What Is Trauma? 17

This blogpost is written to honour the memory of the victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre sixteen years ago today in 2001, and the victims of summary execution and torture at the hands of Pinochet and his thugs in Chile forty-four years ago on this day in 1973.

I want to write here about the politics of trauma.  Or, how our political leaders cash in on trauma in order to gain and maintain their power.  Before I proceed, I would like to make one thing perfectly clear: I do not subscribe to conspiracy theories.  Remember the Truthers?  The conspiracy theory nutters presenting all kinds of "evidence" that the US Government was somehow behind the downing of the World Trade Centre sixteen years ago this September 11.

Their idea is that the Bush Administration plotted the destruction of the Twin Towers as a ploy for justifying the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as well as for terrifying New Yorkers and other Americans into fleeing under the protective wings of Mother Washington.

I don't know what really happened.  I don't want to know.  However, given our natural tendency towards being played upon by fear and of traumatizing ourselves, I don't think that our governments really need any more help.  They don't have to conspire a damn thing.  We're already afraid and skittish and all they have to do is make political hay out of our natural tendencies towards fear and paranoia.

I have mentioned in other posts that trauma, rather than being a unique individual response to stress and violence, is more a collective experience that most of us remain in denial about.  Our perpetual collective trauma makes us very compliant subjects for our governments.  In earlier times the legitimate and constant fear of warfare and invasion made the king's subjects flee under his protection. 

The Aztecs and other native peoples of Mexico successfully persuaded the people that the gods needed to be regularly fed on human flesh or the entire cosmos would collapse.  This fear of the unknown made many willing victims climb the steep stairs of pyramids to the altars where their beating hearts would be torn out of their chests.  Fear of offending the gods, and fear of being chosen for sacrifice were more than sufficient for keeping the people under control.

I have already written extensively about the successful monopoly of terror shared by the Spanish monarchs and the popes for keeping the people under control.  Conform to the letter or get burned at the stake.  The very spectacle of hundreds of innocent victims being burned to death and the din of their screams of agony must have been more than enough to keep your average Spaniard submissive and compliant to pontiff and crown.

We live in very different times now.  But we are still afraid.  We, who have less to fear than any of our ancestors are probably among the most timorous losers that ever trembled on the surface of the earth.  Yes, we are afraid of terrorist attacks.  Worse, we fear poverty.  This is the new shadow that keeps us collectively fearful, traumatized and submissive.

When our governments, under pressure from the CEO's of multinational organizations drafting and signing international free trade agreements, cut back on fair wages, fair working conditions, and fair supports for the vulnerable, this transformed the poorest Canadians into objects of fear and loathing.  No one wanted to end up like us: homeless, hungry, sick, alone and unwanted, mentally ill, and very likely to die early in life.  So they became all the more compliant to the dictates of globalism, working, scrambling and competing all the harder to get that education, that degree, that advanced degree, that job, that overpriced rental apartment, that tiny overpriced condo, anything to not sink to the gutter and the open sidewalk.

I am not going to suggest here that our governments intentionally invented legislated homelessness.  I still wouldn't put it past them.  One way or another it has become a very effective scare tactic for keeping the rest of us in line, compliant, competitive and working our poor starving fannies off to make the One Percent all the richer while we become ever so much poorer.