In 2016 I wrote a depth psychological response to the movie, The Big Short, which is an investigation of the underlying factors involved in the 2008 financial crisis. The crisis was precipitated by the collapse of a model of financial reality, when the model itself was taken as the reality. The high-stakes financiers in the secondary money market built model upon model, losing sight, in the process, of what the models were representing. So, for example, they bundled mortgage loans together and made those bundles into assets, a new kind of reality, forgetting or ignoring the fact that they merely represented real loans that were in danger of defaulting. When they did finally default the crisis got underway. The financial models, taken as reality, rather than as representative of ordinary reality (i.e. the actual defaulting loans) collapsed when ordinary reality could no longer be ignored. The assets were finally discovered to have no value at all and an entire system went into crisis.
Now, in 2017, we are faced with another, related, “reality” question. Laurence O’Donnell of MSNBC (5/18) opened his program with this introduction (transcribed with some paraphrasing) in reference to the growing crisis of the Trump presidency:
It is human nature to crave familiarity. We’re constantly seeking recognisable patterns in everything we do so that we can understand what is going on. The more confusing something is the more we crave a model for it… then we know where we are. We want to know exactly what it is. If we have no model then we don’t know what it is. It could be something we haven’t seen before.
The model of choice for understanding the Trump phenomenon is of course Watergate. Many are now drawing parallels between Trump and Nixon in an attempt to generate a model, based on the past, for understanding what we now facing. As O’Donnell says, this reaching out for the familiar (the past) is how we normally understand the unknown future. Then, we say, we know what the unknown is. That is, we now have a model and we know the model because it is rooted in the known past. Without a model, we are plunged into the unfamiliar and confusion follows, according to O’Donnell. Modelling the Trump phenomenon on Watergate is an attempt to control the unknown future by generating a model based on the past and calling the model reality, just as the financiers did prior to the GFC.
And just as in 2008, when the unknown future began to take shape, our craving for understanding in terms of a known model will come under increasing strain to the point of fracture. O’Donnell seems to have a sense that what we are facing now may not be predictable on the basis of the model of Watergate when he says, “It could be something we haven’t seen before.” This remarkable statement by a journalist deeply embedded in the old paradigm—the old way of knowledge in which the future is predicted on the basis of models created from the known past—is a hint of a tremor rippling through our Western culture at this time.
Such knowledge can no longer serve us.
Models of any kind initially represent reality, or Life. But with increasing abstraction, their representative nature has become lost and the model loses its connection with Life. Pictures of the world are now taken as the world and the “picture” quality has been forgotten. This habit of thought is reinforced across scale today so that parents, looking at a cartoon book of animals will say, quite unthinkingly to their child, “Look! That’s a fish, a dog etc.” quite unaware what reality their children are being inducted into. The military will look at a satellite image, showing dots or shadows flitting across the screen and make a decision, based on their modelling, to “acquire the target” while down on the ground, actual people are blown to bits. Their decision is based on the model, taken as reality, its representational quality no longer being a concern.
Our psychologically lifting off any connection to ordinary natural nature means that our entire culture and its practices, institutions, etc., has become divorced from Life, or Being.
Now we are being confronted with a phenomenon that will not conform to our attempts to model and therefore understand and control it. This means that there is something lying behind and beneath the Trump phenomenon that cannot be controlled or understood by our present systems of knowledge. This “something” is bigger than what we can know, when our knowledge is based on models of the past. The collective is catching wind of this “something”, when, for example, reporters are saying, “it could be something we haven’t seen before.” The “something” is bigger than what terrible men such as Roger Stone, long-time friend and shaper of Trump, can know when he claims that “Hate is a stronger motivator than love.” He may know this is true on the basis of his past experiences in the realm of politics today but what is approaching us behind and below the Trump phenomenon, is stronger than hate and Stone does not, cannot know what it is.
A tremor is now rippling through the Collective—a hint of what is to come. It is not something we can know in terms of the old paradigm. From within the hate, the desire to control, the paralysing fear, the intense uncertainties, is emerging an unknown “something”. The collective is now sensing it and is becoming afraid—afraid because we cannot control it by knowing it as an object of consciousness. Instead we will increasingly find that we are becoming objects of another consciousness that is superior, encompassing our human consciousness.
Have you ever been alone in a forest, quietly sitting there in the gathering dusk, only to behold yourself as the object of some wild animal’s gaze? There you are, alone and very vulnerable, being gazed at by another being that you cannot control in any way. You don’t know what it is going to do next but you do now understand your own being as an object of a strange and uncanny consciousness and you are no longer an agent of change, no longer a self-willed subject imposing yourself upon an inert world. A tremor ripples though your body just as it did today when I walked by a yard and dog leaped at me barking wildly. A ripple went through my body and my hairs stood on end.
But you know what? I welcomed that tremor. I suddenly felt alive in a way that our culture denies and tries to simulate in a thousand technological ways. I no longer felt isolated from an inert world. I was no longer separated from a dog “over there”. Space collapsed and, although a fence physically separated us, he and I were, in actual experience, interpenetrating, just for a moment. I also became wild!
We have over a long period of time divorced ourselves from this Life, preferring our models to wild engagement with Life. Now it is time to face the music! And it is a wild, dithyrambic music, not man-made at all. As Western culture fragments and splinters, models will not help us deal with what is to come. The unknown “something” that is emerging will teach us, not how to control it, but how to participate with it. In other words it will teach us how to live again.
But, as the Trump phenomenon is demonstrating, there are the claims of death to address first!
