Having been on the receiving end of survival of the fittest and order out of chaos, resulting in a breakdown in personal structure and complete mental disorganization, I’d have to say I would choose equal rights, equal opportunity over survival of the fittest or order out of chaos. This cliché ruled a time when our country was more social and saner.
The lack of adequate knowledge was a big source of my parent’s problems and of course time in which to acquire that knowledge was an issue. Those with essential knowledge were not sharing it with the public, as in, putting it on the television, or even promoting helpful books about various important subjects on television, which grew into our biggest outlet for information, because writers were suppose to be doing it for us through the television. We were exposed to magazines and newspapers. Books take time to read and comprehend when you lack a sufficient vocabulary.
So a broad vocabulary is important to understanding the world around us, the books available to us, and especially those books which are more technical in nature. Words are most important to understanding what is being said to any of us at any given time. In essence, reading and education seems to be the basis for equality and equal opportunity.
In the past, children from poor families have been excluded from a significant amount of knowledge to which the children of wealthier families have been more privileged, simply because they are born into a higher economic class where education is often private, segregated and exclusive to certain types of knowledge. This means there has always been disparity within our society and while the Declaration of Independence states, “all men are created equal”, all men and women do not remain equal. This is the reality of a capitalist society. Within this society, the development of personality, influenced by society and its constantly changing ideas, desires, and pressures, determines the state of equality in a country, a state, a city, a town and in families. Religious and personal beliefs, education and the psychological construct of individuals and groups of people determine how things are carried out among communities. As we evolved from these more rural and religious bound communities we carried with us mental and emotional baggage which plagues many who are still trapped in old ways of thinking about equality between men, women and their children. As our cities grew more populated and diverse, and we adapted to different ways of perceiving our neighbors, it was considered necessary to assuage some of the competition for well paying jobs. Words and how they were constructed to achieve one’s ends were created to defend one’s intentions. Of course this was in no way restricted to the job market and has been applied to the potential for inequality among races of people. The drive for creating races which equaled or outnumbered others, has given rise to its own set of problems.
Social pressures to achieve, to be like the Joneses or to climb the corporate ladder of some large company were often failed dreams. Failure to “make it big”, often resulted in aggression and hatred toward those who were successful, toward parents or members of the community. Gloria Steinem mentions numerous serial killers like Edmund Kemper, Charles Starkweather, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy, in her article Supremacy Crimes, published in 1983 in the book Feminine Frontiers. None of these men came from well to do families, but aspired to better lives. Bundy never became the successful lawyer and Gacy never made top salesman.
Since then, Arsenic and Old Lace has been discovered as part of the drama Gacy was re-creating in his life. The film itself reveals the nature of Gacy’s problem. The older women were murdering their suitors because the persons these characters represent were likely forbidden to engage in sex with certain men or were engaging in sex with men for money, again, killing them was the answer to resolving their persecutory complexes and so it was with Gacy and Aileen Wournos. Thoughts, undisclosed about the film itself might also be the source of Gacy’s actions and may apply to the others. Dr. Joseph Murphy in his book, the Power of the Subconscious Mind, states the tendency to hold, in our minds, thoughts and feelings about others can manifest in our own lives or those of our children or neighbors if we fail to acknowledge them. I never mentioned Jeffery Dahmer in Supremacy Crimes as his case was not an issue of supremacy but is nevertheless critical to the social issues we face. Dahmer supposedly murdered and cannibalized seventeen young males. Dahmer was from an upper middle class family. His father was an analytical chemist, his mother a homemaker. He had a troubled youth, became alcoholic and moved away from his parents. I discovered the 1949 film titled Obsession also called The Hidden Room, in which a jealous and obsessed Psychiatrist discovers his wife was involved with another man. He kidnaps the man, locks him in the basement of his laboratory and over a matter of days tortures him mentally and emotionally and eventually attempts to kill the man in a bath of acid. Dahmer kept a mannequin hidden in his bedroom closet. In the film, the psychiatrist is arrogant and definitely fits the description of a professional male who thinks and feels himself above others intellectually and socially. In the 1949 film we discover why the viewer was unlikely a product of white male supremacy but of the portrayal of white male supremacy by the psychiatrist in the film, created and controlled mostly by white males during the time.
Eric Berne mentions in his book Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy, a script is an attempt to repeat in derivative form a whole transference drama. I can relate to this, as many of my self destructive experiences are the result of transferences from repressed anger and fear I was unable to cope with in my youth. Contaminate a disturbed childhood drama with films, music, some novel or unhealthy transferences or projections and you create a seriously disturbed mind, a mind possibly out of touch with reality. Projecting is a primitive defense mechanism used in order to cope with unwanted or intrusive thoughts, yet I think it is sometimes necessary to project in order to discover the content of the mind. While this is true, it is critical that unconscious material and projections be contained and worked through in safe environments. A high level of education, sensitivity and awareness are essential to working through these kinds of issues within a community. I invite you to also consider the religious beliefs of those around us which often makes others an easy target for the unconscious projections of unwanted content. It is so easy to cast our sins toward the crucifix, itself possibly an unconscious object on which our minds fixate, causing us to unknowingly direct repressed content onto others. Eric Fromm delved into these issues in his book, Sane Society more than 55 years ago. Unfortunately, because of the extent of television viewing in our society, people can become entrained to projecting randomly and without awareness. This does create social havoc and results in the kinds of problems these men suffered in their lives or explosive mass killings like Columbine and Blacksburg and numerous other mass killings like those associated with Jim Jones.
Headhunter films were prevalent in the 40’s and 50’s. It is unclear whether these films which dramatized acts of decapitation and cannibalism, influenced Dahmer’s activities. Frankenstein was about attaching the head of a deceased person onto the body of an imbecile. Looking further into Dahmer’s history we also learn he told his father he had dissolved a dead squirrel with chemicals. The Adventures of Indiana Jones, depicts a captive Jones invited to dine on the brains of decapitated monkeys. Crazy in Alabama depicts a woman trying to dispose of her dead husband’s head after murdering him for abuse although the details of his demise was never portrayed in the film. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, a 1950’s film, deals with a woman having her head cut off in an accident and her fiance’s attempts to keep it alive in a bath of chemicals in order to attach it to another body whom he finds via interviews for modeling. In the television series Get Smart, Control is the name of Maxwell Smart’s headquarters and Chaos is the enemy headquarters. In these films one is constantly reminded Chaos is a negative undesirable place but because of the nature of the programming, one might avoid projecting this chaotic content away from the self. Dahmer’s life can clearly be defined as chaotic.
We tend to place the whole of the social problem upon men like Gacy, Dahmer, Kemper, Starkweather, and Bundy, leading the public to believe their dysfunctional childhoods were the only cause for their crimes and because they were so heinous and frightening we tend to focus on only aspects of their personalities. One needs to be conscious that the victims bring to the drama their own set of mental and emotional problems. Repetition compulsion is the tendency to repeat some unconscious dramatic situation or some repressed trauma until one has mastered it. “Unaddressed issues contribute to chronic patterns of re-enactment”, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a Clinical Review, pg. 89. The victims of these kinds of films, particularly like Dahmer, Gacy, Kemper and Bundy, may have had dysfunctional patterns which attracted them to these killers. Were they parental figures? The nature of our society and their developmental issues, turned Dahmer, Gacy, Bundy, Berkowitz and Kemper, into killers.
Entertainment currently publicized has been permitted by the political and judicial systems because of issues with constitutional rights to freedom of expression, but also because there is often some redeeming social value to certain films and novels. I question the true potential of any redeeming value in any form of violence portrayed in films but moreso described in novels or even historical accounts of violence unless they are consumed by a more mature, stable and knowledgeable audience. Many film makers produce and publish negative kinds of material because they know it will hook and addict their viewers, often disguised as healing a problem but more in the name of making money. In the seemingly innocent and psychologically advanced series, Twilight Zone, one can find a direct cause for the potential to kill without conscience, but with no intent. In the episode titled Perchance to Dream a frame displays the words shooting gallery, a man soliciting shooters, a swirling circle just like the one in The Woman in Green that hypnotized Dr. Watson and a duck and squirrel as a target. One must be familiar with State Fairs and shooting galleries in order to manage this content. Couple this with hypnotic suggestions from other Twilight Zone episodes like Twenty-Two, One Step Beyond’s, Ordeal on Locust Street, or The Sherlock Holmes episode, The Woman In Green and you have a serious potential for mass killings as well as single instances of murder. What goes into the brain creates the mind. It can become a vicious cycle to the viewer and is clear maturity is essential to preventing the acts of violence which can result.
History too plays a part in the drama of many of the social issues we still face in our society and some in these industries participate in the collection and reintroduction of that history so we are hopefully safer, but are we succeeding? There have been roughly 200 reported serial killers in the United States since 1966, most killing more than one person. Even acts of desperation committed by the Donner Party an historical event which long preceded Dahmer, could have contributed to his behavior, not because their acts still exist but because of the collection and dissemination of that history in order to understand ourselves. The mothers of some of these men may have been suffering from low self-esteem because of poverty or emotional baggage heaped upon them from their native countries. They were likely never encouraged to become educated but to find a rich husband and get married. This kind of thinking and behavior encourages supremacy issues and co-dependency. How others view and react to their personal situations and the pressures of a capitalist society are at the core of their personal conflicts which some often inflict on the whole of society. It is a fact that immigration and equal opportunity have displaced hundreds of thousands of poor white Americans in the US. The result is anger, aggression and destructiveness, mostly inflicted on the self and their families in the form of elderly abuse, addictions of all kinds and suicide. There were more white men in Guyana who joined Jim Jones than blacks. That was in 1978. This isn’t a defense for the behavior of white men but surely a cause. As white men are lifted into unknown territory they are more prone to the history of which they are possessed. Black men who remain possessed of a white man’s life will likely suffer less because, as history is acted out, it no longer exists.
Today we have a menagerie of psychological problems where the lack of equality isn’t as much a personal issue as it is an issue of corrupted thinking infecting the minds of the wealthy as well as the poor. Wealthy children are rebelling against their parents because of the conditions their wealth has created in the lives of poorer people. We have poor children admiring and wanting to be a part of the families of wealthier people because they have been exposed to its advantages through television and are certainly experiencing the inequities and disadvantages of that wealth in their lives. With this inequity comes all manner of disabilities which confront our mental health systems. Many of these disabilities have nothing to do with brain chemistry but are the result of the misuse of language and minds corrupted by television, novels and music.
The science behind the concept of words creating behavior and desires is called neuro-linguistics. I am sure by now all of you have heard of it through Tony Robbins, Noam Chomsky, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the latter two having created this science. Of course Jewish history has revealed it has been in existence for centuries but was little known to the masses. Words and ideas formed from the television, poorly contrived books and novels which do nothing to advance psychological development or improve personal existence all contribute to some form of mental disability, but are heavily marketed to the public. As we progress these words and worlds become part of our history and are inherited by those who follow us.
Many of these words and phrases, now called memes among marketers in the 21st century and used to target consumers, have been used to target women and people of color in the past and are still being used to a degree in the present. These words, phrases and ideas are still out there among us being passed on from one generation to the next, from one ear to another. The only thing evolving these phrases are the choice of words used to represent the debasing name calling. The more learned some are, the more difficult it is to discern the intent of some terms used and thus is only known by those using them. This leaves the victims of such attacks blind to the harm projected toward them. This is also true for those who speak foreign languages and those who only speak their native language. While we may not understand the language, we can often feel the anger and resentment emanating from them. I am reminded of the chapter on Challenging Authority in Crimes of Obedience by Kelman and Hamilton, pg. 163. They discuss the process by which the enemy is verbally debased and abused to the point it is no sin to eventually kill them and in fact killing them becomes more a necessity. The constant infliction of verbal abasement, also called brainwashing, undermines self-esteem, affecting resilience so that self inflicted harm becomes an option as a way out. If conscience prevents one from harming one’s self, it may be projected onto one who identifies with the intent and so inflicts the harm for them. This did happen to me in 1993. This is not restricted to our military. In a social setting here on our own turf, we find the same tactics used among young people who have deemed another a threat to their self-esteem, their security, or may represent some part of themselves with which they are unable to cope. Again, Steinem mentions this in her article, Supremacy Crimes. Derogatory labeling is the way we know it most often. This applies to the wealthy as well as those who are economically poor or of different ethnicity.
In our more urban communities psychic entanglements are a real issue when it comes to mental illness. A young child can walk down the street and play with the neighborhood kids one day and be themselves and the next day, become someone else, especially if the parents lack this awareness. Recently, a frame from a Twilight Zone episode called Perchance to Dream, was discovered which may be a causal factor in some of these killings. The frame involves a carnival man at a shooting booth. Behind him are the words, shooting gallery, although shooting is obscured, yet anyone can identify the setting as that of any State Fair, yet the words can weave their own life into the brain and mind and some unfortunate event can trigger a problem. There is an onlooker who appears to be dreaming and a duck and squirrel as targets. This affirms the dreamer is recollecting the shooting gallery scene. Women in some rural areas are referred to as squirrels. Other similar films which contain hypnotic suggestions, when coupled with frames such as the one mentioned, can make for dangerous content in the mind. The Wikipedia lists roughly 200 serial killers between 1966 and the present in the US alone. Some of these killers were women. Some women are forced to identify with the male dominate figure with whom they live or associate giving cause for some of their behavior, but the issue is how we all are infected with content from films, novels and music which are clearly the cause of many of our social problems rather than curing them. This will no doubt lead to much discussion in this direction.
The November 2012 issue of The Atlantic magazine mentioned there were roughly 104 million people who subscribed to cable TV. The SAMSHA statistics states roughly 45.6 per cent of the US population was suffering from any form of mental illness in 2011 with 31.6 million receiving mental health treatment. 17.5 per cent of these people were also suffering from substance abuse. 11.5 per cent of the population were reported as having a serious mental illness with roughly 7 per cent receiving mental health treatment. That’s 5 million people with serious mental illness who received no treatment and 50 per cent of these people reported not receiving treatment because they were unable to afford it. The ratio of men to women was higher for women and there was an equal number of white males and native American Indian males reporting mental illness and substance abuse together. January 2013’s unemployment rate was 7.9%. NC reported 438,000 unemployed in December 2012, New York and Texas reported 790,000 and 771,000 unemployed while California reported 1,804,000 unemployed. We don’t know what percentage of these numbers include those who do not have to work because of wealth, inherited or otherwise. This should be enough to scare anyone.
Only those who profit from the unfortunate chaotic mental life of others would be content to permit others to live that way.
