Voting ANC: Oh come all ye faithless …

… joyless and de-fea-ted, oh come ye, oh co-ome ye to Luu-thuu-li house. Oh co-ome and behold him, with glorious spout sur-mouun-ted…

Jokes and a new song for the shower aside (with lots of soap after a night of serious bed-jostling to make sure), what’s so bad about the ANC getting “in” again, note the double entendre?

Mike Trapido, for all his blasting away at the policies and leaders of the ANC as if he were a sanitary engineer with an exceptionally stinky blockage to remove, has reminded us again he will nevertheless be voting for the ANC. His contradictory writing behaviour aside, I think he’s profoundly correct. Why?

As I have blogged before, we are in the process of evolving a global consciousness that will transcend groups, that is, various religions and ideologies. Some thinkers in this field include Thom Hartmann, Eckhart Tolle, Ken Wilbur and Father Thomas Keating. We are moving from sociocentric (too strongly identified with one’s own group, seeing it as the ultimate bearer of truth) to becoming worldcentric (identifying with the world’s urgent needs, putting the world first, not our group). As I’ve said before, we had better evolve and damn soon if we are to survive as a race.

This evolution is contingent on and mirrored by our development from early infancy, sometimes in depth psychology known as fulcrums.

In fulcrum one (very early infancy), the self is in fusion with the world and cannot identify itself as being apart from the world. In fulcrum two, often known as “birth of the emotional self”, the infant cannot separate what it is feeling from what the world is feeling. She is still learning that when she bites her finger that hurts, but when she bites a pillow that does not hurt.

By the time we get to fulcrum four, the self has evolved into being part of a group, be it a church and/or a political party. The group is the centre of the self’s universe and the only correct way there is (which is why Galileo had a hard time of it with the Catholic Church). If you are a member of this group and its ideology or myth, then people in the same group are your brothers, your sisters, your comrades. If not, you, oh dear, are going to burn in hell. You are an infidel, unsaved, unclean. This self in fulcrum four has still not moved to the next stage of evolution, which is what we are going now (hopefully), worldcentric. Now either the self moves on, or it regresses.

Like children’s psychological development, we will not evolve effectively if there are unresolved issues at previous stages of our growth. A fair amount of regression therapy needs to be done. We need to resolve any repressed or denied traumas or resented events in earlier stages of our evolution, our “evolutionary childhood”.

Let’s take the example of Mike Trapido. (By the way I have a background in psychology and twenty years experience developing children and adults so I am not just sucking this out of my thumb.) When I examine his choice to go ANC in the light of evolutionary psychology it is with the understanding that virtually everyone has baggage, unresolved stuff. Mike loves to lampoon and castigate various leaders of the ANC yet he will vote for the same party. He says he will “slaughter” them in his “I’m voting ANC” blog if they are out of line, and he has many times, but he still votes for them. Why?

This is my theory, not just about Traps, but about the many who will vote ANC despite the brutally hard facts suggesting otherwise.

It is well known in depth psychology that you play out the traumas and habits inflicted on you by close family members. If your brother had sex with you or fondled you repeatedly, you will seek out abusive relationships with others later on in life partly because that is the only way of relating you can identify with, the only way of being in the world that you know. You are “stuck” or too strongly identified with those events, and cannot evolve until you have resolved them. SA citizens have been enormously abused by the ANC but because it is the only way of politicking they know, many will vote ANC. They are in denial of their own trauma, or perhaps to put it better, South Africa’s trauma.

Take Traps’s denial. He mentions that he will “slaughter” the ANC and “give them the biggest kick up the backside if they come short”. Oh yeah? Really? Now I am not castigating Traps’ character. He most certainly castigated the likes of Julius Malema’s as he worked through the gentleman’s atrocious school report card in a blog last year .

Nor am I saying that it is so, but Traps’s belief that he can “punish” the ANC or that his criticism matters to them, comes across as an early child unresolved event before the age of two. Prior to that age, as I said, it is commonly accepted that infants cannot separate what they are feeling from what the world is feeling. If I hurt everything in the world hurts. The child is completely identified with the world and cannot separate what it is feeling from what the world is feeling. My obvious point is: does Traps actually think he can kick the ANC up the backside in such a way that it will hurt them, or they will notice the criticism, that they will care one whit? That he can “slaughter” them, metaphorically speaking? (If he doesn’t think so, why does he tell us so?) This thinking is a complete delusion, grandiose, and suggests deep denial. On that note, denial is accompanied by a rationalisation of the maladjusted behaviour that is not logical. Nothing in his blog where he says he will vote ANC gives me, or many readers as I saw in the commentary, any clarification for his voting decision. (In fact, as other commentators suggested in different words, it came across as attention seeking.) This punishment myth, in some forms of depth and evolutionary psychology, and in terms of childhood development, is known as being stuck between fulcrum two and fulcrum three, “the child begins to understand it cannot itself magically order the world around”, as Ken Wilbur put it. Daddy won’t just go away and leave me with my toys. It is time for bed, period.

And well, if Traps intends to kick the ANC up the backside, he is going to look like a pirouetting ballerina with a frozen leg permanently raised in the middle of an arabesque, foot aimed at the theatre ceiling. Maybe he should put his leg in a plaster cast to keep the leg eternally up. Perhaps a rugby image would do Traps more justice, a latter day Joel Stransky with leg and rugby boot high in the air, immobilised in that position. Because there’s a helluva lot of kicking to do, duh.

Grant Walliser put it perfectly in his latest, brilliant blog. Let me quote him rather than fumble for the words: “The ANC has had 14 years in power. Under their governance South Africa has slowly crumbled from an international success story and an African leader brimming with promise to a largely mismanaged and morally corrupt nation state”.

Grant is speaking of regression here. But hey, regression, as I have said, is what we therapeutically need to resolve issues at earlier stages of our development so we can evolve.

So let’s vote ANC and do some regression therapy. Let’s own up to all our traumas, how our family and other groups mistreated us. Metonymically speaking, we need to look at us being stuck on the memory of our father holding up the meat cleaver to chop up the lamb roast. We need to get honest with our misinterpretation of that event with our therapist or priest. In other words, we need to own up and realise we were the lamb roast. Then, through therapy, maybe hypnotherapy, we need to help Daddy put that big scary knife back into the kitchen drawer and give him a big hug. Because until we find closure and let go we cannot evolve.

So, yeah, let’s vote ANC and regress to our teenage years again so we can shirk responsibility and plunge into our rampant, unmanageable, confusing hormones at those beer and joint parties we like to think our parents did not know about. Let’s confront and resolve our self-esteem issues (ohmigod I would rather die or be a paraplegic in a wheelchair than have pimples or a small weenie) and neuroses that we were developing at that age, commonly known in many spiritual and psychological circles as the “false self”, which inhibits authentic growth.

Let’s vote ANC and go back even further in childhood, to a stage sometimes known as a “mythological worldview” where everything is centered on me and my needs. Why aren’t all the Christmas presents under the tree mine and only mine? They should be, shouldn’t they? (Think SA communist party and Cosatu members always flying business class, think arms deal corruption, think … no don’t think, remember we are regressing.)

Vote ANC so we can regress even further to when we were a few months old, which the Romantics and some therapists say we were in Paradise. As the Romantic poet Wordsworth penned, “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream”. This early time of infancy was regarded as a holy state of bliss, we were pampered to, indulged (think Carl Niehaus, think Schabir Shaik … no remember, we’re regressing, don’t think).

Keep voting ANC and we go back into the womb and life was a glorious nine months in a kind of Radox steam bath, pity we don’t get served scotch on the rocks…

And then…

Agh toe! come on! With apologies to Woody Allen, is this just a male thing or who doesn’t want to end (or begin so we can truly evolve) as a marvelous, bed-bouncing climax??

Let’s finish by going back to my re-working of a famous hymn at the beginning of this blog:

Oh come let us abhor him
Oh come let us abhor him… (repeat to fadeout)