The Ubiquitous Nature of Power

Why would previously elected governments cut services that would ultimately harm the economy when they build their campaigns on the economy?

Why are essential services, that intervene in crises before they reach their ultimate social cost, being underfunded or shut down?

Why does the corporate media in its news and entertainment programs promote an image of our world as greed-driven, macho, and violent while all the serious discussions around how to effectively deal with the problems are slotted in the back pages or late night shows?

Why has so much hatred been directed towards those who love or pray differently and why has so much contempt for the poor and marginalized been inflamed and so little done to alleviate the misery?

Why have our governments failed to care for the environment upon which our future health and wealth depend?

At first these may seem like separate issues but to me, they are all connected in one very important way – they lead towards social breakdown and ultimately destroy civil society.

So it appears that some in government and media, actively support and work towards the destruction of the entity they are supposed to be governing. It also appears as though people in Western democracies are voting for the parties that are destroying their futures.

Is this intentional? Are there powerful interests conspiring to bring about a slow and painful end to the human project, or has something gone terribly wrong in the way we identify with the collective future?

David Suzuki points out that we have “developed a way to estimate economic activity by measuring the value of all transactions for goods and services” called the Gross Domestic Product. However it doesn’t seem to include the services that come from government – that is disdainfully called taxes.

Corporations measure their success not by the quality of their products or how it helps people, but by how much their stock sells for. Politicians measure their success, not by what they have done for their constituents, but by how many votes they get.

In essence, what this means is that the health and well-being of humanity and the environment, is “overburden” to use a mining term. What this means for us and our children is less health care, lower education in terms of learning rather than superficial tests, less public transportation, more pollution environmentally and culturally, the silencing of real debate, the end of science, a global distancing from the reality we live, and a greater focus on invasive corporate measures.

Prisons will be filled with environmentalists and activists for social justice. People will be afraid to talk to their neighbours. City centres will become territorial battle grounds for drug lords. The sensitive and educated will die quietly from drug overdose. Families will break up under stress. Suicide will overtake obesity as the major epidemic. Bigotry, prejudice and balkanized wars will make the commons uninhabitable.

If we want to know what this looks like, think of all the failed nation states constantly in turmoil while transnational companies extract huge profits. Think of pipelines covering the earth, the sky filled with industrial chimneys and dark satanic mills powered by slave labour getting crushed or burned in hazardous warehouses. To use a quote attributed to George Orwell “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

The enemy is not one particular country, the enemy is that dissociated power universally accepted as force, rather than something that flows from our relationship to the environment in which we live. When we cease to look inside ourselves for the capacity to care and organize a humane world, we become victims or sociopathic egos punishing all that we can’t control.

We have come to this stage not because of progress but because of a ubiquitous disorder which we must examine to begin the work of healing. Our power lies in many things but mostly in accepting we are vulnerable, fallible and mortal.

This post was first published in The Flying Shingle then online at Episyllogism.

What is Loving Kindness?

Buddhists teach that everyone suffers. Even those who appear to be cold behind their sense of wealth and superiority. Even those who work in offices where they are expected to police the law. Even those who are hired to torture prisoners.

Given power in civil society is an added stress and loving kindness makes it a kind of torture in itself.  For example, a surgeon or medical doctor learns what causes pain in his or her patients. A prison guard is expected to keep people in their cages. A drug dealer sells a different kind of prison to his customers. Strategists plan the destruction and killing of people they haven't met.

When you look at it deeply, politics and business demands a separation from emotion, sympathy, compassion — for the sake of profit. We call it rationality. Winning the profit margin means selfishly planning your days around meeting your goal, getting more, convincing others to give you what you want, paying attention to how you look, what you wear, how you sound and smell. 

According to brain development a crocodile doesn't have the capacity to feel pity towards the food it eats as it rips the flesh of its meal. But humans are born with the capacity to consider the pain of a fish with a hook through its face. 

Empathy comes early in the life of a human unless it is shut out — consciously or unconsciously. Any animal that gives birth must care for its young by caring what happens to it and is given the "gift of stress" along with brain development.

In civilization, social practices either nurture the awareness of empathy or cut it off. A society run by those who have no connection to caring for others, tends to design its business to separate us from our natural empathic brain signals. 

Big business (not small proprietor owned storefronts), including politics, is run mostly by those who have succeeded or who never developed the capacity to feel connection to another, to feel their pain, or to observe the face of grief.  They are called psychopaths or sociopaths. Their brains are wired to bypass concerns or feelings for others.

What pain does it cause a CEO to cut thousands of jobs in the country they live, in order to plan more profit, and to keep doing it because it's his or her job to do that? When does the signalling for success get turned off?

Examples of dead fascists like Stalin and Hitler reveal millions of deaths are not enough to satisfy. Slave owners willingly organized public displays of brutality to make their point.

Business demands that its practitioners cut off their senses if the only thing that registers, the only feedback, is a number on the bottom line. Pressure wipes out whatever your brain measures in order to take it back to the reptile. 

You cannot see or feel what you're doing to the planet, to your children, to your pets, or even your property — you must consistently keep your mind occupied on that fraction of who you are in order to play the game. Act faster, be more cruel, more alienated, lonely and ultimately swallow that learned contempt on yourself as you do to all life.

At what point would you feel the loving kindness you once possessed? How far back would you have to go to call on that? 

Loving kindness may be an ethic discussed in various religions or beliefs, but it's part of human capacity and could save our lives.

How is your sic-o-meter?

Is your skin uploading too much information these days? Do you see strange reports on Facebook and Twitter?  Phrases quoted, beliefs expressed, coming from the mouths of those who should know better? Are you wondering what happened to our leaders and our stateswomen?  Do you ask why there is no good news anywhere?

Well you have joined the world as you perceive it.  Your body is now a nervous substrate of all the information you read, see and hear.  Your sic-o-meter is working.

If you feel there is nothing you can do to respond effectively to all this noise, you are not alone.  What I think might be happening to your mind-body receptor (and mine) is the convergence of all those tweets, headlines and status updates. They are pureed into a felt-sense of the world which may feel like you are well-informed.

This puree, already containing your tribal associations, your habits and prejudices, will blend with external information. Rationally you may think that a mud slide in the Kootenays doesn't affect you, or that suicide bombers in Pakistan are not a threat to your loved ones.  You may not even stay awake at night worrying about climate change outside of a heat wave in summer.  You may receive the hourly news with equanimity and calm as though all the bad things just happen to others.

But our sic-o-meter could be working a lot better if we are able to see the many ways in which we are connected to this world.  If any news story elicits empathy for those who are personally affected, then our sic-o-meter does more than hear and internalize the 'out-there'. It tells us how we can respond, emotionally, intellectually, and physically to the world we live in, so that we are not powerless, not simply sitting in the audience watching a movie.

This doesn't mean taking sides. Or giving all our savings to charity. Or declaring our political opinions with everyone we meet.  The way in which you or I can respond is as a member of this global human family.  It is compassion not judgement, that gives us the power to respond authentically.  Judgement  without empathy is an alienation technique that gives us the fleeting sense of being innocent bystanders.  We are not, we are stakeholders.