Thursday, November 12, 2020

"Market Fantasy Updates 11/12/20"

"Market Fantasy Updates 11/12/20"
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
"The more I see of the monied classes, 
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
Gregory Mannarino, PM 11/12/20:
"BE AFRAID: The Fed. And Wall St. Mega-Bank
Goldman Sachs Are Now In Lockstep"
Updated live.
Daily Update (Nov. 12th to 13th)
Insanity... 
And now... The End Game...

The Daily "Near You?"

Bulverde, Texas, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"There Are Simply No Answers..."

“How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”
- Barry Lopez

“The Individual vs. The Illusion Of Consensus Reality”

“The Individual vs. The Illusion Of Consensus Reality”
by Jon Rappoport

“This is such a supercharged subject, I could start from a dozen places. But let’s begin here: the individual is unique, because he is he. He is unique because he has his own ideas, because he has his own desires, because he has his own power. That power belongs to no one else. In particular, it doesn’t belong to the State. The State will try, will always try to suggest that it is granting power to the individual, but this is a lie. It’s an illusion broadcast with ill-intent. While everyone else is trying to manufacture connections to the group, under the banner of a false sense of community, the individual is going in the opposite direction.

Philip K Dick: “Insanity - to have to construct a picture of one’s life, by making inquiries of others.”

Consensus reality is the reality of sacrifice. It is coagulating energy, form, content, substance that takes on amorphous shapes studded with slots into which people can fit themselves.

The independent individual thinks what he wants to think. Over time, he keeps graduating into new, more nearly unique levels of what he wants to think. He rises above the group. He rises to his own thoughts.

There is no subject and no substance which is not infiltrated by consensus reality. Wherever you look, you will encounter it. The group is the basis of consensus reality, and the group pact extends everywhere. The group fears a sector where only individual thought can tread. That would be dangerous to the illusion. “Well, we’ve got things well in hand in most places, but over there and over here we’re not in charge. A different kind of reality pervades.” No, that doesn’t work for the group. The exceptions would blow a hole in the rule.

“Stay away from the corner of Lexington Avenue and 34th Street. Something too weird is going on there. We come in and try to inject consensus on that spot and it doesn’t work. Our “sharing” energy bounces off that corner. We may have to call in the troops to surround the place and cordon it off.” Alert! Alert! Consensus reality is breaking down in Sector 328-A! Locate the problem! This is an emergency! Bring in the news team to shore up the illusion! Turn on the hypnosis machines! Group consensus is fraying and fragmenting in Area 768-B! Call the professors and pundits! Discredit the individual! Call him a monster! Do something fast!

Consensus reality is an illusion in the sense that you can see it and I can see it, but we didn’t sign up for it. That’s the catch. Take any area of life, and I mean any, and that’s the case. Wherever there is tight consensus, perception ensues. That’s the whole point. “We, the group, aren’t fooling around. When we sign a pact among ourselves, we intend everybody to see what we decide is there to see.”

So you, the individual, can opt out. That doesn’t necessarily mean the consensus disappears; you can still see it, but you see it without accepting it. You can see the oasis in the desert, which is a mirage, but because you have your own bottle of water, you don’t have to run toward the mirage and fall down on your knees and try to drink from the pool.

Philip K. Dick: “Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… increasingly, we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated electronic mechanisms… And this is an astounding power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”

The strong and free individual evolves. He doesn’t stay the same. He doesn’t know everything worth knowing today. He knows enough, but not everything. He continues to emerge with new ideas, new energy, new invention. He becomes larger. He gains more power.

When the illusion of consensus reality attains a level beyond mere slogan, it enters the realm of systems. This is its most convincing format. A system appears to be watertight. Each one of its parts has relations with the whole. This is interesting, because that mirrors what a group is. Each member is a part that connects to the whole. Consensus as a system is like a game of chess that plays the same moves over and over. Game one is the same as game two, three, four… That’s where its illusion of power comes from.

The individual, though, doesn’t proceed according to systems. He isn’t moving from one closed context to another. That’s the group. The individual may retain the same general principles over time, but what he does and thinks strikes out into new territories. Because he creates. There is no individual without creating.

Consensus is the coin of the realm. It is forced from the top, and it is signed up for at the bottom. One hand washes the other. Societies may begin through consensus, but if they have any courage, they shift focus to the job of pulling away coercive restraints on the individual. Regardless, the individual asserts his freedom. It is his to begin with, not the group’s. No one gives it to him.

American society is moving rapidly to an inverse, an upside down structure, in which freedom is looked upon as a privilege grudgingly accorded in the absence of a reason to take it away. The prevalent official attitude is: consensus must be strengthened. It must dominate the landscape.

Through vast experience, the free individual knows that consensus has no theoretical limits. Group-perceptions about the way things are can give birth to the most universally “proven objective truths.” In his explorations, the individual may even find that a demonstrated law of nature is nothing more than a consensus. And, therefore, an illusion.

The group has conception of Normal. Normal is like a message passed around, from hand to hand, and when you look at it closely, for content, it dissolves. There was really nothing there. This is similar to what happens when physicists probe further and further into matter, looking for smaller and smaller particles, and come up with an enormous amount of empty space.

The group consensus is the illusion. Finally, there is mindless hive-action covering a vacuum. This is also what occasionally happens to people who have hidebound political ideologies. The people on the Left move further and further to the Left, and the people on the Right move further and further to the Right. Finally, they are both so distant from government they meet and stare at each other in shock. At that point, they are just individuals.

From my unfinished manuscript, "The Magician Awakes": “You keep saying it doesn’t matter. Sometimes you say it out loud and sometimes it’s just a very strong thought that could cut through a melon. You repeat it over and over—”it doesn’t matter.” You’re sitting there with the most powerful thing in the universe, your imagination, and yet it doesn’t matter. New worlds are waiting for you. But you don’t pull the trigger.

“You go to meetings. What are these meetings? Who’s there? What do you talk about, the end of the world? Your problems? The conversations seem to be endless…”

“But society runs on groups! It must have groups!” And what? The individual must give in and join and belong? That’s the conclusion? I’m afraid not. Consensus reality is a cartoon that is trying to become as real as steel. What deconstructs the steel and exposes the cartoon? There is only one thing that can do that. Nothing and no one else is going to do that. The individual does it."

"Life Is Hard?"

"Life is hard? True - but let's love it anyhow,
though it breaks every bone in our bodies."
- Edward Abbey

"When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard," 
I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"
- Sydney Harris

"The Post Covid World, The WEF’s Diabolical Project: 'Resetting the Future of Work Agenda' – After 'The Great Reset'. A Horrifying Future"

"The Post Covid World, The WEF’s Diabolical Project: “Resetting the
Future of Work Agenda” – After 'The Great Reset'. A Horrifying Future"
by Peter Koenig

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has just published (October 2020) a so-called White Paper, entitled “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda – in a Post-Covid World” (download link). This 31-page document reads like a blueprint on how to “execute” – because an execution (or implementation) would be – “Covid-19 – The Great Reset” (July 2020), by Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO (since the foundation of the WEF in 1974) and his associate Thierry Malleret.

They call “Resetting the Future” a White Paper, meaning it’s not quite a final version. It is a draft of sorts, a trial balloon, to measure people’s reactions. It reads indeed like an executioner’s tale. Many people may not read it – have no awareness of its existence. If they did, they would go up in arms and fight this latest totalitarian blueprint, offered to the world by the WEF.

It promises a horrifying future to some 80%-plus of the (surviving) population. George Orwell’s “1984” reads like a benign fantasy, as compared to what the WEF has in mind for humanity. The time frame is ten years – by 2030 – the UN agenda 2021 – 2030 should be implemented.

Please view this complete and critically important article here:

"How It Really Is"

 

Gregory Mannarino, "The US Economy Continues To FREE-FALL As Inflation Rises"

Gregory Mannarino,
"The US Economy Continues To FREE-FALL As Inflation Rises"

"Even Stricter COVID Lockdowns Are Coming, And They Are Going To Be Extremely Devastating For The U.S. Economy"

"Even Stricter COVID Lockdowns Are Coming,
 And They Are Going To Be Extremely Devastating For The U.S. Economy"
by Michael Snyder

"Are you ready for another nightmare? Earlier this year, the COVID lockdowns that were instituted all over the nation resulted in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s and forced more than 60 million Americans to file claims for unemployment benefits. After seeing how well that first round of lockdowns worked, one of the “scientists” that will be telling Joe Biden what to do about this pandemic wants to do it again. Yes, you read that correctly. During an interview with Yahoo Finance, Dr. Michael Osterholm said that what we really need to do to get this pandemic under control is to lock the entire country down for four to six weeks:

"Shutting down businesses and paying people for lost wages for four to six weeks could help keep the coronavirus pandemic in check and get the economy on track until a vaccine is approved and distributed, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, a coronavirus advisor to President-elect Joe Biden." And Osterholm isn’t talking about doing “soft lockdowns” like we saw in many states earlier this year.

In an article that he co-authored in the New York Times, he argued that lockdowns need to be “as comprehensive and strict as possible”: “The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential,” they wrote in the New York Times. “To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.” Basically, Osterholm wants Australia-style lockdowns all over the United States for at least a month and probably longer.

Doesn’t that sound fun? On Election Day, the American people had a choice between a pro-lockdown presidential candidate and an anti-lockdown presidential candidate, and approximately 80 million of us voted for the pro-lockdown guy. So it looks like that is precisely what we are going to get.

During the campaign, Joe Biden pledged to “follow the science”, and Osterholm is going to be one of the “scientists” that will be on his COVID-19 advisory board: "Osterholm was appointed to Biden’s 12-member Covid “advisory board” on Monday. The panel of advisors is co-chaired by former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith of Yale University. Other task force members include Dr. Atul Gawande, a professor of surgery and health policy at Harvard, and Dr. Rick Bright, the vaccine expert and whistleblower who resigned his post with the Trump administration last month."

The good news is that these psychos will not be running things until early January at the earliest. The bad news is that governors around the country are already instituting a new round of lockdowns. For example, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced new restrictions for New York on Wednesday: "Governor Andrew Cuomo announced new lockdown and social distancing restrictions for New York on Wednesday as coronavirus numbers in the state continue to trend upward. Under the new statewide restrictions, all bars and restaurants with state liquor licenses as well as gyms must close at 10p.m., starting on Friday. Cuomo called such locations “main spreaders” of the coronavirus. Indoor gatherings at private residences across the state must also be capped at ten people."

And Ohio Governor Mike DeWine is saying that his state may soon impose new restrictions on “bars, restaurants and fitness centers”: "As coronavirus cases continue to skyrocket in Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine threatened to order bars, restaurants and fitness centers closed in one week if newly confirmed cases continue to increase."

Of course this is just the beginning. If the number of daily cases continues to soar, we could start seeing draconian lockdowns all over America even before we get to Inauguration Day. In other words, get ready to spend a lot of time at home this holiday season, because you might not have any other choice.

To me, it is unthinkable that anyone would even want to consider locking down the country again. The first wave of lockdowns absolutely crippled our economy and caused a record-setting tsunami of job losses that we still have not recovered from. In fact, John Williams of shadowstats.com says that if honest numbers were being used the current rate of unemployment in the United States would be 26.3 percent.

Apparently that is not enough. So what are we going to shoot for this time? 30 percent? 40 percent? And what happens if we lock down the entire country for six weeks and then another massive wave of the pandemic comes along just six months later? Are we going to keep locking down the U.S. over and over again?

At this moment, our economy is on exceedingly shaky ground and more layoffs are being announced on a daily basis. For instance, Exxon has announced that they will be laying off 14,000 workers and Disney has announced that they will be laying off “thousands” more workers in addition to the huge wave of layoffs that they announced earlier this year.

Overall, more than 60 million Americans have already been forced to file for unemployment during this pandemic, and every single one of those individuals has a story to tell. One of those displaced workers is a woman named Michelle Kulaski, and prior to the pandemic she was already living paycheck to paycheck. Now that she has lost her job, she finds herself on the verge of having to “live in her car with her two cats”: "Desperate for cash, Kulaski sold much of her furniture, including the bed her children sleep in when they visit and her grandparents’ desk. In all, she made around $300. Still, Kulaski has fallen behind on her $755 rent and her landlord has moved to evict her. If she has to leave her apartment, she said she’d probably live in her car with her two cats."

Now sickos like Osterholm want to destroy even more lives, and if Joe Biden ends up in the White House they will almost certainly get their way. We are already in the midst of a horrifying economic depression, and a new wave of lockdowns would make things far worse. These are such troubled times, and many believe that the difficulties that we have experienced in 2020 are just a warm up act for what is coming in 2021."
Related: 

Highly recommended:

"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 11/12/20"

by David Leonhardt
Nov. 12, 2020
Click image for larger size.
• The virus is spreading so widely across the U.S. that any number of states might now be considered the worst off, depending on the measurement. South Dakota, for instance, has the highest hospitalization rate, while Texas has the most cases.

• The C.D.C. now says masks protect the wearers, in addition to those around them.

• Brian Jack, the White House political director, tested positive. He is the fourth person to contract the virus after attending an indoor White House event on election night.

• The pandemic has devastated New York City’s yellow taxi industry, with revenue down 81 percent from last year. “I can’t hold on, not like this,” one veteran driver told The Times.

Nov. 12, 2020 12:04 AM ET: 
The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 52,146,000 
people, according to official counts, including 10,473,911 Americans.

      Nov. 12, 2020 12:04 AM ET: 
Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count
Updated 11/12/20, 4:26 AM ET
Click image for larger size.

A "Must Read":

"The Lessons Of Trump"

"The Lessons Of Trump"
by The Zman

"An old bit of wisdom is that you should never try to con a con man. This advice is not aimed at con men, of course, but at honest people. Grifters are intuitively dishonest, which means they instinctively work every angle to some advantage. Normal people are simply unable to think like this, even when they are trying to do it. Their scruples get in the way of their scheming. This is something that Trump should have had in mind when he took office four years ago. It was his first mistake.

Trump came to Washington thinking he was smarter, more clever and more resilient than the people he had mocked for so long from his couch. There’s no question that most people in politics are stupid. Without a government grift, they would end up peddling replacement windows door-to-door. But politics in a liberal democracy does not select for smart people. It selects for clever and ruthless people. Washington is the major leagues for the most clever and ruthless.

To his credit, he did outfox them from time to time, but after a while, they began to get the measure of him and figured out how to out-clever him. The FBI scandal is a great example of how they simply outmaneuvered him to delay the process. More important, they got him to drop it as a campaign item. What should have been a key part of his campaign as a populist champion went unmentioned. Time after time Trump tried to play their game and every time he came up a loser.

Similarly, Trump came to Washington under the mistaken impression that his opponents would follow the rules and abide by their own rhetoric. After all, he won the election, the people have spoken, time for the winner to enjoy the fruits of victory. That’s how it is supposed to work in a democratic society. From the very beginning he assumed these people would play fair, despite the fact he knew they spied on him in the campaign and tried hard to cheat him out of his victory.

This is a great example of the civic nationalist disease. This is a malady that is most pronounced in men of Trump’s generation. The civic nationalist loves rules and fully expects his enemies to play by those rules. In reality, the ends justifies the means mentality of the Left has poisoned the entire ruling class. These are people devoid of honor and virtue. Playing by the rules, especially their rules, is a sucker’s play, one Trump never figured out in his four years.

No matter how many times the political class kicked him in the groin, he refused to accept this reality. The strange thing is he campaigned in the most unconventional way, preferring rallies to the formula popular with the political industrial complex. He was a refreshingly unconventional politician in his campaign, but he was thoroughly conventional in his governance. In office, he played by the rules of Washington, while Washington made the rules up as they went along.

Probably his biggest mistake in office was in not seeing the FBI scandal as a purely political affair, rather than a legal one. He was conned into thinking it should be handled by the courts as a criminal matter, when he should have used it as a political hammer to bludgeon official Washington. By the election, all of the classified information should have been leaked and revealed. This would have kept Washington petrified about what he may release if they got too aggressive with him.

This would have fed into the subplot of his campaign. It was always Trump the reformer against the political class. Instead of working with Republicans like he was one of them, he should have treated them as part of the problem. Trump needed to be Harry Truman running against a corrupt establishment. He would have accomplished more and he would have provided a clear reason to support him 2020. Instead he kept trying to be accepted by people who detested him.

Stylistically, Trump the salesman was an amusing bit of comic relief in the 2016 election that probably won him the benefit of the doubt. The trouble was, he kept selling his voters after he had won. The campaign is about promises, while governance is about delivering on those promises. Trump did some good things in office, but he never spoke of them, instead preferring to keep promising to look into new things and maybe do other things. It quickly rang hollow with his voters.

The great lesson to learn from the Trump era is that winning the crowd is useless if you don’t have a plan to put it to some purpose. Trump is not an ideologue, which allows him to be pragmatic. That’s a great asset in politics, as long as you have the secret list in your head of things you want to do in office. This is what makes the Left so powerful as a social force. They never lose focus on their goal. They know why they seek power, so they adapt and keep moving forward.

Trump never seemed to know what he wanted to do in office. Like all civic nationalists, he has this vague notion in his head of what America should be, but he was never able to translate it into policy. The closest he came was the many administrative changes made to the immigration process. He never spoke of those, because like all civic nationalist, he preferred to dream of the mythological America where everyone happily abides but the rules of the republic.

There are many other things that can be put in the list of mistakes by Trump over the last four years, but the overriding theme is this. Trump never rose above the petty and practical to grasp his historical moment. Like everyone else is Washington, he had no vision of the future. As a result, he got bogged down into the swamp he promised to drain, playing petty politics, squabbling over small issues. The moment called for a man of vision, but instead got a pitchman from Queens."

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Alert! They Give Green Light To New World Monetary Order And Global Currency Reset"

"Alert! They Give Green Light To New World 
Monetary Order And Global Currency Reset"
by Epic Economist

"The global elites are already lined up to seize the opportunity given by this critical juncture to launch The Great Global Currency Reset. While globalists attempt to defend that The New World Order will make the changes that have never been made inside the financial systems and into the social sphere, analysts have been trying to open the public's eyes by showing that dubious intentions are laying behind this proposal. 

The switch to digital currencies will give them exclusive mechanisms to monitor all users' movements, enhancing even further the control enforced upon the population. In this video, we discuss how the invasive surveillance technologies required by The Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution could lead us to a Technocracy and far away from freedom. 

Against the backdrop of a global health emergency and a collateral economic collapse, a handful of global bureaucrats based in Davos, Switzerland is asking the world to embrace their view of a technocratic future. In June, the head of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Klaus Schwab, said this was the perfect time for The Great Reset since right now there are many urgent reasons to justify reshaping all of society and the global economy. 

The ideology behind the Great Reset is the very mechanism required for setting in motion The New Global Order, and it wouldn’t be possible to introduce such a bold plan without a global crisis, whether it was manufactured or solely the byproduct of unfortunate circumstances, one that would shock society to its core.

The health crisis is the perfect loophole for the global establishment to promote its plan upon a fragile and dissatisfied population that has been severely affected by the outbreak, leaving them more "susceptible" to give away their freedoms to the idea of greater centralized power and control. In short, 

It would be configured as a modern “social contract”, designed to tie people to it through an electronic ID connected to people's bank account and health records. In their platform, there will be a score called "social credit" in which individuals will be evaluated by their overall performance and tendencies, however, experts warn that very soon this score could dictate every facet of everyone's lives.

It is nothing but a long-term plan to monitor and control the world through digital surveillance and artificial intelligence. In other words, The Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be the new slogans for the old “New World Order” and directly connected to the trans-humanist movement.

Technocracy is an economic system based on resource allocation using computer technology mechanisms. In that way, it enables the automation of “social engineering” and social rule, therefore out-passing the predetermined governmental structures and removing the need for democratically elected leadership.

But the image that will be sold to the public will only emphasize dystopian promises for the future, in which the "kind, engaged, selfless" leaders of this world will bring us the Green New Deal to help us get back into harmony with nature while ensuring a universal income and canceling individual debt. The WEF will arise as an unpretentious helping hand that will come in through the IMF and “rescue” countries drowning in debt by distributing facilitated financial bailouts.

However, the cost of their help can only be paid with our personal freedom and liberty. In order to launch The Great Reset, the WEF would have to increase people's trust in technology, more specifically, in “crisis-relevant tech,” which includes the development of a digital health passport and contact tracing that will perform under a new form of internet governance. 

This pass would use blockchain technology to store encrypted data from individual blood tests, allowing users to prove that they have tested negative for the current infection. This would be a next-level surveillance system tied to our bio-electronic data, something that's as sophisticated as it's scary. These new technologies will soon give some corporations and governments the ability to hack human beings.

Tyranny emerges silently. You'll only notice how far it has gone once it's too late. Don't be mistaken: the new normal is not starting now, we're still in the process of the collapse. The new normal is when the Great Reset accomplishes its goal, reassembling the entire economy, social relations, and owning our lives as a piece of property. But yet, if you're on the side of those who have chosen to see, then you still have a choice."
Related:

Musical Interlude: Neil H, “Candlelight Dreams”

Neil H, “Candlelight Dreams”

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Braided, serpentine filaments of glowing gas suggest this nebula's popular name, The Medusa Nebula. Also known as Abell 21, this Medusa is an old planetary nebula some 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Gemini. Like its mythological namesake, the nebula is associated with a dramatic transformation.
The planetary nebula phase represents a final stage in the evolution of low mass stars like the sun, as they transform themselves from red giants to hot white dwarf stars and in the process shrug off their outer layers. Ultraviolet radiation from the hot star powers the nebular glow. The Medusa's transforming star is near the center of the overall bright crescent shape. In this deep telescopic view, fainter filaments clearly extend below and to the left of the bright crescent region. The Medusa Nebula is estimated to be over 4 light-years across.”

The Poet: Mark Strand, "Dreams"

"Dreams"

"Trying to recall the plot
And characters we dreamed,
     What life was like
Before the morning came,
We are seldom satisfied,
     And even then
There is no way of knowing
If what we know is true.
     Something nameless
Hums us into sleep,
Withdraws, and leaves us in
     A place that seems
Always vaguely familiar.
Perhaps it is because
     We take the props
And fixtures of our days
With us into the dark,
     Assuring ourselves
We are still alive. And yet
Nothing here is certain;
     Landscapes merge
With one another, houses
Are never where they should be,
     Doors and windows
Sometimes open out
To other doors and windows,
     Even the person
Who seems most like ourselves
Cannot be counted on,
     For there have been
Too many times when he,
Like everything else, has done
     The unexpected.
And as the night wears on,
The dim allegory of ourselves
     Unfolds, and we
Feel dreamed by someone else,
A sleeping counterpart,
     Who gathers in
The darkness of his person
Shades of the real world.
     Nothing is clear;
We are not ever sure
If the life we live there
     Belongs to us.
Each night it is the same;
Just when we’re on the verge
     Of catching on,
A sense of our remoteness
Closes in, and the world
     So lately seen
Gradually fades from sight.
We wake to find the sleeper
     Is ourselves
And the dreamt-of is someone who did
Something we can’t quite put
     Our finger on,
But which involved a life
We are always, we feel,
     About to discover."

- Mark Strand 

Free Download: R.D. Laing, “The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

"The Divided Self: 
An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness"
by R.D. Laing

"Ronald David Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989), usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness – in particular, the experience of psychosis. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder. Laing was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, although he rejected the label. Politically, he was regarded as a thinker of the New Left..”

"First published in 1960, this watershed work aimed to make madness comprehensible, and in doing so revolutionized the way we perceive mental illness. Using case studies of patients he had worked with, psychiatrist R. D. Laing argued that psychosis is not a medical condition but an outcome of the 'divided self', or the tension between the two personas within us: one our authentic, private identity, and the other the false, 'sane' self that we present to the world.”

Freely download “The Divided Self: 
An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness”,
by R.D. Laing, here:
"Insights Of R.D. Laing"

"Decades ago, psychiatrist R.D. Laing developed three rules by which he believed a pathological family (one suffering from abuse, alcoholism, etc.) can keep its pathology hidden from even its own family members. Adherence to these three rules allows perpetrators, victims, and observers to maintain the fantasy that they are all one big, happy family. The rules are: Rule A: Don't talk about the problems and abject conditions; Rule A1: Rule A does not exist; Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or nonexistence of Rules A, A1, and/or A2."

“From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.”

“Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.”

“We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.”

“Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”

“We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.”

"Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”

"For This Is What We Do..."

"It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till."
- J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Lord of the Rings"

Sam: "It's like in the great stories Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end it's only a passing thing, this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines it'll shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something even if you were too small to understand why. But I think Mr. Frodo, I do understand, I know now folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there's some good in the world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for."
- Samwise Gamgee, "The Lord of the Rings

"What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?'"
 - Barbara Kingsolver

“For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.”
- Gregory David Roberts, “Shantaram”

"My Desire..."

 

The Daily "Near You?"

Tangerang, Jawa Barat, Indonesia. Thanks for stopping by!