Citadels of Paranoia; Panoramas of Despair: An Occupation of Phantoms. 

by Phil Rockstroh

Depression is the soul’s way of saying, to paraphrase the Vietnam era antiwar chant, "Hell no, I won't go.” 

The bad news is, we have been deluged with bad, even mortifying, news, and for such an extended period of time, the mind reels in bafflement as the spirit sinks. Despair seems an apt response to events one cannot reconcile, of circumstances of which one cannot gain perspective nor control.

Las Vegas: Garish shrine to the dreams of a stunted national imagination.

“The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt from Letters to a Young Poet

Depression can be a compensatory response to the inherently manic nature of capitalist dominance of every aspect of life in late modernity. The affliction knocks you on your ass and keeps you there until the psyche can find a better means of using the agency of libido, which, under the extant corporate/consumer/surveillance state panopticon has been usurped. Under the system’s economic despotism and attendant anomie and alienation,  one’s longings, more often than not, do not lead to the connecting eros of a life-enhancing vocation or deepening interpersonal encounters but only as a vehicle that hijacks one’s life into the service of a soul-crushing system, wholly designed to exploit every moment of this fleeting life for the benefit of an overclass of parasites, a klavern of vampires and ghouls. 

Depression is the soul’s way of saying, to paraphrase the Vietnam era antiwar chant, "Hell no, I won't go.” 

Alienation is an apt response to negotiating a soulless landscape. Where is the eros in Big Box/stripmall encounters? The ad hoc architecture of the consumer culture, which manages to be both utilitarian and garish, renders the heart dry as dust and grinds the mind to spittle. The psyche is in constant communion with its outer surroundings. Thus, what comes to pass if what is extant is a nadascape of vapid commercialisation, designed to deliver the shallow sensations concomitant to consumerism but lacking a connecting eros to both numinous inner realities and binding human encounters? A mortification occurs. Some individuals are driven to lash out in anger, even in acts of mass murder. The rage remains inchoate thus is displayed In acts of road rage…in nebulous hatred of outsiders and minorities and the foreign other. 

The propagandists of empire are privy to the fact. Hence, so many are convinced, so easily, that North Korea and Iran are threat to the homeland; that Russiagate is a thing; that the US military and the nation’s so-called intelligence agencies are a force for good and act as agents of protection against a hostile world. 

But with some, their soul isn’t buying it. Depression pulls one deep into oneself; therefore, manic compensation and displacement is not possible. They have opted out of the collective madness. Depression’s descent into the self becomes the option to surface level tropes of distraction. Compulsions fall away like Autumn leaves, the sap of life is seemingly frozen, the winds of the world howl through barren branches of one’s inner wilderness — to wit, an accurate apprehension of the sound of propaganda and its affront to mind and soul. 

Yet: All too many cannot envisage the veritable dangers of our age: ecocide and their threatened extinction of the human species; blanched coral reefs, scoured of life; dying oceans, gagging in plastic particulates; the sky burning, the ashes of charred forests stippling the wind.

Shooting sprees. As American as convenience store hotdogs, mass incarceration and drone murder. 

Las Vegas, the crass and sterile US landscape on stilts and steroids, retails in empty sensation. Dominion of night where coruscating lights have scoured away the stars. Perpetual, meretricious come-ons. City of towering, shlock temples wherein what the US holds sacred is worshipped: legal larceny, the deification of empty sensation, and the transubstantiation of everything it touches, flesh and material, into fodder for exploitation. Kitsch über Alles. A 24/7 neon pentecost of mammon. 

A wilderness of the collective mind howling with hungry ghosts. Vengeful spirits…inundate the air of the US cult of death. The imprecatory prayers of millions of slaughtered Indians ride the western winds and are funnelled into the void of vapidity that is Las Vegas. 

A man, eaten hollow by alienation, his soul rancid with displaced rage, stands on a hotel balcony. The heft of his firearm is the only thing that feels tangible in his hollowness and amid the weightless sheen of the architecture of the city below. 

The life of an Iraqi, Libyan, Yemenian, Syrian, Palestinian et. al. translates into nothing in the US American system of value. “The only thing those people understand is brutality. When we rain down death….that is the fate they demand.” 

The shooter’s mind roils. He acts as he has been conditioned to act. Now, he has achieved the power and control he has been denied. He is a military empire of one. His birthright as a US American has been fulfilled. God bless the USA. 

After mass shootings in the US, the sale of firearms rises. The phenomenon is very much like the reaction of alcoholics whose solution to the stress-inducing trouble, pain, and chaos that their addiction inflicts upon their lives is to attempt to remedy the situation by careening into another drinking binge. US Americans are attracted to guns in the same manner drunks are in love with their chosen killer. 

They are seeking sanctuary from fear. All too many view the world as a hostile place, and the remedy, US culture has instructed them, is to dispatch the threat by means of violence. These tormented souls believe they will be provided safety on a weapons-bristling citadel built on a mountain of corpses. (Floridians had to be advised that it would be a less than propitious act to fire weaponry into the fury of Hurricane Irma.)

Thus discussions of “gun control” will only exacerbate more fear, will cause gun sales to rise, and will increase the body count. The great unspoken is: US Americans fear the wrong things. The culture roils in a miasma of confused apprehensions and displaced responses. The threat US Americans are attempting to ward off is comprised by an occupation of ghosts, the ghost of history that stalks the precincts of their own minds.

If the habit of communal engagement is forsaken the heart atrophies from a lack of practice. The presence of others, even the panoply of life itself, is misapprehended as menacing…Others are perceived as malevolent, inhuman – as phantoms, devoid of face, heart, and blood.

Empathy is cultivated through participation mystique. Denied of the experience, the heart is at risk of being rendered a cold citadel of angst and paranoia. Without empathy’s agency, passion cannot be transmuted into compassion. Sans the sublimation of the heart’s hearth, psychical fires threaten to become a raging wildfire of collective madness:

“Putin’s neo-Cossack hacker squads have invaded my hard drive; Iran craves nukes; North Korea is a coiled, nuclear viper of seething crazy. Or the madness is made manifest as shooting sprees whereby the mass murderer attempts to cut down with barrages of semiautomatic weapon fire internal phantoms that torment him from within .” – Paranoid thoughts such as those can be read as, a confused soul’s dark fantasies of release from ego-ossified bondage although by means of the agency of death. 

Moreover, I have noticed that often the true state of mind crouched beneath paranoia is envy. 

Envy…unconsciously evinced as, others are taking up your space in the world and are plotting to maintain the arrangement by your undoing. 

There is a solution: Go take a survey of the world beyond your self-circumscribed range and Insist on your portion of life -- your portion of fate. 

Yes, of course all too many situations in this life are rigged e.g., the capitalist state. 

But life itself is too vast, too intricate to be fully controlled; the world is too big to rig. 

First release yourself from the stultifying confinement attendant to self-inflicted bondage. 

Then proceed into the midst of life and show your face to the world. 

Storms will pass, the landscape glistens with renewing rain…

Set barriers and barricades aflame…their flames caress the future.