History as Trauma
As you read your next Zero Hedge article and try to make sense of the world we live in you may like to consider this perspective.
When a person experiences an event that totally overwhelms their capacity to cope a surprising survival mechanism kicks in. They blame themselves for what is happening.
In his classic study of Hiroshima A-bomb survivors Robert Jay Lifton noted a pervasive “death guilt”. This guilt for an event that obliterated all normal boundaries of life was so deep that survivors felt they no longer deserved to live. So ubiquitous was the presence of this guilt that Lifton titled his book Death in Life.
Guilt works as a survival mechanism because it returns to the person a sense of control over the situation. If I am to blame for what is happening then, however bad a person that makes me, at least I am not helpless. In fact, I must be powerful. Just look at what I have done!
Yet while self-blame improves a person’s ability to survive in the short term, the long term consequences are profound.
The belief that a person is to blame for the suffering of all men, women and children who participated in the experience gives rise to other negative beliefs.
They are shamed for having committed such an act. There is despair for being the kind of person that would do such a thing. Belief in the need for punishment is also likely to be present.
Feelings become beliefs as a person habitually identifies with them. Feelings of hurt and rage over the experience add to the negative emotions that now make up the person’s identity.
Needless to say these feelings and beliefs are not pleasant. So instead of being felt and released, they are repressed.
In the unconscious they do not remain idle. Instead, they are expressed as compulsive behaviour. Because they are unconscious the person in effect forfeits conscious control of their behaviour for large areas of their life.
Unknown to themselves they are no longer in control but being controlled.
For example repressed self-blame can express itself as repeated failures in business, relationships or health as the person is driven to self-sabotage opportunities for happiness.
Most often unconscious beliefs are projected into the world in a process called transference. Instead of blaming themselves a person perceives the problem as out there. Their troubles are always someone else’s fault. It can be their spouse, the government or on the international stage, another nation.
In order to ascertain how pervasive this compulsive behaviour is in society you may wish see whether in the next ten minutes you blame yourself or someone else.
Having appreciated the survival mechanism by which compulsive behaviour comes to dominate large areas of a person’s life, could it be that the latest news is itself an expression of compulsive behaviour stemming from a traumatised state?
News of terrorist attacks, corruption and war come from all over the world. Atrocities like these are also pervasive throughout history. This means that for the above thesis to hold we need an event that took place that was both global and so overwhelming that it produced a society where compulsive behaviour became the norm. Does such an event exist?
Two Princeton University academics, Immanuel Velikovsky and Julian Jaynes, both independently found such an experience occurring around 1,500 B.C. I summarise their work in Wake Up: The Human Journey Beyond Cataclysm and in a series of YouTube videos.
In Worlds in Collision Velikovsky presents evidence that around 1,500 B.C. the Earth was involved with a near miss encounter with Venus. The result was massive physical upheaval including three mile high tidal waves, flaming meteorites follow by twenty years of gloom.
The focus of Jaynes’ work is the development of human consciousness. He describes a transition from what he calls the bicameral mind to the consciousness we are familiar with.
In the bicameral period of human development Jaynes provides evidence that men and women were directly connected to the gods. As corroboration spiritual traditions around the world describe a golden age of peace and abundance when the gods were close to man. They go on to narrate that troubles began when this connection was broken.
Was 1,500 B.C. the time when history as we know it began? Does this history describe a traumatised race compulsively expressing unconscious feelings and beliefs they have yet to come to terms with? Is this what we see in the news every day?
Here is a carved image of Tukulti-Ninurta I of Assyria who reigned between 1243-1207 B.C. Jaynes calls Tukulti the world’s first tyrant. Before him there were wars but nothing on the scale or savageness displayed by Tukulti’s armies as they swept into adjacent lands. Killing for its own sake and the obliteration of towns was something new.
Jaynes suggests Tukulti’s behaviour was the result of his experience of an overwhelming event. In the carving he is standing, then kneeling before an empty throne where his god once sat. Lines from an Assyrian cruciform tablet from around the same time reads:
“My god has forsaken me and disappeared,
My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance,
The good angel who walked beside me has departed.”
A free app enables you to actively participate in fostering global peace.
