It feels to me that nearly everything we consume these days is not only empty calories, meaning none of it adds nutritious sustenance, but in fact is detrimental to physical, psychic, and spiritual health.

But, for the moment, let’s just stick with the empty calorie idea—meaning nearly everything we take in is like eating sawdust.

Think about it. TV, movies, video games, YouTube crap, AI slop, TikTok, Facebook, X, Quarter Pounders, Big Macs, Pepsi, Pizza, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, football, basketball, pickleball, on and on and on and on. Sure, here and there might be an inspiring football game that isn’t just about moving the ball across the field, but about teamwork, camaraderie; maybe you could say the same about a pickleball game, an activity with a close friend, out in the air, the sun, etc. And maybe you find a decent film, about something meaningful and moving. But it isn’t often, my shrew friend, it isn’t often.

There was a time when people entertained themselves with art, not just sensory stimulation. Composers of symphonies, ballets and operas were the superstars of the day. Their work was adored and revered. People found meaning and deep insight from the works of Beethoven, Stravinsky, Monet and Picasso.

The biggest difference in the way people approached such things back then was that they stimulated something more than the body. We’ve all heard the phrase “mind, body, spirit.” Today we are only concerned about feeding the body—bodily sensations. There was a time when people also stimulated the mind and spirit. The body is easily satisfied with sensation. Eating a pizza, or a Big Mac, hits certain sensate points that eating a cauliflower does not. Leave that up to sugar, carbs, and other “stimulating but not healthy” substances. We obviously see the same in drugs and alcohol. Stimulate, stimulate—that is the name of the game.

The body also responds radically to thrills, danger, and physical risks. Although most people will now avoid anything that may cause harm or suffering, they are still attracted to things that may appear to create harm and suffering—like video games, horror and action movies, virtual reality games, and live sporting events.

There is currently very little interest in anything that stimulates the mind or the soul. There is a bit more attention paid to the mind than to spiritual endeavours, but not much more. Both are largely ignored. But what is ignored almost entirely are things that don’t seem to fit in any of these categories. Things that may be labelled superstitious, ritualistic, or just plain odd.

I just recently read about tying ribbons around piano legs in Victorian times. For whatever objective reason this happened, it seems to be an example of a ritualistic action that happened “just because.” The reason I find this important is because this action, and many more similar to it, would stimulate an inner system that lay somewhere between the mind and the heart.

That system doesn’t run on dopamine hits or on arguments. It runs on participation—on doing something that is older than you, slightly unnecessary by modern standards, and aimed at a layer of experience that is neither pure sensation nor pure thought. The piano-leg business, even if the popular story of sexual panic turns out to be mostly satire that got out of hand (that the bare legs of a piano is sexually inappropriate), still points at the habit of treating ordinary objects as if they carried a little more meaning than their function required. You drape the furniture, or you don’t. Either way, the gesture itself is the thing.

Consider a few others that used to occupy the same territory. In parts of Britain and New England, when someone in a household died, a person would go out to the beehives, knock gently, and tell the bees. Sometimes they draped the skeps in a scrap of black. The formula was short and almost domestic: the master is dead, but don’t you leave. Fail to do it, and the bees might swarm, or stop making honey, or simply die. No one needed a peer-reviewed study to justify the walk to the hives. The act acknowledged that the bees were part of the household’s continuity, not just livestock, and that the boundary between the living and the dead was worth a small ceremony. It was neither a thrill nor an analysis. It was an attention paid to something intermediate.

Or take the old shoes found bricked into the walls, chimneys, and eaves of houses from the late medieval period well into the nineteenth century. A single worn shoe—often a child’s—placed where it would never be seen again. The later rationalizations talk about trapping witches or evil spirits that couldn’t reverse once they entered the shoe. Whether anyone still believed that literally by the time the practice was common is almost beside the point. The gesture was the concealment itself: an ordinary object enlisted to hold a threshold. You didn’t do it for the sensory pleasure of the act, and you didn’t do it because a logical proof demanded it. You did it because the house, and the people in it, seemed to require the mark.

Stopping the clocks when someone died belongs in the same family. The hands were halted at the hour of death; the mirrors were covered or turned to the wall. Practical reasons existed—recording the time, preventing vanity during mourning—but the deeper register was the deliberate pause. Time and reflection were suspended not to create a spectacle and not to solve a problem, but to mark that ordinary sensation and ordinary thought were, for a while, insufficient. The house itself was put into a different mode.

None of these acts were free of fear, status, or exclusion. Sin-eating, in which a poor man was paid to eat bread and salt that had rested on the corpse and thereby take on the dead person’s sins, is an example that makes the darker edge plain. Yet even there, the community treated the physical gesture as capable of carrying a spiritual load. The point for us is not that we should revive any of these things. The point is that they once occupied a category modern empty-calorie culture has largely abandoned: actions whose value lay in the doing, the continuity, the enigmatic, and the recognition of an intermediate layer rather than in immediate sensory response or rational, mind, justification. Or doing them for some unknown, mysterious satisfaction they may have brought. This is more coming from a consciousness of the heart rather than a consciousness of the intellect, or even more base, a consciousness of the body and sensations.

That layer I am talking about—call it the psyche’s need for enacted meaning, or simply the space between mind and heart—does not get fed by scrolling, by the next quarter-pounder, or by another round of simulated danger. It gets fed, when it gets fed at all, by gestures that are slightly unnecessary, slightly traditional, and aimed at something that cannot be fully reduced to either the body or the mind, or even the spirit. We used to have more of them. We have fewer now. The intake of empty calories keeps coming.

If you would rather not subscribe at this time, and maybe give a little just for this article, please click the button above and give as much as you feel is comfortable. This helps me immensely in keeping up with my writing! Thank you so much!

The paperback version of this amazing book (authored by your’s truly!) will be available on November 2, The Essentials of Successful Coupling: Archetypal Tools for Relational Depth.

The ebook and the audiobook ARE AVAILABLE TO BUY NOW!!

What I would love to get from all of my loyal Shrew Views readers is an honest review of the book on Amazon! Hopefully you responded to my post from a few weeks ago and got a free copy of the book. If you have not, PLEASE EMAIL ME and I will send you a pdf copy if you have time to read it, and hopefully leave a review!

If you have already read it, and would like to review it (PLEASE!!) follow the links below…

REVIEW LINK-DIRECT TO REVIEW THIS BOOK

https://kdpbook.link/for/B0HLY9959L/review

This book would be great for any of you shrews who are having trouble in your romantic relationships, want to improve an already great partnership, or are just curious about an archetypal approach to healthy coupling. OR for anyone who just LOVES my writing (blush, blush).

Here is a blurb about the book:

If you’ve ever felt like your relationship fights are stuck on repeat… if couples therapy helped a little but never reached the deeper patterns… this book offers a different path. Drawing from Jungian depth psychology and timeless mythic wisdom, The Essentials of Successful Coupling reveals the hidden archetypal forces at play in every partnership — and gives you practical tools to transform conflict into connection, shadow into strength, and ordinary love into something sacred and resilient.

Being in a 21st-century romantic relationship is brutal. Cultural forces, old wounds, and unconscious patterns constantly threaten to pull couples apart. Most therapy helps manage the surface fights, but rarely touches the deeper, mythic energies running beneath them.

In The Essentials of Successful Coupling: Archetypal Tools for Relational Depth, psychotherapist and Jungian author Todd Hayen, PhD, RP, offers a powerful alternative. Drawing on decades of clinical experience and the rich tradition of archetypal psychology, this book illuminates the timeless patterns — Kings and Queens, Warriors and Lovers, Tyrants and Devouring Mothers, Puer Aeternus and Shadow complexes — that secretly govern how we love, fight, and connect.

You’ll learn:

• How psychological complexes hijack your conversations and turn them into unwinnable power plays — and exactly what to do the moment one activates.

• Practical tools like the Couples Dialogue, Soft Power, and Steadfast Power to de-escalate conflict and rebuild safety.

• The real meaning of the Masculine and Feminine in relationship, beyond modern cultural noise.

• How to recognize and integrate shadow archetypes so they stop sabotaging intimacy, sex, money, family dynamics, and more.

• Why understanding your partner’s (and your own) inner mythic landscape creates deeper attraction, respect, and lasting transformation.

Blending profound psychological insight with real-world stories, fairy tales, modern examples (from Breaking Bad to everyday garage fights), and actionable guidance, this book goes far beyond typical relationship advice. It doesn’t just fix fights — it helps you rewrite the ancient story your relationship is living.

Whether you’re struggling in your partnership, preparing for deeper commitment, or simply want to love more consciously, The Essentials of Successful Coupling equips you with the operating manual for the soul of your relationship.

For couples ready to move from survival to sacred union.

Todd Hayen

This is really a second part of Monday’s article titled “Quantity vs. Quality.” It seems I got carried away with the medical perspective there, and my real intention in writing that piece was to focus on the “pussification of modern humanity.” I hope that term doesn’t offend anyone—some of you will know what I am talking about.

Maybe this is just a man thing, because men are the ones who can become “pussified” and women typically not—for obvious reasons. But I don’t think it is just a man thing, although it may be more prevalent among men and less common among women, because, well, women are basically already pussified. But it’s all a matter of degree, isn’t it? Women are the fairer sex (don’t let them hear that), and men are tough; I mean, women are “sugar, spice and everything nice” and men, “snips, snails and puppy-dog tails.” Right?

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When my first wife was dying of cancer, I heard this a lot. The doctors would often ask, “Which do you want—quality of life, or to live longer?” Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t think they ever got that far and actually asked us that to our face. But it felt like they did, and certainly with the decisions we were making day in and day out, it was definitely on our minds. I would typically blurt out, “I want both! Dammit!” So did Janice.

But it was just as often made clear to us that we couldn’t have both, and that we had to choose one over the other. I still tended to go with quantity if I had to make a choice. Of course, that was easy for me; I wasn’t the one dying. So it was in my best interest to keep Janice around as long as I could. I knew if she was really suffering, I wouldn’t want that, but most of the actual pain I saw wasn’t that severe (thank God). What was serious was the general pain-in-the-butt nature of everything: the chemo, the monthly trips to Chicago from LA, the lost hair, the lost money and time. It got pretty gruelling for me as well, but nothing like what it was for her, poor thing. It was pretty horrible. It wasn’t until close to the end that it all became unbearable; then she couldn’t walk, was in a wheelchair, and her mind started to go.

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I know, I know. Please forgive me. Dragging Nazis into anything these days is about as fresh as a decade-old meme. I’m sorry. But really, Nazis have such good use with comparisons. I mean, really, most people come up with an instant understanding of what a Nazi is when you utter the word. I am not sure if that understanding is fully correct, but it is usually pretty consistent. Nazis were bad, crazy, evil, ugly, hateful, obsessed, crazy—did I say that already? And their infamous leader, Herr Hitler, was the consummate historical devil-man—almost as bad as Trump, but not quite.

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I have a very busy life. You wouldn’t know it if you really looked at it, because it would not seem that busy to other people. It certainly is not as busy as a mother of four—or even of one, for that matter—or an executive of a big successful company, or even a successful used-car salesman. I can’t imagine what a life like that would be like, because mine is busy beyond control. My basement looks like a bomb has hit it. My office is equally a mess. I have things on my to-do list that have been there for years, and certainly things that have been there for months that I do not get around to doing.

I’m not quite sure what to say about this, because I don’t know what to do about it. I am too busy to think.

There it is. The confession. Or maybe the non-confession, because nothing has actually been confessed. Just a statement of fact followed by a shrug. The to-do list is a graveyard of good intentions that somehow never quite die; they just get buried under newer good intentions that also never quite die. The basement is a physical manifestation of the same problem—boxes, half-finished projects, things that were once urgent and are now simply there, taking up space, generating a low-grade guilt every time I walk past them. The office is the same, only with paper instead of boxes.

Is this a modern problem or just a me problem? I suspect both. Everyone I know who isn’t raising small children or running a company seems to be in roughly the same boat. The calendar is full. The inbox is full. The mind is full. And yet, when you step back and look at what actually got done in a week, it doesn’t feel like much. Or at least it doesn’t feel like the right things. The important things. The things that used to matter when “busy” meant something different.

I used to think busy was a sign of purpose. Now I’m not so sure. A lot of the busyness feels like motion without direction—scrolling, answering, organizing, re-organizing, looking something up, putting it down, picking it up again. Chatting with AI. The day ends, and the list is longer than when it started. Not because new things arrived, but because the old things never left.

Maybe that’s the part worth looking at. Not the mess itself, but the strange fact that the mess is stable. It doesn’t get worse in any dramatic way, and it doesn’t get better. It just sits there, demanding attention it never quite receives, while I do other things that also never quite finish. And I still call it a busy life.

It’s weird, to say the least. I embark on big life pursuits, like creating a psychotherapy practice, or, before that, making a career of writing film and TV music in Hollywood. Now I am focused more on writing and have finished several massive books, as well as about 500 Shrew Views articles. But I still don’t feel like I have enough hours in the day to do any of it justice. I also don’t feel what I have accomplished is really much of anything special. Why is that?

I think about people like Elon Musk or Donald Trump and wonder how these people can cram all that they have to do into one day. Of course, they’ve got a lot of other people around helping them. That would be useful. I obviously don’t have that, and probably most of you reading this don’t have it either. But I wonder if you have the same problem I have with all of this. Do you?

Getting older doesn’t help. For whatever reason, we old folks are told to get the clutter out of our lives, to just relax, and enjoy our last years. Clutter is not just the insurmountable piles of junk we have accumulated over decades of life, but clutter in the form of passions and continuing ambitions. Much of these things are self-limiting, though. Like I no longer think about the big house I will one day be able to afford, or even the massive photo project I have envisioned completing when I have nothing better to do. Forget it. I do still hold onto my passions and still want to accomplish something along those lines, like write a lot of books that people buy, read, and like. But that takes a lot of work. And I am not supposed to be working anymore. I am supposed to sit on the back porch with my dog and maybe a few pet ducks, eating beans out of a can.

So, why am I so busy? Most of my endless to-do-list projects are clean-up projects. Things I should be doing to prepare for my eventual and imminent death. Things like sorting through those photos, throwing out old crap I have collected for a lifetime, cleaning up the blown-up basement and the garage filled with crumbling ancient tarps, wooden birdhouses acquired over the years, and about an inch of greasy dirt on the floor. Everything should be in order and sparkly clean before shuffling off this mortal coil.

No wonder I am too busy to get anything done. It reminds me of the macabre activity I’ve read about when prisoners on death row are forced to dig their own graves. Getting old is so much fun.

All that said, I do still have a lot on my to-do list that isn’t so dark. Lots. I enjoy writing very much, promoting my books, and preparing for marketing. I love writing my Shrew Views articles for all of you to read; I enjoy doing lots of things. But still wonder why I can’t get much done in any reasonable amount of time.

Maybe the joke is that the only item I reliably finish is the one that describes how little I finish. Writing this just added another corpse to the graveyard, and I’m already too busy to bury it properly. The basement can wait. The list can wait. Apparently, so can I. At this rate I’ll die mid-sentence, mid-list, mid-mess—and someone else will finally get around to cleaning it up. Hopefully they won’t put “finish Todd’s to-do list” on their own list. That would be cruel.

If you would rather not subscribe at this time, and maybe give a little just for this article, please click the button above and give as much as you feel is comfortable. This helps me immensely in keeping up with my writing! Thank you so much!

That is a rather narcissistic statement to begin with, isn’t it? If we want to be something, then, according to this statement, we can be that thing, regardless of what it means to anyone else, or what it means to our own obligations to reality.

The woke liberal culture would say yes: we can be anything we want to be. Anything? According to those who say we can, not quite. You cannot be a “toxic” male—or much of a male at all, especially a white one. You cannot be a racist, by their definition. You cannot think women should play traditional roles. You cannot be a Trump supporter, a conservative, or a Christian. No, no, no. According to the “woke liberal culture,” you have no right to hold these identities. They do, however, believe you can rewrite the body (among other things). You can be a woman even if you have a penis, or a man if you do not. Be a “furry,” a raccoon, a unicorn. Be anything you want to be. And not only can you “be” it; everyone around you has to acknowledge and accept what you say you are. And not only do they have to “acknowledge and accept” what you say you are, they too have to believe it.

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I have a new book coming out on November 2, The Essentials of Successful Coupling: Archetypal Tools for Relational Depth. It is about the patterns under a relationship, not another communication guide.

I am sending advance copies to readers who will actually finish a book like this. If that is you, here is the file:

GET YOUR FREE REVIEW BOOK!

It is free. In return I am asking for an honest review on Amazon after November 2, not a kind one. A sentence that it was a free copy is enough. If you hate it, say so. If you do not finish it, do not write.

Here is a blurb about the book:

If you’ve ever felt like your relationship fights are stuck on repeat… if couples therapy helped a little but never reached the deeper patterns… this book offers a different path. Drawing from Jungian depth psychology and timeless mythic wisdom, The Essentials of Successful Coupling reveals the hidden archetypal forces at play in every partnership — and gives you practical tools to transform conflict into connection, shadow into strength, and ordinary love into something sacred and resilient.

Being in a 21st-century romantic relationship is brutal. Cultural forces, old wounds, and unconscious patterns constantly threaten to pull couples apart. Most therapy helps manage the surface fights, but rarely touches the deeper, mythic energies running beneath them.

In The Essentials of Successful Coupling: Archetypal Tools for Relational Depth, psychotherapist and Jungian author Todd Hayen, PhD, RP, offers a powerful alternative. Drawing on decades of clinical experience and the rich tradition of archetypal psychology, this book illuminates the timeless patterns — Kings and Queens, Warriors and Lovers, Tyrants and Devouring Mothers, Puer Aeternus and Shadow complexes — that secretly govern how we love, fight, and connect.

You’ll learn:

• How psychological complexes hijack your conversations and turn them into unwinnable power plays — and exactly what to do the moment one activates.

• Practical tools like the Couples Dialogue, Soft Power, and Steadfast Power to de-escalate conflict and rebuild safety.

• The real meaning of the Masculine and Feminine in relationship, beyond modern cultural noise.

• How to recognize and integrate shadow archetypes so they stop sabotaging intimacy, sex, money, family dynamics, and more.

• Why understanding your partner’s (and your own) inner mythic landscape creates deeper attraction, respect, and lasting transformation.

Blending profound psychological insight with real-world stories, fairy tales, modern examples (from Breaking Bad to everyday garage fights), and actionable guidance, this book goes far beyond typical relationship advice. It doesn’t just fix fights — it helps you rewrite the ancient story your relationship is living.

Whether you’re struggling in your partnership, preparing for deeper commitment, or simply want to love more consciously, The Essentials of Successful Coupling equips you with the operating manual for the soul of your relationship.

For couples ready to move from survival to sacred union.

Todd Hayen

If you would rather not subscribe at this time, and maybe give a little just for this article, please click the button above and give as much as you feel is comfortable. This helps me immensely in keeping up with my writing! Thank you so much!

This is a spin on the boiling frog idea—a frog sitting in a pot of water on a stove as the heat is turned up very slowly. The frog doesn’t notice he is being boiled alive until it is too late. The analogy works fine with a lot that is going on these days (I wrote an article on this topic in the very early years of the Covid sham). But people are not frogs. They are people. And we must assume that people are a bit smarter than frogs (are they?).

For the sake of this article, let’s just say people are smarter than frogs. So then, would they notice the water getting hotter in the pot? If they are indeed smarter than frogs, they would probably wonder why they were in a pot of water to begin with. And since being in a pot of water would raise a red flag, they might notice the water getting hotter—certainly at the point where it started to get dangerous. So let’s assume that too, for the sake of this article: that people would wonder about the pot first, then be clued in that something odd was going on, and subsequently notice the water getting hotter.

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Lying is easier than telling the truth. Have you ever tried it? Lying? Most people have at one time or another. Oddly enough, it is more satisfying than telling the truth. And more fun. It gives you a rush of power. There is also something about living in a fantasy, even if only for a moment, that is deeply invigorating. Humans love stories they make up. 90% of our lives are made up of such stories.

It is rather astounding that we don’t lie all of the time. Why not? As long as we don’t look insane—telling someone you drive a red car when they are looking directly at your blue car is usually not a good idea. But if you can get away with it, why not? Particularly if lying helps you in some way, even a little bit. And it’s even fun, most of the time. The truth is often boring. Put a little zing in your life.

So, why tell the truth at all? For some reason, truth has become sacred. Did the “good” idea of telling the truth start with the Bible? John 8:32. Jesus said it. “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” He was speaking to the Jews who had believed in him—about himself. Know him, the truth, and that truth will set you free. I don’t know if Jesus was talking about telling lies, but maybe indirectly he was. He was stating that knowing, thus telling and speaking, the truth would set you free. Free from what? Lies, of course. Tyranny. Untruths from others with power will indeed imprison you; the lies become the chains that bind you. Those who speak the most powerful lies—the most powerful speakers—will control you, and that’s the whole point.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Why can’t ordinary people just tell lies? Well, usually lies get found out. As much as we seem to grapple with this on a daily basis, there is an objective reality out there. And when you make something up that doesn’t fit that reality, people will usually eventually see it. The objective reality typically doesn’t change and transform itself into the lie you made up about it. When this happens, the people you lied to stop trusting you. And trust is an important thing if you are going to get through life without more suffering than you can handle. But that isn’t the only reason we shouldn’t lie.

The odd thing about “back in the day” is that lying was both easier and harder. Easier because there were no cameras, no emails, no paper trail, no playback. Harder because you lived in a face-to-face world. Reputation was the currency. In a village of a few hundred, a liar didn’t need a fact-checker. He needed neighbours. Once your word went bad, trade, marriage, credit, and even simple conversation got expensive. Aristotle supposedly put the practical punchline this way: Asked what liars gain, he said they gain this—that when they speak the truth, they are not believed.

That’s the social reason. The philosophers went further. They treated truth-telling as something that held the person together, not just the village.

It was the thing that kept a human being from coming apart. Socrates would rather drink the hemlock than recant. Aristotle said the liar’s real punishment is that when he finally tells the truth, no one believes him. Augustine called the liar’s heart “double”—one thing known, another spoken—and said the mouth that lies slays the soul. Aquinas put it dryly: Truth is the mind matching the thing. Kant went further and said even the kind lie, the one told to the murderer at the door, is vandalism against trust itself; once we grant an official exception, promises and contracts start to rot. Different centuries, same hunch: A lie does not just fool the neighbour. It splits the speaker, and if the biggest speakers do it well enough, it splits the world.

I like Aquinas’s quip: “Truth is the mind matching the thing.” Implying that the mind is flexible, fluid, filled with imagery, and “the thing” is solid, objective, material. Whoa. So true. At least in a certain way it is. Today “the thing” is about as flexible and fluid as the mind. It is difficult to tell objective reality from AI slop, that’s for sure. Today reminds me of Orwell’s 1984 in so many ways (ha, ha, really?)—particularly the illusory part, the “tell the truth” part, you know, with “2+2=5” and all that. In the book, the wars themselves were a kind of stage set. Oceania was always at war with somebody, Eurasia or Eastasia, and the enemy could flip overnight—“We have always been at war with Eastasia”—because almost no one ever stood in the actual war zone. The front was far away, the bodies were unseen, the records were rewritten at the Ministry of Truth. If you cannot put your own feet on the ground, you cannot check the story. The story becomes the ground. Sound familiar?

Come to think of it, there really is no reason at all to tell the truth if you have big power, because no one will know what the truth is. And if you think you know what is best (like these leaders undoubtedly do), why tell the people something that will confuse them? And who says any of these people care a hoot in hell about “the people”? All they care about is themselves. Does anyone out there believe governments care about the people they govern? They are so far from that it isn’t funny. Do you believe Zelenskyy cares about the Ukrainian people? He may care about the country Ukraine, because without Ukraine he would have no power, money, and whatever else his position brings him that makes him happy. Do you think Mark Carney cares about the Canadian people? He cares about them as long as they are the ones who have the power to elect him. He cares about Canada for the same reasons Zelenskyy cares about Ukraine. Do you think Trump cares about the American people? People thought he did. That is why they voted for him. I think most of those people now believe he betrayed them. So, they all lie, lie, lie.

I’ll tell you why you should tell the truth and not lie. Because it is the right thing to do. If you are decent and have love in your heart, you tell the truth. You don’t tell the truth so people will trust you, or so you will get your way, or so “your mind matches the thing.” You tell the truth because a person of good character tells the truth. And it will, indeed, set you free.

If you would rather not subscribe at this time, and maybe give a little just for this article, please click the button above and give as much as you feel is comfortable. This helps me immensely in keeping up with my writing! Thank you so much!

That’s a rather big statement, isn’t it? Before I write a word about this topic, I think most of you will agree with the title. But maybe not. If not, tell me why in the comments.

Certainly, considering medical technology, it seems the opposite would be true. How could any sane person say Western medicine is collapsing when medical technology has made such progress in the past fifty years?

MRI and CT scans that let a doctor look inside you without opening you up. Laparoscopic and robotic surgery that used to mean a zipper down the chest and now means a few holes and a night in a chair. Childhood leukemia, which killed most of the kids who got it in the early 1970s, now has a five-year survival rate around ninety percent. Hepatitis C, once a slow death sentence, is now curable. Heart-attack death rates in the West have fallen dramatically since the 1970s—statins, stents, bypass, blood-pressure drugs, the whole industrial kit.

Yeah. Like am I an idiot?

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Everyone, you might say. But I don’t think so. Sheep!! you might scream. Some yes, some no. Shrews? Some, maybe; some not, for sure. So what’s the point? If you can determine who is brainwashed, you know who to keep your mouth shut around. Completely shut. Not only is it pointless to try to teach them anything, you put yourself in a rather bad spot if you say much of anything that contradicts their brainwashing. That doesn’t mean you have to agree with them to stay safe. You just can’t let them see that you don’t.

This is weird, I know, but trust me when I say we need to stay out of touchy conversations with brainwashed people—especially if they have any influence over you: family, close friends, bosses, employees, and the like. We have reached a point where conversations with people who already think you are a conservative, Right-thinking conspiracy theorist are not only unpleasant; they can do you irreparable harm. You may be pegged as a super-extremist, not worth giving the time of day.

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That’s a good thing, right? Isn’t that what we’ve been fighting for all along? Isn’t that what Norman Rockwell meant when he painted Freedom of Speech—the guy standing up to speak, with some folded-up paper in his pocket? That’s what free speech is all about, isn’t it? “Every man has a voice to be heard.”

Yeah, I thought that was the whole point, too. Now I’m not so sure. I remember when the Internet was first coming into mass awareness, and I read an article commenting on it as a forum for every thought every person ever had. The article said this would be the first time such a bulk of information would flood our attention, almost all of it unedited and unvetted.

The author who wrote this article believed this would be a huge problem: that before then, information was sorted through, vetted, and deemed “worthy of human consumption” before it was made available to the throngs of humans grabbing for it.

This is good and bad, of course. The “good” is that before something was published, many eyes went over it, it was carefully determined to be accurate, and it was rejected if found to be preposterous, sensationalist, or downright a lie. (I am speaking here more of news items and non-fiction work.) Of course, if something was labelled “fiction,” the scrutiny was a bit less extreme. But it was still important to identify it as such (recall the famous Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” broadcast).

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Alberich is a character in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle—a fifteen-hour operatic extravaganza of gods and goddesses, heroes, warrior princesses, giants, mine-dwelling dwarves, and aquatic Rhinemaidens. Alberich was a dwarf who made his way to the Rhine to cavort with its mermaid inhabitants: the sexy, cunning Rhinemaidens who guarded the river’s sacred lump of gold.

Able, miraculously, to move among them in their watery realm, Alberich seeks love from the flirting water-damsels. They tease him relentlessly with their shadow-feminine coercion. Eventually he has had enough of the abuse and launches into the famous curse-of-love aria whose fragments echo through the rest of the fifteen-hour epic.

This moment becomes the foundation of the entire Ring Cycle. After being rejected in his pursuit of true love—expressed through his wish to engage with the physical Rhinemaidens, presumably in a sexual manner—Alberich shifts his focus of acquisition to the material gold the lovely girls are guarding. Distracted by his clumsy attempts to seduce them (who in their right mind could ever love such an ugly thing?) and wholly unaffected by his amorous efforts, they drop their guard. Alberich seizes the gold. Before doing so, he renounces love itself and proclaims that anyone who possesses the gold will lose love as well. The gold is thus saddled with this curse—the renunciation of love. Consequently, the curse replaces the greatest of human potentials, love, with the pursuit of material wealth and power.

How appropriate. Isn’t this what we currently see in modern society? And it was obviously present enough in Wagner’s time (roughly 1859–1882) for him to use it as the foundation of his epic opera cycle. Love (soul) replaced by material idolization (the Bible’s golden calf). Humans have struggled with this since day one. Love is of the soul, of God, of all metaphysical reality; gold is material. It is wealth with monetary value, and with it comes power. That power is either obvious—ruling and controlling other people—or more subtle: the ability to summon, at will, instant gratification through consumption that tries to satisfy the senses and the intellect.

Humans generally express love through relationships—with children, with friends and family, with God, and most prominently with a significant other, a sexually compatible partner. This is what Alberich, the masculine side of this two-sided coin, was attempting to do in the watery confines of the Rhine. But he was doing it all wrong. He wanted payment from the Rhinemaidens (sex, which is the masculine conduit of expressing divine unity consciousness: love) without paying their due—which is the King’s offering of presence, protection, and passionate cherishing: the safety, honour, and steadfast devotion that allows the feminine to open in receptivity rather than tease, withhold, or turn her radiance into a weapon.

Tsk, tsk.

The lovely maidens did not respond to the dwarf’s beastly demands because they did not understand his divine needs, and he did not respond to the maidens’ divine needs because he did not understand them either. Again, another prominent resonance with modern—as well as not so modern—culture. Why did neither party understand the very basics of divine love as it is expressed in material bodies? (Even though both the Rhinemaidens and Alberich are decidedly not “human,” I believe Wagner meant for them to represent humans both spiritually and physically.) They didn’t understand, much as today’s modern humans typically do not understand, and as humans of bygone eras most likely did not understand as well.

Why? I can’t answer that question, but people have been trying to for millennia. More than likely, Alberich’s curse has been in effect long before his encounter with the Rhinegold. Humans long ago lost a clear and present relationship with the non-material and with how the non-material—love—interrelates with the material, as in the female and male bodies and psyches. Women require different needs to be fulfilled before they can fulfill the needs of men. Typically, if done correctly, these needs are met naturally and organically; one is not provided merely as a result of the other being supplied. Neither side needs to comprehend the complexities of the other’s needs. The supply is natural according to archetypal law, and as long as nothing blocks it, the flow is consistent and reliable.

But what if there is a block? In Alberich’s case, the block was more than likely ignorance formulated through childhood trauma. No one watching the opera is given any backstory to Alberich’s early formative years (do Nibelungs have childhoods?). The Rhinemaidens mention an unnamed father who told them to guard the gold, but that is all. Their family of origin is never assessed. We cannot be sure what unconscious complexes prompted the shadow behaviour of these figures. We only know it happened as Wagner scripted it. But did he just make all of this up, based on no real human precedent? No, he didn’t. Real humans are often caught in the same dysfunctional dynamic, minus the fantasy symbols of mermaids, dwarves, and lumps of gold.

As a practicing psychotherapist, I see countless men in couples therapy in constant pursuit of their female partners for the divine expression of love through sexual connection, only to be rejected with shadow, misunderstanding comments such as “All you think about is sex” and “Sex shouldn’t be that important.” But alas, it is that important—to him. And to Alberich. The Rhinemaidens mock him, laughing at his seemingly barbarous effort to experience love. And that is just what it looks like on stage: Alberich stumbling across the rocks at the bottom of the riverbed in an attempt to get his hands on the spritely maidens, so agile in their watery environment. He looks like a fool, blinded by physical lust and toxic desire. Is he a fool? No.

It is interesting to note that in his frustration with failure, he curses love, not lust (which is what the female water-sprites believe they are withholding). If Alberich truly believed all he wanted was a water-tumble with the girls, he would not have cursed love; he would have cursed lust. It was love he was seeking. It was love he was denied. As a typical male, physical sex was the primary conduit through which he could experience divine love. So, this is what he thought he was asking for. Until he didn’t get it. Then he decided to renounce love for all who chose the power of the gold in place of the pursuit of love, starting with himself.

I doubt Alberich actually knew this (that it was love he was seeking), as most modern men don’t. But Wagner did. And in his genius, he used Alberich to let the audience know: curse all who worship the material over love.

So, Alberich says, in effect, “To hell with love! What is it that I can get instead? What can I get that does not require female approval?” He should have asked himself instead, “What do I need to give to the Rhinemaidens for them to give me what I need?” And that is, indeed, a huge part of the problem in today’s romantic partnerships. There is a substantial lack on either side of the coin in understanding the needs of the other. Since the archetypal systems automatically provide these needs without requiring anyone to understand them when all is functioning as it should, no one makes much effort to understand much of anything because they don’t have to. It is only when the setup for the archetypes to function smoothly is not present that suddenly nothing works right. In today’s culture, this happens more often than not. Patriarchal males, shadow warriors, “Me Too” movements, and radical feminism all do not bode well for smoothly running archetypal systems.

So, what do we do about all this? We make an attempt to really understand what your partner needs to feel loved, desired, and romantically fulfilled. Believe it or not, men and women are different in this regard (and in many other regards as well). Don’t believe the common mantra of today: “Men and women are the same.” They aren’t. They are clearly equal in value (and the women have a slight edge on this account), but they are not the same.

Since Alberich is a mythological symbol, I don’t think there is anything he could have done differently to elicit love from the Rhinemaidens. Neither could they. They were built to do just what they did: represent the shadow archetypes that ultimately caused the renunciation of love. We, as humans, are not the same as these mythological representations. We can do differently, and we can love differently. We do not have to shift our attention to satisfaction from the material world—wealth and power—when acquiring love becomes difficult. We have to stick with it and realize there is no substitute for it. And I am not speaking only of the romantic love between two sexually compatible human beings; I am speaking of any expression of love—toward children, friends, animals, nature, art, music, and all creative passions. This is what brings meaning and purpose into our lives. And, needless to say, this should be the prime directive of a healthy human being.

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I just saw Christopher Nolan’s epic movie The Odyssey, and I must say I really liked it. It wasn’t perfect, but I was impressed. I know Matt Walsh, Elon Musk, and a few other conservatives would not be happy with me, but who cares. I walked out of the theatre wondering what all the fuss was about.

Since I have not read Homer’s poem, I really had nothing to compare it to. The hoopla from the far right seems to focus on things like not sticking with the original story, the fact that Greeks of Homer’s time would never say “dad” or “fucking beach,” and poor choices in casting—such as Lupita Nyong’o as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” who, in their view, certainly would have been a white woman. There are a few other complaints I won’t go into just yet.

Let’s start with the most egregious of these issues—the fact that Nolan departed from Homer’s storyline.

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Starting with the Garden of Eden, it seems God figured out that if Adam and Eve had free rein, they would surely blow it. Free will, yes—they had to have the choice to do whatever they wanted—but with consequences if they did. Ah, yes, consequences. Imagine that! It seems these days people just don’t get the concept of consequences.

So, after a bit of time, ol’ Moses went up into the mountains and brought down the Ten Commandments, only to return to crazy people dancing around a golden calf. Jeesh. Leave ’em for just a minute, and already they are cavorting with the result of their free will. Consequences? Maybe not right away (although Moses got kind of ticked), but eventually the false-idol thing bit them in the butt.

No one seems to want rules, eh? Especially restricting ones like the Ten Commandments. But hey, there are only ten of them. That isn’t too bad, is it? We probably would do a whole lot better these days even sticking with just those ten. Do you think we can do it? Stick to ten rules? No way, José. No way.

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People don’t care because they don’t know. Simple as that. I know I’ve been through this a million times, but I just don’t think I’ve nailed it. Maybe now. It’s nuance, still, but it’s something more than I have written about before.

My stepson got married a few weeks ago, and I officiated the ceremony. Even though I did not know everyone who attended, I had the chance to talk to a lot of people. The wedding, by the way, was beautiful. I’m not really a fan of all the expense and hoopla that goes into these events, but I do believe rituals like weddings are important for keeping the psyche healthy. Most people these days still adhere to the rituals of dressing up, looking their best, and formalizing the affair as much as they feel comfortable with—“I do” statements, walking down the aisle, the formal declaration of “husband and wife,” even “kissing the bride.” So it was fun and meaningful in that regard.

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Right versus Left. Here we go again. I can already hear the knives coming out. Fine. Let’s try something slightly less bloodthirsty this time and look at what each side actually thinks it is doing, rather than the cartoon versions we usually throw at each other.

Both sides, if you strip away the slogans and the rage, are trying to build a community. They both want a place that feels like home, a shared identity that holds people together instead of letting them fly apart like shrapnel. They just have completely different ideas about how you get there, and what you’re allowed to keep once you arrive.

The conservative, or at least the classical Right-leaning view, starts with the individual. Each person is more or less on his or her own to become the best version of themselves they can manage. Community is not something a committee designs and then drops on your head. It is supposed to emerge. Free people, left mostly alone, tend to form families, churches, neighbourhoods, and habits that look a lot like one another. Shared language, shared stories, a rough moral consistency (the Ten Commandments still work surprisingly well as a starter kit), and a preference for the people who actually live next door rather than an abstract “humanity.” Love is personal first—your kids, your spouse, your actual neighbour—not a government program.

If you want that kind of cohesion to last more than a generation, you cannot treat every incoming culture as equally compatible. Some things will erode the foundation. So the Right, at its more honest moments, admits there have to be limits. Diversity is fine when it adds to what’s already there. It stops being fine when it starts dissolving the very thing that made the village worth living in to begin with. That is not hatred; it is pattern recognition. You can call it exclusion if you like. They call it self-preservation.

The progressive, or Left-leaning view, starts at the other end. Community is something you construct from the top, or at least from the middle, through rules, institutions, and a central authority that decides what fairness looks like. The great moral project is inclusion: every culture, every belief, every identity gets a seat. Equality is not just a goal; it is the operating system. The assumption underneath is that all these different ways of being are, at bottom, compatible—or can be made compatible if we just apply enough education, regulation, and goodwill. Good luck with that.

Here is where it gets sticky, and where the shrew in me starts twitching.

The Left also holds a set of very rigid, universal moral standards. Women must be treated a certain way. Speech must stay inside certain lines. History must be narrated a certain way. These are not suggestions; they are non-negotiable. Fair enough—every culture has non-negotiables. The problem is that the Left rarely notices that its own preferred culture (let’s call it late-liberal, secular, therapeutic, equity-focused) is itself a very particular culture. It is not a neutral container that can hold every other culture without changing them. It has its own priests, its own heresies, its own sacred texts. When a genuinely different culture arrives with different ideas about family, sex, authority, or the sacred, the progressive project has to choose: either water down its own standards or start policing the newcomers. In practice it does both, then pretends it is still being “inclusive.” Look at how the Left perceives the Christian Right (don’t even mention “Christian Nationalism” to a liberal). It isn’t pretty. So much for “inclusion.”

That is the contradiction that never quite gets resolved. You cannot demand universal conformity to a specific set of progressive norms and celebrate radical pluralism at the same time. One of them has to give. Usually it is the pluralism. The village that was supposed to contain every possible village-version ends up looking a lot like one particular village with extra flags.

I am not saying the Right has this all figured out. Their version can calcify into nostalgia, or worse into a kind of ethnic or religious club that treats outsiders as permanent guests at best. And “just let individuals be free, and community will magically appear” ignores how much shared culture already has to exist before that freedom doesn’t turn into atomized loneliness and shopping malls. We all have seen that particular movie.

But the Left’s version has a built-in impossibility. It wants the warmth of belonging without the boundaries that create belonging. It wants the moral confidence of a creed while insisting creeds are oppressive. It wants a strong cultural identity that is simultaneously infinitely elastic. That is not a political program. That is a pipe dream.

From a psychological angle—this is the part I can’t help but tell you about—both sides are wrestling with the same old human problem: how much difference can a group absorb before it stops being a group? The Right answers by tightening the circle and hoping the people inside it still have enough room to breathe. The Left answers by widening the circle until the circle itself becomes the only identity remaining, and then wonders why people feel rootless and start inventing new tribes out of pronouns and grievances.

The agenda, of course, loves the fight. As long as we are screaming at each other about which village is the real one, we are not looking at who actually owns the land, who writes the zoning laws, and who profits from the demolition. Divide the frogs, and keep the pot on the stove. Classic.

I do not hate the Left. I have said that before, and I mean it. Plenty of people I love live on that side of the fence. What I cannot pretend is that their model, as currently practised, can deliver the community they claim to want. It keeps tripping over its own idealism. The Right’s model is narrower, sometimes colder, and frequently hypocritical, but at least it admits that a culture is a thing with edges.

So here we are. Two incomplete maps of the same territory. One starts with the person and hopes the village appears. The other starts with the village and hopes the person still matters. Neither is going to save us by itself. The shrew’s job, as usual, is just to notice when the tidy map they’re handing us—Right’s version or Left’s—doesn’t match the actual ground we’re standing on. And then to keep asking the question neither camp seems eager to sit with: what, exactly, are we willing to share—and what are we willing to lose—in order to have a place that still feels like home?

I don’t have the tidy answer. I just know both sides are describing a village they have never quite managed to live in at the same time.

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[Hey folks, here is another blast from the past. I have not been able to write much these past few weeks…some personal turmoil going on. Hopefully by next week I’ll be back at it! So here is another reprint; I think the SECOND Shrew Views contribution. Let me know what you think, and let me know if it feels like it was recently written! I think it was April 2, 2022 when it first appeared!]

Everyone knows by now the analogy often tossed about these days describing a frog in a pot of water on a stove. The heat is turned up so slowly that the frog has no idea that if he (or she) doesn’t jump out he will be boiled alive.  Seems that most sheep, the normies, are like the frog. The rest of us (for the sake of simplicity I will call the rest of us “shrews”—more on that later!) are doing most of the jumping—or at least trying to. I don’t know if TPTB (“the powers that be”—need I clarify?) really care about a few jumping frogs, although our shrew numbers are increasing every day and may soon outnumber the sheep! What does seem to be clear is that some of the sheep are waking up and are attempting to jump out of the pot themselves.

It seems quite imperative that the majority of frogs stay in the pot, because if most of them jump out, there will be no dinner for whoever is cooking them. The shrew frogs are very much aware of the heat being turned up leading to their demise, the sheep frogs still are not quite sure what the hell is happening. In order to fully know the degree of seriousness regarding the pot and water situation you have to believe that the point of being in the pot to begin with is to be boiled—dead. Maybe we can still stick with a metaphor here, but possibly not—the intention of the boiling pot could literally be to kill the sleeping frogs contained therein. Or, at the very least, have them completely under the control of TPTB. Do they need to remain asleep forever? I can’t actually answer that question, maybe not, but maybe so. I would think it would be best that they are close to being asleep most of the time. If they wake up too much, they will possibly make too much ruckus. Look at all the totalitarian regimes throughout history, real ones, as well as made up ones (as in Orwell’s “1984”). Being partially asleep, if not totally asleep, seemed to be a rather important criterion in these regimes. Most people, historically, living under totalitarian rule are not that aware of the freedoms they have lost, or the dehumanizing power they live under. This control on a large populace was obviously achieved through government lies, confusions, departures from reality executed by the predominant media, censorship and the silencing of opposing voices—on and on. Us shrews are very familiar with these tactics. The sheep don’t believe they exist, even when their little noses are rubbed in it. These tactics have worked brilliantly for centuries in various contexts. Yes, there have always been thinking, awake, shrews, but they are typically silenced, or eliminated, very quickly.

Sheep do whatever they can to avoid seeing the truth. Obviously they think they see it, and make a lot of noise about what they believe is true and why it is true. In this Covid situation typically the noise they make is about how “unscientific” the shrews are, yet in an argument, you seldom hear sheep talk about actual science. They just like to rant on about how so and so is stupid, an anti vaxxer, or a science denier, or is publically discredited in various ways, or was kicked off of YouTube so they MUST be an idiot. I have never heard a sheep talk about actual science. Maybe they do, and maybe I’ve heard it, but certainly not often.

So the sheep continue to get cooked. Of course the shrews are cooking too. So far, the jumping shrews are getting just as cooked as the sheep, but they are awake, and feel the pain of the boiling water. And, of course, as much as they jump, they can’t get out of the water. Neither can the sheep, but they don’t seem to care—not yet at least.

TPTB are a bit concerned that there is so much jumping going on in the pot. It is possible that all of the shrews and some sheep might jump around so much the lid pops off and a lot of the frogs get out, which could slow things down—not stop things mind you, but slow them down. If most of the sheep and shrews got out of the pot because they were all awake, then that could cause a real disruption in the mainstream agenda. But most of the sheep that are hopping are not really awake. They must want to get back to what, in their previous asleep state, seemed normal. They are tired of Covid—tired of being afraid of it, tired of lockdowns, of restrictions, of inconvenience. They are not awake to the bigger picture like shrews are. In order to be fully awake, a sheep or a shrew has to believe in some rather radical things.

1.     The Government of whatever country you live in is corrupt, and they really don’t care all that much about you, if anything at all.

2.     Big Pharma is corrupt, and although, if profitable, may come up with some stuff that actually helps people, for the most part they will kill you if they can make some dough doing it and keep most everyone asleep so they can keep doing it (turning up the heat).

3.     Most doctors are like privates in a huge powerful army. They follow orders from their generals and “commanders in chief” and they typically do not question them. They get all of their information from specific sources that could, for the above reasons 1 and 2, be wrong. They are NOT, usually, scientists or researchers (although some, on the shrew side, most definitely ARE, but we don’t hear much from them because they are typically silenced (see above.)

4.     Institutions such as hospitals and universities depend so much on funding from the corrupt government and corrupt pharmaceutical companies that they are completely unreliable, if not criminal.

5.     The mainstream media is also for the most part “fake.” The media is mostly owned and otherwise funded by the corrupt pharmaceutical companies, the corrupt government, and whoever else is supporting the power and money agenda.

This is a big pill for sheep to swallow . . . for anyone to swallow for that matter, but for some mysterious reason shrews, and wanna-be shrews, swallow that pill without even thinking about it. Why? I don’t know, and this article isn’t going to attempt to figure that out. We just do, and bless us for that.

There are even bigger pills to swallow than the five listed above—the Great Reset, which includes centralization of government and economy, possible eugenics/population reduction, etc. I won’t go into all that. Most shrews are onboard, some are not quite there yet, but some form of “bigger agenda” is at play here beyond just power hungry rich people.

So where does this leave the pot of boiling frogs? Many say the heat is being turned down. Why? Some say because TPTB believe all the frogs are going to get out and shut the whole shebang down. Some say TPTB are afraid for their own safety, that they could be held accountable, tried by a court, and punished—possibly by hanging from an end of a rope.  

Granted, TPTB have great incentive to keep most of the frogs asleep so they can continue to boil them. But, in my humble opinion, they are far from any immediate concern that there are too many rambunctious jumping frogs. They may turn the heat down, but only in effective ways that assure calming the frogs down a bit, while turning it up in other ways that the frogs don’t notice.

We need to continue hopping, and knock that lid off.

As far back as I can remember—and that is way, way back—I have never relished the idea of moving with the crowd. That is probably why I am a shrew, or at least the basis for it. My wife claims I just hate authority; I don’t think it is that simple. And even if it is true that my repulsion at joining the gang keeps me from complying and succumbing—and thus defying authority—it isn’t always a good thing. Sometimes the crowd is the right way to go. We humans were designed to comply with consensus; there is innate wisdom in groupthink, at least that is supposed to be true, assuming that groupthink is organic and not influenced by an individual or smaller group (like government) with its own self-serving agenda.

That is the operative word here: self-serving. It took me most of my life to realize that governments and the people who make them up are not serving the people who voted for them. I used to think that happened only once in a while, but otherwise there was usually good intention behind it—but nowadays, the ol’ “They’re doing the best they can” or “They didn’t have all of the information” argument seems to be the way to go if you don’t like what you see. Poppycock. Now I know better.

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