Rainy February Day

Downtown Eastside. Methadone Clinic. I'm having a break at the Gastown Diner. 50 patients yesterday afternoon. 2 doctors away. I was alone. Glad to have another person today. Worked late. Had great birthday dinner with staff and former staff. Everyone wishing me happy birthday because Gilbert's Feb. 22 birthday came up and mine is this weekend. Never realized that we were so close in birthdays. The girls all love Gilbert. He's an awesome little dog. Restaurant didn't treat him with the respect he deserved. He stayed in the car but is now enjoying all the treats he received.
I had an allergic reaction to something, maybe a bite, maybe stress. It happens rarely. I carry reactine about just in case. Hives. Now sluggish with disturbed sleep.
Hard enough working well. Yet I know so many people working sick or injured. My patients who resurrect and return to work always amaze me. It's so easy to 'give up'.
I love Seligman's work with Authentic Happiness. He'd seen the majority of dogs put under stress eventually didn't try to escape and assumed the fetal position whenever stressed but a small few were 'resillient'. It's like the personal research of Victor Frankl, the amazing Jewish Psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz and described his experience in Man's Search for Meaning. Freud felt that people would devolve into their animal selves subjected to sufficient stress. Frankly saw the greatest of humanity in the worst of depravity. My patients who were veterans and survived concentration camps described the same.
Even a doctor who was in Leavenworth described the moments of kindness and caring of one prisoner for another. Psychopaths are few. They're thought to lack that part of the brain that gives us conscience and the capacity for empathy. Most of the criminals are 'sociopaths' . They 've not developped beyond the adolescent boy and girl gang affiliation or may have regressed to that.
Dr. Carl Jung described Freud as being afraid of the unconscious and extremely uncomfortable with anything spiritual or not clearly 'material'. He describes episodes of this anxiety of Freud's in his autobiography.
Milton Erickson, father of American Psychiatry, and Hypnosis, described 'Freud's view of the 'id' " as fear based. He felt Freud overlooked all the automatic and positive functions of the 'unconscious' . Freud's "Id' was a 'lower power' and Freud celebrated the executive functioning of the rational man. After the wars of the age of rationalism with the immense destruction of human life there was a reconsideration of the limits of reason. This may explain the willingness of men like Erickson to question the 'master'.
The greatest intellectual experiment of the rational mind was 'communism' which resulted in more millions killed that fascists or religious wars.
I'm reading Charles Taylor's , The Secular Age.
Aim gave me a political science book last night describing "post america'.
The American empire has been call "Pax Americanus". The thought is that China is going to be the competitive world power. I don't think so. There is a tendency to look at America in 'isolation' without realizing that the American Empire was just the culmination and consolidation of a number of 'Empires' starting with the Greek Empire. That was followed by Rome, then France, Spain, England, Spain, Russia and now American.
The 'empires' successes have been by the inclusion of the 'stranger' and cosolidation of 'new inclusive' entity'.

People like to look at America without consideration of NATO or the United Nations ,

There is no 'east/west" division as such. India and Japan, clearly Asian are part of what might be better described as "The Democratic Empire". Communist rheroric likes to divide the world in the paranoid 'good and evil' groupings 'beurgeois and proletariat'. There's an interesting alliance developing between Moslem extremist religious cultism and Communist extremist China. This ideological chimera is no different than the Russia Germany romance during WWII. THe more religiously fanatic a people the more they are in line with fanatic aetheists. "Pax American" then or the "Democratic EMpire" despite the CIA and Homeland Security becomes inded a 'Middle class empire' that appeals the world over to this group that Marx denied. Pax Americanis is the 'moderate' alternative to the extremism that always comes as a Trojan Horse. When the Communists "liberated' Eastern Germany they reduced it to a slave whereas the Moderate Democratic liberation of Western Germany lead to it becoming a competitive powerhouse equivalent to Italy and Japan, a contender really to it's 'parent' the democratic moderation of post WWII idealism.
All over the world tyrants are turning their guns on their people having filled their jails with 'dissidents'. America's jails are filled with drug addicts. In the east they are shot but 'dissidents' are shot or jailed. The freedoms of the Moderate Middle Democratic Empires are beyond anything known or tolerated in Communist or extreme Muslim countries.

Oh well, all this is above my pay grade and not part of my special interest. I'm just reminded how as a young man I was so 'swayed' by 'reason' and 'ideas' without realizing that the limits of 'rationalism' had been demonstrated in the War to end all war and The genocides of Communist countries on any one who didn't share their fanaticism.

Now 'democratic socialism' isn't Communism. Canada is a democratic socialist country to a large extent with a tendency to slip into communism or capitalism since the centre rarely holds. European nations are commonly democratic socialism. It's a very different animal from Communism.

Personally I prefer God so I lack the nihilism of believing that aetheism will prevail in the future. My personal bet is on a spiritual democratic socialist capitalist society.
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