In edition 7.6 of this newsletter I wrote a short essay which probed the oppositional nature of ideologies. I made quite a number of points, the main ones being: that all ideologies are defined in opposition to some threat to their existence; that they are at their most powerful and motivated when fighting against that threat; and that in the absence of that threat they seek out other rivals which can take the place of the vanquished opposition. In this newsletter I will make similar arguments concerning consciousness and how people behave in much the same way as ideologies. But first there are a few things about ideologies that I would like to comment on as they relate to the post-election period in the U.S. Note that I wrote about ideologies before the last election.

In George W. Bush's second inaugural address it almost seemed as if his speech writer was an avid reader of my newsletter, using my theories to construct a speech which would motivate all Americans to destroy our adversary, tyranny, in the name of our god, Freedom. Everything that I wrote about was in evidence in the address: the warnings of complacency, the morphing of the dictatorships of old into current world powers, and the depiction of the entire world as a desperate struggle between good and evil. It remains to be seen just how much those ideals are put into actions but the "Freedom Crusade" is certainly on the march.

In BB7.6 I wrote, "In their quest to destroy their adversaries, ideologies can turn inwards upon themselves, conducting a campaign of ideological purification. This often becomes necessary when a substantial number of followers cannot make the connection between the current adversary and the original adversary of the ideology." By the time of the inaugural address this had already happened to a great degree in the one area that President Bush had the most control over, his cabinet. Out went the last of the moderates and in went the extremists and yes-men, or rather yes-persons. Furthermore, in the preceding months there had been an ideological purge at the CIA with a number of senior officials being forced into retirement. Added to that was an expansion of an intelligence gathering group headed by the pentagon which has no congressional oversight and is completely controlled by the executive branch. Even though it is this sort of consolidation of power that the U.S. was created to oppose, as long as the true believers in charge see a difference between themselves and their enemies they will continue to seize power, in ways much like their foes, to use against their enemies, foreign and domestic.

I'd be very worried about this situation if it weren't for the fact that control of the U.S. economy has been placed squarely in the hands of foreigners, some of whom are run by the very governments that the U.S. opposes. With a massive debt and a constant need for more loans, the U.S. government and its citizens can ill afford to push their drive for "A New American Century" too far. Foreign investors can pull the plug at any time. The only trouble is that if the U.S. economy falls, everyone's economy falls, and so foreign lenders see pulling the rug out from under America as a tool of last resort. Nonetheless, I feel that time is getting close.

Now, turning towards the oppositional nature of consciousness. In the Fireaxe theory I made the following contentions regarding consciousness: that consciousness is created by instilling within a person a permanent sense of inadequacy, in essence a state of constant fear; and that the deeper the sense of inadequacy, the stronger the person is motivated, generally to serve their ideology. It is here where we can see the reason why both ideology and consciousness share an oppositional nature: an ideology is much more unified if it, and its members, all stand together in opposition to a similar foe. It benefits an ideology to force its oppositional nature on individuals. Thus, within every ideology there are a great number of lessons that are taught to its members about the dangers of its adversary with the intent of crafting the consciousness of its members in such a way that they fear and oppose it. This unity of vigilance solidifies the structure of the ideology as newly made conscious members conform to the ideological system.

I view consciousness as being a state of hyper-vigilance necessary for survival within a modern society. I've discussed my theory on consciousness elsewhere and so I will only go over it briefly here. The demands of the modern world require each person to have an internal model of the world which includes a model of himself or herself which they can use to perform long term planning. Long term planning is critical in today's world, since without it you must always react to things as they occur, which, in our modern society, is often far too late. You need to be able to plan for the future and visualize yourself testing out various options to be able to make a good choice. Once you have such an internal model, you can see yourself in your mind's eye, know that you exist, and thus are conscious.

There are many dangers within our society despite its calm appearance and overly-publicized sensational crimes. Most of these dangers come in the form of victimization and exploitation with a great many of them being perfectly legal. As a child you must conform to avoid humiliation at the hands of your peers and work hard to live up to the expectations of your parents and teachers. As an adult you face those same pressures and more, including living up to the expectations of your boss and spouse, providing for your family, and fending off the constant assault on your wealth from all directions. Failing in any one of these areas can result in anything from mild discomfort to a major personal catastrophe, so we try hard to succeed. Successful defense requires consciousness so that we can think through all the problems that we face and avoid falling for the tricks and traps of clever con artists. But consciousness is more than something which forms when dangers are imminent and then goes away when they are distant. Consciousness is a permanent state, and that implies a continuous source of danger. I think that consciousness is made permanent by repeatedly exposing someone to sometimes traumatic failures until the fear of failure has been made indelible in the mind of the individual. This can come about as a series of lesser traumatic events, a single very traumatic event, or some combination of the two. It matters not how it comes about, since the important part is that the individual will always feel the fear of failure and thus will always work towards preventing it.

We don't set out to traumatize our children and peers, in fact we usually set out to do the opposite since we love and respect them, but both we and our society have expectations for our children that they need to live up to or else they will suffer both in the present and in the future. So in order to help them to meet those expectations, we are forced to motivate them to achieve. We try to use the "carrot only" approach, but that can only get us so far. Punishment is required to prevent our children from doing things that we don't want them to do and also to prevent them from becoming spoiled, lethargic, or content. So when they fall short, and they inevitably do, the hammer comes down. Punishment isn't necessarily a physical beating. In fact, that is not the most effective form of punishment. Far more powerful, and potentially traumatic or damaging as well, is some sort of deprivation, such as taking away a beloved possession, social isolation, or withholding affection from the child. We don't want to do these things, but we do them because we they work: motivation is increased and expectations are often reached where the "carrot only" approach had failed. But there are dangers. It isn't easy to get exactly the results we want, usually because we are not in a rational state when we are applying punishment, and severe trauma leading to mental disorders can sometimes be the result.

This may sound like I am contending that consciousness is some form of insanity. I wouldn't go so far as to say that, but due to the similarities between consciousness and dissociation disorders it seems that consciousness is in essence a mild form of dissociation with similar causes and mechanisms. Dissociation is a form of mental paralysis, temporarily disconnecting mind from body, which stops the person from moving or acting in any way. It is the "freeze" part of the instinctive fight, flight, or freeze reaction to dangers and served our ancestors and predecessors well during encounters with predators who located their prey primarily through detecting motion. I think that in conscious people, this dissociation mechanism enables us to stop and think whenever we encounter dangers, serving as a layer between the outside world and our thoughts, and as a layer between our thoughts and our actions. Since most of the dangers we face are not immediate, we can afford the luxury of waiting and thinking through our options. And since many of the dangers we face are complicated, we need to prevent ourselves from acting reflexively or impulsively lest we do the wrong thing. Also, with practice, I think we are able to relax the total paralysis part of the dissociation mechanism so that we can think and act at the same time. We can also learn to be thinking about one thing while we are doing another, allowing us to deal with dangers full time while going about our daily lives. That is pretty much the definition of dissociation, a sharp division between mind and body, but not so sharp as to inhibit all action. Thus, in my view, as conscious organisms we are constantly in fear, to a degree, and constantly trying to work our way out of that fear. I think that the conscious state is one of mild, controlled panic.

The goal of child rearing is to place the child into this state of controlled panic by applying punishment until the state becomes permanent. Now, it would seem that this type of child rearing would result in the child having an adversarial relationship with the parent since the parent is the one who applies the punishment. Of course, this is not desirable since the member of an ideology shouldn't come to view a surrogate of that ideology as their adversary. So instead, the force which is responsible for a child's failure in meeting social expectations is said to be something other than the punishing agent. In most cases the child itself is blamed, or at least the part of the child associated with the ideology's adversary.

In Christian mythology, bad behavior is either blamed on the devil, or stems from the evil within us all as a result of original sin. This ties bad behavior to the abstract adversary of the ideology and results in the process of socialization being portrayed as a battle between good and evil for the child's soul. In more secular ideologies, bad behavior is seen as stemming from the child's animal instincts which must be purged so that one can become civilized. Note here that seeing a part of one's self as being animalistic or evil and trying to distance yourself from it contributes to the dissociative feature of consciousness: the child tries to dissociate his mind from his body. But regardless of ideology, during child rearing the adversary of the ideology is always connected with the force which causes the constant state of fear in the individual. Furthermore, it is that constant state of fear which drives consciousness, giving it a reason for being. A child is made constantly afraid of something and is constantly trying to figure out a way to make the fear go away. But the child cannot, as the fear is a permanent feature, and thus so is conscious. The adversarial relationship lasts a lifetime.

But it is not always the case that a child accepts the ideology's adversary as his or her own. In some cases the child will see his punishment as unjust and see authority figures as adversaries. This form of anti-authoritarianism can also be bent to the will of the ideology if the person can be made to see that the authority figures he or she has contempt for are those of rival ideologies or are corrupt members of the current ideology. I think that the majority of people have more than one adversarial prototype inside them, having experienced different forms of at least minor trauma at the hands of many, and that people have a mixture of both types of adversarial relationships: the weaker adversary which needs to be controlled or purged, and the stronger adversary which needs to be overthrown. I also think that the mixture isn't always balanced with people tending one way or another. Putting terms to these two archetypes I could call one conformist and authoritarian and the other rebellious and anti-authoritarian, but in real life the labels will be blurred as people share both forms and express them in different situations.

In the essay I wrote on the adversarial nature of ideologies I made a rather disturbing contention that in the absence of a rival ideology which serves as an adversary, an ideology will either find a new adversary or turn inward on itself, indulging in either purification or ideological mutation. I think that the same premise is true for consciousness. Although the state of fear that drives consciousness is permanent, it can grow stronger or weaker depending on external forces which are perceived as threats. Since this force directly drives our consciousness, our drive and energy grow stronger as our fears become greater. Fear can be very motivating, and can propel us to great heights, allowing us to reach our true potential, and thus it is in our best interests not to live in peace, but in a manageable state of fear. And so, like ideologies, we make war on our adversaries and seek out new adversaries to replace those that we have either vanquished or are no longer a part of our lives. And sometimes we find surrogate adversaries to take the place of adversaries who we cannot oppose in real life. The reason is simple: the struggle makes us strong. It makes us who we are.

This quest to defeat adversaries can take a socially positive form, such as taking on great challenges, replacing them with greater challenges after we've succeeded and the luster wears off our past glories. But the quest can also take on a socially negative form, such as individuals seeking to re-live their past traumas in search of revenge and finding new adversaries which will play the role of their old ones. Since past traumas deal with adversarial relationships with authority figures, loved ones, and peers, re-living these events often takes the forms of crime and disobedient behavior, deliberately causing harm to a spouse or loved one, searching for or simply provoking fights with others, or engaging in the same traumatic behaviors experienced earlier in life, either from the submissive side or the dominant side. The abused becoming the abuser is a common example of reliving traumatic experiences from the past. Furthermore, since the adversary can never be truly beaten (it is permanent in the mind) the struggle is often played out over and over, becoming pathological, as if a person was addicted to the experience.

We can see this more easily in extreme cases, but the mechanism of re-living past traumas applies to milder traumas as well. How many of us know of others who always seem to get themselves into the same situations or conflicts over and over? And how many of us seem to find ourselves re-living past traumas or acting as those we once despised? Doesn't it sometimes seem like we are actively trying to bring these things on ourselves? We are. Although these are sometimes dangerous or self-destructive behaviors, we do them because they reinforce our identity and make us feel conscious and alive. We are at our best when we are fighting tooth and nail against our adversary although our "best" may be a shocking display of cruelty or pathological behavior. We do these things because our alternative is to turn inward on ourselves, engaging in self-hatred and a desire to change or purify ourselves. But either way we are driven by a desire to find and defeat new adversaries be they others or ourselves.

The concept of adversaries in the mind is nothing new. They're also called "inner demons", "voices in our heads", "monkeys on our backs", or simply "issues". We all have them, to one degree or another, but only see them as a problem when they cause very anti-social or self-destructive behaviors. The field of psychotherapy is focused around ridding people of their worst adversaries or at least allowing people to control them. Since the Fireaxe theory states that since adversaries are permanent, trying to rid yourself of them is an exercise in futility. However, it is possible to change the form of your adversary by throwing off the old perceived causes of your worst fears and adopting new ones. This is what religion has done for centuries. Conversion is the process of freeing people from past adversarial relationships while remaking those adversaries to be those of the religion. Though religious converts may claim to be free, they've really only traded in their old inner demons for new ones. But conversion techniques are hardly restricted to religion, and you can see examples of ideologies, advertisers, cults, and other institutions using fear to sell their message. And while sometimes they seem to be selling only beautiful dreams, beware of the adversary coming in through the back door.

Consciousness and the permanent state of fear have a symbiotic relationship. We seek out new adversaries to make us stronger, and we need to defeat our adversaries to make the pain and fear go away, at least temporarily. In essence we are trapped in a continuous cycle of creating and destroying rivals, much like how police shows require their writers to produce an endless succession of criminals to be put behind bars. Indeed, those shows, and movies, that we love to watch are like surrogate experiences for us. We meet an adversary, he is built up into a fearsome force, and then he is brought down to earth. We feel uncomfortable when the fear grows and relieved when it goes away, at least for a little while. Sports contests act in a similar way, as do soap operas, reality television, and especially computer games. We become addicted to these things, and our society's tremendous desire for such surrogate experiences is strong support for an adversarial relationship lying at the core of our being.

If there is nothing that we can do about changing our mental state, the question becomes how can we focus people towards more socially positive behaviors rather than pathological ones. I think that the key lies in a contention I made about ideological struggle: that aggressive ideologies must continue to grow or face internal strife as their aggressive members will feed on each other to satisfy their needs. Contentment is a behavior that is universally viewed as bad by all modern societies and thus we are unable to rest on our past achievements. Growth is all important, and only in a growing society it is possible for each person to reach a greater height without taking away from someone else. Without that growth there will be internal conflict and pathological behaviors of every kind. So we are compelled to grow, sometimes at great cost. The trouble is that we live in a world which is both rapidly expanding its population and rapidly exhausting its resources. We cannot grow at this rate for long, and thus the future does not look at all peaceful.