Untimely Reflection on the Sickness of the Soul

Mobilizing white poor working class for racist (post-Jim Crow segregation), Fascist (Nazi), and xenophobic (Trump) causes is an old practice. Does this 6 minutes of Martin Luther King's Montgomery speech not remind you of Trump's anti-immigrant arguments--and winning the presidency?:

"Our whole campaign in Alabama has been centered around the right to vote. In focusing the attention of the nation and the world today on the flagrant denial of the right to vote, we are exposing the very origin, the root cause, of racial segregation in the Southland. Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.

Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. (Listen to him) That is what was known as the Populist Movement. The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South.

To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century.

If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion."

https://soundcloud.com/mipdo/rare-mlk-jr-on-how-the-races

Those white working class, who voted for Trump and some who didn't, are poisoned by a history of some of the most destructive American "values" and "dream":   unbridled capitalism, transformation of the Gospel of the poor to the Gospel of the rich, 

the adoration of wealth, usury, and Trumpian extravagant, 

a deep racial institutionalized hatred, 

devaluation of all values, 

drunkenness, 

explosion of private life, 

sexual debauchery and abuse, 

misogyny and gender confusion, 

the ethical collapse of Gospel of Prosperity 
and secular nihilism, hedonism and humanism.  

This is the sickness of our societal soul. 

It is strange to me.  I now notice that my life journey was from confusion and cloud to painstakingly taking steps to know myself, from narcissism and false image, sweeping things under the rug, and to escape the truth about myself, to a kind of enthusiasm, painful enthusiasm to see myself, to diagnose the sickness of my soul.  Because life nailed it down in my soul fully, tortuously, torturously, completely, irrevocably, undoubtedly, that my image is fictitious, it is a vain glory, it is a seed to be cracked open to grow, a cocoon to be torn apart to fly out of it to freedom, the freedom from the self: the self is at the same time the sickness and the healer.  

I felt I was under a spell, a strange spell, the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the sickness that I swallowed in the garden of Eden, is this sense of self-consciousness which seeks pleasure and glorification, complacency and power, fame and adoration, the child in us never grows old, we just learn to cover it up with serious talk and sophisticated gestures, while killing its innocence. 

I awakened to the fact that I was under a spell.  It is a breach inside the self, to detach oneself from total immersion in a lie, a delusion, an illusion.  It is like a spark of recognition for an insane person to realize for a moment that s/he is mad, s/he is schizophrenic, s/he is manic-depressive, with constant endless justification and reasoning that s/he is OK and all her or his delusions and clanging make sense and are real.  It is like a sudden awakening out of anosognosia, from a spell of addictive self-satisfaction. 

Before that awakening, I couldn’t honestly give ears to a critique about my weak points.  We all need to feel good relatively about ourselves to function somehow.  But this feeling good about oneself can also completely closes one off to the sickness of one’s soul.  Only life nailed it down in my soul fully, tortuously, torturously, completely, irrevocably, undoubtedly, that we are trapped in a collective stupidity and madness to overlook the only way we can find our way out of this maze: to drop the cloak of self and to see the sickness of our soul, face to face, without escape or manipulation, without fashioning and ornamentation—to the cure of God-consciousness, that I am nobody, nothing, a dying limited speck of dust.   

All my glory and attributes, the beauty of mind or body, is just a fleeting bubble of fictitious self-significance to endure this false consciousness, this awakening to my self-consciousness after eating the fruit of the tree of good and evil, to feel good about myself somehow as I know I am nested with death.  And I have come so far from my origin and source of existence that I don’t remember anymore why God did not accept my sacrifice and instead accepted Abel’s.  I have fallen into centuries of oblivion to feel satisfaction in devouring the world for my petty survival—as survival of genes is the only meaning I can hold onto, and my greatness is the number of airplanes, skyscrapers, and ivory Trump towers that I can own.  I have lost my connection to my source so deeply that I don’t remember what I killed Abel for.

Why did I kill Abel?  For he reminded me constantly of the sickness of my soul, that God is less pleased with me than him.  Since then I have done everything I could to forget my soul: I blamed God and asked for absolute equality between everyone, the murderer and the victim, while I raised a system of exclusion just to fill this damn void inside my soul, this deep loss that I am not loved, not taking even one step to see the sickness of my own soul, why am I not loved?  I sought power and money, houses and castles, names and honors, towers and casinos, I drew dividing lines between black and white, between Native-Americans and Americans, between immigrants and Americans, between women and men, because I wanted, begged, cried for, day and night, the absolute equality of good and evil, of meritorious and ignominious, because I can’t stand the sickness of my soul.

Because I don’t have that strength of soul to bury my tainted self once for all and see the base and disgraceful void inside my soul so that to cure myself to God-consciousness.  I have lost it.  I killed Abel.  All I want is to forget.  I want to forget that I am not applaudable and commendable, that I am not admirable and praiseworthy.  I hate myself and conceal it in overdoing everything, I become the Trump tower.  I escape the fact that I am contemptible and deplorable, unethical and unsavory.

    

I look deeply into this sight for which I have been whining all my life, to be accepted, to be lauded, to be admirable, I see this little narcissus who can’t stop scolding the whole world because God didn’t accept his gift and can’t stop this face keeping and look straight into the dry well of his soul and acknowledges its sickness. 

I want to highlight this again to make my point clearer: why did Cain kill Abel?  He killed Abel because he couldn’t see the sickness of his soul, his sacrifice was not a real sacrifice, it was not a sacrifice of his “self”, it was to have an admirable and laudable self in the eyes of God without having the merit for it.  This is important, the self which wants to be admirable and applaudable in the eyes of people (as God is forgotten now) cannot look into its sickness of the soul, which is this very desire to be applaudable—without knowing that the only way to pass the bridge to God, to God-consciousness, is to look into the sickness of one’s soul and get dissolved in the love for beloved without asking to be applaudable, but realizing that the only praiseworthy being is God.  God shall accept this sacrifice when I overcome the sickness of my soul: the self.

This is the same about social sickness.  I am not frustrated or angry for the election of Trump.  I am glad to look into the sickness of our society, because life nailed it down in my soul fully, tortuously, torturously, completely, irrevocably, undoubtedly that the only way to go forward is to look straight forward into the dark hole of societal soul.

Trump’s election shows Gospel of Prosperity, the worship of money, to praise billionaires and to see them of being capable to hold the highest office in the country.  Trump’s election shows that America has lost its soul to usury system of greed and needs the hatred of strangers to scaffold its self.  A self which holds itself together by a language of “we” vs. “them”, a societal self that can’t look into its own sickness, which is nothing but this desire to have a “we-self” vs. “them”. 

Now different sources exclaim that it is the white working class who chose Trump, because democrats couldn’t recognize and address their loss and organize them.  But this is again not looking into the sickness of our societal soul.  Democratic party is a corporate party and Clinton is incapable of mobilizing people to vote, because in the depth of their experience people know that Democratic party is a crippled child of corporations.  The white working class is poisoned by a history of American values and dream: a transformation of Gospel of the poor to a Gospel of the rich, the adoration of wealth, usury, and Trumpian extravagant, a deep racial institutionalized hatred, devaluation of all values, drunkenness, explosion of private life, sexual abuse, misogyny, gender confusion, the glorification of queen beauties.  We are poisoned by the ethical collapse of Gospel of Prosperity and secular nihilism, hedonism, and humanism.  This is the sickness of our societal soul.