The Hunger
Games from a Jungian,
Political, and Environmental Perspective
Dennis L. Merritt, Ph.D., Jungian Analyst, Ecopsychologist
www.ecojung.com
The
movie The Hunger Games
at one level depicts the adolescent's world on steroids and at
another level relates to powerful forces stirring in America. As a
nation we are struggling to find a new identity as the myths that
have sustained us are showing their age and ineptness while the
controlling powers are expressing themselves more strongly. In
Games those controlling
forces directed by President Snow, played by Donald Sutherland, are
challenged by a powerful feminine energy in the form of sixteen year
old Katniss Everdeen, played by Jenifer Lawrence. I see Hunger Games as a allegory of current American culture as Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, about the Salem witch trials, was an allegory of McCarthyism in 1952 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crucible).
The Story
from an Archetypal Perspective
In
the film the rule of the archetype of the Old King as embodied by the
President is nearing its end. The King represents the dominant
features of a culture depicted in its values, attitudes, behaviors
and systems. (1) Old systems in Snow's realm are showing signs of
strain in a decadent society that has lost its soul. The ruling power
uses intimidation, deceit and diversions to maintain its position.
The Capitol is the powerhouse and center of President's domain, a
place of ultra modernity in its buildings, machines, and electronic
marvels. It is inhabited by a ruling elite of shallow people living
in luxury who are caricatures of humans with their bizarre clothing,
makeup and behaviors. This society without a heart is epitomized by
an annual event—the Hunger Games--captivating the entire culture.
The games cruel nature is symptomatic of the absence of the Queen
archetype--there is no feminine companion/counterpart to the
President. The Queen symbolizes the Eros or archetypal feminine in a
culture, the feeling values and how people relate to each other. In
the
film a primary
feminine figure is the woman who reaps the tributes from the
districts: a shallow, empty, painted woman enamored with the allure
of the games.
Outside the Capitol lie twelve poor, starving, downtrodden districts
still being punished for a rebellion over 74 years ago. Twelve is an
archetypal number associated with wholeness (twelve months, twelve
apostles). Here we have a kingdom of the haves and the have nots,
reflecting the 1% and 99% in American society. Every year a male and
a female between the ages of 12 and 18 are selected at random as
tribute (sacrifice) to represent their district in the Hunger Games.
The randomness highlights the cruel uncertainty of fate, subjecting
everyone to its fears. The games are an annual reminder of the
punishment for rebelling against the powers that be, a punishment
meted out in the form of human lives for the entertainment of the
populace and a means of maintaining a fear in both city and country
of the ruling power.
The tributes get trained in the arts of combat and survival before
being thrown into a dog-eat-dog world--the ultimate survival
show—teenage gladiators in a Thunderdome sport. To survive they
must generate interest in sponsors, selling themselves to their
captors' conscious and unconscious desires. Game activities are
manipulated for audience appeal and the rules changed accordingly,
including a manufactured love scene.
Katniss Everdeen is the heroine, cats being associated with the
archetypal feminine–sensuous, sleek, and cunning. Everdeen sounds
like evergreen, a symbol of hope and rebirth. Kat is an attractive
woman of the woods who developed her hunting skills to help feed her
starving mother and sister. She is an Artemis type with the heart of
an Amazon female warrior. As a young woman she represents open and
innocent feminine energy, full of potential, not raped by society or
sold out to its values. She holds the possibility of birthing a new
generation, symbolic of a new paradigm, and becoming the Queen of a
new culture with a positive Eros. Katniss is from the last of the
districts, the twelfth, similar to the archetypal domain of Jesus
coming from rural Nazareth. She represents the salt-of-the-earth,
down-to-earth, hard working class of her coal miner district. Her
type of people do the back-breaking, unpleasant and often dangerous
jobs, represented in American society by the likes of coal miners and
illegal immigrant workers.
Katniss embodies the archetypal energies of what Carl Jung called the
“the two million-year-old man within.” This is a link back to
nature, a place to get clean when, according to Jung, we have had too
much civilization. (2) Katniss is a woman toughened by suffering and
survival, having lost her father in a mining accident and living in
abject poverty under the oppression of the Capitol. (3) She sees and
experiences the dark side of the ruling forces, as do women and
minorities in a male-dominated society. This is archetypically
presented in our Judeo-Christian tradition by Job seeing the dark
side of God. (Jung 1969, p. 365-397; Merritt 2012, p. 55) Katniss has
not lost her heart, displaying the compassion of a Jesus in offering
to sacrifice herself for her terrified younger sister. She shows warm
teenage affection for Gale Hawthorne, a wholesome male from her
community who shares a love of the wild. Kat is an emblem of courage,
fearlessness, and grit; a crafty being with what Jesus said is needed
in this difficult world--“to be as cunning as serpents and as
innocent as doves.” (Matthew 10:16)
A hero needs helpers, helpers who know the system and its weaknesses.
It often comes from unsuspected sources, in this instance a drunken
mentor, Haymitch Abernathy played by Woody Harleson. Alcoholism is
one of the prices paid for living in a soulless world. Katniss wins
him over by her very nature and he teaches her the importance of
appearance, presentation, and the vagaries of the powers that be. She
also wins the support of a symbol of the oppressed in our society—an
African American male, Cinna, played by Lenny Kravitz. He uses his
sense of beauty, sexiness, grace and flare (Cinematic), aided by his
sensitivities as a minority, to design outfits that dazzle the
Capitol audiences, functioning like Cinderella's fairy godmother. (4)
His stunning gowns enabled Katniss to outwardly display and see her
true beauty and have it reflected back to her in the admiration of
the audience and sponsors. The challenge is to not to be seduced by
power, glamour and material ways but to stay connected to one's soul,
the inner beauty of the True Self--to remain as Cinderella in
contrast to her step-sisters. By staying connected to Cinna's spirit
when she faces the massive audience adoring her and her dress, she
maintains her balance and equilibrium and does not get abducted by
fame and adulation.
Katniss
acquires an ally in the games in Rue, a young African American girl,
a child, from a poor agricultural district, representing the roots of
slavery and racism as a repressive element in American society. Rue
does not have a killer mentality and lacks Kat's tough survival
skills associated with a more primal hunting base, so Rue becomes the
innocent sacrifice. Katniss is able to avoid the competitive
hunt-to-the death game, killing only in self-defense much like
Americans like to imagine themselves doing. She suspects Peeta, her
male partner from district twelve, has turned against her after she
sees him in alliance with killers, but his non-aggressive suggestion
to his band to wait it out rather than attack Katniss ends up buying
time for a solution to emerge at Rue's suggestion (the wasps). Peeta
remains true to his commitment not to let his soul be destroyed by
the system and had revealed his secret love for Katniss—saved by
Eros. Flashbacks reveal that she had seen him at a humiliating moment
when he was being severely reprimanded for burning loaves of bread
that had to be thrown to the swine. Peeta felt guilty for tossing a
loaf to Katniss that landed in the mud as she crouched in the rain:
the bread of life delivered in a hostile manner. By using camouflage,
cleverly, he survives by hiding with his wounds in plain sight. Peeta
is an interesting combination of brute strength and a sense of
beauty; someone who can easily tote heavy bags of grain and
be a master cake decorator; can handle raw ingredients and produce a
delicate finished product.
The
deepest conflict Katniss experiences is to be placed in the position
of having to express romantic affection for Peeta. He certainly loves
her and the audience wants a good love story, `a la Shakespeare’s
“star crossed lovers” in Romeo and Juliet, so Katniss goes along
to get along. Meanwhile, her True Love back in the home district
watches the unfolding drama on TV. Jung said it is better to be a
conscious hypocrite than an unconscious one. In the end, we do not
know if Katniss will stay with Peeta or somehow get back to Gale,
also a woman's name, suggesting a man with a developed feminine side,
his anima (see the anima section in my blog at this site on A
Dangerous Method).
Archetypal
Monsters in American Democracy
Many
Americans can identify with the tone and feel in Hunger
Games
of being trapped in a deadly system that seems impervious to change.
How such systems can develop in a democracy is an important issue and
the answers are related to the film.
Modern day monsters, according to Jung, are the large machines and
huge organizations such as the military complex, big businesses, and
corporations: he asked us to imagine how the little merchants felt
when they were crushed by the Standard Oil Trust. (Jung 1984, p. 538,
539) President Snow (cold, heartless) with his Capitol and its
relation to the oppressed personifies a monster developing in
American society and its affect on the dynamics and current state of
American culture. (5) Snow's monster status in our culture is largely
the consequence of the manipulations by corporate power to establish
systems and laws to extend its range. American cultural biases,
fears, racism, self-image and conservative religions have been
deliberately manipulated with concepts and boiler-plate laws
developed by conservative think tanks. These are promulgated by “fair
and balanced” news groups and funneled out to politicians through
the likes of the American Legislative Exchange (ALEC). (6) Popular
showmen of hate radio like Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh use their
genius of communication to spread the propaganda.
There
has been a slow but profound evolution of the American monsters like
the military-industrial-congressional complex and businesses too big
to fail. (7) Corporations are an integral part of these systems.
Originally created with a revokable charter to facilitate economic
development to benefit all people, corporations have evolved to have
the legal rights of a person with the sole charge to make money for
the stockholders. That
is the sick system, that
is the main monster. There is no
responsibility to one's children or grandchildren, let alone the
seventh generation.
Moral obligations to people, the next generation, the environment, do
not exist. Money talks, “Show me the money!” Money is God.
A prime example of the plethora of corporate power abuses is
described in two letters sent by the British Royal Society to Exxon
Mobile, berating them for funding groups that deliberately mis-inform
people about climate change. They make it seem that many scientists
doubt that the present climate change is largely due to humans—a
total untruth. (8) One of the groups had been hired by Phillip Morris
in 1993 to create doubt that second hand smoke is harmful to your
health as pronounced by a 1992 government report. (9) President Snow
in the movie is a face, a personification, of that all-too-typical
type of corporate mentality.
The tributes from the districts can be seen as personifications of
deaths consequent to climate change that will literalize the
apocalyptic horrors described in the Book of Revelation. The effects
of climate change resulting from humans burning fossil fuels was
computer modeled over 30 years ago: severe weather conditions in the
forms of prolonged droughts, massive floods, monster storms
(including hurricanes and tornadoes), rising sea levels, exceedingly
highs winds, etc. Humans, it is estimated, will be responsible for
the elimination of half of the approximately 10 million species of
plants and animals on the planet, the polar bear being the poster
child as the Arctic ice cap melts. More insect born diseases will
appear in northern climes and farmers will suffer greater crop
failures and losses. Our national security advisors are expressing
concern over water wars, an inevitably in nations around the globe.
Jung
suggested we might sensitize ourselves to evils like war by imagining
what it would be like to sacrifice a person to the God of War when
war drums are beating. (Jung 1988, p. 1276, 1277) If that person was
randomly chosen, everyone in the society would take it personally.
Then we
would deeply and seriously engage and confront warmongering. The
consequences of climate change are much further reaching than that of
war, indeed will be the genesis of many wars. The young couples in
the Hunger Games might be thought of as sacrifices to corporate power
and the God of Money, for it is the poor and disenfranchised who
will, as usual, be most affected by climate change and be the ones to
join the military for lack of jobs elsewhere.
The 23 deaths a year in the Hunger Games do not compare with the slow
and painful deaths of tens of thousands annually from illnesses
resulting from air, water and product contamination due to inadequate
laws, regulations or enforcement. Also to be considered are the
countless deaths of souls from operating in heartless systems with
the accompanying drug and alcohol abuse.
If
our lives or that of our children or friends were to be sacrificed to
the God of Money, the God of corporate power and financial
institutions too big to fail, we would be outraged by the
conservative Supreme Court decision in Citizens
United that
allows corporations and other organizations to make unlimited
contributions to political campaigns. This year, 2012, oil companies
will make over $136 billion in profits. Citizen contributions cannot
approach this amount of funding. Disempowerment and despair result
from knowing that lobbyists and corporations are literally writing
our laws and of the necessity of politicians to raise huge sums of
money to run campaigns. They have to sell their souls to big money,
as garishly depicted in Hunger
Games,
with the necessity to obtain sponsors to fund campaigns and stay in
the political game.
The Distorted
Power of Advertising in a Consumer Culture
Complimenting the conservative think tanks and ALEC-like groups is
the power of advertising in our consumer-based society. More subtle
than the Swiftboat political ads are the ads that create the basis
for considering issues. A current ad by the oil and gas industry is a
prime example. It features a woman in her power pant-suit confidently
striding across an outline of the US with happy workers emerging in
her wake in the map. She spouts the buzz words “jobs” and the
“energy independence” America will enjoy from new methods of oil
and gas extraction. Not mentioned are the methods used to increase
production—fracking and the Canadian tar sands. Fracking uses
enormous amounts of water and explosive chemicals that include
carcinogens to crack shale bedrock underlying 30 states, thereby
releasing natural gas. Its potential for serious and permanent damage
to aquifers and drinking supplies has not been seriously researched
and alarming problems have already surfaced. (10) The Canadian tar
sands use 2 to 5 barrels of water to produce a barrel of oil and
release 2 to 3 times the amount of greenhouse gases compared to
conventional production. (11) James Hansen, one of America's leading
climatologists, has stated that if the XL Pipeline from upper Alberta
to Gulf refineries proceeds the ball game is over. Inevitably the
amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere will result
in a global temperature increase of over 2 degrees C, beyond the
tipping point whereby irreversible and apocalyptic damage will occur.
Hansen, the scientist, has become so frustrated with lack of public
understanding that he has taken to the streets to organize
demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience. The Bill Moyers interview with Anthony Leiserowitz from Yale provides an excellent review of our climate change dilemma with helpful suggestions on how to deal with it (http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-ending-the-silence-on-climate-change/)
Advertisers
and propaganda agents play on our unconscious fears, attitudes and
desires— racism, sexism, homophobia, abortion issues, macho male
mentality, heroic stances, beliefs that America is number one with
God on our side, adolescent black-and-white mentality, and an
American optimism and naivete. We like to believe we are a classless
society and anyone can grow up to be president. (12a) However, the huge and
growing divide between the haves and have-nots, the 1% versus the
99%, is making that increasingly unlikely. (http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-plutocracy-rising/) Social issues in political
campaigns become tactical diversions from discussions of real
importance—climate change, health care, education, the
consequences of globalizations and automation, etc. What's
the Matter with Kansas (Frank
2004) summarizes how people are persuaded to vote against their best
interests by the deliberate manipulation of evangelical and
conservative religious groups. A six-day creation is endorsed by 49%
of Republicans and 39% of Democrats. (12b) “Faith based reality”
makes it difficult to rationally discuss issues and run a democracy.
Polarization and chaos favors the powers that be. A “God is on our
side and you can go to Hell” mentality is not a suitable ground for
the debate and compromises necessary in a democratic system.
The
Hunger Games as the
Distilled Essence of the American Worldview
It
is
necessary to change the systems people get trapped in. Good people
can get co-opted into doing evil things in a corrupt system, be it a
corporation, an ad agency, or a political or business environment. As
in Hunger
Games,
one can get caught up in a competitive dog-eat-dog atmosphere,
confident in one's heroic abilities to overcome all obstacles and
beat the opposition by any means necessary to win the grand prize.
This cultural attitude is rooted in the American icons of the lone
cowboy and the rugged, independent, heroic frontiersmen and women who
battled the savage world of the Wild West. We have remnants of
Calvinism with the belief that being prosperous is a sign of God's
favor—and vice versa. (Merritt 2012, p. 9, 133 note 8) Unregulated
corporate personhood represents the ultimate distillation of the
American worldview. Real people get wounded and killed by the worst
of corporate behavior as metaphorically depicted in Hunger
Games.
At the same time, gambling is increasing in American society as we
struggle in tight economic times, a belief in a get-rich-quick
possibility as a means of escape.
Our films and TV programs are amuck with violence and bounty systems
have been revealed in America's sport—the violent game of football.
We are addicted to survival programs and are voyeurs into the lives
of Hollywood stars. Politicians mercilessly seek any dirt they can
use against opponents. Our populace not only lacks financial, health
and retirement security compared to other developed countries, but we
have not done well in our relationship with the rest of the world.
Growing past adolescence and into a mature country has been a
problem.
Hunger
Games
reflects an adolescent world with its cliques, nasty remarks, deadly
rumors, bullying, and massive levels of uncertainty and insecurity.
Katniss does her best in the games, and throws a monkey wrench into
the system by being ready to commit suicide with her partner rather
than sell out. They were ready to sacrifice the False Self, being
part of the system, to protect the True Self in Thelma and Louise
fashion. (13) That makes the system look bad. Appearance is
everything: witness corporate greenwashing. In the film, the street
revolt is crushed and the couple's victory is temporary--they return
to their enslaved communities and the Old King remains in power.
Katniss is in danger of being trapped in a False Bride position in
the end, appearing to the world as partner to Peeta. A True Bride
status remains her goal to attain. (14)
Hunger
Games as an Elaborate Punch Dream
I
see Hunger Games
as a film version of what University of Wisconsin-Madison psychiatry
professor James Gustafson calls a “punch dream”--a dream with a
kick from amplified negative energy or situations. The dreams' intent
is to shock the dreamer into awareness. An example is the dream of a
bright but mousey woman who was having a difficult time establishing
her own power and identity. She managed to slowly get onto a degree
path and was within a couple years of completing her Ph.D. when she
entered analysis. She dreamt she was walking around the house picking
up the faeces of her family members. I often used that dream in our
analytic sessions when I wanted to remind her to be more assertive
and to hold her ground. She is now the chair of prestigious
university department.
Hunger
Games, like
many dreams, extrapolates a current situation into a potential future
narrative. If one takes the negative energies and systems in our
culture, extends them out 74 years and amplify the results,
metaphorically it might look like Hunger
Games.
Amplify unfettered, unregulated, free market capitalism and financial
institutions in a globalized economy and dramatically increase the
gap between the haves and the have-nots, and voila!
The Ayn Rand and environmentally ignorant solutions currently being
proposed for government programs in education, health care, energy,
research funding, student loans, etc. will take years to yield their
deadly fruits. Imagine what it will be like to ratchet up the effects
of climate change and extend it out 74 years beyond Katrina.
A
Paradigm Shift as the Way Forward
From
an archetypal perspective it is crucial that we understand the Greek
god Hermes if we are to confront at the deepest level of the issues
raised in The
Hunger Games.
Hermes is the messenger and trickster, the god
of dreams, the unconscious, businessmen, advertising, adolescence,
gambling and film makers. Hermes can lead the way or lead us
astray—it depends on our awareness of his activities and the
ethical positions we take on them. (See volume 3 of The
Dairy Farmer's Guide to the Universe—Hermes, Ecopsychology and Complexity Theory) These aspects of Hermes and many of the salient points in this essay are exquisitely well illustrated in the Bill Moyers interview with Marty Kaplan from the Norman Lear Center with some closing comments on current McCarthyism thrown in as an extra. (http://billmoyers.com/segment/marty-kaplan-on-big-moneys-effect-on-big-media/)
We
can see what needs to be done but the forces are deeply entrenched,
well funded, and organized. It's going to be a long hard struggle as
Joan Biaz said in in one of the last anti-Viet Nam war protests held
in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jung associated our period with a time
of danger and chaos when old systems no longer work, the powers feel
threatened, and they forcefully and deceitfully struggle to maintain
their position. Jung saw the last 2000 years, the astrological Age of
Pisces, as being the Christian era. The sign of Pisces has two fish
swimming in opposite directions, representing to Jung the light and
dark sides of Christianity. The first 1000 years emphasized the light
side of God and strengthened the ego, while the second 1000 years
revealed the dark side of God and the split in our God image—we
don't have monotheism but a dualistic religion: on earth the Devil
has equal power with God. (Jung 1969, ¶¶ 257, 644, 660, 733;
Merritt 2012, p. 58) Jung, who died in 1961, emphasized the necessity
for a paradigm shift in the West and for the world to the extent
Western values have come to dominate the planet. He coined the terms
“New Age” and “Age of Aquarius” for this needed shift and
said an important feature would be the emergence of positive
archetypal feminine energies. Many see 1968, that pivotal year, as
the beginning of the Aquarian Age. I see the emergence of strong
young women in recent movies as an important sign; Katniss in Hunger
Games,
Alexander King in The
Descendents,
and Sabina Spielrein in A
Dangerous Method
(see my analysis of that film in my blog on this site).
This is a challenging and exciting time. Within a few years we must
reformulate our concept of what it is to be human and how to relate
to the environment in a profoundly different way. Millions of people
around the globe are organizing to address environmental issues. The
Earth Charter is a superb document providing a comprehensive
framework for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global
society. It recognizes that “environmental protection, human
rights, equitable human development, and peace are interdependent and
indivisible.” (earthcharter.org.) (15)
Two movements in America are particularly interesting. The Move to
Amend is organizing to get a constitutional amendment to abolish
corporate personhood. (movetoamend.org) This process will take years
and time is short, so I like the focus of the Citizens Climate Change
Lobby, whose premise is that major change occurs when ten percent of
the population is passionately committed to a cause.
(citizensclimatelobby.com) They are pushing for a carbon tax bill as
the most effective means of limiting CO2 emissions, a position
supported by James Hansen. (16) “Moyers and Company” on PBS is
required viewing for topics germane to these and other issues
directly or broadly related to environmental problems.
My
contribution has been to develop the field of Jungian
ecopsychology, allowing me to integrate my background in the
ecological sciences (a Ph.D. from Berkeley in entomology) with nearly
30 years of experience as a Jungian psychoanalyst and over 25 years
of participation in Lakota Sioux ceremonies. (17) My thoughts are
contained in The Dairy Farmer's
Guide to the Universe—Jung, Hermes, and Ecopsychology, the 4 volumes being available from Fisher King Press and other publishers. (18)
After developing the principles of Jungian ecopsychology in volume 1, Jung
and
Ecopsychology, I show how
they can be applied in psychotherapy, our educational system, and in
our relationship with indigenous cultures. Volume 2, The Cry of Merlin--Jung, the Prototypical Ecopsychologist, reveals how an individual's biography can be
treated as an ecopsychological exercise and articulates how Jung's life
experiences and concepts make him the prototypical ecopsychologist. Volume 3, Hermes, Jungian Ecopsychology and
Complexity Theory, provides an archetypal, mythological and symbolic
foundation for Jungian ecopsychology. Volume 4, Land, Weather, Seasons, Insects: An Archetypal View, describes how a deep,
soulful connection can be made with the environment using a Jungian
ecopsychological approach. This involves the use of science, myths, symbols,
dreams, Native American spirituality, imaginal psychology and the I Ching.
Notes
- The kings in ancient times were regarded as living gods or as God's representative on earth with the wellbeing of the peoples and the land associated with him. An excellent description of the archetypes of the King and Queen is presented in Marie-Louise von Franz, 1996, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Revised ed., Shambhala: Boston and London, p. 50-55. Studying fairytales was the most important means of developing an archetypal perspective and a symbolic eye during my training at the Jung Institute in Zurich.
- We can get clean by going out into nature or going inward through our dreams to connect with nature within. (Jung 1984, p. 142)
- Apropos of the theme of corporate power and Hunger Games is the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster on April 5, 2010. A methane gas explosion killed 29 miners and Massey Energy was blamed due to numerous safety violations over a period of years. A report from an independent investigation noted how Massey intimidated politicians with the vast amounts of money it could and did use to influence elections to get favorable legislators and judges. The report also noted that safety regulations were violated to increase profit margins. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Big_Branch_Mine_disaster retrieved April 13, 2012)
- The master of ceremonies exclaims, “She's on fire!” Katniss is alive with life energy, with spirit portending redeeming possibilities like that of the flaming apostles at the Pentecost. Red is a sign of life's blood, of passion. At the physical level, she's hot.
- The ability to personify is an important human trait. Many of the ancient Greeks knew the gods and goddesses were not real, but they also knew there were forces both within the psyche and in the world that had powerful influences on their lives. These forces were personified in the forms of stories, images, statues, rituals and symbolic expressions to make the Greeks more conscious of the forces and their interactions with each other and with humans.
- The American Legislative Exchange exerts a powerful influence on American politics and attitudes through a system designed to favor big business. Basic concepts are that everything should be privatized except for a strong defense and minimum regulations should be imposed on businesses. ALEC is funded almost entirely by corporations with the ultraconservative Koch brothers being a major supporter. (http://www.thenation.com/article/161973/koch-connection) Federal and state legislators, mostly Republicans, are wined and dined at subsidized annual meetings where model legislation is handed to them to be enacted in their home states and in Congress. Goals include crushing the labor unions, undermining public education through voucher programs and other means, restricting voter rights, privatizing the health care industry and Medicare, opposing health and environmental standards like restrictions on greenhouse gas omissions, establishing corporate prisons, and supporting concealed weapons and “Stand your ground” laws as seen in the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. (http://alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed)
- President Dwight Eisenhower, the commanding Allied General in World War II, gave a farewell address to the nation on January 17, 1961, just days before leaving his second term in office. He warned of the dangers of a military-industrial complex and the undue influence it could have on American society both financially and spiritually. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWiIYW_fBfY)
A "must see" 2003 documentary is "The Corporation," a film based on the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan, a University of British Columbia law professor. An excellent description of the film on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_%28film%29) lists the sociopath traits of a corporation if indeed it were a person, which means that the business form dominating the world's economic systems is sociopathic, period. Running beneath the credits at the end of the film is a list of websites that elaborate on particular topics and offers opportunities to get involved in rectifying the problems. - http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/sep/19/ethicalliving.g2
An excellent video on climate change deniers is Potholer54′s latest video – “The evidence for climate change without computer models or the IPCC”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ6Z04VJDco.
His video “Science vs the Feelies"makes some great points with good humor besides.
- Air quality poorer than in Los Angeles and Houston has been reported in sparsely populated counties in Wyoming with large numbers of fracked gas wells. There is growing evidence of a relationship between fracking and the recent spate of earthquakes in the Central and Eastern US. Pressure from then Vice President Cheney resulted in laws exempting fracking from air and water quality standards and removing a requirement to disclose the names of the chemicals used in the process. At best the natural gas from fracking may release half the amount of climate change gases as burning coal, but estimates are that full utilization of the its potential will raise global temperatures by 3.5 degrees C, well above the 2 degrees increase estimated to be the potential tipping point. (Bill McKibben, 2012, Why Not Frack? The New York Review of Books, Vol. LIX, No. 4, March 8, 2012, p. 13-15) The documentary Gasland offers a good introduction to the problem. (http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/whats-fracking#faq)
- The tar sands strip mining and drilling project in Alberta, Canada has been called the largest and most destructive project on Earth. If the Keystone XL pipeline is built, Canadian boreal forests and wetlands in an area the size of Florida will be mined, removing the area as a carbon sink and instead adding it a contributor to greenhouse gases. Over 50 square miles of toxic waste ponds have alreadhy been created, and severe water pollution is affecting the health of downstream indigenous populations. Millions of migrating birds will be lost and huge aquifers in the US will be at risk from accidents in piping this particularily toxic mix of oil and gas to the Gulf. Production is expected to triple by 2025. Two excellent websites are http://www.nrdc.org/energy/dirtyfuels_tar.asp, which includes a video showing land damaged from the removal of tar sands, and http://www.nrdc.org/energy/tarsandsinvasion.asp
Top quality updated information on the effects on the climate resulting from the Canadian tar sands industry can be found at TarSandsRealityCheck.com. It counters the high-level pro-oil sands lobbying ongoing in Canada, the U.S. and Europe around the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and Europe on the Fuel Quality Directive.
12a. The power of advertising and propaganda, Hermes' domains, is extensively discussed in this article: http://truth-out.org/news/item/17020-transcend-conditioned-consciousness-none-but-ourselves-can-free-our-minds. (retrieved June 17, 2013) The article also examines the distortions in American society resulting from the accumulation of wealth and explores hopeful possibilities offered by the Internet.
12b. http://today.yougov.com/news/2012/02/28/social-issues-big-party-differences-gay-rights-and/ retrieved April 15, 2012.
13. The True Self/False Self is a concept developed by the brilliant British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. It is intimately related to Jung's concept of the Self. To live in relation to the True Self is to live out of the unique essence of one's nature and in a manner that furthers the integration of the personality and a movement towards wholeness. The False Self is a fragmented personality unaware of its unique and essential nature because it is identified with the collective and/or has split off parts of itself due to traumatic experiences (the complexes). Also see note 14.
14. An alchemical image of wholeness is the sacred marriage, the mysterium coniunctionis, the mysterious union of opposites. The opposite sex is the most available biological equivalent of the Other (see the anima section in A Dangerous Method on this blog site). A woman personifies the soul of a man (and vice versa), the embodied unconscious, and at the deepest level, in those divine moments in a romantic relationship, is the face of God. The divine marriage is thus symbolic of a union with God. The True Bride is this deepest level of the anima, acting as a function of the Self (usually God in our culture), the True Self in Winnicott's system (see note 13). Since one's unique nature is an integral aspect of the True Self, very few women come close to a particular man's ideal woman within (his anima), a prerequisite for the experience of sublime moments in a relationship. The False Bride is the anima related to the distorted sense of Self, Winnicott's False Self, before we have discovered our unique and true nature. I discuss the dynamics of the discovery and connection with the True Bride in my analysis of Grimm's Cinderella in Appendix D: The Alchemy of Psychoanalysis in volume 1 of The Dairy Farmer's Guide to the Universe—Jung, Hermes, and Ecopsychology.
16.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/06/nasa-scientist-climate-change
17.
If
you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all [his]
projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty
thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and
conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now
unable to say that they do this or that, they are
wrong, and they must be fought against…Such a man knows
that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only
learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the
world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal
part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day. (Jung
1969, ¶ 140)
Jesus
articulated this 2000 years ago in
Luke
6:41: "Why do you see the speck in
your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? 6:42 Or how can you say to your neighbor, 'Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,' when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye."
your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? 6:42 Or how can you say to your neighbor, 'Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,' when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye."
18.
Click on the bookcover of volume 1 depicted beside this blog and it will take you to the FisherKing website
where chapter 1 of The
Dairy Farmer's Guide to the Universe
is available free.
References
References
Frank,
T. 2004. What's
the Matter with Kansas—How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.
Metropolitan Books.
Jung,
C. 1969. The
Collected Works of C. G. Jung . 2nd
ed. Vol. 11. Psychology and Religion: West and East. H.
Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler and W. McGuire, eds. R.F.C. Hull, trans.
Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.
1984.
Dream Analysis: Notes
of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930 by C. G. Jung.
W. McGuire, ed. Princeton University Press: Princeton.
1988.
Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra: Notes
of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 by C. G. Jung. James
Jarrett, ed. Princeton University Press: Princeton.
Merritt,
D. L. 2012. The
Dairy Farmer's Guide to the Universe—Jung, Hermes, and
Ecopsychology. Vol. 1. Jung and Ecopsychology. Fisher
King Press: Carmel, CA.
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