.
Jesus’ much heralded new covenant comes to mind of an open empathic heart to supplant the written rules of Torah which can make headway in such a postmodern world. Since Jesus’ espoused vision for living from the heart, it has never taken hold, except perhaps in rare subcultures. The weight and opacity of the written word has never been lifted from our minds with adequate parental empathy and/or adequate healing offerings freeing us from representational identification and its rigid, opaque, literal/legalistic use of words.
Living by rigid rules is the expected norm to navigate life when deeply representationally identified. Literalism, legalism, and orthodoxies (of all stripes) require a mind deeply-steeped-in and saturated with representational rules: Fearful of doing anything not sanctioned by the book. Living by heart as Jesus recommends requires a free awareness unattached to old rules and available to living right now!
When freed from the rigid meaning of words, as accompanied by postmodernism, higher consciousness will still use them but in a more diaphanous, less opaque-attached, way. Words will be used to describe categories of things and ideas and such as always. In addition, words will be used increasingly to help others, to provide guidance and empathy to free ourselves and others of pain through healing and reducing the trauma-driven emotional need for seeking representational hideouts built of memory-traces and increasingly computing machines that capture discrete aspects of past experiences. Instead of a McDonalds on every corner we need to have healing facilities now available from myriad traditions and cultures spanning the globe for their expertise in freeing us from the deleterious lingering effects of our past injuries that tie us tight to old written rules.
Punctuated equilibrium, somewhat popularized by evolutionary biologist, Steven J. Gould, holds that evolution – whether of biological, social, geological, or consciousness domains (I may be expanding Gould’s range of disciplines where punctuated equilibrium is important) – is not a gradual accretion of small alterations over eons making huge changes. In times of great turmoil, whether from asteroids slamming into the planet or corrupt socio-political regimes spurring social change, evolutionary innovation often occurs abruptly and over relatively short time periods separated by huge times of quiescence.
The Trump presidency, so different from any in my 68 years for ignoring presidential norms of decency, decorum, kindness, accepted ways of money-making, caring about all the citizens, and the ways of doing business for our government (maybe I am naïve that it has not been ongoing but now so transparently opaque).
Not merely ignoring, but constantly flaunting, reveling-in and proclaiming iconoclasm as his core principle of a political movement with disruption as its core tactic save making money. The 60s sized up the establishment authorities as corrupt, hypocritical, and rendering values subservient to money-making. Trump’s brigades were recruited with similar rhetoric but there is an authenticity to the hippies that is sorely lacking in Trump.
Trump’s narcissistic need to be constantly re-mirrored (extrapolated from Kohut’s ground-breaking psychological work and discussed in blogs dated 6/20/17 and 11/21/17 in some detail) is the great flaw in his psyche. Like Narcissus, he will fall eventually from craving his own image.
This absurd and dangerous presidency could, if we survive it, provide the jarring impetus for a massive psycho-socially punctuated surge of development by millions and perhaps billions to establish a new developmental adult consciousness norm. Many, enough hopefully, for a critical mass to make choices from this new vantage-point to equitably and fairly share the fruits of wealth and technology to transcend a defunct and increasingly lethal tribalism in the multicultural recognition that all human beings are of the same tribe.
Making decisions to heal the hurts most of us were subjected to in childhood and making a priority of providing healing centers everywhere is key. Altering our normative parenting practices with a premium on empathy and love, especially at critical developmental stages (again see blogs dated 6/20/17 and 11/21/17), will nurture our children so they need not be ensnared in the past-based web of representational identification. Of course for parents to adequately nurture will require their own healing of the early hurts perpetrated upon them that the aforementioned healing centers can provide. This will free offspring to live vitally and spontaneously in the present intrinsic moment where life’s most fulfilling experiences reside.
Though we will still be engaged in the vitally important instrumentally-obtained, using mental representational faculties and their technological extensions (keeping track of what has been useful in the past and open to new innovations that will be stored for the use of posterity), to provide for the material necessities (food and shelter) that life in this physical world requires. Thus we will recognize that our real higher selves are satisfied, not by material acquisition and the status and re-mirroring supplies it provides. Seeking sacredness individually, in dyads and small groups, and communally through experiences provided by an adequate nurturant culture that promotes development beyond the same-dull-round of being stuck in the past and its written rules devoid of heart. Intrinsic sacredness will be possible in such a world.
The elite 1% need a new vision of possibilities for their life so they recognize that their poor manipulation-based human relationships, constant anxiety, and incessant instrumental striving for “compensatory” esteem gains (again see blogs dated 6/20/17 and 11/21/17 which discuss Heinz Kohut’s use of “compensatory” psychological gains) that do not really satisfy is not the optimal option. Perhaps with such a new vision for enough to realize the benefit paucity of their unfulfilling ego-aggrandizing ways, they will help promote the needed social, economic, healing and parenting innovations to manifest genuine deeper human connections and intrinsic satisfactions that no instrumental striving can provide. A critical mass of us all must see that our economic-civilization dominated way of life is not inevitably etched into the social evolutionary trajectory of history (as Francis Fukuyama argues in The End Of History and the Last Man) but built of choices that we all make as we evolve individually and collectively. We could make different choices with a different vision of what is possible for the quality of our lives which really boils down to the quality of our experiences, as they depend much upon our normative nurturant culture which, again, is subject to our free will, though a mind stuck in RI has little of that.
We have the technology to provide for the material/physiological needs of all people. Economist David Korten has a note in one of his books (I think it’s The Post-Corporate World) that I am tracking down that cites a UN study concluding that we could feed, clothe and shelter everyone.
When/if enough of us sufficiently heal our early traumas and improve authentic empathy for our children, our fellow humans, and ourselves, we may seek fulfillment beyond the obsessive instrumental grind of compensatory ego aggrandizement that drives our economic civilization. This fulfillment involves genuine experiences of intrinsic, ecstatic, loving, aesthetic, athletic, sexual, sacredness which is all of our birthrights when our society gets its priorities straight to nurture each of us optimally. No longer will material acquisition be the central organizing thrust of our aspirations. We can recognize economic civilization by the mistrust and seeking of material advantage that permeates most of our human interactions.
Postmodernism ushers in a potential freedom from the tyranny of the written word that holds much potential promise if we make the right life-affirming choices with consciousness untethered from emotional pain.
I know this smacks of polyanna. Yet I fear that unless we create a multicultural world where all people are recognized as more kindred than not, and where it is at least somewhat safe to trust, our days are numbered with the enormous power we have to pollute and kill that will not remain under wraps forever. I estimate (and it is really a guess) that we have 50-100 years to make sufficient change to last…….
Representational Studies 