The World as Forum for Action is “composed,” essentially, of three constituent elements, which tend to manifest themselves in typical patterns of metaphoric representation.
First is unexplored territory – The Great Mother, nature, creative and destructive, source and final resting place of all determinate things.
Second is explored territory – The Great Father, culture, protective and tyrannical, cumulative ancestral wisdom.
Third is the process that mediates between unexplored and explored territory – The Divine Son, the archetypal individual, creative exploratory “Word” and vengeful adversary.
We are adapted to this “world of divine characters,” much as the “objective world.” The fact of this adaptation implies that the environment is in “reality” a forum for action, as well as a place of things.
Unprotected exposure to unexplored territory produces FEAR.
The Individual is protected from such fear as a consequence of “Ritual Imitation of The Great Father” – as a consequence of the adoption of group identity, which restricts the meaning of things, and confers predictability on social interactions.
When identification with the group is made absolute, however – when everything has to be controlled, when the unknown is no longer allowed to exist – the creative exploratory process that updates the group can no longer manifest itself.
This “restriction of adaptive capacity” dramatically increases the probability of social aggression and chaos.
Rejection of The Unknown is tantamount to “Identification with THE DEVIL,” the mythological counterpart and eternal adversary of the world-creating exploratory hero.
Such rejection and identification is a consequence of Luciferian Pride, which states:
‘All that I know is all that is necessary to know.’
This pride is totalitarian assumption of Omniscience – is adoption of “God’s place” by “reason” – is something that inevitably generates a state of personal and social being indistinguishable from HELL.
This Hell develops because creative exploration – impossible, without (humble) acknowledgment of the unknown – constitutes the process that constructs and maintains the protective adaptive structure that gives Life much of its acceptable meaning.
“Identification with the devil” amplifies the dangers inherent in group identification, which tends of its own accord towards pathological stultification.
Loyalty to personal interest – subjective meaning – can serve as an antidote to the overwhelming temptation constantly posed by the possibility of denying anomaly.
Personal interest – subjective meaning – reveals itself at the juncture of explored and unexplored territory, and is indicative of participation in the process that ensures continued healthy individual and societal adaptation.
Loyalty to personal interest is equivalent to identification with the archetypal Hero – the “Savior” – who upholds his association with the creative “Word” in the Face of Death, and in spite of Group Pressure to Conform.
Identification with The Hero serves to decrease the unbearable motivational valence of the unknown; furthermore, provides the individual with a standpoint that simultaneously transcends and maintains the group.
“So much for preliminaries.
When we enter the world of the 9/ 11 myth, we find ourselves on the terrain of mass psychosis, mass hallucination, mass delusion. The twentieth century has shown how powerful these ideological figments can be.
This book proceeds from the standpoint of Platonic idealism; a Marxist might say that with 9/ 11, we enter the world of radically false consciousness, where the superstructure has become completely detached from social and material reality in a way that Marx never contemplated in his writings.
A suggestive study that addresses precisely this complex of problems is Joseph Gabel’s 1975 False Consciousness: An Essay on Reification.
Gabel sees reification (hypostatization) as the making of people, ideas, and time into things. His point of departure is the gross fact of mass belief in ideological chimeras, specifically Nazi and Stalinist ideology.
The 9/ 11 myth is of a piece with these.
GABEL: THE POLICE CONCEPT OF HISTORY
Gabel elaborates a lengthy definition of the political world view which is correlated with alienated and manipulated political life under the rule of schizophrenic/ autistic ideologies which exhibit a low degree of fidelity to reality.
Gabel called this the “police concept of history;” if he were writing today, he might well have called it the intelligence community or CIA theory of history.
Gabel writes: “The police concept of history is the negation of the historical dialectic, in other words the negation of history. . . . History’s driving force is not the ensemble of objective forces but good or evil individual action . . . since the ‘event’ is no longer understood as the normal substratum of the course of History, but as miracle or catastrophe; it is no longer dependent on scientific explanation but on black or white magic.
In the Manichean diptych of this view, the hero (leader) and the traitor represent two poles of the same principle of reificational negation of the autonomy of history.
It is therefore a pseudo-history, a non-dialectical result either of success due to the genius of the leader or failure explicable through treason; an authentic ‘syndrome of external action’ permits the privileged system to evade eventual responsibility.
The Police Concept of History represents the extreme form of political alienation; it is both a sociocentrism which dichotomizes the world into a privileged system [the US] and a non-privileged remainder [the Arab and Islamic world], and a phenomenon of consciousness of a schizophrenic nature.
Since the privileged system is considered as perfect, extra-temporal and extra-dialectical, the event–particularly the unfavorable event–can only be explained by means of external action; it is experienced as an unexpected, ‘undeserved’ catastrophe, which is no longer integrated into the normal course of events whose succession constitutes the threat of concrete, dialectical temporality.
One can compare this ensemble with the two specific elements in the clinical picture of schizophrenia, the syndrome of external action and the deranged experience of the end of the world (Weltuntergangserlebnis, abbreviated as WUE by German authors), the clinical translation of the appearance of the dialectic in a reified world which can accept the event only as a catastrophe.”
(Gabel 115–116, with my interpolations)
Here we have the principal elements or memes of the 9/ 11 myth in a clinical description a quarter century before the fact. The event has nothing to do with real historical forces. The realities of world commodity flows and of the world financial system in particular go out the window.
Bin Laden and al Qaeda provide a deus ex machina of absolute evil and black magic.
9/ 11 is the undeserved catastrophe or WUE, experienced as a nightmare out of the blue.
In order for such notions to gain mass acceptance, the American ideology had to already have traveled a considerable distance down the road towards schizophrenia and autism, and such mass acceptance has in turn further accelerated that descent.
For Gabel, schizophrenia is a loss of contact with reality and with history. His definition of schizophrenia depends heavily on the notion that, for the schizophrenic, development over time has become incomprehensible, while relations in space have become all-important. In space we can often choose to move, but time does not permit this. Therefore there is a close relationship between a radically anti-historical view of the world, as for example among the neocons and the Bush regime, and the syndromes of clinical schizophrenia, prominent among whose symptoms Gabel sees morbid rationalism, understood as a weak hold on reality: “In the light of recent work, schizophrenia appears as a loss of the sense of personal history, and psychotherapy therefore consists of a reconstruction of the totality of the person with a reintegration into history. From the viewpoint of the investigator the schizophrenic loss of the historico-dialectical perception of reality can be seen in the form of a preponderance of the spatial factor or as a loss of experienced time: as over-spatialization or as sub-temporalization.” (Gabel 116) Gabel’s work here dovetails with that of Frank, who points to Bush 43’ s notorious refusal to discuss the details of his youthful debauchery before the age of about 40. It is as if these episodes were repressed and no longer accessible to memory–at least, in Bush’s own propaganda patter. Frank is certainly on firm ground when he points to the fundamentalist belief structure of Bush and of so much of his base as representing a rejection of human history, personal history, and of natural history as well: “Just as fundamentalist creationist teachings deny history, the fundamentalist notion of conversion or rebirth encourages the believer to see himself as disconnected from history. George W. Bush’s evasive, self-serving defense of his life before he was born again displays just this tendency. . . . To the believer, the power of spiritual absolution not only erases the sins of the past, but divorces the current self from the historical sinner.” (Frank 59–60)
WOE IS WUE: CATASTROPHE FROM OUTSIDE A PERFECT SYSTEM
A vital part of the WUE brought about inside the perfect system by evil forces is that these evil forces are axiomatically seen as coming from outside of that perfect system. Evil is always external, never home grown, as it was for the racist southern sheriff who thought that all racial tensions were the work of outside agitators. “The result is that when the evidence of the historicity of existence forces itself on the misoneism (hatred of change) of reified consciousness, it appears as an unexpected catastrophe, inexplicable and often attributed therefore to external action. . . . For sociocentrism, the privileged system being perfect, any change (particularly any unfavorable change) is the work of external maleficent powers.” (Gabel 288 and note) Gerhard Wisnewski has related this idea most directly to 9/ 11. As Wisnewski points out, “from outside” is the central slogan of the official version of 9/ 11. “The impression is produced that the perpetrators came ‘from outside’: from outside of the building, from outside of America, even from outside civilization. The official version of these events screams ‘outside, outside, outside.’” (Wisnewski 143) In a world axiomatically defined by terrorism, the Manichean outlook seems destined to win out. Sanguinetti saw something similar in Italy at the beginning of the strategy of tension: “In view of terrorism presented as absolute evil, evil in itself and for itself, all the other evils fade in to the background and are even forgotten; since the fight against terrorism coincides with the common interest, it already is the general good, and the State, which magnanimously conducts it, is good in itself and for itself. Without the wickedness of the devil, God’s infinite bounty could not appear and be appreciated as is fitting.” (Sanguinetti 3) Gabel insists again and again on the key role played by the loss of the historical dimension, and it is clear that this problem was shared by twentieth-century America with Nazi Germany and with Soviet Russia. Anglo-American propaganda exhibits an overwhelming tendency to demonize enemy leaders: Noriega, Milosevic, bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein are notable examples, but the tendency goes back to Kaiser Wilhelm at the very least. Today the explicit speech of propaganda is conducted on the overtly infantile plane: good guys and bad guys, of bad actors, and most of all terrorists. Gabel writes: “ For Gabel, this is another symptom of reification (hypostatization): “As a prisoner of a universe where space takes the place of duration, man in the reified world cannot understand history as the expression of creativity and spontaneity. Consequently the undeniable fact of change forces itself on this ‘consciousness of immediacy’ as a catastrophe, as a sudden change from the outside that excludes mediation. . . . Seen in this perspective, history appears as a function of demiurgic action. An external force (God, the hero, a party) transcends the efficiency of its autonomous dialectic. Reified consciousness is essentially ahistorical: mens momentanea sive carens recordationem [a mind in the moment, or lacking memory], said Leibniz on this subject.” (Gabel 151) Here is history reduced to a fairy tale, with the cocaine-abusing, alcoholic, mentally-impaired Bush as the hero of the good, and the rich, misfit, raving ideologue bin Laden as champion of evil. How can hundreds of millions of people believe in such a product? Gabel discusses the stress on biological heredity and race as one of the leading anti-historical features of the Nazi outlook, and there is evidence that Hitler was also well aware of this. Gabel points out that Nazi ideology, with its glorification of race and biology, was marked by “morbid rationalism in its worst form.” Gabel argues that “any unfavorable event for this racial pseudo-value is itself extra-historicized and ‘understood’ in terms of treason or conspiracy: the ideology of national socialism is logically inseparable from the theory of the ‘stab in the back.’” (Gabel 117) If fascism comes to the United States, it is now certain that its ideology will prominently feature the 9/ 11 events as a stab in the back to a benefactor by an ungrateful and treacherous outside world; fascist neocons are already spouting this point of view. Ironically, the German request for an armistice in 1918, which Hitler later condemned as a stab in the back by Social Democratic politicians, was actually the work of Field Marshal Ludendorff and other future backers of Hitler. As for 9/ 11, which Bush blames on the Arab and Muslim world, it too had some of its main backers inside the US military and intelligence services.
SCHIZOPHRENIA:
REJECTION OF HISTORY AND REALITY
Frank sees Bush’s paranoid schizophrenic hostility to real historical processes reflected in some well-known aspects of his bureaucratic methods. One is his insistence on absolute, unquestioning loyalty on the part of his underlings: “Like the alcoholic father who is threatened by the independence of his family members, Bush demands absolute loyalty and conformity, trying to freeze his national family in time. . . .” (Frank 46) For Frank, Bush has no use for history in any form; he remarks, “with a president who refuses to view history as anything but an enemy he cannot afford to acknowledge or engage, it’s impossible not to wonder what painful lessons of history we may be doomed to repeat.” (Frank 161) One way of denying historical reality is to wipe out the past; another is to insist that the leading delusion of one’s own time is destined to last forever. The Nazis did this in one way, Bush in another: “the historical time of national socialism was dominated . . . by the chimerical hope of an empty eternity”–there was the promise of a thousand year Reich, sometimes escalated to 20,000 years of Nazi world domination. (Gabel 134) For Bush and the neocons, this has become the nightmare vision of a war against terrorism which is literally endless. Bush’s fraudulent “war on terrorism” is of course a war of civilizations directed against the 1 billion Arab and Muslim people in the world; it is more hypocritical than Hitlerism because it assiduously denies its own real content.
In reality, the “war on terrorism” is a racist war against Arabs and Muslims today, with China and perhaps Russia as candidates for all-out attack at some later time. From time to time the real essence explodes to the surface, as in Bush’s call for a crusade, or in General Boykin’s comments on satanic Islam. Neocon radio talk show hosts like Michael Savage are more explicit every day, and it is they who service the belief structure of Bush’s hard-core followers. Gabel sees racism as another denial of reality and history: “The racist perception of human reality is schizophrenic in several ways,” he observes. Gabel also detects a depersonalization of members of the targeted group, “which is reflected particularly in caricature, the strongest weapon of ethnocentrism.” (Gabel 123) In Bush’s fear-mongering oratory, the denial of reality is so great that it often approaches the qualities of hallucination, and sometimes enters into that domain. “It will be admitted that there exists a certain analogy between hallucinatory consciousness which, in its demand for homogeneity, is forced to alienate in a hallucinatory form the tendencies that it no longer manages to organize in a concrete totality, and, on the other hand, reified political consciousness which, in its postulate of political homogeneity–a postulate which the totalitarian state tries to put into practice–attributes to the foreigner (in the widest sense of the term, implying also political heterodoxy) facts for which a simple dialectical consideration of reality would permit a rational explanation to be given.” (Gabel 279–280) Frank connects this to the hatred of the lawful character of reality, which we see in Bush–who loves to live outside the law as an individual, from his drunk driving arrests through his National Guard shenanigans to his illegal election–and in the neocons–who hate the very concept of international law: “Wilfred R. Bion points out that the part of the personality that hates internal law–the laws of reality, of time, of responsibility, of loss–hates external reality as well. It attacks links made in the mind, undermining the capacity to think and organize that comes from facing reality and its limitations. Living outside the law of mature responsibility becomes both the midwife of omnipotent fantasy and the mortician of the capacity to think.” (Frank 89) Bush boasts about his own penchant for seeing the world in black and white, as a single Manichean opposition of good and evil, with no nuances or gray areas. As Frank notes, “there are no shades of gray in this fight for civilization. . . . Either you’re with the United States of America, or you’re against the United States of America.” (Frank 13) Gabel saw the same phenomenon in the Nazis: “By virtue of the implicit Manichean postulate of ideological thought, the enemies of enemies so often enjoy an undeserved favorable prejudice; for the political Manichean one is either” with us or against us, as Bush constantly repeats. (Gabel 97 note)
INFANTILE EGOCENTRISM AND ETHNOCENTRISM
Many have noted the primitive and childish quality of the Bush/ neocon analysis, with its mindless parroting about good guys and bad guys. Bush’s oratory also shares another key feature of the infantile mind–egocentrism, or the tendency to see large and distant events as having been caused by ones own petty actions. This is exemplified by the suburbanite who thinks that getting the car washed will make the rain come down. After 9/ 11, Bush notoriously divided the world into terrorist bad guys and pro-American good guys. He insisted, in other words, that the world should be forever organized around this single event.
Gabel shows that adult egocentrism and schizophrenia go together: “A zoologist who, having been successively bitten by a dog and a cat, used as a scientific concept ‘the animal species which bites zoologists’ would be guilty of false egocentric identification. . . . False identification is an important aspect of the anti-dialectical structure of ideologies and, at the same time, a valued technique of economy of effort for propaganda.” (Gabel 92) What egocentrism represents in the stunted individual, ethnocentrism accomplishes for the sick society. Think of Bush’s post-9/ 11 axis of evil, composed of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Yet, there had been no rogue states’ summit to sign a treaty of alliance among these three. Iraq and Iran had been enemies, and North Korea, a true hermit kingdom, lived in its own isolation. Yet, Bush insisted like a small child in defining the three exclusively in relation to himself–within, it should go without saying, a universe of discourse already defined by the 9/ 11 myth. Once again, Gabel described something similar under the Nazis. Under the Nazi regime, “the non-German world seems to a large extent to have been interpreted in terms of the postulate that the enemy world was homogeneous. This was less because of a working hypothesis about propaganda than ideological convictions of a delirious nature. . . .” (Gabel 120) The Nazis portrayed a world of capitalists, Bolsheviks, and Jews who were all mythically united in their hatred for Germany. Although often couched in religious terms, the neocon ideology is close not only to that of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, but also to that of the Nazi sociologist Gumplowitz, whose major work was devoted to the conflict of the races. This is also not far from Huntington’s clash of civilizations. In each of these cases, history is dominated by mythical entities. We think of the Cambone-Boykin-Geoffrey Miller axis in the Pentagon and US Army; Boykin was responsible for a raving declaration that his Christian God is stronger than the God of Islam, and that Islam is satanic. In reality, Boykin knows nothing of universal Christianity, and the god he worships is between totem and Mammon. Schizophrenic personalities like Boykin and Miller (a member of the sinister religious sect called The Fellowship) were observed to have been over-represented among the personnel of the Nazi concentration camps. The same would appear to be the case among the Bush administration; Cambone, Boykin, and Miller have become the architects of the gulag that stretches from Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib to the system of illegal CIA secret dungeons and illegal ghost prisoners reported to be operating in numerous countries. Frank notes that “the eminent psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan has written that we need an enemy to rally the community around a ‘chosen trauma.’ Almost immediately after 9/ 11, Bush began speaking of the war, in grandiose terms, as a kind of epic and eternal struggle. . . . Making the war against terrorism perennial keeps him in power, by keeping the terror externalized.” (Frank 98) Although Frank hesitates to say so, 9/ 11 is obviously the chosen trauma.
BUSH’S DIVINE MISSION AS SCHIZOPHRENIC SYMPTOM
Bush has spoken of his own role in regard to 9/ 11 and Iraq as a divine mission assigned to him by God; especially chilling was his remark that he did not consult his own father before the aggression against Iraq, but did consult his “higher father.” Here we have the image of the hero who goes forth on a divine quest to hold back the forces of chaos and the WUE. As Frank reminds us, “Bush has always been surprisingly explicit in declaring that he sees himself on a mission from God, and it is his belief in that divine assignment in which we see the most potent combination of politics, psychology, and faith at work.” (Frank 71) For Gabel, this notion of a divine mission is an integral part of the schizophrenic mis-perception of historical change in the real world. Gabel links “the syndrome of external action and the deranged experience of the end of the world. . . . Consequently, when the event forces itself into reified consciousness, the latter makes this evident through a double technique of partial obscuration: from the point of view of causal explanation it interprets it as the act of an external power; on the level of lived experience its experiences it either as a catastrophe or, on the contrary, as a sudden significant (and always heteronomic) irruption into the axiological void [vacuum of values] of the world itself: a divine mission. In short, like a manic crisis, the WUE is an axiological crisis, a sort of storm of values on the boundaries of two atmospheres of different axiological-dialectical density. . . . Thus a connection is created between morbid rationalism and the phenomenon of the end of the world experience. It is as one aspect of the anti-dialectical mode of being-in-the-world that one can place the WUE in the same ambit as deranged perceptions, hallucinations, and other elements of sub-realist experience.” (Gabel 292–293) Heteronomy is the opposite of autonomy; it is the unfree state of being controlled by outside forces, such as manipulation of the traumas of one’s own past. In a striking insight, Gabel shows that the road to a thoroughly schizophrenic foreign policy is paved with ultimata. The Bushes have been prodigal with ultimata: there was one to Saddam Hussein in 1991, one to the Taliban regime in 2001, and another to Saddam in 2003. For Gabel, these come straight from the schizophrenic tool kit of projection; he says that “behavior does exist on a societal level that is phenomenologically close to the psychiatrists’ ‘mirror symptom’–This is when a State–usually totalitarian–chooses a fictitious interlocutor in order to have an act of violence or a territorial conquest ratified in the form of a supposed negotiation. This is–just like the clinical phenomenon in question–an illusion of encounter with an artificial interlocutor; a behavior of schizophrenic structure.” (Gabel 259) Reagan hailed the “magic of the marketplace,” obviously a very white magic. In the grim times of 9/ 11, Bush 43 has had to deal mostly with black magic, but there have been exceptions. One was in the dreamtime that lasted a week or two for some observers after the fall of Baghdad to the Anglo-American aggressors. Frank is right to comment that “there’s no clearer example of magical thinking than the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner that served as a backdrop to Bush’s flight-suit photo op on the Abraham Lincoln.” (Frank 86) The essence of magic is action at a distance, which Sir Isaac Newton unfortunately made presentable in the Anglo-American world. The official story of 9/ 11, with everything directed in the last analysis by bin Laden using his laptop in the distant cave of Afghanistan, represents a thinly veiled version of magical action at a distance. Gabel pointed out more than a quarter of a century earlier that racism too is based on a magical and irrational world outlook which “also admits fairly often the existence of action at a distance of an undeniably magico-schizophrenic nature. . . . this is the very definition of paranoid deranged thought. . . .” (Gabel 123–4)
RESULT: THE 9/ 11 MYTH AS PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
Because of the capitulation of the Democratic party and the associated liberal intellectual establishment, Bush and the neocons have enjoyed success as mythographers beyond their wildest dreams.
The tenant of the White House may have discovered in the powers of myth a stimulant more potent than his beloved Jack Daniels; at one point, according to a reporter, Bush appeared “bedazzled by his administration’s own mythmaking.” (New York Times, July 31, 2003)
Out of the preceding considerations, we can gradually come to understand the 9/ 11 myth in its actual status as a kind of Ersatz or substitute religion, or more precisely as an hysterical Ersatz civic religion designed to promote social cohesiveness when all other ideologies have failed. What Franks says in his summary of Bush and Iraq applies even better to the American public and the 9/ 11 myth: “The individual who clings tenaciously to unverified beliefs confuses his beliefs with fact, and often inflicts this confusion on others in his struggle to resolve it in his favor. When many people are persuaded to subscribe to the same pretense, of course, it can gain the aura of objectivity; as British psychoanalyst Ron Britton has observed, ‘we can substitute concurrence for reality testing, and so shared phantasy can gain the same or even greater status than knowledge.’ The belief doesn’t become a fact, but the fact of shared belief lends it the valuable appearance of credibility. The belief is codified, takes hold, and rises above the level where it might be questioned. Shared beliefs can come to define a community; religion is, after all, a communal structure, uniting groups in shared beliefs. In societies where religion is especially powerful, such shared beliefs can actually become law, imposed on others, often restricting their behavior.” (Franks 62)
