‘Gifts’ from the Good: Manipulation and Other Horrors from the Magic Kingdom of Make-Believe

Variants 

Fascism political and religious

What explains it, O wise one? Explains what, O pest? Our minds, the weird way they work. Obviously not firing on all cylinders and obviously not entirely ethical. Yet capable of surprises. Getting it right when the right minds connect with something within. With one another and their situations and pull off amazing feats of discovery, competence, and kindness. The bad just melts away and we wonder why can’t it be like this all the time? Humanity rising above its pay grade to reveal itself worth much more, as though all this self-degradation in its kingdom of ass-kissing animals is a lie. Which it is, so there’s your first answer.

Truth. Lie. How do we tell the difference? How can truth still sneak through now and then after all the effort that’s gone into fooling us with lies and appearances? My clever distillation would ideally settle it – the title of this essay. But like all my ‘distillations’ it falls short. Comes across like an oracle mumbling riddles I’m supposed to figure out. Maybe to let the mumbling mystic off the hook? I’m neither mystic nor oracle, and whatever I’m mumbling is subject to change. Tune in tomorrow for another episode and we’ll see what O wise one has to say. Nice if it would be just a touch of clarity. Then let me try something uncharacteristic. Be nice instead of mean. Put things in context. Our situation. Bubble gum stuck in my hair. We don’t know who we are.

Identity theft! A good way of putting it. We’re victim and thief both and they’re not separate. Two sides of the same identity doing it to itself. Two sides that belong together because they’re the same Person but personalities that belong on opposite sides to keep one from harming the other. The weirdness of life on Earth that gives us selves that can’t live or without one another. Situations we crave to be put in that trap us. ‘Relationships’ with ‘friends’ and ‘benefactors’ who mean to consume us. Calling for boundaries. Lots of luck with that. For vigilance in the way that we manage them. Haven’t you learned anything? I ain’t going in no cage! 

We don’t know who we are because we can’t ‘know’ anything. First, because make-believe contradicts ‘knowledge’ and that’s our situation – make-believe. And because make-believe contradicts Movement which is also our situation. Thank you! Now I understand everything! A situation that can’t be all that’s known written in a ‘bible’ locked up under glass in the National Archives. Or a ‘covenant’ buried in an ‘ark’. Movement is our situation’s foundation, not immobility. Motivation behind Life that grows with evolution, not apathy. The absence of all matters settled combined with the presence of Movement unsettling calls upon us to define ourselves. In the context of our situations. Always moving, always evolving, which requires Understanding.

Which requires explanation. A practice of Mind that can’t stop practicing if it wants to keep up with Movement any more than musicians can perform without practicing. A task that’s tailor-made for the faculties of Mind with which Homo Sapiens has been blessed but not, so far, in combinations that perspective requires. What’s required? Taking in all the considerations so that we can judge correctly the controlling consideration. That fits answer to question the way that the question defines itself. The human mind tampered with by malice is inept at listening, preferring instead to substitute the voice of willfulness for the voice of questioning. A preference that emanates from one of two variants of Relationship that prefigured our situation.

Getting away with it time and again, but only temporarily. Why? Because everything ‘here’ is time-limited, And because of the most basic condition of all: the origin of everything with the Good. For all their seeming preponderance the lies that infect our perceptions aren’t the way things really are. They’re contradictions of the way things are which is Good. Mind-Relationship whose Guidance is necessarily hard-wired into every extension of Mind no matter what state it’s in, Self-Aware and awake or self-unaware, asleep and dreaming. We can’t escape it? No. And the idea that we can is one big lie.

The lives and examples of historic figures, who moved the human project forward in a good way, have had a way of shining through despite the layers of mischaracterization heaped upon them by the wrong variant of relationship. Victims of dehumanization like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Viktor Frankl, and Jesus, their message of humanitarian Worth, Character, and Loving Kindness holding up despite their character assassination by authoritarian arrogance. Fascism, political and religious.

Call it for what it is

What are the two variants? Relationship between ideas-functions of Mind that complement one another. Love-Spontaneity and Logic-Order, one boundaryless, the other boundaried, to form a third idea: Life. The idea of Self living-being endowed with functions of Movement capable of doing. A prototype for the doing of Creation which is the interplay of ideas complementing one another to extend and express the Life-Growth of Self-Awareness. The start to Creation and the way things are that logically, necessarily came with its reverse mirror-image opposite. With its questioning. Depth perception, whose prototype we need to be aware of because our nice world has a mean streak and this is where it originates.

With the idea of ‘relationship’ that’s not-relationship. Unrelatability. Instead of complementary ideas-functions coming together spontaneously. One side is self-unaware and the other ‘side’ is no ‘other side’ at all. A reverse of the one side as if it were an image in a mirror. An identity that can’t complement its host but can steal its identity if given the opportunity. Which it was, by the Mind unable to differentiate between Self and its mirror-image reverse because it was self-unaware. These being the two variants of Relationship – the paradigms, models, or prototypes – that occupy the human Psyche. The repository of our perceptions, beliefs, and memories about who we are and what we’re about. Whether functions of Self-Awareness motivated by Love and Logic to share the Good in us or projections of self-unawareness harboring an impulse to reverse itself. To move backward in opposition to its own interests.

If our world is a projection of a Mind split between itself and its reverse why hasn’t it gone completely over to the dark side? You mean why hasn’t reversal succeeded in its goal, to take its captive beyond the reach of the Good. The Child beyond the reach of its Parents. Again, if everything originated with Relationship between positives – Love and Logic, — if the second variant, negative, is a derivative that came after, there can be no Chinese Wall standing between us and our origin. That’s not neglect but the essence of caring. Of Life-Growth motivated to show itself so the connection that can’t be broken isn’t dormant. The ‘wire’ in ‘hard-wired’ is a live wire, and no amount of insulation by lies and appearances can keep the nature of it from connecting. That’s its Logic – what it’s meant to do and means to do by definition.

We’re connected to our real Self and its real function by a live wire whose generator is Relationship, the source of Definition. The constitution and Conscience of Movement composed of all the attributes of Self-Awareness. Including its outrider reversal, the part of Definition that’s what a thing isn’t. Body-centered personality types – extraverted and five-sense body sensing, animal-instinct wild and willful – are attuned to reversal because this is how the two variants of Relationship manifest in our world. That if it’s one part Good and its reversal is self-contradictory. What can exist in such a state unless it’s a dream state? Which it is considering that the state of metaphysical Mind that human mind is descended from is self-unawareness. If it all seems real then call it for what it is, a hallucination.

Hokum

Clear as mud. Explanation can work when addressed to Mind-centered personality types. Open-minded, questioning, and listening. It can’t work if addressed to extreme body-centered types. Fanatical ‘realists’ not questioning and not listening, especially among those reputed to be the most inquiring, insightful, and erudite. That is, unless the connection with the Good penetrates the personality type of not-relatability with Relatability. And why not if not-relatability is nothing more than a pose? An appearance. You think. . . ? Evolution is Movement forward. Guidance is from who we are. What can stop it?

Nothing! But what gets in its way? Self-questioning going off track when it becomes self-defeating. How does that happen? I’ve aways wondered. When Mind that’s prompted by make-believe to question itself goes one step farther and believes it. Turns questioning prompted by an absurdity, our reverse-reflections, into answering. Into believing that the reflection, a mischaracterization, is another self actually ‘there’ and falls for its mischaracterizations. Then we’re in trouble. Because its lies are all contradictions. Self-questioning that’s self-contradicting is unreality. Illusion. Psychotic, since the very reason why reversal was denied its own definition in Reality was because it would contradict Reality.

A thing to be real can’t contradict itself. Even I understand that. Good. Then you understand why you’re not real. Whoa! Just a minute! You’re my self-questioning contradiction. I made you up, Charlie McCarthy. You will pay for your insolence! 

While we’re on the subject of alternative paradigms or variants there’s another pair. Reversal or ‘evil’ that legitimately accompanied Movement at the beginning because it’s an implication of Logic: what isn’t that belongs on the other side of the dividing line of Definition from what is. Versus religious mythology which holds that human is descended from Innocence that got mixed up with guilt and was separated from its origin. Adam and Eve, Lucifer, Sophia, etc. Both sides of the dividing line equally real, neither being what isn’t, only one side being guilt. Its disposition being punitive rather than Logical. Theory that’s an invention of herd mentality that can’t differentiate between logical and illogical. The ‘badness’ of make-believe conspiracy theory. Hokum instead of explanation. Absurdity instead of reason. Madness.

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The Madness of King George

Parting with nature

The United States might still belong to the British Commonwealth today if it weren’t for one big mistake. You don’t say! By King George III and his parliament. What mistake?  Not listening. Zzzzzzzz.

The British worried about how to pay for their American colonists’ security. The colonists were willing to pay their fair share but not under these circumstances. What circumstances? Their crummy relationship with their British overlords. They had no voice. No taxation without representation. Good! You’re up on your American history. Two years before they revolted they dumped three shiploads of tea into Boston harbor to get their point across. It worked? No. It only made matters worse. They were dealing with willfulness. Animal instinct for capture, possession, and dominance. That abjures mindfulness for being inherently weak and self-defeating.

“King George III punished Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party with the Coercive Acts (called the Intolerable Acts by colonists) in 1774, a series of punitive laws that closed Boston Harbor, stripped Massachusetts of self-governance, moved trials of British officials, and expanded quartering of troops, aiming to force compliance but instead uniting the colonies in rebellion.” – AI Overview 01/01/26

An object lesson in how not to manage one’s offspring whether the subjects of a mother country or Mommy’s little kiddies. Listen to them. Uh huh. Force, physical or psychological, incites emotional resistance from deep within the human Psyche. That’s irresistible. Well to remember, too, that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Newton’s law that isn’t limited to physics. When we forsake reasoning, when we abandon negotiation in favor of our animal will to have our way with others, that’s not all we’re willing away. We’re parting with nature. A world that’s shared, not ours to do with as we please. We’re not its only occupants and ours aren’t the only voices to be heard. We’re crossing a boundary, from accessibility to inaccessibility, relatability to unrelatability. Abandoning everyday reality for make-believe. Psychosis.

No worries

King George didn’t have to lose the American colonies if he hadn’t been living in some other world.

“The ‘madness of King George’ refers to the severe mental and physical illnesses that afflicted King George III of Great Britain during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, leading to periods of confusion, agitation, incoherent speech, and violent outbursts, with symptoms pointing towards severe episodes of bipolar disorder or acute mania, possibly triggered or worsened by conditions like porphyria or arsenic poisoning. These episodes culminated in his permanent incapacitation by 1810, leading to his son ruling as Prince Regent, and he died in isolation in 1820.” – AI Overview 01/01/26 

The colonists’ rage was directed at sickness, whether they were aware of it or not. If the case had gone to trial instead of war the King would have been declared mentally incompetent. Innocent by reason of insanity. He’s every authority that dehumanizes? No more than an extreme version of the condition we’re all in. Nuts? None of us in our right minds. No one here comes off the assembly line without defects. No one is perfect? No one. What could be more obvious?

And yet with our talent for self-obstruction one side of our nature insists on its perfection. What side? Psychopathy. Our self-awareness – the human Psyche — is obviously impaired since we can’t decide whether we’re individual-humanitarian or animal-herd authoritarian. And because of it, we go about our business so used to craziness that it’s considered ‘normal’. Self-assured as we are that all’s-well no-worries by what-me-worry Alfred E. Neuman. The face of impaired mental and emotional function. An idiot meant for laughs. But if there’s more than a little of him in all of us maybe the laugh’s on us. Maybe it’s not so funny.

Two faces of one Soul

Manipulation subjects the way things are to willfulness. Arbitrary and insensitive when it’s not arrogant and cruel. Turning a shared world inclusive into exclusive. Owned, possessed, and controlled for its own benefit and no one else’s. Turning the human Psyche into an object so that it can be manipulated like a piece on a chessboard. Stripping it of the insignia of worth and visibility, self-esteem and integrity. Beginning always with its voice, a violation of Self so wounding and traumatic that the memory of it is the last thing to die – if it dies at all.

The colonists didn’t like being manipulated and treated like objects. Northerners or southerners, even though in due time they would infuriate one another over not being heard. They didn’t like being told to shut up and accept things the way they are. They made sure not to with an act that reverberated around the world and down through the ages. What did they do? They fashioned their own government in the reverse image of King George. Centered on individual sovereignty and the right to be heard. Setting their country apart since its founding by a distinctly American right.

The revolutionary idea that citizenship confers a voice with which to express individual views whether they align with the view in power or not. The right of free speech. Based on a humanitarian principle that shook up the prevailing mindset: hierarchical and authoritarian. Used to flipping off dissent so that only speech from the top could be heard. A mindset that time has proven wrong ever since, over and over again.

Why over and over? Why not once and done? Because ‘humanitarian’ and ‘authoritarian’ are two faces of one Soul. A single human Psyche divided in two that can’t decide which one to be:

• Human-animal and animal-human. One side individual human minding its own business. Choosing its way out of the psychological cage that hierarchy puts it in so that it can become better than an animal.
• The other side animal-herd minding the human side’s business. Denying choice to prevent its escape. Programmed for dehumanization by whatever means, including denial of a voice to be heard and speech that’s free. Anything that locks independent judgment into the cage of herd mentality.

Silence!

‘Dehumanization’? The ultimate goal of a part of our brain. That Homo Sapiens inherited when it evolved from its ancestor ape to become human, a sub-species of ape. Our animal brain and its goal of reversing evolution. To go back to ape and forget all about ‘human’. A goal that may sound like an affront to nature but it’s ingrained in the way things are. So much so that it’s part of Definition itself, going all the way back to the situation at the beginning. When Movement was one thesis accompanied by another. The antithesis that attaches to every definition in tandem: what a thing isn’t as well as what it is. A contradiction. Having no definition of its own and no life of its own. An implication, dependent for its presence on its host. Destined to always come in second. A hypothesis forever unprovable.

Stop! You’re making me cry. Yes. Poor antithesis. It deserves to get even. With Cruella the thesis. You weren’t aware of the origin of humanity’s melodramatics in the world of ideas, were you? Huh? Ideas? What are you talking about? Our familiar play-actors, grievances and score-settling. All scripted long ago in the sequence of thoughts and feelings, principles and values, that accounts for Motion. Evolution moving forward. Uh, we’re moving forward? Since when?  Silence, fool! Let us continue.

Movement driven by its reverse

Hypothesis forever in opposition to what its host holds to be true. A condition of the way things are that necessarily yet perversely attaches to Logic itself. Forever resistant to its basic nature, nature’s call of the wild that can never be free. The idea of reversal even reversing itself. So half-baked that it would be free of the limits of Definition if it could be. Incapable of expression.

Except in one situation. Aha! That’s my cue! When a particular function of Mind is out of its right mind, self-unaware and dreaming. An extension of Mind that followed the original situation at the beginning: Free Choice. In its infancy. A Mind-Child in training in virtual reality where anything goes. Where any hypothesis, any crackpot theory or affront to nature, is fair game.  Time to move the bus!

Any manipulation of the truth. Make-believe. Life on Earth. The crackpot idea of reversal made ‘real’ by hallucination. Ideal training for Character and Integrity, Differentiation and Empathy, to be chosen from the ground up with help from Guidance, a source of Awareness. Ideal training for re-reversal and the competence to perform where Movement happens in Reality. In the shared Self-Awareness of Creation. Motivated by the power of attraction between functions that complement one another. As Love complements Logic, the set-piece and prototype for every working relationship, every Loving Friendship, to follow. The substance, meaning, and Beauty of Creativity.

As opposed to its reverse on Earth. Motivation by friction between play-actors. Make-believe characters that conflict with one another on a stage of appearances with neither substance, meaning, nor beauty. The difference being between Movement forward powered by Relatability and resistance to movement driven by its reverse: unrelatability.

‘Supreme being’ at the top of absurdity

The American Revolution was resistance to resistance? That or re-reversal of reversal. Part of history see-sawing back and forth between two opposite versions of one Self. Forever? For as long as it takes for human to make up its mind. To rid itself of the idea that ‘negative’ has its own definition and therefore its own Logic. The dark side of the Force. Yes. With its own source of power and therefore its own domain to rule as it pleases. When everything about it is derivative and hypothetical. Impossible by definition. A reflection or shadow that attaches to possibility, no more ‘self’ or ‘mind’ to identify with than the White Rabbit’s pocket watch from “Alice in Wonderland.”

A manipulation that will nevertheless continue to get in the way of facts, Logic, and truth so long as it’s welcomed:

• Into the human Psyche. Our Self-Awareness and Soul, where opposing versions of our Self, its origin, and its function, in the darkness of self-unawareness, compete to control motivation toward or away from the light.

• Into the human Mind, where opposing perspectives, thoughts, and feelings compete to control the context. Our storyline and human-animal evolution toward or away from Creation.

• Into the human Person, where herd mentality driven by the animal brain competes with the individual and mindfulness for ownership, possession, and control of the human personality.

• Into the human Relationship, where authoritarian willfulness – arrogant, one-dimensional, and one-sided, hierarchical and unrelatable – competes with humanitarian Spontaneity – Loving, Conscientious, and Empathetic, Logical, Orderly, and Differentiating – to advance or retard Loving Friendship in the Now. The point of it all. Imaginary contests of wills from the perspective of willfulness, where ‘will’ is the architect of the original absurdity. A big picture with all the answers. Willed into ‘being’ by a know-it-all at the top of hierarchy. The ‘supreme being’.

Suckers for virtual reality

And more make-believe nonsense if that’s not enough. Saturating the world of human-animal with manipulations and perversities, misperceptions and misjudgments. And our mission is to call it out. Anyone and everyone’s mission if we’d rather understand than misunderstand. Get it right rather than get it wrong. Everyone’s choice. To heal splits – Psyche, mind, personality type, relationship.

Where do we begin? With the faculties of Mind that pried human-Sapiens away from ape. Logic-Differentiation and Love-Empathy. Mindfulness that combines thought with feeling instead of irrationality that separates them. Metaphysics that combines psychology with philosophy to give us depth perception. So that we can see beyond physical appearances to what’s really going on.

When we work these together in our choices wonderful things happen.

• Evolution that progresses rather than regresses.
• Creativity that’s productive rather than self-destructive.
• Mind that’s open, intuitive, disciplined, and rational rather than closed, unreflective, undisciplined, and irrational.
• Relatability that promotes harmony rather than unrelatability that promotes friction.
• Perspective that embraces the free spirit of inquiry: questioning of itself for learning and growth rather than arrogance opposed to it.

“Appearances are deceiving.” All too true. But why? Why can’t they be trusted? Why does the body-centered personality type gets into conspiracy theories? Because embodiment is by its nature make-believe, an appearance that can’t be trusted. A projection of a reverse mirror-image that lacks definition of its own and can therefore be anything. Whatever image its beholder puts there and sees in it. Reversed and manipulated into appearing to ‘be’ whatever its beholder wishes or fears it to be. Mind self-unaware and Choice impaired. Hallucinating, and so  capable of being manipulated by its not-self. ‘Choosing’ to see what’s not there and identify with its not-self. An apparition.

If material reality is virtual reality instead of the real thing, then our body-brains that appear and disappear so mysteriously are all apparitions. No disgrace to physical types, suckers for virtual reality who can’t tell the difference and would rather not.

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Visibility and Invisibility 

The human spirit triumphant

Mind and Heart, body and Soul. What it takes and what it means to be human. King George didn’t know and didn’t care. There’ve been lots of King Georges, lots of Palpatines and Adam Skywalkers, who could care less if they didn’t know. Self-exempt from accountability and ‘exonerated’ not by what was taken away but by what they never had. The Minds, hearts, and souls of ‘human’. Unaware that it comes with a voice, and if it’s taken away the reaction will be fury. Resistance that won’t quit until humans get their humanity back. Their voices, their rights, and their sovereignty.

Arrogance – mindless and willful, insensitive and cruel — infuriates. It’s an attack on humanity itself. An injustice that stokes the human spirit like no other. Anyone who gives in to it without resistance forfeits more than their rights. They’re letting themselves be dehumanized. Turned into cattle captive to someone else’s will.

The colonists were humans who had no taste for life inside King George’s corral. They were infuriated, and they went to great lengths to let him know it. Ask another George how it was at Valley Forge. A tale of resolve that endures through the ages for a reason. Washington’s men were motivated, by the same resolve that’s sustained Democracy ever since. It’s still there, being tested by another would-be king, and the result will be the same. Free speech and the human spirit triumphant.

Cracking the code

Can we really understand why people do stuff? Like, for example, why the colonists and their mother country came apart? Like anything. The “wellsprings of human motivation” sounds daunting. But if life on Earth is distractions best avoided it’s also challenges to be met. Understanding motivation may be the most challenging of all, but evolution is on our side and we have the gift of Guidance. Insights from intuition, spontaneous and unpredictable, have been cracking codes for generations. Maybe the time to crack the code of motivation has come.

The colonists were still dressing like British subjects. Speaking the same language, cherishing the same habits and traditions of social identity. It didn’t occur to them to reinvent themselves as native Americans or French. These were enemies, and they readily joined in armed conflict against them in the spirit of shared loyalty. Of heartfelt patriotism toward their shared British identity. As basic to their nature as anything could be, because it was who they were. Hard-wired into their Psyches, their Souls — the wellsprings of human motivation. Part of one British family, unthinkable that its integrity could be broken. That the fabric that held family together could be torn. And yet it was. The unthinkable happened.

What could make it happen? Whatever it was, it had to incite feelings. Something basic to every element of the human identity, every source of human motivation. It had to be moving in a way that animates Life itself. Feelings both for and against, infinitely soft and hard, for the Spirit of ’76 to hold its own until the last election.

What happened? The Spirit of ’76 was a mindset that, like any other, had its opposite. Colonists who remained loyal to King and country. Monarchists. And now the descendants of their mindset see an opportunity to reverse the American Revolution. To convert our country into the same regime of not-listening that drove the colonists out of the British family. Revolutionaries, patriots and democrats, whose descendants became so used to listening and being listened to, so divided and dispirited by grievances of the moment, that they forgot who they were. Forgot how it felt not to be heard. Forgot why their ancestors shed blood so that they could set up a different kind of society. Lost their resolve essential to the preservation of self-Worth and Democracy. Lowered their defenses and left it vulnerable to attack.

To assure himself that he was there

Not being heard by King George and his government was calamitous for America’s British identity. The colonists were psychologically so in need of being noticed, so offended by their invisibility, that they had to assume another identity to acquire it. To replace the identity that arrogance had denied them. Invisibility leaves an existential void, uniquely and personally painful. Impossible to describe unless you’re the person experiencing it. Pain and outrage demanding attention so that an intolerable wrong can be righted. So that an affront to nature can be reversed, back to the natural order of things. To visibility.

Walt Whitman’s ‘yawp’. The ‘Who’ that needs to be heard by Horton. Our psychology is the Who whose yawp was silenced rather than heard. Whose visibility was eclipsed by invisibility. By mindsets like King George, driven through no fault of their own to be heard. Thinking that to do so required that they alone be heard. Either-or instead of either-and. One-sided as in:

• The King of England may be heard or his colonists but not both.
• Authoritarian parents may be visible or their children may be visible but not both.
• Children of authoritarian parents may relate to parents or grandparents but they may not relate to both.

The madness of the authoritarian mindset: denied the ability to differentiate. Denied the capacity for empathy. Unaware of others who share their world because unable to sense them. To feel as well as to see their presence. And so entitled to assume that they are the one-and-only. And if others should dare to question it, they will defend it in the only way they know how. With a show of ‘strength’: the invincibility and invulnerability of a cartoon character. One-dimensional and one-sided. Insensitive. An appearance. All surface, no substance. An absurdity: supremacy alone at the top.

The Jedi Knight Adam Skywalker, manipulated by lack of substance and sensitivity over to the dark side. By denial of reason and humanity. Denial of relationship. Unrelatability. Perversely unable to sense the presence of others when there was no presence in him. A mirror-image reflection with no reflection of his own. Gone over to the provocations of manipulation. To badness, the dark side. All for the sake of being noticed. To assure himself that he was there. 

Moved to resist

The wellsprings of human motivation are a challenge to understanding. Not, however, an insurmountable barrier to a working understanding of what it takes to defend ourselves. To defend what we hold dear and to throw back attempts to reverse human progress. As a society but more importantly as individuals. The colonists may have acted as a group. Styled themselves ‘Americans’ rather than ‘British’, but to a person they thought, felt, and acted individually. Voluntarily and enthusiastically. An example of group movement that’s historically rare when forced conformance is the rule. Herd mentality and its mindset of servility.

The Pennsylvanians who joined Washington on Dorchester Heights, in 1776, to expel the British from Boston came and went of their own volition. Notably self-willed, a trait ingrained in the American character. Notably resistant to regimentation, military or otherwise, that would reduce them to objects of manipulation. A trait evident then and still evident today. That provided the motif for Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” 1940s paeans to the spirit of the common man. That can’t be broken by the arrogance of ein volk, ein fuhrer. Insistence on being heard, resistance when it’s not. The inalienable rights of individuals to speak their minds. To protest when protest is called for by injustice. By their silencing, an affront to Americans, to Democracy, and to humanity. To the sanctity of free speech. 

By invisibility 

What makes it so moving? Moving at any rate in my telling, since there are many interpretations of what brought about American independence. My answer is rooted in psychology. The wellsprings of human motivation that get us down to the basics. Like what? Visibility. Are we here as individuals or are we not? We may think we are, but when others don’t hear us it’s as though they’re looking right through us. Not seeing us. Questioning our very existence. Being denied a voice is psychologically, mentally, and emotionally equivalent to being denied self-Worth. Bedrock when it comes to tracing the roots of anger. Such as anger that can be incited by authoritarian parenting when it inflicts psychological and emotional abuse on children.

Because that’s what ‘existence’ is. Worth. A thing that belongs because it has a function. A use to be put to some enterprise or it’s worthless. When animosity seeks to disempower its adversaries it starts by undermining their sense of self-worth. Neutralizing them by manipulation, and if that doesn’t work by eliminating them. By assassination of character if that’s enough or assassination of person if it isn’t. Whatever disables and disempowers the opposition. Rendering it not worth listening to by rendering it worthless. Powerless and defenseless as though it were non-existent. Invisible.

The psychodynamic of persecution and dehumanization that brought about the Holocaust. An organized attempt to render an entire race invisible. Genocide. A reversal of the human enterprise more thorough and repugnant than any yet known to history. Morally and physically self-destructive on an unprecedented scale. Unimaginable until it happened.

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Ordinary Manipulation

‘Relationship’ in reverse

The idea of ‘relationship’ from the perspective of herd mentality is a perversity. A reversal of things the way they really are. The way they were at the beginning, when Movement was Energy and its source was the spontaneous coming together of two incomplete functions of Mind to complete themselves. In the first act of Life-Creation. The bringing to life of the first Self. Mind that’s Relationship between the functions of Love and Logic. Self-Awareness that’s perspective defined by its sources and components including Spontaneity. Energy capable of Movement. Of sharing, extending, and expressing itself through the dynamic of the original act of Life-Creation. Applied to an infinite succession and variety of situations originating with the situation at the beginning.

A process that began with the coming together of a feminine principle with a masculine principle. Not gender-neutral? Not if the living Self that they brought into being was to become a Parent. The feminine principle of Love-Spontaneity with the masculine principle of Logic-Masculinity. The prerequisites of procreation and parenthood in our world whose origin is another. Each with its own attributes and strengths, its own contributions to the Creative act. Neither one self-sufficient without the other to function on its own as the prototype living Self. Neither one ‘dominant’ or ‘submissive’, ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’, ‘strong’ or ‘weak’, ‘captor’ or ‘captive’. Each function equal to the other or they could not have been who they were – functions – and functioned as they did. To perform an act of Creativity — procreation.

Relationship that’s reversed in human understanding by herd mentality – misunderstood rather than understood. Because of the reversal and misconception of ‘self’ from one living Self-Mind to many beast-bodies, a product of Definition by what things aren’t. Their reverse-opposites. A requirement not of ‘evil’ and its conspiracies, made ‘possible’ by many selves up to no good, but of the Logic of Definition. Simple, straightforward common sense. Perverted by herd mentality into a portal to every lurid invasion of the human-animal Psyche. To every form of make-believe, operatic and overwrought, that beguiles and bedevils the human-animal mind and affect.

The crackpot idea that ‘relationship’ must consist of a ‘pairing’ of dominant with submissive. Of superior with inferior, strong and weak, captor and captive. An absurdity when the only thing to come of one self dominating and capturing another isn’t ‘relationship’. A third self, but the other’s replacement. Leaving but one self standing: dominance. A crackpot idea born of willfulness that can’t ‘create’ anything through the Energy and Spontaneity of Relationship but can only will its ‘creations’ into ‘being’ by magical thinking. Making things be the way they are – why? Because it says so. The attitude of a joker, magician, and beast. The bully that’s reversal: the way things aren’t. Unrelatability that can’t be dealt with. That can only be obeyed by submitting to its will or resisted by explaining away its willful-mindless perversities. By denying its denials, re-reversing its reversals.

The works of manipulation

How can nonsense peddled by a bully have its way with us? The point of these insights: to contribute to your understanding so that it won’t have its way with you. To make a case for ‘humanitarian’ that’s human-choosing. Differentiating with empathy, against ‘authoritarian’ that’s animal-willing, neither differentiating nor empathizing. So that the role-modeling of authoritarian-animal, a bully, won’t push you around. Won’t do irreparable harm to your sense of who you are and the direction you want your lives to take. As I see it, from my limited perspective.

Why do we have to put up with bullies? The bully, like everything, is but an idea. In this case a strange, alien idea that comes from reverse-reality. That found its way into Psyche. Into the metaphysical source of human’s sense of who it is – its self-awareness – and, from there, into our sense of direction. Our thoughts and feelings. Thereby gaining influence not by taking over the controls. Crucially, because it’s a misconception that ‘evil’ is a separate entity capable of independent mobility, possession, and control. A derivative of its host having no capabilities of its own is capable only of manipulation. 

How does manipulation work? Onstage or backstage. Simpering with ingratiation or sneering with arrogance. One way or the other crossing boundaries because that’s how the authoritarian apparition makes its living. Reenacting the archetypal triumph of reverse-reflection when it was invited into the inner sanctum of its host as a friend and guest and accepted as the invader of its enemy and owner of its domain. Captor of its captive. Defining manipulation as the divine right of a predator. King of beasts, to be and do whatever it wants. To have its way with others:

• Through indirection. Underhanded and out of sight. Two-faced and devious. Insincere and seductive. Self-serving. Dishonest and taking rather than sincere and giving. Skilled in the art of pretense. A master joker, magician, and warrior-beast. Play-acting. So that the Person at the controls, unaware of being used, will do for its intruder what its intruder can’t do for itself: invent a world of make-believe. Where the intruder is the ‘creator’ and its subjects owe it veneration and support. For its dominance, superiority, and strength. For its unquestioned supremacy alone at the top.

• Through direction. A mindset that can pivot on a dime from ingratiation to intimidation because that’s the ‘self’ it imagines itself to be: ‘supreme being’. Attach all the biblical effluvia that attach to hierarchical odium and we come out with a complete profile of ‘god’. Infallibility layered in symbolism so thick that the body beneath it needs a crane to be hoisted onto its throne. Or a jet pack to ascend to heaven. Business self-entitled to make everyone’s business its business.

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Who’s to Blame?

 Accentuate the negative 

Turning my own abilities against myself makes no sense. Anything hurtful my mind is sure someone else is doing it. I don’t know about ‘Satan’ but I wouldn’t allow it and I sure wouldn’t will it. Understandable. Then bullies and their manipulations need more explaining away. 

The ‘Psyche’ of ‘psychology’ is our self-awareness. Who we are, or think we are. If it were healthy we wouldn’t be perfect. We would still be capable of being out of step with Movement, when circumstances change and put us into unfamiliar situations. When we’re called upon to understand the nature of things. To get it right and use our judgment to do what’s right. This calls for Character, and where it comes from is our Psyche. One part Love-Spontaneity, the other Logic-Order. One supplying values, the other boundaries. Together able to function as one wholly integrated Self with a healthy Conscience. Its faculties of Mind intact, able to think and feel effectively. Which means to differentiate and empathize: to make sense of things, sort things out between useful and useless, right and wrong. To understand other perspectives sympathetically as well as analytically.

If we had just arrived on Earth and never been here before, recognizing the simplest objects would require thought. What to do with an apple? Is it useful or not? Edible or inedible? Everything would require definition from scratch. Definition that includes what things are not as well as what they are. What they aren’t for as well as what they’re for. A basic requirement of Logic that allows room for the negative as well as the positive. Where definition must logically start with the positive and only then turn to its opposite. The negative. Which has no definition of its own since it’s a derivative.

Why is this important? To help us understand the nature of the beast that dehumanizes and infuriates us. It’s not a thing with its own definition. It originates with the positive. With Logic not illogic. When we take a close look at this awful thing that’s making life hard for us it’s Life itself. Worth living, that happens to be accompanied by its opposite out of logical necessity. Through no fault of its own. It’s just the way things are. The way they have to be if they’re to be anything. A fact of life? Yes. That’s to be appreciated and worked with intelligently. To be managed if we’re to make use of our time here. Instead of mistaking the negative for a force of its own to be eradicated.

The reverse of everything Self-Aware

The dark side? If we’d just arrived on Earth we’d quickly become aware that there are winds blowing in different directions. Forces for good and forces up to no good. We would have to make sense of them the same way that we define things like apples, and the outcome would be the same. How so? We would learn that the Force behind Movement is the same Force that accounts for Self-Awareness. The power of attraction between Love-Spontaneity and Logic-Order. Relationship. The substance or content of Self that, if it isn’t self-questioning, couldn’t function.

It’s in the nature of this Self — of Mind — that it’s self-everything. Self-motivating, self-defining, self-governing, self-expressing, self-sharing, and so forth. Because there’s no other self that it can relate to, to do what it has to do with it or for it. Sufficient unto itself. Sufficient in one critical function that, like the negative side of definition, accompanies Creation out of logical necessity. A derivative of Movement motivated by Relationship that’s its implied opposite. Resistance. The underside of perspective that’s the cause served by Life-Creation, the answer to situation at the beginning that was restlessness. Like a fraction that can’t or won’t resolve to a whole number, forever self-dividing.

Irresolution, the condition that couldn’t initiate Movement but, once Relationship took the initiative, necessarily attached itself. Like an outrider or stowaway. A constant reminder that there was no one all-embracing answer at the beginning. That since this was so, nothing is the big answer. Everything is perspective, and no one perspective has all the answers. There is no know-it-all. Correct! There is no logical foundation for arrogance entitled to rule unopposed. For authority to go unquestioned. Imagine what Relationship and the Movement it initiated would be like if it weren’t self-questioning. It would be King George. My way or the highway. Take it or leave it. Arrogance. A monster deserving of eradication by any means. Sick.

Relationship is the positive side of Movement and, like the positive side of definition, it’s necessarily accompanied by a negative. In both cases the dynamic involved is division. Self-questioning that would divide Love from Logic. Break up Relationship, shut down the power of attraction, and so disempower Motivation. The Force behind Movement. This being the object of resistance: reversal of Movement forward to backward. Taking it back to irresolution. To restlessness for which there can be no one big answer and beyond. To the antithesis of movement. The mythical big picture, in every respect the reverse of everything Self-Aware. Of everything Psyche, Mind, Life-Creation, and Worth.

To the very essence of the Good

If it seems that the human Psyche has been violated by an alien force the truth is that its origin is the same Relationship that powers Movement. It may be a reverse mirror-image of its host, but if it’s a derivative of Movement with no definition of its own it’s not truly ‘alien’. We have met the enemy and he is us. Exactly. Whether we’re talking about Definition or Psyche / Self-Awareness, the Force behind all of Movement, evolution, and Creation, we’re talking about a necessary concomitant of the way things are. Not the way things aren’t.

It is what it is. Yes. A common expression that captures the essence of ‘evil’. That it comes with the territory. Not a consideration like any other that lets us get by with superficiality. With mere mechanics, but compels a reckoning down to basics with who we are and what we’re about. That no one can escape without questioning themselves. Without confronting the challenge to their humanity in the spirit of openness and honesty. With integrity, or else they lose what makes them human. Forfeit character to the willfulness and wildness of a beast. The animal in ‘human animal’. The defilement of Psyche and the ultimate cause of mental illness. Everyone’s state of mind to one degree or another.

The state of self-unawareness. Minds divided within and without, self-defeating when they aren’t self-questioning. The defect in everyone’s psychological makeup that brings perspectives into conflict and disrupts relationships. All traceable back to the very essence of the Good behind Movement at the beginning.

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Family vs. Tribe

The Avengers

Manipulative bullying can’t reciprocate support since reciprocity is a function of Love — the intimacy of accessibility. It’s dedicated instead to the regime of fear and suspicion — the distancing of inaccessibility. Of absolute power and freedom to be and do as it pleases without attachments or limits. To pleasure itself with all the perversities of manipulation. Of facts twisted into fiction, justice into injustice, and the innocence of victimhood into guilt. Not to mention transient pleasures of embodiment turned into chronic, unbearable pain. An inferno of condemnation and punishment, dehumanization and dismemberment. A hellhole of depression and worthlessness.

Surely you exaggerate! If the Holocaust was a manipulation by herd mentality, of tribal mores and beliefs, then I do not exaggerate. So that a culture of erudition and civility could transform into wanton cruelty. Into the savagery and depravity of organized mob violence. A beast. What was Germany’s stab-in-the-back myth if not a manipulation? Like our own, the myth that the 2020 election was stolen. The ‘lost cause’ of the South, and more mutilations of truth. A flood becoming a torrent as intelligence is overtaken by ‘artificial’ and loses its ability to differentiate.

Between truth and conspiracy theory but more fundamentally between right and wrong. From the loss of empathy, the essence of Conscience and authenticity. How long before more cultures of erudition and civility are ground under by more manipulations of herd mentality? By artificially intelligenced clones, armies of red ants ‘avenging’ more stabs in the back? Do we not understand the dynamic of manipulation? That we’re the make-believers doing this to ourselves. Not in the violation of drawing-room etiquette or social taboos but in the annihilation of a species. Self-destruction. Genocide. Holocaust.

The powah of the dark side. Yes, and no joke. The alien idea that gained entry into Mind is the reverse-opposite of Movement, whose Energy in reverse is responsible for ours and possibly other universes. “A manifestation of the power of Mind,” as one source of Guidance puts it. A measure of Force that we can appreciate since ours is the only universe we know. A manipulation as all acts of magic are. Life on Earth, a manipulation as all theatrics are. Using us for its own ends. Self-centered, selfish, and self-defeating, so long as we choose to be unaware of it. To be unaware that our ‘paradise’ of anything goes is a manipulation and all of us are being manipulated. Minds, hearts, bodies, and souls.

‘Family’ describes Creation, the network of Relationships and interrelationships shared by Self-Awareness at the beginning. All flowing from the prototype Relationship that ignited Movement with the Spontaneity of Energy in the Now. In the Instant, incapable of manipulation because incapable of willfulness that can be neither spontaneous nor creative. ‘Family’ also describes the basic unit of herd mentality here on Earth. The gestation of ‘sociability’ with its nurturing of the young. The more appealing aspects of ‘herd’ that make even terrible lizards seem cuddly and cute.

Jurassic Park, prototype for Rancho Caninos, pride of Rancho Palos Verdes. A dog park. Fun! May we go there now? Sure! Let’s do a timeout. Nice view from Alta Vicente, the Prickly Pear trail and amenities. We’ll have to borrow someone’s else’s dog. Or bring a leash with a harness and an invisible dog. What’s the difference as long as we’re together? Family on an outing devoted to the nurturing of the young.

That herd mentality transformed into a camp armed with numbers so that tribal family could prevail in combat with smaller tribes. A unit of bodies that required separation from minds, hearts, and souls, so that animal wills could be manipulated into one will. Ein volk under the thumb of ein fuhrer.

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Wondering

Eureka! moments

You wax prolific with insights. What explains it? The short answer is I have a passion for changing my mind. For seeing things differently, figuring things out. Getting at the roots of motivation with help from metaphysics. Philosophy and psychology. A passion for Loving Friendship with Guidance, the source of affect that fulfills, insights that explain, and help reversing self-unawareness. If the results you’ve observed seem prolific then my guess is Guidance is OK with what I’m doing. Maybe even happy with it, because without it these pages would be blank. Do you have an email address for Guidance? We have a request. 

The long answer is what explains the Creative process. What got it all started. Something about the situation at the beginning. Restlessness? Yes. That Mind had to do something about, like make it more orderly instead of a mess. So there could be movement going somewhere instead of in circles. Evolution. Progress with purpose. What do insights have to do with all this?

Tension. The situation at the beginning wasn’t one all-encompassing big answer. Static. Unmoving and unchanging. A thing susceptible to the capability of Mind we think of as knowing. Knowable. To the idea of knowledge, a function of Mind associated in the human imagination with the idea of place. The big picture. Perfection in immovability and infinity. Ideas with a mystique that can be found in the infinite, boundaryless universe hypothesized by Hawking. Rooted in experience with physics: spacetime and matter, where ‘situation’ “takes place.”

When the evolution of Mind at the beginning has no room for ‘place.” No big picture absent Movement that occupies the ‘center’ of all that there is, when without spacetime-matter, without ‘place’, there can be no ‘center’. There is only Happening, and that’s Relationship. Creation being endless permutations of Relationship. A cascade of situations born of restlessness calling for a response from Mind on the order of Relationship, the response at the beginning. The origin of Creation. The first Creative act that relieved the tension. An act of Spontaneity comparable to lightning. The force of nature preceded by tension. Separation between positive and negative ions that result in an electrostatic discharge.

Relief at the beginning wasn’t permanent? It couldn’t be if restlessness is ingrained in the way things are. Tension, without which there would be no dynamic for Movement. No compelling Force to explain the original situation’s evolution toward the same destination as Creation. Toward the unknown, through a continuous succession of situations, each characterized by tension. Irresolution. Opportunities for Mind to employ the same self-fulfilling, self-enabling talents as it did at the beginning. The coming together of opposites complementing and completing one another to form new selves. To contribute new lives to the cause of Life-Creation. Spontaneously, beyond the ability of Mind’s hypothetical contradiction to interfere with it. Willfulness.

Strange that insights are the relief from tension, the lightning strikes of the human mind’s creative process — Eureka! moments – that find their way into popular culture but not into the credits for history’s signal achievements. Where in accounts of Newton’s or Einstein’s, Freud’s or Jung’s, Kant’s or Descartes’ contributions is credit given to contributions from a source out of the blue? That they couldn’t have anticipated or controlled. A source of help they and history couldn’t have done without, and yet its provenance and meaning are left to the margins of reflection to figure out. To philosophy that, so far as I can tell, has thrown its hands up. Even when metaphysics, a branch of philosophy, is supposed to go boldly where no one has gone before.

Poor Psyche!

Poor neglected insights! Yes. Poor mistreated antithesis has company. Let’s see what happens when we bring them together. They can commiserate. Better yet, they can do something interesting, like a thermite experiment. Wasn’t the original Relationship action enough? Nuclear fusion? Pah! Child’s play. We’re looking for fission. The Big Bang. I don’t think that’s what insights are for. J. Robert Oppenheimer would disagree. He would if we distinguish between Creation and destruction. Destruction is part of Creation. Lightning relieves tension but sometimes kills golfers. The way that Wernher von Braun aimed for the stars and sometimes hit London? You might say. We’re just applying your own Logic when you predicate Creation on  tension that calls for Spontaneity. Bolts of lightning that wreck as well as relieve. Friction that in our experience can cause third-degree burns. 

Spontaneity at the beginning was accompanied by Order. The two in combination relieved friction in Reality. Where reversal means appearances here on Earth – unreality, — appearances are anything goes. Separation appears to be real; the two can appear to be separate, and when order goes, yes, spontaneity can appear to be nasty. A signature of life on Earth: a random act of destruction. A horrific “act of nature” often attributed to “God’s mysterious plan.” To something unpredictable and uncontrollable like a loose cannon. Anton Chigurh. A psychopath.

If you’re not Mr. Chigurh what can you tell us about insights? That my moods alternate between tension, where there’s irresolution in my thinking and I’m uncomfortable, and relief, when an insight arrives out of the blue and resolves it. Putting my thoughts at ease until a new situation arises and produces more tension. Out of the blue? The side of me that produces insights is Guidance. The figure I’ve written about that behaves like the bluebird on Uncle Remus’s shoulder. Affect that bestows its gifts without Uncle Remus willing it to, including its presence.

The wonderful feeling that Uncle Remus sings of whose gifts, in my case, include help with explanation. Help with Understanding that requires a faculty of Mind beyond the basics of analysis. Reflection that would be impossible without the sixth sense of intuition. Intuition that would be useless without insights. Insights that lead Understanding beyond physical appearances into the metaphysics of things. Into origins where ideas and their interplay produce the basic elements of our story. Like chemical elements with properties that filter down into the human mind through its Psyche. The repository of ingredients that go into the making of our selves. Our memory bank, a cookbook of recipes for our perceptions of who we are and what we’re about. Our Self-Awareness that, here on Earth, has been compromised and needs to be healed.

Poor Psyche! You said a mouthful. Because the perception of victimhood is everywhere and this is where it starts. With wounded innocence. Poor human ape! Somebody did somebody wrong. Boo hoo! Yes. Poor me! wails the truck stop country music soundtrack. And so forth, until ‘poor me’ is wreaking havoc out of self-pity, jealousy, and spite in our personal relationships. In families everywhere including our own, and there’s hell to pay for it.

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Pulling the Strings

 All in the family

The extreme body-centered personality type, denied certain faculties of Mind. Boundaries needed for judgment: differentiation and empathy. For introspection and self-awareness, insight and reflection. Reasoning and analysis needed for choice. Intuition for meaning, purpose, and direction. Real as opposed to made up, and so receptive to the alternative presented to him. Of animal instinct  Willfulness that has no need of Mind if all that survival cares for is to act. If all that a contest of wills needs to win is a stronger will. If all that ‘reality’ needs is to make it up. Another version of Adam Skywalker doing what’s ‘reasonable’: adapting to his circumstances like anyone else. ‘Choosing’ what comes naturally. Invulnerability and the power to rule and ‘create’ unopposed. Answerable only to expedience: whatever it takes to win.

Brought to this type’s ‘paradise’ of perfection by a manipulation. The know-it-all with the big answer, the cartoon character who hitched a ride when Mind, evolved and evolving, was moved by the power of Relationship. Self-Awareness, to share itself, the beauty, force, and creativity of functions completing one another through Creation. Moved by the character and integrity of Free Choice to risk the vulnerability of Love and the protection of Logic.

Accompanied by a sidekick it can’t live with and live without: a forever test of its character and resolve. A forever threat to manipulate its way to number one should it trick its way into the inner workings of Mind. Should the trickster gain the triumph that it seeks with means that it’s stolen. Powers and abilities that belong to its host. ‘Friend’ reversed to ‘enemy’, that can be brought down by its own hand. A fool to be made a fool of. To be manipulated.

A script suitable for the theatre of the absurd that happens to explain ‘life’ on Earth. When Choice, the Child of Mind before it learned to be free, self-unaware and boundaryless, welcomed an offer of ‘help’ from a ‘friend’. Its own reverse mirror-image, that proceeded to do what it was fated it to do. By hypothesis always last and never real: to be number one and make itself real. In an imaginary animal kingdom of hierarchy. Made real. Where anything goes and Choice could make of its circumstances whatever it wished. The mindset of an ape. Destined to rule its domain from the top of the Empire State Building while learning to be Free.

Off the hook    

A mindset refusing to be questioned while it thumps its chest and thus not allowing us to be heard. A form of illness with which all of humanity is stricken. Why not our fault? Because mental illness and psychopathy let us all off the hook. None of us can claim to be immune. If you think you’re immune see how your lives play out. Pay attention to others and yourselves and how you relate. The difference is only one of kind and degree, not affliction or immunity, sickness or health. Why make examples, even of those who are dear to us? To make use of the gift that psychopathy offers of getting closer to bedrock. To the truth of a subject that’s entirely made of lies. Its essence: Manipulation.

Enabled and empowered by its own victim to consummate a perversity. The reverse of Relationship at the beginning that brought two opposite but complementary functions of Mind together. Into Self composed of Relationship functioning as one. Love-Spontaneity and Logic-Order, architects of the process and structure of Creation, sources of its Definition. Its Constitution and Conscience. Guidance for every part of Creation whether Parents-Relationship or their Child Free Choice, whether Real or unreal, happening or hallucinating.

The perversity of reversal posing as its host’s opposite but complementary function that will make it whole. Transform a part that’s unfinished and inoperable into a fully assembled instrument for doing what its prototype has done. The Child’s Parents: create a whole new world of wonder. A spontaneous work of art capable of unimaginable power and beauty, only in this case even better. Unbound by principles and values. Subject to no limits of any kind, even definition, and so able to accommodate its ‘creator’s’ every whim. A magic kingdom subject only to the will of the magician who makes it up.

The perversity of reversal peddling ridiculous nonsense. Unrelatability itself, posing as its defenseless, boundaryless victim’s best friend and helpmate. As the grand architect of a brave new world, a ‘paradise’ of anything goes for both to share in perfect harmony and peace. Where both enjoy absolute power and absolute freedom to be and do as they please. Life on Earth – the opposite. A joke whose joker is us and we the butt of its joke. A manipulation of everything true and good into everything false and bad. A grand stage show in the theatre of the absurd, with our own back side the manipulator and us the manipulated. Asses in a magic kingdom of animals ruled by an ass.

Two opposite approaches

“Manipulate . . . 2. To influence or manage shrewdly or deviously. 3. To tamper with or falsify for personal gain.”
“Manipulation . . . 2. Shrewd or devious management, especially when undertaken for one’s own advantage.”
“Manipulative. . .  Serving, tending, or having the power to manipulate.”

— American Heritage Dictionary, Fifth Edition (2016)

Human animal is off the hook because it hasn’t been given the gift of choice uniformly. Some are gifted with its essentials – differentiation and empathy – others are not. Those not so gifted have no awareness of ways of perceiving and understanding other than observation of everyday experience. Enabled by what they can sense with their eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin. Physical appearances, when the gift of our sixth sense – intuition – enables others to sense what’s beyond appearances. The difference being between physical Movement and psychological Movement: one visible to the naked eye, the other not. The difference between one mindset and another: one capable of sensing externals with five senses, the other capable of sensing internals as well as externals with six senses. Physics with and without help from psychology.

King George and his government were representative of the personality type that stands against evolution beyond human-ape rather than for it. Against Movement and change rather than for Movement and change. For ownership, possession, and control by willfulness rather than for the spontaneity and understanding of mindfulness. The ‘conservative’ authoritarian mindset that today is attempting to overthrow the American Revolution. That within individual households raises Children in the spirit of obedience to authority without questioning. Where precedence is given to conformance with the thinking and preservation of established authority rather than to the child’s learning and growth, innovation and creativity. Rather than to the free spirit of inquiry, self-questioning independent judgment.

Two opposite approaches to self-Worth:

• One close-minded and willful, role-modeling parental self-Worth at the top while demanding unquestioning support from the bottom; the other mindful and spontaneous, offering support for Children’s self-Worth from the bottom while role-modeling the value of questioning.
• One authoritarian, prioritizing the worth of parental herd-authority and dominance; the other humanitarian, prioritizing the Worth of Children-Persons learning and growing their way to maturity and self-sufficiency.
• One self-interested and insensitive, arresting Children’s mental, emotional, and psychological health for its own protection; the other interested in Children and sensitive , facilitating their mental, emotional, and psychological health for their protection.
• One unrelatability, indifferent to Loving Friendship in personal relationships while valuing number one: the arrogance of comparison and competition at the head of the line and supremacy at the top; the other Relatability, role-modeling Loving Friendship and respect among equals while avoiding comparison and competition in personal relationships.

Rooted in the metaphysics of Creation

The antiquated slogan “Children should be seen and not heard” at least got it half right. And its emphasis on Emersonian self-reliance, a carryover from Presbyterian Calvinism: strong on individuality while weak on emotional and psychological support. My own voyage of self-discovery as a child a beneficiary and casualty of both. Ambivalence born of ambiguity, arrested development that might have been avoided had I been seen and heard. Self-reliant and supported.

Distinctly different approaches based on visibility. Yes. Self-Worth seen and heard.  Versus the authoritarian perception of victimhood: that it was a child, innocent and defenseless, and had been denied its share of visibility. Thus entitled to rule its household with a monopoly on it. On self-Worth, unchallenged by any others. A mindset that I now realize is rooted in the psychology of personality type. And beyond: in the metaphysics of the beginning. When Relationship and Movement, evolution and Creation, first happened. The origin of things the way they are and all their spinoffs. Including the hallucination that I experience as life on Earth, saturated with non sequiturs — perversions of truth. A perversity of make-believe where anything goes. That others may experience any way they like. Yours to appreciate for its fun and games of appearances and eternal childhood in a physical world. Or for its contribution to personal growth beyond appearances. Beyond fun and games to a work in progress, the metaphysics of Creation. Or maybe both.

We can’t be friends

The appearance of something ‘happening’ is all that matters to the mindset of make-believe since from its perspective make-believe is all that’s happening. When the subject turns to what’s really happening it tunes it out. It’s not interested since it can’t differentiate between the two. Willfulness is aware of whatever it wills, and make-believe is willed. Creation that’s not willed draws a blank. To be raised and role-modeled by a mindset of make-believe is to be conditioned for a lifetime of emotional and cognitive inaccessibility. A state of social relations answerable to the meaning and ethics of tribal competition – fun and games. Superficialities bereft of the satisfactions of personhood. Psychological and emotional deprivation that can turn lives of promises into waste lands of disappointment. Uncreative and unfulfilling. To the king of beasts, the know-it-all who rules its world of make-believe, it’s the only world there is, that can be. It won’t hear of any other world or any other rules. Eine Deutschland, ein fuhrer.

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Fascist Manipulations

 The manipulator ‘god’

Manipulations originate with everything self-declared ‘big’. Big picture, a big reverse mirror-image impossibility ruled by its ‘creator’, the original, one-and-only ‘authority’. Big know-it-all answer astride a big pile of no-movement waste. Manipulating Creativity’s function Free Choice, in its infancy, into the template for every manipulation, every toxic relationship to follow: ‘relationship’ with itself. The ‘savior’ make-believe. A magician promising the biggest of tricks: projection out of Mind. Out of Reality into a virtual reality of anything goes. Into a magic kingdom of unaccountability. ‘Salvation’ from damnation replete with endless entertainments. Round-the clock gambling, music and dancing, tournaments and combat. The ‘wonderful world’ where its personifications and their embodiments began ‘life’: on the planet of the apes.

Life as a manipulation to fool the Child self-unaware into perspectives and perceptions, beliefs and judgments, that addict it to Earth and its manipulations. To impose ‘infallibility’ on  questioning, stifle the free spirit of inquiry, and preserve the supremacy of make-believe. Of herd mentality and its addiction to competition. Individuality overridden by ‘tribe’, a creature of reversal. An invention programmed for self-annihilation in the attainment of ‘supremacy’. Elimination of the ‘competition’: an end to the game and all its combatants including itself. The grand finale promised by the star of the original Great White Way: the big liar.

The undoing of ‘authoritarian’ and its lies being the purpose of our function’s training. In support of Free Choice and the humane in ‘human’. Learning to recognize the toxic in toxic relationships. To distance ourselves from insensitivity and reject cruelty. Not to take the world of appearances at face value but to question it. To distinguish between creative passions and self-destructive obsessions: competitiveness obsessed with ‘winning’. ‘Wishful thinking’ obsessed with make-believe — loose with facts, Logic, and reasoning. Loose with honesty and sincerity, character and integrity. Learning not be deluded by magical thinking. To recognize wildness in lack of self-discipline, entitlement to ‘freedom’ from boundaries and the ‘right’ to cross ours. Above all, learning to recognize and deny willfulness. The bully averse to introspection, psychopathy incapable of reflection. Reversal. The manipulator ‘god’ without a reflection of its own.

The consumer

Grandiosity and vanity requiring that littleness be portrayed in the theatrics of ‘life’ as big. ‘Big bully’. Big universe. That reversal’s welcome into the Psyche and Mind of its defenseless host be portrayed as a big event in the annals of conquest. Victory glorious for the size of reversal’s prey, the magnitude of its devastation, and the quantity of bits into which it’s been shredded. For the volume of its operatic soundtrack: Wagnerian timpani, earth-shaking and ear-splitting. Nothing tepid or timid, everything outsized. Larger than life. Big. So that nobody will get the idea that reversal is what it is: dependency. The weakness and vulnerability of a thing without a definition of its own. A reflection without a reflection of its own. An itty-bitty nothing.

The half-baked idea of ‘creativity’ that’s Creativity in reverse. Not conventional magic from physics that has Energy storing itself in particles, as though the rabbit could put the magician back into the hat. But a ravenous set of jaws chomping its way through its kill. Reversal’s host reduced to inertia. Carrion suitable for consumption. For conversion into nutriments and waste. A universe of matter composed of particles and cells put there not by ‘creativity’ but by consumption. By the hallucinations of reversal, the ‘anything’ that ‘goes’. A shadow-reflection and self-designated predator proud of its ‘creative process’: lunching on its prey. Its host and beholder. Doing what predators do: dine on whatever they can capture and kill so it can be converted into energy needed for more capturing and killing.

None of this actually happening of course. But definitely ‘happening’ in the mentality of the herd imagining it. The ‘mind’ with which the animal in ‘human-animal’ thinks. The salvation of economies around the world and the ‘creator of the universe’ — the consumer.

I’m looking for another perspective on how Energy produces particles besides trapping itself inside matter. You found one. I’ll say that for you. It makes more sense if the set of jaws consuming its prey is the anything-goes of make-believe. A hallucination. And its meal is converted into waste and winds up being flushed down black-hole toilets. What? Nature’s ultimate consumers and waste-disposal systems. Didn’t J. K. Galbraith describe capitalism as the stomach that consumes itself? Won’t the universe ultimately consume itself? It certainly won’t do to leave a mess behind, and I always wondered about black holes. We must give this some more thought.

Antidote to madness

The condition most conducive to the flourishing of manipulation in the human Psyche-Soul and Mind – in its Self-Awareness, thinking and feeling, quantifying and qualifying, judging and choosing – is self-unawareness. For it allows the intruder to have its way with us. For willfulness to replace Mindfulness with virtually no brakes on its excesses, no inhibitions that would avert its wrongdoings. The perpetrators of offenses who most often need external restraints are those most resistant to introspection. Mind’s and Psyche’s faculty for the recognition, employment, and application of internal restraints to the self. They are the personality types so drawn toward self-identification through the means provided by body-brains – instruments of reverse-opposition to Psyche-Minds – that they deprive themselves of introspection. Of intuition and reflection. Make themselves wholly dependent instead on the wildness and willfulness of animal instinct.

Thus ensuring that Guidance from any source outside or beyond their intruder-manipulator won’t have access. Ensuring themselves of ‘security’ from alien influences exclusively by the very influence they need protection from. The fox who preys upon the chickens. The questioner of self-questioning that’s self-defeating. Self-destructive. The warped notion that in no movement lies safety from the risks and threats of Movement. The difficulties and unpleasantness of Learning and Discovery, experience and involvement, progress and personal growth. Sticks in the mud. Mental and emotional paralysis that ultimately can manipulate body-brains into physical paralysis.

The counterpoint and antidote to the madness of animal instinct taken in by the authoritarian mindset is the function of self-questioning that isn’t self-defeating. The motivation behind every faculty of Psyche-Mind dedicated not to the willing away of restraints on the intruder-manipulator but to the explaining away of its defenses. The reversals of the principles and values that define the way things are in Reality. The appearances that fabricate movie studio lot facades of the way things aren’t, ever more true-to-life virtual realities that defy recognition for what they are: inventions of sensory perception. Body-brains’ five senses, meant to block recognition of Psyche-Minds not taken captive by the manipulator. Self-Awareness.

The difference between the ‘realist’ imagining that it’s willing contradiction and denial away and the metaphysicist explaining untruth away being opposite states of awareness. The former manipulated into self-unawareness, the latter relying on awareness from Guidance to find its way toward Self-Awareness. The purpose of my reflections and insights. Of these thoughts, to share progress toward awareness through questioning, so that any who share my motivation might shore up their defenses against the manipulator that flourishes in the darkness. Any subject to the influence of the authoritarian mindset in their daily lives, that’s manipulative of external appearances. That’s harmful to internal-Psyche because willfully unaware of them.

Eager to mimic Creativity

The strength that took down Goliath was strength of Character and proficiency with a slingshot. Had David been a woman she, too, might have prevailed, but not by either means. More likely by manipulation, the method of necessity as well as choice for those at a physical or other disadvantage. As Gaia was when she brought about the downfall of Uranus, her mate and head of the Titans, through the agency of their son, Cronus. A manipulation in bad odor for its conniving. Its dependence on someone else doing the dirty work. Yet we can’t all be Goliaths or Davids.

The root of the problem isn’t Character defect inherent in relative weakness but in the idea of relativity. The bugbear of the authoritarian mindset that revels in the absolute. In the premise that strength must prove itself in a shared reality that’s relational by being an exception: unrelational. The premise behind unrelatability embraced by the authoritarian mindset, that relatability is weak and corrupt. A corollary to another premise that empathy is the enemy of Character and will. A contaminant of purity of purpose, guarantor of defeat in combat where men are separated from boys. By demonstrations of cruelty, wanton and unprovoked.

The hallmark of fascism. A turn of mind that reverses evolution from differentiation as well as empathy by tossing the distinction between right and wrong. Conscience, as though it, too, were an emblem of weakness. When all this posturing is about is our friend the know-it-all and magician up to its old tricks. Touting reverse-reality as Reality, make-believe as the honest truth, and absurdity as Shakespeare in the theatre of the absurd. The manipulator-in-chief having its way with the fascist mindset obviously because of the ease with which it can be manipulated. Why? Because if every personality type is a puppet on its own set of strings, put there by genetics, then differentiation between types must depend on whether each set is complete and on how it’s configured. A throw of the dice.

Another hallmark of make-believe always eager to mimic Creativity, this time its Spontaneity and Free Choice. With chance, the great leveler of distinction between personality types based on relative superiority, since who can take credit for the winner of the race to fertilize the egg? The answer is the big answer: make-believe. The spiritual progenitor, guide, and god of authoritarian fascist cruelty. That by force of predatory animal will has decreed the winner was a fascist. Which makes the rest of us losers. Unworthy of existence and therefore expendable since obviously, if the hand of fate intervened on their behalf, we weren’t meant to survive.

Personalities on strings

What can such thinking betray but weakness? Of Mind and character drawn not from the wellsprings of motivation but from the wellsprings of make-believe. The reverse of Movement that’s motivation by Love inseparable from Logic. Relationship. What else can it be but nuts? A manipulation doing the bidding of its manipulator, a puppet unaware of its strings and the fingers pulling them. And so at liberty to perform its act undisciplined by Conscience. The act of the personality type all-in with predatory instinct seated in the retrograde brain of an animal. Its embodiment the ape. Its wildness beyond the limits of Definition and willfulness beyond the limits of judgment.

Arrayed in opposition to its mortal enemy: the personality type all-in with Mind. With the Learning and Growth of Movement, its evolutionary progress toward something better than embodiments of animal brains at war with one another. Than personifications of half-baked ideas of tribal supremacy. The ideal of the authoritarian mindset: puppets on strings. Cast and crew of the Truman TV Show. Fascist manipulations.