Individualism & Equality. Statism & Globalism. Reality & Joyfulness

What’s New / Linda Rondstadt

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The current campaign for president is the strangest one in history. Any number of reasons could be given. But why waste anyone’s time giving them. Everyone has their own cache of reasons. A leading screenwriter couldn’t write a more exciting script than the one that plays out each day over the news.

It seems like we’re on that runaway mine car roller coaster in an amusement park. Going faster and faster over steeper bumps and around sharper turns. It was one of those rides I was sorry I got on. I liked excitement but it was more of a controlled excitement I liked rather than some strange excitement stirred up by the national media in a current VP of the United States that had the lowest VP ratings in history.

The battle between the Republicans and Democrats today has outgrown the definitions of domestic politics, though. It has moved to more of a globally based battle between state individualism and global community. It is a much larger than a battle between domestic Republican and Democrat parties. The state media would have everyone thinking this. Their power depends on the amount of culture’s distraction from the back-and-forth spell the media spins each day to the public. 

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Our culture and time is all about the ability of the powerful to distract the populace from the things that are most important to them. Certainly, they are distracted from looking at the larger context of life with the popular focus of most media on the content of everyday culture. 

A distraction from looking at the larger context of life. By an increasingly (gravitational almost) pull by content away from context. The content of the images of everyday life and the cycles and rhythms it brings each day. Power in the nation depends upon this distraction more than anything else to maintain power today. 

In effect, the daily media attempts to keep a tennis match of manufactured news each day in a back-and-forth battle. Just follow the tennis ball over the net. Focus on content rather than the context (medium) of the stadium the tennis match is played in.

This is what distracts the populace from watching the content of the tennis match of news, made to distract the populace from looking upward and around at where and what they are in life now. 

It’s time to lay off watching the news each and just watching the context of the world. 

Upward and outward. 

The battle between symbols is at its most intense in American history. In many ways, it is a battle between the feminine and masculine archetypes. This is reflected in many ways. First of all, in voter support polls for the Democrat and Republican parties.  

In many ways, it’s between Equality and Freedom, the two great archetypal symbols throughout history: with Equality representing the feminine archetype of wholeness and Freedom the masculine archetype of individualism. Both symbols, as I’ve argued many times, are the two great – paradoxical – founding symbols of America. Both are true but not at the same time. America was given its world-leading dynamism because of this paradox with symbols at its founding, always battling each other for control: the masculine and feminine sides of the American psyche.

One, the symbol of community and commonality and socialness. The other, symbol of the individual psyche in community and commonality. Attempting to emerge from this commonality into freedom. The two symbols go back and forth in cycles through life, mirroring in many ways the individual life from the wholeness of inside the mother and childhood to the freedom of separation and growth as an individual. 

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State individualism – called nationalism by many – starts with the idea of personal individualism within oneself. An important part of this individualism is the idea and concept of freedom. Again, it is tied originally to the masculine archetype. (Yet Carl Jung proved everyone has both Masculine and Feminine archetypes within oneself) It’s the ability to distinguish oneself from the Equality and wholeness. The moment of birth. Moments of growth in life. To see oneself as a third person narrator of all that’s going on rather than a first-person Hunter Thompson-type reporter of it all like his Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. 

Global equality and wholeness is what State Individualism is battling today. There is a question in fact who really controls things today: those involved with global matters or state matters? Presidents or Directors of International Groups. It is obvious that this new force of globalism is what the state individualism (Republicans) are up against today. It seems more and more apparent that the government has been captured (and perhaps run) by globalists (Democrats). After all, why the insane border crisis stuff going on? It is impossible to gaslight the populace on this issue although they have tried so hard. 

The symbolic reason for this is that borders define individualism, that distinguishes it from the whole: the other runners of a race, the other football team. It defines a national state of mind. Yet national these nation states exist like unwanted islands on the globe. The dominance of the equality symbol.

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It is difficult to believe that even someone like Obama (knowing his history) doesn’t report to some global controller/master. The true ruler of America? After all, if now is not the time for speculations of this nature, conspiracy theories, then when? 

The facts they’ll remember a hundred years from now: a person who was mentally challenged ran the nation with his VP. Both had the lowest popularity ratings of any President and VP. Did she run the nation during this time? Did she report to someone else? 

Yes, the American presidency has been flash and mirrors for years with many things going on behind the scenes, off stage. But the current presidency offers the special gift of control from the outside more than ever in a presidential administration. The needed candidate for this was someone who would not stand up to the global group. Someone who joined them. Again, the way to explain the insane border situation and policy of the VP. 

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I found myself sitting in bed tonight watching the section of live coverage they have of Kamala in Georgia. There is no doubt that she has come out from what I had perceived her as VP in the administration. She shows a new life I haven’t seen in her during the past years I laughed at her comments. Maybe farther on the path to discovering who she really is. To suggest she knows this, is dangerous and untrue. 

But there was little doubt that there was passion in her voice and more of a practiced style giving a speech. She is being coached by the best in the business these days. Even so, her hidden secret might be she cannot think on her feet, by herself. 

My wife Stephanie catches all of this in Kamala. She went to Oxford University and said the Kamala’s inability to think on her feet would have gotten her tossed out of Oxford or any English colleges. This is the one thing that Kamala seems to fear most: discussion without reading from a prompter. She doesn’t have the ability to think on her feet. She needs a script in front of her. 

She hides from the world who she really is. But perhaps she doesn’t know who she really is. 

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In the VP, the globalists have found a receptive target. If one is going to exert control over someone else, make sure that this someone else doesn’t have a popular following. In other words, make sure this person is not a leader. Someone the populace does not support. Non-Leaders are so much easier to exert control over and always to be preferred by the globalists. The President and VP have offered the perfect text experiment for this new type of government control in America. The opaquest in American history. 

But – importantly – there is the opposition symbols of time behind the two campaigns today: the symbolism of the past in memory and reflection, and, against this, the symbolism of the future in imagination. Memory and hope in many ways. Yet memory and the past means little to our current Generation Z and Millennial generations. The generation seems ready for the future more than any generations.

The VP uses an interesting word when she used the word “re-imagine.” She uses it when suggesting we should reimagine police. It is a word that does not impose another word on one but rather asks for the participation in the listener, reader in consideration of a possible future scenarios. It is a powerful word for the symbol forces pulling for the future today.

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Policies and position papers used to be useful things to consider when trying to make heads or tails from all of this. (Like I tried for so many years) 

But behind everything, there is the powerful symbol battle between the past symbolism and future symbolism. It wouldn’t be the first revolution based on the various beliefs about time.

The battle is based on one between Individualism & Equality. One might also say corresponding symbols drawn together at the same time such as Reality & Joyfulness and Statism & Globalism. The last page of the great American novel The Great Gatsby expresses this conflict with the past and future saying:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning –

So, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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There are key (hidden) symbols involved in the dynamics of world events today. As in the title, it is a battle between a number of key symbols: a battle between past & future; between individualism (freedom) & equality. On a global scale, a battle between statism & globalism. The former are nations of the world that fight off attempts at being “globalizing” or homogenized into global politics. There are also the symbols associated with the reality of the world as opposed to those who seems to create her own reality each day. Molded by the media and scripted each time she goes out. 

The symbol of Kamala associated with the spread of joy and hope to America. An important word to her is the world “re-imagine.” It is an interesting linguistic device, asking for participation from readers in creation of this vision by invoking a past imagine going to work and creating a new imagination. Reimagining the world.  

Her campaign is totally about the future. She needs to run away as far as she can from her past. But it has been captured on so much media it is impossible to run away from. Yet her women followers present a growing movement in America. So many women want to focus on the future and not the present or the past. 

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The focus on the future is in direct conflict with Trump’s focus from the beginning on the American past in his slogan “Make American Great Again.” It is the word “again” that gives praise to the “great” past of America. Trump’s campaign is not one spreading joy like Kamala’s campaign. He focuses on serious international threats to America. He promises to close the border. He will reduce corporate income tax rates. 

Trump’s campaign can be seen as an appeal to the past against the joyful appeal of Kamala to the future. The future is the best place for her. And she feels for all of us. But it is a place that exists in imaginations that are reimagining all of this. Best we all move into a new world – a “reimagined” world. It is one of the greatest clashes between the paradoxical founding symbols of America in Freedom and Equality. 

Are we going into the future, into something new and different. Or are we confronting the reality of the present. With the strength of our past.

The future of the nation will be determined in a few months. The past or the future? 

No wonder my anxiety is kicking up these days.