Another point which may strengthen the case against the “professional managerial elite” is that a fancy university degree does not buy a person a brain or a fully functional mind. In most cases, a fancy university degree may condition a person to become servile and accustomed to taking orders rather than thinking critically and independently. And despite the reverence for fancy university degrees, when one compares China’s seven-member “Standing Committee” of its Politburo to the principal members of America’s “National Security Council” (NSC), the difference in brainpower and knowledge between the two groups is essentially the difference between night and day.
In a sense, the physical and mental health problems in America can serve as a mirror for an even deeper social reality, which is that most Americans are sick and tired and are fed up with the fearmongering and terror which emanates from both Trump and the establishment. The main difference between Trump and the establishment is that the latter exports the fearmongering and terror overseas, whereas the former brings it all home. Which is worse is hard to determine, given that external policy is the direct and primary cause of internal affairs. Serendipitously and in a synchronistic way, I sat next to a Hispanic man who was accompanying his mother during a flight to Miami this past February. Out of the blue, he proceeded to chat with me, and he gave me very basic but important advice. His advice was to always “keep things simple” in life and that the fact of the matter is that people are “sick and tired of war.”
And as mentioned before, a convergence and synchronicity of interests and viewpoints might be occurring in the global public sphere as a result of the “cloud” and internet annexing the physical space and physical world to a large extent. The mood and sentiment expressed by the man sitting next to me during a plane ride in Miami is now universal and widespread because a mood and sentiment is the most credible and legitimate indicator of broader social reality. In turn, general situations and trends are largely deciphered and inferred through samples and individual experiences. And as the Korean philosopher and scholar Byung-Chul Han wrote: “A mood is not a subjective state that rubs off on the objective world. It is the world.”
In turn, our collective and conscious mood and sentiments are a byproduct or result of subconscious factors which control and shape conscious reality. And arguably, everything which manifests in our conscious reality has long existed in the subconscious mind. Hence, all of us are unconsciously and subconsciously manifesting a pre-existing conscious reality which has long been situated in our subconscious mind. Experience and ‘Eidetic Memory’ are perhaps the predominant factors which determine the contents that are collected by the subconscious mind through the course of time and are then manifested into conscious reality. Hence, as Carl Jung wrote:
“My thesis…is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”
Hence, the ontological turbulence of a postmodern world which is exacerbated by the influx of information and viewpoints as a result of the advancements and evolutions in globalization and technology is part of a collective ‘individuation’ process which in turn will determine our collective social reality in due time.
Adam A. Azim 