Oedipus, Trump and Hitler, The Wall, Pink Floyd

This will be a stump of a future post (oh, how often does one start that way and never come back to finish!!??) about Oedipus and the urge to improve oneself or one's nation by removing the Other.
     In the Oedipus myth they did it: they thought the way to ensure the safety of their city was to kill the monster that was causing all the death and destruction. They awaited a saviour to make everything all right again. Oddly, Oedipus was both the one who understood the riddle - ie that evil is within us - the 4-legs-in-the-morning, 2-legs-in-the-noontime, 3-legs-in-the-evening one - and the one who played the saviour and made Thebes feel safe and rescued for a bit.
     Things went horribly wrong, due to the whole killing-the-father-marrying-the-mother thing, and of course they had to kill someone to cut that evil right out of Thebes. But the seed of the whole situation was way back - it was already in the ruling family before they had their beloved baby son brought up far away so that he couldn't possibly fulfil the awful prophecy.
     Which of course was the mechanism for his not recognising his father or mother and the means by which the prophecy was able to be fulfilled - fulfillment by attempted avoidance.
     The evil was within them right from the start - actually from before the start.
     The saviour that was supposed to purify them by removing the evil monster - he killed the Sphinx, didn't he? actually brought the original evil right back into the heart of their civilisation.

     Hence Trump doesn't have any more hope of making a better world by building a wall and only keeping pure Americans - however he defines them - and sending everyone else away or refusing them entry - than Hitler did.
     In my youth I thought we'd learnt those lessons and any countries still caught up in internecine wars would eventually see sense. How one-sided do you have to be to be blind to the feelings and point of view of the people that a quirk of time and geography has deemed to be your enemies?
     Now I think we're in a downward arc of the circular nature of things.
     And I think all those who ask "how could all those supposedly nice people in the 1930s support Hitler?" are about to see how.
     My hope? That rather than strictly circular, we're in more of a "two steps forward, one step back," sort of a system, and that enough people have progressed morally sufficiently to recognise the beginnings of a recurring pattern and to keep speaking out and doing something about it until the pattern can be reversed.
     And may we have more and bigger steps forward, and fewer, smaller, slower steps backward.