September 10, 2000
Over a year ago, The Jackson Progressive carried the author's article on the Littleton killings, evoking the mythical story of Kronos eating his children as a metaphor for the way in which our society is treating its youth. Although school killings are not as frequent in the national news media as they were then, the image of Kronos is, unfortunately, becoming even more apt.
Item: Mississippi law, under what is called "zero-tolerance," defines driving with a blood alcohol content of over .02% to be a DUI if the driver is under 21 years of age, whereas the limit is .10% for adults, on the theory that it is illegal for minors to imbibe alcohol at all. If a driver negligently injures or kills someone while violating the DUI statue, the crime is classified as a felony with a sentence of up to 25 years. The Mississippi legislature has therefore made it possible for an 18-year-old to receive a 25-year sentence for actions that would not even be a crime for a 21-year-old. Prosecutors are already charging minors as felons under this statute.
Item: California has recently enacted a constitutional amendment taking away the discretion of judges to decide whether a minor should be tried as an adult, giving the discretion to the district attorney. The change will send thousands more youth into adult prisons where they will be at the mercy of hardened adult criminals and will undoubtedly emerge as hardened criminals themselves, thus increasing the need to build even more prisons;
Item: Early in the '90s, researchers promoted the idea of an emerging generation of "super-predators," a generation of hardened, remorseless juveniles who were beginning to show up in the criminal justice system. Based on demographic projections of a growing juvenile population and a sharp increase in juvenile arrests rates for violent crimes beginning in the mid-1980's, the theory grained plausibility from a series of highly publicized violent youth crimes, and resulted in the enactment of harshly punitive laws aimed against youth. The theory turned out to be not only unsupported by the facts but intellectually dishonest, and the juvenile crime rate, rather than rising, started declining almost as soon as the theory was announced, and by 1997 had declined to its lowest level since 1986. The Draconian penalties are still on the books, however.
Item: In spite of the recent economic boom, for which our politicians and economists have recently been congratulating themselves, the U.S. raises a higher percentage of children in poverty than any other industrialized nation, and by a wide margin. Our infant mortality rates are significantly higher than the rest of the industrialized world. This outcome is not the result of impersonal economic forces ruling our lives like the Greek Morari, but is the entirely predictable result of conscious political decisions made by persons we elected to public office under the influence of the wealthy power elite that finances their election campaigns. We, the citizens of this nation, acquiesced in these decisions, and therefore they are by default our own decisions. We are responsible.
Item: 1000 Iraqui children die every week from the embargo on Iraq, an embargo that exists solely because of U.S. insistence. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when asked about the fearsome toll, stated that it was well worth it and justified by the objectives. The plight of these unfortunate infants simply doesn't exist in our national consciousness, even though their suffering results from the way our tax dollars are being spent. The embargo has not succeeded in accomplishing any of its stated goals. We are responsible.
Item: Schools are apt to classify difficult children as having attention deficit disorder and to recommend medication such as Ritalin. Given a psychiatric recommendation, judges have already began to order parents to administer these drugs and to hold that parents who refuse to drug their children to be committing abuse.
Thus it has come to pass that children, who, due to their lack of physical strength, their immature judgment, their lack of experience, and their legal disabilities, are the easiest of all persons to abuse, are indeed being abused by a society and its legal system that treats them more harshly than adult criminals, forces a large number of them to grow up in poverty, or, in the case of Iraq, simply allows them to die from lack of the basic necessities of life.
There are forces at work here that defy reason. One of the principal tasks of any civilization worthy of the title is to raise its young so that upon majority, they will be ready to assume the privileges and responsibilities of free citizens. But the institutions that our society painstakingly constructed in the past to carry on that task -- its schools, neighborhoods, social safety nets, medicare, Social Security for the elderly, and secure employment for heads of families -- are now being systematically attacked, with virtually nothing proposed to be put in their place other than vague affirmations of faith in the market economy as the salvation of the world.
The author's previous article, "What Is Devouring Our Children? Kronos and Littleton", made the oblique argument that the murderous acts of Harris and Kleibold were a rebellion against society's being taken over by the archetype represented by the ancient Greek god Kronos, who swallowed his children in the fear that one of them would someday defeat him and take his place. In this article, we will examine some more direct evidence of this constellation of the archetype and attempt to put it in psychological perspective. If the spirit of Kronos is awake and active in the land, then we should be able to discover his handiwork.
The story of Kronos has tragic overtones. According to Hesiod, Kronos, having overcome his father Ouranos by castrating him, assumes the rulership of the universe. Ouranos in anger predicts that Kronos will in turn be defeated by one of his own offspring, who will take his place. Kronos, believing the prediction, does the very thing that insures his own overthrow and continues the cycle: he swallows his children as they are born of the goddess Rhea. Conspiring with her mother Gaia and her father Ouranos, Rhea hides her youngest son, Zeus, and instead gives Kronos a large stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which Kronos immediately swallows. Zeus grows up in hiding and eventually defeats Kronos, liberates his brothers and sisters from Kronos' stomach, and takes his place.
There are three points to be noted from this story: first, that Kronos was addicted to power--addicted to the extent that he was willing to do anything to retain it; second, and more importantly, Kronos was unable to conceive of any other solution to the "Oedipal" problem other than swallowing his offspring; third, that Kronos by doing the only thing he knew, swallowing his offspring, brought about the very outcome he most wished to avoid.
Kronos (merged by the Romans into the god Saturn, from whom the sixth planet is named), having been defeated by his son, Zeus, and thrown into Tartarus beneath the roots of the Earth, is the god of melancholia, which we moderns call depression. His color is black. He is cold. He looks backward in time, to a happier period of life, and his thoughts are full of regret. His Roman festival, Saturnalia, is an autumn festival, in keeping with the ideas of ripeness and old age. The Romans, in contrast to the Greeks, had a somewhat higher opinion of Saturn, as the god of sowing and of seed. He was supposed to have taught the Romans agriculture.
The usefulness of studying the mythical gods as archetypes is that once we have identified a pattern of behavior and thought as characteristic of a particular god, we can often predict other characteristics that accompany the original pattern. It is even possible to plot the contemporary evolution of the archetype from the story of the god.
In our study of Kronos, for instance, we need look no further than the epidemic of depression that has swept over our nation since 1990. As we maniacally work and consume, we have reacted by becoming a depressed society, depending on Prozac and the like to keep us in the fast track. In the Renaissance, a society of depressed people would be said to be "in Saturn." Our commercial ethos has no place for Saturn, and, as psychologist and author Thomas More once noted, if the demands of Saturn are not attended to in daily life, he will sooner or later arrive for an extended visit.
A society in the fast track also has no place for children. The Census Bureau tells us that families are working six more weeks every year than in 1980, just to keep up financially. That is 240 hours fewer that could have been spent raising children. Rather than financially assist unwed mothers to stay at home and raise their children, we have decided instead to require them to work at regular employment, with or without adequate child care. More significantly, our commercial culture has single-mindedly expended billions of dollars in the media with the object of turning children into nothing more than materialistic purchasers of goods and services.
A depressed society also has no place for children, who require loving, active, relationships, the very type of relationships that are impossible in the midst of depression.
Like manic-depressive patients, the fast track society and the depressed society can be one and the same. They both seek to evade the demands of the soul, one by frenetic, mindless activity in pursuit of wealth and other earthly rewards, and the other by withdrawal from feelings, conflicts, often from life itself through suicide. If fact, an argument could be made that our civilization is committing suicide by its irrational destruction of the biosphere through pollution and depletion of resources.
The idea of this article began as the author observed the overreaction of the authorities to nonviolent protests over the last year in Seattle, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Los Angeles. As the real story is revealed, it is clear that the police in each of these cities behaved towards the protesters in ways that are remniscent of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy as well as Soviet Russia: infiltration, spying, interception of telephone conversations, extreme brutality against nonviolent protestors, preemptive arrests of protesters in anticipation of illegal actions, excessive and unconstitutional bail, destruction of protestor's property, sealed warrants and affidavits and a host of other outrages that are clearly illegal and unacceptable in a society that claims to be based on laws.
The connection with the archetype should be clear at this point. The fundamental basis of the power of the elites was challenged by the protests, nonviolent as they were. Power, as could be seen in the fall of the Soviet Union, does not only come from the barrel of a gun; it must first be a reality in the mind of the person who wields the weapon or otherwise the gun will never be used. Once doubt creeps into that mind -- the mind of the man or woman whose finger is on the trigger -- that power evaporates, just as it did in Russia.
The Soviet Union is a perfect example of the archetype at work. During most of its existence, the Soviet Union, beset by deep fear of counterrevolution, devoured its children, stuffing them into the Gulag and the mental hospitals or banishing them from its territory, only to disgorge them after its overthrow.
Are we not doing the same thing here in America? The illegal and brutal overreaction to the protesters belies a fear on the part of the elite that one of its offspring will eventually defeat it, and like Kronos, despite the fact that it is led by some of the finest minds in the world, it stupidly sees no alternative to the actions that will eventually bring about its defeat. The media, controlled completely by the power elite, kept a tight lid on coverage of the protests, in an effort to obscure the message the protests intended to convey. As an example, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, wrote hysterical column after column deriding the protesters without once revealing what the protesters were about (or the objectives of the power elite that he represents so loyally).
Eventually the nonviolence will end. Brutality engenders brutality, and the protesters will be replaced with protestors less idealistic and less willing to suffer at the hands of goons dressed in Darth Vader costumes and driving armored vehicles through crowds. During the civil rights era, the City of Jackson purchased an armored riot control vehicle, nicknamed "Thompson's Tank" after Allen Thompson, then mayor. It was rightly regarded as an outrage by the elite media, who today see no problems with the progressive militarization of the police, including the purchase of equipment more suited to the indiscriminate slaughter we usually associated with military combat rather than with keeping the peace in a neighborhood.
The message is clear: the elite that runs our country, and that increasingly controls the entire world, is perfectly willing to devour its children to maintain its hegemony. In doing so, it is acting out the Kronos archetype, doing what will eventually bring about its own overthrow.
Copyright 2000, Thomas Lowe. All rights reserved. Published in The Jackson Progressive, http://www.jacksonprogressive.com. Noncommercial reproduction of this article in its entirety is authorized, provided that this notice accompanies any reproduction.