Is it reasonable to hope for a better world? Study the cruelty and indifference of governments, the disarray of opposition parties, the apparently inexorable slide towards climate breakdown, the renewed threat of nuclear war, and the answer appears to be no. Our problems look intractable, our leaders dangerous, while voters are cowed and baffled. Despair looks like the only rational response.
The mess is the outcome of a long social and political fantasy - that dictates man must be in control of nature. This false assertion has disabled his ability to reflect on his relationship to the world. He cannot allow himself the vulnerability of feelings beyond the will to power.
Every decade he invents more gadgets, weapons, and things to believe in, to possess, to give his life meaning, and every decade he creates new problems, new crises, wars, inequality, prisons, punishments and propaganda - to avoid the realization that he is not in control.
This torture has created the normalization of a mental illness, a game of elevating the self, competing with others for a fleeting sense of power. It demands that everyone exhibit the same values, the same mental illness, the same obsessions.
They are measured in new ages, new conceits and fashions - but ultimately it is about bringing an end to life - because life cannot submit to the game. Life does not worship power over itself, unless man kills everything that refuses to submit to his will.
The fantasy is that the eternal ruler will be the one who destroys everything else, including his own life. The fantasy is that the narrative will be written in the barren rocks, fields and oceans.
It began with patriarchy, when men had to prove they were superior to women by overcoming their senses, by replacing their flesh with armour. Then having to keep those muscles in place by "discovering" other places, building temples, boats and doctrines. The mind had to be fought, wrestled into submission too.
Masculinity removes man from nature, from the land, to that Zulu sentence-word that means "over there where I cry mother I am lost." Man must be broken in, taken from the protection of a loving family, from the comfort of his own nature to be the robotic soldier, the king, the executioner.
Giving birth, love, nurture, compassion, healing, reflecting - all are dismissed as feminine, sissy, and wimpish. Death is for glory and life is for wimps.
The mess we are in is the breakdown of our own nervous system, our own eyes, our own hearts. The hatred we are asked to express is the contempt for our selves projected onto the other.
The way to escape this mess is by loving ourselves and through compassion for the suffering of others.
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