Is it possible to create radical change without violence?

(first posted August 24, 2016)

"The climate crisis is here, now, but a compromised, corrupted media doesn’t want to know." says George Monbiot (The Purse is Mightier Than the Pen)

Who controls culture? Is it media, public opinion, or money?

Culture is starved of wisdom if we abandon it to the authority of the purse.  If leaders are mesmerized by money they will follow trends. They will believe they have no choice, and what has happened to western culture is the wholesale sacrifice of life to the altar of profit.

The Library of Social Science researchers and scholars have hypothesized a law of sacrifice in six ways, the first of which is "Cultures invent or create ideological concepts that they elevate into “absolutes”— worshiped as the essence of society. But how do people persuade themselves that the ideas their society has constructed are real? "

Propaganda is very sophisticated, and we often can't see how we are being persuaded if not manipulated. Our own desires are reconfigured to lead us to accept horrible outcomes. Like war, for example - do we leave our home and family to slaughter strangers or let the enemy slaughter us?

We are raised to fit into the community, to trust the authority of parents and teachers, who help and protect us, and who will punish us if we don't obey.

But what constitutes  a well functioning society? One that makes clear the rules and laws and where the masses are seen as stakeholders. It's not fear that preserves this but social responsibility and integrity.

The radical change comes from the actions of an observant citizenry that is informed, educated on history and politics, who understands the principles of fairness and the power of inclusion. Those who watch and listen to what is going on around them and weigh that against media headlines. Those who ask who benefits and who choose the greater good, and who do not trust an institution just because it has power.

This would be the seed of the radical - that we practice citizenship and refuse ideological absolutes.

Often what is presented as radical is an invasion of hostile ideologies that persuade us to sacrifice our lives for God, country, communism or capitalism. These require violence and human sacrifice in the thousands because they are a transfer of power.

Whatever is worth defending is that which asks our input and attention, our care and help - to live for it, not to die for it. 

David Brooks, Abbie Hoffman & Culture

The meritocratic establishment, who overtook the Protestant values of America before the 60's ...  "created an economy that benefits itself and leaves everybody else out. It led America into war in Iraq and sent the working class off to fight it. It has developed its own brand of cultural snobbery. Its media, film and music industries make members of the working class feel invisible and disrespected." David Brooks, The Abbie Hoffman of the Right: Donald Trump, The New York Times.

How do we connect these different cultures in a way that enables people to talk to one another so we can learn how and where to move forward? How do we include all views in a way that makes sense? Does it need to make sense?

Rape Culture

Sleeping Lion

With the current focus on the Ghomeshi trial and the way victims are being branded through the courts, it would be logical to believe that choking and penetrating someone is far more violent, far more guilty than smiling and being nice.  But in rape culture the purpose of everything is to normalize rape as a way of being. To make every living entity a victim or a conqueror. In rape culture it's far more shameful to be a victim.

We are sent to the forum as gladiators whether we want to be or not. We learn that in order to win, somebody must lose. Everything on the earth is here for the purpose of being conquered by the glorious conqueror.

It's not that we are inherently evil or good.  It is that we have been, through the experiences of our ancestors, traumatized.  We have learned how to hide who we are in order to survive.  We have learned how to entertain ourselves with games that we might win so we don't address the depth and breadth of this oppression.

So it comes down to this - am I the rapist or the raped? Am I the winner or the loser? Am I the user or the used? Will I challenge what I know is wrong or recede behind the door of my home - the only sanctuary where I am allowed to be me. Will I lock those doors so no-one can get in?  Will I allow my children to enter school and the work place to be psychologically raped every time they are compared with sluts, idiots or monsters? Will I learn how to be well adjusted in this world, or if not entirely adjusted, will I survive?

The proof of this rape culture, this acceptance of violence as normal human behaviour, is the way the legal system works and media's acquiescence to power. It is not the rapist that is on trial, examined and interrogated, who must prove he is innocent, but the victim who must prove they never uttered a word, stood, sat, smiled or fluttered in any way that could be perceived as "a come on".

The purpose of rape culture is to blame the victim, to heave contempt on the tender shoots of life, and to turn innocence into powerlessness, to brutalize every diverse expression of life into silence or submission.

Cultures of rape see women as walking wombs, walking threats to man made power. Cultures of rape see men as instruments to serve the system - soldiers, CEO's, policeman, drivers, strategists - they must serve without question - and those who do question will be crucified and forgotten. Human nature is the menace and it must be reduced, ridiculed and discouraged. Misogyny will end when science has created the means to make eggs and sperm in a lab without using what nature has created.

This is the world of psychopaths who have made themselves slaves to the system so that ultimately they might make the world a playground for their egos.

This lion of justice is sleeping. Rape is not about the minds and hearts of men and women at all.  It's about the absolute triumph of the system with all its purchased institutions, over the whole of nature.

Desire, Design and the Operating System

It appears to me that human history and all its inventions dwell within a circle of power.  The glorification, the use and abuse of power interacts with our human endeavours mostly beyond our control. There are nations and people who possess power but not forever.  Anyone who has had power over others or things fears they cannot hold their control forever.  As individuals and institutions we create laws, culture (media) and ideology in order to maintain an illusion of control, to protect ourselves from chaos.  If I were to say this is the truth - it would be my attempt to wield power over this instant.  If I were to study philosophy, science, law and culture to the breadth and depth of my capacity it would be in order to influence the world.  It's too late in my life to attempt this even if I could, and even if I achieved it (500 years after William Shakespeare), it would be for a brief moment in time and place, and it would be a call for the next player to deconstruct this theory.

As news stories appear daily about our prime minister, the mayor of Toronto, or the president of the United States as they play out the extent of their given powers while they can, some may believe they possess powers beyond their position and that all they have to do is manage it well. But all political leaders must negotiate with the ever changing directions of power in their lives - the interests that support them and attack them are like tennis balls on a court which they must hit and send back to their opponents.

All that we desire and design is negotiated with other desires and designs which we cannot see or even plan for. There is always the pressure of the operating system projecting and sabotaging our strategies.

Our human history has led us to believe that we possess the power to control the world and we give those willing to stand up as leaders our loyalty, as long as they convince us they can protect us from the chaos of invading interests. But when our leaders break or reveal cracks in this promise we sack them with derision and ridicule.

This is a very violent game - to the senses of all who are involved.  It seeks scapegoats and sacrifices.  It allows millions to suffer starvation, genocide, indignity and madness, mostly because we cannot see power as something beyond our will, that no matter how much we worship and strategize, we can never control.

Because we are addicted to our own sense of entitlement we believe our leaders hold the key to our security through some kind of magic.  The esoteric rites are for high priests only, who are trained to keep the secrets of their submission to powers we cannot name or see.

So how can we live free of oppression? First by understanding that the oppressor is not a person or party or nation or corporation - it is a co-dependent game of denial.   They play their part sometimes well, sometimes appallingly, but the news reveals they are exhausted.  Even the largest corporation treating civil society like an obstruction to their goals, installing  puppet governments to do their bidding, can only maintain their illusion if we keep believing in it.

If power is within and beyond us then we must learn how to negotiate with power as we would with nature - that it belongs to history and the future, to our ancestors and our great-grandchildren.  This requires a sense of shared ownership and responsibility.

The Gun - a failed symbol of power

The power of America since the second world war is indisputable. Achieved through weapons, propaganda, and money, this power is as oppressive to the people who wield it as it is towards the designated enemy.

When a young gunman enters Sandy Hook Elementary School and kills twenty children, the world grieves.  We struggle to find answers to questions, too big to grasp.

But the issue is larger than guns themselves. It is what they represent in our psychology. The phallic symbol representing male fertility has been worshiped in various ways for centuries.  Since we have learned that fertility requires more than one member, we are required to understand the complexity of nature.  So effective, healthy masculinity is no longer served by the worship of a phallus any more than femininity is represented by a uterus.  Yet phallic symbols exist everywhere in images of power.

Once power was idealized as a heavenly distant god, a monarch, a ruler or military might, it separated its true nature from the power of life.  Nature, life, became the object to conquer, to dominate, to exploit. Our sexuality became a political tool, and the feminine symbol of cycles, circles, and vessels were dropped, while the phallus was made immortal by metal. Complexity, emotion and human nature was seen as weak. A man was required not just to be courageous in defending his tribe but by immortalizing himself as part of an army, a soldier.  He had to become super-human as being human was not good enough. Later he became a sword, a gun, a bomb, an aircraft. Or a minister to the divine weapon interpreting the universe through a harsh patriarchal ruler, and was required to wipe out the realities of existence, the doubts, the humanity, through staunch doctrines that require unquestioning obedience.

I am not saying this is God.  I am not attempting to explain God, but to separate divine power from the doctrines that have ruled our societies for centuries:  the corruption of the universe to serve an ideology. So the gun as the ultimate phallic symbol destroys life at its spiritual base first and then destroys fertility, whether it be new life or creativity.

The world's great religions began with men who changed their world through insight and courage and who  triumphed over mortality through resurrection into the afterlife. They mostly preached a reverence for life, not that man should transcend it. Their messages have been corrupted too, in order to fit the ruling ideology.

Men who are born here are not gods, just as women are not goddesses. We are human and mortal. We can be harmed by war, famine, climate change, abuse, torture and broken hearts. Wealth or fame does not nullify our existence. Neither does it exalt it.

We have, for the most part, gotten over the phallic symbol.  Guns do not fertilize. They intimidate. They turn men into robots. They kill.  But mostly they kill creativity, sensitivity, empathy, reason, exploration, love, joy.  They render us powerless to be who we are or could be.  They render life redundant.

But life contains confusion, pain, sorrow.  We are vulnerable to the emotional weather this brings and if we don't receive the care we need when despair falls heavy around us, we can't process it.  Certainly not in a culture that values things more than life, that preaches we are worth the sum of our gadgets and diplomas, and are required to prove ourselves not just with an inventory of these things, but with more than everyone else.  This breeds despair and contempt for our own lives and the lives of children and all those who have less power than we at any given moment. Reason tells us that we can't all be winners. And so we can't be comforted by our mothers, fathers, siblings and teachers.

It's this despair that rots our culture and makes some of our brothers so alienated they seek validation in guns. In this delusional state we shall hasten our own demise, and ultimately the womb we call the universe shall carry on without us.