How’s that thought for you?
Fear, pathological adolescence and white supremacy

So you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts
What’s so amazing about really deep thoughts?
Boy, you best pray that I bleed real soon
How’s that thought for you?
She’s been singing in my head for over a week now, dear Tori Amos. I have loved her work for decades, and Silent All These Years is a classic, of course. But when lyrics pop into my head uninvited, like these did, at an unexpected moment and without having heard the song, it’s usually a message from my subconscious and I know I need to pay attention to the words.
Apart from my admiration for Amos’ skill to evoke an entire plot complete with fully developed characters in a mere four lines, what strikes me most about this sequence is the frustrated maturity of the female protagonist’s voice.
What’s so amazing about really deep thoughts? If you have a heart in your chest and a brain in your skull, why wouldn’t you have deep thoughts?
Why not, indeed? I was never this big-mouthed when I was an adolescent, but I do relate to the feeling.
I’m not passing any kind of judgement, it’s rather a feeling of loneliness. Like some lone ranger crossing a high mountain pass, looking back down with longing to the lights of the village safe below. Those who live there have no clue what it looks like this high up, and they can’t or won’t go the distance, and he knows his true home is not down there.
There are few travellers on that particular path, so yes, it tends to get lonely. Only much later you learn you are not the only one, and there are people to whom you can truly relate, who breathe the high altitude air perhaps not exactly in the same way you do, but who know how to navigate the passes safely and who will embrace you as family.
So no, there is nothing amazing about really deep thoughts, only it takes a particular kind of effort (or should I say a maturing process?) to reach that point, and since so many people feel that this road is not for them (or are discouraged from pursuing it), those who do choose the path are met with — at best — astonishment and — at worst — hostility.

Why am I harping on this string?
Ah, there’s dear old Bill Plotkin again.
One confronting statement this depth psychologist and wilderness guide has made, is that in western civilization as a collective, we have a very hard time maturing past the adolescent stage. Adolescent as in: a tendency to strive for acceptance among our peer group, to worship heroes and conquests, and sustain an insatiable hunger for material comfort, recognition and success, beyond any reasonable limit. I tend to agree with him, frankly.



Like so many people worldwide I was shocked and appalled by what happened at Charlottesville. But as I sat watching the Vice coverage on alt-right leader Chris Cantwell, I felt I saw Bill Plotkin’s assertion illustrated right in front of me.
I’m not one for cliché thinking, those of you who have been reading my blogs know that much. And I know all too well how anger is in fact always a disguise for some other thing, usually very vulnerable, afraid and sad, underneath. But still, somehow I always thought that extreme violent or fascist thinking would wear a face resembling something like Rocky-meets-Darth-Vader: macho, dark, stong, and utterly convinced of the violence it was drenched in.
But the man shown in this documentary is nothing more than a teenager. Not in age, clearly, and I don’t mean to imply for a second that he is innocent or harmless. But stop listening for a moment to the horrible words he says and focus on his non-verbal language: the violent stares, the mouthing-off, the gloating, the avoiding of eye contact when confronted with a truly challenging question, the display of weapons… I have seen my stepsons act exactly like this (except for the guns, thank god!) when they were between thirteen and eighteen years old, and I have seen the same in the hundreds of high school students I met every day during my teaching years. This is not adult but adolescent behaviour. Everything about this man screams: I’m scared, I need to prove and assert myself, and I’m going to be so loud about it it will even quiet my own fear.
His strong facade came down quickly enough when, as a result of the Vice video, he was suddenly facing death threats. There’s video footage showing him weeping and crying he’s innocent. Again: anyone with a teenager running around the house will find this all too familiar.
So okay, maybe a lot of hate is adolescent or even childhood fear in an aggressive disguise. So what?
Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there.
In 2008, Bill Plotkin wrote in Nature and the Human Soul, in a passage discussing the ‘masculine’ (yang) core personalities of certain adolescents, male or female (there’s a discussion about their ‘feminine’ (yin) counterparts as well, but I’m not going to go into it here):
‘Teenage boys and girls with masculine cores must succeed as adolescent heroes. In the course of fashioning an authentic way of social belonging, they must prove themselves by rushing off into the world, slaying dragons and rescuing the oppressed. To fix what is wrong with themselves or their world, they need to perform outwardly heroic deeds. Win or lose, their authenticity or character are forged in the heat of “battle”. In leadership and negotiation, their proclivity is to make statements and stake out positions rather than ask questions.
All this is normal for adolescent boys and girls with masculine cores, but in a soulcentric environment this adolescent heroism runs its course by age fifteen or so. This is as it should be. If a man (or woman) at age thirty or beyond is still proving himself through dragon-murder, he might be a grave danger to himself and others. If he happens to be the leader of a sizeable army or corporation, he can wreak untold damage. If he is the commander of a nuclear superpower, he can destroy the world-as-we-know-it.’
Talk about foresight.
I’m definitely not the first person to write that a belligerent child is throwing a tantrum in the White House as we speak. The very person in control of the American nuclear warheads today is living proof of both Plotkin’s social diagnostic skills and his worst nightmares.
What can we possibly poise against this?
Maturity.
Deep thoughts.

This is a challenge we have to take on as a society, a global society even. It’s about both allowing oppressed groups to own their strenghts and formerly priviliged groups to feel their emotions.
It’s about growing into adults, by owning our fears, learning to discuss them, and taking responsibility for the ancestral luggage we carry within us, realizing it might be clouding our views.
It’s about growing up, and helping others to do so, too.
Plotkin, one last time:
‘Although women have been terribly oppressed for five thousand years or more, and although femininity has been suppressed (especially in males) for as long, the problem has not been masculinity but rather immaturity. The solution is not to make femininity more important than masculinity but to create a soulcentric society in which mature men and women are more prevalent than lifelong adolescents.’
How’s that thought for you?

