Consolidating Power through Ritual Contempt For Life

"Well over 250 million people died in the 20th Century as a result of political violence. This includes an estimated 200 million deaths that were the result of people killed intentionally by governments, and perhaps fifty million deaths as the result of warfare. Among governments that were the most prolific in murdering people were the communist USSR, China and the Mao Guerillas, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and of course Nazi Germany." Hitler, War - and the Holocaust. Richard Koenigsberg.

The complete essay needs to be read as Koenigsberg reveals how violence breeds violence.  It appears to arrive from the idea that young men are born to experience the glory of running out on the battlefield to be gunned down.

Dying on the battlefield has mostly been portrayed as sudden death but that's not how it happens all the time or most of the time.  Sometimes they lie on the field in excruciating pain - intestines falling from a gaping wound, arms and legs blown off, eyes ripped out, faces blown away, cold icy rain on frozen mud.  Or prisoners transported in cattle cars without food or water, the stench of urine, pus, for days, weeks or more, knowing that wherever they arrive it will not be good.

Megaphones spouting the glory of giving your life to war, worshiping the men who designed the battles - Kemal, Ludendorff, Hindenburg, Hitler, who told the people in various words - we do not ask you to fight but to die for your nation.

Now I am thinking of ideologies preached by a few candidates of the Republican Party that are clearly destructive to those who have had the privilege of living in a peaceful, almost democratic nation.  Their policies are not about running a nation but about preparing people for war through hatred and division. Fascist parties in Europe and America are not interested in governing a nation  - they are looking to centralize power.

Why do they focus on hate? Is it because they/we are seeking revenge? Is it because we cannot imagine a world that is just and so we think it useless to work towards a better world? Has the system created the means to destroy us as soon as we enter school through ritual humiliation and competition, so we grow up valuing things more than ourselves? 

Would it be that education, compassion, social justice, cooperation, wisdom and social responsibility would take back the power from those who preach that our worth, our only worth, is when we become the means of aggrandizing the emperor?

Would you like to die on a bloody field or coffee shop with your limbs blown out of reach, or in a cattle car with the stench of pus and urine, or a slow and painful death as a refugee carrying your infant to nowhere? 

Who benefits from this global contempt for life?

Healthy Biosphere Means Healthier Humans - Suzuki

"Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, can be triggered by pesticide exposure. When we consider the vast array of chemicals spewed into air, water and soil, predicting those that may interact with each other and our genetic makeup to create health problems is difficult if not impossible." David Suzuki, Science Matters. A Healthy Biosphere Means Healthier Humans 

Profit must include more than just dollars.  We need a spreadsheet that measures peace, happiness, health and hope for the future.  In order to get this we need to recognize the power that has been forgotten.

Real power is what we have when we have choices and often we cannot see the power available to us.

For example, a young mother may not feel powerful when her newborn infant keeps waking at night, crying for attention.  She will feel drained and at the mercy of her baby. A young father will not feel powerful because the needs of his children exhaust his days.  But caring and loving children really teaches them about what is worthy of our attention .  Loved children often grow up to be responsible, creative adults, who have the tools to raise their children with empathy and good guidance. These families are capable of being functioning citizens who are then able to imagine how to contribute to a healthy society.

Where the emphasis in a family is about punishment and control rather than an observation of their childrens' needs they grow up blind to the powers of sustaining life.  Adults who were abused as children often cannot see how they are abusing their loved ones, and by extension cannot imagine how to create peaceful societies.

There are those who have survived brutal childhoods and still have learned about loving kindness as a social adhesive, but so many will fall under the false promise of power-over. It becomes a mindset of dedicated denial of the infinite power of life where great conquerors walk a thin tightrope in a spiritual vacuum.

Healthy humans learn how to use their power wisely.

Forward Civilizations

Just because those who promise to single-handedly save the world turn out to be fascist dictators, does not mean the goal of social justice is not worthy, nor that we are absolved of the responsibility to work for the greater good.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his book "Not in God's Name" looks into the phenomena of killing for the sake of religion and religious extremism.  While some believe that we have to get rid of religion because of this Sacks puts the blame not in religious tradition but in the human heart - which he points out, is the most deadly weapon of mass destruction.

While I haven't read the book I did listen to the whole hour of  Tapestry when Sacks was interviewed. I was taken by his expressed reverence for life, by his tolerance of different view points including atheism.

As a scholar he is able to articulate the ages where humanity left God and pursued "the will to power". He pointed out that although we live in nature we have evolved to a consciousness of our effect on nature. Therefore power cannot be separated from responsibility without us losing our humanity?  Is this what Sacks means by our relationship to God? It's probably deeper than my interpretation.

I tend to see religion as having been misused to preach the supremacy of an institution, a race, a gender. When a religion becomes a mass movement the ruling elite re-interpret the doctrine in favour of consolidating their own power and their position. In listening to Sacks I understood that this misrepresentation is mostly due to our human tendency to put our selves into the centre of all things.

All stories are about how the narrator views him or herself as the interlocutor of meaning, and the many ways in which they are tripped up, thrown off their path of righteousness.  However, it is too late to interview Abraham, Jesus or Muhammad, so we have to find the wisdom in our doubts and experiences, to retrieve meaning.  The thing is we are so often wrong, we are limited, and our views must be fed with new information and examined. And what about God? 

I think the key point in Rabbi Sacks' interview is that we are in relationship to a higher power. God does not control me because I have free will, therefore anything I choose to do can be for the good of this planet and my community but I cannot claim to know what God thinks.

A way in which we might move beyond our own obsession with power is to understand that life and truth is beyond the time and place our small lives inhabit.  The clamor of extremism and a shallow fundamentalism is due to the arrogance of our species to think we have the hotline to the universe.

Religions who preach chauvinism of any kind pander to the vanity and fears of its congregation and so remove us from the whole story. Ideology that demands obedience to a certain doctrine cuts off our dialogue with the unfolding universe.

Our task is to be human, to think, to feel, to speak, to listen, and to love life, even though we don't know the outcome or the ending. Does this mean we can't help but create stories on the beginning and the end as all religions do?

Sturm und Drang

Broadchurch is a TV crime drama about a community in Dorset, UK. I watched series 1 and 7 of 8 episodes of series 2, before I decided not to watch any more.

The crime was committed in the first episode of the first series. 11 year old Danny went missing and was found murdered, and I thought the series would be about who killed him and why. Most of series 2 takes place in the courtroom, but most of the focus is on the trauma visited upon the families and neighbours of this small community. By the fifth episode I begin to wonder why the drama is drawn out so long.  There are long scenes on beaches, in homes, in caravans, including screams, shouts and accusations as just about everyone is blamed.

In fact as I look back over the series I would say this drama is more about whose fault it is. Our need to accuse others for making us miserable rather than giving compassion to our loved ones who have survived, seems to upstage all else. Pulled into an eternal power struggle with the world, viewers may well sit on the edge of their  lazy-boys clenching teeth as tears and blood spill out across the screen while the coastal tide rolls in and out.

But rather than knit the plot together, the show kept giving us more characters, violence, spite and despair, and I found I had forgotten the original plot, and the question of who killed Danny and why. I become suspicious of the intentions of the drama and suspicious of my own addiction to wanting to find out how it ends. What is the point of all this sturm und drang?

There is plenty of evidence in the world that we suffer from the harm done by those who we think we should trust but who get caught up in their own struggles. It's beginning to look like a predictable Punch and Judy show played over and over again.  In the news, on radio, on television, on social media, at dinner parties, and in the bedroom.

From here it looks like our brains are wired for destruction, rage, and disappointment. But the program is funded by corporations who have their own agenda. Is it beneficial for the market when TV dramas show humanity as being dysfunctional and powerless?

On a parallel issue I think of national security and how we deal with threats. Brahma Chellaney in the Globe and Mail article "How to shut down jihad factories" gives us a brief history of the rise of jihadist organizations that have attacked unsuspecting citizens in the Middle East, Europe, and America from the 1970's. "With Western support, tyrannical oil monarchies in Riyadh, Doha and elsewhere were able to ride out the Arab Spring, emerging virtually unscathed. Saudi Arabia has faced little international pressure, even on human rights."  But rather than look at the role our military industrial complex has played, we are urged to hate and turn away from the causes, we are urged to remain in a state of collective powerlessness, leaving the task to "experts". 

Pretty much like the people of Broadchurch who are groping for ease of pain but who cannot find it from one another or the professionals who are there to fix it.

Surely it's our ignorance that perpetuates injustice, war, terrorism and violence, whenever we vote for politicians who offer false but easy answers that allow us to repeat the mantra "It's all your fault". Were the characters of Broadchurch somehow guilty of looking for the scapegoat rather than piece together the events that led to Danny's untimely death?

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