The Unconscious Bias

Walking around the Farmer's Market on a summer morning I passed two craftswomen engaged in conversation.  What word describes the opposite of misogyny? In passing I chimed misanthropy. The second woman said that is the general term for the hatred of humanity. And the question was, what is the term used to express the hatred of men, males. I moved on because I didn't want to get ensnared in this conversation I had heard from others in different times and places.

I anticipated after the two women concluded there was no opposite to misogyny in our language, they felt that a hatred of men coming from women, was not recognized.  The second woman said it's not fair.

There is no opposite of misogyny because a hatred of males has not been a systemic tool. Women became the possession of men, chattels, and the institutions governed by men created a fear and hatred towards the feminine to justify the power men were given over women.

Less than a century ago, women who spoke out in public, who were engaged in challenging the status quo were often beaten, imprisoned and raped. It was mostly women targeted during the witch hunts. It was women who were trained to be submissive and obedient to men. It is women whose character is whacked in courts where rape is the charge. In domestic abuse cases, up to now, women were blamed for violence inflicted upon them. Our society claimed they must have asked for it. A man who beats his partner claims "she pressed my buttons".  Sexuality for a man is conquest, for a woman it is slut shaming. Doesn't every woman know this? How many more examples of men's contempt for women do we need to know? Southern states that try women who have miscarried for murder? The misogynist attacks on Hilary Clinton?

It was my assumption that the women at the market were feeling sympathy for men who were being attacked by the feminist movement. This made my blood boil. But perhaps they were saying its not fair how women are viewed. Perhaps it was the opposite of what I thought.

Yes there are women who hate men but it's not supported and justified by our social system.  Hate hurts us all on a personal community level, but when hate is used to support the violence towards a whole group of people it becomes a weapon, and weapons we can't see are devastating.

Had I inquired I might have pounced in judgement based on my assumptions.  Emotions operate first. Also I was not invited to participate in the conversation. Had they been shouting then their opinions would be open for comment, the volume entering and changing the environment.

But it's times like this when I feel there is a need for conversations about civil society and social justice, and a movement for adult education. Questions such as when do expressions of hate become a crime? When should the public intervene? In what ways are we implicated when misogyny, racism and homophobia are expressed?

Naming the Disease - Social Atomization

Henry Giroux writes in his recent Truthout article titled "Donald Trump and the Plague of Atomization in a Neoliberal Age" of Leo Lowenthal who warned back in the forties about the atomization of human beings under a state of fear. "What he understood with great insight, even in 1946, is that democracy cannot exist without the educational political and formative cultures and institutions that make it possible."

This confirms my sense that we are trying to fight a social disease with rational arguments while the supporters of fascist movements just want a messiah who will deal with the big problems so we don't have to, but who have no idea of the danger in giving unconditional power to a single ego. A functioning democratic society can be annoying and tiresome but it has many conditions that challenge power.

In a free and democratic society that pays taxes for education, justice, and social protections for the most vulnerable - we are continually being updated with facts that challenge assumptions of how we can instinctively know the leaders we pick will protect us. That we have social standards that can't be broken. Or that we will be okay as long as the economy is okay. Or, even that we have progressed and would never push a woman in front of a train because she was wearing a headscarf.

In the fifties and sixties I was given an education based on social justice. It wasn't in headlines but it underscored all that I learned. It didn't guarantee fairness or security but assumed we had a responsibility to care about one another. We didn't read Giroux, Lowenthal or Arendt, but we knew of Socrates and Orwell.

Yet many who graduated from this era were quite happy to throw it away because it wasn't perfect.

Now we are at such a stage of civil entropy we shrug while finance capital rules and public benefits are eroded. Those at the bottom are left without a means of earning a living wage, without hope, continually ground down by endless poverty and denied human dignity.

"Mass fear is normalized as violence increasingly becomes the default logic for handling social problems." Giroux writes.

If we stop to read this age and condense all the hostility around us, we will see that life itself is the enemy of fascism. Fascism silences conversation, it wants unquestioned obedience, human sacrifices, the glorious sunset, robotic armies.

Totalitarianism wants power without the human stain, without competing organisms, without reflection or question or thought. It is the muscle without a brain, The sperm without the egg. The knife without flesh. The future without compassion. The masculine without the feminine.

The corporate media keeps telling us this over and over again, in a thousand different scenes and sound bites.

If I Can't Rule the World I Shall Destroy It

This is the cry of the authoritarian narcissist, and those who support him or her. It's a cry of despair from the minds of those who believed that reason and justice ruled the world and now realizing it's the opposite, feel betrayed but cannot see their part in it. In denial and without humility they sink into the dark hole of revenge. 

The trouble is we confuse ideology or the power of ideology with right and wrong. "Ideologies may be viewed as societally defined ideational structures that exist in order to permit latent dimensions of the psyche to become manifest in the external world." says, Richard Koenigsberg in his essay "Why do Ideologies exist".

When someone says "the real world" what they mean is the "ideational structures" that we have taken for granted as "truth". What we often call human nature is the "psychic functions" that permit certain desires and fantasies to be projected onto "reality".

The ideational structure I am most affected by is the notion of control. Raised in a nation who preached progress and who embarked on racist, colonial brutality, we argued about how to rule the world but not how to care for it. 

The male head of the household made decisions for members of his family whom he viewed as weak and childlike, who needed his strength and protection.  When things didn't go as planned the ones who failed were those who could not live "up to" the patriarch's laws.  

In authoritarian cultures, the sons learned to shut down their emotions and daughters learned how to keep silent.  Love became duty. Empathy and compassion died. 

We are born into a set of beliefs that our parents and teachers assume are right, and since we need approval from our society to survive, we learn how to adjust ourselves to an external view. It works to oppress and make obedient the people who live under its power.

I grew up believing I was good and those who behaved and thought like me were also good, and if we all thought the same there would be peace. Prejudiced and privileged, I must now swallow how wrong I was. Thanks to the Republican party in the US, I see how corrupted the white colonialist is capable of becoming. I see the harm I have caused by believing I must be in control, by holding on to control and blinding myself to the effect it has on those who have less.

The more I age, the more I lack confidence in talking about big issues. How to create or be part of an inclusive and just society is beyond my control. Things are changing. There is so much I cannot know - even on my own street. I am a stakeholder in this thing called humanity but not its ruler.

When despotic opportunists threaten what little bit of civil society remains, I feel absolutely lost. Outraged that we vote for hate rather than deal with our own discomfort because we are not in control.  You and I can't rule the world. Yet we commit endless acts of violence to support the delusion that we can. Nations are not great. And we are destroying the world because we can't rule it.

Fascist and communist movements in Europe in the 1930's, according to Hannah Arendt, recruited support from the masses dismissed as being too stupid for the other parties.

Chris Hedges, in his article The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism. writes there is only "one way left to blunt the yearning for fascism coalescing around (Donald) Trump. It is to build, as fast as possible, movements or parties that declare war on corporate power, engage in sustained acts of civil disobedience and seek to reintegrate the disenfranchised—the “losers”—back into the economy and political life of the country." 

In short,  we must declare war on our addiction to power-over and use our power to care for and heal our world in any way we can.