Nowadays we look around us at the well-oiled machinery of our advanced technological age and fondly muse that our society is as stable as bedrock. It is not. It is in fact a mad mishmash of individua
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Nowadays we look around us at the well-oiled machinery of our advanced technological age and fondly muse that our society is as stable as bedrock. It is not.

It is in fact a mad mishmash of individual fears, sacred cows, crazy desires - and a deep underlying sense of insecurity.

The rock-solid state used to be the th century's secular TOTEM, for it was the symbolic appeasement of aporetic oedipal rage in a symbol - to Hegel as his many followers.

Then radical opposition to this centrality arose through Marx, and the modern bifurcation of politics, which has been totalized in postmodernity, first arose.

Why?

Because religion was no longer the foundation of the state.

As Freud says, we neurotics NEED a Totem, but that Totem was being politically dismantled. An Unbearable Lightness of Being was being born. The mad mishmash is our inheritance.

And so we no longer have a secure substitute for our parents' love - our childhood Totem - which our inner Oedipus has cut out of our lives. So we hide the Bugaboo - that’s the sum of our fears, our taboo - safely in the symbol of a Totem: our books, our TV & our Films.

My own Oedipus took up his parricidal arms against the taboo when I was twenty. An overly affective type of kid, I had never really left my feathered parental nest. My inner Oedipus cut those ties, but they never stopped bleeding.

Until I read Judith Viorst's Necessary Losses. The myth of uniformly happy family ties MUST die, a necessary loss. Without wings we can't fly.

But back then I chose the false comfort of a Totem of icy alienation, like so many others. An invalid substitute for rage, because it too kills our SOULS.

And reality gives us wings ONLY if we have a valid Totem to substitute for the Taboo of finding liberation from the myth of the nuclear family. You see, severing himself like that is Oedipus' undoing. As with the alienated.

But it doesn't have to be like that.

Isaiah's suffering Servant was someone I could identify with - and He is THE traditionally valid Totem. The Totem Freud couldn't accept. When we hate, we are killing Him. And so eventually, it is OURSELVES we are killing with our primitive rage.

That happened to me, eventually, believe it or not!

You see, I have managed to kill my own high opinion of myself with that same rage, and recover my inner humanity. As in the great new book Love and Rage, I had to USE my anger as a means toward the end of attaining tranquility. So I did.

At the end of my road my heart is clear of spiderwebs - and happy.

The thunderheads of my rage are dissipating in a new sunrise.

For Freud was wrong.

A true Totem is STILL viable, because it brings peace.

And God is the Totem that leads us Home to Ourselves - WITHOUT illusions.