An empathic petition in support of healthy men

 Ink is being poured into the magazine and newspaper pages (as are electronic digits online) attempting first to discern what happened on November 4 in the election and second, how to move forward in a focused, disciplined and effective manner, not only in the U.S. but throughout the geopolitical arena.

Diagnosis, including and beyond the ‘medical model,’ demands a critical look at the individual political actors, the political culture, and the attitudes, perceptions and beliefs that are apparently ‘driving’ the political ethos. Far from a single presenting ‘issue’ (e.g. the current occupant of the Oval Office), or a single media outlet’s blatant and unapologetic bias (e.g. Fox news or MSNBC), or even a single political party or political ideology (radical right or left, or even centrist), or casting for another silver bullet (e.g. social media” or “Russian interference,”), any attempt at a diagnosis must embrace a critical analysis of how many factors interact in a moment in time. And that moment can only be considered as a moment in a longer historic flow from the past, stretching far into the horizon.

In  an interview reported on his website, The.Ink, Friday, November 13 2020, Anand Giridharadas says this:

…I think if we were to be honest with ourselves, and if many men were to be honest with themselves, they’re in a bad way….For some men that’s (the economy) the big thing in their lives. The desertion of opportunity is an economic fact that quickly becomes a cultural and a gender fact. In many communities, men were raised with an idea of themselves as a provider, as the stable source of income. The world has changed where they’re not the stable provider, or the wife earns more money, or not having a college degree no longer provides the kind of life that it did. The larger dynamics of the erosion of patriarchy, the ascendency of women and the growing (in)equality in this country over the last generation are another tremendous, tremendous source of change….If a society fails to show those men, in this case, who they can be on the other side of change, what is left for them when this mode of being is rightfully taken away—if they can’t be convinced that there’s some other way of being a man, of being a human being, of having dignity on the other side, then in addition to their own failure that they visit upon others, it becomes our collective failure, because they lash out…..Donald Trump…is a weak man’s idea of a strong man. In many ways, he represents an authoritarianism fueled by feelings of emasculation. Weak men look to him to be the husband that, deep down, they fear they can’t be to their wives; the father that they fear they cant be to their children; their lack of vigor in the economy or otherwise. If we don‘t heal men, I think we’re going to have more Trumps in our future.

Thanks to Anand Giridharadas for uttering so eloquently and courageously what some men have been saying for some time. And then, in a albeit imperfect parsing of his words, while there is definitely a tectonic shift in the economic stability, certainty, security and promise of men, it has to be noted, too, that much of that shift in fortunes resulted from other men seizing short-term, personal self-aggrandizement (whether in profit, political standing, or some other equally  ‘instant’ gratification). The shift from a public consciousness dedicated to the building and sustaining of public institutions, libraries, social services, health care facilities, and educational resources to the highly individualistic testosterone-fed addiction to personal success in business needed and attracted the undivided attention of millions of men.

Currently, a documentary film, Assholes A theory from director John Walker, investigates “the breeding grounds of contemporary ‘asshole culture’—and locates signs of civility in an otherwise rude-n-nasty universe. Venturing into predominantly male domain, Walker moves from Ivy League frat clubs to the bratty princedoms of Silicon Valley and bear pits of international finance. (from the Assholes, A Theory website). Robert Sutton, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has authored a book, The Asshole Survival Guide. He defines an asshole this way:

An asshole is someone who leaves us feeling demeaned, de-energized, disrespected, and/or oppressed. In other words, someone who makes you feel like dirt.

Obviously, the current occupant of the Oval Office sparks much of this conversation, and yet, while we need to protect ourselves from persistent “assholes” their very existence speaks loudly about their current place on centre stage of our political culture. And, without devolving into a pity-party for assholes, given that their behaviour is totally and unequivocally intolerable, the primal scream they individually and collectively emit needs some detached, objective and professional analysis.

Those who hurt others are those who are hurting themselves. That is neither original nor really very profound. Yet, for many men, unfortunately, when we are “hurt” we act and speak and pout as if we are angry. Hurting, in a male-dominated culture, is so profoundly and defiantly repressed, given that it signifies weakness, and weakness is also profoundly and defiantly rejected as a possible and reasonable and tolerable experience (including emotions, perceptions, beliefs, and anticipated/projected perceptions of others). For a man to wrap his arms (brain, heart, body) around the bottom line that he is afraid, that he is hurting, that he is lonely, that he is unloved and unwanted, for many if not most, is about the most difficult challenge of his life. And for many, the depth of the pain (hurt, failure, shame, tragedy, bullying, defamation) too often has to be so deep and penetrating that only then is there literally no other option but to surrender to the vulnerability.

A recent episode of The Good Doctor explored the ripples of implications of COVID-19 among the medical staff, detailing a protracted conflict between Dr. Aaron Glassman (Richard Schiff) and his partner, Maddie Glassman over the doctor’s effective emasculation at being refused permission to participate in the hospital’s excessive needs. His self-imposed estrangement from his partner, burying himself in computer games, refusing to go on marital walks, and generally behaving in a highly irritating manner, created an domestic/emotional/psychic impasse broken only when he finally acknowledged his own fears, his own feelings of uselessness, and his own new awareness of how much of an “asshole” he was truly being. Naturally, his partner authentically and dramatically expressed her appreciation for his gift of self-disclosure, especially given how hard it was for the character to bring himself to that place.

Like most of us, we can be assholes, but most of us do not seek or wish to inflict pain on any other people. Those whose need to inflict pain are the most “assholes” among us, and we all need to guard against reverting to that kind of behaviour. And, just as many men do not consider themselves conversant, fluent, adept, skilled at identifying emotions, especially those more subtle feelings like being ‘hurt’ or disappointed, or shameful, or embarrassed, (these words and the experiences that generated them originally are indelibly burned into our memories), we slam a door, stomp out of a room, shout obscenities, blame the other, engage in a loon-like escape, or act out in a manner that effectively serves to sabotage us either directly or indirectly.

In the political arena, preserving a pristine public image, while secretly undermining an opponent may not surface for some considerable time. Similarly, in the business, professional world, many can and do ‘get away’ with acts of sabotage, justifying them as the only way to get ahead, or to ‘show that we are not weak’ or to demonstrate our ‘prowess’ and thereby compete for the next promotion. And the first single act of betrayal of another, may remain hidden from public disclosure; it remains to fester within our own psyche, undoubtedly. That ‘festering’ part, however, remains out of sight and out of reach in those moments when our “betrayal” seems the only option available. Pausing to reflect on our motives, and then to pause even longer to consider whether there are any options to our “shitty’ behaviour, in a world so fast-paced, and so based on competition, and on being rewarded for quick-inventive-creative thinking on the spur of the moment is literally and metaphorically prohibited. And this is especially true in the moment of greatest perceived threat, danger, risk, when the adrenalin is running like white water, through our system.

Recent reports of suicide in Canada, indicate that 75% of all suicides are committed by men, many of whom do not have (or do not seek) support (personal, neighbourly, professional) for what might be loneliness, alienation, shyness, employment status (especially if one has recently lost a job), or financial stress, or even repeated attempts to ‘fit’ into a new environment. This fitting in to a new environment is made more tremulous for those who have already experienced one or more situations in which their contribution was not valued, not understood, not wanted because it might ‘show up’ those already ensconced in their roles. And given that men are more likely to talk (not only in talk therapy but also in pubs, coffee shops and in workplaces) as counterpoint to the deployment of our/their hands in some shared project, men in Ireland and New Zealand have devised and exported what they call “Mens’ Sheds” where local men randomly gather in a shed or a garage, or a basement to work on some variety of projects depending on the interests and the skills of participants.

It will take hundreds, if not thousands of Mens Sheds around the globe to begin to make a ripple of an impact on the bruised, wounded, shameful, ostracized, alienated, ageing, solitary, unfriended (and potentially unfriendly) men whose lives have been dealt some kind of psychic blow (perhaps even of their own making). And given a culture in which those who are not or cannot “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” (like the rest of us have already done) there is little appetite, especially among prominent, successful wealthy, well-respected and status-filled men in positions of leadership, executives, politicians, lawyers, doctors, accountants for attitudes that begin to recognize the growing tide of displaced men (and that phrase is evocative of those DP’s who rode the rails in the Great Depression). And without a recognition of the complexity and the confluence of multiple influential factors (some stemming from local conditions, others from conditions generated and the provincial or state level, others of a national or international impact), and the basic yet glaring fact that men have had and are continuing to have a really difficult time in what to many seems like the obvious “getting on with it” there will continue to grow a gap between the male “have’s and the male have-not’s. It is far more likely that our women friends and partners, colleagues and associates are and will be much more empathic in first grasping, and then fully comprehending, and then enacting policies, practices, incentives and supports, training opportunities and re-start incentives. Nevertheless, will men even be willing to consider accessing such new options? Will men consider such social and economic and educational supports another patronizing hand-out to another ‘desperate’ and especially “weak” “failure” of a man?

We are proud, as men, and while we have some reason to be proud of what other  men, including our fathers and grandfathers have accomplished. And pride is far too often a barrier both to our own acknowledgement or both our strengths and our weaknesses and to envisioning and anticipating and then to accepting a supportive hand when it if offered. Just as we cannot permit the “perfect to be the enemy of the good” in our public policy, or corporate governance, or our private, domestic relationships, including the relationship we have with ourselves, we can no longer tolerate our own hubris to suffocate our potential. And how can we possibly come face to face with our potential, if we are blind and deaf to those endearing words of support that have been showered upon us for decades, as we disdained their melody and their caring rhythm.

As pogo reminds, We have met the enemy and he is us!

While originally modified from Commodore Perry’s military quote by cartoonist Walt Kelly in 1970, to celebrate the first Earth Day in 1970, with the message, man, from his treatment of the earth is the planet’s enemy…can justifiably be currently applied to the condition of masculinity in North America, at least. And, it says here that if we are to own the “enemy” within, for the sake of the planet, we will first have to take ownership of the “enemy within” as men.

And we will need all the help we can get, especially from our female partners!

Is this political incest we suffer from?

There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There’s something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It’s like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with. (Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale #1)

Chris Kofinis, Democratic pollster, talking to Carol Off last night, on CBC’s As It Happens, bemoaned the tragic failure of his colleagues in the polling business in the U.S. for having gotten it so wrong AGAIN (remember 2016?), and called many of them out for trying to “tilt the news story” in the direction of their own personal (professional?) preference. Kofinis believes it is his job to listen to each person in a focus group and attempt then to figure out not only where they are coming from but what they are thinking. In other words, Kofinis believes it is his job to practice an art/skill/science in which the American public (and likely many other contemporary cultures) does not believe, does not adhere to, does not practice, and does not consider it even relevant to their private, family, community and national health: ACTIVE LISTENING!

All the psychobabble opponents will already have closed their laptop/tablet, given their utter disgust that this piece is about to launch into a defence of listening. It is not only the literal words, sounds, gestures, and even body shifts that are available to anyone who is “listening,” it is also the “person” inside all of those expressions who, if we are even to begin to honour the adage, all men are created equal and deserve both respect and dignity…that is so prominently and proudly proclaimed as political rhetoric in most democracies. And the “person” currently has become either an ally or a foe. The former is a potential client/customer/voter/parishioner/fixer or lender while the latter is a potential ideological nerd/religious fanatic/gender warrior/ethnic polluter/trickster/ignoramous…both lists could continue interminably.

And each of these “persons” are transactional agents of some agenda….And, baked into the ‘cake’ of each person is the notion that full disclosure of opinion, thoughts, feelings even if they are tentative, spontaneous, experimental, nonchalant and/or trivial and socially-motivated is unacceptable, immature, naïve, simplistic, too intense, and/or reductionistic.

Long ago and far away in another life, I free-lanced as a cub reporter, covering an earlier iteration of the trump archetype who left a legacy as a perennial mayor of a small northern city. The word on the street, following each and every election in which this man was victorious ran like this: “Surprising how he won, given that whenever I asked someone how they voted, everyone denied voting for him!”

Denial of any even meagre form of attachment to this man was so abhorrent to the “political class,” to the elite, to the educated, to the upper middle class of the city that they/we refused even to acknowledge any participation in his electoral victories. His own public, often-repeated adage ran something like this: “I don’t’ care what you say or write about me, as long as you spell my name right!” For him, any and all publicity was more beneficial than none.

Along about the same time, I was mentored by a wise owner-operator of a car Intdealership who, upon hiring me to prepare and produce some of his advertising tutored me: “Don’t ever believe any of the opinion polls; people will lie to pollsters! And never prepare an ad targeting teachers, lawyers or doctors; they are the cheapest people on the planet!”

There is a fault-line peering out from under the rubble of Tuesday’s American election for the White House. The “over-performing Republican red-mirage” as it has come to be dubbed, turned what the polls and the national media had twisted into a landslide for Biden into an extremely tight, nail-biter of a race, the outcome of which is still up in the air. And as results trickle into newsrooms, various media outlets are continuing to ‘shade’ their version of the numbers in favour of their preferred (and their audience’s) preferred candidate.

There seems to have been almost no voter attention paid to the nuanced version of tax policy, environmental policy, immigration policy. And as for presidential malfeasance, given that the election was considered by many to be a referendum on the trump first term, only the Democrats waded through that swamp, while 67.5 trump voters decided he was their ‘man’. “I cannot stomach the man, but I like his “policies”….were words that spewed from many voters in interviews. And when asked about which specific policies, the interviewer heard silence or some version of ‘he is a man of action and not words like the other guy.’

Image, slogan, deft manipulation of reality, by the master-magician, rolled off the minds of those 67.5 millions as they likely privately cursed his person, his personal values and his language and his sexism, racism, homophobia, and his outright disdain for everyone of those thousands who risked their lives in attending his mask-less, crowd-crushing rallies.

And the intimate, and even mutually seductive enmeshment of the trump voter with their ‘man’ could well wear the mantle outlined by Margaret Atwood above. There is a delicious, seductive, hideous, nefarious, secretive, thrilling quality to cursing a monster in private, behind his back, and then trumpeting his “action-accomplishments” blindly and willfully ignoring everything else. Bring him ‘down to the common denominator, while deflating him, and then exaggerating how “the effete elite, political class are “picking on him” evoking a lever-pull in sympathy for the victim of this political chicanery is only one equation that attempts to unpack the mysteries of this week, and the last four years, and the potential for the next four, should he cling to power.

We already know about the political incest rampant in the Republican-trump ‘party’ in which sycophantic hugging and clinging to the president not only did not “do them in” in the eyes of the voters; it actually pummeled them into victory. And yet, is there also another facet of political incest among and between trump-voters and the trump-man himself?

What is it that he “knows” or “intuits” or “smells” or “touches” about the people who vote for him that the “public” discourse cannot and will not penetrate?

There seems to be a “devilment” that motivates, infects, stimulates and undergirds both the voter and the president. They share both a capacity and a desire to wreak havoc, as mutual-cohorts in a war various described by Breitbart, Bannon, QAnon, the white supremacists, the law-and-order devotees, People of Praise, evangelicals, the KuKluxKlan, the nationalist/populists, Foxnews, Barr, Jack Nicklaus/BobbyOrr, with the ultimate ‘saviour’ from all the carnage and evils that dominate the list of deep neuroses currently infecting the various participants.

Deconstruction of the “traditional establishment” was one of the original battle cries from Steve Bannon, in aligning himself with the trump candidacy. “Draining the swamp” was another of the guiding slogans of the campaign….seemingly not only cognizant of but also riding the wave of angst, fear, disassociation, alienation, and despair then impacting a rather large segment of the American public.

Singling Obama, the intellectual, the articulate, the circumspect, ‘no-drama-Obama’ as the target of much of the energy for this anti-establishment drive, while convenient for those needing a glib excuse, only masks the depth, the danger and the toxicity of the 67.5 millions.

When Iago becomes the “hero” of Shakespeare’s Othello, the world has indeed turned upside down. When Al Capone becomes not the villain of the twenties, but the hero, at least in deviousness if not in the object of his villainy, then the “treasured” tradition of history and pride in the legitimacy, the integrity, the authenticity, and the trust-worthiness of the American experiment in the constitutional democracy is turned on its ear. When the moon-shot, and the Peace Corps, the AIDS-Ebola-Swine-SARS victories, the New Deal equalization, the Voting Rights unleashing millions of African Americans from demeaning poll taxes…when these are overshadowed by a few paper towels tossed in disdain to the literally drowning people of Puerto Rico, the caging of hundreds of children as deterrence to other potential immigrants, the disavowing of COVID-19 and then the heroic ‘recovery’ by ‘superman’ trump….then everyone on the planet can see the sun setting on the promise of the American commitment and dedication to their own well-being, not to mention their protective instincts for us all.

There is some hint of morning sunlight in the historic number of voters who mailed, walked, levered, and posted their voice/vote in this election, even if that glimmer has yet to reap any of the potential benefits from a release from another four years.

However, even if after all the votes have been counted, and even if Biden moves into the White House (still very much a suspect prospect on Thursday, November 5, two days after election day), the Senate appears to remain in Republican (McConnell’s) hands, thereby potentially thwarting legislative initiatives that might rise from the White House, and pass through the decreased majority of Democrats in the House. And, we are all left to ponder the myopia, the politically-correct narrowness of the design of the Mueller investigation, the apparent lack of equivalent (or perhaps more venomous) energy of the trump voters, and the Republican/trump leadership, on the part of the Democrats.

Decency, honour, the adage of “bringing a knife to a gun-fight,” not to mention ‘car-rallies’ and a refusal to knock on doors (to protect both canvasser and elector from COVID-19), in a contest with the devil, do not replace or substitute for a much more muscular, even frenzied attack, against an enemy the scruples of whom are not only lacking, but twisted.

In athletics, it is known as ‘the killer instinct’…A real-estate professional, when asked what he especially liked about his career, replied instantly and passionately, “I just love the chase!” There is an instinctual, (and perhaps more attributable to men) aspect to the political war, also dubbed a “blood sport” (also in highly masculine terms). And the rise of a high degree of sensitivity, compassion, empathy, and the obvious decency that accompanies those traits, (all of them embodied and celebrated in and by Biden, while totally missing from the trump camp) for many reeks of the feminine.

This is in no way to paint Biden with a feminine brush; however, even in the middle of a pandemic from which 400,000 Americans might die, before the end of 2020, the concept of “caring for one another” (by social distancing, wearing a mask, rejecting large crowds and parties) has been not merely flaunted, but virtually destroyed throughout the campaign and also throughout the trump presidency.

The triumph of greed, narcissism, mis-representation of reality, and the appetite to devour the sugar-high of these cotton-candy “treats”, and thereby endorse and participate in this political orgy can only be considered appalling by the rest of the world, as it most certainly is by those who voted against trump and for Biden, in whatever equation of that mixed motive applied.

Atwood has much insight to offer the public opinion industry, (as did that car dealer), and also to the political guru’s whose lives have been twisted, as has the life of the republic, by the tornado that wears a blue suit, a red tie, a red MAGA hat, and nevertheless, sees every moment as another in which to inflict vengeance, to instill and to unleash fear and doubt, while promising “greatness.”

Is he a student of Orwell or, more likely, a clone of those operating the government in Orwell’s 1984, where the Peace Ministry conducts war, and the truth Ministry continually re-shapes and re-tells history so convincingly that today’s enemies are tomorrow’s allies, and vice versa?

In any case, we are all entrapped in a universe whose foundational footings of truth have been eroded and concussed by rhetoric that cannot be put back into the vault of the archives. These footings need a totally new “crew” as well as at least a decade of truth-telling, accountability, decency, and honour in order to public the public “square” back into structural security.

And it will take more than throwing paper towels to recover from the trumptsunami! 

"Teach your children well"...(Crosby Stills & Nash)...a song trump never learned!

We hear trump supporters touting the “business-man” approach and the market growth potential of a re-elected trump presidency. A ‘man of action’ and a ‘doer’ not merely a talked like other politicians…are other epithets being applied to the incumbent. 

Nevertheless, those of us just on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, saturated with political advertisements from all candidates, and especially from The Lincoln Project, a group of former Republicans who have turned diametrically opposed to this administration and especially its ‘leader’, perhaps have an ‘owl’s-nest’ view, without having to take on the direct result of our personal vote in the American election today.

One of the eight founding members of The Lincoln Project, Jennifer Heard, head of the GOP in New Hampshire, appearing on Morning Joe on MSNBC today, articulated the sycophancy of Republican senators, and the racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and the ‘caging’ of immigrant children on the border as just some of the features of the administration that erase many of the honourable traits of the  Republican Party before trump.

While the American media turns a laser-beam on the two candidates (and their running mates) there is another aspect of this moment in time that begs notice, amplification, and even neighbourly advocacy.

While those ‘caged’ children are a tragic testament to a failed presidency, it is the long-term impact of the trump administration’s failures, including those “actions” to which some cult members refer. The long-term impact on the American children, the anecdotal, unconscious and even conscious messages, learnings, fears and even mis-directed and mis-applied ambition, like sand pellets in a desert wind-storm, will impact the psyches of millions of kids for generations. And that impact does not even begin to address the direct impact of lost, permanently ill family members, all of this resulting from the negligence of the trump administration in its refusal to address the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic.

From a ‘lay’ perspective as opposed to a clinical, research view, (although scholars will conduct graduate research for decades) to reflect on the language, the attitudes, the ennobling of the attitudes, beliefs and actions of those whose sole ambition is to sew terror in the homeland, one easily uncocvers many reasons to  endorse wholeheartedly, Noam Chomsky’s judgement that this president in the worst criminal in human history. There may have been no missiles fired into the homeland, by the administration, (although American missiles took out one of Iran’s top military leaders in Baghdad), the body language, the rhetorical language, and the individual images of both of those aspects of this presidency, can and will only culminate in a social and cultural residue of toxicity whose stain on the psyche of many already struggling young men and women.

And, just as the administration is dead-set against scientific testing for COVID-19, ‘because testing will result in higher numbers’ of cases, so to the administration is profoundly aware that deaths associated with the pandemic cannot and will not be criminally assigned to the president, (the legal argument of causation precludes such a process). Yet it is those collective, and deliberate and conscious words and actions that poison the public discourse, based as they are on vengeance, reprisals, character assassinations, dismissals, merely tentative and impermanent hirings and supervision of all major executive positions that are brewing in the collective consciousness and the collective unconscious of the American psyche. And these ‘flags’ are also linked inextricably to the obvious self-serving narcissism,  disclosure more recently publicly disclosed by courageous defectors from the administration (the anonymous author of the editorial, the former assistant to pence on the pandemic advisory task force, the former national security official.)

Earlier this year, Jason Wilson, writing in The Guardian, March 18, 2020, under the headline, ‘The Far Right--White nationalist hate groups have grown 55% in trump era, report finds…Southern Poverty Law Center warns of growing movement driven by ‘fear of demographic change’…’White nationalist hate groups in the US have increased 55% throughout the trump era, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and a ‘surging’ racist movement continues to be driven by ‘a deep fear of demographic change’. (The report continues) Nationally, there were 155 such groups counted last year, and they were present in most states. These groups were counted separately from Ku Klux Klan groups, racist skinheads, Christian Identity, groups, and neo-Confederate groups, all of which also express some version of white supremacist beliefs…The report notes that the perpetrator of a massacre on 3 August 2019 in El Paso, Texas, where 26 were killed, and another man who attacked  a synagogue in Poway, California, killing one woman and wounding three more, claimed to be motivated by the idea that white people were being replaced. The increase in hate groups includes many which openly advocate violence, terrorism, and murder, and ‘accelerationist’ groups ‘who believe mass violence is necessary to bring about the collapse of our pluralistic society’, including organizations like the Base, Atomwaffern Division, and Feuerkrieg Division, according to the report. Seven members of the Base, six members of Atomwaffen Division, and one man, Richard Tobin, who is allegedly a member of both groups, have been arrested since last October on charges including firearms offenses, conspiring to vandalize synagogues and conspiracy to murder….According to the SPLC report, the arrests are evidence that federal agencies are finally ‘hearing the alarm bells’ regarding violent white nationalism. It points out that in the last year, ‘the FBI upgraded its assessment of the threat posed by racially motivated extremists to a ‘national threat priority’, and the ‘Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced a strategic shift toward countering racial hatred.’ But the report says that those efforts are hampered by senior members of the Donald Trump administration like Trump aide Stephen Miller, ‘who has long been allied with anti-immigrant hate groups’. Miller’s attempts to insert white nationalist talking points into rightwing news website Breitbart’s coverage of the 2016 election were exposed last year, but the administration has retained him in his senior role….Along with the increase in white nationalist groups, there was an increase in homophobic and transphobic organizations, with anti-LGBTQ groups increasing 43% in 2019. Many of those highlighted in the SPLC report are religious fundamentalists. The report calls for a ‘national movement against hate violence in America’ in defense of ‘inclusive  democracy.

There is no reason to conclude from such reports that all or even most young people will fall into the trap of insidious, nefarious and hate-mongering speech or activity. Indeed, thousands of young people have volunteered as poll-workers in the national election, and many others have become much more conscious of their opportunity to engage in the political process, in a positive way. However, there is a serious risk to those young people already living on the margins, especially given that those numbers have grown exponentially with the impact of the pandemic. Life on the margins, including food shortages, blocked access to health care, impeded access to educational and employment opportunities, (literally thousands of businesses, many employing young people in the service sector have shuttered permanently) carries with it an extra burden of psychic desperation. And, in lay language, psychic desperation is just another word for feelings of “powerlessness”. And, when we are feeling powerless, we are also often experiencing walls closing in on us, thereby foreclosing on what may have been options in our past.

Without options, and blocked from what are considered normal opportunities, desperate young people do and will turn to illegitimate quick fixes. And we all know that there are a plethora of others willing to take advantage of young people in such a state. Preying like vultures on the vulnerable, the weak, the lonely, and the desperate is deeply ingrained in many cultures, including the United States. However, just as nine million cases, and 230,000 deaths from the pandemic cannot and will not be formally laid at the feet of the president, nor will the ravages among young people long after his departure from the White House (hopefully today!)

Listening to the vacuity of the explanations of ‘trump voters’s attempting to justify their decision tragically lays bare a devastation or perhaps more accurately, a depletion of the reservoir of critical thinking, based on reflective sorting through the vacuous propaganda, the lies, the deceptions and the false promises by tjhose voters. Clinging to cliches, slogans, ‘pro-life’ and faux-righteous sanctimony, anti-socialist fears, gun rights, caricatures of Biden and Harrris and their allegedly frightening plans, that have been manufactured and delivered by the master-hoax himself hardly displays an adult maturity so deeply needed by the vacuum of confidence and trust that trump has literally sucked out of the public square.

Enabling bullying at the highest levels of the nation’s most cherished and formerly trusted offices, deploying power for the sake of personal self-aggrandizement by the administration and the Senate leadership, confirming judges to put their whole bodies on the scales of justice for generations, defying allies while consorting with terrorists and saboteurs, raping environmental protections, while abdicating the Paris Climate Accord, appealing for the overturning of the Affordable Care Act to the Supreme Court while publicly lying about protecting pre-existing conditions….it is not only that these individual and heinous measures are detestable…taken together, they comprise a landfill of self-impugned superiority, mis-guided mentorship of the adults as well as the young.  trump’s sowing of the national cultural garden with spiteful, toxic, even radioactive seeds that will continue to grow and fester among the various endangers not only the current young generation, but also injects new and threatening warning signs on the horizons of those public agencies entrusted with protecting the public and preserving the peace.

While Obama tells audiences that ‘you would not put up with such behaviour from a school principal, or a co-worker, it might be even more to the point to suggest that were a teacher to perform in the manner, in the vernacular, and with the philosophic disposition of this president, the parents of the children in his classroom would be howling for his dismissal in the first week. And yet, after four years, during each and every hour of which we are fed despicable morsels of hate, contempt, vengeance and venom from a twitter-verse whose investors must be drunk on the champagne they continue to devour as their Twitter stock climbs exponentially and their dividends mount, (all of it resulting from the president’s absolute dominance of the social media), there are still some 42-45% of the American electorate who refuse to see the fires that area burning through, not only the forests in California and Colorado, but also through the culture forests of  tradition, honour, respect, rule of law, judicial fairness and especially the truth.

It is those latter ‘trees’ that have sustained the nation for well over two centuries, just as the redwoods have sustained the forests on the west coast for even longer. And given the president’s contempt for the forest management (no raking of the forest floor) and his declaring global warming and climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, we cannot and must not be surprised that he cares so little for those sustaining trees in the forest and the metaphoric trees of the political and social culture.

“Contempt for ‘the other’” is the engraving on the prospective tombstone of this man who can and will see only those aspects of the universe that directly inflate his hollow and empty and starving ego.

And that is a mantra from which the nation and the world desperately must escape!

Will it? 

Will American "discernment" triumph over mascara?

 Public discourse is overflowing with political comparisons based an any one or more of innumerable “tape-measures” each of them approximating a continuum from one end of the spectrum to the other…Whether it is ideology, level of academic achievement, theology/religion, level of income, professional sector, postal code, gender, age demographic, purchasing habits, political party affiliation…our self-assessments range from the sublime to the ridiculous.

And inside each of the broad ‘categories’ there are sub-sets that, for example, divide the left-leaning democrats (liberals) from the centrist and from the right-leaning. Similarly, among even the broad category of “Christian” there are not only denominational titles but also “belief” leanings, in favour of a woman’s right to choose or opposed to abortion (except in cases of rape, incest or endangerment of the mother’s life). The collection and curation and interpretation of statistical data, based on highly sophisticated equations and algorithms is a surging commercial sector, on which the political class, the corporate and the philanthropic sectors have become enmeshed and co-dependent.

In the dark ages, the last half of the twentieth century, in high school English class, the concept of “who is your audience” for your writing was a favoured teaching/learning nugget. The person, or group, for whom words were scribbled mattered because ‘their’ language and receptivity would determine whether or not ‘your’ words made an impact. And it did not matter whether the desired impact came from an argument/essay/opinion or from a narrative, drama or poem. On the ‘writing’ continuum there was also this rubric: write what you know and care about most deeply. Authenticity, integrity, granularity, viscerality, the goal of ‘bringing the reader into the writing was the overriding principle. And the range from the language of the poet to that of the propagandist helped critics to discern, through comparisons, those writers they considered more effective than others.

Discernment, as to distinguish between highly nuanced guideposts, as different from wisdom, the difference between what is wise and what is not, is a matter inherent to the new student in each and every academic discipline. One example is m the difference between  bacteria and  virus. The former (bacteria) are single-celled, living organisms, with a cell wall and all the necessary ingredients to survive and reproduce whereas the latter (virus) are not considered to be living because they require a host cell to survive long-term and to reproduce. On the political level, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is known for his guiding principle that a politician campaigns in poetry and then governs in prose. The poetry connotes and sketches high ideals, creative images, inflated promises and visions that are designed to capture the imagination of the voters, while, in office, ‘the devil is in the details, most of which are insufferably boring, often conflicting with other substantive and compelling details, and frequently any resolution (compromise) satisfies no party. Blair’s aphorism, however, has the potential to disdain both linguistic camps, given that poets see themselves as anything but political, and those in positions of leadership almost refuse to divorce their work from the creative imagination.

All democratic societies, nevertheless, regard the fullest development of the individual citizen as one of the highest goals and accomplishments of its history and tradition. Such measures as voting turn-out are used, as well as individual family incomes, to assess the degree to which the society has achieved the full development of its people. And given that any leadership is dependent on the consent of those for whom it is responsible, the linkage between aspiring and incipient leader and ‘the people’ is constructed through language, in both words and images. The purpose of this messaging is to convey that elusive, inscrutable and essential bridge, trust, confidence and ultimately the marking of a ballot, individually and then to be counted collectively to ascertain the name(s) of the next government.

The argument here, then, is that the level of discernment of ‘the people’ (level of literacy, level of discernment of virus from bacteria, for example,) matters as much or more than the design of the candidates’ messages. That is the intellectual, emotional, cognitive and ethical capacity to discern, and then to acknowledge the bases on which that discernment was made, between statements grounded on generally agreed, verifiable and verified information and those statements, like helium-inflated balloons, float through the stratosphere without worrying about every having to land matters more than the presentation of the candidate.

However, in a culture (think U.S.A.), in which the individual reigns supreme, and the collective assessment, capacity, discernment, literacy, of ‘the people’ is given public attention only if and when some ‘study’ compares academic achievement levels of all the countries in the O.E.C.D. (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), the ‘performance’ (including the words, the tone, the gestures, the attire, the attitude) of the performer dominates the coverage. Morphing talking heads on television and in podcasts from political critics to theatrical critics, however, only exaggerates the vacuum in policy, in the rough and tumble of ideas, legitimately and historically struggling for the discernment of the voter. In 2008, a street-joke ran the gamut, following the appointment of Sarah Palin: “if you put mascara on a pig, it is still a pig!” Well, what happens when the whole “pig” is a tube of mascara, given that the triumph of ‘freedom-of-choice’ in the absurd extremis has effectively removed the need for, and the pursuit of mature, diligent, critical and essentially existential discernment of the people, for the people, and by the people.

In honour of a road trip along the Pacific coastal highway, the Canadian poet Earle Birney wrote a poem entitled: (a portion of which here is from One Muddy Hand, on goodreads.com quotes)

Billboards Build Freedom of Choice

Yegtit?

Look See.

AMERICA BUILDS BILLBOARDS

so billboards kin bill freedoms choice

between-yeah between billbores no

WAIT

its yedoan hafta chose no more

between

say like trees and billbores lessa

course

wenna buncha trees is flatint out inta

BILLB-

yeah yegotit

youkin pick between well

hey! see! like dat!

ALL VYNIL GET WELL DOLLS $6.98

or-watch wasdat comin’ up?

PREPAID CAT?

PREPAID CATASTROPHE COVERAGE

yeah hell youkin have damnear

anything

FREE 48 INCH TV IN EVERY ROOM

see! or watchit!

OUR PIES TASTE LIKE MOTHERS

yeah but look bud no chickenin out

because billbores build

AM-

yeah AMERICA BUILDS MORE

buildbores to build more-

sure yougotta! yugotta have

FREEDOM TO

hey…

Satire, of course, exaggerated, yes, in the very nature of satire….but also in the essential nature of satire, there is a profound grain of inescapable truth…and that truth is dark and deceptive and destructive.

And what is dark and destructive about it is that freedom of choice, far from being the consequence of some blaring billboard advertising slogans, can and will only emerge from the hours of reading, pondering, reflecting, debating and then determining the most “weedy” and even ‘hair-splitting’ choices, not merely between two crispies or crumpies cereal, or between a trump and a Biden, but more expansively, between a nation and a culture that sees each and everyone of its people equally, that regards each and every one equally and respectfully, that cherishes each and every one equally and that builds the promise of its future on the strengths, talents, insights, creative imaginations and ambitions of each and every one of its people.

And such discernment, obviously and unequivocally, demands a level of maturity, and even complexity, that cannot abide the rush of a rock-concert crowd’s adulation of a performer, or the seduction of that performer’s trickster sales pitch…After all, it is not rocket science to note that, if that tube of mascara could talk, it would scream from Birney’s billbores (not a typo) that the reductionism of freedom of choice cannot and will not pore the footings for the sustainable anything, least of all a nation determined to repair the erosive and corrosive destruction of the last four years, and determined to face itself and the world giving full accounting and taking  full responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its people (projected to reach half a million by mid January, 2021), the infections of nine million (also projected to reach double that number). A nation fully committed to re-engage with the complexities of NATO, the Paris Climate Accord, the Iranian Nuclear Accord, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court….cannot allow itself to be entangled in the lies, the innuendoes, the  deceptions and the distortions, not only of the science of the pandemic but of the delicate balance of power that has sustained a relatively landscape in geopolitics for over half a century….

Children, and even adolescents are captivated by the lyricism, and the reductionism of the slogan of freedom (of choice) and yet remain mesmerized and confused by the complexities of governing a sovereign nation. Escaping their notice and the attention of their most alert and focused intellects are many of the complexities of any nation. These include the nuances of Supreme Court decisions, the nuances of a Federal Reserve that sets interest rates in relationship to the vagaries of the market, the Homeland Security department that is charged with protecting the homeland from adversaries within and without, the FBI and the CIA, both agencies that must be fenced off from the political arm of government, as must the Department of Justice. As each of these agencies falls, willy-nilly, without a single effective manoeuvre to stop the tsunami of hollow-empty ago-driven narcissism of the current occupant of the Oval Office.

As an 88-year-old ex-pat now living in Montreal, and voting for the first time in her life put it, I have to do whatever I can to remove that man from the White House….and so too, hopefully, will the millions of men and women who have never voted before, and those who have previously voted for candidates from the Republican and other third parties, awaken to what has to be considered a tipping point election, in the history, not only of the U.S. but also of the whole world.

Environmental protections erased with the stroke of a pen along with civil servant protections from dismissal; executive leadership positions morphed into “acting secretariats” reliant on the whim of a psychotic chief executive; promises of coverage for pre-existing health conditions, while pursuing with blood-haste, a petition to the Supreme Court to eviscerate those very conditions and the individual mandate from the Affordable Care Act; the caging of children separated from their parents as a deliberate deterrent to other potential migrants; the illicit relationships with foreign dictators, the denial of responsibility for prevention of the ravages of COVID-19;….these are not reducible to a billboard slogan, nor are they compatible with a nation conscious of the street violence of police brutality that screams of systemic racism, nor with a budget that awards tax breaks to the top 1% while ignoring the plight of hundreds of thousands of business owners/operators who have had to shutter their operations as a consequence of the pandemic, without federal aid; nor are the literally dozens of overt actions by Republican governors and legislatures to disable access to voting…

As Noam Chomsky, in the latest edition of The New Yorker so succinctly and so starkly puts it, Donald Trump is the Worst Criminal in History…

And to those words, also not amenable to a billbore, we humbly and silently utter, “Thank God for Noam Chomsky!”

And to the great hockey hero, Bobby Orr, (from my home town!) who just this week took out a full-page advertisement in the New Hampshire Union Leader, endorsing the president, I can only shake my head in shame, that such a decision would corrode what previously was a platinum reputation for both hockey and what most considered honourable.

Discernment depends on much more than instant gratification, although much of the U.S. economy has come to depend on such manipulation. Sadly!

Striving, relentlessly, for the day when the power of love overrules the love of power (thanks to Gandhi)

The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace. (Mahatma Gandhi)

Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent than the one derived from fear of punishment. (Mahatma Gandhi)

In our last essay, we advocated for a pursuit of meaning, never to be sacrificed for sheer, mere, power.

Of course, such an idea begs so many questions, explications and inferences that it must not be left hanging from the tree of confusion, ambiguity or a need for mastery.

Internal power, the capacity to look inward, through the mirror of consciousness, memory, disciplined inquiry and criticism, and then to bring into the world the essence of one’s identity, whatever maxim, or gesture, word or action that epitomizes the who and the what of our being needs to share, provides a relevant, realistic and reachable foil for what the world talks about as “power” in the determination of the life of a culture. Extrinsic power in relation to the “outer world” is expressed in deeds, achievements, awards, titles, certificates and legacies, recognized and presented, by representatives in that “public square”. Of course, both internal power and extrinsic power intersect in each and every exchange, whether private (in diaries, interior monologues, soliloquies, prayers, confessions, autobiographies and canvases, manuscripts, photo art museums, etc.) or in acts and words offered to an audience.

In our individual lives, we all know that we resist a full accounting of our shame, our embarrassments, our failures, and our self-inflicted sabotages. Getting a full appreciation and acceptance of the wholeness of who we are, ushering in a degree of self-respect and authenticity, nevertheless, depends directly and indirectly on such a full mirrored accounting. Secrets buried deep in the caverns of memory continue to haunt us, to the extent that their pulses are blocked from consciousness. Released, like those gold nuggets panned for by goldrush miners, those same secrets have the potential to untie the threads of bound nerves of shame, tight muscles and tendons of unworthiness, and to open pages of journals (literal and metaphorical) previous encased in dust and mouse droppings in the attic of our mind.

While obvious, and thereby considered trite, this recipe does not unfold into a mixing bowl like those gourmet recipes we all treasure. In fact, its unrelenting truth is one of its more effective safe-guards, keeping many of us jogging away from the challenge, or even resisting when others peek behind the veil of our public mask and telling us more about ourselves than we were ready to acknowledge. Paradoxically, our resistance to mining our own nuggets leaves us more vulnerable to the seduction of extrinsic power, status, money and reputation. While not based on empirical sociological research, anecdotal narratives including personal experience suggest that many of us who avoid critical self-introspection are the very ones who seek public applause, acclaim, and the extrinsic rewards of power over others.

If belief in the subtle and nuanced image of how unworthy, incompetent, immature, awkward, unintelligent, unlikeable holds sway over more uplifting adjectives describing our identity, (and all of us have zillions of moments when we were derided by others, many of whom we respected) then we will undoubtedly seek and find opportunities to exercise power through groups, teams, clubs, families, classrooms and workplaces. And for most of those opportunities, we will be rewarded also in a manner that comports with the “classical conditioning” that pervades the marketplace of both ideas and commerce, including political commerce, academic commerce, medical commerce and legal/accounting commerce. In short, we study, we work, we learn, we plan and we develop in a culture that endorses and practices extrinsic rewards for acceptable behaviour and especially for what it considers exceptional behaviour.

Those rewards/awards are all designed and administered by those in charge, who themselves have been steeped in that same culture, and who sincerely believe that in passing it on, they are serving the “best interests” of the community as a whole.
Another irony, however, is that this extrinsic classical conditioning is or at least can often be a trap, seizing and holding tight to its best examples from youth up to and including retirement from high-ranking and highly respectable positions of honour, achievement and respect in the community. In North America, however, there are far too many stories of individuals who, in what has come to be known colloquially as a mid-life crisis, ‘crash and burn’ or change careers, leave marriages, over-consume, over-gamble, or pass through what can only be termed a turning point of some considerable import.

“Is that all there is” (Peggy Lee’s pop hit) sums up the emotion of the experience. Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman incarnates the archetype from the mid-century play, Death of a Salesman. Not all biographies, however, default in such a dramatic manner. Some are so well integrated into the requirements of the ‘system’ that they continue unperturbed, insofar as ‘we’ the public can see, far into retirement without any perceivable tragic eruptions or changes in their midlife.

Churches, clergy, chaplains, psychologists and psychiatrists, spiritual directors and more recently social workers have been traditionally ‘appointed’ and thus sought out as resources for those seeking guidance in and through a mid-life challenge. This cadre of professionals, however, continue on the suburbs of our professional communities, given that seeking their support continues to be regarded as a profound indication of some kind of personal, emotional, psychic and thereby social and professional weakness, (or to be less polite: illness, sickness, abnormal-ness, and unreliability). Only recently, have employers in some sectors, come to consider the emotional/psychic state of their workers as significant, in fact integral to the quality and reliability of their performance. Some have turned this “function” over to Employee Assistance Programs, (EAP’s) in an oblique manner so as not to ‘invade’ the privacy of the individual, and so as to offer a buffer of “protection” for both public relations and insurance purposes, while the volume and pace of work increases and wages and salaries remain constant or decline.

In the public arena, including the file of worker ‘rights’ and workplace safety and security, we now have some rather limp laws to which workers can refer, through legal counsel, in the event of an unlawful dismissal, or perhaps in cases where employers were negligent in protecting workers. As part of the ‘social net’ embedded in legislation, legislators, lawyers, politicians, corporate executives and the occasional social activist debate both public and privately their ideas, and by inference their beliefs and perceptions of how others ought to be regarded and treated by their deliberations.

Here is the nexus where the private “character” of public leaders intersects with the publicly acknowledged and demonstrated needs of individuals require address. How power has been perceived and delivered in the lives of those public figures will have a significant, if less visible and far less investigated, impact on the manner in which these men and women form their agendas, undergird their arguments and relate to others who are themselves committed to the climb up the public ladder of power.

Competition between and among individual and groups (political parties, churches, social service agencies, corporations) and the people in leadership is both predictable and inevitable. Whether such competition is considered a ‘zero-sum’ game, (in which if I win, you lose, OR if you win, I lose) or a shared pursuit of a common agenda through which all parties ‘win’ is a direct function of how power is to be deployed.

And many of the rules for such deployment depend on the culture within the decision-making body. And that culture itself, will rise from both the ashes and the bricks of those who preceded the current actors. Some of those rules will be overt and stated, while others will be covert, hidden and only ‘sprung’ on those considered opponents who threaten the power of those who consider themselves to be in charge.

It is in this ‘colliseum-of-conflict’ where the rubber of individual humans’ ambition, articulation, reputation, and character meets the road of the same traits of those opposed to whatever one side is proposing. Many historic conflicts were brief and lethal; others were more protracted but none less lethal. Court rooms evolved as a moderation of both techniques and outcomes of human conflict, themselves increasingly dependent on the culmination and summation of their own precedents.

Underlying all human conflict, and the intersection of opposing human interests and ambitions and goals, are tools like words, traditions, patterns of thought, foundational thinking and philosophy, religious belief, and evolved and still evolving definitions of concepts and arguments, evidential theories and practices and the collection and curating of information.

So too, underneath all public arguments lie the self-concepts of the participants, the adherence to a common footing of truth, as well as a commonly accepted pattern of process, including the mutual civility of the participants, as well as an agreed recognition that given the honour and respect of the process and of the ‘friend opposite’ all parties to the debate will accept and respect the decision of those charged with making it.

None of this is rocket-science, and no Philadelphia lawyer is needed to discern the obvious and minimal requirements of a civil engagement for the purposes of building and enhancing a wider and deeper seam in the granite edifice of public trust, confidence, reliability and deferral.

Whether that public trust and confidence has been entrusted to any of a number of public institutions, or directly into the elected or appointed roles and responsibilities of individuals or panels, it is the “bank-vault” that we are consider our shared bank account, to be held in reserve, respectfully, by those who temporarily, and tentatively hold the reins and the keys to that vault, while they hold public office.

And whether we want to consider the heritage and tradition and custom and laws and even the spider and cob-webs that have gathered among the archives as well as the biographies and the signatures of those whose name grace the laws, and the law cases and judgements, all of it taken together is the inheritance from our forebears through us to our children.

And if and when that trust, both in the content and the processes “we” have had entrusted to our generation, is torpedoed, bombed, and even more dangerously secretly and blindly subverted, right before our eyes, then we can all see that our “inheritance” has been removed. We are then legitimately left with our mouths agape, our hearts broken, and our minds stripped of all of the intrinsic and extrinsic guardrails, buoys, radar screens, and moral and ethical benchmarks our parents and grandparents believed were worthy of upholding and defending.

And, not only are we faced with the prospect that not only the basic requirements of a civilized community are being torn down, but the prospect of a universal human agape (love) of which Gandhi speaks so eloquently, and which the world needs more than ever, fades into oblivion like the Arctic ice floes.

We are all crippled in our capacity to love when we are constricted by our fear exacerbated and enhanced by the tyranny and trend-line to fascism we are witnessing. And, yet, it can be considered an act of universal (agape) love to “Say to th(is) darkness, we beg to differ!” (With thanks to Mary Jo Leddy, for her spiritual biography entitled, “Say to the Darkness, we beg to differ”)

 

Editor’s Note:

I include here some pithy quotes on power, from a variety of human sources, for your reflection:

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts…perhaps the fear of a loss of power. (John Steinbeck)

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it. (Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear)

When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts. (Michael Ende)

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object or murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me? (George Orwell, 1984)

For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit. (Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions, Conversations of the Post 9/11 World)

Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. (Paulo Freire)

Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning and purpose to our lives. (Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection)

The strategic adversary is fascism....the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us. (Michel Foucault)

Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself. (Elie Wiesel)

 

When one with honeyed words but evil mind

Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state. (Euripides, Orestes)

Asking for help with shame says: You have the power over me.

Asking with condescension says: I have the power over you.

But asking for help with gratitude says: We have the power to help each other.

                                                  (Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking)

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often but by striking true. (Honore de Balzac)

Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate…the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead) 

We will not give up meaning for power

 Modernity is a deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power. (Yuval Noah Harari*)

Borrowing from shortform.com, a book summary: Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari

the Israeli historian lists three “religious narratives” (also spread by liberalism). Even to call them “religious narratives” implies a contextual basis that many ‘moderns’ would reject.

However, the first is ethical judgements that dictate what is right and what is wrong (e.g. murder is wrong).

The second  are what Harari calls, “factual statements” that use religious text, history of scientific perspective to create a fact, such as ‘God said, thou shalt not kill’…These statements are not always an objective fact, but rather offer a perspective ‘framed’ as a fact. (e.g. life starts at conception)

The third threat, according to Harari, consists of guidelines, which are statements that combine ethical judgements and factual statements to guide followers in a particulate direction (e.g. Christians should be pro-life)

Harari also notes that recent scientific studies expose flaws in liberalism’s  ‘factual’ statement through research calling in to question the two key liberal concepts: free will and individualism.

The electrochemical processes in the brain are subconscious, meaning humans have no control over the neural system, that creates thought or action. When external stimuli cause a reaction in the brain, the human body will naturally respond to the electrical and chemical interactions.  For example, you don’t choose to get angry. Anger emerges naturally due to the body’s response to external stimulation. These reactions can be either deterministic or random, but they’re never ‘free’.

As for individualism, researchers have discovered that human behavior has nothing to do with a singular unique voice that leads them toward their true goals. Rather human thought is dictated by the interactions between the two hemispheres of the brain, which create two versions of the human experience—the experiencing self and the narrating self.

Segregating the “experiencing self,’ from the narrating self, is another in the nuanced, and highly provocative thought-cognition-cultural insights that display one of the more challenging as well as widely deployed notions of contemporary clife: that the person and the global, that the spiritual and the political, that the scientific and the theological are, far from their original Aristotelian segregation, much more impactful and unified and thereby in need of new research, and new theories and new structures in order to better link our human reality with our capacity and willingness to cope.

To see human complexity not through the lens of stereotypical cultural images, myths and metaphors, including those foundational to religion of any faith, risks one of the deeply embedded energies and initiatives of history: finding blame, ascribing fault and human choice, on the one hand, while also seeing human beings as created in the image of God in need of forgiveness.

The notion of a human deity, however, even poised and painted as a conceptual, metaphysical transformative creature, however, risks another of the plausible pit-falls, exaggerated, persistent and unshakeable hubris.

If we are faced, as Harari notes in the quote introducing this piece, with a contract that requires our sacrificing meaning for power, we are clearly not prepared, educated, enculturated, or even convinced that such a contract is our predetermined fate. Is Harari, on the other hand, possibly being ironic? Is he proposing that our research into our minds, including our electrical-chemical stimuli and responses, a process that could actually endanger our pursuit of that old Viktor Frankl chestnut: ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ and the eradication/removal/disavowal/trashing of the notion of human responsibility for meaning and purpose, as well as the corollary that certain forces might become (or are) existential threats?

The question of an historic lens that attempts, through a ‘bifocal’ perspective to integrate the individual human with the needs, perspectives, aspirations and dreams of the whole of humanity, poses a different set of both observations and questions. While we are deeply committed to the legitimate probing penetration into the human electro-chemical-mechanical-neurological-anatomical-circulatory-anatomical aspects of research into the human “person,” we are also deeply indebted to those scholars in human spirituality, human intellectual and imaginative “faith” perspectives and their unique, cogent and also penetrating and transformative assessments of their empirically grounded colleagues’ findings.

For example, when the law faculty of Queen’s University decides to remove the name Sir John A. Macdonald as its “titular head” because of the first prime minister’s association with residential schools, and the inference that he held racist views, one is prompted to inquire, “Is this decision in the best interests of those aspiring legal-beagles, whose life and professional careers will need to address, assess and integrate the divergencies of interpretations of evidence from multiple witnesses, interpretations, scholarships and historical perspectives?” And when viewed from that perspective, the answer has to be unequivocally “No!” Another example of “cleaning up” the blindnesses and the allegedly inappropriate judgements of history, including the honouring of former leaders, in a scorched-earth approach that demands “zero tolerance” of imperfection, renders those so fully engaged in this process of hygenic sterilization of our culture as the leading battalion in a headlong and inevitably tragic pursuit of perfection.

Regardless of the empirical findings of our brain researchers, and the implications of those findings, we are and likely will be for the foreseeable future, engaged in a process that seeks to discern, to compare, to reflect and to in turn educate young minds in a social, political and ethical/spiritual context that carries and accepts the burden of our own imperfections perhaps in a manner that is less debilitating that previous generations have found it to be. Lifting the burden of perfectionism, without a blind pursuit of purity, regards the continuing pursuit of the best minds in all fields of intellectual, spiritual, ethical, metaphysical and even future studies.

The goal of lifting the burden of perfectionism from individual lives, as well as from the corporate life of the collective unconscious, is a highly ambitious aspiration that will leave some despondent in anxiety and fear of failure. It could also embolden others to commit to researching the various sociological, spiritual, ethical, legal and medical/psychiatric aspects of the human condition in a way that begins to transcend the fences that currently carry electrical (and potentially radioactive) currents of power among those engaged in the research process, and those attempting to interpret its meanings for the rest of us.

Power, as a goal of purpose, however, is not a sustainable goal for the human being. We are not mere instruments of agency, whether of our own design or for the purposes of fulfilling the requirements of another. Our existence, far from being reducible to any single act, word, expression or achievement, continues as a moment of meaning, with or without any observable, measureable, accountable and thereby ethical purpose. We have a meaning and purpose simply in and through our existence. And that meaning and purpose, while it may not be clearly identified or defined, nevertheless, constitutes a base line of both thought and action from which to consider, perceive and value each other inhabitant of the planet.

If we are to begin to assign archetypes of one god, to the seemingly superhuman and surreal discoveries made by humans, in their pursuit of the most cutting edge discoveries, even as speculation, then we are at risk of sacrificing the most generative and life-giving feature of our humanity, our incompleteness, our vulnerability, our unknowing, our fallibility and our imperfections and our mortality.

Sacrificing meaning for power is precisely a prescription for our own doom. Meaning is amorphous; meaning is evolving, meaning is flowing, and meaning is elusive…and thereby, like the “East” from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness… Extrinsic motivation has been researched and deployed for centuries, as the means by which both people and civilizations evolve, develop, mature and ‘rise’ dependent on the various notions of improvement at various periods of history. And we simply devour stories about our accomplishments, our military victories, our medical break-throughs, our scientific and technological discoveries. Even this week, there is new evidence of the potential of water on the moon, conceivably in quantities sufficient to sustain a human group or community. And while we concur and endorse such explorations, we have to hold our feet to the “fire” of the competing epistemologies, theologies, ethical and moral ambiguities, ideologies and especially turf-wars that constrict each and every human enterprise.

Our addictive commitments to our successes, married to our equally compulsive denial of our failures, as individuals, as families, and as nations and as a human global enterprise is not a gordion knot whose disentanglement is even part of the most idealistic visionary’s range. Burrowing deeper into the “weeds” and the soil under those weeds in science, while exciting, invigorating, and potentially even hopeful of new visions at the level of human interactions, will take eons to be translated, transposed and applied to the human condition, given the obvious, yet willfully denied proliferation of saboteurs, from within each and every political party, each and even religious congregation, each and every office and corporation not to mention each and every application for those revered grants for the very research Harari applauds.

I recently expressed the words of a patient of Parkinson’s disease, “I am much more that Parkinson’s!” were those words. And as an analogy, this patient speaks for each and every one of us. Regardless of whichever ‘specialist’ is assessing our person and our condition and our circumstance, even in the middle of a pandemic and potentially a life-threatening illness. We can no more identify as an agent of any specific exercise of power, even including the exercise of our own narrowly perceived intentions, ambitions, goals, objectives or ideals. We are not even reducible to a list of “values” given the range of definitions, connotations, interpretations and applications of those political “placebo’s”.

We have just witnessed the confirmation and swearing-in of Madame Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the United States, through a historically tragic 52-48 vote, the least bi-partisan vote for a nominee in U.S. history. Power, in its raw and unilateral, totalitarian and totally indefensible form and application, has “succeeded” in fulfilling the designed purpose of the executive and the Senators to ‘stack the court system’ with right-wing justices. Why, in god’s name, would anyone agree to let his or her name go forward for such an appointment, except under the misguided pursuit of a shared agenda of politically and legally beheading  of such laws as Roe v Wade and the Affordable Care Act, not to mention the abhorrent restrictions in voting rights, civil and gender rights, and the prevention of more a more narrow restriction of gun rights?

The obvious reason/motivation for such an appointment, starting with the political narcissism of the president’s re-election based on the sycophantic subservience of his cult, to the similar politically motivated re-election of men like McConnell, Graham, Crus, Cornyn, et al…and then the personal ambition of the nominee herself, a member of the People of Praise, a right-wing Roman Catholic sect whose dedication to the literal dominance of the husband and the subservience of the wife echoes a literal and dysfunctional application of scripture to the families of today.

The obviously debased motivations, intentions, ethics and morality of this process, top-to-bottom is evidence of the individual and the political surrender of anything supportive of the body politic, the public interest, the long-term healing of the nation to the personal ambition of those people who are the most insecure, the most neurotic, the most co-dependent and most insidiously-motivated, in the name and service of something/someone they call God, as to be an incarnated lie.

It is not mere hypocrisy that is on display; it is the outright blatant disregard for all “others” in the pursuit of power that leaves many if not most of us, gapingly appalled.

*Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli public intellectual, historian and professor int eh Department of History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is the author of the popular science best sellers, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century.