The Nation’s sentiments have been with those killed and injured in Boston last week. Now in the aftermath of the carnage, American consciousness on Sunday’s news talk shows is focused on making sense of it. I found Sunday’s (4/21) Melissa Harris-Perry Show to be the most dynamic and deepest. The show is hyper-linked above to the first session with four other segments following. Some of the ideas discussed were; fear of the other, confrontations with pure evil, self-radicalization, home-grown terrorist, perceived injustice, the higher self, the whiteness of the American Complex, and others. After watching this past week’s struggle to understand what happened in Boston, I finally saw in Melissa’s show a glimmer of insight into the challenge facing the U.S. The guests were impressive: Valarie Kaur, Ari Melber, Zaheer Ali, and Michael Eric Dyson. Dyson was the most animated and framed the deep challenge facing us, what he calls here the American Empire Complex.
The search for understanding has been projecting of evil outward onto the Other. President Reagan’s “the evil empire” and President Bush’s “the triad of evil” are examples at the highest level. In the aftermath of Sandy Hook, we are looking for solutions in background checks for gun purchases and new health-care legislation addressed to dealing with individual crazies – both are focused on projecting onto the alone sick individual. In the case of the Boston bombing, we are now looking to understand how these brothers got radicalized in the other – Russia. We now hear the idea of self-radicalization, which is explained as the ability to use the internet to visit radicalizing web sites anywhere in the world – yes the outside Other. Absence from most of this discussion is the insanity of the American Empire that Dyson writes about. Here is Pinky’s take on empire building as Globalization and the metaphysics of control…
If we watch carefully the MHP show, we see the proper stance to the threat of terrorism is not from without but from within – it is the insanity of the American culture that is the source of evil and terror she is experiencing (Fromm, The Sane Society). If Christian America were to follow their savior’s teaching, they would heed Christ saying, Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye with never a thought for the great plank in your own eye? In order to Love thy neighbor as thy self, one has to learn how to love thy Self. Loving one’s enemy and turning the other cheek follow on actualizing Self-love and removing the dark shadow plank in our eye is the first analytical step. Edinger in his stimulating book, Ego and Archetype, suggests that these teaching clearly indicate that Jesus was the first depth psychologist nineteen hundred years before the unconscious was empirically established by Freud. This has been written about below in the Blog entry “Deep Jesus, Us?” and for the global perspective it is simply realizing our security as a nation is dependent on a Global Mind Change – our security is dependent on the security and need fulfillment of the Other.
What this means in terms of John Nash’s creative intuitive insight in this Beautiful Mind Bar Scene is that Adam Smith the father of modern economics needs revision. Smith’s principle that rules corporate capitalism is “In competition, individual ambition serves the common good” and “The best result comes from everyone in the group doing what is best for himself.” Nash’s insight sees that this needs revision, “The best result will come from everyone doing what is best for himself and for his group.” We need to look very carefully at corporate capitalism to see our evil and how we are being Banked Into Submission. We need to wake up to what Christ is saying, it is our evil producing the evil we think we see in the Other.
Follow on with James Wolfenshohn President of the World Bank 1995-2005 Stunning Confession. After all of this we still have to understand the challenge John Nash set for us – “Doing what is the best for American and our World” – what are the governing dynamics of this?
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