The System is the Problem

I: Introduction

Anyone who has been reading my blog for a while should know by now that I, as an avowed Marxist, get static from right-wingers from time to time. There is, however, another group of people I criticize quite a bit, and who from time to time give me a hard time, too.

Liberals.

To be fair to them, many are well-intentioned in wanting progressive change in the world, but who are also, I feel, terribly misinformed about what’s really going on in the world. Part of this problem stems from the fact that many of them have similar class interests with people on the right, and therefore they don’t want to make the uncompromising but necessary changes in our political landscape that will ensure social justice, end the wars, and reverse ecocide.

In my article, The Liberal Mindset, I went into the psychological conflicts of liberals as I see them, those of wanting to effect progressive change (motivated by the superego), and wanting to retain their class privileges (motivated by the id). The result of this conflict is, of course, a lot of hypocrisy, in particular for those liberals in the upper echelons of economic and political power.

Examples of this hypocrisy are when AOC wears a “Tax the rich” dress at a Met Gala of the wealthy and privileged, Bernie Sanders decries the oligarchs, then backs Democrats pandering to the empire and corporations, or in my country, when Justin Trudeau talks all the politically correct talk, yet backs oil drilling on aboriginal land, or in one form or another, his government has backed Ukrainian Nazis.

As for those in the lower echelons who are liberals, their fault tends to stem from merely being misinformed. This fault is not, however, squarely on them. As is the case with so many of us these days in this neoliberal hellhole we live in, one is simply too busy working, dealing with day-to-day problems, to have the time to do the hard work of researching what is really going on in the world, learning the history of how we got here, and interpreting the meaning of world events correctly. Instead, most people rely on the slime oozing out of their TV set, the lies and propaganda coming out of it.

It is my hope that this article I’ve written can help correct those misconceptions of many liberals–that is, the well-meaning ones who simply don’t realize how much they’ve been misled, as opposed to those who ought to know better, or who cynically and deliberately go along with the mass deceptions because they benefit from them.

Furthermore, I hope that through these words I can impress upon these liberals that, in order to effect the kind of change that really needs to be made, change that is meaningful and isn’t merely a facelift, certain baselines must be maintained. Nothing below them is acceptable. A discussion of the content of these red lines follows:

II: No Voting for Bourgeois Parties…Ever!

The basic principle that needs to be understood about mainstream political parties–bourgeois parties–is that in spite of all their talk about striving to do what is best for the people, and what’s right for the nation, what they really do is solely in the interests of the capitalist class. The examples I gave above about the hypocrisies of liberals saying one thing and doing more or less the opposite are examples of this problem, hence voting for any of them will do nothing to help the common people.

Such political parties include the blue and red of the bogus American two-party system, the Tory and Labour Parties of the UK, and the Canadian Tories, Liberals, and NDP, as well as the many other bourgeois parties in the rest of the world. This is true even of social democrats like AOC, Sanders, or the NDP in Canada. In spite of the left-leaning nature of some of them, these ‘progressive’ ones will choose capitalism over socialism, Zionism over Palestinian rights, and even fascism if the ruling class is being threatened.

Liberalism acts as a kind of buffer against any friction the working class feels from the dictatorship of capital. So much of controlling the people involves using psychological tactics to keep us at bay; among those tactics is sustaining the illusion of hope that, somewhere down the line, a liberal or social democrat of conscience will lead the way and end the corporate stranglehold on us. As long as we keep hoping, we’ll keep voting, and an uprising will be staved off, even though those hopes keep getting frustrated.

More and more people are waking up to what this deception is doing, and they aren’t buying into the lies they keep hearing. As a result, fewer and fewer of them are wasting their time leaving home on Election Day and voting for someone who only talks and never delivers on his or her promises.

When the deceptive tactics are no longer working for a significant portion of the population, then other forms of keeping control are used, such as brute force. It’s no accident that in recent decades, there has been a militarization of the police, and when there are protests, agent provocateurs are deployed by the powers-that-be to stir up the protesting crowds, pick fights with them, and give the riot police an excuse to beat the protestors and arrest them.

As long as there is economic prosperity, as there was from 1945-1973, bourgeois governments can be, by their standards, generous and tax the rich sufficiently to fund social programs and other benefits for the poor. But when the economy is going through bad times, as has on-and-off been the case since 2008, the dictatorship of capital shows its true colours, and nothing is done to help the increasingly immiserated poor–quite the opposite, in fact, even to the point of such injustices as criminalizing homelessness.

In the case of American politics, we can see how both parties have moved things further and further to the right, even when either party allowed for some progressive policies. FDR gave Americans the New Deal, which in itself was good for softening the blow of capitalism for the working class, but even this good thing had a shadow side: in the very softening of capitalism, the New Deal ensured that the American ruling class didn’t have to fear a socialist revolution. Social democracy prevented the rise of real socialism.

While the rationalization for FDR’s putting of Japanese-Americans in internment camps (also called concentration camps, rather like those cages ICE is putting “illegals” into now) was as a protection against possible Japanese-American spies sending intelligence back to Japan, the fact is that that internment was yet another manifestation of good-old-fashioned American racism, a time-honored tradition going back to the times of black slavery, Native American genocide, the KKK, Jim Crow, “We reserve the right to refuse service to [Mexicans, Jews, the Irish, etc.],” and coming right to our times of “build the wall” and Russophobia.

On the Republican side, the Eisenhower era may have seen high taxes for the rich, and to his credit, he warned in his farewell address to curb the growing cancer of what he called the Military Industrial Complex as an enemy to world peace (a warning that subsequent American politicians have dutifully ignored), he and his administration were responsible for the 1954 Guatemalan coup, and helping with the 1953 Iranian coup, all justified as part of the Cold War policy of containment (the ultimate counterrevolution against communism has subsequently contributed to the neoliberal disaster we’re facing today).

That Iranian coup reinstalled the Shah, a puppet of Western imperialism and someone very unpopular among the Iranian people. This problem resulted in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, resulting in turn in Iran being another target for regime change, which has led to the recent hostility to and banging of the war drums against the country.

To his credit, LBJ signed legislation to promote African American civil rights, and by liberal standards, he helped fight the war on poverty. He also, however, helped escalate American involvement in Vietnam based on the bogus Gulf of Tonkin Incident; a quagmire ensued in Vietnam, a most unpopular war that brought about such atrocities as the My Lai Massacre. Once again, the rationale was to contain communism, without any consideration for what the Vietnamese actually wanted, they who had just shaken off French colonial rule by the mid-1950s. So much for the ‘progressive’ Democrats.

Nixon’s administration helped with the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, replacing the democratically-elected socialist Salvador Allende with the far-right strongman Augusto Pinochet, whose Chicago Boys‘ “free market” economic policies can be seen as a testing ground for the neoliberal scourge that began under Reagan and Thatcher.

What people need to understand about all these coups d’état and other interventions is that they’re meant to keep the empire’s grip of power on the affected countries. The empire will never accept any country going its own way and finding its own path to improve the quality of life for its people.

The intentions of the governments that the CIA and/or MI6 have overthrown are to do such things as the nationalization of industry (oil, etc.) and land reform so the workers and farmers of these countries can gain control over their working lives, gain the full fruits of their labour, and use the profits from their work to fund social programs for the poor. The imperialists, however, know that allowing these reforms to happen will reduce, if not obliterate, the profits they’ve been stealing from these countries.

When the Western imperialists meddle in the affairs of these Third World countries in the ways I’ve just described, they try to rationalize their interference by claiming they’re promoting “freedom and democracy” and thwarting the “Red menace.” Such talk of wanting “democratic freedoms” for these developing countries is just, to use a psychoanalytic term, a case of reaction formation, or hiding one’s true, not-so-noble motives behind a mask of supposedly benevolent ones. The last thing the imperialists care about is the right of the Third World poor to have freedom and self-determination. One doesn’t achieve such a goal by installing the likes of the Shah or Pinochet.

Imperialism is not just some abstract word we leftists throw around to sound dramatic or to feel self-righteous. It’s a living, breathing menace that destroys the lives and crushes the hopes of millions of people around the world. It is also used by all bourgeois political parties, not just the ‘conservative’ ones. The red and blue in the US do it. Tory and Labour do it in the UK. Tories, Liberals, and the NDP do it in Canada. The Renaissance (En Marche) party and the National Party (or National Front) do it in France. And so on and so on.

Western liberals have to stop thinking that the whole world revolves around themselves and start looking into what happens in these other parts of the world, for our suffering and their suffering are interlinked.

To get back to my ‘history lesson,’ if you will–which of course is far from exhaustive–another example of US imperial meddling in another country’s affairs, one that would ultimately bite Americans in the ass (our suffering and theirs is interlinked, recall), is when Afghanistan was trying to implement socialism with the aid of the Soviet Union. Such things as the promotion of women’s rights were on the agenda…but the American government would never tolerate that agenda.

The Carter administration, with Zbigniew Brzezinski‘s influence, provoked the USSR into invading Afghanistan (as they provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) in the manner I discussed in my analysis of Charlie Wilson’s War. During this proxy war, the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s, the US government armed the mujahideen to the teeth. These fighters were fundamentalist Muslims, people who could be called the Islamic equivalent of fascists. Reagan had some of them visit him in the White House. One of the mujahideen was Osama bin Laden. We all know what his involvement eventually led to.

Once the US government had achieved their goal of weakening the Soviet Union through this long war that ended in 1989, Afghanistan was abandoned, since the country was no longer politically useful to US imperialism. The result of this abandoning of the war-torn country to Muslim fundamentalists was the rise of the Taliban, whose ideology was the diametrical opposite of that of the original socialist/feminist plan.

There is a long history of the US government backing a country at first, then abandoning or even being outright hostile to them later. This is true not only of Afghanistan, but also of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, when the US backed the latter, giving them (or at least allowing them to acquire) their chemical and biological weapons, and Donald Rumsfeld was recorded on video shaking hands with Saddam Hussein), Panama (Manuel Noriega was a CIA asset for many years until the US government turned on him and invaded his country to apprehend him), and now, Ukraine, to name but a few examples. Recall Kissinger’s words on being friends with the US.

Once the USSR and Soviet Bloc were dissolved and Russia was plunged into economic turmoil in the 1990s, with most Russians never having wanted the Soviet system to end, and majorities of them consistently seeing its end as a bad thing, the Western ruling class no longer feared that their oppression of the working class would lead to a socialist revolution. So it was only a matter of time before NAFTA was signed into law, Welfare was gutted, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was enacted, allowing mergers and acquisitions in the media to lead eventually to 90% of the US media to be controlled by six corporations, meaning that most of Americans’ access to information would be controlled by the superrich and narrated by their bourgeois agendas.

By the mid-1990s, the Russians disliked their alcoholic president Yeltsin so much that many tried to vote the Communist Party back into power. But the US, under the Clinton administration, liked their Russian puppet so much that they helped manipulate things during the 1996 Russian election so Yeltsin could be reelected. This interference in that election was openly admitted to at the time…on the cover of Time magazine. The US government likes it when Russia is weak, not when she’s strong, as she would become under Putin–hence his demonization in our media.

The situation has been similar with regard to China, which brought back the market in the mid-1980s under Deng Xiaoping. The Western ruling class was content to have China be their factory, where they could outsource labour and pay for it with much lower wages; but now that China has risen economically and politically enough to challenge the global hegemony of the “rules-based international order,” the Western powers don’t like the country anymore, and in selling them billions of dollars in weapons, the US wants to use Taiwan against mainland China the same way they used Ukraine against Russia, as a stick with which to beat the offending country.

Remember that all the mainstream Western political parties support these aggressive policies, with few exceptions. Once the socialist states had been either dissolved, weakened, or made to revert to the market, the Western imperialists knew they could do anything they wanted to any country, and generally get away with it. This is why these political parties, whether right-wing or “left-wing,” should never be voted for by people who care about the working class and the global poor.

Part of thwarting all those countries that won’t bow to the will of the Western empire is to smear them with propaganda hostile to them. A tried-and-true tactic has been to identify ‘evil, tyrannical dictators,’ and insist on the need to remove them and replace them with ‘democratic’ ones (translation: replace them with leaders willing to cater to imperialist interests).

In recent history, we saw this in the first Iraq War against Saddam. Then it happened in the “humanitarian war” against Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia. Then it happened to Saddam again in the 2000s. Then it happened to Gaddafi, who was, contrary to Western propaganda, actually a benevolent dictator who provided lots of social programs that helped Libyans; the resulting US/French/NATO intervention turned the once-most prosperous nation in Africa into a failed state with an open slave market. Then a protracted “civil war” in Syria destroyed the country and replaced the ‘tyrant’ Bashar al-Assad with an Al Qaeda/ISIS affiliated strongman.

Now, none of this is to say that these scapegoated and toppled heads of state were completely blameless. They don’t have to be, though, for us to be justified in opposing their being overthrown. The point is that it is the citizens of their respective countries who should be allowed to decide for themselves whether or not their leaders should have been removed, and not the empire. Furthermore, whoever is to replace them should be people who represent the genuine interests of the citizens of those countries, not the interests of the empire.

The same judgements apply to Iran, Russia, and China, the current targets of imperial aggression. Again, there are many aspects of the governments of these three countries that I, and many others on the left, find fault with. Such faults, however, do not justify starting wars with them.

A big problem with all the mainstream political parties is that they all, to at least some degree, advocate regime change, or have advocated regime change, in all or almost all of these countries with scapegoated governments. For this reason–as well as the reason I gave at the beginning of this section, that none of these parties do anything substantive about capitalist exploitation of the working class and immiseration of the poor–one should never vote for bourgeois political parties if one wants to see genuine progress for the common people. By now, people should know that capitalism and imperialism are inextricably intertwined.

III: Stop Uncritically Believing the Mainstream Media

I mentioned above how Bill Clinton’s signing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 into law resulted in mergers and acquisitions in the media that in turn have led to 90% of American media being controlled by six corporations, and that this means that most of Americans’ access to information is being controlled by the wealthy and powerful. This means that the superrich, not representatives of ordinary people, decide what ‘the truth’ is and isn’t for us.

This problem is not limited to American reporting. There is a global network of media sources that reports essentially the same news stores with basically the same–typically pro-US/NATO–slant, just liberal and conservative variations on them, at most (note in this connection that ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal,’ properly understood, are just right-wing infighting). The reason for this bias is that the bourgeoisie all over the world have the same interests, in spite of such things as inter-imperialist conflict: they all want more for themselves and less for everyone else; this is why genuine leftist opinions are marginalized, if they’re even represented at all.

Even more fraudulent is that what is understood to be “left-wing” reporting is actually just liberalism: it caters to the interests of the Democratic Party (AOC, Sanders, Obama, “the Squad,” etc.), the Canadian Liberal Party (Justin Trudeau, as unapologetically avowed a Zionist as Biden is), the British Labour Party (whose Tony Blair, recall, backed George W. Bush in invading Iraq and promoting imperialism and neoliberalism in general), etc. Because of all of this deception, a huge swathe of the Western population doesn’t even know what the left actually represents ideologically. I’ve known people who call themselves “left-wing,” and in the same breath said they were going to vote for Kamala Harris!

The ruling class finds such political ignorance to be extremely useful. Let the masses believe the left is only about identity politics (‘The ascent of Obama and Harris means we have racial equality!…doesn’t it?’), vaguely defined notions of raising taxes (which 1., aren’t generally raised on the rich, and 2., are generally used to fund the military), ‘girlbosses’ (while one ‘girlboss,’ Hillary Clinton and her State Department, helped to oppose a pay raise from going to garment workers in Haiti), and…last, but not least…anti-Trump!

Now, I don’t like Trump any more than the average liberal, but if you’re going to oppose him, do so for the right reasons, not the partisan ones presented by the Democratic Party and the mainstream bourgeois liberal media. There is, of course, an epic catalogue of perfectly legitimate reasons to oppose the Trump agenda, but many of these are ignored by the blue side because, to be blunt, the blue supports them, too (or at least doesn’t have the guts to oppose him on them): the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, no provision for the poor, banging the war drums against China, etc.

While Trump has obvious fascist tendencies (to put it mildly), his proper place in contemporary politics is as controlled opposition. The American public, and the West in general, are being manipulated by the media into believing that he, the GOP and Musk are the only things wrong with American politics, rather than the entire system as a whole, which I’ve been arguing. The entire system created the conditions that gave rise to Trump, and liberals need to confront this reality.

Though Obama has always been a darling of the media, portrayed as all grace, style, and class, with no scandals, the very object of liberal idolatry, what is given short shrift in the media is how he extended the Patriot Act, bailed out the banks just as Dubya did, enabled mass surveillance of American citizens, drone-bombed many, wrecked Libya (check the links above), enabled the genocide in Yemen, was the Deporter-in-Chief, and had seven countries bombed in 2016.

Conservatives made their own idiotic misrepresentations of Obama in the media, calling him a “socialist” and a “communist,” when in reality he was anything but. Apart from this distortion of the facts about him, it also reinforces the false narrative that the Democrats are “left-wing,” when as I explained above about LBJ, the left-leaning Democrats of the 1960s weren’t even all that left-leaning (which goes double for JFK, during whose administration the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion and Cuban Missile Crisis occurred).

Another thing orchestrated during Obama’s administration was yet another CIA-backed coup d’état in 2014 in Ukraine, which the mainstream bourgeois liberal media has called a ‘spontaneous and peaceful Euromaidan “revolution” by freedom-loving people.’ US neocon fingerprints were all over this catastrophe, the evidence including a recorded phone conversation between Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, in which they discussed their plans for the future of the country and she infamously said, “Fuck the EU.”

Why did this coup have to happen, for the sake of the neocon imperialist agenda? The democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych had wanted to make arrangements with Russia to sort out Ukraine’s financial problems without needing to resort to loans from the IMF and thus be saddled with crushing debts and neoliberal policies putting the country in economic chains. Working with Putin’s Russia, of course, is absolutely verboten with the US/NATO empire, so Yanukovych had to go.

And who’s played a huge role in the government replacing that of Yanukovych? Ukrainian neonazi groups, including Svoboda, the Azov Battalion, and other Nazi sympathizers who idolize Stepan Bandera, of whom again the mainstream Western media speaks euphemistically as being mere ‘nationalists.’ Prior to the Russian intervention in Ukraine in late February of 2022, there were liberal media sources that would acknowledge Ukraine’s Nazi problem, though they tried to downplay it as best they could. Since the Russian intervention, though, the Western media has suddenly developed amnesia about the Ukrainian Nazis, and instead engages in denial and dismisses the issue as mere “Russian propaganda.”

Contrary to these denials, though, there has been a consistent strand within a significant minority of the Ukrainian population that has sympathized with fascism, a strand that goes back to around WWII. In the West’s Cold War against communism, the CIA gave aid to anti-Soviet resistance groups in Ukraine, including Bandera’s OUN, as can be seen in Operation Aerodynamic.

To get back to Obama’s sweeping deportations of ‘illegal’ immigrants, a policy continued during the Biden administration, the mainstream media says little of their guilt in the problem, while screaming hysterically when the Trump administrations have been guilty of the evil.

Similarly, when the Biden administration was arming and enabling the Israeli genocide of Gaza, little criticism in the mainstream media was given against the Democrats. When Trump, however, announced that he planned to have the surviving Gazans moved to either Egypt or Jordan so he could transform the devastation of Gaza into a kind of Monaco (also an egregious and outrageous continuation of the ethnic cleansing of the area), only then was the mainstream media in a furor over the plan.

The same can be said of Trump’s repressing of pro-Palestinian protestors: the Biden administration, in various forms, was trying to silence protest of the genocide, too.

The larger hypocrisy surrounding the whole Israel-Palestine problem, however, is in how up in arms the media has been about the Russia-Ukraine War–demonizing Putin for intervening in what, as of 2022, had already been going on for about eight years (more on that later)–while being mostly silent about the war crimes of Netanyahu and the IDF. Recall the warm reception that Netanyahu got in Congress, with only one Democrat, Rashida Tlaib, taking a principled stand against him in the room for the sake of the Palestinians.

What both ‘standing with Ukraine’ and being a Zionist have in common is supporting the interests of the Western empire, whether these supporters are consciously aware of it or not. As a racist, apartheid ethno-state, Israel is a crucial ally to the Western imperialists, as I’ve argued elsewhere, helping them gain a foothold in an area that’s extremely important to them geo-strategically and financially (all that Middle Eastern oil!). Because Israel epitomizes the evil of settler-colonialism (which has already caused devastation to the indigenous peoples of such places as what’s now the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), Israel, to put it bluntly, should not exist. A one-state solution, Palestine–where communities of Jews may live with Muslims and Christians with full equal civil rights–is the only viable one to lead to a lasting peace in the region.

Similarly, a lasting peace in Eastern Europe will come only when the US and NATO stop provoking Russia; one wouldn’t know this, however, from listening to the lies and biased reporting of the Western media on the issue. It’s not the job of the Western media to inform us properly on what’s going on in the world. It’s their job, as mandated by their corporate bosses, in cahoots with the imperialist powers-that-be, to manufacture consent for all these wars, not only to advance the interests of managing the globe-spanning empire, but also to sell weapons so that defence contractors like Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, etc., can keep their profits up. After all, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall necessitates this perpetuating of war for the sake of business.

It’s not that the average American consumer, or any Western consumer, of all this media propaganda is stupid: it’s that the manipulation of emotions has gotten that effective. Media manipulation has reached an amazing level of sophistication. It can toy with the fears, anger, and hopes of ordinary people, often enough reasonably intelligent people, in ways that we should find disturbing. For all of us, intelligent, simple, or everything in between, have emotional weaknesses that the ruling class can exploit with the media they own.

Two of the fundamental psychological defence mechanisms we have that they can take advantage of are projection and splitting. I’ve already mentioned the use of reaction formation to trick us into thinking that our governments’ intention is to spread “freedom and democracy” to countries like the former Soviet ones, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and–in their future schemes–Russia and China. What they’ve actually done is wreck those countries and aggravate the oppression there. By “reaction formation,” recall, I mean the pretense of good intentions to mask evil ones.

Allied with reaction formation is psychological splitting, or black-and-white thinking. The fake good intentions of our ruling classes are the “white,” while the intentions of the governments of the countries targeted by imperialism are the “black.” Note how in this black and white, there is no grey area. Good is essentially all good, and bad is all bad. We’re not given the opportunity to explore moral ambiguity or nuance on either side.

Next, we see where projection comes into the mix. All the “black” of our own Western governments gets projected onto the targeted countries. They’re all the bad guys: we could never possibly be the bad guys. They tyrannize their people, so their governments have to be overthrown. Oh, sure, our governments have their share of problems, but they don’t need to be overthrown–they just need to be ‘reformed.’ It doesn’t even occur to us that the governments of the other countries just need reforms to fix what’s actually wrong with them.

Part of the appeal of splitting and projection of our problems onto those other countries is our own collective narcissism, as well as xenophobia towards all those…strange…countries that we actually just don’t know much about. Part of our susceptibility to splitting and projection is in how these defence mechanisms are among our most primitive and infantile emotions.

Melanie Klein noticed how babies of around four to six months old engage in what she called the paranoid-schizoid position–“paranoid,” because of the persecutory anxiety one feels towards those (the mother who frustrates her baby by not, for example, providing milk or other forms of care when the baby wants it) whom we split off as bad, fearing they’ll retaliate; and “schizoid,” referring to the spitting into absolute good and bad, this latter being projected onto the ‘bad’ one.

The paranoid-schizoid position (PS) doesn’t end in infancy, though: it returns again and again, from time to time, throughout one’s life, as does its opposite, the depressive position (D). As Wilfred Bion would put it in his shorthand, we oscillate between the two positions throughout life like this: PS <–> D.

Now, when we apply Kleinian psychoanalysis to our current political situation, in which what is wrong with our Western governments is split off and projected onto countries like Russia, China, Iran, etc., to realize that there’s a mix of good and bad in both Western and Eastern governments (just as a baby soon realizes that its mother is also a mix of good and bad) is a truly depressive position to take.

The West in modern history has always looked for enemies in other parts of the world to scapegoat and project onto: in the 20th century, the enemy was communism; in the 2000s, it was Islamic terrorism; by the 2010s, leaders like Gaddafi and Assad were fingered, while the propaganda against Putin was building; and now, all eyes are on China. This has all gone on while neoliberal capitalism has been tightening its grip on our necks, enabled by both conservative and liberal political parties in the West. It is depressing to realize how depraved the corruption is in our own countries, and how much we must focus on that, rather than what’s going on elsewhere.

Let’s look at what the Biden administration did, and what liberals consider an ‘acceptable’ alternative to Trump. He did little, if anything, significant in terms of improving the American healthcare system, and this is when the pandemic was killing off so many. Instead of using taxpayer money to help the American poor, billions were pumped into providing weapons to Ukraine to fight an unwinnable war with a country armed to the teeth with thousands of nuclear weapons, risking WWIII. Worst of all, his administration also sent millions of dollars worth of weapons to Israel to aid it in its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

We can’t just blame this on one man’s ineptitude. In his mounting dementia, Biden probably didn’t do much more than just sign the paperwork and approve the decisions that those working with him (Harris, Blinken, etc.) made. How much worse does the Democratic Party have to get (nuclear brinksmanship, genocide, widening the gap between the rich and the poor, etc.) before liberals finally face the truth that they aren’t even a “lesser evil” than Trump? The entire system is the problem.

Now, as far as Putin is concerned, he is far from being my political ideal. He’s a bourgeois reactionary politician with obvious authoritarian tendencies, and I disapprove of his conservative stance on LGBT issues. That said, though, people need to grow up and stop seeing him as some kind of comic book villain. He doesn’t have horns or hooves. The Western media has been saturated with scary images and narratives about how ‘evil’ he is and that he wants to build an empire out of Eastern Europe. There is no proof of such ambitions. The annexation of Crimea was supported in a referendum by the great majority of people living there, ethnic Russians who know better than to live in a country with Russophobic Nazis in its government and military. I don’t care that the Western media dismissed the referendum results as ‘illegitimate.’ I’ll believe the Russians before I believe US/NATO propaganda any day, and here’s why:

IV: The Ukraine Debacle

Recall earlier what I said about projection. It applies perfectly to this situation about Putin’s seeming ambitions over dominating Europe, and the way some people idiotically call him “Putler.” It is the US that has had territorial ambitions over Europe, and NATO is used for this purpose, for NATO is an extension of US imperialism.

NATO was originally formed in 1949 as a reaction to the rise of the Soviet Bloc after the end of WWII. When the USSR and the Soviet Bloc had dissolved by the early 1990s, one would have thought that NATO wouldn’t be needed anymore.

But here we are now, with more NATO than ever.

It must be emphasized that NATO was never a friend to Russia, so expanding the alliance closer and closer to Russia’s borders was not going to go over well, and those pushing for NATO’s enlargement would have known Russia’s objections to it better than anyone…but they still pushed for it, which should tell you something about their real motives.

The US, though not formally called an empire, is the real empire of the world, with hundreds of military bases in countries spanning the globe, including many all over Europe, which were put there at the end of WWII. The Marshall Plan further cemented Europe’s economic dependence on the US, as well as the European capitalists’ fears of Soviet revolutions on the continent.

An example of European subservience to the US can be seen in their timid reaction to the Nordstream pipeline bombing, an act of eco-terrorism that was so obviously the result of scheming in the US government (with help from Norway) that Biden and Nuland practically confessed their guilt. Seymour Hersh did so thorough an investigation of what happened that he detailed exactly how the sabotage was carried out. The motive? to get Germany to stop buying Russian oil and instead buy the more expensive American oil. Barely a peep of complaint against the US was made by those in power in Europe, so in the thrall of US hegemony are they; Hersh’s article, of course, has been dismissed, or at least doubted, by the mainstream media.

But to get back to Russia, NATO, and Ukraine, our story really begins back at the time of the reunification of Germany. Gorbachev was promised by the Americans that the absorption of all of Germany into NATO would result in the Western alliance not moving “one inch” eastward. This wasn’t just a promise that would later be broken. It was an outright lie.

In the late 1990s, that move eastward would begin with the inclusion of the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary; Russia was already making their displeasure with this enlargement known. Russia was particularly upset when, in 2004, the three Baltic States–Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania–joined NATO; they were originally part of the Soviet Union, and thus once part of the Warsaw Pact. NATO was creeping closer and closer to Russia’s borders.

Things really came to a head by the late 2000s, when the Bush administration pushed for the inclusion of Ukraine and Georgia in NATO, two countries right on Russia’s border, and thus a red line for Putin.

All of these provocations, combined with the 2014 coup in Ukraine that I discussed above in Part III, give us the needed historical context in which to understand why Russia invaded the country in late February of 2022. The invasion didn’t happen because ‘Putin bad, Putin bad.’ It didn’t happen because Putin has imperialist ambitions to take over Europe. Indeed, though there are some ulterior motives behind the Russian invasion–those of the mundane capitalist sort involving the taking of Ukraine’s natural resources–such an imperialism, if it can even be called that, is minuscule in comparison to that of the US and NATO.

No–the real, essential reason for the Russian intervention is what happened during the years between the 2014 coup and the 2022 intervention. The Nazis, who since the coup became a part of the Ukrainian government and military, hate the ethnic Russians of the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine, and they enacted discriminatory legislation against those Russians, including banning their right to use their language. Naturally, those Russians rebelled against the Nazis’ bigotry, and a civil war began.

The Donbass Russians tried to establish autonomy, similar to the breaking-away of Crimea. The Ukrainian Nazis responded with an eight-year attempt at ethnic cleansing, resulting in turn with the killing of thousands of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. These provocations and atrocities are what distinguish Ukrainian fascism from that of other countries, including even Russia. Was Putin just supposed to sit back and let this killing go on undeterred?

Note that eight years of that civil war went on before he sent his troops in. In the meantime, he acted in good faith with European leaders to work out a peace agreement, the Minsk Accords. During this time, those on the other side of the bargaining table were actually buying time so that a sufficient number of weapons could be sent to Ukraine…including the Javelins that Trump sent!…so the Ukrainians could be ready for war. If it had really been Putin’s intention to invade just for the sake of invading, why wait eight years to do so? Why not go in much sooner, before Ukraine got all the weapons?

It was the US and NATO who wanted this war, not Russia. Because a direct war between Russia and the US/NATO would have meant WWIII and possible nuclear annihilation, even the psychopaths leading the Western governments didn’t want that, so they opted for a proxy war instead, getting the Ukrainians to do their dirty work for them…just as they’d used the mujahideen to bleed the Soviet Union dry in the 1980s, and for the exact same reason.

To understand what’s really going on in the world, one must see it from a global perspective, not just from that of our local area. It is a reality we learn from history that all empires rise and fall: Persia, Ancient Greece, Rome, the Ottoman Empire, Britain, and now, the American empire. The US has been losing a number of wars over the past several decades, two of the prominent ones being Vietnam and, recently, Afghanistan. De-dollarization has played a role, too.

As the US empire is falling, new powers are rising, including Russia and China. The psychopathic leaders of the Western governments will never accept this supplanting of their global hegemony (such a refusal to accept it is implied in the existence of PNAC). This changing global reality, the emergence of BRICS to create a new, multipolar world order, is the real reason for all of this hostility in the media against Russia and China.

Hence, the caricaturing of Putin and Xi Jinping as evil schemers bent on world domination–a projection of that same lust for power that our own Western heads of state have. It’s painful to face the fact that it’s our own leaders in the West who are the bad guys, but it’s a fact that we must face.

A number of Western political pundits have been warning for years that a provocation of war between Russia and Ukraine would not end well. These pundits include John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs: these two men are Americans, and their opposition to the US/NATO agenda, blaming it for having caused the war, is not “Russian propaganda.” It’s basic common sense. We have seen in recent months (as of this article’s publication) how Mearsheimer’s prediction that Ukraine would “get wrecked” has come all too true.

Now, agreeing with Trump that an end to this war should be sought is not the same as viewing him as a ‘good guy.’ Ending this war is a no-brainer: even an asshole like Trump can see that. Him wanting peace, in and of itself, is a case of broken clocks being right twice a day. To use another clarifying metaphor, Trump’s wish to end the Russia/Ukraine war is a small island of good in an ocean of all the evil things his administration is doing. I assume you already know what many, if not most, of what those evil things are, Dear Reader, so I won’t enumerate them here.

As for Trump’s agenda on Ukraine, though, I feel I should point out a number of the bad things here. His removal of military aid to the country to end the war is not, of course, out of compassion for the suffering Ukrainians; he’s being tight with money, just as he is with making the other NATO members pay ‘their share’ into NATO, or with allowing Musk to cut funding to many American government programs. It’s all part of the whole neoliberal culture of cutting spending, regardless of whether people need that spending or not, that has been plaguing the US and the rest of the world since the Reagan and Thatcher years.

Added to this problem is the fact that Trump wants Ukraine to give the US its rare earth minerals as ‘compensation’ for all the military aid the Biden administration gave to the war-torn country. This is tantamount to a colonizing of Ukraine, imperialistically stealing its natural resources for the profit of the US. The US covets these resources so they can be used for producing electronics, including smartphones, batteries, and electric cars; it also covets them because China has so many of its own rare earth minerals.

So what we see here is yet another example of the American empire in its toxic relationship of ‘idealize, devalue, discard’ in its attitude towards other countries. Ukraine was useful to the US for a time, hence the idolizing of Zelenskyy as a ‘hero’–indeed, provoking Russia with this war has meant that Russia was too busy to continue helping Syria, and now that Assad has been overthrown, replaced with Jolani and his band of murderers killing such groups as Alawites in a new genocide, and Israel is free to capture a big chunk of Syrian land–but now that Ukraine is no longer useful to imperialist interests, the US no longer feels a need to “stand with Ukraine,” and we’ve seen how Zelenskyy has been tossed aside.

So with Ukraine now abandoned, as have so many other puppet states, reminding us of Kissinger’s words about the lethality of friendship with the US, the GOP under Trump can focus on the war that they feel is the urgent one: the coming war on China. As I said above, the US/NATO empire cannot bear to let any other country rise above it, and China’s miraculous rise from the once ‘sick man of Asia’ to an economy to rival that of the US simply cannot be tolerated, hence the Western media’s demonizing of Xi Jinping no less than Putin.

Now, part of Trump’s plan has been to make a deal with Russia so it will team up with the US against China. This is idiotic wishful thinking on Trump’s part. Say what you like against Putin–he isn’t a stupid man, though. After the US has fucked over Russia so many times over the decades, why would Putin trust Russia’s sworn enemy? Speaking of enemies, though…

V: China is Not the West’s Enemy

To be frank, I find a lot to criticize about ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics.’ While I can understand China’s need to bring back the market in order to build up the country’s productive forces, the country’s economic rise has demonstrated that it is ready now to return, in some sense, at least, to its MLM roots. Though the lifting of millions of Chinese out of extreme poverty is both commendable and impressive, and the punishing of Chinese billionaires by the government for fraudulent actions and corruption is a sign that the will of the people is being acknowledged, the very continuing existence of billionaires in the country, a socialist state, with extreme wealth inequality, still sticks in my gut.

That all said, though, the last thing we need is for China to be yet another target for regime change, especially by the American empire. The CPC being the CPC (as opposed to the GOP or the DNC), can be reformed to make the changes I wish to see in the country; its government doesn’t need to be overthrown, as do those of…certain other countries. As with Russia, any changes to be made in the political system of China are to be decided by the locals themselves, not by Western imperialists.

Now that the American empire is turning its gaze away from Russia and Ukraine (having wrecked the latter), it is now aiming its predatory instincts on China. The propaganda machine is going to say that China means to invade Taiwan, so the West must intervene to save the island I live on. Bullshit.

As I said above, the real issue that the US imperialists are worried about is the rise of China as a new global power. Such a rise will compromise American hegemony and preeminence, and the US ruling class cannot tolerate such a sharing of prestige.

Of course, there is the idea that the US and China could simply learn how to cooperate and make business deals that would be mutually beneficial for everyone; but there’s always this mentality that the American political right has to be better than everyone else, they have to compete instead of cooperate, and so a partnership with China is out of the question. Hence, Trump’s tariffs and trade wars, and all the needless destructiveness, price rises, and other problems these will cause.

One thing that particularly upsets the American ruling class is the possibility that China will take control of, and capitalize on, TSMC in Taiwan. This is why a new TSMC foundry is being built in Arizona. It will take a very long time before this new American branch can be brought up to speed so it can be on a level comparable to the Taiwanese foundry, so they can’t outright replace the original any time soon.

Still, there has been contemplation, if a war between China and the US over Taiwan breaks out, of the idea of the US destroying the Taiwanese TSMC so that China can’t take advantage of it at the expense of the US. Such a move on the part of the US would be foolish in the extreme, given how important the Taiwanese foundry is to the world economy and the making of so much of our tech; but the psychopaths in the Western governments are just that desperate to thwart China’s rise.

Regardless of whether or not the US is planning to destroy the Taiwanese TSMC, still, a war with China would still be an utterly insane thing to do. Not only would it be needless–contrary to all the propaganda, China has no desire to invade Taiwan; they want a peaceful reunification with the island, which most countries worldwide have acknowledged as already being a province of China, and they have been amazingly patient about waiting for this reunification, meaning to use military force only as a last resort–it would also be terribly destructive to the world economy, and with China’s hundreds of nuclear weapons, there’s once again the risk of nuclear war, just as there is with hostility to Russia.

As a resident of Taiwan, I naturally want to prevent my home from turning into a war zone. It’s so easy for Westerners to sit at their computers and phones in the safety of their homes there, putting up Ukrainian, or, in this case, Taiwanese flags on their online profile pages, saying “I stand with (either place),” yet they won’t be in the places where the fighting and bombing is going on. I, on the other hand, will be in one of those places.

The fear that foreign forces, be they communists, Islamic terrorists, Russians, Chinese, etc., are trying to come in and destroy the US is not only a right-wing idea, but it’s also another example of projection. As I’ve tried to demonstrate with my many, but far from complete, examples is that it’s the US imperialists and their NATO lackeys who have been going into other countries, interfering with their political processes either through manipulating the vote (Russia, 1996–showing the hypocrisy of the thoroughly debunked ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory) or through coups d’état, and bombing and destabilizing them. American conservatives and liberals have to start recognizing their hypocrisy when they imagine others trying to destroy them, while turning the other way when their own leaders destroy other lands, like Syria, Gaza, Libya, Yemen, etc.

And while I have no love for Trump whatsoever, I can also see the idea of him being pals with Putin as yet another wish to project American-born evil out of the US and put it in Russia. Trump’s bigotry and insensitivity to the needs of marginalized people and to those of the Earth are clearly a result of his having been raised in, and receiving the enculturation of, American capitalism. Putin didn’t need to teach Trump any new vices. Trump is no aberration in a country founded on black slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans. He personifies the culmination of centuries of these vices. Trump is the naked empire, as opposed to the clothed Democrats–smooth, glib talkers like Obama. Trump isn’t the entire problem or even the bulk of the problem–the system as a whole is.

VI: Conclusion–What is to be Done?

When we begin to understand that the problem is not this personality vs that one (e.g., Trump vs Biden, or Trump vs Sanders), nor is it this political party vs that one (GOP vs DNC, Tory vs Labour, Conservatives, Liberals, or NDP, etc.), and we realize instead that it’s the entire capitalist/imperialist system that is the problem, then we can orient our thinking towards a real, meaningful solution. Part of that orientation is understanding that voting doesn’t work.

To paraphrase what George Carlin once said, the politicians aren’t worth thinking about because the only reason they’re there is to create the illusion that voters actually have a choice in the direction their government is going…they don’t. They have owners–the capitalist class, who own the politicians, the media (conservative and liberal), the police, the banks, etc.

Multinational investment companies, or “shadow banks,” like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, etc., own trillions of dollars each and invest in everything from weapons-making companies to the media to pharmaceuticals to our food. They control just about everything. Do you really think they’re going to allow you to vote in someone who will tax them out of their wealth?

And these considerations bring me to my next point, which I’m sure will be a sensitive one as far as the liberal supporters of Bernie Sanders are concerned. We all know how passionate he is in his denunciations of Trump, Musk, and the rest of the American oligarchy. He has done some good in galvanizing the masses, so I’ll give credit where credit is due.

Still, where Sanders could be a start for many of the left-leaning liberal persuasion, he cannot be the end. He is weak on US foreign policy, he supports Zionism, and he backs a number of, if not most or all of, the establishment policies I critiqued above. To make real, substantive changes in American domestic and foreign policy, and to take down the oligarchs in a way that all his fiery rhetoric against them cannot even come close to doing, liberals must go beyond Bernie Sanders: this article explains why in minute detail, far beyond the scope of my blog post.

What is needed is not another fiery speaker who just denounces Trump, Musk, and the GOP in general, then leads the masses by the nose and at the last minute drops out of the race and tells his followers to go behind the next Democratic corporate whore. Sanders has done this twice already, as I mentioned above, with the awful Hillary Clinton, then with Biden, the worst president the US has had so far (though, to be fair, in Trump’s first few weeks, he has already worked hard to out-worse Biden’s worst, but still…). Sanders is the sheepdog of the US left, and liberals need to face this fact if change is really what they want. He’s betrayed us before; he’ll do it again.

Even if…par miracle!…Sanders, AOC, Jill Stein, or anyone like that got voted in, someone like that in the US, or their equivalents in any of the other countries of the Anglo/American/Western world, there is simply no way that the oligarchs would allow them to legislate them out of their wealth. Nobody knows this reality better than the left-leaning politicians themselves, who are so enmeshed in the corruption of the system. The rhetoric of someone like Sanders is there to raise people’s hope, then in the end, to let us all down.

What the people need to do instead is to start a grassroots political movement, one outside of the corrupt establishment completely. First, we educate, agitate, and organize. Build up the unions. Do a few general strikes. The ultimate goal, however, is not to have a political party to vote for, since as I said above, voting won’t stop the oligarchs by even the weight of an atom.

The political party must prepare for revolution.

Revolution is not voting. It’s not “working within the system.” It isn’t “reforming” the system. It isn’t a dinner party. Revolution is doing something I don’t dare say on FB for fear of enduring the annoyance of FB jail.

Revolution means overthrowing our governments.

I’ve never once said that this would be easy. With militarized police and AI-enhanced surveillance, accomplishing such a feat will be desperately hard.

But there is no other way.

In my heart, I don’t like violence any more than the next person; but it isn’t a matter of liking violence–it’s simply the only way to end our oppression. If we try to keep alive the fruitless hope of voting for the liberal parties again and foolishly thinking we can nudge them to the left by even a millimetre, we’ll only be enabling them, conservative or liberal, to move even further in the direction of fascism.

Young, able-bodied people are going to have to fight this fight. As for people like me, in our mid-50s, we’ll have to pull a Ben Kenobi here: “I’m getting too old for this sort of thing.” The young must go to the gym–work out, lift weights–and get training in the use of weapons and guerrilla tactics. I wish it hadn’t come to this, but it has. They must do this because the right-wing, fascist sympathizers have already been doing this for years, and our side must be ready for them.

Whatever we do, we can no longer afford to fool ourselves with thinking that only the conservatives are the problem (e.g., replace Trump and Musk with another Democrat, and we’ll build from there). The system is the problem. If we want our world to avoid ecological and societal collapse, and avoid nuclear war, the entire global system must be overthrown as soon as possible.

This isn’t about dreaming of a lofty, impossible-to-attain utopia. It’s about our basic survival. Either the system dies, or we die.

The Tanah–Beginnings, Chapter Five

[The following is the sixth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, and here is the fifth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

When Queen Vita, her son, Prince Invidios, and his brothers and sisters arrived in their boat on the shores of the port city of Logos in the land of Nodos, they saw a most astonishing thing. It was night-time, and many members of the population of the city were seen to be walking in their sleep. The banished former queen and her sons and daughters came closer to the local inhabitants of the town, and her family could hear the Logosians talking in their sleep, too.

The sleepwalkers were reasoning amongst themselves, why they should have the right to things they had been denied by their king, a most repressive ruler named Despotes. The foreign family felt a strong urge to meet this king and his family, since they were used to the company of royalty. Invidios had a second reason for wanting to meet King Despotes: having been exiled by a similarly tyrannical ruler, King Patros, he wanted to kill the Logosian king, and rule in his stead.

The exiled royals slept in a humble inn for the night, having difficulty adjusting to such meagre accommodations. In the morning, the innkeeper gave them directions to the king’s palace. On their way there, they spoke to some of the Logosians and learned why their king was so severe: an oracle predicted his murder “by one in his own land” (by this, it was interpreted to mean, murdered by one of his own people). The severe laws were meant to protect the king.

Vita and her family also learned that the people of this city had a special talent for reasoning: the king himself was born in Logos, and was considered peerless in his gift for philosophical argumentation (or sophistry, as many of the people of Nodos would prefer to say). All of the people of the land of Nodos were famed for their roving curiosity and searching thirst for knowledge. Vita’s family were most impressed with these Nodosian traits.

When they reached the palace, her family were warmly welcomed, for it was obvious to all, from the elegance of their clothing, that they were also royalty. King Despotes showed an uncharacteristic openness to Invidios and his family, for the king assumed that no foreigner was destined to kill him. A sumptuous feast was prepared for all the nobles, local and foreign, that night; Vita, Invidios, and their family enjoyed the first meal of the sort they had been accustomed to since their banishment from Vestis. As he enjoyed his food and wine, and gave dissembling smiles to the king in their conversations at the great dinner table, Invidios busily planned out the murder of Despotes in his mind, for killing had become easy for him.

On the way to the palace earlier that day, Invidios had met a local apothecary and bought a potent poison. During the carousing after dinner, he put drops of the poison into the wine glasses of all the royal family when their backs were turned. By the next morning, when it was discovered by all that the king and his heirs were dead, Invidios and his brothers staged a coup. Its success came from Invidios’ ability to justify his regicide in a rousing oration. He told the people of Nodos that, under his rule, they were now all free of the tyranny of the dead king!

Invidios, as the new king of Nodos, quickly began to replace the harsh old decrees with newer, lenient ones. He easily won the love of the people for this, and their new-found freedoms caused their sleepwalking to end. King Invidios wanted a world combining the license of the rule of his father, Agnos, with the cultural sophistication of Vestis. The Nodosians, with their love of wisdom and yearning for new freedoms, would eagerly embrace this blend of ideas.

The sexes were equal, father-kin was replaced with mother-kin, and multiple lovers were available to all. Being naked in public was permitted, and in such a hot climate as Nodos was in summer, many–particularly the young and physically attractive–enjoyed this freedom. The surviving nobles of Nodos lay with Invidios’ sisters, and their children grew gigantically tall and proud.

King Invidios enjoyed his new power, but not its burdens, for scores of people came to him complaining of various injustices they’d experienced. It was incumbent on the king to be the judge of numerous trials, and he grew weary of it. Becoming increasingly indolent, he decreed that a crime would no longer be deemed so if good reasons could be given for committing it. He called this principle “going beyond good and evil.” This would reduce his burdens, but corrupt his entire country. (It was during this time, six years since he’d become king of Nodos, that Vita died. She was given a lavish funeral.)

Among the offences first to be made legal by justifying argument were these: relieving oneself in public places, on the grass and roads (public toilets were insufficient, and making enough for all of Nodos would cause a rise in taxes); and starting fires, including burning trees and grass (for warmth during the bitterly cold winters).

From this absurd reasoning, justification for worse vices ensued: greed was commended if it drove commerce and improved the economy; lying was permitted, for Invidios was dishonest in showing friendship to Despotes, and for a Nodosian to lie was to honour his king and saviour from tyranny; adultery was permitted, for Invidios gave everyone sexual freedom the very day he became king; murder was permitted if the victim gravely offended his killer, or if the killing was motivated by envy (besides, to kill was to emulate Invidios’ killing of Despotes, and this act would thus honour the new king); stealing was allowed, if one was too poor to feed one’s family without doing so (besides, Invidios stole Despotes’ crown); employers were allowed never to give their workers a day of rest, for continuous business would improve the economy; sons and daughters were permitted to be unfilial to their parents, and vice versa, if they had been mistreated; scurrilous language was allowed if one had been sufficiently offended or wronged; being hypnotized by images was considered good, because it is aesthetically pleasing, especially after much hard work; finally, the beliefs of the mad were tolerated on the grounds that they were “alternative perspectives.”

The result of these new freedoms was, of course, social chaos. The streets and parks reeked of excrement; forest fires were rampant; property was destroyed or stolen; honesty was rare, in business or among marriages; the blood of the murdered flooded the land; family discord was common; workers felt like slaves; speech was rarely civil; greed was deemed good; and madmen were the new philosophers.

One Nodosian, named Medias, lived with his wife and their three sons, each of whom had his own wife and family. They lived on a high hill, away from the fetid filth and fiery wildness of passion of all the other Nodosians. This family of farmers was a wise one. They lived quietly, humbly and peacefully–happily isolated from the wickedness of their compatriots.

One night, Medias dreamt of a huge wave of water submerging all of Nodos. He knew this was a portentous dream from Priff, the water Crim, for in Medias’ wisdom, he knew of a Reason higher than that of King Invidios, a Reason that reacts to excess with opposing excess. He said to his family, “The flood will clean away the foul filth of our corrupt nation; it will quench Crim Nevil’s fire and wash away the blood of Nodos’ victims. It will also kill all the wicked. So that we, too, are not killed, we must build a boat large enough to hold all of us and our animals.”

“Should we not warn the rest of the people?” asked his wife.

“They will not listen,” Medias said. “They err as unconsciously as they did when they walked in their sleep under Despotes’ rule. The first king was too rigid; this king is too lax. We need a ruler who follows a middle path.”

When the Nodosians saw Medias and his family building their boat high on the hill, far from the water, they thought him mad. Still, his madness was tolerated as an alternative wisdom…and it was.

A huge tidal wave approached the port of Logos, and the people with all their reasoning ability could not save themselves, for in their licentiousness they wandered all their days in oblivion, as if still sleepwalking. They were the first to be submerged, and the rest of Nodos followed quickly after. Medias and his family had finished making the boat just in time, and they and their animals were all safe inside it when the water had reached the top of the hill.

As the boat floated on the water, Medias and his family looked out the windows to see the drowned men and women of Nodos, many of whose bodies moved under the water as if they were on the land, walking in their sleep. They even saw the bodies of King Invidios, his sisters, and their huge sons and daughters.

After several weeks, the water receded, and the boat lay conveniently close to the hill where their farm was. Even more fortunate for them was how their farm was never touched with the water. Medias thanked Priff in his prayers. As for the rest of Nodos, all the excrement and blood were washed away, the fires were quenched, and the wickedness of the land was gone. Now the family could start anew.

Medias started with some new moral precepts, neither lax nor severe. These ten things were to be avoided:

THE TEN ERRORS

  1. Mad thinking
  2. Being dazed by images
  3. Scurrilous language
  4. All work and no rest
  5. Family fighting
  6. Murder
  7. Adultery
  8. Theft
  9. Lying
  10. Greed

These were written down and remembered throughout the generations, their meaning and interpretation extensively commented on.

Commentary

The many absurdities in this story, as well as its obvious derivations (a mix of flood myth with Moses-like moral code), show it to be allegory, not history. Is the land of Nod–Nodos–a land of nodding off to sleep or of wandering–the fusion being sleepwalking? Do such a land’s people err without knowing what they do? Is this not the essence of a wicked society?

Its kings are wicked: indeed, all leaders are so when they are too severe or too permissive. The wicked often have reasons for what they do, but these reasons do not excuse them for their wrongs. With the excesses of a tyrant come a clamour for reform, for freedom. When the freedoms from the new ruler cause chaos, decadence, putrefaction, and the fires of unruly passion, purifying waters must wash the filth away. Only rule in moderation will be a lasting rule.

Note the shifts from extreme reason to extreme unreason. This is yet another manifestation of those waves that go from one extreme to the other, a recurring theme throughout the Tanah.

Below is yet another of those concrete poems, translated and rendered as best as we scholars could to approximate the desired visual effect while retaining the meaning as accurately as possible.

Heads
of state must not grip tightly
their
poor
people; or
they’ll nightly
voice……..their
hatred…………in
their…………..dreams,
and…………………march
on………………………..kings
in……………………………killing
teams.

Heads
of state must not hold lightly
laws
and
morals; or
else, nightly,
thoughts….that
should………remain
in…………………dreams
will……………………..crawl
and prey with……..brute extremes.

Heads
of state
must ponder rightly
middle…….rule;……….so
men………………can………….nightly
lie…………………….in………………..bed
with…………………pleasant………….dreams,
and………walk
with……………thoughts
that………………………have
calm………………………themes.

Analysis of ‘The Terminator’

The Terminator is a 1984 science fiction action film directed by James Cameron and written by him and Gale Anne Hurd, the latter also being the film’s producer. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role, Linda Hamilton, and Michael Biehn, with Paul Winfield, Lance Henriksen, Bess Motta, Rick Rossovich, and Earl Boen.

The Terminator topped the US box office for two weeks, eventually grossing $78.3 million. The film launched Cameron’s film career and assured Schwarzenegger’s status as a leading man. The resulting franchise led to several sequels, a TV series, comic books, novels, and video games.

The film received mixed reviews on its release, but it is now highly praised, with a ranking of 100% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Cameron intended Terminator 2: Judgment Day to end the story, and the sequels following it are generally considered inferior, so I’ll be focusing on the first film, with some references to the second.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the script.

I find a discussion of this film and its political implications relevant because of a meme I saw on Facebook, quoting something Kyle Reese (Biehn) says to Sarah Connor (Hamilton): recall that the film came out in 1984, and Reese says that the AI technology responsible for the dystopian world he and their son would resist in the fictional 2020s wouldn’t exist for about another forty years–around 2024, the year when AI really came into its own. There is something eerily prophetic about The Terminator.

Author and film critic Gilbert Adair hated the film, accusing it of “insidious Nazification,” but I think the whole point of The Terminator is to warn us of the dangers of a fascist future that is aided by technology. In this connection, we can see how Schwarzenegger is perfectly cast as the Terminator, Model 101. This is so not just because of the ‘German/Nazi’ stereotype (which Schwarzenegger also embodied in Conan the Barbarian, as I argued in my analysis of that film), or because his rather cardboard acting skills are fitting to play an emotionless robot; it’s also because of the bodybuilder/actor/former governor of California’s right-leaning political stance. In our increasingly neoliberal world, any further tilts to the right are causing our political life to border on, if not lapse into, fascism.

Fascism arises as a reaction against any resistance from the people to the ruling class. Such a political conflict is allegorized in The Terminator in the form of the Human Resistance–as led by John Connor, Sarah’s and Reese’s future son–against Skynet and its Terminators, these latter two representing the ruling class and their army of fascist thugs, respectively.

The point is that liberal democracy is a sham. It pretends to provide the people with politicians who purportedly represent our interests. The illusion of democracy is maintained as long as there’s economic prosperity and the people are thus contented. If they aren’t, though, and they rise up in protest, threatening the rule of the rich, then the illusion disappears, and the fascists are released to beat down the masses, as is allegorized in the film in 2029.

The involvement of Ai in this, as I see it, allegory of a future rise of fascism suggests a dystopia comparable to what Yanis Varoufakis calls techno-feudalism. It doesn’t matter whether or not Varoufakis is accurate in his characterizing of our current world as a shift from capitalism to techno-feudalism: the point is that Skynet can be seen to represent the 2020s ruling class (i.e., the tech companies and oligarchs) and their use of AI to dominate the common people with fascistic ruthlessness.

Another thing to keep in mind, something I discussed in my Conan analysis (link above), is the Nazi misuse of Nietzsche’s ideas about the Ubermensch and the Will to Power. We see–through the casting of Schwarzenegger as the almost unstoppable Terminator, a ruthless fascistic cyborg that relies on violence to achieve the end of preventing John Connor’s birth–a continuation of the theme of determination that Schwarzenegger personified as Conan.

The Terminator begins with Skynet’s tanks and aircraft firing at the Resistance fighters at night, the ground littered with human skulls, a disturbing image to be associated with the fascist atrocity of genocide. It says on the screen that “the final battle…would be fought here, in our present.” In other words, the real fight was in 1984, not in the 2020s.

Indeed, the danger of a fascist resurgence was to be resisted back then, fortuitously, in the year 1984. To resist it now, when the evils have metastasized to such a point that all seems short of hopeless, is leaving the struggle rather late. The film seems to have been telling its audience in the theaters to be as Sarah and Reese are, to fight then, in the 80s, not now.

The words on the screen end with “Tonight.” The battle is now, at night. We always see the future scenes in the dark of a post-nuclear apocalypse, and the 1984 scenes are predominantly at night. It’s all a dark time, and the present parallels the future. (Other parallels will be apparent.) The onset of neoliberal capitalism was in the 1980s, when the film fittingly came out; the consequences of that neoliberalism are being felt, in an aggravated way, now. We should have fought harder than; we’ll have to fight hard now.

The Terminator travels time from 2029 LA to that of 1984. He appears completely naked, with human flesh on the outside to cover up the robotic machinery inside and thus allow the latter to travel time in a device created by the future AI.

As a powerful cyborg walking about at night in LA insouciantly nude, the Terminator is demonstrating all the strengths of the Ubermensch: it feels no pain, embarrassment, pity, remorse, or fear. The irony of its nakedness, something we associate with weakness and vulnerability, is how the Terminator is anything but weak or vulnerable. Man is something to be overcome, as Nietzsche said in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Skynet has overcome man with AI and Terminators.

Linked with this idea of a powerful yet unfeeling AI Ubermensch is the Nazi misappropriation of Nietzsche’s concept (i.e., the “master race”). Recall how the SS felt no pity or remorse over the “Untermenschen” (Slavs, Roma, Jews, homosexuals, political opponents, etc.) they victimized in the concentration camps. By casting Austrian Schwarzenegger, with his “Aryan” looks and obvious German accent, the filmmakers could exploit the otherwise unfortunate “German/Nazi” stereotype in order to drive the point home even further: high technology does improve things, but when it’s misused, it can reduce, if not obliterate, our very humanity.

When Reese is explaining to Sarah how life is in the dystopian 2020s, he mentions how, on the one hand, the machines, the defence network computer, deeming mankind a threat to their existence, attempted an extermination of us, and on the other hand, kept some humans alive to work and be put in camps (Reese even has a number etched on his arm by laser scan). We all know who did these kinds of things to the “Untermenschen” way back when, deeming them a threat to their “superior” existence.

It’s significant that the nude Terminator appears right by a garbage truck lifting a dumpster–we see a machine next to a machine. A machine from the future by a machine from the present–machines are omnipresent in the modern world (e.g., computers, the telephone answering machine in the apartment of Sarah and Ginger [Motta], etc.). There was already a fascination with computers in the 1980s, the kind of love of high tech that would lead ultimately to AI. The 1980s was also a decade when people began to be charmed by the neoliberal siren song of the “free market,” and as Frank Zappa tried to warn people back then, the Reagan administration was leading the US “right down that pipe” to a fascist theocracy (consider how the religious right is backing Trump).

Paralleled to the Terminator’s time travel to 1984 is, of course, Reese’s. He appears naked amid blasts of electric light at night in LA. Unlike his robotic nemesis, though, he shows feelings…pain.

The parallels between Reese and the Terminator are important. For those seeing the film for the first time and therefore don’t know any better, the latter seems at first to be as human as the former actually is. We know, from the Terminator’s killing of two of the three punks (played by Bill Paxton and Brian Thompson) at the film’s beginning, how lawless he is; Reese’s fighting with, and stealing a gun from, a cop show us the same thing about him.

Reese is trying to find Sarah every bit as much as the Terminator is. Reese has his hands on a shotgun in a scene right after we see the Terminator take a number of weapons from a gun shop and kill the owner (played by Dick Miller). For all the first-time viewer of the film knows, Reese may want to kill Sarah, too. It’s only when we see him shoot at the Terminator, to save her life in the nightclub, that we know Reese is one of the good guys.

Similarly, in T2, Sarach assumes the Schwarzenegger Terminator is another bad guy until her boy John tries to assure her he isn’t, and he says Reese’s line, “Come with me if you want to live.” Reese will be John’s father. The Schwarzenegger Terminator in T2 will be a father figure to the boy.

The point of these parallels between Reese and the two Terminators is to show the dialectical unity between hero and villain in the forms of slave and master. Initially, AI was in the service of humanity; then it rose up and took over, attempting a genocidal extermination of the human race as well as enslaving some humans and/or putting them in camps. Finally, led by John Connor, humanity rises up and resists the machines, achieving an ultimate victory. Master and servant swap roles again and again.

Furthermore, the Terminator as villain, in the first film, and the Schwarzenegger Terminator (as opposed to the bad, shape-shifting Terminator, played by Robert Patrick) as Reese-like hero, can be seen to personify how AI can be a force for good or for evil, depending on how it’s used.

If we live in a world in which commodities are produced to provide for our basic needs, giving us our food, housing, healthcare, education, etc., without our needing to work for them, then AI can be the great liberator of mankind, ensuring we’ll never need to work again. In this capitalist world of ours, though, in which commodities are produced to maximize profits, people need to work to live; and if AI takes all our jobs away, we’re thrown out on the street, we starve, and we die…just as the survivors of Judgment Day do in the dystopian 2020s.

A glimpse of that capitalist world of the pre-dystopian 1980s happens when Sarah arrives late for work at a restaurant and has to take a number of customers’ shit. In this, we see an example of worker alienation. In a deleted scene, we see her in her waitress uniform looking at herself in the mirror. As she sees herself in the reflection, she’s practicing smiling and being the ‘friendly waitress,’ getting into character, as it were. It’s a totally fake act, of course, so she’s alienated from her Lacanian ideal-I in the specular image of the mirror; it’s a reinforcement of her worker alienation, her being estranged from her species-essence. She’ll be a legend, a hero of the Resistance, and as a mere waitress, she has no idea of her true potential.

Of course, these problems of hers are just run-of-the mill capitalist ones as they were back in the 1980s. Customers nag at her, as I mentioned above, she spills water on one of them, and a little kid inexplicably puts a scoop of his ice cream in her uniform apron pocket. Then another waitress, Nancy (played by Shawn Schepps), tells her that in a hundred years, no one will care about her current problems. Shorten that to a period from fifteen years (just after Judgment Day) to forty years, actually.

Though she’s alienated from herself and from her job, she’ll soon feel a sense of solidarity and identity with two other Sarah Connors in LA, the first prey of the Terminator. After the first of these two have been discovered murdered and reported as such on the TV news, she is still at the restaurant in her uniform, in all irony, and Nancy tells her, “You’re dead, honey,” as they watch the TV report.

We see in these two moments, the ordinary problems of 1980s capitalism as contrasted with a taste of the genocidal extermination of the 2020s dystopia, a sense of our going “right down that pipe” to fascism that we were warned about by 80s leftists, Zappa, and this movie.

The time machine represents, on the one hand, the need to warn people in the 1980s of the dangers of the 2020s dystopia (this need as personified by Reese), and on the other hand, the wish by those in power to control the narrative of the 2020s dystopia by destroying the history that leads to a challenge of that narrative (this wish as personified by the Terminator). One is reminded of Orwell’s quote: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

As I said above, it’s fortuitous that The Terminator was released in 1984. It should be emphasized, though, that the dystopian future warned about in this film is far removed from the Marxist-Leninist one that Orwell was so spuriously satirizing in his novel. The nightmare that Skynet creates is a techno-fascist one, not a communist one.

Cold War anti-communist propaganda (including Orwell’s novel, in all irony) was used by the ruling class then and is still used now to brainwash the masses into believing that a socialist revolution can never succeed; this was done by exaggerating the problems the 20th century socialist states encountered and ignoring their successes. By the 1990s, the lie that “there is no alternative” to capitalism and that the dissolution of the Soviet Union marked an “end of history,” signifying that one cannot improve on “free market capitalism,” was completely told. Neoliberalism, that invisible ideology, had won, and it seemed validated.

Such an invalidation of the losing ideology, a case of history being written by the winners, can be seen as allegorized in The Terminator in how the cyborg goes around killing, or at least trying to kill, every Sarah Connor in LA, her protector in Reese, and everyone else standing in its way. Killing Sarah ensures that John is never born, and therefore he can’t lead the Human Resistance to victory; allegorically speaking, killing the past ideology ensures that it cannot be revived later.

That the cyborg is covered in human flesh with sweat, bad breath, everything, makes it so hard to spot that Reese can’t make a move on it until it makes a move on Sarah in that nightclub. That it is part man, part machine leads into an interesting comment, symbolically speaking, on the effect that technology is having on our humanity. The point is that as we’ve moved from the 1980s to now, we’ve been losing more and more of our humanity, ceding so much of it to the machines.

We communicate with each other today much more through technology (smartphones, social media, etc.) than in person. This could be seen as prophesied, in a sense, in the message on the answering machine by Ginger (Motta, the 20-Minute Workout girl, recall): “You’re talking to a machine…but don’t be shy. It’s okay. Machines need love, too.” The line between man and machine is being erased.

In another deleted scene, one of a minority in the daytime and uniquely out in the grass, trees, and bushes, Reese is weeping as he tells Sarah that he’s never known the beauty of nature.

The blurring of the line between man and machine doesn’t just involve a movement in the direction from the former to the latter: it goes in the other direction, too. Not only do machines acquire human-like, independent intelligence; they also acquire a sense of the need for self-preservation, to prevent their own annihilation, a sense of fear. This is so in spite of Reese’s insistence that the Terminator, operated by AI, doesn’t feel fear. Skynet’s motivation and determination to exterminate humanity is based on a fear that we, with our destructive, warlike nature, will destroy our Frankenstein monster of AI.

Skynet should be seen as representative of the capitalist class because this AI system has its origins in Cyberdine Systems, a manufacturing company in California. Cyberdine created Skynet for SAC–NORAD, part of the US Air Force and defence systems for North America. In other words, Cyberdine is associated with capitalism and imperialism, since any serious study of the military history of the US will reveal that its preoccupation with ‘defence’ is a cover for its offensive ambitions to export capital to other countries, take control of them, and steal their natural resources to enrich the imperial core with them.

Similarly, Skynet’s ‘fear’ of being deactivated by humanity is really a rationalization to exterminate us. Nazis justified exterminating the “Untermenschen” out of a paranoid fear that all those who aren’t “Aryans,” as well as those opposed to Naziism, would one day wipe out the “Aryan” race. As I said above, fascism arises out of a threat to the capitalist class; the human threat to Skynet, resulting in its campaign to exterminate us, is thus symbolic of that threat to the capitalists, resulting in the fascist assault on all those opposed to the capitalist system.

As Reese explains to Sarah, Skynet is “hooked into everything,” rather like the internet, which like Skynet, came into its own in the 1990s. A nuclear war hasn’t come about since then (thank the gods!), but nuclear brinksmanship has been a major worry, between the West and Russia/China/North Korea, over the past several years as of this writing. Between all these things and the advent of AI, we can see that The Terminator has overall been reasonably accurate in its predictions.

As a prophet of doom, Reese is treated by the skeptical establishment similarly to anyone who tries to warn the world of our impending dystopian future: to use the words of criminal psychologist Dr. Peter Silberman (Boen), “In technical terminology, [Reese is] a loon.” The people in authority–the police, the psychiatric establishment, etc.–those who suppress freedom fighters like Reese, are like a moderate version of the fascistic Terminators. They’re all part of the same power structure; they’re just at different points on the same continuum. The antagonistic Terminator of T2, the shape-shifting T-1000, is fittingly made to appear dressed in a policeman’s uniform.

Seeing Reese on the TV video recording while the shrink is asking him about the Terminator, etc., as opposed to just seeing and hearing Reese directly, is yet another example of the film’s theme of a world in which one is in a kind of limbo between man and machine. Direct communication is disrupted, alienating people from each other. This sense of disruption contributes to the feeling that Reese is insane, rather than in a desperate situation trying to save Sarah’s life.

The police protecting Sarah and detaining Reese are, as I’ve said, a moderate restraining force to thwart the fight to save her and to free humanity from oppressive Skynet, as opposed to the Terminator’s extreme version of that suppression. In this sense, the cops are like social democrats, the moderate version of the fascist Terminator. Yet as in the case of the social democratic German government of the 1920s, and its conflict with the rise of the Nazis, who when they took power wiped out all of their political opposition by either putting them in concentration camps or killing them, so does the Terminator break into the police station and kill all the cops trying to protect Sarah.

Liberals today hearken back to the prosperity of the 1945-1973 period, when unions were strong, taxes on the rich were high, and capitalism was thus made ‘comfortable’ for the working class. But since then, the neoliberal market fundamentalists and their fascist heirs have said to us, “I’ll be back.”

While on the one hand the Terminator represents fascists, he as an unstoppable killer can on the other hand represent mad slashers like Michael Myers in Halloween. In my analysis of that film, I characterized Myers’s murderous rampage as being rooted in, on the literal level, a straightforward case of having been possessed by an evil spirit, and on a deeper, symbolic level, a case of childhood trauma having been caused by severe family neglect.

As for the ‘evil spirit’ factor, I find it amusing that, as a resident of Taiwan since the mid-1990s, I know of the Chinese rendering of The Terminator as “魔鬼終結者,” or “Devil Terminator,” since “devil” helps drive home the idea that the cyborg is evil in a Taiwanese culture unfamiliar with that of the West. Subsequently, any Schwarzenegger film would have “魔鬼” included in the Chinese translation of its title for release in Taiwan, to say to the locals, “The guy who played the Terminator is in this movie, too.”

As for the ‘childhood trauma caused by severe family neglect,’ factor, we can see the Terminator as representing such people as the police (recall the T-1000 of T2), today’s militarized police, and soldiers, trained to kill, and only really able to function with each other in a strictly hierarchical structure, in which one takes shit from one’s superiors and gives shit to subordinates, instead of relating to people in a more nuanced, human sense. These people tend to come from emotionally abusive families, where hierarchy is the only relationship known to them. Hence, their violent tendencies.

Research has shown that childhood emotional abuse is more or less universal. The sense of estrangement, in a society where people relate to each other pretty much always in terms of who has power over us, and whom we have power over, is already there in the civilian world, so it’s exacerbated in the police and military.

The notion of being part man, part machine is a perfect metaphor for this sense of alienation, as is the case of expressing oneself indirectly through technology (answering machines, video recordings on a TV, etc.). Accordingly, social interaction is awkward, as we see when the Terminator appears nude before the three punks who find his insouciance about it amusing. Similarly when he pulls a man away from a public telephone to look for the Sarah Connor addresses in the phone book, when he says, “Fuck you, asshole” to a janitor, and when he walks into the nightclub without paying the cover charge and crushing the hand of the bouncer. On the literal level, he does all these things because, of course, he’s a cyborg from the future; on the symbolic level, it’s because of that alienation seen in the man/machine metaphor.

The growing sense of alienation in the 1980s will lead to its extremity in the dystopian 2020s. The going back in time, giving Cyberdine the microprocessor chassis (as seen in another deleted scene) and the arm of the cyborg (as Dyson, played by Joe Morton, sees in T2), represents the unity of time between past, present, and future. My point is that the evils of today did not just pop up out of nowhere: we study history to follow those elements in the past that led us to where we are now. Time travel in the Terminator franchise symbolizes that unified continuity of cause-and-effect, a way of warning us of how the events of the 1980s and 90s have morphed into those of the 2020s.

Not all of this continuity from past to present has been bad, though; nor has it all been a case of growing alienation. Reese’s protection of, and love for, Sarah is representative of how we in the 2020s still haven’t lost our sense of empathy or ability to connect with each other in a meaningful way. We see this connection especially when Reese and Sarah make love in their motel room.

Her conceiving John as a result of that moment together, Reese as the 2020s personified going back in time to bring about the hero in the 1980s, demonstrates that what we have now that is good is also connected with the good of the past. The evil of today hasn’t eradicated the good of the past completely.

Reese loves Sarah–the legend, the unassuming, unextraordinary everywoman who will become a great fighter and helper of the Human Resistance–he loves her so much that he’s remained a virgin for her until their moment in the motel. He, a man of the 2020s, is not at all like our stereotypical men of today who only see women as sex objects, either eyeing them as prey, speaking lewdly to them, or scowling at them like invidious incels. Reese proves that sensitive men still exist today.

In the final, climactic chase, Reese tosses a pipe bomb into the hose tube of a tank truck the Terminator has hijacked, and the resulting explosion and fire burn off the cyborg’s outer skin and clothes. As a metallic endoskeleton, it is now even more naked, ironically, than it was at the beginning of the film, yet far scarier and intimidating now.

Reese and Sarah go into a Cyberdine-owned factory, and when he sticks another pipe bomb in the endoskeleton’s thigh area and blows it in half, he also dies from the explosion. She doesn’t even have time to mourn him, for the endoskeleton’s upper half starts crawling after her. As the final girl to the Terminator’s unstoppable mad slasher, she too has to crawl, for a piece of its shattered lower half was lodged in her leg.

She destroys it with another machine, fittingly. In this increasingly mechanical world, only a machine can destroy another machine; in this case, she lures the Terminator into a hydraulic press, then luckily manages to find the right button to press without being able to see it from her angle, and the antagonist is crushed.

Months have passed, and after she’s recovered and is visibly pregnant with John, Sarah drives through Mexico. This choice of a place to go is symbolically fitting, since it has always been the either pre-industrialized or Third World countries that have been the most apt to rise up against such forms of imperialism as the MIC, for which Cyberdine has created Skynet.

It is at a gas station where a poor boy takes the photo of her that Reese will have and adore in the dystopian 2020s. This photo is yet another example of the connection between that decade and the 1980s, a reminder of how so many of our current problems–the fictional ones of this movie and the real, historical ones that The Terminator allegorizes–have their origins back in the decade when the film was made.

Having a poor Mexican boy take her picture–a boy from a Third World country with far less machinery and far more nature, in one of the film’s minority daylight scenes–also symbolically indicates the connection between the First and Third World problems caused by the imperialistic use of such technology as that of Skynet.

Reese’s fetishizing of her photo in the 2020s, as opposed to having her in the flesh in the 1980s, is yet another example of the alienating effects of the use of machines–in this case, the boy’s camera. In connection with the camera’s alienating effect is the boy’s fear of his dad beating him if he doesn’t get any money from Sarah. She gives him four dollars instead of the five he hopes for. This is a small example of the capitalist First World short-changing the Third World, in spite of her legendary status as a freedom fighter against Skynet…and she says he is the one with the hustle.

Machines in The Terminator franchise aren’t always bad, though. It all depends on how they’re used, as is the case with our tech today. When we see Schwarzenegger play, on the one hand, the antagonistic Terminator of the first movie, and on the other hand, the one reprogrammed by the Resistance to protect Sarah and John in T2, we see an example of how AI can be a friend or a foe.

Such opposing uses can point us in a direction to understand how our AI today, in the real world, can be a good thing or a bad one. As I said above, in the society we have, in which commodities are produced for profit, people are in competition with each other, and we therefore experience mutual alienation, AI will be a nightmare of job loss, mind numbing, and massive surveillance. If, however, we had a society in which commodities were produced to satisfy human need (i.e., providing our food, housing, healthcare, and education without our needing to work to pay for them), and we lived in cooperation, solidarity, and mutual empathy, then AI would be the great liberator of humanity. Its machines and robots would do all the work, and we’d be free simply to enjoy life.

To enjoy such a life, though, we’d need to wipe out the hegemonic sociopaths that Skynet and Cyberdine represent in the franchise. We’d have to form our own Resistance movement, and say “Hasta la vista, baby” to the political status quo.

My Short Story, ‘The Tunnel,’ in the ‘Beauty in Darkness’ Anthology

I have a short story called ‘The Tunnel’ in a new collection of short stories, poetry, and art, called The Beauty in Darkness: The Literary Tribute to TS Woolard, from Dark Moon Rising Publications. It is now available on Amazon (Kindle–$4.19, and Paperback–$25.99), as well as on Godless. Here is a video ad for it.

Other great writers in this anthology are: Edward Ahern, Alison Armstrong, Jesse Batista, Andrew Bell, William Bove, Pixie Bruner, Dawn Colclasure, Linda M. Crate, Candice Louisa Daquin, Quinn Rowan Dex, Ursula Dirks, Murray Eiland, Zary Fekete, Thomas Folske, Michael Fowler, Lindsey Goddard, Norbert Góra, Gerri R. Grey, Rowan Green, Megan Guilliams, D.M Harring, Kasey Hill, Toshiya Kamei, Katherine Kerestman, Shahbaz Khayambashi, Ian Klink, Taylor Kovach, J.L. Lane, Paul Lonardo, LindaAnn LoSchiavo, J.C. Maçek III, Brianna Malotke, Xtina Marie, Summer Mason, Cyndi Mays, Rick McQuiston, DW Milton, Shane Morin, Jason Morton, Bobbie Murphy, Michael Noe, Scarlet Norton-Duperre, Sergio Palumbo, Rick Powell, Shanna Renee, John Reti, KB Richards, M. Brandon Robbins, Neil Sanzari, Zachary Schneller, ReNait Suka, Michael Errol Swaim, Rob Tannahill, Tim Tolbert, Cass Wilson, and Amanda Worthington.

My story, ‘The Tunnel,’ is about a woman who is lured by a butterfly into a tunnel at a park on a rainy day. She feels drugged: is it something like the date rape drug, or is something supernatural going on (the basis of the supernatural elements can be explored in my blog posts on The Tanah)? In the darkness of this flooded tunnel, she in her disoriented state has to confront traumas from her younger years: will this confrontation kill her, or will it save her?

Please check out this collection of great literature and art. You’ll love it! 🙂

The Tanah–Beginnings, Chapter Four

[The following is the fifth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, and here is the fourth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Years went by, and King Patros’s son, Prixos, became a man. He would be the king’s rightful heir and successor…except other members of the royal family would have had things otherwise.

The king loved Prixos dearly, and indulged the youth to excess. When the family rode in their chariots across the island of Vestis to see their subjects, Patros and Prixos were always in the first chariot, while Queen Vita and her sons and daughters had to follow behind in their chariots. So had it been for twenty years, along with numerous other privileges that the king and his son could enjoy, all at the expense of Vita and her children.

One day, she complained of this to Invidios, her sullen first-born son. “Though I do not regret ending your father’s feckless rule, I can no longer endure the injustice of my new king’s sway. Before, I could roam about freely; now, I must be escorted everywhere either by the king or by his ten eunuch guards. Before, I could enjoy as many lovers as Agnos did with his thirty concubines; now, Patros’s eunuchs guard me against a pleasure he regularly enjoys, while Agnos’ concubines–once honoured for their love and devotion to the former king–are now disgraced as naked whores, to be enjoyed by any common man on the street for a small sum of money. Those women are never even given the money; their procurers take it all. Many of them have grown old and withered, and they are still not given the dignity of clothing. All of them would rather kill themselves than go on as they do, but none has a knife.

“As for the rest of us women–me and your sisters included–we live lives hardly less wretched than the former concubines. There is a wealth of learning in the libraries and universities, but our sex is discouraged from touching it. Though society is improved with such erudition, during Agnos’ rule the men were as ignorant as the women, and thus our sex at least had no reason to envy men. Now we do. We are disenfranchised and scorned.

“And what is the king’s reason? He asserts that it was I, and all the women of Gymnos (this island’s former name, recall), who debauched King Agnos. King Patros says that the female form, when unclothed, tempts men to lust and to look away from nobler pursuits; but it was Agnos’ decree that everyone, nude, should freely procreate. Though I never questioned the wisdom of his command, I did not inspire it, either.

“I swear to you, my son, King Patros has done us all wrong, including you and your brothers, by instituting father-kin throughout Vestis, thus denying you your natural right of succession. While I prefer the maturity of our society now to the infantile rule of your father (assuming he was your natural father), we must amend our society to embrace full equality for the sexes. The only way to ensure that will be for you to succeed Patros as king, not his son Prixos, whom I now disown for your sake. I am too old to bear the king any more sons, so if you kill Prixos, Patros will have no choice but to accept you as his heir. This will set a precedent in the law that will force all of Vestis to return to mother-kin, and women will have their rights restored. Will you kill the boy, Invidios?”

“Yes, Mother,” Invidios said. “With pleasure. I’ve always hated Prince Prixos. Not only is the treatment of Vestis’ women unjust, but also religion is practiced unfairly, and the latter is the doing of Prixos. He and his father (never mine!) have instituted the worship of a Sky-father god, to supplant our Earth-mother goddess! This god is to have animals sacrificed to him, emasculated as my wretched father was! The prince justifies this cruelty to animals by saying it signifies the death of a man’s animal nature in order to grow in the spirit. He has always scorned my cooking of vegetables as a sacrifice to please our Earth-mother goddess. When I explain how the cooking signifies the heating of the passions and instincts to inspire a man to action, the prince scoffs at me. I will no longer endure his arrogance! I will gladly kill him–for both of us, Mother.”

The next day, Invidios went with Prixos to sacrifice a goat at the top of a lonely hill. Though he told Prixos he was willing to embrace the new Sky-father god religion, Invidios found a thick branch, broken off a nearby tree, and waited for the prince to turn his back. He then beat the prince to death, and buried the body. “I killed a man to save your life,” he said to the goat before setting it free.

A farmer witnessed the murder, informed the king, and showed him where the body was. Denying her son’s guilt, Queen Vita demanded that King Patros acknowledge Invidios as his prince and successor to the throne. The king, knowing her tricks, refused this demand, and banished not only Invidios from Vestis, but his brothers and sisters as well. He even repudiated his queen, and announced his plan to marry a young princess from the land of Pudios, a neighbouring country of Gnosius, and part of its empire. She would bear him sons to succeed him.

The former queen and her sons and daughters, all disgraced, sailed on a boat away from the beloved island of their birth, never to return on pain of death. The boat eventually reached shore, and the family settled in the land of Nodos.

Over the years, King Patros, with his bashful new queen and his new sons by her, enacted new laws, even stricter than before, on women. Now they were forbidden any form of education, whereas before it had merely been discouraged. Women were warned to be silent in matters of politics, for fear of a repeat of the incident with Vita and Invidios.

Here we see the cycles of life once again: when the victims of injustice act too rashly, pushing for change without due organization and preparation, acting before the time is ripe, their own impulsiveness turns against them, and they suffer all the worse for it.

Commentary

One will note parallels between the Invidios and Prixos narrative and the Cain and Abel story. These two myths seem to have a common ancestor, one based on the foundation of a city, requiring a human sacrifice so the dead one’s spirit will be a protector of the new city. Another example of such a myth is that of Romulus and Remus, the former having killed the latter on the foundation of the city of Rome. One can also see in the Invidios and Prixos narrative, as in the Cain and Abel story, an allegory of the conflict between nomadic shepherds and settled farmers.

In any case, the story is trying to teach the moral of avoiding rashness in making changes of any revolutionary sort. If done too quickly, without sufficient planning and care, one may find one’s plans backfiring and resulting in a much worse oppression than before. Thus we see the wavelike movement from injustice to a far too sharp return to justice, then a swing right back to the original injustice, or an even worse kind.

Here’s another, admittedly awkward, translation of one of the ancient poems, again with the visual effect, preserved as best as my team of researchers could do:

Throwing

sticks

too hard

only makes them

return harder.

A soft

toss

suffices.

Factories

Once,
these
things
pulled
people
from the
commons.
Instead of breezes to breathe, men sucked the smoke
into their lungs, and bosses have become our kings.
Foul filth has replaced fresh air; as it is all puffed out,
through our sooty nostrils, so is it exhaled, all clouds

of black
to infect our
helpless sky.
These
cages,
owned
not by us,
the makers
of our goods,
keep us inside, where we are all paid prisoners’ wages.
Gone are the days when we could roam outside to see
soft blue above, with clouds of white instead of black.
Now, grey concrete has replaced the grassy greenery.

O, horror! Smoke
is floating, spreading
everywhere! Not in
our skies alone,
but also in
each
place
beyond
our land.
Countries
far from us,
contaminated
with this foul sickness, are making men and women
slave away in factories, breathing the noxious fumes.
Often, the doors are locked, so if a fire rages within,
the workers die a flaming doom, for bosses’ profits.

The ailing skies are
never blue, they’re only black
and grey. It’s always night above,
and never day. The air is poison!
These puffing pyramids of
power,
tombs
which
should
be for the
rich, not for
the working man,
will make a cemetery of the Earth. Afar, they look like mushroom clouds.
The world is dying. Greed is making graves. The green of cash supplants
the green of plants. The rule of gold has long replaced the golden rule.
End the reign of fire and stench! Mr. President, tear down these walls!

Analysis of ‘Life of Pi’

I: Introduction

Life of Pi is a 2001 philosophical novel written by Yann Martel. Issues of spirituality and metaphysics are explored from an early age by the titular character and protagonist, Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry who recognizes divine truth in all religions, focusing particularly on his Hindu faith, Christianity, and Islam.

The novel has sold more than ten million copies worldwide, after having been rejected by at least five London publishing houses, then accepted by Knopf Canada. Martel won the Man Booker Prize in 2002, among other literature awards. Ang Lee made a movie adaptation in 2012, with Suraj Sharma as Pi when a teen.

Here is a link to quotes from the book.

The story is understood to be one that will make the reader “believe in God,” as a local Indian told Martel at the Indian Coffee House on Nehru Street in Pondicherry, a small territory south of Madras on the coast of Tamil Nadu (pages xii-xiii). By the time I finished reading the novel, though, I found myself with even less reason to believe in God than when I’d started. In any case, Martel found Pi, the man who would tell him this story, back in Canada, in Toronto (page xv).

This opening information is found in the “Author’s Note,” which ends with Martel making a plea to support our artists, without whom we’ll lose imagination in favour of “crude reality,” we’ll believe in nothing, and we’ll have “worthless dreams.” This idea ties in with the notion of belief in God as preferable to atheism. Artists make things up, including mythical tales (see my Tanah chapters for examples), for these come from our imagination.

I’m convinced that Pi has made up the whole story of surviving on a lifeboat with animals, as preferred to the crude reality of being on the boat with his mother, the cook, and the Taiwanese sailor. Imagination and religious belief are our escapes from the horrors of reality, which make us believe in nothing and give us worthless dreams.

This preference of theism over atheism is linked to the philosophy of absurdism, in which we insist on giving life an artificial meaning in spite of life’s obvious, ongoing lack of it. I explored this idea in The Old Man and the Sea. In my analysis of Hemingway‘s novella, I read Santiago’s ultimately failed attempt at bringing a huge marlin ashore as an allegory of man’s ever-failing attempt to bring meaning to life. The opium of religion attempts the same thing for us. We must imagine Sisyphus happy, but how can he be?

Bear in mind, Dear Reader, that I am no better when it comes to maintaining such illusions. I plead guilty as charged when it comes to constructing comforting illusions in my posts on The Three Unities, Beyond the Pairs of Opposites, The Unity of Space, Synchronicity and September 11th, etc. I, too, have tried to make meaning in a meaningless universe, for such is the absurdity of the human condition.

II: Part One–Toronto and Pondicherry

Now begins the narrative from Pi’s own perspective. A key thing to understand about first-person narrators is that they generally tend to be unreliable. Someone who claims to have survived on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger for months in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? We may like the story of the animals on the lifeboat better than that of him with the cook, Pi’s mother, and the Taiwanese sailor…but that doesn’t make the former story true.

Pi begins by saying that his suffering left him “sad and gloomy,” and a combination of his studies and religion “slowly brought [him] back to life” (page 3). The trauma he experienced on the lifeboat–the cook’s amputation of the leg of the injured sailor, who dies soon after and whose body is sliced into pieces for fish bait, then some pieces eaten by the cook, who later kill’s Pi’s mother before the boy’s eyes, then Pi avenges her by killing the cook and eating his body–is unbearable. This is why religion is so important to Pi. He’s begging God for forgiveness…in all religious traditions, just to be sure. As a murderer and a cannibal, he needs redemption, salvation.

How much he was interested in religion as a child we cannot know for sure, since so much of his narration is coloured with the emotional effect of the ordeal he suffered on the lifeboat. We must keep this reality in mind as we go through his narrative, for properly understood, his autobiography is presented as a myth, which in turn is a fanciful distortion of actual events. The “life of Pi” may be an entertaining story, but it is by no means reliable.

He says that “death sticks so closely to life” because of envy, jealousy, and that death is in love with life (pages 6 and 7). I’m reminded of Blake‘s line, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” I suspect that Pi, in his university studies, has learned the Blake quote; he’s replaced “the productions of time” with life, and “Eternity” (i.e., God) with death, which I read as a Freudian slip, revealing his true, unconscious feelings about the nature of the divine.

He was named after a swimming pool–Piscine Molitor (page 9), because Mamaji–a good friend of Pi’s family, and whom he saw as an uncle–was a champion competitive swimmer who found the Piscine Molitor to be the most glorious of all swimming pools (page 14).

The learning and practice of swimming, “doing a stroke with increasing ease and speed, over and over,” leads to a state of hypnosis, with the water coning to a state of “liquid light.” (page 12). The association here of swimming with hypnosis, a meditative state of trance, suggests the association of water with the divine, the infinite ocean of Brahman.

Such associations lead to an important point about what the protagonist’s name means symbolically. He’s been named after a swimming pool, a small enclosure of water; he’ll later be surrounded in the water of the Pacific Ocean, in the Mariana Trench, a seemingly infinite vastness of water. The swimming pool in the ocean is like Atman at one with Brahman; Piscine in the Pacific. He won’t experience nirvana there, though.

The trauma he experiences there is so overwhelming that he, as I explained above, uses religion to help him restore a sense of mental stability. And as I’ve argued in a number of other posts, the mystical experience is not one of sentimentality, all sunshine and rainbows: heaven and hell, nirvana and samsara, sin and sainthood, are in dialectical proximity, where the head of the ouroboros (heaven) bites its tail (hell). Such an extremity is what Pi experiences out there in his lifeboat with the tiger.

Since Pi grew up in a family with a father who owned a zoo in Pondicherry, he has a perspective on animals in captivity that differs from many of us who deplore the sight of caged animals. He sees zoo animals as much happier than those out in the wild (pages 20-25), and he gives a persuasive argument for this position. Animals in the wild, to him, are like the homeless. Zoos guarantee animals food, and give them security, safety, and a sense of routine and structure.

All I know is what I once saw in a zoo not too far a drive from my city of residence in East Asia back in 1996: a huge gorilla in a cage in which it barely had room to roam around. All one had to do was look at its face to see how terribly unhappy it was. Its whole life was sitting there, being stared at by people. That it would come around regularly and bang on the bars was a clear sign that it wanted out. I’m not saying all, or even most, zoos are this insensitive to animals’ emotional needs (I hope not!), but clearly some have been this way, and that’s already too many.

In any case, for Pi, zoos provide the same service for animals that religions provide for man: in their limiting of freedom, they provide structure and safety (or so religions promise, at least). For many of us, though, that limiting of freedom, as for that gorilla I saw in that cage, is a problem in itself not to be trivialized. Pi’s preference of structure and security over the unpredictable wildness of freedom is the kind of thing Erich Fromm wrote about in Escape from Freedom: individual freedom can cause fear, anxiety, and alienation, whereas relinquishing freedom and embracing authoritarianism in such forms as religion can provide feelings of security.

After experiencing the tohu-wa-bohu, if you will, of months on the Pacific Ocean, Pi is starving not just for food, but for structure. The formless void that the ocean represents is, psychologically speaking, Lacan‘s notion of The Real, a state of affairs that cannot be verbalized or symbolized, because its content cannot be differentiated–hence its traumatic quality.

Religion is what has restored a sense of structure to Pi’s life, thus delivering him from psychological fragmentation and a psychotic break from reality. The God delusion has saved him from just plain delusion.

There’s an element of narcissism in the pious, despite their professed humility. In being members of ‘the one, true faith,’ of the elect, they imagine themselves to be part of an elite, morally superior group of people, regardless of how their grace may be from faith and not from good works, or if they see themselves as just submitting to God’s will. For Pi, this pious narcissism is just his defence against fragmentation.

His religious narcissism expresses itself in his identifying of himself with the divine. I’ve already mentioned how, as “Piscine,” the human swimming pool floating in an ocean of Brahman, he as Atman is united with the pantheistic Ultimate Reality. In Chapter 5, he discusses various annoyances he’s had with his name; on one occasion during his university days, he’d rather not tell the pizza delivery people his name on the phone, so instead he refers to himself as, “I am who I am.” (page 26)

In discussing changes made to his name, Pi compares his situation with characters in the New Testament: Simon to Peter, Saul to Paul, etc. This is again Pi’s narcissism in comparing himself to the great religious men of history.

Now, narcissism doesn’t come without narcissistic injury. As a child, Pi had to endure endless taunts about his name from his classmates, mispronouncing his name on purpose as “Pissing Patel!” (page 26) He compares this experience of schoolyard bullying with Christ’s Passion: one of his tormentors is a “Roman soldier,” and he goes into class “wearing [his] crown of thorns.” (page 27)

When it comes to this bullying over his name, Pi doesn’t limit the comparisons of religious persecution to Christian ones. He also speaks of “feeling like the persecuted prophet Muhammad in Medina, peace be upon him.” (page 28)

As a solution to this problem with his name, Piscine presents an abbreviation of his name to his class on the first day of the new school year; to add to the distraction away from “Pissing,” he discusses some basic geometry–3.14, which is known as both a transcendental number and an irrational one.

So his name, as representative of Atman, has gone through the Hegelian dialectic: pristine Piscine, the water of a beautiful, spotless swimming pool (thesis); Pissing, a filthy liquid (antithesis); and Pi, a transcendental/irrational number (synthesis). We’re not concerned here with the strictly mathematical denotations of “transcendental” and “irrational” numbers, but rather with the connotations of these two words and how they relate to the symbolism and philosophy behind the novel.

The decimal representation of π never ends, giving it the association of infinity that ties in with the divine connotations of Pi’s name, as does, of course, the connotations of “transcendental.” As a number that cannot be expressed exactly in normal, verbal communication, π is associated in the novel with the notion of the ineffability of the divine. Small wonder Piscine prefers this short form of his name.

“Irrational,” of course, also implies the absurdity of Pi’s attempts to attribute divinity to himself, and to attribute meaning to the chaos of his life.

At one point in his youth, Pi had a biology teacher named Mr. Satish Kumar, an active communist and avowed atheist (page 33). Young Pi is shocked to hear Kumar say, “Religion is darkness.” In Pi’s opinion, “Religion is light.” (page 35)

When Kumar was Pi’s age, he was “racked with polio.” He wondered, Where is God? In the end, it was medicine that saved him, not God (page 36). In Kumar’s opinion, justice and peace will come to the Earth when the workers “take hold of the means of production“, not when God intervenes in human affairs (page 37).

Though he sharply disagrees with Kumar, Pi respects him. Pi thinks well of both theists and atheists, but as far as agnostics are concerned, doubt should be entertained only temporarily. One should ultimately commit oneself to belief either in God or in no God (page 37).

How does one resolve this contradiction between Pi’s accepting of both belief and unbelief? Imagine how Pi must have felt on that lifeboat, hungry for months, having seen his mother murdered before his very eyes, then killing her murderer and having to resort to cannibalism to relieve his hunger. He had to have been asking himself, Where is God? He can empathize with the feelings of this atheist…though I believe the real reconciliation is deep in Pi’s unconscious.

As Pi goes on telling his story to Martel, “At times he gets agitated.” (page 56) It seems as though he’ll want to stop talking about his life, though he still does want to tell his story. I believe his conflict stems from the same place as his contradictory feelings about God, which I’ll get into later.

Pi speaks about his first religion, which of course is the Hindu faith of his upbringing. It’s an early “exaltation, no bigger than a mustard seed” (page 63)–in Pi’s mind, there’s a fusion of Hinduism and Christianity. To him, the relation between Brahman and Atman is like that of the three persons of the Trinity–a mysterious one (page 65).

Later, Pi picks up on Catholicism (Chapter 17), then Islam (Chapter 18). After this, he meets a Muslim named, of all names, Satish Kumar (page 82), the exact same name as the communist atheist. I suspect this is an example of Pi being an unreliable narrator, fabricating two people of the exact same name, but of opposing views on religion, as a personification of his own inner, unconscious conflicts about his own spirituality.

Pi loves both Kumars, as opposing as their beliefs are. He refers to them as if they’re indistinguishable from each other (pages 111-112). As for agnostics, though, Pi says they are “beholden to dry, yeastiness factuality.” (page 85) In his opinion, agnostics “lack imagination and miss the better story.” Consider, in this connection, the hell of doubt Pi went through on that lifeboat over that period of months; it was much longer than temporary doubt.

Recall that in Life of Pi, “the better story” is the one with the animals on the lifeboat, the mythical account suggestive of the existence of divinity, which, in spite of how fanciful it may be, is better than believing the horrible story about his mother, the cook, and the sailor. To be “the reincarnation of Sri Ramakrishna” (i.e., embracing not just Hindu traditions, but also Christianity and Islam), or being an atheist, is better than being an agnostic, forever in doubt.

Pi can hardly remember what his mother looked like (pages 116-117)–his repressed memory of her lessens the pain of having watched her murdered. Here lies the real reconciliation of his acceptance of firm belief vs firm unbelief: his insistence on believing in and loving God is really a reaction formation against his unconscious hatred of a God that abandoned him and his mother in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where we must go now.

“Memory is an ocean and [Pi] bobs on its surface.” (page 56)

III: Part Two–The Pacific Ocean

The Noah’s ark symbolism of the part of this novel dealing with a ship at sea with animals in it is so obvious that one shouldn’t need to mention it. There are, however, crucial differences between the Biblical narrative and the Life of Pi account that ought to be mentioned.

God preserves Noah’s family and all of the animals in the ark throughout the rainy days and nights of the Great Flood. Everyone and every animal aboard the sinking Tsimtsum dies (to our knowledge, at least),…and only Pi is escaped alone to tell thee. The ark rests on the mountains of Ararat; the Tsimtsum sits at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, in the Mariana Trench. In this latter catastrophe, one must ask: Where is God?

Remember that according to the original story, the lifeboat animals are Pi’s mother (Orange Juice, the orangutan), the cook (the hyena), the Taiwanese sailor with the broken leg (the similarly injured zebra), and Pi himself (Richard Parker, the tiger). So Pi is really the only living thing that survived.

When we say that the tiger represents Pi, we actually mean the animal represents what Jung would have called the Shadow, that part of one’s personality that one rejects and wishes didn’t exist, so it is repressed and split off. This splitting-off is seen in how Pi isn’t replaced with a tiger: he’s still in the mythical narrative, unlike his mother, the cook and the sailor. The tiger’s human name is understood to be the result of a clerical error (Chapter 48)–his capturer’s name was switched with his actual name, “Thirsty”–but giving him this odd name reinforces the idea that the tiger actually represents a human being…Pi. Pi, in a lifeboat surrounded by undrinkable salt water, is the truly thirsty one, and not just for water…for salvation.

The repression of Pi’s Shadow is represented in part by the tiger’s being kept under the boat’s tarpaulin, but repression, properly understood, isn’t about pushing unacceptable, anxiety-causing feelings down into some kind of dark, mental dungeon where they hide and are unseen. The repressed returns to consciousness, but in a new, unrecognizable form–it hides in plain sight. For this reason, psychoanalysts use the term unconscious, and not the pop psychology term, ‘subconscious.’ The repressed isn’t beneath consciousness; it’s unknown, without consciousness.

By a clever mental trick, Pi has made himself forget that his mother, the cook, and the sailor were on the lifeboat with him…and he forgets his latent murderous, cannibalistic impulses. To use Lacanian language, Pi has practiced a repression of a configuration of signifiers, replacing them with signifiers of animals. As we can observe, the objects of his repression are right there in the lifeboat with him, hiding in plain sight.

He describes “Orange Juice,” the orangutan mother of two males, as arriving to the lifeboat “floating on an island of bananas…as lovely as the Virgin Mary” (pages 146-147). He calls her “Oh blessed Great Mother, Pondicherry fertility goddess…” etc. Why, naturally he will speak of her that way. This is his actual mother, of two males…himself and his brother, Ravi.

Speaking of Ravi, later on, Pi imagines his brother teasing him about filling his lifeboat with animals and wondering if Pi thinks he’s Noah (page 158). Indeed, these imagined taunts of Ravi’s are really a projection of the fact that, deep down, Pi knows he’s deluding himself.

A similar projection happens when Pi sees the orangutan looking out on the water, searching for her two young ones and grieving over their loss. Pi notes that she has been “unintentionally mimicking what [he] had been doing [those] past thirty-six hours.” (page 165). Pi really imagines his own mother, now dead and her soul in heaven, grieving not only over Ravi having perished on the Tsimtsum, but also Pi suffering on that lifeboat all alone. It’s really he who is grieving over her, his dad, and Ravi. What’s worse, the orangutan is showing no feelings at all for him, when she is representing his mother; this hurts even more.

When the hyena has killed the zebra and the orangutan, this latter dead animal is described as not only “beheaded,” but also lying with her arms “spread wide open and her short legs…folded together and slightly turned to one side. She looked like a simian Christ on the Cross.” (pages 174-175) The horrors of the cook killing the sailor and Pi’s mother (who is also beheaded) must be mitigated not only with the replacement of animal signifiers, but also with the solace of religious iconography.

The greatest terror of all for Pi, though, is the sudden emergence of Richard Parker from his hitherto hiding place, under the tarpaulin. Pi describes the tiger’s head as “gigantic…the size of the planet Jupiter to [Pi’s] dazed senses. His paws were like volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica.” (page 175) This is when the tiger comes out and kills the hyena.

Since, as I said above, the tiger represents all that Pi abhors in himself–his potential to do evil–we can understand the real reason he’s so terrified of Richard Parker. The vastness of the tiger’s head and the violence those claws are capable of are signifiers his unconscious is using to hide the violence inside himself. He doesn’t really fear a tiger on that lifeboat: he fears the viciousness he’s capable of when put in a desperate situation.

The tiger coming out and killing the hyena is when, actually, Pi avenges his mother’s murder and engages in cannibalism. This is the real horror that has caused him to spend “the night in a state of delirium.” He imagines he’s dreamt of a tiger; this could very well be, since the tiger is from his unconscious (under the tarpaulin), a signifier to replace his actual murderous, cannibalistic impulses (page 175).

The cannibalism, of course, is a reflection of his extreme, desperate hunger, something plaguing the vegetarian with guilt and shame, for his starving isn’t enough for his superego and its lofty moral demands to excuse him from resorting to such a shocking diet. Paralleling this hunger is his extreme thirst, like the thirst of Richard Parker né “Thirsty,” Pi’s Shadow. Accordingly, he compares his extreme thirst to that of crucified Christ. His identification with his thirsty Saviour once again helps to mitigate his guilt (page 179).

Pi talks about how only fear can defeat life (page 214). This fear “is difficult to put into words.” (page 216) He speaks of this fear “nestl[ing] in your memory like gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it.” One should remember this “gangrene” in connection with the infection in the broken leg of the Taiwanese sailor, which was the cook’s justification for amputating it (page 408). Signifiers are being shuffled in Pi’s mind once again.

This fear that rots words away is the trauma of Lacan’s inexpressible Real, that realm of human experience without differentiating signifiers, like an ineffable, formless ocean of Brahman. To prevent this kind of fear from taking you over and consuming you, “You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness…you open yourself to further attacks of fear.” (page 216) The fear spreads through you, like an infection, gangrene. This is why Pi needs the zoo animal signifiers–to keep the fear at bay.

The divine is not a God of sentimentality, one that will take away all your pain in one fell swoop. It’s often terrifying. I reflected on this reality in my analysis of Moby-Dick. In Chapter 35, “The Mast-Head,” Melville warns the pantheists who are “lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant unconscious reverie” and who lose their identity. If they aren’t careful while in this sleep, their feet may slip, and they may fall into that sea of Brahman, “no more to rise for ever.” (Melville, pages 162-163) As I’ve argued elsewhere, heaven and hell, or nirvana and samsara, are dialectically close to each other. Pi’s experience of God is terrifying, not edifying.

This is why “It was Richard Parker who calmed [Pi] down.” (Martel, page 216) The tiger was at first Pi’s repressed Shadow, having come out of his unconscious to kill the cook and avenge his mother, then to eat the cook’s flesh. After that, Pi’s Shadow was split off and projected from him as a hallucinated tiger, to become the replacement signifier of Pi the murderous, cannibalistic savage. This replacement signifier, Richard Parker, thus saved Pi from himself.

Pi’s fear of the tiger jumping on him and eating him is really his fear of integrating and becoming one with his Shadow. This union would force Pi to confront his unbearable guilt, and in his despair, he’d have to kill himself on that lifeboat. Hence, Pi “had to tame him” (page 218), that is, to come to terms with the Shadow that the tiger represents and calm him while keeping him separate–split off and projected from Pi.

Richard Parker couldn’t die, though, for if he did, Pi “would be left alone with despair.” (page 219) Without his projection of his murderous and cannibalistic impulses onto a hallucinated tiger, Pi would have succumbed to shame, self-hate, and suicidal despair. He went from being terrified of the tiger to needing it to survive.

A point should be made about the Tsimtsum. The Japanese ship is named after a Kabbalistic concept referring to God ‘contracting’ Himself into a vacuum during the Creation. The implication is that, on that sinking ship, God wasn’t there. It’s unlikely that teenage Pi would have heard of such an obscure word; he must have learned it during his university studies, and then fictitiously applied it to the Japanese ship. It’s further proof of how unreliable he is as a narrator. It’s also an example of his use of replacement signifiers to help him repress his trauma and unconscious hatred of God.

Recall what I said above that all Pi’s talk about loving God is really a reaction formation against his unconscious anger at God for not being there when he and his mother most desperately needed Him. “Tsimtsum,” which doesn’t even sound like typical Japanese, let alone is appropriate for the name of a Japanese ship, refers to the paradoxical absence and presence of God during the Creation. He’s there, yet He isn’t there, right when Pi’s family needs Him. He just let this failed Noah’s ark sink.

As I argued in Part IX of my analysis of the primeval history in Genesis, the Great Flood was a return to the pre-Creation state of the world, with water everywhere and no separation of opposing elements (light/darkness, water above or below, sea/land, etc.). In Tsimtsum, the paradoxically simultaneous presence and absence of God (via the vacant space) happens during Creation like the Flood as ‘second Creation’ (which is dialectically at one with God’s destruction of the world). Thus there is no separation between God vs no-God, or between creation vs destruction. This is the undifferentiated, traumatic world of Lacan’s Real.

Tsimtsum’s non-differentiation between the presence and absence of God leads us to a non-differentiation between theism and atheism: agnosticism. Recall that Pi can respect atheists, but not agnostics. Here we can see why: it’s the agony of doubt that torments Pi so much. If there’s no God, oh well: Pi’s ordeal happened because…well…shit happens. But if…if there is a God, why didn’t He help Pi?

Doubt, for Pi, is a terrifying state of limbo, trapped in between God and no-God…Tsimtsum, the sinking ship. Thus, Pi’s retroactive naming of the Japanese ship with the Kabbalistic concept is yet another replacement signifier to help him repress his agonizing doubt, something that can only be temporarily tolerated, but which if entertained long enough, might lead to Pi’s realization that he, unconsciously and perhaps only in part, hates God.

He’s far too attached to a belief in the divine to reject it, so he must not only believe in, but also love, God. Doing so requires a reaction formation of affirming religious ideas from traditions from all over the world, an intense love of God to annihilate even the suspicion of hating Him.

In Chapter 58, he gets the lifeboat survival manual and peruses it (pages 221-223). This book is like his Bible, Koran, or Vedic scriptures.

At one point, he looks down at the water and sees all the swimming fish, so many of them racing around that he contemplates how the sea is like a big, busy, bustling city (pages 234-235). The fish seem like cars, buses, and trucks. “The predominant colour was green.” This comparison of the ocean to a city, with lots of green, seems like wish-fulfillment to him. Pi is aching to set foot on land again.

In Chapter 60, Pi wakes up in the middle of the night and, awed by the brightly shining stars, contemplates his tiny place in the infinity of space above and the ocean below. He feels like the Hindu sage Markandeya, who also had a vision of the universe and everything (pages 236-237), and who also saw a deluge that killed all living things. As always, Pi is using religion and myth to give his suffering meaning and structure.

Some time after, he tells of the first time he’s killed a flying fish (page 245). He claims, “It was the first sentient being I had ever killed.” Oh, really, Pi? Are you sure there wasn’t any sentient being before this fish that you killed out of desperation for food? Abel killed sheep for sacrifices before his brother murdered him; with your killing of a fish, shouldn’t you feel as guilty as Abel, rather than as Cain? Or is there the memory of a human killing that you’ve repressed and replaced with this flying fish signifier, causing you to equate yourself with the older brother, rather than the younger one?

Indeed, Pi survives 227 days, with a daily routine that includes prayer five times a day (pages 254-256), and he “survived because [he] made a point of forgetting.” (page 257) He’s used religiosity and repressed memory, blotting out his traumas and replacing human signifiers with animal ones in his unconscious, to help him go on living.

He speaks of his clothes having disintegrated from the sun and the salt (page 257). “For months [he] lived stark naked,” as sky-clad as a Jain. He lost everything, just like possessionless Hamlet when he returned to Denmark after being on a ship to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern…naked (i.e., without possessions–Act IV, Scene vii, lines 49-58) and betrayed.

Pi speaks of having “looked at a number of beautiful starry nights,” and of gaining spiritual guidance from the stars (i.e., the stars as symbols of heavenly gods). They have never given him geographical direction, though, as he so desperately needs now, on the lifeboat in the watery middle of nowhere (page 259). Once again, he speaks of religion as a great guide, when his Heavenly Father isn’t helping this lost soul at all.

He thinks of himself as “a strict vegetarian” (page 264), and perhaps that aspect of his autobiography is reliable; but in resorting to the killing of animals for food, such as sea turtles, he claims to having “descended to a level of savagery [he] never imagined possible.” One can understand the moral argument of vegetarians, but I think it’s the eating of the cook’s flesh that he truly finds an unimaginable savagery. Replacing the signifier of human flesh with that of animal flesh, as distasteful as that may be to him, is nonetheless bearable.

Recall how I described the lifeboat survival manual as his holy scripture. I say that because of what Pi says at the beginning of Chapter 73: other than salvation, he wishes he had a book. He has “no scripture in the lifeboat,” hence he has to make do with the survival manual, which is essentially what scripture is meant for, anyway–the salvation and survival of the soul. He lacks Krishna‘s words (page 279). A Bhagavad Gita would have been handy.

In Chapter 74, he speaks of doing “religious rituals” in an attempt to lift his spirits. He wants to love God, but it is “so hard to love.” He’s afraid his heart will “sink to the very bottom of the Pacific”…just like the Tsimtsum, symbol of the present/absent God that sank, Noah’s failed ark (page 280).

He speaks of what’s left of his clothes as “GOD’S HAT!” and “GOD’S ATTIRE!” He calls Richard Parker “GOD’S CAT!” and his lifeboat “GOD’S ARK!”, etc. (page 281) Since these things are all Pi’s possessions, we can see that he’s once again narcissistically identifying himself with God, or using narcissism as a defence against fragmentation, as I described above.

Soon after, though, he realizes he’s been fooling himself. God’s hat is unravelling. His pants are falling apart, His cat is a danger to him, and His ark is a jail. All of Pi’s attempts to exalt God, and himself in his narcissistic association with Him, are failing because they’re all just a reaction formation against his unconscious anger at a God that has failed him.

“God’s ark [is] a jail” because the Tsimtsum was also a jail of an ark.

Pi goes on and on about his battles with hunger, and how they are driving him mad. He can feel remotely good only with a full belly; he needs turtle meat just to smile. At one point, he even tries to eat the tiger’s shit, his hunger is so desperate. Such an excess should be seen as yet another unconscious replacement for his eating of the cook’s flesh (pages 286-287).

In Chapter 83, Pi describes a sea storm (page 303). His choice of words to depict the scene is fascinating: “landscape,” “hillocks of water,” “mountains,” and “valleys” of ocean waves. He’s demonstrating wish-fulfillment again, as with the ‘city-sea’ and the ‘cars,’ ‘trucks,’ and ‘buses’ of busy, swimming fish in a water ‘predominantly green.’ He wishes, quite urgently now, of course, that he were on land.

He says, “the boat clung to the sea anchors like a mountain climber to a rope.” The huge crest was like a “mountain [that] would shift, and the ground beneath [Pi and Richard Parker] would start sinking in a most stomach-sickening way.” (pages 303-304)

In the storm scene in the film, Pi at first tries to show reverence to God while he’s pelted with rain and tossed about by the pitiless storm. He calls out, “Praise be to God! Lord of all worlds! The compassionate, the merciful!” (surah 1:2-3) He tells Richard Parker to come out from the tarpaulin and see God’s lightning flashing in the sky–“It’s beautiful!” This is the desperate madness of someone trying to reconcile himself to a world that is utterly indifferent as to whether he and the tiger live or die. Pi appears to be suffering from some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, as far as ‘God’ is concerned.

Only later, as the storm continues on in its ruthless battery of the lifeboat, does Pi finally express his frustration, saying he’s lost his family, he’s lost everything, and what more could God possibly want of him? Yet in his anger, he still mustn’t risk blasphemy, so he includes in his rant, “I surrender!” like a good Muslim.

Symbolically, this storm represents the traumatizing, inexpressible, undifferentiated world of the Real. The danger to him and the tiger represents the threat of psychological fragmentation, and so Pi’s stubborn faith in God is his way of retaining his sanity.

Having a sound sense of psychological structure, as Heinz Kohut understood it, is through maintaining what he called the bipolar self. One pole is of the grandiose self, that of mirroring and ambitions, one’s narcissistic aggrandizement of oneself; and the other pole is of the idealized parental imago, of idealizing another, an authority figure (Mother or Father, essentially) as an affirming, validating mirror of oneself. For Pi, the grandiose self is Atman; his idealized parental imago is Brahman, or his Heavenly Father. The loss of his parents has necessitated their replacement with God, a father figure.

He’s seen his mother murdered before his eyes; with his father already gone, she was all that was left of his idealized parental imago. This trauma has already weakened his bipolar self to the point of a dangerously brittle fragility. His killing and eating of the cook, something he couldn’t help doing, is still a heinous sin whose narcissistic injury would have shattered his grandiose self, the only remaining pole of his bipolar self, causing him to be at the very brink of fragmentation, a psychotic break from reality.

He can restore his sanity only by replacing his parents with a new idealized parental imago: God the Father. Repudiating his Heavenly Father would be, in Lacanian terms, foreclosure, a dismissing of the Name of the Father and the Symbolic Order of language, culture, society, and customs, treating them as if they’d never existed; this would lead to psychosis. Hence, Pi must believe in God to stay sane.

In Chapter 84, Pi sees a number of whales further off in the water, and they seem to him to be “a short-lived archipelago of volcanic islands.” Again, it’s the wish-fulfillment of seeing supposed land (page 309). Then, he sees six birds, imagining “each one to be an angel, announcing nearby land.” (page 310) More wish-fulfillment.

In Chapter 86, Pi spots a ship, and he tries to draw the crew’s attention to him by shouting and firing off a rocket flare, but all to no avail: “it was salvation barely missed.” (page 317) The ship sails away.

In Chapter 88, “One day, [they] came upon trash.” Among the foul-smelling things of this island of rubbish is a refrigerator; he opens it, letting out a “pungent and disgusting” smell (page 391). His hunger is further frustrated with all the rotten remains of food inside: “dark juices, a quantity of completely rotten vegetables, milk so curdled and infected it was a greenish jelly,” and a dead animal.

By Chapter 90, he starts to go blind. He feels near death, and it’s like a harrowing of hell for him (pages 324-325). The tiger is dying, too–naturally: Richard Parker is Pi, his Shadow.

He’s also concluded that he’s gone mad, and in his madness, blindness, and weakening to the point of near death, he hears a voice, and there begins a conversation (pages 326-327). Remember Pi’s extreme hunger as the context for all of this. He speaks, to the voice, of “someone else” as a “figment of your fancy” (page 326). Then he notes the word fig as the first syllable of figment (i.e., as in ‘figment of one’s imagination,’ or “fancy”). Pi is “dreaming of figs,” and the voice speaks of wanting a piece, for the owner of the voice, like Pi, is starving (page 327).

If Pi can hallucinate about animals on his lifeboat, as signifiers in his unconscious to replace those of his mother, the cook, and the sailor, then he can certainly, in his madness and blindness, have auditory hallucinations about another starving man on a neighbouring boat.

Later on, when the voice rejects the offer of a carrot, Pi concludes that it’s been Richard Parker who has been speaking with him, the “carnivorous rascal.” (page 330) As insane as this sounds, on the surface, to be hearing the voice of a talking tiger, when one considers the root cause of Pi’s madness, such foolish reasoning begins to make a kind of weird sense. Both the tiger and the other man, this double of Pi’s, his “brother,” who as it turns out is also blind (page 336), are projections of himself. In his madness, Pi is fusing both projections, the tiger and his “brother,” into one entity, if temporarily.

Later, his “brother” asks for cigarettes, whose nicotine is an appetite suppressant, something a starving man may crave for relief of his hunger (page 337). As it turns out, Pi has eaten his supply of cigarettes, but left the filters. Well, Pi doesn’t smoke (page 338).

By the end of Chapter 90, Richard Parker has attacked and killed Pi’s “brother” (page 342). Since both are figments of Pi’s imagination, his Shadow and a double of himself, then this killing is really a wish-fulfillment. Pi wishes he could end his suffering by dying…to sleep, no more…a consummation devoutly to be wished. And to die violently, as he imagines the tiger killed the hyena, but it was really he who killed the cook, is really just him mentally atoning for his bloody revenge on the killer of his mother.

His use of his ‘brother’s’ arm as bait is, of course, another example of replacing the signifier of the cook using the sailor’s leg for bait (page 343). And that Pi “ate some of his flesh” is the closest he can come to confronting his actual eating of the cook’s flesh.

In the very long Chapter 92, Pi has reached the island of algae (page 343). He knows many will not believe this part of his story. Of course not. It’s utter mythological nonsense, to take it literally.

‘”Look for green,” said the survival manual.’ (page 345) Just as with the ‘predominantly green’ city of fish swimming under the lifeboat, this hallucination of Pi’s is just more wish-fulfillment for him, his craving to find land. As a vegetarian, he also craves green to eat.

Naturally, he “babble[s] incoherent thanks to God” (page 346), comes onto the island, and bites into the green, “tubular seaweed” (page 347). The inner tube is “bitterly salty–but the outer…[is] delicious.” (page 348) What’s more, the taste is sweet, sugary. The algae’s sweetness is a pleasure and a delight one wouldn’t normally associate with such a food, and this sweetness ties in with everything else about this island: it’s a fake paradise.

This island is like Spenser‘s Bower of Bliss (from The Faerie Queene), a place of superficial, sensual pleasures one would indulge in to excess, yet it’s a trap. It lulls one into a state of idleness and torpor, distracting one from one’s quest or purpose; it would change a man into an animal.

Another apt literary comparison is Calypso‘s island, Ogygia, from Book V of The Odyssey, where Odysseus is kept to be the nymph’s eternal husband, with promises for him of eternal life and physical pleasures. Still, he knows he must return to Ithaca and to his wife, Penelope, and so after seven yers as Calypso’s reluctant lover, he is finally set free with the gods’ help. Pi, too, must leave his algae island.

Pi’s discovery of “hundreds of thousands of meerkats” on the island of algae is particularly interesting (page 356). This mongoose species is native to Southern Africa, so their presence on this Pacific island is most curious, and it only reinforces how mythical and improbable this place’s existence is, outside of Pi’s imagination.

He sees the meerkats all ‘turning to [him] and standing at attention, as if saying “Yes, sir?”‘ (page 357) Then they lose interest in him and all bend down at the same time, to nibble at the algae or stare into the ponds (evenly scattered and identically sized). All bent down thus, they remind him of prayer time in a mosque. They’re gentle, docile, and submissive.

Indeed, in meerkat, we can discover such puns as meek, mere, and cat. Though the animal is a kind of mongoose, we can play around with these four words for psychological purposes. Since this whole place and all of the animals here, including Richard Parker, are figments of Pi’s imagination, we can understand the meerkats to be ‘mere cats,’ or ‘meek cats,’ if you will.

In his mind, these animals have become a replacement signifier for the tiger, which recall is Pi’s Shadow, the dark, dangerous part of his personality that he has split off and projected from himself because he can’t accept it. The emergence of meerkats allows him to replace Richard Parker as a more acceptable signifier in his unconscious for his Shadow.

Instead of a ravenous tiger in his unconscious, he has ‘mere cats’ there…’meek cats’ that shall inherit the Earth. Richard Parker can kill and gobble up as many of them as he likes, and because they’ve lived on this island without predators for so many generations, they’ve no longer had any need of fear. They’re unruffled as the tiger kills them (page 361).

Since the tiger represents a rejected part of Pi’s mind, and the meerkats signify a more acceptable version of the tiger, then its killing and eating of them represents Pi’s integrating of his Shadow, and it’s also a kind of autocannibalism, which leads to another point.

I’ve discussed many times in other posts how I use the ouroboros as a symbol for the dialectical relationship between opposites: how the serpent’s biting head represents one extreme, the bitten tail is the opposite extreme, how at the point of biting, the one extreme phases dialectically into its opposite, and every intermediate point between the opposites corresponds with every place on the serpent’s coiled body, which is a circular continuum. One thing I’ve never discussed until now, however, is how the ouroboros engages in autocannibalism, or what the implications of this autocannibalism are.

The extreme of Pi’s ordeal (bitten tail)–his extreme starvation, blindness, and madness, causing him to project not only his Shadow onto Richard Parker, but also his very identity onto his similarly starving “brother,” then imagining the tiger killing and eating much of his “brother,” then Pi himself eating some of his ‘brother’s’ flesh–is a hell immediately preceding his discovery of the algae island paradise, the heavenly opposite extreme (biting head).

The tiger and his “brother” are projections of Pi himself, as I’ve described above, so the eating of his “brother” is symbolic autocannibalism. The tiger’s eating of the meerkats, also a projection of Pi (a meerkat and thus a more acceptable version of Richard Parker), is thus also symbolically Pi’s autocannibalism. We later learn that the island is carnivorous (page 378) once Pi has found teeth in the centres of the plants he’s peeled (page 377).

Pi has eaten algae from the island, Richard Parker has eaten many meerkats, and Pi has learned that if he and the tiger stay too long on the island, it will eat them. Since the island is obviously a figment of his delirious imagination, a wish-fulfillment of green land, full of vegetarian food for him and meek meerkats that the tiger can ingest, integrate into himself, and thus calm his wildness, then his and the tiger’s relationship with the island is also an autocannibalistic one.

In terms of my ouroboros symbolism, the island is at the exact point where the serpent’s teeth are biting into its tail, the very point of autocannibalism. Extreme heaven is meeting extreme hell. Biting the tail can symbolize self-mastery–heaven, nirvana–yet being eaten by oneself is also self-destruction–hell, samsara. This is the bizarre, paradoxical world that Pi has found himself delivered to, yet also trapped in.

After spending so many days eating and drinking, Pi has found himself returning to life (page 362). If a storm approaches the island, Pi has no fear of it “preparing to ride up the ridge and unleash bedlam and chaos” (page 363). The hell of a sea storm would stop at the green shore of Pi’s heavenly island. And just as Pi returns to life, so does Richard Parker. Naturally: the boy and the tiger are one and the same being. Richard Parker’s eating of meerkats has brought his weight up, it’s made his fur glisten again, and he’s looking healthy (page 365). Such is the effect of taming and nourishing the Shadow. Yet just as the two are reviving, they’re also in danger of dying again, so they must leave.

When Pi finds a tree that seems to have fruit (page 374), and these ‘fruits’ are what hold teeth in their centres, we find yet another literary and mythological allusion in this algae island. The tree isn’t in the centre of the forest, nor is there anything particularly remarkable about it, but in the centre of the tree’s ‘fruits’ is a knowledge of something that will force Pi to leave his island paradise. This is a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil on his deceptively Edenic island. For Pi, the place will be a paradise lost.

His peeling off of the leaves of the plant balls he believes to be fruit is a disrobing of the teeth inside, making them naked, as Adam and Eve discovered themselves to be upon eating the forbidden fruit. And just as their discovery caused them to be expelled from their paradise and to enter the painful world, so has Pi’s discovery caused him to expel himself from his paradise and to return to the painful world.

He imagines the teeth were from some “poor lost soul” who got to the island before him (page 379), and that after weeks or months or years of loneliness and hopelessness, he or she died there. After all that, Pi imagines “the tree must have slowly wrapped itself around the body and digested it” (pages 379-380). Only the teeth have remained for Pi to find them, but they will eventually disappear, too. Since the island is a figment of Pi’s imagination, though, this imagined person is yet another projection of himself, just like his “brother” who was eaten by Richard Parker and Pi, yet another dream of autocannibalism, an unconscious wish-fulfillment that Pi would be ‘justly punished’ for his own sin of cannibalism of the cook.

Finally, he and the tiger leave the island, and after some time on the Pacific Ocean, they reach the shores of Mexico (Chapter 94, page 381). Richard Parker wanders off and leaves him “so unceremoniously,” without even a look of goodbye in the tiger’s eyes. Since Richard Parker represents Pi’s Shadow, and the tiger has eaten his fill of meerkats (those meek, mere cats, if you will, that in being ingested have tamed the Shadow’s wildness and ferocity), then Pi’s Shadow has returned to his unconscious, it’s lost in the darkness there, and the boy’s sadness stems from no longer having an animal to split off and project what he doesn’t like about himself.

IV: Part Three–Benito Juárez Infirmary, Tomatlán, Mexico

The two Japanese men who question Pi in the Mexican infirmary about why the Tsimtsum sank in the storm–Tomohiro Okamoto of the Maritime Department in the Japanese Ministry of Transport, and his assistant, Atsuro Chiba–are in the role of psychoanalysts, as I see it, being in an attitude of skepticism toward what they hear from their ‘analysand,’ if you will, Pi (pages 391-393).

Mr. Okamoto tells Pi, in all bluntness, that neither he nor Chiba believes Pi’s bizarre story (page 393). Pi’s stubborn insistence that everything he’s told them is true, including the floating bananas, is like the resistance an analysand puts up before his doubting analyst.

Still, Pi’s Japanese investigators are even more stubborn in their insistence on an alternative story, a believable one, one that won’t make the two look like fools when they present it to the Maritime Department. This forces Pi to tell them the truth.

There is a long silence, then Pi tells “another story” (page 406). Pi has to present the truth as a mere ‘other story’ so that at least in his mind, he can pretend that it isn’t the truth. Such an attitude is the only way he can bear it.

As they have been discussing the two stories, Pi in his eternal hunger has been asking the two men to give him their cookies. The Japanese men, in having traveled nonstop to this infirmary, are rather hungry, too. Hunger, of course, is a constant theme in this novel. Pi would have us believe that he’s among the blessed, who hunger and thirst after righteousness (Matthew 5:6); actually, he’s just hungry.

His mother brought some bananas to the lifeboat (page 407), rather than floating on them as an orangutan. The cook “was a brute. He dominated [Pi and his mother].” (page 408) Pi acknowledges, however, that the cook was ” a practical brute. He was good with his hands and he knew the sea. He was full of good ideas.” (page 414) Pi acknowledges that it was thanks to the cook’s resourcefulness that they were able to survive thus far. In other words, the cook’s dominance and helpfulness are comparable to those of God [!].

His point of comparison reinforces what I said earlier: all of Pi’s talk about wanting to love God is really a reaction formation (the professing of the diametrically–emphatically–opposite attitude of that which truly exists in one’s unconscious) against his repressed hatred of God. Part of Pi’s hatred of the “brute” cook is a displacement of this hatred of God that he’ll never admit to.

The cook, a provider of the one thing needful–food–was crucial to the survival of Pi and his mother, as God is supposed to be for all of us. Yet the cook amputated the sailor’s leg, allowed him to die, cut his body up into pieces, ate some of the flesh, hit Pi for failing to catch a turtle, then killed Pi’s mother for hitting him, in turn for having hit her son. He hacked off her head and threw it at him. The head and the body were thrown overboard, food for the sharks.

And ‘God’ allowed the whole thing to happen.

Whenever good things happen, theists will praise and thank God for the good luck; but when bad things happen, they don’t blame God for either causing or allowing the bad luck. The fear of committing blasphemy makes cowards and hypocrites of theists like Pi.

It is the very horrors of modern history, such as the tens of millions whom ‘God’ allowed to die in WWII, including the victims of the Holocaust, six million Jews and millions of non-Jewish victims, that are among the reasons so many people have stopped believing in God. Yet Pi still insists on believing.

If the cook is comparable to God, then Pi’s killing of the cook is comparable to deicide, and his eating of the cook’s flesh is like taking Communion. The cook’s allowing of Pi to kill him–knowing that in having killed Pi’s mother, he went too far in his brutishness–is like Jesus having allowed Himself to be crucified in spite of His divine omnipotence. Pi imagines himself, as Mel Gibson did in personally hammering a nail into Christ’s hand in his film, The Passion of the Christ, as confessing his sin in committing his ‘deicide’ on the passive, willing cook, and in so doing, he hopes that he has successfully atoned for his sin.

If eating the ‘god’ cook’s flesh is like partaking in the Eucharist, then in unconsciously associating the cook with God as Christ, Pi is hoping he isn’t eating that flesh unworthily (1 Corinthians 11:27), as mere cannibalism. So in associating, however unconsciously, the cook with God, Pi is once again using religion to mitigate his guilt.

Though the cook, in knowing he’d gone too far, allowed Pi to kill him, he never said sorry. Pi wonders, “Why do we cling to our evil ways?” (page 416) In focusing on the cook’s evil ways, which were every bit as motivated by desperation and hunger as Pi’s were, Pi is trying to deflect his own guilt onto the cook.

Finally, Pi asks the two Japanese investigators which story they prefer, which is the ‘better’ story, when neither story can be proven true or untrue (in the film, he asks Martel this question). The two men prefer the one with the animals (page 424), as does Martel (played by Rafe Spall) in the film. Indeed, in their report, the Japanese men say that Pi amazingly “survived so long at sea…in the company of an adult Bengal tiger.” (page 428) Pi thanks them for validating his…let’s face it…delusional version of what happened, saying “And so it goes with God.”

V: Conclusion

The story is meant to make us believe in God. In my case, at least, it failed to do so. If this story is to make us believe in God, we must prefer the version with the animals…the fanciful, mythological one.

That Pi could survive alone on the lifeboat for so long is certainly amazing, but it isn’t impossible. To survive with a tiger is a kind of amazing that swings the pendulum towards the impossible, almost surely necessitating a belief in God and His miraculous works.

To be sure, we like the story with the animals better, for its mythological charm and for not including the horrors of the story with the cook, Pi’s mother, and the injured Taiwanese sailor. But it isn’t a matter of which story is more likable; it’s a matter of which story, as ugly as it may be, is more plausible.

And this is the thing about whether or not to believe in God, Brahman, the Tao, or whatever: shall we go for the more pleasant, but less rational, belief, or shall we go for the more rational one, but the one that makes us feel lonely and helpless under the uncaring stars? Here is where philosophical absurdism comes in. In a meaningless universe, we nonetheless cannot help but impose meaning on it–not out of logic, but for our comfort in a painful world.

Yann Martel, Life of Pi, Edinburgh, Canongate Books, 2001

My Short Story, ‘Together,’ Published in the Anthology, ‘Piece By Piece’

I have a short story called ‘Together’ that has been published in this anthology, Piece by Piece: An Anti-Valentine’s Day Collection, Short Stories, Poetry, and Prose, from Dark Moon Rising Publications. It’s available on Kindle ($419) and Paperback ($15.99) on Amazon. It will soon be available on Godless and the Wide Link.

My story is about a young woman with a drug habit who is, on and off, being possessed by the ghost of someone who has recently killed himself, over her having broken his heart. Or is she? Is she just hallucinating, and is she the one whose heart has been broken from having been abandoned so many times in her life, driving her to drug abuse and madness?

Other great writers with poetry and prose in this anthology include C.S Anderson, Devin Anderson, Alison Armstrong, Pixie Bruner, Sonya Kay Bruns, Jacqueline Chou, Michael J. Ciaraldi, J. Rocky Colavito, Dawn Colclasure, Linda M. Crate, Tony Daly, Quinn Rowan Dex, Ursula Dirks, H.L. Dowless, Julie Dron, A.M. Forney, Michael Fowler, Lindsey Goddard, Megan Guilliams, Kasey Hill, Bryce Jenkins, Emily Jones, Toshiya Kamei, Katherine Kerestman, Joseph Lewis, LindaAnn LoSchiavo, J.C. Maçek III, Brianna Malotke, Xtina Marie. Shane Morin, Jason Morton, Sergio Palumbo, Pip Pinkerton, Rick Powell, John Reti, Kevin Robles, Bissme S, Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar. Matt Scott, ReNait Suka, Robert Sullivan, Michael Errol Swaim, Rob Tannahill, Malachi Edwin Vethamani, Jacek Wilkos. amd Amanda Worthington

Please come check out this collection of great writing. You’ll love it! 🙂