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Originally Posted by demonrail666
There's a significant difference between looking at things 'as they are', and reducing complex issues to simple, for want of a better term, black and white ones. I'd be the first to condemn Europe's handling of Africa and certainly believe that white rascism remains a problem throughout the world. But equally, we can't reduce all of the world's problems to the status of modern day symptoms of historical white supremacy. It's a cul de sac that leads only to a blinkered understanding of the world today, and to calls for racial seperatism from both sides.
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There's no denying that Africa has historically been plundered for its resources, consequences be damned. It's a really sad saga and it just goes to show the sad state we're in as human beings. And that goes for the powerful that create the pillage and the drones that sit back and support it as long as they aren't affected. Now please forgive my foray into Jungian psychology, but here it goes. Important to realize is that it's only when the manipulators of public opinion add commercial and economic pressure and/or acts of violence to their activities do they achieve a temporary success. What happens in actuality is that this merely causes a repression of the geniune unconscious reactions. And mass repression leads to the same result as individual repression...mental illness; all such attempts to repress the actions of the unconscious must fail in the long run, for they are basically opposed to our truest instincts.
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Originally Posted by demonrail666
The problem is power in all of its myriad forms: be it in the hands of blacks, whites, whoever. Whites have throughout much of history wielded more power than blacks - leading to the opression of the latter. But so the same can be said of men over women, the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, and so on. We need to look into overall structures of power before looking at single instances of its misuse - examples of which can be found in all communities, be they white, black, male, female, straight, gay, etc.
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That's extremely nicely put, demonrail666.
http://www.sonicyouth.com/gossip/sho...&postcount=358
The human problem, in general, is the psyche's obedience to its master, which is fear. Instinctual fear is one thing. It helps keep us alive in accordance with natural selection and natural law itself. Instinctual fear cuts right through our bullshit filter.
The type of fear we are in as humans is a different type of fear, a self-created, sinister type of fear and confusion. In Kierkegaardian terms, it's dread, "the sickness unto death." It's a deep psychological pit by which we create a programmed personality mask, or ego, that serves to actually deny our own fears, and ultimately serves as a shield to protect us from pondering our own fear of death. It is in the acceptance of fear of death, and then the approaching of the acceptance of death itself, that the process of individuation and ego integrity begins. The self is in tune with the unconscious; unfortunately, we are rarely in tune with the self. Such is the root of the world's strife on every level, because only connections with the self can ward off the self-sabotaging control that envy, jealousy, greed, anger, depression, anxiety and insecurity have on our ailing minds and the unnecessary harmful, violent behaviors that result. But instead, we persist headstrong in our error, and on a path of neurotic
dissociation towards psychological illness. We allow the filter of the ego to endlessly split everything into more and more categories, we build more and more fences, more mental walls, more separations. We attach ourselves to our cultural hero systems and its corresponding institutions to erect edifices of symbolic psychological meaning. Our minds become false constructs, and we undercut ourselves willingly, and with great pleasure, because it keeps us from having to really deal with the fear of death.
Now I do feel I have some talents, that I have a good level of educatedness, and most of all I feel I have a gift of a good memory and a sense of order to my thoughts, thoughts that I can slow down fairly well at times.
But, even so, I only have a slight smidgen of ego integrity. All of my life's sufferings have awarded me a little tidbit of wisdom and have made me, like Socrates, a little less ignorant, but it doesn't amount to too much unless it's seen all the way through and thoroughly cultivated. And so, like everyone, I have my personality ticks, my shortcomings and my faults, and I am usually controlled by my fear on some level when I analyze my behavior as objectively as possible.
One of my faults is that I expect anyone to regard this as anything more than "psychobabble."
