The other morning I had a mind-blowing revelation – this breaking news that has people freaking out – it’s all bullshit. There’s a bigger problem facing us and we don’t even see it.
The insight came to me while I was headed for work southbound on the 101 freeway, taking a break from the headlines and listening to George Clinton’s breakout anthem Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow. For a brief second I saw everything so clearly. I knew exactly what I needed to do, and what all of humankind must do to save ourselves.
Then I was cut off by a baby-blue Prius and my thought-bubble popped. I lost everything. All that insight gone in a flash. Just the sense that the problem is not the problem andthere’s something bigger out there that we need to be paying attention to.
Let’s Have a Collective Panic Attack
If you can handle a little P-Funk in your music diet give Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow a spin. It starts slow, builds to a funky, inspirational groove until about two thirds of the way through when the spoken word lyrics take a dark and terrifying downhill slide into bad acid trip. Clinton and the other vocalists call out helplessly “I can’t feel things…I can’t hear myself…I don’t know how to feel…I’m so confused…I don’t understand.”
I don’t have any experience with LSD (sorry to disappoint you kids) but I do have some knowledge of garden variety panic attacks. George Clinton’s collective freak-out feels awfully familiar. It feels like a group panic attack. And it feels a lot like the collective hyperventilating taking place 24/7 on cable news.
Trump and the Media and the Monster from the Id
We are in a weird place in history, where the second most powerful person in the world has a laser-like focus on one thing and one thing alone – drawing attention to himself. We also have a cable news and social media system that is built to amplify messages using viral phenomenon.
Trump and the media are locked together in an ever escalating positive feedback loop. Let’s add Democrats, leftists, progressives and disgruntled Republicans to the mix – anybody who considers themselves part of The Resistance. (Think of Wile E. Coyote trying to stop a giant snowball rolling down hill…he gets flattened, only to become part of the snowball and part of the problem.)
Together Trump and the media have created a kind of energy being much like the Monster from the Id, the terrifying enemy spawned from the subconscious of Dr. Morbius in the movie Forbidden Planet. The harder you try and fight this energy being the more powerful it grows. You can’t kill it because it is us.
Breaking Free from the Id Monster
Positive feedback loops tend to end badly. The patient dies. The fissile material melts through the reactor’s containment barrier. The person who trips at the top of the stairs keeps falling until reaching the bottom. The feedback doesn’t stop until the system runs out of energy.
But in the case of audio feedback – the kind George Clinton uses in “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow” – you can break the loop by simply moving the input away from the output. Get the microphone away from the speaker.
In terms of the Trump/Media Monster from the Id this is going to mean that we’re going to have to stop feeding the energy being our attention. We’re going to have to direct our energy toward something fresh and new and hopeful.
Maybe in this way we can free our minds and the rest will follow.
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