Your Task is to be Human

[Public domain], Wikimedia Commons

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one. Ludwig Wittgenstein

The whole single great problem is what? Perhaps coming to terms with the diversity of life? Or is it daring to be human when the whole structure of your world wants you to be an example of the current value, such as making money?

There are many ways you can make money. For example the oldest profession - prostitution. But it is a dangerous one and not too well rewarded unless you learn how to prostitute whatever commodity is most highly prized.

Taking care of infants is not too high on the stock market. Teaching children and adults is fraught with conflict. Those who want to teach us how to think are often under attack. Trading in stocks and shares may be lucrative if you do it a particular way. Being a doctor or a lawyer is well paid in the Western capitalist world if your clients are rich - but if the human part of you also wants to help and not to harm then you may work for the poor and be poorly paid.

Can it be said that the measure of success is how much money you make? Of course it can and often is, but whether it's true or not requires some other study. For example, drug dealers might be the richest people on a short term basis.  Or a long term if you are the chief and not near the front where you will be required to torture and kill or be tortured and killed.

Generally humans have lots of nervous information blinking through the body and brain. When you are born you form an attachment to your mother if you're lucky. But that also means you form attachments to your father, your siblings, grand-parents, aunts or uncles.  If you are loved by them you can't help but love them back.  If they emphasize success, wealth, etc., more than unconditional love, then you may feel driven to find that elusive success that no-one really explains but expects you to achieve.

I think the problem is, that we live among so many lies about success and how to achieve it, that we are lost. Being human is taken for granted when we don't really understand what it means. Because of those messages blinking through our bodies we suffer pain - headaches, insomnia, sadness, fear.

Some harm themselves for the sake of approval, some dare not think for the pain of it, some come to the conclusion that the only way to survive is to wield power through intimidation because so much of our narrative glorifies the conqueror and silences the victim.  Some believe that the only way to win is to get rid of the blinking lights through addiction to work, power, drugs, alcohol - or whatever is available.

With each century it seems that our problems stem from symptoms caused by previous symptoms of not knowing what it means to be human. The extent to which we are willing to threaten all life on this planet in order to get a brief fix indicates to me we could lose our humanity forever and not even know it.

Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/l/ludwigwitt147258.html

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one. Ludwig Wittgenstein
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/l/ludwigwitt147258.html

Arrested Development and the Future of Humanity.

Endless news reports on mainstream and social media indicate that while we are in a mess, threatened by climate change, dismissal of civil society and its needs such as education, health, art and security – we do have ways of challenging the status quo.  We have the evolution of our human nature that is far more complex than is given credit. We are at risk but the world has not ended yet.

We are stuck in a mythology that arrests our development, as our political representatives cease to problem solve but focus instead on who is to blame, shopping for scape-goats. We shake at our breakfast table listening to all the pundits warn of the many threats to our security until we are convinced we have no power at all.  

Eventually we stop planning, fundraising, organizing, sharing and caring, turn inward until the next bad driver, rude neighbour, or abusive boss, reveal everything that is wrong with the world and then we blow up in rage. At the end of the day, we return home, turn on the TV and watch hours of insults and brutality for entertainment.

To fight back against this continual, sensory oppression, we need to own the future in the way we care for our family, our jobs, our clubs and our places of worship.

We are not spectators, we are investors, stakeholders.  This is what it means to be citizens in a civil society where we treat each other with respect. It’s not a competition, it’s not a game. There are helpers, advisers and experts ready to support our community building. They are not always right or wrong. The heroes are not gun totting movie stars,  but your neighbours, ready to help, grateful for what others have done.

We give and take, celebrate our achievements, acknowledge our mistakes, become literate in what works and what doesn’t.  Take on the small tasks until we develop the confidence to take on the big ones.  

Trust is developed in community when we refuse to divide it by class, skin colour, or religion. People are less threatening when we get to know the person behind the fear, and learn to listen. We learn how to be vulnerable and to be sensitive to the ways in which others are vulnerable.

Then the scales fall from our eyes as we realize we have been trained to see our world and ourselves as a construct for the ruling system, rather than who we are.  We become more curious about how our best interests are sabotaged by fear and prejudice, and how we can transcend those pitfalls, and that most crises are fixable. That we have more courage to face up to the challenges of the unknown than we thought.

Then it becomes clear to us that being human is the task. That all other things like being a parent, a teacher, a police officer, a councilor, a president, needs study and education, but most of all requires the continual engagement of the heart and mind.

Women Who Have Made the World Better - A List You Won't Find in Mainstream Media

"I am those 66 million girls who are deprived of education." Malala Yousafzai. Nobel Lecture, 2014 Peace Prize

Malala Yousafzai 2014 Peace Prize 

Optimism of Petals

Svetlana Alexievich 2015 Literature
Youyou Tu 2015 Physiology or Medicine
May-Britt Moser 2014 Physiology or Medicine
Alice Munro 2013 Literature
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf 2011 Peace
Laymah Gbowee 2011 Peace
Tawakkol Karman 2011 Peace
Elinor Ostrom 2009 Economic Sciences
Herta Muller Literature 2009
Elizabeth Blackburn 2009 Physiology or Medicine
Carol Greider 2009 Physiology or Medicine
Ada Yonath 2009 Chemistry
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi 2008 Physiology or Medicine
Doris Lessing Literature 2007
Wangari Maathai 2004 Peace
Linda Buck 2004 Physiology or Medicine
Elfriede Jelinek 2004 Literature
Shirin Ebadi 2003 Peace
Jody Williams 1997 Peace
Wislawa Szymborska 1996 Literature
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard 1995 Physiology or Medicine
Toni Morrison 1993 Literature
Rigoberta Menchú Tum 1992 Peace
Nadine Gordimer 1991 Literature
Aung San Suu Kyi 1991 Peace
Gertrude B. Elion 1988 Physiology or Medicine
Rita Levi-Montalcini 1986 Physiology or Medicine
Barbara McClintock 1983 Physiology or Medicine
Alva Myrdal 1982 Peace
Mother Teresa 1979 Peace
Rosalyn Yalow 1977 Physiology or Medicine
Betty Williams 1976 Peace
Mairead Corrigan 1976 Peace
Nelly Sachs 1966 Literature
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin 1964 Chemistry
Maria Goeppert Mayer 1963 Physics
Gerty Cori 1947 Physiology or Medicine
Emily Greene Balch 1946 Peace
Gabriela Mistral 1945 Literature
Pearl Buck 1938 Literature
Irène Joliot-Curie 1935 Chemistry
Jane Addams 1931 Peace
Sigrid Undset 1928 Literature
Grazia Deledda 1926 Literature
Selma Lagerlöf 1909 Literature
Bertha von Suttner 1905 Peace
Marie Curie 1903 Physics, 1911 Chemistry

See the whole list here http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/themes/other/womens-day-2016.html

Life Afterlife

afterlife is a TV series about a woman called Alison who sees dead people and the reaction she gets from the outside world – news media, psychologists, ex wives, ex friends and anyone who is trying to cope with the demands made on them.

The ghosts appear as solid living people.  They have strength and power and yet their existence is denied.  Why? Who is it that keeps the ghosts alive? Mostly the deniers who want to impress their rationality on the world, who vehemently insist that ghosts do not exist because they can’t see them – therefore all mediums are frauds.

At one point the main character was institutionalized because of a mental illness which we don’t get to know  beyond the various standard labels fought over by the reigning experts.  There Alison was tortured in the way patients are usually tortured by living in the sanitized ward where they are not entitled to own their knowledge. Alison is a victim, marginalized, unable to get on with creating peace in her life. Accosted by people suffering from grief, hated by strangers who accuse without knowing her, and the dead people who need to get a message to their loved ones.

The last episode I watched begins with a man who suffocates his lover in their bed which Alison gets to know about through a woman who knocks on Alison’s door seeking help. She begs for Alison’s help. Out of compassion Alison stays at the apartment and experiences the death of the murdered woman.  The psychologist who is studying Alison for a book on psychic-phenomena, and who wants to protect her while inserting his own theory on everything she says, goes with her and sees the murderous ghost.  Only he doesn’t suffer the symptom of being suffocated – he just witnesses it.

There is a scene before the murder where you hear the man instruct the woman not to turn on the radio, talk to anyone outside the apartment, or to make a sound within. In effect she is to be invisible, inaudible, not real.  She is not to exist.

The psychologist, Robert, who is haunted by the presence of his dead son, denies any of the phenomena he felt at the spooked apartment, explaining it in terms of his psychological reasoning.

After the death of his young son, Robert is frozen in guilt and sorrow, his wife leaves, marries someone else and is now pregnant. She feels betrayed by Robert’s interest in Alison and demands that he cut ties with her. She accuses him of betraying the memory of their dead son. 

The story is filled with characters making demands on others.  Demanding they see the world as they do.

After Alison insists that the woman (who sought her out) should  leave the apartment immediately because her life is in danger, a centre-fold news article reveals the true identity of the woman. She is a journalist who assumed another name. The journalist “proved” Alison is a fraud because she created the haunting story. Again Alison finds herself betrayed, under attack, alone and reviled.

At the end of the episode the ghosts re-enter the vacant apartment claiming victory that they have returned to this beautiful place that no-one wants because it is haunted.

Whether ghosts are real or not, or whether we create ghosts, or ghosts are created to keep us afraid of the unknown is never answered. But I suspect this series is mostly about the loneliness of people who live in a culture built on ideologies and experts and who find themselves alone because the world demands adherence yet does not listen to them.  We live in a nattering, chattering age, calling forth the Shrew and taming her, replaying Othello and his Iago, creating the new Hitler and Stalin, calling those who see the world differently – idiots and frauds. 

Why does our culture in this post-modern world insist on trying to prove the existence or non-existence of phenomena? What does the journalist have to gain?  What does the ex wife have to gain? What does the psychologist have to gain? And what do the ghosts gain?

Review - Refugees Welcome: poems in a time of crisis

Refugees Welcome – poems in a time of crisis. Edited by Oliver Jones. Eyewear: 20/20 special edition (2015) www.eyewearpublishing.com.

“We like the idea of the South. / Until it knocks on our door.” (Rishi Dastidar) This is the first stanza of the first poem in this small and powerful anthology.

Poems take risks, make generalizations, in order to get to the defining element of psycho/social reality. Politics assumes it speaks on behalf of the nation it claims to serve. But who does it really serve? That is the question for the poem.

Who is served when we take in refugees or immigrants? While we tend to think of them as the other, the other knows we are the privileged, who can, in the comfort of our living rooms or office debate the issue as though it is an abstract, rather than life or death.

Thomas McColl imagines the dreams of those who have nothing else to claim … “eyelids turned into wings … above and across the barbed wire”. The vulnerability of life without walls and insurance policies is captured in Kate Noakes observation between “Black black rocks / oily with dawn / an early lamb”, reminding us how fragile our bodies are when most of us work so hard to surround ourselves with symbols of security. But refugees, war, prejudice and corporate power enter the village like “A limp rag doll, washed up on the kitchen table” (Angela T. Carr).

Sophia-Louise Hyde asks us to mind the gap between “#indifferent” and “#hope”. Devices like social media almost parenthesize civilization as we live it from day to day. Media says if it bleeds it leads but the instrument doesn’t weep, and we do even though we try not to admit it.

“Our humanity diminished” writes Adele Fraser, where “the sea, cold, unconscious, welcomed where we did not.” Civilization is much more than the economy, it is about being human and living from a human consciousness. The poet reminds us that we are entering into madness when we fail to remember who we are. Metaphor is a short cut to do that. “There is a place where the wing tears.” writes Margo Berdeshevsky. Civilization has enabled us to fly and to believe it is our individual egos that created that.

Much of corporate media feeds into the myth that we are superior because of what we have and to leave out the part of how we arrived here. George Symonds closes his poem with “Papers, papers, everywhere / And not a word believed.” So if our own creations are no longer believed what is left? Compassion?

Sally Flint confesses to have “held children who died when taken / by illness who no medic could save. / But someone could have helped” Aylen Kurdi, the 3 year old toddler found washed up by the tide.

It’s not enough to know that the instruments of power have destroyed civilizations many times before. We need to ask how those instruments work to make us less human, to oppress the spirit for the glorification of power over life. We need to see our own children in the ones who have been sacrificed for constructed goals. We need to stop making excuses for ourselves. While preaching closes the mind and the book, the image persists.

In this book there are forty pages of images that will waft into your mind and heart, to consider the link between the value of your life, and where that value comes from.

Other poets in this book are Zena Hashem Beck, Andrew Oldham, Ellen Davies, Antony Owen, Jim C Mackintosh, Rosemary Appleton, Emma Lee, Monica Corish, Janet Vickers, Kathleen Bell, Frank Dullaghan, and Colleen Sensier.

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.

Why Are We So Angry?

Here are some answers to that question.

The breakdown in civil society means we must make personal decisions in public when we are not sure what is right, or what seems right is more dangerous than is apparent at the moment.

Driving on a two lane country road that is narrow and curved, a driver ahead of me had stopped for a few seconds. I just waited. After a few seconds the driver moved forward and stopped again. Because of the curve I couldn't safely overtake them so I waited, congratulating myself on being patient. Then the driver started backing up quite fast, so I backed up, then they made a left turn down a narrow road.

Afterward I was impressed with the sense of entitlement shown by this driver for not indicating via lights or signals what they needed to do, or for doing the safe thing and driving forward until the next turn off where they could have turned back in the right lane to make the turn they missed. The driver appeared to expect or hope that I would accommodate their needs.

Later I realized I was complicit in this dangerous driving - it could have been a mess if another had driven up around the corner as I was backing up. Later still I realized I didn't know what to do at that moment. Should I have just remained in that spot refusing to move back, honked my horn, got out of the car? There is something about being in a vehicle which makes us isolated in our decisions. In a fraction of a second we can destroy lives even if we don't want to.

Later I felt angry - not so much at that particular driver, but because I didn't know what the right thing to do was. It's easy to dismiss any social or safety discomfort as being someone else's fault. Blaming is even encouraged in hierarchical societies as long as we blame those on the bottom of the power spectrum.

We see so many big problems and grave dangers to our future, that billions of isolated egos can't seem to fix. Nevertheless there is an undercurrent of outrage and disappointment when the mind becomes aware of the broad scope of injustice which is mostly felt when a child starts looking beyond the immediate family to the larger society.


Ann Jones, in her article "After I lived in Norway America Felt Backward Here's Why" relates her experience of being a journalist in Afghanistan then travelling to Norway and returning home to America. What she finds is this:

"I had, in fact, come back to the flip side of Afghanistan and Iraq: to what America’s wars have done to America. Where I live now, in the homeland, there are not enough shelters for the homeless. Most people are either overworked or hurting for jobs; the housing is overpriced, the hospitals crowded and understaffed, the schools largely segregated and not so good. Opioid or heroin overdose is a popular form of death, and men in the street threaten women wearing hijabs. Did the American soldiers I covered in Afghanistan know they were fighting for this?"

I include this here to compare the small experiences of learning how to live with one another peacefully, with the results of centralized power that destroy millions of lives through war and neglect. For centuries marauding tribes has destroyed the civil societies they conquer and proceed to replace what might be intelligent behaviour with trauma and chaos. Here we are either exploitable resources or refugees.

Now hate groups are flourishing with their malevolent prescriptions that deflect the real causes more fear and hatred.