Psyche of Society.

Psyche of Society and Holocausts, who cares?

There are many books on the subject of psychology related to individual states of existence with notable experts who have attempted to explain the processes at work that may shape the actions of individuals and mind modes that convolutes between the arguments of the nature or nurture that forms and impacts on overall behaviour.  In most negative contexts it is the displayed behaviour psychology of what might be deemed to be a behaviour pattern that is unhelpful, socially unacceptable and dangerous to the individual afflicted with say an obsessive psychology, or it is potentially a danger to others in a perhaps numerically limited way. Psychologically damaged or high operating psychopath individuals that portray such excessive behaviour traits may stand out to the extent that they are noticed and are assessed as being treatable by some form of medication or controls and society may comfort its-self that in a civilised culture the excessive dangerous behaviour of individual is just that, an individual aberration that is treated humanely as possible, albeit some do have to be taken out of social circulation permanently.

Yet there are occasions when some normal (in an acceptable behavioural way) individuals are, for a variety of reasons, maybe afflicted or have suffered a change to their psyche that drive them to adopt a persuasive stance that becomes completely at odds with their ‘normal’ past behaviour and more noticeably portrays attitude or expressions that are considered unreasonable from an acceptable social context but by their being in a position of power / influence are given a relaxed benediction to extol their new psychological expressions and within a little while, infect or persuade others to group and adopt a similar performance. Although individual psychology studies are manifest in their reasoning as to how and why the psyche of individual may be formed there is little real substantive arguments to point to the danger a society faces when an able performer, with a powerful platform, can override ‘common sense’ or a responsible balance of reason, to take over the awareness of society and drive it to unfortunate divergent consequences. Often the take up of such divergent expressions occurs when within the culture there is a period of subtle undefined tension / stress that may have had a long gestation time and this compounds with the expanded driven psychosis to develop a force of authority that progress’s forward with covert intimidation to become a self driven manifestation of a faction psychosis, cult, or dogma which although emanating from the core group, expands to be influential within a wider society.

This distorted influence, taken up by a large enough force then becomes the unchallenged internal secreted view of the psyche of society and dependent on the influences under which it is driven and the purpose it is put to, colours the majority of the social order to the extent that mass action can be carried out with little opposition or examination to the actual rational of the afflicting psychosis. The warnings of ‘by words and deeds shall you know them’ becomes for a while overshadowed in the psychosis that grips the actors patently oblivious to the unreasonableness of their action and perhaps to a limited degree, thankful that the effects are not impinging on themselves or their own. Self preservation is a powerful motivational force that only an ascetic, saint, hero or martyr can challenge.

It might be suggested that there is no real comparison between the psyche of an individual, shaped by personnel events and the identification of a covert discordant group faction within society or the development of a social psyche however there is such a thing as a corporate perception that generates an awareness others may take to encompass the view of a culture, be it America, English, French, German etc. There have been some good examples of group psychosis that directs a coordination action which in retrospect are a wonder to understand but taken as a condition of joint enterprise can be seen to be as a result of singular or preconditioned sway absorbed by a group and made manifest. Such psychosis is often used to focus on an event, situation, or any others in whatever form to hide a different reality or disguise inconvenient truths or create a scapegoat as a way of solving an ephemeral problem and maybe ride with an opportunistic endemic one. In most cases of open and volatile expression (free speech) the influence of such distractive action is limited and does not explode into the psyche of society at large even though there may be an undercurrent of usable preconditions that would facilitate a mass psyche movement to aid an engendered social psychosis. Common sense or a broad moral balance may be enough to expose the irrationality of a developing social psychosis; however these values sometimes are found sleeping or does not gain enough force to counter iniquitous measures.

In a limited way one might draw parallels of group psychosis with cases such as the 17^th century  Lancashire and Salem witch trials,  or in the 1990/1 in UK (Scotland) when a number of social workers believed that children were in danger from satanic rituals, black magic, devil worship or in the expressive fervour of crowd football followers, or the recent economic problems built on the past hubris of decades that led directly to the ongoing economic crash of 2008; or the political Greek and Berlusconi situations, are all potentially wellsprings indicators of group psychosis at work that are damaging and are, because of their limited extent, generally not looked upon as a symptom of an hidden endemic problem and are thought to have little powerbase to contaminate a wider society but the impact still reverberates in the collective complex. Linking this collectivism to the unseen drive within a society, Jung in1918 wrote an article in which he selectively illustrated the different ‘heritable’ essentials of the collective unconscious in and between chosen semites and germanics, used later as a force to be complicit in the orchestrated genocide of a people, with the suggested barbarian psyche in play of the offenders. He also suggested that the unconscious within an assemblage ought to be taken very seriously as shared ‘archetypes’ (shared memories, imagery, beliefs) of disparaging nature can be unleashed to cause uninhibited destructive actions.

Sunday the 27^th January 2013 was declared as the Holocaust Memorial Day for all those slaughtered by state and civil organised administration. It is in the UK dedicated to the remembrance of the victims of such killings, held first in January 2001 as a national day and has been on the same date every year since. The date is set as the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 and predates the 2004 the UN votes, to formally commemorate the Holocaust atrocity; the killing of more than a 6 million people who were selected for their religious conviction, ethnicity and purported excessive influence within a society. The word Holocaust has been taken by the survivors as the term specifically to define those expunged for being jewish semite, with a more expansive definition being applied of recent time (although not generally accepted) to include all that systematically perished during war and conflicts like Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia or Syria etc.

It is often been explored after an event of extinction, how could such atrocities occur in any social order? What drives a culture to set about the destruction of defined others that have lived in close association and not recognise the abhorrent nature of the often early consequential actions that are created, the direct or indirect precursors that allows complicit expulsion to take place which deliberately puts those targeted at a seemingly accepted endemic disadvantage leading to their victimisation and atrocities. Yet simple innocuous actions of covert victimisation has and still does occur in the most civilised cultures, surreptitiously easily carried out when linked to sophisticated or uncultured bipartisan tribalism wrapped in a cloth of popularism  that is designed to engender separation, fear, loathing; to differentiate on any level created archetypes that divides one against another, to gain superiority, mask covert action in the pursuit of power and presage a dogma designed to raise or focus angst for self preservation against the proxy cause of one’s own discomfiture.

As Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks said on thought for today program on the 28th, “Each case is different, but it seems to me that it begins with fear. When the world changes, and not for the better, people start worrying about what the future holds. Fear is the most ancient and powerful of all human instincts, and usually it seeks an object, something to focus on. Someone must be behind all this. When you hear the words, “It’s all the fault of,” (anyone) that’s when the alarms should start ringing. Because if history teaches anything it is that it doesn’t take evil men to commit evil deeds. All it takes is fear and a willingness to blame others”

Yet even the most sophisticated society has within it an apocalyptic element of persuasion that is hard to discern when evidence for action to correct a perceived imbalance of circumstances is presented as (disingenuous) reasonableness that seeks to gain popular support and isolate any counter views of legitimate concerns. The perpetrators of the initial archetypes    may well hide behind the smoke-screen of unintended consequences however one does not have to wait to examine the early affects to ascertain the intended overall intent of the guiding principles held by the promoting cadre.      

It is easy to discern the character of individuals that hide behind the personification of their public personality and trends that allows such destructive forces to run loose with the start of simple innocuous remedial steps to take place to solve or ease ‘problems’. Look to Individuals that are adroitly flexible in their manner of dealings with implicit humanity issues and their verbosity that can switch from one expansive view to another narrow selective one of special pleading. They take on the mantel of any office with ultimate flexibility and see no conflict, no disingenuousness, in the things they say and do. They are willing to inflict misfortune onto others with personal impunity and gather to themselves similar minds to flow with the application of power for their own ends. They Invent euphemisms to disguise the implications of actions, deconstruct the intentions with emoluments of perverse reason. They generally aim to stand apart from the host, have or develop an insularity of circumstances while proclaiming their understanding of misfortune and caring nature.   These are the people that will ‘man’ the gates of termination, these are the people that will orchestrate the machinery of authority to create the infrastructure and force compliance, all the while not feeling or understanding opposition to their views. These are the people that although they may choose not to really see the harm being caused by their supportive actions they are at the same time under some relief that it is not them being harmed. The epitaph of “do no harm” does not apply.

It is unproblematic to fall into the trap of focusing on the ills of a time, transferred onto selected others when it is used as a way of appealing to the majority who may be inured to the inequitable circumstances or miss fortune of others who are not advantaged by the rigging of social and economic systems. They (the comfortable ones) for example; the high tax payers, the honest hard pressed workers, the professional middles classes, the squeezed middle, expropriating businesses, are the ones being hurt with the miss placed beneficence gained by the undeserving of a few, perhaps the poor, the disabled, the workless, the carers, the aged, foreigners; anyone not of us are the cause of the problems. In this misdirection it creates a sense that in lifting the undeserving as the cause of the ills of society, rather than seek to correct the dysfunction of systemic civil infrastructures, ‘helping’ them with dependency retractions will be a step to the ultimate solution.

One may be able to discern, at this time, the dialogue being developed that yet again has echo’s of historic repetition and lifts the targets used as the means of creating separations and just now it only takes one word to catalogue the actions by the cloak named ‘austerity’, under which the psychosis creatures waits to be able to grow. Rather than see the developed economic system being caustic and in need of radical organisational controlled investment, self interest is taking the easy option of externalising archetype superficiality and giving expressive vent placed in speeches and mindless expressive derogatory terms that single out a group for vermin attack to support special pleading of a dogma that may appeal to a volume of people and persuade them to accept what might be normally attributed as a bizarre approach, such that it deliberately aims to hurt and punish the helpless and disfranchised; it is an abomination to create any form of human sectarianism, yet it continues and the excuses are to hand; this policy is not like that, this strategy is different, the unintended consequences of this constructive dogma cannot lead to organised slaughter, we did not mean this to happen. One polemic excuse and destructive act follows another and the perpetrators cannot change path, they will do anything to continue to deceive them-selves in the blind belief of self righteousness and bend as many as they can to their corrupted will in the name of prudence, efficiencies and fairness in austerity!....

So what of Holocausts, the disenfranchisement of the segregated, the plebs, wasters, spongers, shirkers, workless, the aliens and dispossessed, anyone not of us? Who cares? It may be one of the most disgusting and unappealing aspect of human nature that it feeds on greed, avarice and the designed misfortune forced onto others so easily promoted by misinformation / euphemisms; fear easily creeps into humanity. With  many perpetrators inured from the pain being inflicted by their actions onto others and that the limited few that have a care cry into the pending storm knowing that isolation, ‘ketteling’, forced independence, anomie self-determination and beggaring thy neighbour carries an appalling social, civic and conscience cost - Mathew13:12.

So frankly not enough do care and so the likelihood is that there will be another avoidable social holocaust. The 21^st century will have its own additional cataclysm to contend with and it will not just be limited to an allowed Balkan, Ruanda, Syria etc example and this time it may not be in a contested uncivil land or time. The psyche of society is changing and the 1st world is again ripe for the picking.

Renot 2013

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