Karl Schlotterbeck

This is going to sound like a politically-partisan commentary on current events but don’t let that obscure the underlying psychology that appears to drive some of what we are seeing.

Let me start with Sigmund Freud. He was an interesting character in his time, of his time, and in retrospect from our time. Of his various theories, there was one I paid little attention to in my younger years. It was his “death instinct” or Thanatos. Thanatos was the companion to his better-known pleasure principle or life drive (Eros). Thanatos, as I understand it, is an instinct toward destructiveness and death. It is exhibited in people who engage in risky behavior. They find it more thrilling than frightening to risk life and limb in unnecessarily dangerous activities. Of course, today, we have other kinds of explanations for such behaviors such as differences in neurology, or internal biochemistry, or behavioral addiction. In another time they might have been accused of being possessed by demons.

Each of these areas of explanation has its merit but let me return to Freud.

Through all these years after reading Freud (back in the 60s and 70s), I would not have thought of Thanatos again except that I see a pattern strongly emerging in the direction of Donald Trump’s Republican party.

In his personal history, Trump leaves a wake of bankruptcies, unpaid contractors, sexual assault and bragging about sexual assault, calls for the death penalty even for exonerated black men, and bragging about being able to shoot someone and not lose followers – which brings me to his followers.

His party and those who follow him endorse policies that guarantee unnecessary death for innocent and vulnerable people. This is the emerging pattern that’s becoming increasingly obvious. I’m referring to cutting healthcare support, cutting social security, canceling funding for cancer and other medical research, undercutting America’s education system, replacing scientific findings with business-friendly ideology, violent immigration interventions, destruction of old-growth forests, permitting drilling in environmentally fragile areas, removing regulations that would prevent industries from poisoning air, sea, and land, catalyzing hatred against various specific groups, the assault on women’s healthcare and bodily autonomy, withdrawing support for USAID, religious bigotry, policies hastening climate change and, of course, supporting genocide and starting his own unnecessary war based on a paranoid orientation to the world (ignoring here the influence of Netanyahu in the Iran attack). Also note the glorification of force, of war, the destructive efficiency of the military rather than life-supporting actions such as protecting and feeding hungry children or empowering women. Those who would advocate for environmental protection are being called “domestic terrorists.” The saga of the Epstein Files is a testament to power, domination, and the ruination of children.

 These are not unconnected or random. It would, of course, be illuminating to follow the money to see who profits from each of these, but there is a common thread that runs through each of these policies and action. Each of these actions and policies will bring not only health challenges but unnecessary deaths to a large number of people and destruction of environmental safety and ecological integrity.

What’s more, a segment of Christian believers applaud all this death, disease, and destruction as signs of their desired and celebrated apocalyptic end-times. It would seem in these days that the legendary four horseman are riding out from the halls of government. Because of this apocalyptic orientation, these believers see no reason to plan for the future, or to preserve a healthy environment for the world’s children. The sooner things fall apart, the sooner will come their savior – so they believe.

So, Freud may have been right after all. It looks like the American ruling regime along with a particular Christian sect have become a cult of Thanatos whose outcomes, whatever else they may claim, are destruction and death. What eventually happens may depend not only on the actions and votes of ordinary people in the next year or two, but also on the recovery and empowerment of Eros, or the life drive. And right now, it appears that women and indigenous peoples carry the strongest expression of Eros.

(This is an expansion of a previous Instagram post.)

My mother was a character. She observed people, noted things others usually missed, and seldom kept them to herself. Being rather outspoken, she often ruffled people’s feathers – not exactly socially correct, but honest. Some of us loved her all the more for that.

In her last years (somewhere around the age of one hundred), she unexpectedly told me that she blamed their church for my father’s death. He’d passed away some 20 years before from a massive heart attack at age 80.

His church was very important to him. He poured his heart, time, talents, and money into that church. He served his church in the choir, at the lectern, on the board, and in various other activities.

The church building had little parking space of its own, leaving congregants to park on the neighboring streets. The time came when some members moved to buy adjoining properties to turn them into a parking lot. This meant razing the homes of the less-privileged people who lived there. This was the crux of the matter for my father: that the church would turn people out of their homes to make room for more convenient parking. This, according to my mother, was what caused his heart attack. He apparently believed that sheltering people was more important than having a space for cars. By her account, the church betrayed his deeply-held principles, and it broke his heart.

I don’t know what happened to the people the church unhoused, but I do know what happened to my father. My mother saw that pain in him until his death, and she kept her observation to herself for all those years. I feel privileged that she shared it with me.

I think I know how my father felt. My heart aches at the suffering some agencies of our government is inflicting on children and vulnerable Americans and others within our borders. I let my mother’s revelation be a warning and I work to not go down the same road he did with his heartache. I know I’m not alone. Many people feel the heaviness of being betrayed, of hurting, and of experiencing the vicarious traumas we think are too big to address and too atrocious to believe.

We would all do well to protect our hearts, not by numbing them or by denial, but by staying centered in our hearts and in the values we commonly share – values untouched by ideology, political tribalism, and the stresses of the life we’ve all helped create. Having a heart does not have to mean living in jeopardy if we are mindful and stay rooted in the things that make our hearts come alive. Anyway, that’s how I do it. So far so good.

I miss my father and his big heart with his love for this country, his respect for the military in which he served, his care for people of all kinds, his devotion to his family, his generosity, humor, and humility. His life taught me many things, but this lesson came through my mother’s observations that:

1. Care can be dangerous.
2. Because of that, it takes courage to stay open to caring.
3. And it is vital to include the health of oneself in the caring.

Stay curious, be true, and always take heart.

Cultish aspects of some religions, philosophies, political and social movements, beguiling and seductive as they are, are betrayals of humanity. They promise release and freedom from the troubles and trials of this world and offer us a golden life in another world, accompanied by lost loved ones, angels, saints, or even divine beings. These elevated beings then become responsible for our being, our love, our life, our joy. Like a fetus returned to the womb, we need do nothing. This is the seductive enchantment. The prophets of such movements tell us that this world is inferior, not to be trusted, evil; that the beauties of the senses are but transient illusions. Even our being here is portrayed as an accident, a mistake of an ancient ancestor or divinity, or a place of punishment, trial, or karmic reward and punishment (a.k.a. “lessons”). It begins to look like this other promised world is little more than an extension of the pleasures and pains of this one.

They promise much but, in my view, they ask even more. These are cults of betrayal, denigration, denial, self-hatred, a blinding to what is before us, and general depravity. We are asked to cut ourselves off from the Natural World that has given us life, to deny the beauty that is rampant around us, to pretend the seasonality of everything reduces its value in calling it “transitory” and worth less with each loss. It is a betrayal of our ancestors who nurtured our seed of life from time beyond memory. Our ancestral lineages are no longer sources of wise counsel, but burdensome old relics of another time. These cults ask us to also betray the children to come, to exploit and extract the life out of this world that they will inherit. And so the harbingers of death spew toxins into land, sea, and sky while they create disease and cures for their profit.

In these ways, we are asked to deny our loving enmeshment with the life that came before us, surrounds us, and comes after us. We are asked to deny and betray our place in the natural order of things, to deny that we bear responsibility for the conditions of this world that we shape with every thought, word, and action. Our ideas and our thinking have been separated from our own vibrant bodies and the experience of our lives that would teach us real and present truths – despite what corrupt regimes would want us to know.

We are asked to betray all that we are through by denying the core values revealed in our deep-heart desires. They would have us believe that we all fit into some category that a predatory society would impose upon us. Delusional destructive dualisms have been imposed on us of right/wrong, material/spiritual, religious/secular, us/them, life/death, left/right, profit/loss, and of gender. All of these boundaries made up and maintained by those wanting to control the multifaceted spectrum of being that every one of us has the potential to manifest.

We are asked to live a half-life, acknowledging only part of who we are, reading only approved writings, teachings, and their authorities. This is a sign they cannot stand on their own because their authority is illusory.

The reality is that we are here, and these cultish movements would have us pretend we can evade responsibility because of an imagined there. If someone else can be blamed, then we are absolved of responsibility for the world we have created.

Let me be clear – not all religions, philosophies, or movements do this. I’m not making some wholesale dismissal of any of these. These are not just the machinations of some established and erudite religions or philosophical movements, but they insidiously show up as in our current political regime that says, “Do not believe what you see. Let us tell you what you see, and what you are allowed to see; and let us make the determination of what it means, what victims intended before we killed them. Let our ideology replace what your eyes see.”

It won’t work. We are the breathing moment of an ancestral line that has given us the raw material for our singular life that asks of us to maintain consciousness and courage. Like it or not, we are the creators of what is to come. Despite our appeals to invisible forces and divine beings, we are responsible for our lives, for this world, and for our destiny. We bequeath the seeds of possibility to those who come after us through our actions, words, and thoughts. Whatever song we sing echoes into the distant future.

Do we live our lives and values in mutual service to one another, in reciprocity with the natural world on which we depend? It takes courage to be present and attentive to the direct experience of who we are, to the nature of the world around us; and it takes even more courage to accept the responsibilities that come with being and with consciousness. But to do so, we are rewarded with the realization that beauty endures, transitory seasons and cycles are sacred, and we have many ways open to embody the life we live, the life for which we are responsible, the life that we are living.

(I had written much of this before realizing it as an elaboration of Chapter 9 of my book The End of Karma: What Causes Our Karma and the One Thing It Asks of Us – hence the title of essay.)

Across my social media feed come ex-evangelicals criticizing various aspects of their former churches, along with ex-Mormons, ex-scientologists, and atheists, all of whom make charges of hypocrisy, and of quoting or misquoting their Bibles. I see ordinary citizens calling out politicians for failing to follow the constitution, and politicians and pastors decrying the rise of Christian nationalism.

Among all the arguments about religion in politics, feigned and genuine victimhood, about which group’s ideology should prevail, do we really not know that love and respect for one another are basic moral principles, or that mercy, forgiveness, generosity, hospitality, and the empathic application of the “golden rule” are the most desirable?

It all puts me in mind of the development of our constitution, for which the signers came together to discuss in a deliberate way how people should treat one another, and they attempted to define the relationships among people, states, and the federal government.

So we don’t get distracted from my point, let’s set aside the ironies and inadequacies that the discussion only included men, that protection of the privilege of white male property owners was a prime consideration, that much of its democratic strength was copied or adapted from native peoples this government sought to destroy, and that many of its promises have yet to be fulfilled or have been subverted by a wealthy elite.

What I’d like to focus on here is the idea that moral principles were developed based on agreement – not on an individual’s authority, some divine right of kings, brute power, or reference to scriptures. The authority was in the agreement of those who would be subject to its provisions (again, tainted by their privilege).

This was a higher level of moral development than submission to authority or avoidance of punishment or promises of later reward.

Things have changed for me in this season of gifts and wishes. I no longer wish for a bicycle, something electronic, or a new car or camera – not that I wouldn’t enjoy them.

Nowadays, I wish we had a government oriented to meeting the individual and collective needs of every resident on this land, and contributes to the global well-being of our neighbors in the world.

I wish we had a president who knew something other than how to gain attention, accrue power, and profit, and knew something about humanity, culture, civics, our constitution, about truth and poetry.

I wish we had a competent person heading Health and Human Services who knew something about research and who could integrate the methods of “scientific” medicine and other traditions of health, healing, and well-being – not just a cog in a political machine of disruption.

I wish we had a secretary of education that knew something about education and had a goal of improving its functioning – not just reducing it to a cash cow for profiteers and religious propaganda.

I wish we had someone at the head of consumer protection actually devoted to the protection of the consumer, rather than the exploitation of consumers by corporations.

I wish we had a justice system that was just, that supported the idea of justice unrelated to status, wealth, ethnicity, race; a just system that reflects the ideal of liberty and justice for all.

I wish we had media that give us something other than one-dimensional heroes with violent and destructive pseudo solutions to life’s problems and, instead, offered models of wholeness, growth, construction, and triumph over human foibles. There’d be fewer explosions and more revelations, less heat and more light.

I wish we had more religions that could integrate their ideologies with the world we face today, not for the glories of individual advantage, development, wealth, or salvation, but for service and the recognition of how each one of us is embedded with the greater world and what harms one of us hurts all of us.

I wish we had a non-toxic economic system that incentivized innovation, entrepreneurship and the well-being of individuals and communities.

I wish we had a society that values truth, kindness, taking care of us and our neighbors; a society that expects much from those who have been given much.

And finally, I wish for more poetry, more truth-telling, more grass-roots music and more books.

Darkness is not just the absence of light. Darkness has its own presence. It is an invitation to withdraw from outer things, people, activities, attachments, and ideas. This means to turn toward the mysterious inner landscape that exists beneath all our thoughts and actions. It’s mysterious, unpredictable, often unruly, and does not necessarily follow our social and personal expectations.

I suspect it’s that unpredictable mystery that inclines our culture to grasp for ideas and activities that emphasize light – candles, tree lights, rituals, lawn and house decorations – and to focus on the turning season that promises new light. I also suspect that any new light doesn’t come to most of us because we do not really give up the old light that dwelling adequately in the darkness would allow us to do.

We are often apprehensive In the dark, we don’t know what might move inside us or around us, what might confront us, what unresolved issues might present themselves. These things don’t come to torment us. They invite us to digest them fully and take the power out of them in any way we might have at our disposal – contemplation, therapy, journaling bodywork, a new study or discipline, shamanic healing, or spiritual or energetic healing.

The darkness is an invitation to a world of greater light, healing, and revelation.

Science, shared values, the arts, community principles, orderly decision making, and care for others are enemies of this and all autocratic regimes as they invoke a god they don’t believe in and substitute for it a malicious god in their own image. Sufficient self-righteousness is required to cover their guilt and unworthiness.

A court of law is expected to operate by established principles and shared values, which is why this administration so vehemently seeks to undermine them. They interfere with subservient loyalty to a despot.

The educated class, especially intellectuals, attempt to make decisions based on reality, science, and reasoning, which violates conformity to propaganda and unbridled greed. It’s why this administration seeks to undermine higher education that does not bend to its faux authority and artificial view of the world.

Knowledge of real history tells us something of who we are, how we got here, and who paid the price of our survival and achievement, as well as to whom we owe gratitude and more.

Artists persist in creative self-expression and show the value of alternative perceptions of the world, which is why art is a threat to uniformity, standardization, and the unthinking and uncreative mob mind.

Love, charity, and care for the vulnerable interfere with the unifying hatred that desperate regimes need to stay in power, which is why this administration actively creates anxiety, destruction of families, and terror in vulnerable, minority, and “alien” populations.

Hate, anxiety, and anger create a mindless passion that is more intent on destruction and suppression than on solutions to problems.

Recognition of global interdependence is anathema to delusions of superiority.

The cynicism of dictators creates chaos and foments discord that, in their propaganda, requires a strong arm and suppression to “fix” the problem they created.

Collective bargaining interferes with autocratic domination and control and, instead, shares authority, profit, and advantage among those on whom success depends.

It’s easy to understand why this administration is doing what it does: to overwhelm, terrorize, confuse, divide, and upset makes a population much easier to manipulate than does respect, transparency, honesty, and service.

I don’t much care what you call yourself,
or what labels you wear,
or what ideas you treasure.

I want to know if you have compassion in your heart
for all people.

I want to know if you treat others with kindness, with consideration.

I want to know your expectations of authorities, leaders, and clergy –
                whether they serve people or ideologies,
                whether they seek truth, or status or conformity,
                whether they seek service or privilege,
                whether those who offer them nothing
                                are given as much consideration
                                                as those who benefit them.

I want to know the outcomes of all actions
                in the generations to come.

A priest in her own church addresses the most powerful man in our country and calls for mercy for the vulnerable in our society. His followers and other performative Christians revile her. Pastors have been driven out of their churches for having taught the Sermon on the Mount. Clear-eyed Bible scholars who faithfully attempt to accurately translate what the text of the scriptures are trying to say to their people are upbraided for not conforming to “official” church dogma.

What does this say about our society and about the state of modern Christianity in our world?

When Christianity began, it was a revolutionary movement promising liberation, calling for the sharing of resources with the poor, divesting of wealth, care and healing of the sick, praying in private rather than publicly, and for love, forgiveness, and – yes – mercy.

A representative of their god has been identified with a secular ruler. A lying rapist full of malice and greed can now be called a tool of their god. Our Christianity of today has become largely a tool of the state and the status quo. It’s not really a new phenomenon. Christianity’s Bible has been used to justify America’s killing and removal of the Indigenous people of this land, and the enslavement, segregation, and oppression of dark-skinned people. Despite its lofty rhetoric, ideals, and mythologies, this country was built on genocide, theft, slavery, and rule by a landed aristocracy at the expense of the working poor. It’s the same ideology that used biblical texts to approve of slavery, genocide, segregation, exploitation of the vulnerable and poor, and persecution of minorities of any kind. And wealth is seen as virtue rather than a responsibility to help the less privileged.

After two thousand years, this strain of Christianity has become not a prompt for uplifting humanity but a justification for the worst instincts of the selfish and greedy in humankind. This occurs when it’s been taken by a government as a façade to defend against those who would speak truth to power.

What god are they worshipping?

Theirs is not a god I would celebrate, let alone worship. These “Christians” are not the people with whom I’d want to spend eternity in any heaven or hell. Their presence has already created hell on earth for many people. It’s no wonder congregants leave their churches – churches that lack relevance to today’s needs and promote religion over spiritual development.

It seems that all through history, genuine spiritual movements get hijacked as they become institutions more interested in their own dogma and survival than the revolutionary spirituality that gave them birth, which makes them easy targets for manipulation by secular leaders.

Blessed are those who speak truth to power, and who advocate spiritual exploration rather than conformity to dogma.

There’s a German word I find applicable in these times in which so many people are suffering by neglect, invasion, bullets, bombs, bigotry, oppression, and persecution. It’s a word for those of us who feel the suffering of the world and have grown weary in the constant struggle that all people might enjoy dignity, respect, and self-determination. That word is Weltschmerz. It describes the sadness and weariness in a world that is full of pain.

The world seems dark. Political extremists have infected mainstream politics with ugliness, mainstream candidates and their minions refuse to accept voters’ choices, a televised insurrection that attempted to destroy constitutional processes is gaslit with pretenses of imaginary election fraud, and one presidential candidate speaks openly about jailing his political opponents and releasing convicted criminals. Women’s wombs have become the property of some state governments as politicians insert themselves between a woman and her doctor, dictating medical procedures that have already resulted in death – all under the “pro-life” banner that doesn’t give a damn about living children, especially if they are not white. An entire political party can craft its identity around paranoid hatred and persecution of any minority they can try to blame for their troubles. A large swath of politicians can justify the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian children and possibly more than 100,000 innocent civilians and call it “self-defense” with a straight face, turning a blind eye to televised genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Political debates can be won on lies slickly told rather than substance and truth. Oil, chemical, and tobacco companies can lie for decades about their toxic products, their victims left to suffer and die while they line the coffers of greedy and unscrupulous “politicians.” One lobbyist has more political influence than any legitimate constituency.

Any notion of truth is sacrificed for profit, dogmatism, exploitation, manipulation, and self-interest. Millions of dollars can be spent on bombs and bullets used to kill innocent people. Public servants who tell the truth – like meteorologists or election officials – receive death threats from right-wing extremists.

Proliferation of the internet could have meant a shared search for the truth and reality but now the most demented of ideas, rumors, innuendos take on a life of their own, fueled by the faux grievances, obsessions, self-interests, fears, and emotional imbalances of pathetic people who are happy to spread the diseases of their minds.

A radical anti-democratic religious movement has made public its sinister plans to take over government and our social institutions to make America a theocracy. Conspiracy theorists concoct hidden conspiracies in their alternate realities while such plans as this (and Project 2025) are openly trying to take over our lives, control media, and establish an American religion. Similarly, large swaths of Christianity have been hijacked for personal gain and political power with identity politics used to push for oppression and self-interest rather than liberation. Most of modern religion in our American world has been freed from any connection to the spirituality that gave it birth. (My last book was about this, called Shadows in the Light of God).

For all its chest beating, pomp and circumstance, America is behind other developed nations in so many ways that have meaning to everyday people. Healthcare is a privilege in America, and it is being made increasingly difficult to vote by people who are afraid of losing elections (again).

Clouds of the Dark Ages are being spewed out of places of religious and political corruption to make it easier to exploit people and land where everything becomes a resource and commodity for someone else’s profit. America has developed so many fault lines. Some seem new but that’s because they are only now becoming visible. Some are being manufactured to serve exploitation. Some justify passivity in the face of evil, claiming that it’s their god’s hand in everything or it’s the “End Times.”

My usual lightheartedness has been burdened by all these shadows. It’s hard to bear the heartbreak. It makes it hard to sing, to write, to create art. Fortunately, I’m surrounded by love to and from the people around me. I have hope for the next generations as well as sorrow for the world we are leaving them, and anger at the challenges they face because of self-serving politicians, corporations, and robber barons.

All of this darkness is what makes a scene from Lord of the Rings so poignant. When Frodo seems to be giving up, Samwise eloquently reminds him that there’s still beauty in the world and that it’s worth fighting for. That scene itself is some of the beauty of this world. Knowing something about large astrological cycles helps. But perhaps beauty is the best remedy for Weltschmerz – recognizing it, finding it, and creating it.