"Fight Fire with Fire"

This is one of my favorite "cookoo cliches" - or cliches, or forms of speech, which galvanize their authority by the way it feels to say it.

It is often goes unnoticed or recognized, but your mind - yes you, the reader of my words - is organized by the principle of 'power'. For example, if someone in fact holds social power, when he (usually a he) exercises it in front of other people, those people with a symmetrical "object relationship' to the ideal of power - which also means the exercise of authority over others - will pick up and assimilate - completely unconsciously - the forms of knowing that the person who expressed power acted from.

I was listening to an interview in which Donald Trump again ignorantly asserted that "torture works" - against the expert study of the subject by psychologists, social scientists and neuroscientists - Donald Trump wishes to believe that a "fight-flight-freeze-faint" syndrome doesn't exist - or - which is even more horrible, he even allows the possibility that "even if torture didn't work" (which it doesn't) "they deserve it anyway". Yes - you heard that correctly. The president of the United States recommends through his speech the value of sadism (and if the pee pee thing is true, masochism as well) - that is, that it is an ideal - a good - that people be horribly traumatized and psychologically and neurologically damaged beyond repair - simply because "they deserve it".

I hope it is clear that this is quite clearly a man with the ethical sensibility of the Nazi's - which is to say, no coherent sensibility - just a partial, picking of information to suit his immediate needs. If his mind could be painted, it would paint something demonically disordered - asymmetrical - black - red - dead - dissociated - Vampiric and vicious.

Don't get too carried away though with "antichrist" imagery: Trump and people who like Trump have simply inherited the ghosts of their ancestors - and so the demons he carries, like all demons, have their etiology in unresolved trauma, which means that everything which 'splinters off' from that originating event is literally - neurologically speaking - bearing a causal relationship to those neurons involved in the mediation of that particular experience. Cause and effect: psychopaths and sociopaths are just what happens when physical attributes (being a male) affords practical power. If we can imagine how far back this thing goes, we may need to go back before the neolithic; but that isn't necessary: even short guys - oftentimes them - can attain practical power simply as a function of their connections or relations with people with practical power.

What I aiming at here is the symbiotic relationship between male physical size and strength and the way authoritarian style of many cultures and civilizations. The problem, as others have written, is that rationality and reason really is on the side of the female i.e. extends from the sorts of emotionality, sensitivity, and attunement, that is generally associated with females. Logic - Science, from Scientia (knowledge), requires the "marriage" of the masculine observing principle with the feminine object principle. The mind needs to know that the knowledge it needs already exists in the world: it just needs to 'attune' i.e. to feel a positive sense of interest, curiosity and wonder towards it.

There is an evil in this world - a sickness - which parades itself as truth to minds that build sand castle convictions which they imagine to be steal towers. The principle of existence - of knowing you exist, but only knowing with reference to the knowledge you've established in your existing: all existential feelings of need are weighed against knowledge - and knowledge, quite literally, is neurologically and psychologically transforming, which means it is epistemologically and ontologically transformative: it changes your sense of reality, your sense of whats real and what isn't - and now position yourself more truly in the wholeness and fullness that is always there when we remind ourselves of it (in the "now" as they say) and all of a sudden your earlier convictions - your earlier insistence of knowing what was true and what wasn't - is shown to be an utter illusion - a horrible, unfair, confusing farce.

That some people have even said "man will beat God", I think to myself: "and by God you mean reality, right?"? Suppose they mean the 'symbolic order'? What does that even mean or amount to, when your favorite capacity to feel, think and experience being emerges through the structured flow of matter? Wishfulness. Trump shows the nefariousness of the absolutism of "just follow your feelings" - when doing so causes you to obliterate the very conditions that sustain your existence.

Finally, to the point of this thread: feelings of existence are so persuasive that someone can be inclined to mimetically parrot the phrase "you don't fight terrorists by being pu$$ies, you have to fight fire with fire". I think to myself, do people even logically ask themselves when they hear this phrase what it actually is saying? If there is a fire, and I add fire to that fire - wouldn't there then be more fire as a function of my adding to it?

As a matter of reality, you fight fire with water, which is to say, you fight the aggressiveness of others with a patient, tactical attunement towards the reasons for acting this way: after all, only those who are hurt want to hurt others. Only when your inner world has been "singularized" by Trauma (with a capital T) does the notion of blurring opposites become appealing. And since narcissism becomes the chosen defense - the mind "expunges", dissociates, ignores, and manipulates attention through the force of affects to not properly attune - because the body - its vitality - seeks its enlivenment elsewhere.

This is why its often said that we are ruled by "angels" and "demons". The object relations are minds become 'entrained' towards function within us as drives, desires i.e. forces within the body. The issue is fundamentally two streams - mind (ego) and soma (body ego) - each moving at different rates, knowing different things - the one inclining at one time, and the other agreeing, or vice versa - such as when we have been shamed by someone - register it as a negative, limb curling affect - only to be instantly drawn to construct a picture around the emotion of anger: the actual core - the emotion which registers the meaning of the interaction - is eviscerated, unnoted, and left "unsymbolized".

A sane person fights fire with water - otherwise your fire throwing will burn the entire thing down.

a reply to: Astrocyte

so then the "angels' and the "demons' are both metaphoric in your reference?

Wall of text. Boring and lame attemp at calling trump supporters racist. Yawn for effort

For the people who didnt read this post it went something like this. Bla bla bla hippy metaphysical nonsense then mix in some religion bla bla bla add some entry level college psychology a dash of attempting white shaming and stir with the official "I'm a liberal and dont like trump".

Also the term fight fire with fire is a term used by firefighters who use controlled burns to starve a fire of fuel effectively killing the fire. It is also a awesome song by Metallica.

What? What is the point you are trying to make exactly? Trump is a psychopath?

I really did try to understand your point, but it's late so maybe it went over my head.

Edit: Last portion of my post could be considered mean spirited. So I'll just stick with maybe it went over my head.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Great post, S&F. Most Trump supporters only think about what's directly in front of them rather than analyze the internal motivations of what they're seeing, so don't worry about those that don't understand.

a reply to: digital01anarchy

Saved me some time there