I watched Total Recall (the 1990 version with Arnold Schwarzenegger). Action films are the perfect camouflage for spiritual stories.
In Total Recall, the rulers of Mars have convinced the masses that Mars lacks an atmosphere, and it is an unlivable place without the injection of fake air. This is how the rulers of Mars control the population (air is for sale, and the oxygen supply is cut off to particular locations when their populations rebel). Oxygen/atmosphere is symbolic of spiritual knowledge/awareness of the soul’s existence. But the ancients who lived on Mars prior to the arrival of humans had the foresight to build machines, hidden deep in the mountains, that are able to generate an atmosphere on Mars. This ancient knowledge is equivalent to the wisdom in the book (the book from The Man in the High Castle, which is called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy).
I recently had a completely unexpected immersion in What’s Really Going On Out There. The experiment is nearly (but not quite) at its peak. Can humans live in a totally de-spiritualized universe (one without real oxygen, with only ersatz spirit)? How far can the experiment be pushed before something breaks? A.k.a., how little contact with reality can people have without falling into a despair that leads to death?
What do I mean by reality? I’ll take Edgar Allan Poe’s definition of the universe from his poem Eureka: “the utmost conceivable expanse of space, with all things, spiritual and material, that can be imagined to exist within the compass of that expanse.”
You are not your memory. You are what you do. This line is the cure for unhealthy narcissism. We are all narcissists now, unless you are a psychopath. The reason this psychological dynamic is so important to understand is this: unhealthy narcissism makes a person an easy target. Psychopaths prey on narcissists because unhealthy ones are the perfect cattle, ideal for sacrifice. That’s why narcissist hate has become so popular: it’s a project. Narcs are the only system-approved out-group across all political, social, and cultural lines. The word’s meaning (narcissism) has become so incredibly diluted that it’s now an empty word, ready to be filled with the characteristics of any inconvenient group of people.
For the psychopaths, a narcissist is anyone who believes in the human spirit and its individual value. We are taught that the individual is opposed to the collective. But the collective is not a group of individuals; the collective does not exist. Whenever “the collective” is referred to, what this really means is the collection of psychopath-approved beliefs, the things that the psychopaths have deemed acceptable for the masses to believe. Psychopaths themselves don’t believe in anything, but the “collective” is simply the things that they allow you to think.
If you insist upon your own value and perceptions, if you disagree with any of these approved-lines, you are a narcissist.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a real pathology, a real form of unhealthy narcissism that has become so common as to become the norm. It is a narcissism that was never limited, an identity without boundaries. Healthy narcissism is how a person develops a stable identity in the first place. Narcissism is necessary for maintaining one’s dignity in the face of the real spiritual disease of these times, which is not narcissism, but psychopathy. Unhealthy narcissism is boundary-less, without limitation, an identity without definition. But it isn’t inherently evil or wrong, and a certain degree of narcissism is essential for survival.
Unhealthy narcissism’s spread throughout the general population is a defense mechanism. It happens when a psychologically normal, non-psychopathic person attempts to mimic psychopathic traits. Unhealthy narcissism is a failed imitation of psychopathy. Narcissists fail at being psychopaths, but they aspire to be like them. Regular people who are trying to be something that they are not and never could be end up as unhealthy narcissists.
Unhealthy narcissism is a reaction or response to the rise of psychopathy. The reason unhealthy narcissism has become so widespread is that psychopathy’s accelerated spread throughout the general population has led people to develop psychological defenses. Traditionally, few people would have any direct interaction with psychopathy; now, our entire world is being re-made into a psychopathic paradise.
Psychopaths have encouraged narcissism via many methods (destruction of the social fabric, economic warfare, propaganda, brainwashing, etc), but people have willingly (consciously or subconsciously) adopted psychopathic traits in the hope that these qualities would empower them against the decimation of the world at the hands of the psychopaths who currently rule it.
What is psychopathy? It’s the ultimate form of insanity. It’s the belief that the only reality that exists is material, and there isn’t any spiritual reality. Psychopaths are equivalent to the colorblind. They are blind to human emotion. Unhealthy narcissists are people who are attempting to adopt this alien worldview, but they do not understand its nature, they only understand it as selfishness because they are perceiving it from the outside, not the lack of moral foundation that would enable someone to act in that way (to act as if there were no spiritual consequences for their actions).
By adopting this form of insanity, regular people believe that they are safer/well-defended against exploitation. By becoming like them, by adopting the psychopath’s form of insanity, the person believes, they are less likely to be harmed. In truth, the adoption of these traits actually makes a person more vulnerable to manipulation and more likely to be exploited. Unhealthy narcissism is self-deception, and deception is food for psychopaths. Psychopaths thrive in conditions of deception and ignorance, and narcissism is ignorance of the self.
Arnold in TR loses his unhealthy narcissism in order to learn how to follow Jesus and gain access to spiritual reality. Oxygen is spiritual reality. The painful process of stripping away his false identity is necessary, it’s the first step, toward understanding the spiritual foundation of reality. Unhealthy narcissism is basically false memory (an implanted and incorrect memory of oneself). The unhealthy or stupid narcissism is the false image of oneself. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a true image of oneself that exists: the difference between the false and the true self is that the true self doesn’t arise from who someone believes him or herself to be, or who a person tries to convince others to believe he or she is. It arises from what someone actually does in the world and how someone responds and reacts to the world. The self arises not from descriptions, but from actions. That’s why an action movie is the ideal vehicle for telling this story.
I’m having some stupid self-doubt today. It’s my narcissistic traits acting up (this will never come out as great as I imagine it to be, it’ll never be as amazing as it is in my mind, and seeing the reality is disappointing). But something is better than nothing. Always? Maybe not always. Sometimes doubt is helpful and useful, stopping us from doing stupid things, but how to tell the difference between prudence and self-doubt? Locating the origin of the emotion, which is only possible with self-awareness. I can tell that this doubt’s origin is fear, not love. It was inspired by a stupid thing I read, just pure nostalgia-fantasy-propaganda trying to convince people that moving back home to be closer to family is always the answer. If only it were that simple. If doing what everyone has always done guaranteed salvation and survival, then there would be no need for individual selves with individual judgment or discrimination between alternatives. But we are hopelessly individual, and we can’t go back to what we were in the past.
We cannot rely on templates, predecessors, or received traditions because this is a time of spiritual crisis. We are living through a novel situation, and novel situations require creative solutions, which can only come from within the self. But if we are disconnected from ourselves, it’s impossible to do anything new or creative; without knowledge of the self, we are simply mimicking what we think others have done before. To add to the confusion: Because our civilization is run by abusive and psychopathic people, we don’t have the true story of what our ancestors did. The past has been distorted. But I think that, via fictional works, we can access a truer version of the past.
I think Philip K. Dick told the Same Story (the one true story) in all of his books. PKD was a mystic. False depictions of PKD proliferate, such as Jonathan Lethem’s description of PKD as a communist in the introduction to the mangled version of the Exegesis that was semi-recently published. The recent PKD renaissance concerns me. Clearly the goal is to strip his works of their spiritual essence (hence changing the book in The Man in the High Castle to a film in the new adaptation). The goal is to ensure that the wrong people of the future don’t read his books by spreading the false impression that he’s a run-of-the-mill hippie-hedonist writer. In reality, he’s one of the most important spiritual writers of the 20th century.
What story was PKD telling?
Schizo Movie Reviews 