From Man to Zombie: Have We Lost Control?

"Derek Chauvin never lost control. Not for one moment. He didn’t question himself. He didn’t let his emotions show. If he had, maybe George Floyd would have lived. If he had allowed himself to feel the anguish in Floyd’s voice, the tremors in his body, he might have lost his self-control. He might have let up the pressure on Floyd’s throat for just a moment. He might have responded emotionally, empathetically, man to man, being to being." attributed to Jeffrey St. Clair in a post on Fred Guerin's Facebook page.

We have never been in control. We are part of the Universe, most of which we have no control over, if 'we' are a ruling elite on planet earth.

Control is a myth, a hunger driven by an obsession with power, raised by a long patriarchal, colonial habit of training boys to be men who have no emotion. If this is our father, our brother, our son ... "we" and our thoughts, feelings, and observations don't register in a man's world.

For a man to be raised under the doctrine of power over the world, to be in control to make sure through training and indoctrination that he is in control and he is winning, he will never fail—the only relationship he has with the world is as conqueror.

The universe with its various natures, shapes and climates, are the other, enemies, in the vortex of colonial capitalism and its "economy".

Thankfully most men have not totally sacked their minds and their feelings. Most men are attached to family, friends, nature and inner conflict. Healthy emotional intelligence tells people it is unrealistic to win and never fail, to control those we love, to always be right and never wrong. Even the famous singer "Sting" understood how fragile we are. Famous men like David Suzuki tell us how dependent we are on the health of this planet. Teachers, military men, doctors and lawyers, understand we are in relationship to the interdependent web of existence.

Those institutions that hold up the example of the great conqueror are not human, they are built on money and power, and have worked to disengage with the culture of men and women. The normal wisdom of keeping an office running smoothly by winning support from stakeholders has been shut out. There is no reasonable conversation. Workers are treated like plastic leggo blocks that can be stuck together and pulled apart, to the extent, they don't know who they are.

The ruling power, to maintain its power, must atomize all its parts. A police officer is trained to identify the "enemy" and kill it, culturally, legally and psychologically. Every aspect of this organization is beyond readable to the outside world which must be silenced, tamed against against any other narrative. This is what the white man is trained for in an absolute system. The white woman is trained to worship the man's power and wealth and to be a beautiful trophy in the man's lexicon.

Taking care of the climate, the planet is not on the agenda of the mind indoctrinated to serve the ruling culture. Therefore civil society must be destroyed. Art, Love, Family must be subsumed into the doctrine for never-ending domination. Women must be battered into submission. Wildlife must be caged for entertainment. Diversity must be enslaved to the ruling class. Servants must be lobotomized. The boot embedded on the face of humanity forever.

This is the mental illness we must fight and struggle against if we want to live. This is the prison we must break down in its entirety if we want to preserve life for ourselves and our grand children.

The ruling elites who have held the whip over our story for centuries, do not want us to find truth, freedom or peace, because it will mean they lose control over the universal narrative.

The Currency of Cruelty

 

It's not just the bullying. It's the cause of bullying. 

Yesterday there was a CBC report of an assault by a 16 year old who threw his victim's cell phone and wallet in the lake told him  to remove his clothes and walk home naked. Then a video of the event was posted on social media to show other people jeering and laughing at the victim. The victim was picked up soon after he was spotted walking. Whatever brief thrill the offender received from performing this cruel, demeaning act, and whatever the other kids felt next morning when they woke up, needs to be interrogated.

If causing shame to the victim is a laughing matter then we all need to ask ourselves how did we get here? I believe all who were present will be traumatized by this, even if older hardened drug dealers are involved.

The first question is, if power is so hard to attain, do we need to traumatize youth to establish our position, and if the answer is yes, it means human society is a failed experiment. If we (and by we I mean all who live here) cannot live without torturing others, it means we are homeless in a fundamental sense. 

I know that there is institutional cruelty in prisons, corporations, and politics, and that has trickled down into social and mainstream media. I know many of us have experienced bullying as bully or bullied. I know there are many situations where power has been so abused we no longer recognize what real power is.

Cruelty for cruelty's sake is a numbing example of social fascism which alienates us all from belonging. Alienates us from our own family of beings. 

Traditions of masculinity training in young boys, makes them lonely and isolated candidates for gangs, the military, police forces and political movements. They are trained to be nothing until they are invited to be something.

I would like to ask the bully how he feels about this today? I recommend that schools, parents, priests and social workers get engaged with the emotional and mental health of citizens who live in a society that values money more than health in our community. But mostly I suggest that corporate business and media examine these questions in their publications and broadcasts.

Further reading: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicides_that_have_been_attributed_to_bullying

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-teenager-robbed-nanaimo-1.5984957

Methods of Division

 

The focus is the thing. The thing is the subject and the cause. The ego is the divider, the warrior, and the ruler.

I want to be careful not to make consciousness a game for the ego. I want to encourage the noises and structures that allow us to look at life as a way of mystery while we collectively improve life for all.

For example: If I write about who is to blame for the problems that make our survival difficult, then it becomes a judgment and doesn't encourage conversations on how small individual difficulties can be overcome.

I feel imprisoned when blame is the topic rather than discussing ideas to address a problem recently identified.

Social change can happen with conversation: empathic enquiry, being an ally, being on the side of loving kindness, acting on loving kindness without issuing dogmatic demands. Of course there are dogmatic demands being made by a virus, for example "I am here and I will spread". The arguments come when large organizations demand practices not everyone agrees with. 

This is where challenge enters. I will wear a mask but I am a citizen not a police officer. Tension arises in how I deal with others who are not wearing masks or keeping a physical distance. 

A family may purchase a home and think it's okay to blast the stereo into the early hours of the morning, because the home belongs to them, but the noise wakes up the family in the house next door, who have young children.

False pride and selfishness causes suffering and creates division.

Cutting down trees for profit of a few while destroying habitats for those who live and depend on the forest culture creates a hierarchy of privilege. Privilege creates imbalance of power. Centralized power creates structural violence. Violence creates division not only between groups and species but within our minds and hearts. Culture becomes a battle ground of opinion and reactive blindness.

Earnest Hemingway was a famous American writer who waxed poetic phrases on bullfights and wildlife hunting. The struggle for life and death was a beautiful thing, but it was his life and the animal's death. A life that did not volunteer for that battle. A life that only wanted to survive while the man's ego built his entertainment on the animal's suffering.

But then I eat meat — so an animal is raised in compounds then killed for my diet.

Division is built within existence: meat, fish, dairy, roots, plants, nuts, seeds, oil, cotton, silk: all require other species to be consumed for my survival. But that does not free me from responsibility to choose where I will draw the line between my needs and the well being of others.

Maintaining balance is a precarious struggle between right and wrong, us and them, need and want, comfort and poverty, peace and war, truth and propaganda.

My ego is worth nothing but my loving kindness includes all on this planet for as long as I have life. This is not a choice but an imperative for me. Being a human with freedom depends on this balance. 

Who is to blame for this? No-one.

A Prince Died This Morning

 

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, consort to Queen Elizabeth II, father of Charles, Anne, Andrew and Edward, died at the age of 99 at Windsor Castle. The various news outlets will have more details about the cause, but I just wanted to note it here, without comment on his character because all my information is second hand.

I am related to this family by imagination because as long as I have been alive, I have read about and watched films of the royal family. Their faces and the stories are embedded in my memory and I have enough empathy to know that losing a family member through death is difficult no matter how old they were or how much their death was predicted by health.

Wishing the family support and comfort as they grieve.

Humanity And Its Potential

There is no end to the list of what's wrong, what we are doing wrong, what they are doing and how we can fix it.

Not only is the list larger than anything we can document, I sense our ideas and values need a complete overhaul to support such a move forward. To begin I suggest we are tender with ourselves and avoid blaming or being hard with judgement.

You are not to blame for the level of dysfunction in our society today. When a system is in place, it affects our thoughts, our feelings, our relationship to all things, our art, our music, and our struggle to find solutions.

However you are responsible to how you relate to the violence that erupts from this dysfunction.

I am not a sociologist, psychologist or even a political scientist. I am not even chosen by a deity. Furthermore no-one has asked for my opinion on this large topic, and no-one will be silenced because I have written this. Should I be expressing my thoughts then?

Yes, as a human being, revealing to you my limited credentials. I write as a single person. No armour or authority. 

First I must confess my opinion of suffering caused by an "authority". Children abused by parents, people abused by police, the homeless and the poor abused by economic systems, lonely strangers abused by neighbours, and all those who are abused by traditions that favour some over others.

I am not saying that nothing works in our society, I am saying that tradition has a built in weakness.

Tradition, laws, governance and our reliance on reward and punishment is contained by a prejudice that allows most of us to believe that we are right and they are wrong. Emerging from prejudice is hard work and never ending.

How does the economy respond to our alienated innocence and vulnerability? Whose task is it to save the world?

The "who" is all of us. The "what" is acknowledgement of the shared burden. The "how" is enquiry. The "what" is duty. 

Since it is human activity which has cut down trees, poisoned wells, and destroyed cities and nations. Bulls and Elephants have not been as destructive as humans, and humans who live within nature do not build pipelines for bitumen—it's us who live in complex societies.

Since we don't have weapons to fix what's broken we need to fix what we can with dialogue and curiosity. When someone responds to your tender questions with dismissive put-downs turn the enquiry towards them.

In reply to accusations that you think too much, you are too sensitive, too naive, too gullible ... turn the question back to them.

What do you think about, what troubles you at night when you want to sleep, what responsibility do you feel you have in maintaining a livable society, and lastly ... what efforts are you making to keep a fair and open society?

Yes, it's broken. Yes, we are broken. What are you going to focus on to protect your grand-children? 

If you get the answer—looking after #1. Move on. You are talking to a creature who has given up his or her humanity. 

 

What is Masculinity or Machismo?

 

"Machismo, the Spanish term for masculinity, has become a pervasive term in the conversation of gender studies in the United States. ... The origin of machismo can be traced to pre-Columbian times and has been influenced by both indigenous and European forms of masculinity." https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com

"Toxic masculinity is when the archetypal image of what it means to be masculine becomes harmful and aspirational. It thrives by penalizing behavior which does not conform to its standard and celebrating behavior which does." https://www.aurorand.org.uk/news/top-10-toxic-masculinity-behaviours.

Being stoic
Being promiscuous
Championing heterosexuality as the unalterable norm
Being violent
Being dominant
Sexual aggression towards women
Not displaying emotion
Not being a feminist ally
Risk-taking

Not engaging in household chores and caregiving

“There is a constantly reoccurring notion that real manhood is different from simple anatomical maleness, that it is not a natural condition that comes about spontaneously through biological maturation but rather is a precarious or artificial state that boys must win against powerful odds. This recurrent notion that manhood is problematic, a critical threshold that boys must pass through testing, is found at all levels of sociocultural development regardless of what other alternative roles are recognized.” –David Gilmore


“We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.” –Theodore Roosevelt
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/quotes-about-manliness/

Masculinity Quotes. Goodreads.com:-

“Manliness consists not in bluff, bravado or loneliness. It consists in daring to do the right thing and facing consequences whether it is in matters social, political or other. It consists in deeds not words.” 
― Mahatma Gandhi

“There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone.” 
― Norah Vincent

“Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.” 
― Sheila Jeffreys, Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective

“Once upon a time black male “cool” was defined by the ways in which black men confronted hardships of life without allowing their spirits to be ravaged. They took the pain of it and used it alchemically to turn the pain into gold. That burning process required high heat. Black male cool was defined by the ability to withstand the heat and remain centered. It was defined by black male willingness to confront reality, to face the truth, and bear it not by adopting a false pose of cool while feeding on fantasy; not by black male denial or by assuming a “poor me” victim identity. It was defined by individual black males daring to self-define rather than be defined by others.” 
― bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity

“Our culture is now one of masculine triumphalism, in which transhistorically feminine expressions – empathy, sweetness, volubility, warmth – are seen as impediments to a woman’s professional trajectory in many sectors.” 
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“But by far the worst thing we do to males — by making them feel they have to be hard — is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is.” 
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists