Victim Consciousness

How Tribes Suicide By Not Addressing Their Internal Conflicts Before It's Too Late

“There is one who can see it all without hating.”

—Tomas Tranströmer

When, in childhood, we heard fairy tales about a wedding laid to ruin, it was always because somebody felt left out, or was not invited.

What begins as a hurt feeling in somebody, turns to a dark shadow twin feeling, (when it is no longer a feeling:) Resentment. This seed, or unclean spirit, in the right soil, can grow into a full scale haunting; can live on after the person’s death, infect entire communities, and lay even the strongest tribes to ruin.

So a “haunting” is really, as Marshall Rosenberg knew, a concentration of unmet needs over time.

—The need to belong

—The need to belong, and lastly

—The need to belong.

In communities, a group of people can take offense on behalf of another (anointed) person, who they feel has been wronged—setting in motion a collective shadow projection. Then they neither a) let it go not b) try to resolve it.

It takes on a life of its own. Whole tribes are laid to ruin.

This die-off is preferred to open communication that reveals either feelings or needs, especially if the group are involved in anything to do with what we call “science.”

Nobody will call it hatred but that’s what it is. Hatred is the last alchemical response to what began as a perceived slight or affront. [“The Anatomy Of Hate” by Vaclav Havel, here.]

One single cause: Nobody took any interest in the feelings or needs of the one onto whom the shadow was being projected. Instead, vicim centered diagnosis, with words like “always” and “never” close at hand.

And here’s where René Girard’s work on scapegoating and sacrifice is so stunning: He mapped the mass psyche and brought back the finding that we choose scapegoats in the belief—the collective belief—that the destruction of that designated scapegoat will bring power and triumph to the whole tribe. Rain, crops, land acquisition, protection from illness, a final conquering of germ theory with even Peter Duesberg thrown off the mountain— or what have you.

The goals are always used to justify the scapegoating.

My cherished, late friend Richard Kotlarz, the monetary historian, used to say, when I asked him about the spiritual content of different feelings, an unusual thing about anger.

It stayed with me.

“All anger is a sign of self importance.”

I think I said the word “gulp” out loud.

He knew I struggled with anger in ways he did not. But the Lutheran years, in Sweden, had imprinted on my soul that nothing, nothing at all, in any galaxy, was worse than self-importance.

“All anger?” I said.

He was fairly sure it was all anger.

Wait! I know what you’re thinking.

“They killed my son with their vaccines. I’m not supposed to be angry?”

They bombed my village and killed my entire family, and I’m not supposed to be angry?

Can anger be constructive?

Take a moment with this clip—it’s truly revelatory:

They say anger repressed turns to immobilizing depression, and I can testify to that, but what about anger nourished and encouraged? The waters we swim in. Everybody is not only angry, but keeping tabs whether the rest of their tribes are angry at the right people on their behalf. And if they’re not—well, then they are “dead to us.”

That’s what shaming lists and blacklists are for: To repel from us the sight of our own selves, which could crush us. [Jung said do it anyway.]

Violent people elevate (anoint) a few and diminish others, as a two-part loop and sequence. Like the Golden Child phenomenon in families.

In other words: Elevating the anointed in the name of stripping all others of value. It’s done by stealth and almost entirely concealed as a mechanism of violence.

Healthy people lift up as many as they can at the same time.

Many can be right at the same time even if they hold very different “views.”

And how many people understand or appreciate the fact that wrongness (error) actually gives birth to truth, and so need not be beaten like a field mouse by a terrified housewife with a stiff broom.

Everybody who was generous enough to be wrong about a matter became, served as, the compost of the green truth sprout. And truth takes time. At least 30 years for anything of any significance to come into clarity, but usually more.

Marshall Rosenberg said that compliments are as essential to “violent” communication as scorn and diagnosis. “Same game,” he said. “Reward and punishment.”

His most central mantra was:

”Say the need.”

I sometimes can not believe he was Jewish, but he was.

Many of us have hilarious stories of failure and humiliation from the times we attempted to “say the need.” Doesn’t there need to be some kind of interest in your “needs” before the conversations occur? What if we flat out can’t interest anybody?

Either way, do watch the Marshall clip above. And if you want to see the whole 3 hour Red Shirt presentation, it is here.

I will forget 98% of what I ever saw on the internet eventually, but I will never forget that clip. I always swim back to it, having forgotten everything he taught, having failed, having expressed my unmet needs in a “suicidal manner” at 4 in the morning, or what have you.


”It is difficult, truly, to be reconciled to sky-high injustice.”

—Zbigniew Herbert

Anger

Many cite John 2:15-16, as proof of what we call “righteous anger:” The good kind.

And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the tables; And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father's house a house of merchandise.

— John 2:15–16, King James Version^[9]

Jesus needed the anger to move the stuff out, fast.

This is where the contemplation of this Bible passage usually ends—but it should be a beginning. We should ask: “Why were they trading money in temples?” (Subject will be returned to.)

Disinterest in The Feelings Of Others: A Recipe For Catastrophe, and Yes: Self Importance

Richard and I were building a taxonomy of the spiritual world over the 17 year span of our friendship. I would bring things (spirits as I understood them) to him and ask if he knew what they were.

The only times I recall real anger, rising up in his voice was when he was in the presence of the spirit of mockery. I think I had read him some mocking attack or other, probably of me, probably during the worst days of the HIV dissident civil war. The side that felt it had been slighted expressed an astonishing array of violences—thus, the question of where power resided became complicated. One side may have been factually right, while the other side was infinitely more decent and civilized. But the eyes all went dark and glassy, gazing at the scientific accuracy kind of rightness, infused with the hunter’s bloodlust.

“I hate mockery,” Celia, “I really hate it,” he said.

“I know Richard,” I said.

He hated it even more than I did.

1 Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers,

(Psalm 1)

Another spirit we examined was accusation. I called Richard one hot summer day from a CVS on Amsterdam Avenue, feeling for some reason near death, and asked him about accusation, which we’d discussed many times. I walked outside and the din of traffic made me have to strain to hear him.

“Accusation…in the spiritual realm?”

“Yes.”

”You’re asking me what it is?”

“Yes.”

There was a pause. He was thinking.

“Jet black,” he said. “It’s jet black, Celia.”

“Every time?” I asked.

He said yes.

I’m always astonished that people are not more afraid of accusation than they are.

They’re more afraid of bulls or snakes than they are of an accusation arising in themselves, against another. But it should be the other way around: A bull or a snake could kill you, but neither could make you betray something you once loved.