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let the unknowable be as it is,
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on collective narcissism

excerpt follows

Robert Scheer – “I’m half Jewish and half German” – points out that high culture didn’t stop Germany from sliding into fascism:

… they still had the best music, and they had the best science, and they had all of this in Germany. And it didn’t save them at all, it didn’t help them at all. And I have always found that very depressing when I apply it to the United States. 

CH: Well, because I think that the problem was that—I mean, just as under Stalinism, there was a war against culture, replaced with faux culture. You know, the whole attack on Jewish science was part of Nazism and Stalinism. So you’re right, except that it shows how swiftly a society that reaches those cultural heights can be reoriented towards barbarism. And I would argue that that is one of the fundamental dangers in the United States, is the war we’ve made on our own culture. The Nazis made, had a huge movie industry, and they didn’t make—they made some horrible propaganda films. But most of it was fluff, was garbage, was Hollywood-type entertainment. And you know, mindless entertainment; spectacle. Spectacle—fascists do spectacle very well. Stalin did spectacle very well. And that creates a kind of cultural milieu where people lose the capacity to think critically and self-reflect, which is what authentic culture is about; that capacity to get you to look within yourself, look within your society. And it’s replaced with this collective narcissism, which has been on display at this convention. And that’s very dangerous. And we’ve seen Trump ride that collective narcissism, and exploit it through right-wing populism, and do what proto-fascist movements always do, which is direct a legitimate rage and a cultural narcissism towards the vulnerable. Undocumented workers, Muslims, homosexuals, you know, on and on and on. So the destruction of culture is a key component—actually, my first book, “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” and the wars that I covered, noted that a culture that goes to war destroys its own culture before it destroys the culture of the enemy.

RS: But basic to that manipulative concept, obscuring your own responsibility—the denial of, say, Jesus, who may not have existed but it was attributed to him in Luke, of the Good Samaritan—trying to understand the other, and that the other also has a soul, and so forth. Obliterating that, making people throwaway people, whether they’re the people you deal with in jail, or the people we’re bombing. As the Democratic convention is going on, a Democratic president is randomly killing people with drones and what have you. And you even had Madeleine Albright get up there to a standing ovation—I was stunned—and she’s a woman who at one point defended the bombing, starvation, actually, in Iraq, and you know, this is the price you pay. And I was thinking about that; essential to this whole narrative is that idea that Reagan pushed—he wasn’t the first, but the Germans had it too—that you are the city on the hill. You are the place that God is watching.

CH: Right. Well, that’s what the collective narcissism is about. And with collective narcissism, means you externalize evil. So every moralist—I mean, having covered war, I know how thin that line is between victim and victimizer. I know how easily people can be seduced into carrying out atrocity; I’ve seen it in every war I’ve covered. And I think the best break against that is understanding those dark forces within all of us, and the capacity we all have for evil. That’s what makes Primo Levi such a great writer about the Holocaust. And so collective narcissism essentially says we—it creates a binary world, as you correctly point out, where other human beings embody evil, and when we eradicate them, we have eradicated evil. And that, of course, propels a society into committing atrocious acts of evil in the name of good. And that’s what the Nazis did, and I would argue that’s what we do in the Middle East; that’s what we do in this vast system of mass incarceration; that’s what we do in our internal colonies; that’s what we do to our poor.

RS: And that’s what we do in our foreign policy. And there is a common theme that we saw at both the Republican and Democratic conventions. And it was surprising to me how much they had in common in this respect: that we are the aggrieved. It’s like the people in Germany after World War I, who became convinced that they had been victimized by the rest of the world. Right, whether it was Jewish bankers in New York, or it was the French, or the Allies, or what have you. And it was interesting, we’re recording this at the point when Barack Obama’s going to speak at the convention tonight. But last night, listening to the speeches, they had you know, first responders; 9/11 was a big theme, because after all, Hillary Clinton, senator from New York, and she had the credentials of having been around during 9/11 and so forth. And it was all about, you know, this—first of all, sort of a continuation of the idea that no other people in the world have ever been attacked in this way. Right? You know, we are a nation—

CH: Well, it’s the—you know, all of these societies that descend into this, I think what you correctly called barbarism, sanctify their own victimhood. This is what’s killed Israel. And you sanctify your—once you sanctify your victimhood, it’s beyond understanding. And it gives you a license, or you believe it gives you a license, to do anything

[full audio and transcript]

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“the pain you feel is capitalism dying”

Samuel Alexander wrote:

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a good death: “the kind most people would choose”

Nino Sekopet, an extraordinary end-of-life counsellor, on the questions he most often faces

from the article the tweet links to:

A Dutch actress with terminal cancer came to see Sekopet, along with her son. She was unflinchingly realistic and decided that in order to avoid lots of “bulls–t,” she wanted to end her life with VSED. Their conversation was almost buoyant with laughter, simply because that’s where that family was. “That’s a very light, almost funny, cheerful death that’s stayed with me,” Sekopet says.

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lightly edited copy from DWD Canada:

  • It is legal to end your own life in Canada and has been since suicide was removed from the Criminal Code in 1972
  • You have the right to refuse any and all treatment, even if refusal might hasten your death
  • You have the right to stop treatment after it has started. Ethically and legally, there is no distinction between discontinuing treatment and refusing it in the first place
  • In Canada, nutrition and hydration by tube is considered medical treatment. You have the right to refuse or stop it
  • You also have the right to turn down food or drink and the right to refuse to be fed or given drinks by others
  • The above is referred to as Voluntary Stopping of Eating and Drinking (VSED) and is supported by many palliative care providers

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Be sure to choose palliative care that includes informed use of glycerin swabs to relieve thirst, and so on. With no fluid intake you are likely to lose consciousness in a week or so and – without intervention – never regain it. Please read this Guardian piece: 'It was a good death, the kind most people would choose' (Sophie Mackenzie on why her family backed her mother's decision to stop eating and drinking when faced with terminal cancer).

from this page on the DWD Canada website:

Document your wishes. When it comes to end-of-life decisions, what you've put in writing will carry more weight than something you've mentioned in passing. Clear, written instructions will also make it easier for your substitute decision-maker to act on your wishes. So write them down! You can use the forms in our Advance Care Planning Kit or have a lawyer or notary draw up your documents. It's up to you.

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The Dhammapada: Jacob Needleman’s afterword

to complement what follows, please watch this July 2020 interview

transcript of the afterword – from 1:12:30 – by Jacob Needleman to his reading* of the Dhammapada:
+0:00
Buddhism was born in India. In its beginnings it conceived of itself not as a new religion but as a reconstitution of what is essential in the vastness of the Hindu tradition. Taken as a whole, the Hindu religion can be likened to an Olympian armed campaign with great generals dispersed abroad, their huge armies and infinitely variegated weaponry converging upon the enemy, the ego, under some divinely conceived master strategy. Compared to this, Buddhism appears upon the Indian scene as a direct hand-to-hand attack with no holds barred, striking instantly and mercilessly at the enemy’s weakest point. By and large, Buddhism has retained this quality of one-pointed practicality even amid the later flowering of a metaphysics and mythology which, in all of its aspects, rivals the entirety of Hinduism.
+1:11
Put succinctly, the Buddha, who is understood to have lived and taught in the sixth century BC, taught that the principal cause of all human suffering and desolation is the deeply ingrained belief that there is such a thing as a self or ego that persists through time and change. Everything else in Buddhism, its art, philosophy, rituals, and techniques, originated as tools for the destruction of man’s illusion that he is a self. This doctrine of no-self or non-Atman is, as it is said, the diamond which cuts through all errors and confusions of humanity.
+2:02
According to this teaching, everything in human nature is in flux, and a man is nothing but a serial bundle of sensations, thoughts, and feelings, one proceeding from another, with nothing to hold them together either in life or death. And not only man, but all things in the universe are without self, without a fixed nature that abides from moment to moment. In the endless and rigorously determined chain of cause and effect that constitutes the universe, we human beings fail by fixing our interest or desire upon one or another phenomenal aggregate, either within our self or external to our self. Therein is the root of all our sorrow. What can liberate us is the deep and thorough understanding of all things, including the personality, as causally determined processes of becoming.
+3:06
Consciousness – meaning the totality of thought, feeling, perception, sensation, pleasure, and pain – is not a being but a passion, not an activity but only a sequence of reactions in which we, who have no power to be either as or when we will, are fatally involved. Individuality is motivated by and perpetuated by wanting; and the cause of all wanting is ignorance – for we ignore that the objects of our desire can never be possessed in any real sense of the word, ignore that even when we have got what we want, we still want to keep it and are still in the state of desire. The ignorance meant is of things as they really are, and the consequent attribution of substantiality to what is merely phenomenal; the seeing of self in what is not-self.
+4:13
At first glance, this doctrine of no-self seems in direct opposition to the Hindu view. But if there is any general view with which the Buddhist doctrine conflicts, it is surely our own Western worldview as embodied not only in the popular understanding of Judaeo-Christian doctrine but in the goals our whole civilization has set for itself.
+4:40
The religions of the West have imbued us with the idea of an individual, eternal soul created by God – also, in his way, an individual – infinitely precious and irreducibly real. As our modern society drew away from religious doctrine, it substituted for the soul the idea of individual personality, not immortal perhaps, but for that very reason all the more our own and precious. The establishment of our identity, our role, has been the banner cry not only of scientific psychology but of all the major intellectual movements of modern times, including existentialism and humanism. We measure a person’s strength by what we take to be the distinctness and vividness of his individuality, and we all seek to make our mark, either as artists, scientists, or business people. To the Buddhist, all this striving is the pursuit of a phantom. The identity we seek to establish is nothing more than a thought, a picture in the mind of what we are or can be; it is in nowise based on fact. Our sense of persistence and sameness through change is a trick played upon us by the automatic functions of memory and buttressed by the fact that we are given a name and treated by others as though we were a self. Indeed, our whole society is but a vast collection of sleepwalkers each addressing the other and conceiving of himself within his own dream of selfhood. All our ideas of morality and obligation, blame and praise are based on this dream and serve only to strengthen the illusion of its reality.
+6:46
Putting the Buddhist doctrine of no-self in the above way, its congruence with Hindu thought becomes clearer. We might say that for the Hindu or Brahmanic religion, human ignorance is the ignorance of who we are, of our ultimate divinity, where for Buddhism it is ignorance of what we are not. We are not this ego. It is in fact a cardinal trait of Buddhism that its teachings are in negative terms. Break down the illusion, the error, and the truth will appear by itself, for it is always there. It is only obscured and hidden by our ignorant beliefs about ourselves and the desires attached thereto.
+7:40
Of all the great religious teachers of the world, none has incarnated and lived the idea that ultimate reality is beyond the grasp of the ordinary mind with more purity and concentration than the Buddha. This in part explains why the Buddha’s discourses say nothing about the existence of a Supreme Being, for example, or about immortality. Such questions “tend not to edification” since they are put by the deluded mind which is quite content to speculate endlessly about these matters while clinging to the very beliefs which perpetuate its suffering.
+8:24
Its strategy of negation has misled many Westerners into thinking Buddhism is pessimistic and antilife. Some have even thought of nirvana, the ultimate goal of Buddhist discipline, as a sort of spiritual suicide. Nothing could be further from the truth, and in fact there is no religion which has a higher estimation of human possibility. It is only that it is not spoken of directly and positively. The exalted level of nirvana can be seen indirectly by attending to everything which the Buddhists say it is not. It is not love, consciousness, peace, freedom, happiness, or immortality in any sense that we understand. We are given no words for it because we have no experience of it; and in the absence of a corresponding experience, names merely purchase further illusions. The Gospels, we may recall, also speak of the “peace that passeth understanding.”
+9:40
We come to the conclusion that just as the great mystics and saints of our own traditions could describe the Supreme Reality only by negation and analogy, so the Buddhist tells us of nirvana. Since, however, nirvana also designates the whole of reality, then we see why Buddhism also refuses to admit that our ordinary thinking and language can accurately be applied to anything that is real. Thus, reality is also named the void or emptiness.
+10:22
A final note – especially important when we come to inquire if a genuine Buddhist way can take root on our own soil. Buddhist moral rules are never ends in themselves. It is essential to realize that ethical commandments in the Dhammapada are understood as necessary preliminaries to any greater spiritual development.
+10:50
What is especially valuable about the Dhammapada is that it shows us there is no real separation between true human morality and the process of inner development. The admonitions and insights in this great text resonate on all levels of our search for our authentic humanity. At one stroke they bring inspiration to our halting everyday efforts to care for our neighbour and guidance in our efforts to look into ourselves for the radiant energy that is traditionally termed the Buddha nature.
+11:29
The Dhammapada presents itself as the actual sayings of Gautama Buddha and was originally compiled for the growing community of Buddhist monks. It was apparently in existence by the time of the emperor Ashoka in 250 BC, and quickly became popular with all schools of Buddhist thought and practice. It is now no doubt time for it to speak more universally to the whole of our morally and spiritually hungry modern world.
*You can sometimes find a recording of the reading on YouTube. Please try a search for a copy and email me the link to embed the video below if you find one. Whatever the case, please watch the 10-minute interview from July 2020 above to complement the transcript.


Amazon lists the complete recording as a 1994 audio cassette that is “currently unavailable” –  but you can download it as an audiobook for $0 with an Audible trial. You can read the publisher’s preview of the 1999 audiobook here. And you can read a lightly edited, gender-neutral version of the afterword transcript here. Also, by the way, all three of the July 2020 interviews are embedded here.

Google Books / results of a search

dukkha is wanting something: it’s in the mind; nirvana is wanting nothing: it’s beyond the mind, it’s reality;  
reality is all that is – the whole, the void, empty of everything but the potential for anything – mind included

may all be well, be well and want no more / two site-specific searches

the short URL tiny.cc/afterword links to this post on the afterword by Jacob Needleman to his reading of the Dhammapada