Politics, Meditation and Mental Illness

Politics is defined as the art or science of influencing government policy. I’ve always been surprised by the term ‘science’ in relationship to politics but political science is defined as ‘the social science discipline that deals with the systems of government and the analysis of political activity and behaviour. ‘  A scientific study did show that voting was influenced by sunny versus rainy days. That’s good science.
 All aspects of psychology, marketing and logic and rhetoric go into the ‘power game’ of ‘politics’.  Indeed war was considered the last act of diplomacy.  So politics might include nuking the enemy when all else fails.  It’s not a particularly ‘ethical’ or ‘moral’ field if one views history.  Politics has been part of the social behaviour of cannibals and the Amish.  Nazis and Tibetans have politics.
I’d hazard to say that Meditation, the reflection on God or oneness or breath, alone, by oneself, is perhaps the exact opposite of politics.
Monasteries have major political disputes once two monks get together in a cell.  Lovers are fine until the government of bed enters the equation as in ‘whose going to make the bed.'
I’ve had moments of mental illness when I’ve become involved in politics personally. I vote. I contribute money to political parties.  But rarely have I actually got involved in ‘governance.’  I’ve been a ship’s captain and keeping a crew from mutinying when they are frightened has taken all my moral reserve.  Marriage has had me thinking ‘all’s fair in love and war’.
To this end I appreciate the irony and difficulty involved in herding cats and humans.
Lovely studies like the “experiments’  show that most people will devolve quickly to murderous behaviour despite all their pollyanna high minded spiels of peace and good will.
All around the world there are clear and evident examples of the masses of people and large groups acting poorly given half  a chance.  What’s actually miraculously  quite abnormal is to see people acting well.  Those who think it is our ‘nature’ to be love children are to my mind, the most mentally ill, delusional, and likeliest to project their murderous rage on their neighbour.  (They’re commonly attracted to the left wing which generally lacks standards so celebrates inclusivity and later gets into difficulty justifying pedophiles in their midst).
Our closest animal neighbour is the chimpanzee and ask the peaceful rhesus monkey how it likes living beside these fellows when they have a hankering for monkey brain. Even the peace and love bonobos who share equal DNA with chimps and man aren't loathe to kill other primates in a political way.  So, for the mentally ill among us, killing is a ‘natural’ human trait.
However in the war research of “On Killing”,  by Lt Col Dave Grossman, he has noted that collections of humans range from very good killers to not very good killers.  Robert Hare the forensic psychologist has specifically looked at psychopaths and sociopaths.  My favourite Sgte Major described his own killing propensity as “I don’t like killing other humans but there are wolves and I’m like a sheep dog.  The wolves want to kill the sheep and I want to protect the sheep. Killing wolves follows from that."
We are living in a time when the sheep baaas and blatting have loud speakers called media and internet.  The mentally ill deny their capacity for killing but are noted to enjoy the benefits of having killers among them.  Presidents and Prime Ministers who are associated with  the most violent of all, the ruling elites, (the billionaires, the tyrants, the democratic leaders, UN leaders, etc) all would disarm their populations while reserving the right to be surrounded by gun toting secret service and secret armies.  Rarely are these men and women armed themselves so that they can maintain the lie.  It’s always best that others don’t know your riches. Weapons have always been like gold.  Bankers love to have lots of folk with major weapons protecting them.
So I did my time when younger, serving as secretary, vice presidents, and presidents and leaders in various organization.  All my life I’ve been a member of churches and community organizations ‘volunteering’, but not particularly enjoying it.
The nature of my work is people in conflict.  I’ve trained extensively in the politics of groups and family and individuals psychopathology.  I’ve watched corruption permeate unions and administrations.  I’ve had my life threatened and my family threatened when I’ve been effective in curtailing abuse.
Most activists are irrelevant.  They are predominantly distractions.  When the rubber hits the road, money is defended by weapons.  Those who threaten wealth will be threatened. I tell political folk if you aren’t being ridiculed, threatened and demonized and called ‘mentally ill’ then most likely you are helping and enabling the very people you claim to be against.
The thing that all political scientists will tell you is that politics is complex.  Science is ‘multi factorial’.  I loved to play chess. It was the fundamental game to teach leaders politics and war. There are moves within moves.
I got distracted by politics this fall.  Normally I’m trying to keep my head down.  Canada is a terrifying country when you question authority.  It may be the least terrifying country to question authority in or it may be the most deceitful. I belonged to a group called the “psychiatrists against the political abuse of psychiatry’.  When one questions the killer elite (that 1-2% of society that hold power by force) one is imprisoned in a jail or an asylum.  In Canada as opposed to China, Russia, Saudi Arabia or Argentina, political dissidents are rarely killed. They are usually ‘discredited’, and lastly put in jail or asylum. I was for a time a member of Physicans Against Nuclear War, Human Rights Association and the Canadian Civil Liberties.  I have been frankly humbled and terrified by state power and frankly quite ashamed of my own cowardice and how little I tolerate pain and how easily truth can be discarded by the authorities who actually will tell you “we make the truth’.
Since my own “close encounter’ I have worked with torture victims and refugees from countries where the authorities are more heavy handed than here. I know most Canadians don’t know what they’re talking about. I have friends who ‘whisper’ still despite being in Canada for 20 years.  It’s something I’ve yet to learn. That’s what’s so different about Canada.  
So I’ve really avoided ‘politics’.  Friends who knew me for causing student rebellions and overturning university magazines with acid tongued satire and political writing haven’t recognized me in recent years. I’m a coward. That’s the difference. I’m no longer innocent and I certainly don’t want to be a fool. There’s no ‘one bad man’.  Modern times are a cowboy show. There’s not ‘good guys and bad guys’.  It’s all a bit grey. The war of words is covered by the ‘fog of war’ just like the real war zone is.  The evil is a ‘nest of men and women’ who are paranoids.
I stopped believing in the left or the right having any true distinction because the ‘elite’ will use whichever political system gives it the most control.  I’ve actually begun to think they’re ready to shaft religion too for the ultimate power of ‘one world order’.
My main dialogue is with God.  While I know God works through people and all of that I personally believe my focus needs to be on the transcendent. I belong to an organization that discourages even ‘righteous anger’ . But having decided a law degree would only help me with increased materialistic wealth, as the courts today are solely about money, and they’ve become a legal theocracy above all else, I thought I’d study for a master of divinity.  I had done a ll the ecumenical studies in Christianity and extensive comparative religious studies and world religion studies.  I was arguing more with God and yet having faith in God’s love.  I worried about arguing with my parents because they’d just send me to my room. When I was married my wife would always win arguments with bedroom violence, the siege techniques of the headaches. It became obvious that no matter how ‘right’ I was others were more prone to covert aggression and less interested in the truth.
I loved books, like Brothers Karamazov, King Lear, the Gospel, The Torah, the Bhagat va Gita, the Koran, Thus Sayest Zarusthra, Franny and Zoe, Yogananda, Of Human Bondage, William James, Das Kapita,  For years I’d study chemistry in the day and read the great tombs of literature in the evening. My wife at the time was a party girl and found my interest in book stores and intellectuals rather offensive.  She liked light hearted chatter with agreeing girlfriends and family and avoided dialogue having come I’d later learn from a violent home where alcohol and fists ruled.
I have known always that homicide or suicide don’t win an ‘argument’.  The person who does either ‘loses the debate’, simply because I don’t believe in death.  I also believe if I wanted to be a killer I could be a better killer than anyone I’ve met. Which is why I became a doctor because it’s much harder to revive someone than it is to destroy them. My colleagues are still working on a cure for radiation poisoning.  I’ve become adept at healing PTSD and really did a lot for people with head injury when no one else found these groups ‘sexy’ or ‘lucrative’.  I’m less interested now that i know more colleagues who are superior clinicians in Neuropsychiatry and some of the great military psychiatrists are finally getting their due for their research in PTSD.  There’s an irony that head injury research had to wait funding not for all the soldiers but for the hockey players and football players to appear to have concerns.
But personally my argument is with God.
My brother developed cancer this spring. He’s a young man. I was with my mom and dad when they were growing old and dying.  My brother’s cancer is to my mind a product of the stress he’s faced being a good man in this country of Canada. He’s the best man I know.  He was my big brother and protected me from bullies. We went to boy scouts together.  We canoed. We hiked, We hunted.  My dad and he and I and a dog were a ‘unit’ in the woods together. Fishing mom would come along in the boat but hunting it was just us three with my brother watching over me. Later he’d join the Billy Graham Movement, a really high minded man who was a leading academic and great sports man.  He’s still playing hockey. He has been married all his life it seems to a beautiful brilliant woman and the  two have had the most incredible brilliant sons all really smart fine people, engineer, geologist, psychologist. They’re hilarious and help out and work together.  They’re a Canadian style Salvador Dali Rockwell Family painting in a Group of Seven backdrop. .
I believe my brother’s cancer is a product of the stress its’ become for good people to be good and do good work in Canada today.”  It wears one down.
I’m in Vancouver where there’s a criminal every  block. The principle economy was drug dealing. There’s gangs and killings and it’s all packaged for tourists like some pretty place where everyone is ‘pretty’.  Yet the principal housing market has been dominated by offshore money which we hear by and by has come from factories run by killing workers or by communist gang theft or simple off shore graft.
My brother and I were in boy scouts.  I loved the movie “The Last Boy Scout”.
As a family we recently watched Star Wars together.  Notice these themes that appeal to the ‘underdogs’.
Politically I got pissed off after my brother got cancer.  I have watched health care funding in Canada plummet and our hospitals become dominated by whack jobs.  We have 20 times the administration of Germany with its equivalent if not superior medical care.  Every doctor including myself lives in fear of political interference.  We are told by lawyers to avoid drawing attention to ourselves. We are literally told to do the least for patients. Our political apparatchiks tell us the patient is the ‘customer’.  I am punished for doing more never for doing less.
So then some wanker calls me a “Climate Change Denier”.  This moron calls me ‘psychotic’ because that’s what ‘denial’ is. He says I’m not a scientist because I’m tired of pseudoscientists from the Silent Spring book, to the Ozone layer, then Methane Layer, Global Freezing, to Global Warming, to now Climate Change Fraud demanding money from real science for this attempt at making the UN a one world order and Agenda 21 the halcyon call for the killer elite of tyrant countries at the UN where freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of science are literally outlawed.  In all these racist sexist  UN countries there are scientists like Gallileo rotting in jails.  The Saudis and the Thais arrest anyone who questions the divinity of the king.  The Saudis behead them.
Now our government has given a few billion dollars to the UN wankers and the Climate Change Cult has spent a trillion and a half on bogus ‘save the planet’ bs, meanwhile I’ve watched medicine cure AIDS, erase epidemics, counter schizophrenia. It’s been a miracle after miracle working in the world of real science. We’ve put people on the moon and are sending people to Mars soon. We have lazer surgery and have extended life expectancy and cured countless baby deforming disease in the womb. We, the real scientists, are daily faced with government restrictions because the politicos want committee meeting after committee meeting to discus their coffee breaks.  All the while I guess I see my brother having a curable disease, a mere cancer and I’m wanting all that bogus waste of money in the Climate Change Cult budget going where it needs to go, the cure of cancer.
So I went ballistic when Justin Trudeau won and took a 380 friend multi million victory party to Paris and  gave billions of dollars to the UN tyrants and killers for their bogus pseudoscience scam Climate Change.
Meanwhile I work each day with heroin and cocaine addicts whose pushers are driving ferrari’s and the police are unable to catch them because of the corruption in our legal system that allows drug dealers and their rich political friends to get around the law. Meanwhile I live in fear like every other Canadian that I will make any mistake because I know that the police will have a swat team on me and the Revenue Canada will freeze my accounts and send in a mob of consulting accountants if I make even the tiniest mistake,Meanwhile criminals and drug dealers and lying climate change cultists and fat cats galore get away with rank evil.
I don’t do well with politics any more. I have a flashing ‘suicide/homicide sign in my head and begin thinking of gassing myself and setting myself on fire because the sheer stupidity and corruption of the system sickens me.  Meanwhile I share on face books because I keep thinking I can wake up cabbages.
But we’re all really happy slaves.  Well fed.
One is mentally ill to question authority in Canada. One is perhaps even more mentally ill if one doesn’t at some time question God. Atheists might do well to question themselves.
Now the Muslim Migrants en mass are coming and I’m flash backing to the sheer terror I lived in during the IRA bombings in London and I know Justin Trudeau doesn’t care.  The elite are protected. They live here in West Vancouver. They don’t live in Kitsilano or Richmond, or even Shaughnassey. They certainly don’t live in the Downtown Eastside.
They have lear jets and howitzers and helicopters and private armies and if they get cancer they go to Swiss Clinics and Mayo and thankfully there is ‘trickle down science’ and we learn from the cures that they get for their cancer.
My brother is getting great care and the cutting edge in cancer treatment.  My parents had great medical care. Our family has had really good medical care. And I’m just afraid.  My Prime Minister is offering us marijuana and physician assisted suicide. I’m past retirement age but like all north americans we’re being told that we can’t afford to retire. I don’t want to retire. I just thought I’d have this trade and be able to practice this trade called ‘medicine’ wherever I went.It’s like a carpenter but now there’s a baurocratic tollgate for every action i take. there’s a tax on using the outhouse.
So I’m frustrated. I think the government is throwing money away on cronyism and not addressing the real issues. So I got involved in politics. I became a ‘critic’.  I’m spiritually supposed to be celebrating the positive and ignoring the negative.  I just can’t see any positive. It’s my perspective.
I don’t like being a critic. I like to sing Kumbaya and have group hugs and put my head in the sand like an ostrich. I like to meditate. I like to be  a hermit. I’m happiest alone in Canada’s north with a trailer a truck and a rifle and a dog. I occasionally like others for brief periods.
I like helping people, healing, know my chemistry and pharmacology but mostly like to watch ‘relationship therapy’ in action.  As my lawyer friend said, I saw you become a doctor and thought that if you can get through school so could I. Now I watch addicts and alcoholics stop drinking and drugging figuring if a loser like me can get through life without smoking cigarettes or smoking dope or getting drunk or shooting up, maybe they can.  I have far more pleasure and joy than the average person. i’m blessed beyond any desert I have. I’m grateful for the impossible mercy of the universe. I’m in love with life at times. I’m thankful to be human.  I know so much depends on perspective. I see the effects of my patients depression and mania on the same situation.  I know these things.
But I don’t like politics. I don’t like playing the critic even if I know it’s a game. I don’t think I’d like killing the enemy but I’d be a damn good sheep dog.
Right now we’re in a war of words.  We’re losing.  So much we took for granted like ‘freedom of speech’ is gone.  We have massive propaganda and marketing budgets keeping us collectively stupid. There is a conspiracy. It’s call the Elite or the state and you. I knew Reagan was an actor so I didn’t mind if he was a puppet at times. He was a believable puppet. Justin Trudeau is a high school acting student. He’s just not believable.  His insincerity is so transparent. I have to give him credit he’s trying.   I would rather celebrate the good guys but frankly I don’t see any yet on the other side. it’s not that our Prime Minister is so bad but it’s that ‘this is the best we as Canada can produce’, a high school teacher with a winning name and a cupcake body and Justin Bieber smile.  This is all we as Canadians can put forth.
I want a Winston Churchill even knowing I’d probably have been a critic of him or an Ataturk or a Jefferson.
I really must get back to talking with God. I truly believe he’s the one that’s the primary producer , director and writer of life so there must be something I’m not getting and it’s fundamentally in my relationship with God and not anything to do with cancer or Justin Trudeau or Migrant Muslims.
I’m aging and coming to terms with my death and looking back on my life and thinking that all those ‘ideals’ I believe in and fought for, and sacrificed for,  like ‘freedom’ ,are evaporating.  We know, too,  “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” I think of that each day as I see the food lines and shelters and tent cities increasing in Canada.  There’s a great image in Dr. Zhivago when the smart money man looks out on the street at the starving people outside the restaurant.  I like Douglas Adam’s ‘Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ image best.
Maybe I fear I will be a prisoner of death. I’ve known always that homicide or suicide can free me from life. I say ‘homicide’ and mean, I could ‘hop on a plane’ tonight, fly to the front, whichever one, and join someone killing terrorists and no doubt get myself killed. I could walk out today and be a missionary doctor in Africa and die in the weekly persecution of Christians.  I am ‘free’ in this life.
But death. I think I’m afraid of it because I fear there will be no ‘freedom’ there.  So the encroaching totalitarianism in Canada makes me face the fact  that God has given me death around the corner and I’m not ready for it.  I realize I’m in this stream of life and I literally can not swim back against the rising pressure of history, biography and science..  My brother is no longer ‘free’ because he has a cancer, like a parasite, attached to him.  I know he wants with all his life to be free of this rebel within, this disease that goes against everything he believes in.
I’m sorry I’ve been angry with politics and government and all the media nonsense. I’m sorry I’ve argued with friends and strangers on Facebook. My argument is with god.  I know this.  I have faith but still that doesn’t mean I have to go quietly. My meditation these days is more a 'nails on glass' scream.  I’m past the point of ‘om’.  I’m not ready to say ‘amen’ either.