So begins the revolution in behalf of soul:
The world is primarily and always an aesthetic phenomenon with which our animal senses and innate reactions are attuned.
— James Hillman, Healing Fiction
We tell white lies to avoid conflict or embarrassment. We tell ourselves wholly subjective tales in order to cope with crushing realities. Nations pull creation myths out of the ass of the nation’s collective unconscious. In the case of the Zionist ethnostate the (all too real) storyline has been banished, from the state’s inception, from the Israeli psyche.
What does it do to the collective soul of a nation whose crimes against humanity go without consequence? It goes without saying, they are prone to perpetrate ever increasing criminality until they suffer the consequences of their actions. To wit, Israel will never be capable of living in peace with those who they deem outsiders.
The worst aspects of the Zionist character have been rewarded e.g., as a militarist ethnostate that was created by acts of ethnic cleansing. Nations rise by believing their collective lies…that is, until said lies cause them to fall.
Israelis know the fact. The quiet part spoken aloud is evinced by their actions: They are leaving Israel em masse. Tel Aviv’s Ashkenazi elite dispatch their children to live abroad. They detest the religious zealot death cults arrayed as agents of ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories.
The liberal elites of the Zionist state are mortified by the religious right. Why? The authoritarian lunatics are a glaring emblem of the true character of the state. Liberal Zionists shunt from their conscious minds the reality that they are complicit in the crimes by which the Zionist ethnostate was conceived and the awareness of the nation’s right-wing authoritarian death cultists are the inevitable embodiment of the state itself.
This is the unspoken consequence of Israel’s crimes against humanity; withal, an ugly minded citizenry dwelling in a nation in which its very psychical architecture is a litany of lies.
Untitled (1985; Poland) by Zdzislaw Beksinski
By repressing our reactions to the basic ugliness of simple details, like ceilings, by denying our annoyance and outrage, we actually encourage an unconsciousness that estranges and disorients the interior soul.
— James Hillman, Healing Fiction
With Hillman’s insight in mind gaze upon the hideous, ad hoc, hyper-commercialized griftscape of the US: the nation’s collective mode of mind is manifested in the extant wasteland, and is embodied by the shambling, crass, decaying-before-our-eyes figure of Donald J. Trump.
The president’s brain has turned into rancid guacamole. Moreover, as an analog of the nation’s decline, Trump’s pronounced physical infirmities and florid mental decay have become a form of public spectacle.
Trump:
They have Jasmine Crockett — a low IQ person. AOC is low IQ. Have her pass the exams I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. They’re cognitive tests. Let AOC go against Trump. Let Jasmine go against Trump. The first couple questions are easy — a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe …
Donald Trump cannot cover up all signs of decay and decline by indulging in his Versailles-adjacent rampage of theWhite House’s structure and decor, all in an attempt to cover up his Dime Store-level, located in a decaying strip mall, brain.
From the US griftscape rises the president as grifter.
From Wounded Knee, My Lai, Fallujah, and slaughtered-at-sea Venezuelan fishermen…rise US mass shooters; from the true believer lunacy of 18th Century tent-revivalist, religious zealots…rise present day, authoritarian, gun-worshipping, counterfeit Christians convinced their right-wing interpretation and governmental enforcement of Biblical laws will cause a New Jerusalem to rise from the crushed-to-compost republic beneath the feet of their trooping legions of Christian-nationalist zealots.
depth is afforded by the surface, that is: the world is aesthetic presentation
[…]
To walk right by an ill-designed building, be served and accept poorly prepared food, put on your body a badly cut and badly sewn jacket, to say nothing of not hearing the birds, not noticing the twilight, is to ignore the world. This state of ignorance, this anesthesia is largely the modern human condition,
— James Hillman, City and Soul
On display at MAGA rallies and Christian-nationalist megachurches we are witness to staged spectacles in which beauty has been all but banished. In Trump’s White House assault on the senses — by being pummeled by crass — we are buffeted by the aesthetic equivalent of pussy-grabbing.
Grandeur is Beauty’s eternal dance with Time while grandiosity is but mental vapor in air.
Trump is acting as a vessel of God only if the god in question is the 2nd Law Of Thermodynamics i.e., the ruling god of fascists e.g., “The Thousand-Year Reich” lasted a grand total of 12 years. The MAGA manifestation of end-stage empire embodies the permanence of Trump devoured Big Mac engendered flatulence.
Ugliness turns us inward, away from the world [while, conversely] “beauty…returns our longing to this world.”
— James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World
An example of the latter (“beauty…returns our longing to this world.”) Palace of Justice by Mecanoo, Córdoba, Spain
Soul flees when power besotted men evince an obsessive drive for total dominance over beauty. Moreover, there is a festering rot raging at the core of this vanity-blotted maniac as he revels over the destruction of the natural order of earthly conditions that allowed for the rise of — and is essential for maintaining human existence — on the planet:
“I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax,” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!”
Are you feeling demoralized by the raging fuckwit forced upon us by the Empire Of Soul-Defying Fuckery? From the right we are slagged as a feckless “leftard” from the liberal class we are shunned for being a denizens of the “dirtbag left.”
First, in regard to the latter: Dirt holds nutrients that sustain life on land. No wonder the sterile of ideas/desiccated of mind liberacrats of the Democratic Party bandy the ad hominem at those of us who notice their fecklessness borne of corruption. Embrace the term. Their reeking status quo is the compost wherein a new political ecosystem can grow and flourish. The beauty of this world rises from the dirt of the breathing earth.
Regarding being perpetually pummeled into despair inflicted by feelings of powerlessness by the total dominance of capitalism and the soul-defying systems legion of rightwing bullyboy enforcers, from lowly, online rightist grifters and shitposters to ICE/militarized police state thuggery, James Hillman in Re-Visioning Psychology counsels:
As long as we are caught in cycles of hope and despair, each productive of the other, as long as our actions in regard to depression are resurrective, implying that being down and staying down is sin, we remain Christian in psychology.
Yet through depression we enter depths and in depths find soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the dry soul, and dries the wet. It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness. It reminds of death. The true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression. Neither jerking oneself out of it, caught in cycles of hope and despair, nor suffering it through til it turns, nor theologizing it — but discovering the consciousness and depth it wants. So begins the revolution in behalf of soul.
So begins the revolution in behalf of soul.
Few things are uglier than a flagrant lie. For example, Zionist origin stories that erase the very existence of the Palestinian people; and the noxious mythos of Christian-nationalist that warps the figure of Jesus Christ into an emblem of hyper-authoritarian tyranny and fastbuck grifting; then there is, every hate-rancid word uttered by Steven Miller and the jingoist palaver spewed by Pete Hegseth.
Conversely, beauty broods like a dreaming seed in the hearts of those driven to risk calling out the false mythos churned out by domination-driven power. Hence we come upon the reason that resistance to violence waged against Gaza, Venezuela, and upon human beings slandered as “illegals” stands at the heart of things.
The world, because of its breakdown, is entering a new moment of consciousness: by drawing attention to itself by means of its symptoms, it is becoming aware of itself as a psychic reality. The world is now the subject of immense suffering, exhibiting acute and crass symptoms by means of which it defends itself against collapse.
— James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and The Soul of the World
The Face of the City by Zdzislaw Beksinski
Speaking of manic defense:
We’re going to win so much, you’re going to get tired of winning. You’re going to say, ‘Please, Mr. President, I have a headache. Please, don’t win so much. This is getting terrible.’ And I’m going to say, ‘I’m sorry, but we’re going to keep winning, winning, winning…
— Donald Trump
At present, lies of the authoritarian mind are the dominating force of US political life because they are the last barriers, albeit shoddy, of defense erected against the knowledge of their (self-inflicted) undoing.
Grandiosity becomes the stuff of dust. If there was an honest Christian or Tanakh-true Jew in their authoritarian klavern they would admonish their fellows thus:
“Vanity of vanities; all is vanity” Ecclesiastes 1:2
“He that loveth silver [or cryptocurrency scams] shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase. This is also vanity.” — Ecclesiastes 5:10
In essence, the agendas of Trump and his gallery of hyper-obsequious, human testicle cozies, as well their schemes involving total dominance, are vapor in regard to the vastness of life. They will evaporate in the freedom of air.
In time, their obsessive, all-consuming agenda of total control and absolute power will be the very vehicle of their undoing.
In diametric opposition, the wounded dreams of the afflicted will create the living architecture of the order to come.
Linxia National Grand Theater by DUTS design, Gansu, China
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.