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http://www.geocities.com/catzeye94109/MMR45.html
The Body Snatchers of the Collective Unconscious
We are slaves to those who control the symbolic codes
of the collective unconscious, which is why the
fictions we invent always come back to haunt us, and
will always do so until we realize that the symbolic
codes and the unconscious are products of mortal men
rather than nature. During times of national crisis
such as with the terrorist attack on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, we always hear an
escalation of rhetoric employing highly symbolic
language designed to blur the border between
individual and the collective and internal and
external.
Almost immediately, the public was bombarded with
images, slogans and symbols representing the "New
War," as George W. Bush dubbed it, a "War on
terrorism" as a "war like no other war". The
government and the media have portrayed the
President's war in apocalytic terms, an armageddon
between good and evil, with declarations of the
blessings of God for this war. Over the airwaves, the
public is showered with songs linking the purpose of
the U.S. Government with God's will, and images of
people of many faiths uniting under God... "God Bless
America" along with patriotic images of the flag and
soldiers kissing their loved ones goodbye as they go
off into the "New War". Most astonishing was the
degree to which the government, the media and religion
all seemed to be one voice when we would expect them
to remain separate to maintain a healthy democracy
with controls on the social pathologies which bring
violence erupting from suppression of social
discontent. There is no question about the fact that
the hearts of all civilized people must go out to the
victims of the attack and their loved ones, but what
the elites are doing is cold-blooded exploitation of
the victims, for their political advantage, not
vindicating their loss and our loss.
It is especially ominous that the mass media has
joined in with this orgy of war cries with the
government and with religionists for a Jihad of their
own. Under democracy, we typically turn to the media
as the most powerful watchdogs on the abuses of power
in government. It was with this view that the First
Amendment assuring free speech was included in the
Constitution and the the First Amendment has been
regard as the most important amendment. But for the
news media to function as a watchdog over the
government, it must be devoted to high ethical
standards of objective journalism in the course of
reporting the news rather than manipulating public
opinion and perception and elected representatives in
government. The fact is that the power of the
economic elite that control the media has become
greater than the power of government, itself. Now, it
is becoming all too apparent that a government which
answers to the media elites rather than the people is
equally as dangerous to the birthrights of the
individual than a media that answers to the
government.
It is when borders between freedom and security, the
individual and the amorphous mass of humanity and
among government, the media and religion are blurred
that we see a very conspicuous cluster of
contradictions that we are obliged to tolerate. For
instance, a call for war to achieve peace is the most
dramatic of contradictions, yet here are many others.
We can use the present crisis ensuing from the 9/11
attack as an opportunity to observe some of the things
that Orwell saw in his own day and parodied in his
fictional totalitarian scenario in 1984 in which the
elite used "Newspeak" and "doublethink" to mobilize
the masses in support of Big Brother. Orwell observed
that under the state of war, the masses are always
expected to forego reason in order to win the war even
if we must all believe that 2+2=5 as a test of faith.
Society has already been set up for that with the
belief that there is a division in human nature
created by God between intellect and spirit or
emotion. Orwell describes the "split in intelligence"
as a requirement of Party members in 1984.
Many people associate totalitarianism with
stereotypical military dictatorships, however the
conquest of the few over the many requires other
conditions to be met. Most commentator's on Orwell's
1984 placed more emphasis on the use of the police
state to achieve the coercive impact of
totalitarianism in 1984. It was well known that
Orwell had a deep disdain for the modern military
dicatorships in Europe going into World War II. Much
fanfare was given to Orwell's hatred of the
totalitarian system developed in the Soviet Union by
Lenin and Stalin. In the end, Orwell became a victim
of the very intellectual orthodoxies with all of their
historical and political cliches and dichotomies about
the role of propaganda and modern communications
technology and the cycles of history that Orwell had
satirized. Intellectual orthodoxy as controlled by
the high priests of academia similarly lost the
warnings of Aldous Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD, however
1984, Orwell goes beyond all of the chiches about the
conditions of social and political organization that
define the line between democracy and totalitarianism.
In 1984, the Big Brother that Orwell is trying to
draw the reader's attention to through the eyes of
Winston Smith is not the elite which uses military and
police might as a form of physical coercion, but the
elites who use control of language as a form of
psychological coercion by transforming language from a
system of communication into a system of one-way
unconscious meanings which gives the impression that
language is an unconscious action with a life of its
own rather than a tool for thinking. For instance, in
1984, Syme mystically describes the goal of Newspeak
with great enthusiasm where he tells Winston, "In fact
there will be no thought as we understand it now.
Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think.
Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." Throughout 1984, the
alert reader is suppose to get a sense of Winston's
growing awareness of his own inability to surrender
consciousness to language as he becomes more aware of
the progress of Newspeak and doublespeak in rendering
the "Proles" unconscious, but still capable of going
through the motions of everyday life. To the elites,
the Proles are not even considered human. The
ultimate terror that Winston faces is the terror of
knowing that, while the Proles lose the ability to
think, they retain the concept of "thought" only in a
way that allows them to recognize thought as a crime.
In "Our Bodies, Our Birthrights and the Body
Snatchers," I borrow from the consciousness of Matthew
because of his heroic attempt to foil the methods used
by the Alien body snatchers to detect bodies that are
still inhabited by human life. Humans display facial
expressions that the Aliens are incapable of. The
Aliens think, but with no consciousness that reveals
itself in facial expressions and body language. So
there is a strong parallel between Matthew's situation
in the body snatcher scenario and the situation which
Winston finds himself in. Even the metaphors of Ingsoc
as the elite in 1984 and the body snatchers parallel
in ways that draw the attentive reader to something
ominous that is happening to human life, and that has
accelerated since the 9/11 attack. It is Orwell's
use of "Newspeak" and "doublespeak" in a satirical
context which allows a diagnosis of the human
condition to be made based on the degree to which
language is allowed to connect with consciousness in
ordinary people by the elites. It draws attention to
the fact that the words that have greatest power over
the masses of people are words we are conditioned to
believe as having lives of their own, and that draw
attention to the degree to which our society has
already idealized the unconscious as ultimate reality.
For instance, the use of the left/right and
liberal/conservative dichotomies became established as
psychopolitical orthodoxy in the latter half of the
twentieth century in acadamia and the media as
reference to an aspect of language assumed to have
meaning only in the unconscious.
The belief in a God is no more than the belief that
words have lives of their own, that consciousness and
perception comes from words with meanings coded into
them by some metaphysical process attributed to a
supernatural will independent of matter. Christians
are fond of citing from the Bible, "In the beginning,
there was the Word, and the word became flesh". That
is contrary to what is known about how the human brain
learns vocabulary words, whether it be the word, "God"
or the word, "tree". We are not fully conscious until
we can separate words from the things they represent.
The persistence of this teaching about where language
comes from is due to the underlying symbolic systems
that attempt to define a communal meaning of language
from the perspective of a "collective mind" and it is
from that perspective that our society has acquired a
strong bias against the belief that perception,
consciousness and the ability to learn language come
exclusively from the human nervous system and brain at
the individual level. Intellectual orthodoxy preaches
that what makes humans different from animals is that
the human brain was wired in a very special way for
language. This is equivalent to saying that the brain
was wired to worship God, and in fact there are people
who are promoting this belief. The fact is that the
nervous system and brain are wired for perception, not
specifically for language. Language is what we do
with perception rather than the other way around.
There is nothing inherent in how the brain connects
sensory perception with language which requires us to
divide perception between feeling and intellect. If
one suddenly has strong feelings to be acted upon that
can't be put precisely into words, it's more likely
that it is a conditioned response than a revelation of
profound wisdom from a mystical source.
The trend with the Jungian influence in acadamia is to
try to reconcile religion with psychology by
exploiting the lingering sense of ambiguity over the
interchangeable use of the words, "mind" and "brain."
Even a lot of atheists who have obviously no
difficulty dispensing with the word "God" feel bound
by intellectual orthodoxy to the word "mind" to
account for perception despite the fact that the
words, "God" and "mind" are psychologically identical
in their acceptance of mystical explanations for the
origin of language and their obsession with connecting
langauge with cosmology rather than with the immediate
need to use language to reduce the response time
between stimulus and response. We need to be able to
respond to what is going on in the here and now, not
to what initially kicked off the evolution of humanity
out of the primordial sludge. Otherwise, we will
forever remain stuck in a time warp.
Theism, in both its religious and secular forms
(psychology) is still trying to get away with the idea
that "God" (mind) is all-seeing and knows our every
thought. "God" is suppose to be the ultimate Big
Brother. "God" is the Alien body snather that gets
inside people's heads to enslave them if they cannot
control them by physical coercion. "God" is "Mind"
that takes over the idendity of the individual brain.
This is the correlation which we will focus on here
between Orwell's 1984 and the movie, "The Invasion of
the Body Snatchers".
Jung's theory of archetypal images and collective
unconscious has played a major role in the
solidification of the association between key concepts
in religion, economics and politics in and the
unconscious. To assume that the unconscious is a
natural part of life is to assume that the words which
trigger the strongest feelings don't even have
histories in the errors of thought of mortal men. But
for all of the awe and mystery in which words like,
"God," "soul," "spirit," "mind" and even "sex" arouse
in us, these words do have histories in the errors of
mortal men, errors that can be traced through millions
of lives destroyed by the violence of war since the
beginning of recorded history. So, in "Our Bodies,
Our Birthrights and the Body Snatchers," the "body
snatchers" becomes a powerful metaphor for the
unconscious, drawing our attention to errors in human
reasoning that are much more basic to how people are
desensitized to contradiction long before the Stalins
and Hitlers and the modern technological tools of mass
propaganda arrived.
Those who wage war are truly like the Alien Body
Snatchers in the movie, Invasion of the Body
Snatchers. The cost of war can be measured, not just
in terms of the lives lost in body counts, but also in
terms of the bodies enslaved. Fiction mimics reality
as a warning. It is when that warning goes unheeded
that reality begins to mimic fiction. That is the
reason why I have chosen this issue of MMR to focus on
the warnings in Orwell's 1984 and Invasion of the Body
Snatchers.
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http://mediafilter.org/caq/caq61/caq61spylocal.html
http://home.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointel.htm
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MOCK/mockingbird.html
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/
http://www.evolutionzone.com/kulturezone/memetics/henson.memes.metamemes.and.politics
http://www.geocities.com/catzeye94109/Orwell.html
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