The Orthodoxy of Power is Hidden

Presidents have the power to start wars, send their bombs and guns to another country and start blowing apart the lives, homes and history of other people.

The amount of pain and harm that comes from weapons of destruction is beyond measure (or at least my capability to measure). Announcements are like - Russia has bombed Ukraine. It makes me feel sick. Another article I read recently said a very wealthy American offers the Republican Party billions of dollars. There are quotes popping up from different sources to reveal money is all that's needed to rule the world of 8 billion people. 

Boys still in their teens, still confused about how the world works, what is right, what is wrong, can enter a classroom with guns and kill children and teachers while police are unsure whether to enter or not. This is the report from a school in Texas.

Anyone who has lived, given birth, nurtured kin, worked to make a business successful, risen to be part of a team of doctors in a hospital operating room, has earned a bachelors degree in science or flower arranging, or suffers from hunger and poverty, must know the world of modern capitalism or democracy or communism, is suffering. We all suffer said my yoga teacher. Writers, teachers, comedians, CEO's, kitchen staff, cleaners, parents, children, dogs, cats, know of suffering.

All, even the narcissistic warmongers held up as heroes - suffer. Famous good people like Gabor Mate, Margaret Atwood, Rebecca Solnit, Justin Trudeau, suffer.

What can we do about it? Anatol Rapoport (the game theory expert) told me many years ago "there are no solutions".

However that doesn't mean we can do as we please, or that it's too late. Bad news piles up because it would seem naive to talk as though there is an answer.

So the problem is not just the evil doers in the world, its that we have lost the narrative to find a way through in the story of civilization. To sing songs, write stories, play tennis, create symposiums among world leaders, clean the house and cook supper, is to trivialize our world. We've got to rule the world, keep every ego in line, threaten bad guys and MAKE SURE all shall be well. And we have a list of punishments to threaten the bad guy, yet if we treat one another as though they might be bad guys, we create the problem.

We alienate the humans who are supposed to live in peace and solve problems, who must maintain all societies to the utmost moral standard. But we don't hold the same views on what must be done, or not done, so our best efforts are lost in wars and arguments.

It's a long loop. What must be done, who is to blame, who are the good, and who are the bad.

All of this is judgement. Trying to solve a world of traumatized people by calling out what's wrong and who is to blame just makes things worse. Using the stick instead of the carrot has been the method for thousands of years and the chains are around the body of humanity.

This is where love comes in. I know it's not a singular cure. But listening to people before they become alienated and violent offers the element of healing and belonging. This means no one of us is responsible for getting rid of violence, hate and greed. And this is not a solution, but the world of our relationships brings us back into a coherent narrative where we use our best selves to help one another, to intervene where we see suffering, to ask others to participate. The world cannot be saved by a ruler, a religion, a law, or a dollar - the world is a cabbage. It requires life to be engaged. It grows, it lives and dies. Where we are is today and problems need our response, our engagement, our love and our care.

Change the World

 

Today I heard on radio another young man died

from a drug overdose.

The hosts talked of how to fix this terrible loss

young people with their lives ahead of them 

in a nation where they could become

journalists, radio programmers

inventors of some new device

great leaders, healers. 

This is not a difficult thing to fix

the only species that threatens is us,  but

the last few hundred years has us addicted 

to the status quo and made our survival unlikely.

Young minds cannot endure the endless insult 

of lies— they cannot adjust easily to the principle 

control all life  to be at the top

by various means separating their desires 

from who they are—making ambition a game show

interrupted by messaging from sponsors

so — we either become a success or we hang 

on to integrity knowing who we are

either love and be loved or compete, 

sell out, dish up, abuse power and win

but we can’t keep winning over brutality 

by the despot needing public applause

from his own shattered self esteem

every time we choose winning over all else

see the grave stone etched

—here lies humanity beneath the rock

of a planet we murdered for vanity’s sake

Dr. Hate

 

We feel many different things in a day. Sudden joy when an old friend connects. Sudden embarrassment when something we did failed. Defeat when a struggle doesn't work out the way we hoped. Hunger when we haven't had enough to eat. Fear when we meet someone who doesn't like us. Emptiness when we've lost sight of our dreams and ambitions, believing we are useless. Hate when a group of people or interests want to silence us, make us the enemy. Hate instilled in children against others who we believe are different from us. Cultivated hate when a group of people attempt to gain power by preaching the problem of others identified, for our benefit, as the enemy.

Deeper feelings like solidarity to a group who have gone to great lengths and expenses to explain and gaslight those who they feel sure are to blame, connecting links and dots to create the "final solution". These feelings drive an individual to a state of powerlessness or false saviour.

We can recover different feelings but when we are surrounded by the fog of hate and disempowered by the enormity of the manufacture problem, we are, in our own minds and hearts, homeless.

The Trumps and Hitlers of our world also suffered. Caged in by stories of warriors and gods, saviours and witches, barbarians and saints.

Hate requires  a complex pecking order. The sorry souls at the bottom and the ruling conqueror at the top - king, president, emperor or CEO.

The greatest threat to our survival is not the endgame, it is the beliefs that sow fear, that make us feel so small we are nothing. People who have suffered terrible trauma become something other, twisting and racking themselves to find relief, to fill themselves up with the right drug to take away the pain.

Dr. Hate is not a person who has learned how to control the masses, it is a cloud that infects who we are, how we see ourselves and destroys civil society. 

We must learn to see ourselves as who we actually are, not what vanity has whipped us up to be. We are worthy of love and nourishment, a society that heals and comforts the isolated ego. We need to install love and respect into the economy.

Call Bullying What It Is!

 "People are entitled to object to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, but the hard-right politics that has crossed the Atlantic tells some people that they no longer need respect the facts, no longer need to listen to others, no longer need to reason or debate. They need only assert, threaten and attack. This new barbarism, combined with the lethal ways in which driving changes us, encourages the worst tendencies and the worst people to come to the fore. We must defend our communities, street by street." 

George Monbiot. https://www.monbiot.com/2022/08/10/streetlife/

Call out thugs, bullies and dictatorships when you see them in your neighbourhood. Name them for who they are and name the systems that elevate them. They want to dismiss the pain of the sensitive soul, ridicule the thoughtful comments of people who have been raised to believe they live in a democracy.

TomDispatch/Nina Burleigh: Right Wing Extremists Are Making Fiction Come True

 

Dear Men

The  Right Wing Exremists are more than misogynist. The movement is anti-life. If it continues to play extreme right-wing warnings that work to reduce a human to "a pussy" - you will suffer, not from angry women, but the further encroachment of authoritarianism. 

Remember WWII after Kristallnacht where German citizens were encouraged to hate their neighbours, labelled Jews, by breaking the windows of their businesses. It escalated to depriving these neighbours of their right to live. As well as destroying the families with Jewish ancestry, they destroyed people of colour, musicians, artists, thoughtful intellectuals. All of Germany was destroyed politically and spiritually.

German citizens at the time of WWII were labelled Nazis regardless of whether they agreed with Hitler's goals or not. Those with a conscience also died in the camps and those who didn't agree with Hitler were too afraid to stand up were tortured by the bombs destroying their fatherland and the guns of others killing their kin in battle. 

When brutality rules a nation it is natural to feel afraid while being ordered to take their bodies to the battlefield.

I have friends who are not comfortable with abortion and who are capable of expressing why. Friends who are good Christians. Also its really easy to take a stand on one side or another, and blame whoever is different. I understand why some believe in God and some don't. I understand why some men hate women and are unable to admit it.

I understand why power-over is such an easy fall-back position and I understand how it rules our world. Most of all I can see how politics isolates and separates us.

Politics is the soap-box, the strap and the gun that dehumanizes us when it is designed to take our power away. 

Hitler managed to take away the power of all Germans and other Europeans. He put us all through hell and destroyed those sent to death camps. 

Politics, economics, are weapons of mass destruction when we are reduced to chattels. Women as pussies, men as soldiers. I am not saying that anyone who fights is destroyed. I am saying that every authoritarian government turns us all into wooden discs on a chess-board. We are shuffled, insulted, tortured and discarded by a patriarchal culture that values action and death, and expresses contempt for feelings, love, compassion and empathy.

(information here taken from article found in scheerpost) 

Nina Burleigh, a TomDispatch regular, is a journalist of American politics and the author of six previous books. Her seventh, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic (an updated paperback version of which will appear in July from Seven Stories Press) is a real-life thriller that delves into the official malfeasance behind America’s pandemic chaos and the triumph of science in an era of conspiracy theories and contempt for experts.