Threats.

Editor,

In classical psychoanalytic theory voices and other projections provide a way for inner conflicts to be represented in a form that allows a subject to interact with them in a more or less concrete manner, sort of like writing down a column of numbers to add them up rather than to try to add them in your head.

Voices are a mechanism with which a human mind can give coherent form to otherwise fleeting images, thoughts, feelings, and ideas.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the form and content of representations like this reflect and indeed are cobbled together from dominant, ubiquitous elements of the cultural milieu in which a subject finds himself.

Americans think in violent terms: killing, shooting, beating, bombing when confronted by conflict. Believe it or not, many other cultures address conflict not with aggression but with the assumption that an offending party will listen to the aggrieved and work together for an amicable solution.

American capitalism is relentlessly hierarchic. The powerful do not share power and feel no discomfort dealing brutally with individuals with less power.

From demonizing unions to backing coups to lying about science to funding warlords to propping up dictators to bombing peasants, to the glorification of war to mongering fear of communists, subversives, people of color, immigrants and terrorists, there is a constant drumbeat of threats and violence as the solution to threats in the USA.

Re: "The Violence in Our Heads" (9/20/2013)