Witnessing Atrocity

(Below is the transcript of the podcast.)

Hello and welcome. I'm Dr. Kernan Manion and you're listening to ShrinkRap.

The title of today's piece is

Witnessing Atrocity – Moving Beyond Shock, Horror, and Disbelief

And it's about countering our human tendency to shut down in response to anguish and perceived helplessness.

Now, I suspect I speak for many in calling attention to how we have been preoccupied with witnessing the events, the atrocities, happening in the war against Ukraine. And I find myself repeating over and over again this sense of unreality, this sense of disbelief, and this sense of horror. And likewise accompanying that a sense of helplessness, of not knowing what to do. And as I talk with others, I find the same response – disbelief, horror, and helplessness.

And it got me to thinking about how powerful this response is for us and how in the face of dealing with an overwhelming atrocity, we end up shutting down, and we don't seem to have the vocabulary or the methodology to move forward.

Shock and Horror Are Like Psychological Trauma

And so what I want to stress in this podcast, and I'll cut to the quick here about where I'm going with all of this, and that is that shock and horror leave us immobilized. They're very similar to the trauma response. They are an assault on the psyche in the same way that trauma is and trauma causes that shut down. It causes an avoidance so that we are not ever able to fully access the traumatic event and its underpinnings. And likewise, with regard to atrocity.

And apart from venting and sharing our incredulity and the fact of our being immobilized, we just don't have the vehicles and the practices in our lives to help us move beyond that expression.

Our Reflexive Shutdown May Be Counterproductive

So it seems that we have this ingrained pattern of denial and avoidance, and this seems to be a reflex that is part of our mental apparatus. And I think it's important now that we look at how that mental apparatus is actually serving us ill.

It is our duty, our human duty, to care for those who are being harmed. It’s also in our self-interest.

That which is causing the shock, the events and issues and situations that are causing this disbelief and resulting in this experience of horror, those events are not going away. And it is our duty, our human duty to care for those who are being harmed. And besides, it's somewhat self-interested to say that the harm that is coming to them is also harmed that is going to be going to others and possibly to ourselves.

And so it is in our best interest to move beyond disbelief and horror. We have to get beyond the immobilization. So what I'm suggesting here is that slowing this process down and really taking the time to reflect about is going to be very important. Pondering, reflecting, deconstructing this whole sequence of emotional response and immobility is really essential to our taking a thoughtful course of action.

The very process of making sense, however, the very process of looking at each of these individual components that coalesce into our disbelief and coalesce into our horror, actually threatens to throw us again into an avoidance response. That's the nature of the avoidance response - that we end up going into shutdown. And so therefore we really need to be attentive to every piece of the events, issues, and situations and feelings that are coming forward that are threatening to shut us down.

Making Sense Requires Interactive Dialog

Now, these various events and situations are immense and they require us to look at them and they also require interactive dialogue, not just dialogue with ourselves, but they require interactive dialogue to make sense of, a process that I call collaborative sense-making.

Now that collaborative dialogue, however, has to get beyond the shock, disbelief and horror response of the other. So in other words, when we're having a dialogue with others, we have to help them get beyond the shock, disbelief, horror, and helplessness. So this exploration here is about the dismantling of that response, understanding what it is that goes on and how we can then move beyond it.

Venting Only Goes So Far

Now you've heard the term venting. Well, we all have that process of venting and it can be very helpful. When you think about venting, you think about, for example, a steam kettle and letting off steam as there's been a buildup of heat. When you're thinking about venting anger, you are talking about letting the anger out in some way.

(Now that may or may not be a helpful process. And it turns out that the overall advice about letting people vent their anger may actually be incorrect. And it may actually embed a process of holding onto anger and not really getting rid of it.)

When we also think about venting, we think about venting toxic odors, not just bathroom, but also chemical factories. And again, what we're talking about is releasing something that has been contained so that we can try to detoxify it.

But it turns out that this venting process is not really allowing us to understand what is creating the toxicity. And so simply venting to one another about our experience of disbelief and horror is not really helping us move the ball down the court, if you will.

Why is it then that we have this experience?

Shocking the Psychic System

Let's take a look for a moment at the concept of shock, psychological shock, that results in immobilization. Now, many of us have had that experience of being immobilized by something very powerful. And we'll see that the immobilization response is generally associated with overload of the system, the psychic system, in some way.

Now I'm going to be referring to the "psychic system" and what I mean by that psychic system is all of the processes that go along with regard to our thinking and feeling and making sense of, and from making sense of, guiding our behavior. Now, that's a lot, a lot of things that are going on in this psychic system and the psychic system is not the sort of thing that you really want to shut down apart from times for sleep. And even there in an environment of unsafety, as we know, the psychic system really does not shut down when it senses unsafety.

So our psychic apparatus is really vital, and yet we are not allowing ourselves to get beyond the shutdown process.

The Causes of Psychological Shutdown

So what is it that causes shutdown? Let's take a look at how the mind takes in information. I'm working on a book on emotional intelligence, a new approach, a very practical approach that I've been working on for a number of years. It is I believe a new take on how the mind works.

And so what we see here is that the mind, the brain and the mind are two separate operations, by the way, stand here in reality and they then see events, issues, and situations in the external world. Now, the only way that we interact with the external world is by taking some representation of it internally. And that's what we call perception.

So that any event out there, we actually take it in through our senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, and I would argue body position being a sixth sense. So every issue event and the situation is internalized into our minds and we then interact with it there. Now I'm going to abbreviate event, issue, and situation with the letters E I S - event, issue, and situation.

Chaos - Too Many Events, Issues, and Situations To Deal With

So what happens is that sometimes we have too many events, issues and situations that are going on that caused us to get jammed up. You know how it is when you have a computer, that's got too much stuff going on in it and it's got too many programs, open, too many documents open. You may be watching a movie. All of that stuff is using up precious memory space, working memory space, and too many things happen, and it just gets jammed up. And the computer doesn't have enough RAM space in order to navigate it. And so it shuts you down.

Those who may have the Microsoft version of computers operating system, the Windows system, may get the infamous blue screen of death that's called “fatal error.” You know, "you've lost everything and you're going to have to restart the computer."

Those who are of the Apple Mac persuasion instead get a beach ball, a spinning beach ball, everything else is frozen. And the beach ball there is just continuing to spin, I guess, trying to give you the appearance that somebody else is having fun and you're not because your screen is frozen. And in any event, what you see is that the error results in your having to restart the computer. It got jammed up.

Now imagine this for a moment when it gets jammed up, when you start it, you got the same problem, again, you can imagine the frustration that mounts there. And that actually is one of the other drivers of what's causing us to continue to shut down. So we have too many issues, events, and situations and we can't tease them apart.

That is a state of mind that I call chaos. Let me give you a kind of a working definition of what I am describing here as intra-psychic chaos. Now, again, intra-psychic is in that psychic operating system of our mind that controls all of our thoughts and feelings and our sense-making and our courses of action. So what's happening here is that we take in those events, issues and situations and they are sitting there and we don't have enough space to sort them out.

Chaos is

too many events, issues, and situations occurring in too compressed a space and time and some or many of which might have immense psychological relevance and potential adverse impact. But we don’t have the capacity to tease them apart and yet recognize the urgent need to make sense of them.

And so instead of shutting down in the sense of a computer where our lights go out, we basically get them off of our plate and put them aside. We just don't know what to do with them. Now we've all had that situation where we're on overload and overload of course is one of the causes of burnout. So we can't tease them apart and we need some way of teasing them apart. But until we have that way, we end up getting them out of our way.

Some E I S Are Overwhelming In and Of Themselves

Now it also happens that we can have sometimes not too many issues, but that some issues are of such immensity and such gravity that they consume all of our psychic resources. And what happens when we have a weighty issue, it can shut down the apparatus. It's simply so overwhelming.

Info - and Crisis - Overload

Now we are also in a state of being in our minds, especially in contemporary society, where we are overburdened with too much information. We've got too much clutter in there and we don't know how to tease it apart. And further, sometimes we aren't even clear that we're getting the truth about the events, issues, and situations. So that ties up our psychological resources.

The Hint of Bigger, Scarier Implications

Another aspect of our shutdown has to do with a vague recognition that, oh my gosh, if this, then that, in other words, recognizing that if this event is going on or situation or issue, then that could lead to that. And, oh my gosh, if that goes there, then ... And then we end up having a catastrophic response and we also shut down.

In other words, we have a vague recognition of where all of this is leading and that causes us to shut down. So that's just one layer of the factors that are contributing to our shutdown response. That is in the E I S layer – events, issues, and situations.

Our Overload of Internal Dialog - Cacophony

Now, every event issue in situation that we encounter, we have a bit of an internal dialogue about.

So we are constantly making comments, sometimes judgment, sometimes descriptions of feelings, but that internal dialogue is something that we are running in our heads. We're having a running commentary. "Oh my gosh, I don't like that outfit." "Oh, that is really awful what happened." "Oh my gosh, look at that accident up there." And so we're having this commentary and it is trying to tell us something.

But when we have too many of those commentaries going on, it becomes a crowd of voices. And that crowd of voices is what I term cacophony. So that when you have too many issues, events, and situations going on, and you know that you need to process them in some way, then all these voices are coming forward and they're all jumbled. They're all tumbling one over another and a part of the mind is saying "okay, everybody, shut up." And then the mind shuts down. So what happens here is too many internal dialogues going on.

Powerful Emotions Associated With Each E I S

Now, also every event issue and situation is laden with emotional responses to it. So we'll find in our internal dialogue that we might be saying to ourselves "oh, I feel so sad about that." Or "my gosh, that really worries me" or" boy that makes me so furious. I'd like to punch that guy." So these are internal dialogues that are suggesting, of course, an emotional response.

And when we then reflect on those emotions that are coming forward, we recognize that every issue, event or situation of relevance to us, is generally associated with one or more emotions going on concurrently.

Turmoil Is a Jumble of Emotions (Predominantly Negative Ones)

Now imagine that we've got anger, anxiety, sadness, shame, and hurt all going on simultaneously in varying degrees. It gets very confusing. We don't really know what they feel like as a composite. All we know is that we feel awful and that that's not a good state to be in.

So what happens is that that combination of emotions is what I call turmoil– too many negative emotions going on in the same space and time where all those chaos events are going on. And we then have a turmoil response, this blend of emotions, and we don't know what to do with it. And so it overloads the system.

“Just Can’t Deal With It Right Now”

Now we also have a shutdown response because, well, we may not want to deal with certain issues. So powerful feelings that come up and that may make us feel inadequate or remind us of other situations in our lives may also cause us to shut down. And so shutdown occurs when we say "I just don't want to go there."

Too Many Potential Courses of Action - And Wrong Turns Are Deadly

And then we also have another reason for shutdown. And that is when we have situations and we are presented with the need for taking some form of action, for making some decision, and yet we don't know what decision to make. And for that matter, we're not even clear about the array of actions that are considered to be made in regards to a decision. We end up having a jam up and we then shut down because we just don't know what to do with it.

So those are the variety of components of what contribute to our shutdown response. So it's really important to them that we understand, aha, okay, this is now what is happening.

What Is Horror?

Now, another level as we said, of the shutdown response has to do with powerful emotion, and in this case horror. Now, when you reflect on horror, what do I really mean by horror? And what I found for myself in reflecting on this is that it is a state of mixed emotion that has components of fear, sadness, anger, and hurt associated with it. It may also have elements of shame and all five of these emotions at least for me, are the biggies, these are the emotions that comprise the turmoil emotions.

Horror Is a Form Of Intense Turmoil

And so we end up having this turmoil response, but we give it the title horror. Now, every person's horror may be different. And so while my horror experience may be predominantly composed of sadness, or perhaps disgust or revulsion (which I see as a form of pain), another person's horror experience may be based on fear or hurt or anticipated harm or anger. And what I find is that each of our experiences of horror needs to be understood, needs to be put out in the open and unfolded so that we can see each of the components of that emotion.

So that as we witness what's going on in Ukraine with people who are being harmed in this way, and killed, we need to articulate what is the nature of our experience of seeing that reality? Because what we'll find is that our experience of witnessing that is very much based upon an empathetic response. We are in fact, experiencing some mimic of, if you will, some imitation, some parallel emotional experience of that person.

Our Biologically-based Human Empathy Pulls Us In

That’s the same empathic response that went on as we witnessed 9/ 11.

When you think about that experience, we relive the experience of the passengers on the plane or the pilot and copilot, or the flight attendants, or the passengers who went to try to subdue the hijackers or those in the building itself that was struck, or those who were trying to flee the building or the firefighters, et cetera. So in other words, we relive those experiences and almost in voluntarily put ourselves in their shoes.

There's actually a neurological basis for this empathic response. And that work was very recently done in the form of mirror neurons, but that's for another exploration.

So we have this empathic response, we have this this horror response and all of those emotions are coming forward.

Powerful Negative Emotions Consume Emotional Energy

Now let's understand that when an emotional excursion occurs, emotions like this use up energy, they're like muscles. And every time you flex that muscle, it draws a certain amount of energy from the stores in order to contract that muscle.

And likewise, I'd like you to be thinking about each of these turmoil emotions as expending energy. And when you expand too many emotions, you're expending a lot of energy.

You know how it is when you do go to the gym and you try to lift weights, let's say, and you're doing that exercise, that practices on your biceps, they're called curls. Now you can do a bunch of those at a time, but then when you try to repeat it a little bit later, you can't get to the same number. And then you might try another round of those and you can't even get to the previous number because the muscles are exhausted. It doesn't mean that the muscle got weaker. It used up all of its energy, it doesn't have any more reserve left.

Powerful Negative Emotions Use Up Our Emotional Bank Account

And so emotions draw energy in that way. And part of our shutdown response has to do with depleting our emotional bank account.

So when we here then look at this shutdown response, what we see is that there is a shock response.

There's a shock response that basically causes system overload. [I meant to say - is a result of system overload.] And that system overload is just like an electrical circuit system. And it basically breaks the circuit. The circuit breaker just comes on because the system is overloaded.

And what's overloading that system are E I S, namely events, issues, and situations; and our understanding of the meaning of those events issues and situations, that understanding being our schemas, our core schemas, the way that we understand the flow of life; and those emotions, which are coming forward as we deal with each of those events, issues and situations; and all of that internal dialogue that has been going on that is a crowd of voices.

Our Intra-Psychic Circuit Breaker

All of that is causing the system overload. This intra-psychic system overload that results in a circuit breaker going off. And therefore we shut down.

Now, if we understand that, what do we do when we have a system in our house that shuts down a circuit breaker? Do we blame the circuit breaker? No, we have to realize that the circuit is on overload.

And so the only way to deal with that is to look at what it is that overloading the circuit so that we do not continue to overload it; we may have to unplug some appliances.

Now, likewise, using that metaphor, we also have to then disect out what is creating our overload so that we can then go about dismantling it. What happens when the system gets repeatedly overloaded?

So let's say that I'm going back to the computer analogy, we have the shutdown, we start it up again and no sooner are we getting working again that are shut down again. I do it again. And then it shut down again, then we re-start the computer and it doesn't even start this time. Oh my gosh, boy, that creates a panic in us because all that work is there.

So we have sort of a compounded shut down and we have a turmoil response in reaction to the preexisting turmoil. Does that make sense? That we have a compounded turmoil response where we are absolutely in a panic about so much stuff going on. And that also is a form of our own shutdown with regard to the current atrocity in Ukraine.

So once we understand that shock and shut down as a result of too many events, issues and situations - that being chaos - and all of these emotions coming forward, now we can then say, all right, if I am going to unload the circuits here so that I don't have the shutdown response, what do I need to do?

And what we need to do is we need to go about it patiently. We need to basically dismantle it piece by piece and look at each component, each event issue and situation; listen carefully to the internal dialogue that we are emitting that we're trying to call attention to; looking at each of the emotions that are coming up around each of these issues, events, and situations; and now understanding, okay, we don't have to have them all crowded all at the same time. We can then spread them out a bit here.

Pondering – Reflecting – Is Vital

Again, pondering here, reflecting, is key part of this understanding, of dismantling the shutdown response. And pondering doesn't mean obsessing. It means taking time to sort out what each of these issues are. So when we examine a bombardment by an army against the Ukrainian people, we then look at this and we say, what is it that is going on with this particular bombardment?

It is unfair.

It's dangerous.

It's hurting people.

These people have nowhere to go.

So you see, these are the internal dialogues that are coming forward. And each of those internal dialogues is associated with a powerful, emotional response. Once we then are able to articulate this, we're able to then put a label on what this event is.

It is unfair.

It is unlawful.

It is a crime of aggression.

And by the way, the crime of aggression was labeled as a war crime as part of the Nuremberg trials after World War2. And I want to make note of it now in the event that I don't come back to it later. And that is that a close study of the Nuremberg trials reveals that the trials were not just about prosecuting the wrongdoers,these individual war criminals. When you read the transcript of the prosecution, you realize that what was also on trial and perhaps even the central defendant on trial was the ideology of hate itself. The ideology of superiority, the ideology of indifference to human wellbeing.¹

Now it turns out that when we go back to reviewing issues, events, and situations, we recognize that certain actions - which are events - are evil.

They are fundamentally opposed to our understanding of permissible human behavior. And in fact, they are violations of laws governing human rights. And you then also realize that certain events and actions that are taken are so wrongful that they even go beyond the concept of respect for human rights. They seem counter to the principle of mammalian behavior, mammalian tribes don't destroy themselves. And so we realize that we are dealing with a fundamental atrocity of such grave proportion that we can't quite get our head around it.

In the opening statement in the Doctors' Trial that was presented by Brigadier General Telford Taylor, he stated

"These larger obligations [that being the prosecution of these crimes], these larger obligations run to the peoples and races on whom the scourge of these crimes was laid. The mere punishment of the defendants, or even of thousands of others equally guilty can never redress the terrible injuries which the Nazis visited on these unfortunate peoples. For them, it is far more important that these incredible events be established by clear and public proof so that no one can ever doubt that they were fact and not fable.

And that this court, as an agent of the United States and as the voice of humanity, stamp these acts and the ideas which engendered them as barbarous and criminal. “

He went on to write

"It is our deep obligation to all peoples of the world to show why and how these things happened. It is incumbent upon us to set forth with conspicuous clarity the ideas and motives which moved these defendants to treat their fellow men as less than beasts. The perverse thoughts and distorted concepts which brought about these savageries are not dead. They cannot be killed by force of arms. They must not become a spreading cancer in the breast of humanity. They must be cut out and exposed for the reasons so well stated by Mr. Justice Jackson in this court room a year ago, who wrote

‘The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.’"

Systematically Re-examining Elements of the Chaos Array

Once we have understood the gravity of the issues that we are confronting, and we have looked at the powerful emotions that come forward and examined how these threaten our very understanding of the way the world works, we then are compelled to wonder, does the aggressor understand this? Do they have a comprehension of how these actions are so wrong, so reprehensible?

And it leads us into an inquiry of if they do understand that, then is there some way that we can enter into a dialogue about our shared humanity? It also leads us into a consideration of if there is not a shared understanding of this atrocity, then what, what do we do?

Events Can Be of Such Magnitude as to Properly Be Termed Evil

One of the benefits of carefully pondering this sequence of the shutdown response, and then drawing out each of the events, issues and situations, the schemas, and the emotion that come forward, and assessing the reality that some events are so powerful that they alone befuddle us and throw us into a state of disbelief. And that some events in and of themselves are so extreme that they can be defined as evil.

Sense-making Through Analogy

Then we go about trying to make sense of what we are encountering. Now, this is where I believe the help of analogy comes to play and helps inform us. We find ourselves then asking, what does this feel like? Have I been here before? What is this most like? And as we envision that, I want to propose this scenario as one that can help us explain the gravity.

Imagine that someone, an assailant, came into a store and held up the store keeper at gunpoint, and other people came into the store and also pointed guns at everyone else in the store. And the main assailant told the store keeper he wasn't here to rob the cash register. He was here to take the store and its property, and that if he gave any opposition, he was going to shoot everyone in the store.

But then on top of that, he said that he may go elsewhere and take more. And further, he said that if anyone tries to stop me, I will track them down and I will harm them and their families.

We Are All Hostages Now

That feels like the experience that we are witnessing presently. It feels like we are witnessing a holdup and a mass murder. But not only are we witnessing a holdup and a mass murder, we are also witnessing a person who is extorting everyone and saying that if they dare enter into the protection of these people, they too will be harmed. In other words, we are all hostages. And one of the aspects of this recognition of being a hostage is that that is in part what's making us feel so powerless.

Not just that we ourselves individually don't know what to do in response to this atrocity, but also that on the larger scale, we are all trapped in a hostage situation. Now, once we go through this process of deconstruction and then teasing apart its various elements, and using analogy and metaphor to understand what this situation is about, then we may be able to draw from that experience and see what it might offer us in terms of action.

So if we think of this as a mass murder and a hostage situation, we need to draw on our experiences of containment of mass murderers and on extraction of hostages. Now I'm not a psychiatrist who has studied hostage negotiations, but I know that that field exists. And one of the principles is to try to talk down the assailant, the hostage-taker, to try to reason, to go about it gently.

And at the same time to prepare to rescue the hostages in the safest way possible.

As we then examine this kind of thinking, we realize, okay, what is it that I can do as an individual here, since I am not directly able to take any action about my own hostage-taken situation. And that is correct. We don't have any power in that.

But we do have the power of collectively reasoning where we are and validating that reality and recognizing that we are all up against a hostage-taking situation.

We are still not clear about what it is that motivates this particular assault, although some fine articles have been written recently about the philosophical, geopolitical, and ethnocentric underpinnings of this current assault. And if we can then understand these [drivers], then is it possible that we can engage the assailant in an examination of the futility of that reasoning?

Additionally, once we go through this deconstruction process and have arrived at some sort of an approach that might be taken, we recognize that we have to prioritize a series of actions. One action, of course, is containment of the aggressor. One action is rescuing of the victims. And one action is rescuing of the hostages. And one is preparing an appropriate repair process.

Another has to do with preparing for a future in which we deal with situations of such gravity. Now, what role do each of us play in that? And this is where I think most of our action needs to be devoted. And that is understanding that our passivity, our ignorance, our laziness with regard to dealing with complex matters of immense gravity has led us to this situation of being paralyzed. And that we have allowed the world to go on by, and delegated various responsibilities to specialists, if you will. So that we say that I don't have a role in that. And that has made us passive participants in this process.

What Role Am I Called To Play?

And rather, we need to be taking an approach that examines what role do I have individually in contributing to world peace and collaboration. You see, this very notion of shutting down and saying that I'm powerless, I'm helpless, is actually creating an easy out for each of us.

And rather, we then need to examine, well, what could I, or should I, have been doing, and what can I do now?

• How many of us really understand the nature of war?

• How many of us understand what constitutes the laws of war and what constitutes a war crime?

• How many of us understand how to reason and negotiate and what is the nature of diplomacy?

• Why do we have diplomacy at all?

• How many of us understand what is the nature of warfare itself and the weapons that are used and what goes into making those weapons and the investment that is put into them?

• And how much of an economy is diverted toward that?

In other words, what I'm saying here is that our own passivity in not taking a more active role in the world, in our governance of the world, in our participation in creating opportunities for collaboration, has allowed us to be in this bind. And the hope here then is that by taking a much more active role in directing the affairs of the world, then we will be able to extract ourselves from this present existential crisis.

And I would argue, we don't have any choice. We are now at a make-or-break position in our existence and the existence of this world.

And so by using a methodology like this [MindSense], a reflection that simply opens up the questioning of what else do I do beside express disbelief and horror? My hope is that by doing this dissection, this elaboration, that we can take a more thoughtful approach toward how to respond to the people of Ukraine and the people surrounding Ukraine, and even to those Russian people and troops who themselves may be involuntary participants in this massacre.

And how can we go about creating a world that then engenders healing and puts us on a course toward collaboration. So let me ask an idealistic sounding question – can leaders change course, especially if they have pursued a disastrous course? Can countries change their orientation? Well, let's simply look at what happened to Germany and to Japan after World War II. Of course they can.

Dismantling Our Own Chaos and Turmoil Clarifies Our Thinking and Opens Up the Capacity for Future Possibility

And we need to hold out that same hope that change can take place within a nation that is being led down a path of disaster. One of the things that I am astounded by in recognizing the role of turmoil is that turmoil and conflict and chaos, all of this ties up our psychological resources.

And one of the things that happens when our psychological resources are so tied up is that we are not able to devote the resources toward positive enterprise, toward creativity, toward possibility.

… we can also have the space to envision possibility.

And so by examining and dismantling as much of this chaos and turmoil that we can, we are able to free up our own resources so that we can think more clearly and act more deliberately and more thoughtfully. And we can also have the space to envision possibility. And once we have that vision of possibility, a vision that includes cooperation and collaboration toward shared values and shared objectives, then what is not possible?

Imagine this, I'm thinking of a John Lennon song from decades ago and the notion being, what if peace broke out? What if there was a war and nobody showed up? What is preventing us from creating a world of harmony?²

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

[Lennon’s live performance:

With that, I thank you very much for reading and listening to this piece on getting beyond our impasse of disbelief and horror.

And I wish you well in your endeavors. Thank you again.

I am Dr. Kernan Manion and you've been listening to ShrinkRap.

1. See Chief US prosecutor Brg. General Telford Taylor’s full opening statement here. Along with Justice Jackson’s earlier opening statement of the Nazi leader’s trials, I suspect it is one of the most eloquent presentations you will find in law: https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/special-focus/doctors-trial/opening-statement

2. John Lennon (of The Beatles) Imagine. https://genius.com/John-lennon-imagine-lyrics