Living in Fear is a Bitch: A Bitch is a Mother Dog

A friend recently wrote regarding the contemporary western fear of Muslims in general as a result of the various acts of Islamic inspired violence in America and abroad. He went on to say, “Living in fear is a bitch and does not set us up for good mental health - or our best behavior.” He then suggested that bin Laden and others trying to terrorize the West are “winning” because they have succeeded in causing us to “live in fear”. I do not disagree with him altogether, however, as is my nature, I like to consider other ways of viewing the matter. This is my response:

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Again, as I see it, "good mental health" is not only a bad metaphor, but an impossible and unwanted goal. This is another of our American unquestioned assumptions--that mental health is ideal, or that it even exists or should exist. As I see it, physical health cannot and should not be equated with the mind or soul. They are two very different entities operating by very different principles. This is true of all systems in Systems Theory; for example, a brain surgeon most likely cannot repair a car transmission, and an auto mechanic typically cannot do brain surgery. While related, the two systems function very differently and must be considered according to their own unique principles of operation. Never assume a metaphor is acurrate until you have thoughtfully examined the correspondances. Unfortunately, the late 19th century reinvention of psyche as parallel to, if not synonymous with, the body is not only wrong, but dangerous.

The mind and soul (two different but interrelated phenomena) are not identical to the body, and medical terminology must be used very cautiously. Anxiety, fear, "paranoia" and most of what has been assembled in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as mental illnesses are normal human psychological functions and responses. Just as an undeveloped baby encounters a world of troubling gravity and hard, sharp objects for the purpose of developing muscle and skeletal structure--so the mind provides all of these "unhealthy" emotions and responses for developing soul.

As you said, “living in fear is a bitch,” and a bitch is a female dog, a raging mother who gives birth. Fear is the womb or container that gives birth to an evolving psyche, and bin Laden can be seen as the "mother of new psychological development". Neurologist Andrew Newberg explains this simply and yet profoundly in his bestseller, Why God Won't Go Away. He explains the neurology of anxiety as the mechanism that drives evolution, and moves the mind/brain to seek a unitary experience of being (God).

I call these normal and necessary experiences of anxiety, fear and all so called "negative emotions," psycho-spiritual isometrics which is defined as “increase through resistance”. On the physical level, if you remove the material and gravitational resistance from a baby's life, you end up with a flaccid, atrophied, dead baby. On the psychological level, if you remove the troubling "material and gravitational" psychic resistance from a human soul, you end up with an atrophied and dead soul.

Remove pain, suffering, and difficulties from a child's life, you end up with middle class kids who kill their classmates because their peers do not recognize how cool they really are—i.e., Columbine and the rise of "well adjusted" middle class kids joining gangs. Experiencing difficulties works as a sort of psycho-spiritual homeopathy--the cure is in the dis-ease, to use a medical metaphor carefully. If you want to see a fascinating study on this phenomenon, read Allan Guggenbuhl's The Incredible Fascination of Violence, or James Hillman's The Terrible Love of War, or his Suicide and the Soul. Or click on this link and read the July/August 2011 article by therapist Lori Gottlied, "How to Land Your Kid in Therapy" which examines how the cult of self esteem is ruining our kids by not allowing them fail and feel fear, rejection and sadness.

This point was beautifully stated in a recent issue of The Week, by Katie Roiphe in The Financial Times:

"One sometimes sees these exhausted, devoted, slightly drab parents, piling out of the car, and thinks, is all of this high-level watching and steering and analyzing really making anyone happier? Can we, for a moment, flash back to the benign neglect of the 1970s and 80s? I can remember my parents having parties, wild children running around until dark, catching fireflies. If these children helped themselves to three slices of cake, or ingested the second hand smoke from cigarettes, or carried cocktails to adults who were ever so slightly slurring their words, they were not noticed; they were loved, just not monitored. Those warm summer nights of not being focused on were liberating. In the long sticky hours of boredom, in the lonely, unsupervised, unstructured time, something blooms; it was in those margins that we became ourselves."

Are Muslims the Problem, or Politicians?

I recently received a long list of why Muslims could and should not be in America: CAN MUSLIMS BE GOOD AMERICANS?

I suggest you read it. It has some good and very valid and accurate points that MUST be learned by those who know nothing about Islam. Here is my response to the question: Can Muslims Be Good Americans?:

Similar concerns and problems were true of many American Christians in the beginning of this nation. It took time for Puritan Congregationalists to give up the idea of a "Christian" theocracy -- remember John Calvin's Presbyterian Geneva which inspired the Puritans was similar to Mohammed's Medina. The Anglicans of the 1700s were arresting, beating, jailing and even hanging Baptists in Virginia. Quakers were considered traitors because they often remained neutral or loyal to King George. The Lutherans hated all non-Lutherans and everyone hated and mistrusted the Catholics and the Jews. There was only one Roman Catholic signer of the American Declaration of Independence named Charles Carroll and many didn't want his name on it. Most Americans favored slavery of blacks, the slaughter of Indians and not allowing women to vote. (For more, read the national bestseller, Founding Faith, by Steven Waldman).

Things in this country have radically changed and always change in this great nation. Why?

~ Because the genius of this American nation is in its ability to self reflect, self correct and assimilate differences. Our problem is only secondarily Islam. Our worst problem is a so called enlightened system that wants to accommodate to all cultures rather than educate them in the basics of American freedom and our system of an evolving democratic republic based on Law for all people. The problem is with our government and educational systems that have become so multicultural that we don't make people see what it means to be an American. Multiculturalism is an addenda to ethnic groups in this nation, not a foundational concept. We celebrate our various heritages as Americans, not in place of being Americans. And by American I do not mean some jingoistic stereotype that one lives in conservative Texas or progressive Boston, but the core principles found in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, as well as the brilliant and many debates that went into the forming and framing of each.

So stop blaming the Muslims, as ignorant and religiously bigoted as they are. Human beings are ignorant, selfish and bigoted by nature. One thing the founders all agreed on was that good politics is rooted in an accurate assessment of human nature. They knew that all humans, without divine intervention and the best of our reasoning powers, end up like the Muslims, or Puritans, or any other group that thinks it is perfect and complete.

The problem is that we have lost our vision and our purpose as a nation. The rise of an entitlement mentality, a naive politics of Utopianism, concern with self esteemism rather than personal and social responsibility, a system of relative legalism and loss of a divine connection are many of our problem. Muslims are simply filling the void we have allowed. That is the problem in Europe. European nations have experimented with religious institutionalisms, secular humanisms, social atheisms and liberal neutrality. That has created a 200 year old vacuum which is being filled with traditional Islam. Read the shocking accounts by liberal journalist and gay progressive author Bruce Bawer in his two books, While Europe Slept, and Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom to see what is really going on in Europe.

When the divine disappears, it will be replaced by something, often a tyrannical version of the divine. For this, read Carl Jung's brilliant essay written in 1957, The Undiscovered Self. Blame the politicians and leaders of our institutions. Work your ass off to vote them out, fire them and get the U.S. back on track. Then those Muslims who want to be here will stay, and those who don't will leave. Those who want to participate in a nation that believes in divine connection (not religious necessarily), evolving democratic republicanism and a free market and government that operates under checks and balances will know what they are getting into. As it stands today, we have become so aimless and foundationless in the name of wishy-washy tolerance and air-headed acceptance, that the next strongest ideology will take over. Then, we will be right back under some form of social and/or religious tyranny.