Our human desires and emotions are oftentimes the “hooks” that memes use to attach to us. Once a meme has colonized us, it can profoundly guide our actions in the world. Therefore, we need to develop discernment to parse the beneficial memes from the malicious ones. Although “toxic mimic” memes might offer fleeting, short-lived “fixes,” a more viable and enduring satisfaction is available in choosing to turn toward life-affirming patterns.

∞

As we’ve discussed over the last several pieces, people are universally compelled by the hope of happiness—but their strategies for meeting this need may vary in efficacy (something we will expand on in this piece). Trance states, which emerge at the intersection of meme and life power, can feed the seeming size and salience of memes and can cause us to act on behalf of memes even in automatic, unconscious ways.

Memetic Epidemic: The Viral Relationship Of Memes To Humans

Let’s talk about how memes infiltrate the human organism. Memes colonize human mind-bodies to effect their own survival and replication in ways that parallel the behavior of biological viruses. Throughout this text, the similarities between the functioning of memes and of viruses are alluded to in epidemiological terms: infection, immunity, etc.¹For additional reading, check out Wikipedia’s page on Memes.

For one thing, simply being exposed to information is oftentimes sufficient to persuade us. Due to human cognitive biases, we are especially vulnerable to believe memes that affirm what we are already “know.” Memes need humans to be receptive to them in order to thrive. When I am exposed to a meme, it has a greater or lesser chance of being incorporated by my cognitive framework depending on all the other memes I’ve already derived or incorporated through the process of living my life—and how much loyalty I feel to those memes.²Regarding the construction of assumptions and notions from stimuli, a helpful concept to reference here is the “ladder of inference,” unpacked in this short video.

Memes are created and evolve in accord with humans’ developmental needs, which can involve any level on humans’ hierarchy of needs. Memes are transmitted, replicated, and are born and die off in accord with their host human populations. Humans are the hosts—memes “ride” the substrate of our consciousnesses for their existences.

The viral operation of memes and their propensity to colonize minds is not an intrinsically bad thing. Humans need memes or else we couldn’t survive. It would be reasonable to view memes as having the agency to infiltrate and colonize human minds—such that the mind is less an agent and more a passive respondent to the activities of memes in its environment. In this framing, memes dominate humanity, and we are mere receptacles or pawns in their own war for survival.

But memes are not naturally parasitic—in a balanced picture, they are symbiotic. Our reliance on memes parallels their reliance on us for their existence. The problem is humans’ weak mental condition combined with the relentless, infectious conduct of certain maladapted memes.

Our Propensity For Addiction

Humans’ receptivity to memes is connected to our unmet needs. When we meet a meme that seems to satisfy a yearning within us, we are more inclined to adopt it. On an emotional level, we all long to feel affirmed by members of our social context. Many of our cognitive biases, interestingly, tend to be related to our need for stability and social affirmation in the world. Further, when our natural human desires or anxieties are provoked (which memes do really well), we may become emotionally hooked to certain narratives.

This is the reality of our common human condition, howsoever regrettable. Such limitations of perception are a lamentable flaw at the foundation of human evolution. But there are ways in which people today are in an especially weakened state, making us dangerously prone to infection by malicious memes.

What makes certain falsehoods so compelling? To what extent does our inborn desire to believe self-affirming stories impair our ability to assess fact from fiction? Consider how our mental and physical situation has been shaped by capitalist forces over generations. Although many of us have the full spectrum of our material needs met by this system, we are continuously emotionally unfulfilled. This is actually an acknowledged side effect of immersive advertising: making us feel like we will never be enough, just in who and what we are.

Without the feedback loop of real-world consequences (which Americans’ material comforts and social isolation tend to insulate us from), there is little ascertainable difference in direct experience, for many Americans, to believing in and following lies as compared to truth. We’ve broken our direct feedback loops with the ecosystems and communities that keep us accountable. Weak and isolated, desperate for any emotional fix for our deep malaise, we are vulnerable to becoming victimized by our own mental shortcomings.³If you doubt our vulnerability to manipulation by emotional hacking, >check out this in-depth article by some of the original architects of Google and Facebook—”the most profitable companies in the world”—which are deeply involved in manipulating our attention in insidiously addictive ways to serve the ends of advertisers. As entitled consumerists, we will get our emotional fixes—even if from unsavory sources who are motivated to keep us addicted.

Jef Safi, co~lapsus 1/4 . . (ın YSE#27) [via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0]

Becoming Addicted To Unhealthy Memes

People are highly susceptible to manipulation; our minds have not kept evolutionary pace with the far-ranging powers and technologies of modern society, upon which most modern humans are utterly materially dependent. This combination of the population’s profound dependence on centralized systems and the technological capacity for controlling the society’s mental condition and behavioral habits is precisely why Orwell’s points in his bombshell book, 1984, were so devastating, so grave. What is especially dangerous about our appetite for social stories to provide us with emotional gratification is that we are prone to accept toxic mimic myths that seem to temporarily meet our needs, even if, in the long run, they leave us hung out to dry.

Gregory Mantsios in “Media Magic: Making Class Invisible” explains that since the 1960s, corporate news outlets have been increasingly inclined to deliver news within framings designed to protect the wealthiest classes by encouraging both fear and aversion of poor people, and a sense of middle-class identifications in its viewers. This trend is a result of the influence of advertisers and corporations on networks. Now, there is a class of Americans who have bought corporate outlets’ deceptions and biased framings for such a long time as to vehemently defend them as real. This, conflated with not having any time to go deep on an issue (a result of increasing economic and cultural pressures in a constantly-connected world), plus the insanely rapid proliferation of (false and true) information, creates a desperate situation.

People’s “appetite” for narratives that affirm what they already believe creates a market for fake and biased news. It seems twisted that people’s fear of complexity—which would lead them to distrust and dismiss a career politician like Hillary Clinton, or the word of 98% of climate scientists, etc.—is the same faith they invest in the complexly-false (entangled), lying justifications of fake news sites. That is to say: they want news, they want somebody to explain things to them with the confidence of an authority…they just seek convenient news—news that reinforces their beliefs, news that nourishes their appetite for emotional gratification.

No dyed-in-the-wool capitalist can stay away from an unserved market for long. As in drug addiction, there is always the pusher, who profits by selling the quick fixes and by hooking his clients on the drug. The market created by people’s cravings for media narratives that serve to reduce their cognitive dissonance, combined with the permanent desire of the powerful class to disseminate social narratives that are favorable to them maintaining their power, has fed the growth of corporate control over news media and of “consumer news,” in which news consumption is centered on the audience’s salient identities and not on the integrity or authenticity of the information presented. Today, dangerously, news consumption has become much like any other consumer product by which we craft our preferred realities to reflect our personalities (rather than honing our personalities on the sharp edge of events occurring in reality).

Social media platforms and other corporate interests literally feed off of our attention, and there is no sign that the profiteers will stop supplying whatever “fixes” the market craves. Capitalism, being so driven by its internal logic to exploit market demand to utter exhaustion, creates social precedent for profound destruction. The sorry situation is that the rule of the day is to extract and make off with whatever you can get from one another—ours is increasingly an “anti-social society,” in the words of Rajani Kanth. And our population is thus materially, psychically, socially, and systematically laid to waste: depleted, exhausted, dumped full of empty fast cheap distractions and emotionally-piquing call-and-responses, while our spirits, identities, emotions, and minds are fragmented into a flinching, throbbing pulp.

This results in a degenerative culture, where humans cannot exercise any manner of meaningful influence on the memes, and instead the dominant memes seem to easily control our movements, as though we were puppets. This is not unlike the working of some viruses, like rabies, which hotwire the organism and force it to perform bizarre activities that do not support its own survival—but do support the spreading of the virus to other hosts.

Until Trump’s election occurred, I genuinely did not believe that Americans could be so stupid. I mean, Trump’s personality, with over 70 years of supporting evidence, is unambiguously one of a greedy, anti-social, megalomaniac con artist. His propagandist, domineering media tactics and cutthroat cunning was openly targeted at manipulating working class white voters. “Don’t most people know how not to be conned?” I thought. Trump was so clearly not a leader, but the toxic mimic of a leader: a bully.

What I discovered is that some people will accept a costly, even devastating, illusion over a challenging truth. While I would find such a bargain absurd (to me, the truth is always worth it, any day any way), to some, it may have seemed like the only viable option. Their desires to be “saved” by an archetype of the diseased-and-decaying American Dream (Daddy Boss Supreme Grand Commander Trump of the Kingdom of Capitalistania: a Dreamland of Perpetual Conquest) is stronger than their willingness to take a long, painful look at how their emotions and psyches have been relentlessly manipulated by corporate-political interests for generations. As I will expand on in the subsequent piece, some Americans would rather double-down on their nostalgic, comforting illusions than divest and take a different path—even under extreme duress. (If memes are alive, akin to viruses, perhaps this would explain their host-people’s behaviors in this circumstance: putting up a fight-to-the-death for survival, going “all in” with nothing to lose.)

Humphrey King, Media-Freedom [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Denial In Addiction Vs. Truth In Reconciliation

Denial, or abnegation, has been observed and analyzed since Freud as an “immature” psychological defense mechanism (immature “because it conflicts with the ability to learn from and cope with reality”). Anyone who has experienced the behavior of an addict in denial knows that it frequently involves one flimsy excuse and meager apology, after another flimsy excuse, after another, all piled on top of one another until you are obviously looking at a bullshit mountain. Yet the addict clings to the mountain desperately, apparently insensate to the stink and unwilling to see or take responsibility for the pattern underlying their continuous problems.

This is just like us with our white supremacy problem and its results; or failure to take responsibility for intensifying climate change; or the continued theft, rape and destruction by which the rich have accumulated political and economic power. Delusionally, we keep trying to justify that which is obviously unfounded, because we are, evidently, so fragile in our sense of self that we would rather believe that we are right than change. If there is indeed “two routes” to persuasion, we need to develop the ability to take the central route, and not the peripheral route, urgently, and as often as possible.

At the outset of these essays, I talk about the essential importance of being willing to change your mind (and indeed, being mindful of the changefulness and conditionality of one’s mindset) as key to self-realization. To align with a genuine eternal force like change, one would need to “make friends” with the change native to every moment’s manifestations, and begin examining what indications there are when something wants to change. At a collective level, if we could harness the eternally renewable power generated by change itself, we could possibly arrange ourselves into more diversifying, yet harmonizing forms.

Denial might protect you temporarily, but it can portend a horrible slide into a lack of complexity (i.e., the dissolution of connections and systems with nothing to replace them). Remember that life is negentropic—it tends to align energy into higher orders. A loss of complexity represents the opposite, or entropy; it indicates organizational decline. This can be witnessed occurring in societies, in ecosystems, in bodies; it is commonly referred to as dying.

If Toxic Memes Could Kill Us

Death is sometimes the price paid for the attachment and commitment we feel to our addictions. But as any recovering addict can tell you, there is always another choice: the choice to turn towards life, to turn towards a higher purpose. If you are harboring a toxic mimic meme, its presence might be indicated by how much effort you have to pour into negating alternative evidence and building complex justifications for your endemic belief system.⁴See “Occam’s Razor” Ask yourself: Is defending your memes causing you to feel depleted and sick? Or does engaging with your memes revitalize and awaken you?

To illustrate how a culture or society could manifestly decline into a reduced state of complexity: it’s a very undiscerning, “low resolution” (i.e., lack of integrity and detail) steamroller of an act for President Trump to just ban any person from a handful of majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. It’s very blatant and unsophisticated for Trump to brand all news that reports honestly on his unpopular behavior as “fake news.” Trump would like to label any news that criticizes him “fake news,” but really, it may not be the slant but the openness he despises—he detests that the American people can discuss his actions openly and find them wanting. Aggressive acts intended to “oust” conflicting narratives effectively represent attempts to shut down complexity—to eliminate nuance, to silence differences, to exact total control over a singular, favorable narrative. Perhaps Trump’s supporters crave their cognitive dissonance to be reduced—but to attempt the relief of tension through policies which actually limit the freedoms and suppress the movements and speech of other physical human beings is a dangerous social slide toward fascism and autocracy.

The lower and lower-resolution you get, there will come a point when genocide becomes acceptable. Genocide is only possible when people’s personal, cultural, and intellectual qualities are entirely eliminated from one’s viewpoint, when people’s bodies are perceived only as shallowly as their skin color or creed in determining whether they live or die. It takes a degenerative social situation to discard entirely the nuances that make people human: their life stories, their cultural capital, their ethnic and genetic roots, their inner capacities (talents, skills, knowledge, etc.), their social bonds, their struggles, their human potentials. When you kill someone, you simply cannot ever know whether that person’s mind contained some untold brilliant technology with which they could have rebuilt the world, if presented the opportunity. When being embodied as “white” or as “brown” or simply as “belonging to a particular group” is grounds for extermination, then the aim of integrating the best of what humankind could bring forth is lost.

Genocide benefits nothing, and those who hallucinate that maybe it sometimes does, hallucinate that they will assuredly emerge victorious. The only need genocide might be said to accomplish is reducing environmental demands and population strain—an implicit, if unconscious, fixation behind supremacists’ anxieties. However, the lower resolution such purges go, the more lasting and damaging the legacy.

It may seem strange that I use genocide to illustrate an extreme “low resolution” outcome of a society. However, humankind is manifestly facing annihilation at the hands of toxic mimic memes. The dominant memes seduce us with images of prosperity but deliver us irreversible destruction of our natural capital and planetary wellbeing. If we continue pouring energy into these currently dominant memes, we will run ourselves into the ground, killing us and the memes. However, we can recover the power to mitigate our broad receptivity to memes and to select which memes we cultivate; if humans could actuate the rapid spread of life-affirming memes, we might end up in a future that both we AND memes can survive.

Christopher Dombres, The Next War [via Flickr, public domain]

The Unknown Beyond One’s Habitual Patterns

They say the definition of crazy is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Why do we not have the society or the democracy we’d like to believe we do? What persists as the barriers to a fair and just society, even after many generations of struggle? What if the problem is not this one particular president or another, but the institutionalized political game, as a whole? To the extent that it limits and does not serve us, and other structures would better serve life-affirming purposes, should we not find ways to intervene?

Let us take the risk of imagining for a moment that our consistent economic and social disenfranchisement is not accidental. That it is in the government’s self-interest to ensure our continued reliance on its structures, no matter how excessively bureaucratic. That it is in the capitalholder elite’s interest to ensure our continued reliance on its systems, furthermore. Different tools, different ways of enforcing their order (police use-and-threat of force, bank debt, wage suppression, tax cuts to the rich, etc.), but the effect is to keep us meek, starved, obedient… and, worst of all, too stupid and wrongly informed to assess, analyze and overcome our situations. Some of us—typically those better off by this social order than others—tend to keep making excuses for it. But the same symptoms persist, with devastating effect. Can we continue to excuse it away? Or might we say the persistence of these problems are direct outcomes of the system’s design? Even if you don’t want to entertain this hypothesis, dear reader-scientist, ask yourself: do you think that it is plausible? Do you think it is worthy of being investigated?

Can the privileged admit their addiction to these systems, and repent? Like an alcoholic’s elaborate legacy of lies and excuses finally crumbling down atop him, do we dare imagine that the system, by design, must result in these outcomes? We spend so much energy explaining and forgiving the outcomes. After 40 years, 240 years…10,000 years of some of the same old shit…Occam’s Razor would suggest that the consistency of these outcomes betray actual power dynamics. I’m not claiming that there is a conscious conspiracy behind this pattern—that is to say, some gang of evildoers murmuring sinister plots behind closed doors—because that would be psychologically cheap (adaptive bias) and is a less likely cause than the organic effects of emergence and lock-in. What I am suggesting is nevertheless a conspiracy—a conspiring of those who lucked into power to retain and enhance their power, which means from a basic, factual standpoint, disempowering everyone else.

There’s no boogeyman going to jump out and attack you—or a government agent—just for thinking these thoughts. This is not 1984—yet. We’re sold a narrative that says we need to fear and abhor any alternative thinking—that to critique capitalism is equivalent to deviant anarchism or godforsaken communism. That’s because if we allowed for the proliferation of direct dialogue and discursive thinking among individual members of a community, we might have years ago realized that our economy and our state could function at a much higher level of integrity—and could work better for us.

Turning Towards Life: Recovery And Integration

To empathize with this common human condition is the first step on a pathway to developing human resilience to conquest by toxic memes. Again, people aren’t the problem—few of us are trying to make the world a worse place. We must compassionately accept and work with our limitations—such as our cognitive biases. We should approach this by borrowing from addiction recovery processes and programs.

First, let us empathize with the core cause of our vulnerability to seduction by malicious memes. There are various cognitive biases that come into play here. In many ways, our yearning to affirm what we already think we know about the world tends to override our search for truth. We may even feel personally affronted when our earlier-held notions about something are proven wrong.⁵Check out this fabulous poster of 24 cognitive biases that can impair our receptivity to real information. https://www.yourbias.is/ This is a natural aspect of the human condition, and it makes sense: complex truths can cost considerable cognitive effort to accept.

Given memes’ efficient ability to infect humans, we must be diligent in developing our memetic immune system defenses to ensure that only healthy, life-supporting memes are the ones that ultimately take root. This involves developing a more participatory role in consciously curating the memes we harbor: fertilizing and cultivating the desired patterns, and uprooting the unfit weeds. If humans were to strengthen their mental conditioning and mindfully participate in the shaping of memes (like memes shape us), we could build towards a more beautiful world by giving and spreading only the memes best adapted to our goals. A little participatory evolution, then. In this way, we can entrain memes to serve our human purposes like one trains a climbing vine in a garden. Instead of passively allowing the proliferation of the memetic equivalent of nuclear weapons, couldn’t we harness our innate love for life into enthusiastically proliferating memes that enhance the conditions for life on Earth?

Although we viscerally grapple with social pressures to “not deviate” from the established norms, it is manifestly appropriate to deviate from a burning building. In recovery from addiction, a commonly-cited turning point in a person’s trajectory is “hitting rock bottom.” There’s a point when an individual becomes desperate enough for a change—almost any change would have to be better than this. Thus let us imagine that what is beyond our current realm—what is more creative, more life-affirming—might be worth taking a risk on. It takes a leap of faith to mount the path to recovery, but it can pay off in rewards much more enduring than the path of addiction. That means there is hope for transmuting natural human yearnings into feedback loops that are much healthier.

To the extent humans are giving into their addictions and not practicing restraint and discernment, memes seem to be riding roughshod over us. How could we develop immunity or resistance to toxic memes? If malicious memes are actively seeking ways to invade our heads, how can we “inoculate” ourselves against infection by false views?

Resilient people are comfortable entertaining ideas that differ from their existing frameworks. They mindfully look for ways to meld new information with old. It is challenging to tolerate different perspectives on reality while maintaining awareness of them all as partially “true” at once, but admittedly our minds thrive on solving complex challenges. There is an enduring, deeply satisfying reward when one dives into and honors the difficulty, the complexity.

Resilience means being courageous enough to apply one’s mind, developing the sensitivity to process direct knowledge of what is real, and the discernment to perceive and negotiate the distorting effects of certain memes. Such people have the increasingly-rare capacity to see through veils of bullshit. This is a powerful skill in navigating a so-called “post-truth” world. So: move towards that wholesome discomfort, a discomfort which promises to give way to blissful new levels of realization.

Humphrey King, New City [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

I want to suggest that you look and think of the social order—and especially the mainstream media—from the perspective of: whose interests are being served by the way this is presented? Who could stand to benefit from me believing that (fill-in-the-blank) is true? Who could stand to benefit from the agenda presented by this media? Behind any great addiction, you will find a profiteer.

Deliberately develop discernment, whereby you practice identifying who has your genuine best interests at heart, and who doesn’t. Journalists and others who are genuinely concerned with keeping the public informed about the truth present a more reliable source (insofar as motives align with actions), whereas fake news rabblerousers are transparently looking to make a quick profit off of you (as an unsavvy consumer) and/or disrupt the social order for their broader greed-mongering ends. Especially in regard to climate science: generally, those who present exhaustively-examined facts are likely concerned with your best interests—why else would they have invested all that arduous, critical work? Whereas those who attempt to mislead you by appealing to cheap psychological reactions—aren’t. In fact, they might be attempting to subjugate you. (On a personal relational level: those who are willing to receive critique and question their own perspectives are trustworthy; those who voraciously assert the inviolable authenticity of their truth, alone—are not. This, interestingly, aligns with principles of productive dialogue.)

By contrast to the profoundly destructive outcomes plausible on a planetary scale (if our toxic oppressive memes remain in charge), a more “high resolution” (or synthesizing/negentropic) approach would involve individuals harvesting the splendid bright consciousnesses of the world’s diverse beings, and then holding those multiplicitous truths intact while tolerating the lively tensions generated. A high resolution approach enables complex decisions to be made that reinforce quality for all. If we were to stay with the complexity, and look for overarching patterns… we might find challenging, but ultimately more blissful and satisfying answers.

Recovery constitutes a new direction for life. It requires embracing the healing, or life-affirming, principle in everything one does. This is the harder path, but it is the path that leads toward survival and achievement. To develop social-scale immunity to virulent memes, we need to invest in providing high-quality/diversely-sourced education and skill-building practices to our populace. We need to build a culture of mutual support that encourages the best from one another. Before participatory construction of a new building (or society), there must be a participatory designing through dialogue. We need people who are trained and equipped to engage with our difficulties. We need to develop discernment about the memetic company we keep, we need to strengthen our impulse controls, and we need to immerse in wholesome forms of health and wellness if we seek a more resilient people and society.

Thomas Hawk, #carpeaux #legionofhonor #sf #sanfrancisco #art #sculpture [via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0]

Are you participating—like, really thickly even—in some narratives that seek to exploit you for your social, intellectual or material capital? Could you experiment mentally or actually with alternatives or opposites to what you believe—and just observing what happens? What do you discover in that process?

In your own life journey, you have probably undergone some “philosophical molting,” whereby you discarded earlier belief systems for better-suited ones. What do you recall about that process of letting go of one belief system, for another? What did you take away from that “molting” experience?

What are some ways you could improve health and wellness in your life, so as to be less prone to seduction by toxic options? Relationally, socially, mentally, spiritually, biologically (nutrition, sleep, exercise, etc.)— consider each dimension, for better health means becoming more whole, and a sound, complete organism is optimally resilient.

The power Trump commands is given by us—our attention, our deference, our minds, hearts, lives. In little ways, we can retake control of how and to what purposes we deploy our minds and spirits.

∞

What am I doing when I am reciting an aspiration that Trump know happiness and its roots? I am alternatively conditioning my mind: reminding (re-mind-ing) myself that Trump is a human being, and the root of the destruction and chaos he is causing lies in his humanity. Trump’s personality traits of ambition, narcissism and insularity—which are wreaking such havoc at the institutional and political scale—these are all direct outcomes of Trump’s particular psychological and social conditioning, grounded in historical, tangible events.

Although the situation is urgent and dangerous, it’s also sad. Compassion is not an inappropriate response, but rather is always an appropriate response to situations of struggle. What are we struggling against, after all, if not other people who would rather keep us deprived and subservient—and how sad is that? What are we struggling for, if not people’s liberties; what are we struggling against, if not people’s ambitions to control and exploit others? In all of human history, why have we not met our aspirations yet? If we did, could we be at peace with one another?

To say Trump deserves to experience peace, love and joy does not contradict the need to resist, prevent and subdue him from causing any more harm. (In fact, I’m arguing that Trump accessing an experience of genuine self-arising satisfaction would be an antidote to his hungry-ghost will to power.) After all—where do Trump’s maladjusted qualities derive from? They derive from him being materially spoiled—catered to, in spite of his poor personal, emotional, psychological and intellectual development—because of his capitalist holdings and the accorded privileges thereof. Trump has learned a life wherein he’s the center of the narrative—everything and everyone seems to hinge upon his fleeting desires. While such a life might seem fortunate to the untrained eye, it also requires that Trump remain insulated from any substantial depths of relationship. Shallow relationships based on mutual exploitation (and not common feeling or understanding) would be “the norm.” Which means: Trump has mentally entrained to, and now physically embodies, the sick and offensive qualities of the mode of capitalism which he’s been immersed in his entire life. A life made of exploiting others does not, cannot, a healthy and fulfilled human make.

Trump’s personality and his reaction to circumstances are conditioned, as are each of ours. Thus his shortcomings are not the outcome of any “evil” inherent in him. (Whether the pattern/system of capitalism, which has shaped Trump’s subjective reality, is inherently evil… that deserves its own discussion.) As comforting as it may be to demonize Trump, that pose only keeps us locked into fruitless and cyclic opposition, into the false duality of “good against bad.” Hence my assertion that Trump needs healing (to effectuate “right” conduct) more than he needs penalizing correction. (And it is not just for Trump, but for all, that I bear this view.)

Bret Polok, “Everybody wants to rule the world.” [via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0]

Firstly, let’s discuss where his popularity comes from (which is part of the power behind the career arc of any politician). His popularity derives from a complex of factors: foremost, that he names obvious, vague demons which people yearn to righteously go after—angry-mob-with-pitchforks style. That is to say: Trump’s rhetoric plays on our baser instincts. Self-righteous violence generates compensatory feelings of pride when faced with terrified insecurity (it’s the bully’s way). This is currently manifesting outwardly in acts of racist violence, giving fresh “life” to below-the-surface attitudes that have continuously saturated the people and policies of the United States from its beginning (which I unpack in depth in a subsequent essay, Mythmaking) . Examples include the recent slayings of two anti-racists who defended Muslim women on a train, February’s hate crime murders in Kansas, St. Louis Jewish cemetery defacement, the mass and deadly assault on anti-white-supremacy protestors in Charlottesville, VA… I wish this list would not go on, but without intervention, it assuredly will.

Secondly, Trump gives equally-sweeping, feel-good promises of reform that will be utterly impossible to implement in the complex, burgeoning reality. However, in saying the appealing thing that “sells tickets” (er, votes?), Trump appears to annihilate the real complexity merely via bullying dominance of the narrative. Trump succeeds because most people would love a reduction in the complexity of our problems. Those who believe that shoving problems aside or silencing them solves problems are egregiously mistaken, however.

Further, Trump represents a brand of gross, pathetic incompetence iconic of total despair and civilizational decline. Those who feel that despair, unconsciously or consciously, may derive perverse delight in Trump’s hilariously terrible character, thus coordinating to elect him to the presidency ironically, like a mass act of trickster energy. All of these elements take hold upon the cultural and social patterns in the United States, which include: extravagant material comfort and sense of entitlement, oppressive economic disparities, and belief in individualism / social isolation.

When a civilization is in decline, when its mythos has begun to slide into meaninglessness, it is only too appropriate that the paragon representative of our hallowed (hollowed?) nation is simply what we find most extremely offensive and entertaining. That’s what makes Trump’s rhetoric popular with certain white Americans—he strikes the nerves of their presumably-“lost” ambitions and thus galvanizes them to turn their backs on facing and embracing complexity in favor of worshipping a false-idol image of their conventional supremacy, reinforced (if reprehensible).

Christopher Dombres, “I do not know what I want, but I know I don’t have it.” Je ne sais pas ce que je veux, mais je sais que je ne l’ai pas . Illustration from 2003. [public domain]

Those repressed anxieties, when offered an outlet, become channeled into a talisman of collective power—in this case, the talisman of Donald Trump’s mythos. Our media environments season us into trance-like states: hypnotized by the narrative, seized by emotionally provocative messages, our attention is funneled like a pump, sucking energy into the objects of the desired myth. (The hypnosis-like state explains why Donald Trump’s supporters, as a whole, tend to be voracious in their denial of real information and facts, so mesmerized are they by their idol’s glorified image.)

So, perhaps it is clear Trump has absorbed cultural and mythic power in the eyes of a subset of Americans. But how is it that he came to power over the fate of the whole United States?

The answer lies in the very same attention-channeling, hypnotic process, only with different objects. This time, it’s our continued vestment of power in our national political institutions. Our obedience to political conventions has enabled a dangerously ignorant and unethical man to assume power—see Obama’s emphasis on “peaceful transfer of power” and the electors’ installment of Trump, despite all manner of red flags going up.

The problem is we revere institutions more than we attend sensitively to the situation. As institutions, we tend to lean on their proud appearance (“the U.S. is the greatest democracy on Earth!”) more than we thoughtfully attend to structural integrity and appropriateness of the forms. In reality, the U.S. is a sorry excuse for a so-called democracy—its people have barely made any substantive modifications to what is now a 240-year-old (and clunkily outdated) governance model. Bureaucratic complexity has layered up to obscuring and insane heights; meanwhile, gradual, insidious capitalist-corporate appropriations of the people’s political power have eaten away the core, resulting in the structures being on the brink of crumbling. However, we’ve been hypnotized by the rhythms of society into a lulled trance—go to school, to go work, watch the news, pay taxes, vote. When in a fearful, regressed state of mind, we tend to cling to familiar and comforting rituals and rhythms, and think that their very act is proof that all is well.

Our own institutions, corrupted, will be our very undoing—if we continue to hold to them out of blind “tradition” or “faith.” We don’t want to be naughty and “break the rules” of this convoluted game, even if it would in fact save our necks in this dire, unprecedented moment.

So it would seem we are entangled in a complex house of mirrors built of people’s ignorant projections that is so brimming with disastrous and fragile elements, there’s scarce hope of not getting crushed in its inevitable collapse, right?

Well… there is another way to view this situation. In the dark night of the soul glimmers a glimpse of the darkness’ opposite.

If we allow that everything that has been discussed (Trump’s nature, the nature of his popularity and influence, and the nature of his current forms of power) can be traced to conditioning—psychological, historical, narrative and material… that would make it all: empty. As in, there is nothing causing any of this to be strictly the case. All manifestation in this moment is merely the result of processes, an outcome of a system of interconnected conditions and choices. However: the present moment’s configuration, which includes Trump as president of the United States, represents diminishing value to the vast majority of us.

As a cultural icon via reality television…as a ghoulish caricature symbolizing capitalist grandeur…as the president of the United States, even, Trump has the power we give him, much like a totem or a talisman, which we imbue with meaning for particular purposes. We imbue this individual with apparent power beyond what the singular human can, in fact, possess. A major cause of this is our desire to believe convenient illusions—something I unpack further in Wanting to Believe. Our fears, our ambitions, and our longings get channelled into the one individual—leading us to believe that he is much bigger, more impressive, and scarier than one pathetic man.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. (Screenshot: The Wizard of Oz/ MGM Grand)

The myth obscures the man. Just as in the Wizard of Oz, before the curtain is pulled back.

Acknowledging that Trump represents a manifestation and a channeling of millions of people’s dark psychic energies, I will be happily joining in the trend of the mass rituals to ask all beings (manifest and unmanifest, human, animal, spirit and otherwise) to bind Trump and his cronies so that they may cease to cause harm to so many.

You may not believe in magic, but how else do you explain these real circumstances we find ourselves, apart from the attentional direction and hypnotic manipulation inherent to a magician’s work? How do you explain: the outrageous frenzy that Trump has whipped his supporters into through aggressive, blame-game distortions that blitz Americans into bewilderment; the invisibility of corporate consolidation of political power, domestically and globally; the unspeakability of capitalism’s devastating environmental, social and psychological consequences; the ways long-held cultural myths (of multiculturalism, democracy, and freedom) are dissipating right before our eyes? What do you call our mass vulnerability to hypnosis by various means—whether occurring in religious, consumerist, political, or other contexts?

Trance is real and it is a feature of human consciousness—call it what you prefer, understand it however you like, but don’t ignore it. The ways in which our emotional, psychic, and intellectual capacities respond and attempt to cope with stress are potent-to-the-point-of-perceptible, yet also emerge in mysterious and unpredictable manners—quite beyond the scope of the rational mind to grasp. And while you may try to dismiss what you haven’t yet grasped (or what you moralistically refuse to acknowledge), that real element you brush aside will still be there—and will reemerge in ever more daunting forms.

The disruptions that Trump continues to cause have emotional consequences on a massive scale, affecting millions of people—whose resulting released energy can be harnessed for good or ill (and indeed, to pretend this isn’t happening makes one subject, and not agent, of it).

Therefore, if you’d like to tap into and wield the wide-ranging energies of millions of people (and, too, animals and plants and spirits and lands and ancestors) who do, indeed and resoundingly, want Trump stopped…why not join in the ritual? What harm could come of it? Any bending of one’s mind toward harm-reducing patterns (including through prayer or ritual) that can subsequently reshape one’s perceptions and sense-making of so-called “consensus reality” is valuable. If seeking to retrain the mind for resilience and adaptability amidst chaos, it is helpful to remember that you retain control over what you put your mind to.

Vinoth Chandar, Kali the Goddess – Navarathri Golu Dolls [via Flickr, CC BY 2.0]

What is your experience of being entranced? Observe how you feel while watching news stories, watching a film, or browsing Facebook. What do you notice?

Is there any edge of awareness that allows for the breaking, or redirection, of the trance state?

If the trance state indicates that you are seeing only what the presenter, or magician, wants you to see, then—how could you take a mental step back and take a fresh look at the elements in the situation?

What are some things you want to believe about Trump? What are some things you want to believe about the United States of America?

What might be some reasonably true alternatives to your assumptions? If you’re not sure, ask people who don’t agree with your viewpoint!

Do you notice a sense of entrancement to your own set of assumptions and biases in terms of your daily conduct? How could you challenge your automatically arising, unthinking reactions to various stimuli, such as people, messages, images, etc.?

Trance states can make us vulnerable to receiving and absorbing messages and symbolic narratives deep within our psyches. Trance can be used maliciously, but also beneficially. How might you employ trance to adjust your internalized beliefs or assumptions in positive ways?

The common myths and meaning on which the U.S. was founded are breaking down, strained by the gnashing confrontation of incompatible, co-occurring narratives. This is long overdue and much needed. Yet powerful interests are trying to seize this shaky moment by trumpeting archaic, toxic narratives that reinforce and advance oppressive agendas in society.

There are auspicious alternatives for how power can be organized in a social order. To free up the space for society to consider significant structural renovations, we must first do deep, digging work to dismantle the supports underpinning prevailing but maladapted myths.

∞

In the previous essays, I argued that the apparent sociocultural phenomenon of Trump is empty and conditional. As in the Wizard of Oz, to view Trump as a monster or an all-powerful wizard is a wrong or illusory view. Rather, recognizing Trump and his supporters as human beings conditioned by their sociocultural context and historical experiences frees this situation up to be much more workable, if handled from a compassionate, conscientious orientation.

The emptiness (conditionality) of what manifests in reality suggests that there is freedom to move among and to reconfigure these real elements. To work masterfully with the strands of many narratives and transform outcomes, one must develop the insight and compassion to trace entrenched assumptions to their origins in experience. Trump the person has invested considerable resources throughout his life in creating Trump the myth. (In dealing with him as a person, we can, collectively, undertake a process of divestment from that myth.)

But there are deep-seated malevolent myths and pernicious technologies that also fueled the grim distension of Trump’s mythic image. White supremacy (and its underlying logic of oppressive hierarchy) presents a paramount, seemingly-massive myth (of both vast and historical proportions) for us to pull back the curtain and reveal its illusory aspects. (If so destructive and prevalent a narrative as white supremacy can be unpacked for its illusory nature, then, dear reader-scientist, what myths can’t?)

Thus, it is my aim to embolden you to investigate and experiment with the myths in your life, whether small or big. This work requires some basic skills at identifying unspoken assumptions, and drawing them out. If those unspoken assumptions are illuminated to be faulty, then the structural arguments (the myth) built on top of them may crumble. May you cultivate a skeptical mind and habitually test the qualities of any myth you encounter.

Making And Maintaining A Mess Of Things: Race & White Supremacy

Race is an ideal construct to choose to unpack in this piece because 1) white supremacist thinking is deeply tied to Trump’s political ascendancy, and 2) race, of the many social constructs in operation, is especially empty. As the PBS documentary series RACE – The Power of an Illusion explains, “race has no genetic (or biological) basis.” Race has everything to do with how one is perceived and interpreted by other members of society. How a person is interpreted is subject to a variety of local contextual cues; moreover, categories tend to evolve to conform with changing social and economic conditions. To provide my own lineage as an illustration, it is unlikely my grandparents and great-grandparents (immigrants to the United States of several distinct European heritages) would ever have gotten together and reproduced without the construct of whiteness to help socially bind them together.

The embodied reality of most people today is “messy” (i.e., comprised of multiple identities in tension) in part because social constructs like race do a poor job of giving language to describe diverse familial and cultural experiences. Conversely, race as a social construct seems almost explicitly intended to function to enforce the desired power distributions in society—that is, to maintain social justification for dominator hierarchies.¹See #8 of RACE—The Power of an Illusion. Thus race is inextricably linked with the pattern of oppression that also causes many other forms of socially-enforced inequities (such as sexism, classism, etc.). Race, and particularly white supremacy, is a consequential illusion that hugely influences institutional, structural and local realities, especially in the United States; but as an illusion, it can indeed be undermined by nudging out just a few unspoken assumptions that secretly give structure to its claims.

I am going to proceed to hold up the mythos of white supremacy to the light, to point out some of its internal structure. I acknowledge that much of what I am reflecting to you through the mirror of my mind can be hard to look at. These middle essays represent something like a dark night of the soul: a raw grappling with our difficulties, daring a descent into total fragmentation. There is a brighter day, just around the bend, but to go through these difficulties is the only path there. Keep heart. Because to insist violence stay buried and out of sight—”someone else’s problem”—is to permit the problem’s continued existence. As Omar el Akkar writes poignantly in American War, “Perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence—a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?”

Only by looking at the frank, painful reality of our addiction will we find the gumption to transform our troubled ways. So let us untangle the strands of this story that thrives in our silence and confusion.

AK Rockefeller, Enter the Drone [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

I could provide a long list of the horrors performed in sacrifice to this evil myth, from genocide, slavery, cultural appropriation, and forced assimilation, to the many subtle forms of systematic economic, physical and social marginalization of people of color today. I will spare you the gruesome details in this space, but if you have any doubt to their reality, I encourage you to do some self-education beyond the bounds of this series.²Recommended reading includes: Noam Chomsky’s Year 501: The Conquest Continues, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, or this list of 16 book suggestions to learn about white supremacy in the U.S.) Instead, I want to explore why we still have to deal with white supremacy today—why it has not yet been routed out.

In spite of abundant countervailing evidence, this myth persists in part due to one of its built-in dynamics: that those of privilege get to choose to maintain their ignorance and their comfort/convenience at the expense of the actual well-being, even physical safety, of others. Many whites who benefit from their dominant position in society, and who unconsciously or consciously wish to retain their privileged status, would feel more at ease to just not acknowledge these systems. It should be noted: any lessening of the forms of overt violence resulting from these systems that may have been accomplished over the course of generations, was won by intense struggles led by people of color and supported by solidary whites—and nothing less. (May we respect and support these struggles whenever possible.)

The “fragility effect” distorts the narratives which shape our society: dismissing the narratives of people of color and centering whites’ narratives; promoting conventional voices and marginalizing progressive ones; weighing white discomfort on the same level with people of color’s survival. Effectively, this imprints on us that some narratives are more important (thus, seeming to be realer or truer) than others, warping our collective perception.

Trump’s political ascendance is fueled by the collective desperation felt by large swaths of culturally-white Americans that their options for continuing to deflect and evade looking at the nature of their privileges are growing slimmer—and, being low on interpersonal, emotional, and psychological resources, they feel that they are being backed into a corner; their defenses flair, which collectively manifests as the growing prominence of white supremacist sentiment in mainstream discourse. The “America” Trump claims he’ll make “great again” is the one where white people (and, especially those of economic and gender privileges, moreover) can rest peacefully in the illusion of their superiority—where they don’t have to be bothered by narratives that conflict with their traditional positions of comfort and control.

In the last piece, I wrote about our strong urges to avoid cognitive dissonance and to surround ourselves with people and messages that affirm our existing views. It is no small task to get anyone to soften their defenses and let divergent stories in. Nevertheless, this task is especially complicated when people feel no social or mythic pressure to adopt a listening stance—when their self-affirming stories tell them that they are naturally in a dominant position, and others are supposed to always listen while they speak. The social acceptability of the dominance of a people is paralleled in the dominance of certain memes.

Previously, I spoke about the reality of trance and its role in healing processes. What would a mass, psychic, emotional and actual reckoning look like? Can you envision a process of restoration, reparation, and repentance—premised on love, equity and solidarity for one another? That we might actually go through the ordeal, the difficulties—and come out the other side?

The alternative to breakthrough is breakdown, or disintegration. When something must break—those two outcomes are possible. The former is integrative—the latter, fractures and scatters (often, violently).

How poetic, then, that the only force that may be strong enough to finally dismember the social fabric and bring down the clunky, ineffectual structures of our government (via Trump’s divisive speech and actions) is white supremacy—the nation’s oldest and possibly most authentic identity and pride.

Meanwhile: the messier the moment, the more stressful the circumstances, and the more psychically fragile the people: the easier it is for the powerful to capitalize on their fear and confusion.

Illustrating The Illusion

WHITE SUPREMACY’S SUPPRESSION OF OTHERS’ STORIES AND HISTORIES: THE ORIGINAL FAKE NEWS?

In 2014, Steve Bannon gave a speech at the Vatican that provides a fair example of some of the staple arguments involved in white supremacist mythology. Although Bannon, with his own weird views, may not represent the perfect spokesperson of white supremacy, his profitable far-right, fake-news-spreading platform, Breitbart News, absolutely caters to circulating white supremacist sentiment and building its community of supporters.

It is through emotionally-stimulating rhetorical forms that more and more individuals’ minds become “hooked” on (i.e., adopt and internalize) narratives of white supremacy. As is widely acknowledged, Trump’s political rise was fueled by stoking the fires of white supremacist sentiment, which was woven throughout Trump’s rhetoric and policies from early on in the presidential campaign. Remember, however, that narratives give an interpretive framework of reality—and the map is never the territory. (Furthermore, as I attempt to show: “power-over” narratives are a map to nowhere, fast.)

In his speech, Bannon claims to be a “hard-nosed capitalist,” and bemoans the way capitalism stopped bettering the majority of people’s lives and has become “corrupted” since “losing its Judeo-Christian roots” (a cultural nod echoed by President Trump in his “we’re saying Merry Christmas again” speech earlier this week). What Bannon calls “divine providence” (providence by a Judeo-Christian God) is that white folks are “creators of jobs” and “creators of wealth.” He claims that this society’s forefathers were staunch enough to prevent the encroachment of Islamic or other cultures into their own, and thus: “they were able to defeat it, and they were able to bequeath to us a church and a civilization that really is the flower of mankind.”

Teacher Dude, This Machine Kills Fascism [CC BY-NC 2.0]

This is “controlling the narrative” at its grandest and finest. Such a picture of history—in which European societies/cultures are naturally superior to all others on Earth—is only balanced if the people and cultures that were used and exterminated are discarded from the narrative, completely—with the king’s grandeur always fixed at the center of your attention (i.e., the central storyline of history).((Ever the point and height of humanity, those kings. (Why is it that those who are most insecure in themselves, most seek their supremacy to be assured?)

This supremacist rhetoric seems reasonable and accurate—if taken from only this narrow historical viewpoint. And to those conditioned (by their schooling, churches, social norms, etc.) to only see from that narrow angle, such nauseating rhetoric could ring true—the “dog whistle” effect. But this rhetoric, like any fundamentalist viewpoint, excludes the stories of many for the exaltation of the preferred narrative. To include others’ actual historical experiences would destroy the argument.

What motivates the abrasive tone of such exclusive, fundamentalist narratives? Fear. Bannon’s advocacy for American “sovereignty” and an arch-conservative protectionism of white assets—both material and cultural—betray fear that someone would come to try to take them away. This actually points to the implicit belief (so-pervasive-as-to-be-invisible, and quite likely IS invisible to a person like Bannon) that “power-over” in oppressive systems of conquest and superiority is the only and perpetual way in which societies functionally organize themselves. They assume that the few who crave power must exact their terrible will on the lives of many, who in turn must give up their bodies, their histories, their lands, and their futures, for the concentrated, bloated affluence of a few kings.

There is a reason these mythologies don’t state their founding assumptions—because if those assumptions were to be brought out and laid on the table, they would be shown to be indefensible. Bannon is leaning on how “taken for granted” some of these dominant myths are; truly, one risks being socially ostracized for calling conventional norms into question. But seductive, “toxic” memes function in the shadows: they cannot show you their true nature, or else their gimmicks would be punctured. Like a magician performing a trick, they need you to miss (that is, not perceive) certain aspects of the trick in order for the emotional hooks to lodge in your flesh—and drag you along.

Simply illuminating some of the unspoken premises enables even the most pervasive myth to be dealt with. I advise developing this skill so you may deftly enter into transformational dialogue even with individuals whose agenda might initially, even unconsciously, be to conquer you with their memes.

The Myth Made Me Do It: When Idea Power Crosses Over Into Reality

Memes (beliefs, interpretations, stories, etc.) live in minds, which are connected to bodies; bodies make beliefs manifest, and thus is violence wrought unto people and the Earth on behalf of memes. This is why attempts to condemn individual people of certain ethnic or cultural origins—as Trump proposed with his Muslim-country immigration ban—will not address or prevent the arising of diseased forms of violence or aggression, whatsoever. Individual people are not the true sources of our problems. The true root of our problems is people’s propensity to act unconsciously/automatically in line with their adopted beliefs. If we gained the skills for navigating and resisting being “hooked” by memes, we have a chance to act more thoughtfully and meaningfully.

There is good reason why we, as a society, have discerned that hate speech is not deserving of the same rights as free speech. Just as with shouting “fire” falsely in a crowded movie theater, hate speech is extremely likely, if not intended, to incite harm. Speech has tangible impacts—psychological, social, and organizational (i.e., organizing actions). Speech provokes action, which is why it is not neutral when someone speaks words that encourage violence. Because speech transmits memes, and not all memes are suited for humanity’s health and wellbeing. Understanding that hate speech is not deserving of the same rights as free speech, we need to advance this ethical step further. We need to undertake a collective project of confronting and neutralizing the threats of entire narratives and mythologies that threaten to undermine societal integrity.

As was discussed in the previous piece, regarding trance states: no matter the content or integrity of the memes, people will act out the stories they have internalized. Due to the way humans are wired, we are prone to become entranced with any compelling organizing framework through which we can interpret the world, and we begin spreading and reinforcing our interpretive framework when we act as though the illusion is the reality. This is how a flimsy mythology such as white supremacy equips people to undertake violent acts affecting real people and materials, even as the structural premises underpinning the mythology are constructed of smoke and mirrors.

AK Rockefeller, Based on a True Story [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

But let us not remain in this confusion. It is so crucially important to stay in touch with what is real and what is myth, and work to leverage real assets to address the maladaptiveness of certain myths. Again, individual people are not the problem; instead, people may provide the solution, by learning to deliberately work with these assumption- and action-forming processes.

If we cannot learn to attack the root of these problems—by mitigating the memes—then bodies will continue to be attacked, and will continue to suffer. A reckoning is upon us—if we cannot face the deep-seated viruses of white supremacy, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression residing in the soft tissue of our minds… then we will further kill and maim whole bodies and peoples, instead.

Radically Reconfiguring How Power Is Harnessed in a Social Order

White supremacy is just one of many forms of oppressive hierarchy that we grapple with in society today. In addition to the white/non-white binary devised for the purpose of empowering some to exploit others, there are binary axes of sex, gender, sexuality, creed, immigration status, etc. that cause like harm. Yet each of these such mythic systems has uniform features, indicating that there is an even deeper pattern-layer that shows up in these particular narrative systems. If we really want to “see to the roots” of our prevailing social conditioning, we must examine all hierarchies of oppression as representing one gross pattern—one mammoth meme.

Hierarchical societal structures (one-way flows which concentrate energy upward) require oppression. Therefore, we are so immersed in oppression—it is so normative and pervasive—that we may not well notice, or have names for, the extensive organizing power of this framework and how it manifests in almost every aspect of our lives. It’s like “the water we swim in,” which is why it can seem impossible to change. But every society’s “normal” is temporary and conditional. What’s normal and prevailing can be changed.

To me, it is desperately important that Americans see how empty and conditional our dominant mythologies are. There are actually a diverse variety of cultural patterns for living harmoniously on Earth, and many viable solutions for achieving widespread abundance, well-being and happiness exist today. To the extent we seek sanctuary in our toxic (but comforting) narratives, we fail to look beyond the boundaries of our conventional understandings for viable alternatives. To change this, let us name our normative patterns and their underlying assumptions, too, and see if we don’t, in the process, uncover open doorways leading to wild and promising alternatives.

AK Rockefeller, The Other Way [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Common to warmongers of any color or creed is the drive to gain power over others. As the notion of noblesse oblige (or its modern form, wherein the U.S. military claims to “spread democracy” as it actually meddles in other nations’ political and economic destinies) signifies, in the myths of the privileged group, attaining power over can be framed as “compassionate” in that one believes one’s culture to be superior, and therefore it is beneficial to impose it on other people “so as to help them.” No matter how well-meaning, it still contains the seed of a desire for power over others—in this case, ideological power-over, which says that “my way is definitely superior to your (often traditional, cultural) way.” That subtle desire for “power over” is an ether that seeps into people’s hearts, regardless of their nation, culture or origin.

There is a view of human nature that “power-over” is what shapes everything in the world, and us. This is Trump’s view. Nietzsche discussed it in the master-slave dichotomy of what is valued. To those who subscribe to this view of power, their aim is to embody nobility: to acquire mastery (i.e., the perfection of their control) over the world. While power is intrinsic in the forms of the world, it is not compelled to take the form of “power-over” any more than water is required to remain liquid and never become ice or vapor. There are other “phase states” that power can take—under the right conditions.

Regarding the state of society today, one of our deepest issues is the pervasiveness of the “power-over” framework and how accustomed we are to acting in accordance with its assumptions. This problem can be healed with alternative memes, forming alternative frameworks of how to understand and relate to power itself.

If there are natural, regenerative sources of power in the world—inherent to the survival and procreation processes of memes and of living things —what are some alternative ways to arrange that power? If our actions both activate and spread the content of our internalized memetic framework, how could we bring more mindfulness to the memes we embody so as to move toward a more life-affirming future?

There are other, often-suppressed ways to orchestrate natural capital that involves very different-looking power relations: referred to as “power to,” “power with,” and “power from within.” These frameworks honor life and life’s intrinsic developmental processes by seeking to productively combine natural resources in a consensual, networked and organic organizational framework. This is superior to planet-wide extractive, coercive hierarchical forms if just because it avoids many of the harms and extreme inefficiencies of a homogenizing, wealth-extracting and wealth-consolidating hierarchy. (It may even help reduce deep levels of cognitive dissonance, if we do in fact experience urges to correct unfair behavior in infancy—prior to social conditioning.) If we can include more and more natural, renewable capital (including people’s inborn talents and capacities) to their fullest extents, this is bound to result in greater and more ecstatic collective accomplishments than ever before.

The Fallacy of Desiring Power-Over and the Authenticity of Desiring Power-To

In the oppressive framework, a small group of elite gain power over the rest of living processes on Earth through extractive consolidating economic and political systems, and (according to this mythos’ implicit laws), this ancient way will forever persist because people will always want power over others. Surely, white wealthy men will continue to defend the power structure that privileges them in accordance with their own interests. Surely, history will only ever repeat itself, just in bigger and more destructive/energy-intensive ways.

What this stance fails to acknowledge or even imagine, is a scenario in which people of oppressor classes relinquish their stance of asserting power over others.

In the case of battling the social narrative of white supremacy, perhaps the most deadly weapon is for people of both sides of the binary to refuse to participate and to devise their own custom relations for how they consensually use and exchange their power. European-descended, white-identified, anti-racist, anti-supremacist people are not hypothetical: we do exist. We are allied with the human struggle for equity and empowerment. We are not “defectors” of our “race”—we reject that lazy, shallow narrative (having seen a bigger picture). We take up positions in the fight for authentic liberation of humankind. Race being a social construct, we sign up to help deconstruct it. We don’t swallow the narrative that anybody should be in power over others, exploiting and profiting off of the lives of others—not even us. Because we just don’t want that. That is not our chosen aspiration.

Compassion instructs that my possibility of being the “other” in any statement is just as likely, and conditional, as being the subject. This is especially relevant to consider in cases of unearned privilege like being born into a body that is conditionally perceived-as-white. Whereas white supremacists cannot acknowledge others’ subjective realities as valid, so narrow is the self-protective narrative they’ve swallowed, anti-oppressionists acknowledge that each being’s lineage represents a valid narrative—that is, we are willing to see the picture from infinite angles, because each being (and each viewpoint) is a sacred piece to understanding the whole. Thus we reject the overarching structure of human relations that oppressive rhetoric seeks to establish as so-natural-as-to-be-invisible. If we reject the underlying premises of such ominous speech—all of the air deflates from the overblown balloon of supremacist arguments. Such bombastic threats are shown to be empty (as in the revelation of the Wizard of Oz’s true nature).

anokarina, We Go High [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

We anti-oppression activists of all kinds have laid down our aspirations to power-over, preferring instead a framework of power-from-within, and power-with. We don’t just seek freedom from being oppressed—we seek freedom to actualize our beautiful dreams for the world. Those of us who have experienced a deep breakthrough (framed as “spiritual,” or otherwise) in which we become directly aware of the interconnectedness of everything—we simply cannot be convinced that the correct social stance for ourselves is one in which we dominate and exploit any other. It cannot be done; that argument will not be won. Not even the temptation of personal gratification is sufficient to compel us. For we have dealt with those temptations already—we have greeted them in their many seductive forms, already, and we have overcome them. Thus do we have the immanent power of knowing better.

Thus have we—as anyone can, and may, and should! (and will?!)—relinquished the real threat to humanity, which is the will-to-power-over. Furthermore, we anti-oppressionists who happen to benefit from unearned privileges (due to our given race, gender, class, etc. statuses) will continue to ally with indigenous and oppressed peoples in our collective quest to eliminate the real and terrible threat to humanity, especially pronounced in a treacherous, insular cohort of people today (but whose potential is intrinsic to any/all people), through processes of compassion, restoration, healing, and accountability.

Changing World Assumptions, Changing World Possibilities

“Our ego is what the mind thinks we are. It is an image of ourselves which grows out of our life experiences—our body, sex, race, religion, culture, education, socialization, fears and assertive ego. We are supposed to know exactly who we are and what we believe and are supposed to be able to defend that identity. The more strongly we identify with something, the more strongly must we reject its opposite. Thus, the strongest, most obsessive egos belong to the least complete beings.”

“Developing an ego is like building a castle against reality. It provides some defense and a sense of purpose, but the larger it is, the more it invites attack, and, ultimately, it must crumble. There is a further problem. All fortresses are also prisons. Because our beliefs imply a rejection of their opposites they severely restrict our freedom.” — Peter J. Carroll, Psychonaut, 165

Be skeptical of rhetoric that completely leaves out that there are many ways to be (some of which may even be holistically better in quality, and yet don’t require privileging a few to the detriment of the many). If we could be free to recognize that there are options for how power is channelled, we’d have the freedom to mindfully contemplate and creatively experiment with the desired forms power can take. Speaking, spreading, promoting and actualizing this truth is the real threat to capitalists and supremacists everywhere: the spreading of faith in, practice of, and cross-fertilization among alternative, indigenous, integrative, higher-quality structures for human organization (which will be expanded on in the subsequent pieces).

It is crucial to gain the skills to sniff out underlying assumptions and articulate them, whether applied to your own internalized belief systems or in encountering others’ narratives. Freeing yourself into the silent space between assumptions can have profound effects, allowing the intuitive, integrative forces within to do their work. But there is more. The real creative potential, the ultimate liberating power, comes when one is able to change underlying assumptions. If you could see your own assumptions as “empty” (that is, conditional, having arisen from all historical moments), would you then have the freedom to creatively experiment with alternative pathways?

The overall course of action that I endorse involves developing the human capacity to respond mindfully to the intensifying onslaught of memes and media. Instead of a unidirectional flow of power—in which memes colonize and manipulate humans without any meaningful resistance, I advocate for developing a two-way flow of power, in which humans and memes both exert influence and must therefore work cooperatively for the mutual benefit of both. You might have noticed that this parallels with my arguments for undermining one-way concentrations of power in social, economic and political forms (oppressive hierarchy pattern), and my advocating for “composting and redistributing” the natural capital locked into such structures for more autonomous, decentralized, and networked forms of power (consensual combinatory networked pattern)—and that the latter may be necessary for our collective survival, to say nothing of the life-affirming benefits it could bring into the lives of many.

In the subsequent pieces, I will attempt to show that these overarching, formidable myths have shaped real, nitty-gritty aspects of our present moment. Using an understanding of power-over and power-to, I will unpack Trump’s hostile claim to power and implications for “how the chips may fall” regarding the U.S.’s cultural and structural identity going forward. Having gone from individual to social, from psychological to mythological, I will further expand on the possibilities for what consensual, organic cooperative arrangements of power could look like at the collective scale of social movements and nations. After all, the collective scale is the ideal scale to explore how memes and humans combine to form epic stories and manifest histories.

jeronimo sanz, Entre o Céu e o Mar [via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

In this open space, invite a dream of a better world to reveal itself.

Witness what emerges.

And notice what resonates.

What are some ways “power over” manifests in your life? Look at your relations—economic, social, material, etc. What do you notice about who or what has “power over” you, and who or what you have “power over” relative to others?

What are some ways “power within” manifests in your life? Do you have the power from within necessary to tweak or modify your operating assumptions/beliefs? How could you develop such power?

What are some ways “power with” manifests in your life? This might involve an experience where two or more people come together consensually, and each contribute their unique strengths, to accomplish a mutual goal. Can you name some examples of times you experienced “power with”? How could you cultivate more such experiences?

Everett Rodgers said, “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation.” Consider the ways in which you receive, and spread, memes—from social media to social norms. In just the past week, see how many messages and behaviors you have been exposed to, and which ones you have exposed others too. What really resonated you, and what felt “off” or empty? What would you change? Going forward, how could you bring more mindfulness and discretion into the memes you give an audience to, and the memes you reinforce to your social networks (online and offline)?

Exercise—solo or in groups: Take a speech by any politician or political figure. This could be a President or Congressperson, or even someone on your school board. Examine the statements in the speech for any underlying, unspoken assumptions that are being subtly broadcast as implicit or “normal” to the audience. See how many unspoken assumptions you can identify and write them out. Then, imagine you are a reporter in the room who is able to ask follow-up questions at the end of the speech. What questions would you ask that might illuminate or challenge some of those underlying assumptions? (Doesn’t matter whether you agree with the assumptions—consider how you might probe them no matter what they are.) Can you get the political figure to acknowledge and defend their assumptions? What kind of discourse would open up, subsequently?

1.	↑	See #8 of RACE—The Power of an Illusion.
2.	↑	Recommended reading includes: Noam Chomsky’s Year 501: The Conquest Continues, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, or this list of 16 book suggestions to learn about white supremacy in the U.S.) Instead, I want to explore why we still have to deal with white supremacy today—why it has not yet been routed out. In spite of abundant countervailing evidence, this myth persists in part due to one of its built-in dynamics: that those of privilege get to choose to maintain their ignorance and their comfort/convenience at the expense of the actual well-being, even physical safety, of others. Many whites who benefit from their dominant position in society, and who unconsciously or consciously wish to retain their privileged status, would feel more at ease to just not acknowledge these systems. It should be noted: any lessening of the forms of overt violence resulting from these systems that may have been accomplished over the course of generations, was won by intense struggles led by people of color and supported by solidary whites—and nothing less. (May we respect and support these struggles whenever possible.) The “fragility effect” distorts the narratives which shape our society: dismissing the narratives of people of color and centering whites’ narratives; promoting conventional voices and marginalizing progressive ones; weighing white discomfort on the same level with people of color’s survival. Effectively, this imprints on us that some narratives are more important (thus, seeming to be realer or truer) than others, warping our collective perception. Trump’s political ascendance is fueled by the collective desperation felt by large swaths of culturally-white Americans that their options for continuing to deflect and evade looking at the nature of their privileges are growing slimmer—and, being low on interpersonal, emotional, and psychological resources, they feel that they are being backed into a corner; their defenses flair, which collectively manifests as the growing prominence of white supremacist sentiment in mainstream discourse. The “America” Trump claims he’ll make “great again” is the one where white people (and, especially those of economic and gender privileges, moreover) can rest peacefully in the illusion of their superiority—where they don’t have to be bothered by narratives that conflict with their traditional positions of comfort and control. In the last piece, I wrote about our strong urges to avoid cognitive dissonance and to surround ourselves with people and messages that affirm our existing views. It is no small task to get anyone to soften their defenses and let divergent stories in. Nevertheless, this task is especially complicated when people feel no social or mythic pressure to adopt a listening stance—when their self-affirming stories tell them that they are naturally in a dominant position, and others are supposed to always listen while they speak. The social acceptability of the dominance of a people is paralleled in the dominance of certain memes. Previously, I spoke about the reality of trance and its role in healing processes. What would a mass, psychic, emotional and actual reckoning look like? Can you envision a process of restoration, reparation, and repentance—premised on love, equity and solidarity for one another? That we might actually go through the ordeal, the difficulties—and come out the other side? The alternative to breakthrough is breakdown, or disintegration. When something must break—those two outcomes are possible. The former is integrative—the latter, fractures and scatters (often, violently). How poetic, then, that the only force that may be strong enough to finally dismember the social fabric and bring down the clunky, ineffectual structures of our government (via Trump’s divisive speech and actions) is white supremacy—the nation’s oldest and possibly most authentic identity and pride. Meanwhile: the messier the moment, the more stressful the circumstances, and the more psychically fragile the people: the easier it is for the powerful to capitalize on their fear and confusion. Illustrating The Illusion WHITE SUPREMACY’S SUPPRESSION OF OTHERS’ STORIES AND HISTORIES: THE ORIGINAL FAKE NEWS? In 2014, Steve Bannon gave a speech at the Vatican that provides a fair example of some of the staple arguments involved in white supremacist mythology. Although Bannon, with his own weird views, may not represent the perfect spokesperson of white supremacy, his profitable far-right, fake-news-spreading platform, Breitbart News, absolutely caters to circulating white supremacist sentiment and building its community of supporters. It is through emotionally-stimulating rhetorical forms that more and more individuals’ minds become “hooked” on (i.e., adopt and internalize) narratives of white supremacy. As is widely acknowledged, Trump’s political rise was fueled by stoking the fires of white supremacist sentiment, which was woven throughout Trump’s rhetoric and policies from early on in the presidential campaign. Remember, however, that narratives give an interpretive framework of reality—and the map is never the territory. (Furthermore, as I attempt to show: “power-over” narratives are a map to nowhere, fast.) In his speech, Bannon claims to be a “hard-nosed capitalist,” and bemoans the way capitalism stopped bettering the majority of people’s lives and has become “corrupted” since “losing its Judeo-Christian roots” (a cultural nod echoed by President Trump in his “we’re saying Merry Christmas again” speech earlier this week). What Bannon calls “divine providence” (providence by a Judeo-Christian God) is that white folks are “creators of jobs” and “creators of wealth.” He claims that this society’s forefathers were staunch enough to prevent the encroachment of Islamic or other cultures into their own, and thus: “they were able to defeat it, and they were able to bequeath to us a church and a civilization that really is the flower of mankind.” Teacher Dude, This Machine Kills Fascism [CC BY-NC 2.0] The presumed past glories Bannon imagines the European nations possessed, he credits to their supremacy. Actually, whites are notoriously masterful at stealing the intellectual, agricultural and cultural capital of numerous other peoples, erasing those people from history and claiming the bounty as wholly their own. For instance: in his present-day call to war against Islam, Bannon neglects to acknowledge that when Islamic states flourished in the Middle East in the eighth through thirteenth centuries, unimpeded by conquering interests, some of the greatest strides in human science, math and the arts were accomplished. The myth of white exceptionalism thrives on the glossing over the blatant material facts of Europeans’ theft and assimilation of other cultures, attributing their glories instead to a magical, god-given superiority (exactly in line with how monarchies and noble classes were justified throughout European traditions, too). This is “controlling the narrative” at its grandest and finest. Such a picture of history—in which European societies/cultures are naturally superior to all others on Earth—is only balanced if the people and cultures that were used and exterminated are discarded from the narrative, completely—with the king’s grandeur always fixed at the center of your attention (i.e., the central storyline of history).((Ever the point and height of humanity, those kings. (Why is it that those who are most insecure in themselves, most seek their supremacy to be assured?