|
|
What
follows is from my reply to someone with whom I have been corresponding
regarding the Rebuilding the Left movement here in Vancouver. I
am sharing it here because I believe it's germane to the project at hand.
As always, I welcome your comments.
You asked me how my project proposes
"to advance the overall endeavour, as opposed to reiterating what has already
been covered." I will try now to answer your question. To do so, I need
to add some background to what I've already told you.
For 24 of my 31 years as a therapist
I practised a primal form of therapy.
From my experiences of being both a primal therapist and a "primalee" as
well as from my existential-phenomenological orientation and my many years
of teaching numerous "personal growth" oriented courses (including parenting
skills), I've come to a number of salient conclusions.
I've concluded that a "healthy" life
is one constituted by dialogue ("real-talk"), by connection,
and
by genuine passion; that those endeavours engendered by
genuine
passion foster dialogue and connection; and that genuine passion
and dialogue are the essential substance of healing,
growing,
creating and loving (that is, connecting). I've also concluded
that healthy people are caring, assertive, trustworthy and
non-violent.
By contrast, those efforts engendered
by morbid passion are precisely those which are engaged in, in order
to evade dialogue and connection; as such, they hinder healing,
growing, creating and loving. Examples of morbid passion include aiming
to harm, to steal from, to win over, to win out over, to get even with
or to shun dialogue and connection with someone.)
And I've concluded that a healthy life
unfolds from the trust during childhood and adolescence that one's care
givers genuinely care and in the consequent recognition of one's own validity,
loveability, and trustworthiness, as well as of one's connection to others
and to the environment. (A cartoon I once saw in the Los Angeles Free
Press brought this last point home to me. It depicted a long canoe
stretched all across the top few inches of the page. There was a man at
each end of the canoe and one was shouting to the other: "Pardon me, sir,
but your end of the boat is sinking!" This really captured for me how related
we are to each other and to everything in our world.)
I've discovered that one of our biggest
and most perverse collective myths is that parents somehow have a natural
talent for being parents and that children generally have happy childhoods.
It seems undeniable to me that most parents are quite limited in their
skills and that few children have happy childhoods. I say this after having
talked intimately with a great many people throughout the years. Almost
all of them--not only clients, but also students, colleagues, friends,
acquaintances, and even random strangers--have described their childhoods
to me as painful, and often even as nightmares; and almost all of them
emerged from their childhoods very "wounded." In fact, almost everywhere
I look I see mostly wounded people struggling in all sorts of disturbing
ways to deal with their wounds.
I'm not suggesting here that all
children are in pain or that all children's pain derives from their
relationships with their parents. But I'm convinced that this is true for
a
large majority of them. And without genuine connection with their parents,
children move into the larger world ill-equipped to deal with playmates,
teachers and other people who tease and mock them, call them names, cheat
them, criticise them, beat them up, and otherwise attempt to assuage the
pain of their own wounds--which only increases everyone's pain.
(A few years ago, I was leading a discussion called "A Dialogue Between
the Sexes." At one point in the discussion, when I mentioned that I
had been teased, etc., as a child, I noticed some of men in the group nodding.
So I asked how many of them had had this experience. It was something
of an epiphany for me when every one of the 13 men in the group
acknowledged that he had had similar experiences: At that moment I realised
how ubiquitous and affecting these experiences actually were.)
The most common strategy that parents
throughout the world use in dealing with their children is threatening
(for example, by "guilting," shaming and/or scaring) and punishing,
combined with a prohibition of dialogue. This inevitably results in the
children:
-
being and remaining wounded
-
believing that they're flawed and defective
and therefore unacceptable and unlovable
-
losing their "I-thou" connection with
their parents
-
being scared that no one will ever love
and care for them and therefore,
-
struggling to flee their pain
-
striving to gain the love and care they
are missing, yet doubting its veracity when it is present
-
trying to fill the emptiness with substitutes.
(In this context, it's important to note that competing and engaging
in capitalism are such substitutes: We don't compete with the
people we love and we don't strive for personal gain at their expense.)
I'm asserting, then, that we are regularly
producing disturbed and wounded children, and have been for millennia--hurt,
angry, sad and scared children, with distorted understandings of who they
are and of how they fit into a world of others.
These are the people who as both children
and adults attempt to flee their pain by engaging in the enormous
variety of violences that prevail (their very number should give
us pause): teasing, name-calling, deceiving, tricking and cheating, keeping
secrets, vengefulness, sarcasm and satire, scamming, conning, engaging
in "conflicts-of-interest" and otherwise taking advantage of others' vulnerabilities,
child-, spousal- and self-abuse (such as self-criticism, overeating, addictions
of all sorts, not exercising and not getting enough sleep), wars, massacres,
persecution, torture, rape, adultery, road-rage, competing (in fact, all
"me vs. you " or "us vs. them" or "winning and losing" ways of relating,
including beauty pageants, quiz shows, sports contests, political races
and corporate competitive practices), etc. In addition, responding either
passively
or aggressively to such destructive actions, ignoring other people's
pain or playing victim are also violences.
Such unending and futile attempts by
people to elude their pain (which, although often experienced only vaguely,
is nevertheless affecting) and to gain love and care may take the form
of efforts to anaesthetise themselves (e.g., caffeine, nicotine,
food, narcotics), to distract themselves (e.g., keeping busy, sex,
reading, attacking others, demonstrating), to will their
pain away (e.g., positive affirmations) or demand that others will
love for them.
Because such behaviours are so common
and taken-for-granted, it's usually not immediately obvious that they are
all ulterior transactions: They are carried out through--and as
a means of--self-concealment and are thus violent and violating,
disturbed and disturbing. They are a person's efforts to get what he or
she wants by coercing other (persuading, convincing, manipulating
them--just as was done to him or her in childhood) and arise from the conviction
that others won't otherwise minister caringly to him or her.
Regardless of whether this is done by
criticising or putting down those others, by being spiteful or retaliating,
by resisting, or seeking revenge, or by playing the unworthy object of
such denigrating, those who take part in such transactions are being essentially
deceitful and untrustworthy. In addition, with their perception distorted
by misinformation and unexpressed pain, they tend to either unrealistically
distrust or unrealistically trust others.
Given all this, attempts to coerce/convince
the wounded people in power to make caring changes are unlikely to succeed
for very long. Wounded people (on either side of the political divide)
tend to blind themselves to and to rationalise the true significance
of their behaviour in order to avoid being overtaken by the pain they're
fleeing. Therefore, they're not likely to either understand or to care
about the harm they're doing, no matter how much it's explained to them
and, moreover, they want at almost all cost to keep their distracting power,
wealth and magical world view. For them to give these up would necessitate
their recognising and experiencing their unexpressed pain. This is very
unlikely because to do so remains as frightening to them now as it was
when they first choked it down.
Moreover, when someone gets pushed,
he or she will most likely struggle to push back, either overtly or covertly.
So, efforts to coerce change--for example, through demonstrations
or even by achieving a majority vote--in the long run are likely to result
only in counter-efforts by those being coerced to find ways to regain what
was lost and to get back at those coercing them. Such is the case with
the conflict between the political right and left, as well as that between
England and Ireland in Northern Ireland, the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda,
the Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, the Israelis and Palestinians, the Indians
and Pakistanis, and the Iranians and Iraqis (who have been at war in this
way on and off for some 1,000 years).
All such violent efforts inevitably
result in vicious circles: Whatever it is that people do to flee their
pain tends to bring about the very outcome that they were trying to avoid
and seems to call for a still greater effort to flee. For example, they
lie in relationships in order to keep from being abandoned, but their untrustworthiness
ultimately destroys those relationships, as they lie still more to cover
up their lies. Or more to the point here, efforts to convince wounded people
to choose to stop being violent--for example, to stop raping the environment
or to be concerned about the plight of poor people--will almost inevitably
result in their resisting those efforts and increasing their violence (as
we can see in the U.S., with Bush now aiming to drill for oil in the Arctic
and abandoning the Kyoto Protocol with regard to controlling the emission
of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere). This in turn will lead to greater
efforts to convince them to stop destroying the environment, correspondingly
greater efforts to resist these efforts, and so on.
This is precisely what we see happening,
for example, in the conflict between the police and criminals, between
political parties and between countries: As police methods have become
more and more sophisticated, so have those of the criminals; the strategies
that are used successfully by one political party are improved upon and
used against it in the next political race; and when one country increases
its military capacity, the country with which it is in discord strives
to meet and exceed this increase. Our demonstrating in the 60's and 70's
did accomplish many important things: the end of the Vietnam war, changes
in the laws regarding segregation and racial discrimination, significant
progress in maintaining separation of church and state, the suspension
of the death penalty, acknowledgement of women's
rights, including acceptance of and support for abortion, improved conditions
for workers, concern for the environment, etc.
But many of these "victories" have been
and are being eroded: for example, the elimination of "affirmative action"
and welfare, the reestablishment of capital punishment, weakening of the
labour unions, decreasing numbers of doctors and hospitals that perform
abortions, the efforts by the new administration to inaugurate 'faith-based"
programs and to pursue the "Strategic Defense Initiative." In other words,
efforts to coerce change merely result in the pendulum swinging back and
forth from one side to the other.
I would be delighted if those people
wanting to gain and preserve such freedoms could actually succeed simply
by demonstrating and orating convincingly, and if the voters and/or the
people being demonstrated against could see the light as a result and make
caring changes. But even if such efforts did succeed and our governments
were to somehow turn considerably left, thus empowering those who had previously
been out of power, I fear--again, because of unhealed woundedness--that
not much would change; those now "in" would simply exercise power over
those who have been turned out and those now out would begin their struggle
to get back in. This is exactly what has happened repeatedly in the U.S.,
Canada and elsewhere, as the political parties have switched power.
Having said all this, I want to state
clearly that I support many of the aims of the "left:" genuine social justice,
universal provision of basic needs--food, clothing, shelter, education,
medical care--and moving beyond capitalism, competition and hierarchical
structures. But I support a radically non-violent left, not one
that uses "us vs. them" and other "winners and losers" strategies
(all the while--ironically--being philosophically opposed to these); in
other words, not a left that uses such rhetoric as "anti-capitalism"
or one that opposes the established order with demands, demonstrations,
"dirty tricks," and other efforts to persuade. I've just not seen such
strategies enduringly achieve non-violent goals and I don't see how they
can.
I'm not at all against demonstrating,
if it's done transparently as a means of informing. But I see little
chance of far-reaching, enduring and caring change happening in this way,
simply because the vast majority of us are wounded and afraid to do what's
necessary to heal and because our consequent misunderstandings about who
we are--individually and collectively--continually obstruct our understanding
of what constitutes a caring world and how to achieve it. In my view, any
efforts to achieve such a world that ignore this are doomed to fail; the
pendulum will simply continue to swing back and forth, which has been the
case for millennia.
I'm convinced that hierarchical and
competitive strategies are the sort enacted by people who have not healed
their wounds. It seems clear to me that time does not heal our wounds,
nor do "positive affirmations" or "insight" or anything else besides the
actual completion of our unfinished dialogues, particularly from
those moments when we were children and the people we trusted to care failed
to face us with genuine care, such that our parts of the "dialogue," our
real
talk, was choked down.
It seems clear to me that efforts to
enduringly achieve caring ends cannot ultimately succeed if our individual
and collective woundedness is not recognised and taken into account; that
such efforts need to be dialogical and non-oppositional;
and that these cannot be truly understood or effectively enacted by people
who have not significantly healed their wounds.
The only way that I see, then, for such
goals to be enduringly achieved is for significant numbers of people to
heal their wounds. As a result, instead of coercing others or competing
with them for what they want, healthy/healed people will eschew hierarchy,
will engage in dialogue, and will competently search together with those
holding differing views to discover mutually satisfying solutions to problems
and differences. The problem, of course, is determining how to get there.
I've been excited to discover in recent
months that quite a few people have been writing insightfully about the
need for radical change to achieve a caring world (e.g., Murray Bookchin
and Morris Berman). But I'm disappointed that none of these writers seem
to recognise the radical significance of our woundedness with regard to
their endeavour--they don't mention it. I was disappointed as well, when
I attended the
Rebuilding
the Left conference in January, to find that none of the people
I heard speak seemed to be aware of this issue. They appeared to be interested
only in demonstrating and making it fun (their words) in order to achieve
their--unexpressed--goals.
Because I don't see anyone else considering
the issues I've raised here, because I'm quite frightened about where we're
headed if we continue down the path we're on, and because I believe I have
both a unique and a significant perspective, I've set out to try "redesign"
the world: to explore "who" we are and the world we've created, to describe
what a healthy, caring world would be like, and to articulate a realistic
plan for healing and transformation.
The discussion group, If I Could
Change the World is a significant part of this effort. Although I do
have some ideas about how to get "there," I'm well aware that this is in
no way an easy task; in fact, I'm not very optimistic about succeeding.
Nevertheless, when I see what's possible for us and realise the harm we're
doing instead, I can't not try.
©
2001 Stephen
E. Linn, Ph.D. • Empowering People
Printable
Version
Download
in rich text format (rtf)
Rebuilding
the Left Website
Canadian
Dimension magazine
Worldwide
Alternatives to ViolencE (WAVE)
 
|
