Secrets kept, illusions eroding even today....

 Keeping family secrets, while the pattern is familiar to everyone, and privacy is required in order to cope with one’s situation, and the line between sharing and concealing shifts depending on a myriad of influences, has several side-effects.

One of the more complex spin-offs of keeping secrets is its corollary, deception. Shakespeare borrowed from Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem, Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field when he penned the famous line:

Oh what a tangled web we weave

When first we practice to deceive

The perils of lying, however, seem to have been buried under the over-weening will to power, that, ironically, comes with a fear of being “found-out”. The Jesuit, John Powell, in a tiny book, “Why I don’t tell you who I am,” answers the question simply, “I do not tell you who I am because that is all I have, and you might reject me.” On the website pubmed.gov, Melody Carter writes, July 2016, in a piece entitled, “Deceit and dishonesty as practice: the comfort of lying:

Lying and deceit are instruments of power, used by social actors in the pursuit of their practices as they seek to maintain social order. All social actors, nurses included, have deceit and dishonesty within their repertoire of practice. Much of this is benign, well intentioned and a function of being sociable and necessary in the pursuit of social order in the healthcare environment. Lying and deceit from a sociological point of view, is a reflections of the different modes of dominating that exist within a social space. French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu theorized about the way that symbolic power works within social order. The social structures and the agency of individual actors moving within it are interrelated and interdependent….lying or acting dishonestly is a powerful act that is intent on retaining stability and social order and could be seen to be a justification of lying and deceit. However, we need to consider, in whose interests are we striving to create social order? Is it in the end about the comfort of patients or for the comfort of professionals?

Dr. George Simon, in a post entitled, “Deceit Can Take Many Forms,” on his website, drgeorgesimon.com, writes this:

Deceit is the hallmark trait of manipulative characters…Deceit and manipulation are…close partners. Covertly aggressive individuals know that to successfully advance their hidden, nefarious agendas, they now only have to conceal their true intentions but also cast themselves in a way that seems benign.

Then adolescent struggle, which in some ways continues, is one that ‘writes’ and then ‘plays out’ conversations in my imagination about the several incidents over the years in which the questions of---

disclosure/discretion

                               safety/exposure

                                                   fear/courage/

                                                                 recrimination/endorsement

                                                                                                 retribution/openness

have oscillated, both consciously and unconsciously as a recurring theme.

At the heart of this intellectual vacillation lies an emotional weed, perhaps toxic virus would be more appropriate:

shame, guilt/acceptance, forgiveness.

And as that latter continuum vibrated, the question of by whom

(self/some other, parent, teacher, principal, clergy, and even deity?)

was the note in play. The indelible imprint of childhood, for many including this scribe, is shame and abandonment at not being “enough” in the eyes, mind and heart of a single parent. (No this is not a pity party, just the facts ma’am!)

Proving oneself as adequate, however, is analogous to a dog chasing his tail:

the motion continues, the tail is never caught. Spinning wheels, as in a snow drift, only digs the hole deeper, while the heat of the tires turns the snow into ice that is even more slippery, deepening the problem, while proving the futility of the rubber siren.

The public life, performance, wardrobe, words, facial gestures, ambition to take on various roles, while on the surface justified (internally and socially) as this version of the ‘Walter Mitty’ fantasy*. Untrained and untried, I sought roles as the co-co-ordinator of the campus formal at university, class president (by acclamation), fraternity vice-president, and then, while teaching in a boarding school, again untrained and untried, eagerly accepted coaching roles in football and basketball, and later, variety show co-ordinator, year-book advisor, and as a part-time worker in men’s clothing sales. When a colleague announced he was going on sabbatical, I casually mentioned that I would appreciate his tossing my name into the hat for his replacement as a free-lance television reporter.

Another of the ‘water-mitty’ fantasies, I had for some time been a spectator of news, public affairs, and the people in provincial and national leadership, from the perspective of a small-town kid whose interest in the wider world exceeded any interest in the issues of the small town itself. In grade thirteen, I recall one moment in history class, when I asked a question about the United Nations, only to be rebutted by the female instructor, with these words: “We do not have time for that question; we have to prepare for a final examination!” “Finals” were the provincial tradition for all Ontario students graduating from high school, and intending to go on to university and the reputations of the teachers were, in part, judged by the performance of their students in those examinations. As a student, however, my  I was unaware of such ‘other’ issues, and focussed only on the topic of geo-politics.

That moment, in retrospect, while glossed over in a heart-beat, seems to have been glued to consciousness. The “no” of the instructor was considered then, and continues today, to have been a form of pedagogical negligence. And yet, it was a seed for other questions for myself, and for others, depending on the situation’s need for questions. Naturally, the Socratic method# of conducting the classrooms and provided decades of opportunity to formulate questions, to imagine and to insert questions spontaneously, as a normal and integrative method of establishing rapport with students. The formal training at OCE Ontario College of Education was enhanced, developed and enriched by decades of practice for many of those who entered the teaching profession when the demand for teachers far exceeded the supply. (Otherwise, I might not have even found work in the field, given my dismal undergraduate background.)

From my perspective, the opportunity to report on local city hall news, on a repeater television station, for $10/report, and $5/interview, seemed like the ideal ‘fit’ for my curiosity, and my need to escape the tedium of sixteen-year-olds. Monday nights, for a dozen years, were given over to attending council meetings, interviewing various political and civil servant actors, writing and recording a three-minute report, on average. While there were moments of anxious timing, the experience was one of the most gratifying, as well as most enriching and disciplining of my life. There was a thermometer of language choice operating in each moment of those reports, as well as in each video-interview. How to express what happened, obviously from a single perspective, and yet retain a level of integrity for the moment being reported as well as for those actors who, undoubtedly, would refuse to continue to provide information and opinion, should the words ‘cross their line,’ was a question that lingered over each report. A single caveat, from a summer job while in university, from a trainer at Canada Packers, a man by the name of Harry Semple, has served me well: “Remember that, when there is a customer compliant, for example with a product that does not meet our standard, you must be fair both to the customer and to Canada Packers. Veering too far in either direction will not bode well for your and our business.”

A teacher colleague, entering the cloak-room area of the staffroom, on a Tuesday morning following my Monday night report commented, “There is nothing of your personality coming across on television.” Whether or not the comment was intended as a compliment or sarcastic tweek, I took it as a positive, given that my personality was not the issue nor was the ‘reporting’ about me. If I were somehow making it possible for viewers to imagine a debate over an issue like restoring the hard services to the Main Street, something no council had attempted for a century, for example, and help them to become engaged in that discussion, then I considered my job done.

On reflection, however, whether or not my reports and interviews were ‘good’ or less so, seems to pale in the light of the ‘walter-mitty’ aspect of the unconscious importance of living out a fantasy or dream.  Call it idealism, optimism, or sheer “puer” archetype. “The Latin phrase, puer aeternus (eternal boy) in mythology is a child-god, who is forever young. In Jung’s conception, the puer typically leads a ‘provisional life’ due to fear of being caught in a situation from which it might not be possible to escape. He..covets independence and freedom, opposes boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable.” The ‘positive’ side of puer appears as the Divine Child who symbolizes newness, potential for growth, hope for the future. He also foreshadows the hero that he sometimes becomes. The ‘negative’ side is the child-man who refuses to grow up and meet the challenges of life face on, waiting instead for his ship to come in and solve all his problems…The phrase puer aeternus comes from Metamorphoses, an epic work by the Roman Poet Ovid, dealing with Greek and Roman myths. In the poem, Ovid addresses the child-god Iacchus as ‘puer aeternus’ and praises him for his role in the Eleusinian mysteries. Iacchus is later identified with the gods Dionysus and Eros. The ‘puer’ is a god of vegetation and resurrection; the god of divine youth such as Tammuz, Attis, and Adonis. The shadow of the puer is the senex, (Latin for old man), associated with  the god Cronus-disciplined, controlled, responsible rational ordered. Conversely, the shadow of the senex is the puer, related to Hermes or Dionysus—unbounded instinct, disorder intoxication, whimsy.” (wikipedia.org)

How can one read, write and reflect on this combined archetype, without having that ‘hitler-chamberlain’ phrase from my father ringing in my head. His phrase referred to how he perceived I was being raised, by two parents, one he labelled the Fuhrer, the other Chamberlain (he saw himself as the latter). The phrase, the ‘acorn doesn’t fall from the tree,’ seems to have some resonance in this story. And the tension between the puer and senex has been the archetypal energy, unconscious, undiscovered, unmonitored and unmetered, for all these decades.

In the classroom, I was considered by some critical peers as “far too close to the students” and thereby less than professional, while from the students’ perspective, I was humbled by their ‘friendship’ and their dedication to their respective tasks and their own growth. Rarely, did I neither envision nor articulate a vision of limits for their lives. Indeed, with one specific student, a male dyslexic, who had extreme difficulty in reading and writing, and yet whose intellect soared in each of his in-class reposts, passed in my grade eleven class, only to be told, by his grade twelve English teacher, “You need to go back to Atkins’ class where there are no standards; you will fail in my class!” Similarly, when the grade thirteen math teacher, teaching in a classroom immediately adjacent to mine, told me, while we were monitoring class movements between classes, “Pam cheated on her last math test!” I instantly remarked, “Pam did not cheat on her math test!” This retort provoked the “too-close to the students” rejoinder. When I determined to seek out “Pam” as soon as I could, and report the ‘charge’ to her, who confirmed my assessment and thanked me for the information, I knew there would be repercussions. She brought her two parents to the parent-teacher meeting that very evening, to confront the math teacher who never mentioned the incident again in my presence.

Attempting to discern whether a person, statement, situation, is authentic on a scale running from high to low, is a lens and an attitude, and a discipline fraught with peril. A similar gordion knot applies to the situation in which one tries to live-out one’s own authenticity, including the well-known and infamous capacity we all have for self-delusion. And the energy, tension and reverberations of that continuum seem to be central to at least this scribe’s attempt to confront whatever reality/appearance that cropped up in my path.

                                                ---more to come---

*In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, an employee of Life magazine spends monotonous days developing photos for publication. To escape and to overcome the tedium, he ‘moves into’ a world of exciting daydreams permitting him to play the hero.

# a form of collaborative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on the process of asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thought and elicit new ideas and assumptions. 

Detouring, from biography, into Archetypal Psychology in pursuit of soul-making for all genders

 Navigating the swirling waters of gender politics, including definitions and vocabulary, human rights, support groups and  public opinion, not to mention various organizational, cultural, ethnic and national aspects, requires more than an advanced swimming skill, a ready helmet, a fully developed muscularity, as well as basic senses, acuity, a full possession of one’s own basis for even considering the questions and a processing method that does no harm, while helping to elucidate new insights. In the midst of these turbulent waters, one encounters words, perspectives and attitudes that bring one up short.

This piece, while deterring from the biographical briefly, is an attempt to find a path between some of the more recent data-word-image sign posts that have emerged while on this path of discoveMeeting a male individual who echoes the distaste and discomfort with Carl Jung’s work for the reason that “Jung has an interest in something called a divinity”, is just one of these ‘litmus tests’ that many universities in North America have failed. Both a divinity and an unconscious, as part of the metaphysic of this profound and generous and complex thinker, and the concomitant ethereal perspective that literally and imaginatively escapes the rational, empirical, experimental, scientific model of formal academic research, however, is not sufficient reason for his studies to be marginalized. History has perpetually, inevitably and immutably cast aside all thought, theory and perspectives, as well as the attitudes and the methods inherent in the ‘untenable’ and the “politically incorrect” and the “intellectually challenging”. From the beginning of recorded history, humans (mostly) male writers and thinkers have ascribed to the gods and goddesses those aspects of the universe over which they had no control, no full comprehension, and not a full appreciation. The whole notion of the history of mythology linked intimately to the cultural imagination, defying one specific academic discipline, for example, is more of an indictment of the traditions of the academic perfectionists than it is of the scholarship implicit in its study, and also in the application of such theories to the study of psychology, as a formal academic discipline.

Falling into the trap of the empiricists, the number crunchers, the diagnosticians and the prescriptive model of medicine, and then galloped at break-neck speed to justify itself with its own DSM and the pharmaceuticals of remediation, along  with interventions of various kinds and theories, to “make people  whole” and psychologically healthy, begs both scepticism and empirical review as to the ‘success’ the current psychological model has attained. Not incidentally, too, the open and free study of Jung, Freud, Perls, Rogers, Adler, Maslow et al, opens the potential for rigorous and critical evaluation both of the strengths of each and the vulnerabilities of each, both in isolation and in comparison. Put James Hillman in that list as well, one who studied and practiced as a Jungian depth therapist, and then evolved into what he terms ‘archetypal psychology’, the ‘making of soul’ as Hillman puts it.

Embracing not merely the full exploration of the biography of individuals, not in search for abnormal and strict adherence to those definitions that assign abnormalities to one of two buckets: medical (because the individual is sick) or legal (because the individual is criminal), it seems to this untutored pilgrim that archetypal psychology portends a different way of coming face to face with human eccentricities, without first ascribing and assigning either the medical or legal templates.

The human imagination, in the form of images that continue to run in and through our conscious and unconscious, flooding each and every minute and situation, as a dynamic in which we all involuntarily and yet inescapably swim, opens the pathway to both an internal and intrinsic perception of one’s soul, from the perspective of the imagination. It also offers the potential of multiple links to those same gods and goddesses, myths and archetypes that have populated our lives forever, it would seem. Medical and legal definitions, by their very nature, are confining to a single or a series of symptoms, and then a class of those symptoms that beg and demand comparison with the appearance of similar symptoms from other individuals in other times. They reduce the universe that we consider from our ‘senses’ to only those symptoms and features that we feel comfortable in acknowledging, with some professional care-or counsel-giver. And, while there are instances in human existence, both individually and collectively, when such fine-tuned attention (psychopaths, sociopaths, sex offender, for instance) seems not merely necessary but serving the interests and safety and security of the community.

It is in the area of eccentricities, those ‘unfamiliar’ instincts that drive each of us, that archetypal psychology could (and we postulate, do,) provide different and useful and far more supportive and inspiring clues to what is, has been, and will be going on in our psyche. Looking at individual lives after their close in death, for example, discloses patterns that are instructive in terms of getting to know who such people were for the purpose of providing a way of seeing for our own lives, looked at backwards. Speculative, curious, indeterminate, somewhat inconclusive and certainly drawing in and evoking more exploration, regardless of which images we might discern, just the ambiguity itself is attractive not only to the imagination but to the culture obsessed with absolutes, correctness, perfection and the sterility of the dominance of those pursuits. Portending naturally towards androgyny, archetypal psychology is both a liberating potential for both men and women. Constricting our models of masculinity and femininity to those positive  “ideals” or ‘heroes,’ or “kings” or “queens” in a cardboard reduction of each of those images, defies the fulsome range of those images that are scampering in and through our psyches throughout our lives.

We are more complex that those self-imposed simplistic, reductionistic magnetic role models; we each can ‘see’ (imagine) ourselves, for example, as not merely taking issue with another, but having a full-fledged duel, or a devious, deceitful sabotage of an enemy, in our imaginations, just as our ancestors themselves engaged in, in their imaginative lives. Often, too, without our fully grasping how, such fantasies birth into our active conscious lives, having slipped the bonds of dreams and fantasies.

 It is those very dreams and fantasies that archetypal psychology seeks to mine, to explore and to supplement our emotional and cognitive and imaginative comprehension of our whole person. As one who grew instincts that, like radar, “smelled” the atmosphere in our home, with a view to determining the relative safety, calmness, kindness, and acceptance, like the knight errant in literature, I tend to deploy that perspective, attitude and absorption of the details in my surroundings instinctively, rather than merely cognitively, or merely emotionally, and certainly not only through the senses. Intuition, without my taking classes in it, or being formally coached in its capacities and risks, or even being conscious that it was intuition that I was using to protect myself, has been my ‘lens’. Also like the knight errant, impelled by curiosity, drive to explore, I have been something of a vagabond, without a permanent home for many of my mid-life years.

With this perspective/lens/soul, I also find absolutes restrictive, confining and deadening. Interested in ‘going inside’ to foreclose on a compulsive and driven effort to ‘prove myself,’ I withdrew from the corporate, public and ‘such models of North American culture. Looking from inside, I could reconnect with fantasies of the writer, the explorer, the adventurer and the shit-disturber, without actually having to engage in the many real risks and dangers if one were to enter into those various vocations physically. Some will undoubtedly consider the archetypal perspective to be ephemeral, fatuous even, and certainly impractical. It does not ‘solve’ any crisis; in fact, in the process of pursuing its requisite questions, often one is led into even more uncertainty, ambiguity and more fanciful dreams and images. Of course, the literary, imaginative and the ideational lens, is not proposed as a full solution; it serves rather as a way of seeing differently from the dominant, (some would say, colonial) model of treating both the self and the other.

And while discussions of various archetypes, images, fantasies and dreams is also enriching for those fortunate enough to find collaborative perspectives in others, no suggestion, or diagnosis or prescription of any kind is either expected or implied in the process from one to another. The imaginative universe, by definition, escapes the “pinning-to-the-board” of the symptoms, as if they were an anaesthetized insect, for the purpose of dissection. Rather, it takes a position, even on such common subjects and vocabularies as “emotions” that is slightly more detached, curious, exploring and suggestive. Seeing emotions as momentary, perhaps inflammatory, phosphorescent, and thereby not conclusive of any specific symptom, but rather a brief and useful expression of something that comes naturally, and passes as quickly as it arrives. It is the residue that lingers, and the patterns of those residues helps in the imaginative ‘dig’ for the images that are ‘in charge.

There is a relevant and potent vulnerability, from the archetypal psychology perspective. Through its lens, we are unable to dominant either our description and definition of an experience, or a final mapping of our lives. There is a shadowy, ethereal, and mercurial aspect to the images dancing in our imaginations, and they are all linked, if we are to taste this approach, with our own death.

And as such, there is an inescapable resistance to all forms of denial, of death, certainly, and also of many other ways by and in which we succumb to the demands of a public culture that ‘sees’ us as things, to be manipulated, deployed, and also dismissed when no longer effective or useful.

The pursuit and the discovery of ‘soul’ rather than the driving and cool ‘spirit’ (to borrow from Hillman) is also a more resonant, more complex and more realistic, even though paradoxical, coming as it does attempt to do, from the imaginative, the images and the eccentricities and the instincts.

“Something” inside told Ella Fitzgerald, appearing at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem in a talent contest as a dancer, to change her mind and tell her audience she was about to sing. Something inside Yehudi Menhuin, at four, after attending a symphony concert, that he wanted ‘one of those’ violins, and when his parents gave him an aluminium instrument, he stamped on it, demanding a ‘real violin. These somethings inside, these voices, Hillman terms the daimon, the angel that resides somehow, somewhere in our psyche, that, while not determining our specific vocation or professional career, nevertheless, serves as an influential factor in ‘how’ we go about living our lives.

And both men and women, regardless of where they might find themselves on the continuum of ‘radical’ or modest gender advocates, for their own gender, can explore their own lives, through the mirror of memory, fantasy, dream and images none of which are exclusively masculine or feminine, nor can or do they deny the androgyny of each of us.

Talk of “winning” as some of the more prominent mens’ support groups do, seems more than a trifle restrictive, based on clearly defined goals and the accomplishment of those goals. This model is embedded in the cultural imagination and the political ethos of North America, and, from the perspective of this desk, it is, has been and will continue to ‘erode’ much of the energy, imagination and hope from millions, as an exclusive model for all genders.

A 'biographical' lens peering into mysogyny and misandry...

Cruelty is a modest word, that can morph into ideology of the victim (ideological feminism) on the one end of the spectrum and into the triumph of the alpha male on the other end of the spectrum. Regardless of which polarity is speaking, writing or acting, men and women are being hurt, some of them irreparably.

Debates over the virtues/sins of men and women have raged for centuries. Whether the female goddess image, worshipped by both men and women, or the heroic king, also worshipped by both genders, have witnessed and enhanced the swinging of the pendulum in a cultural oscillation, without end.

Various writers over the last two or three decades have attempted to document, some of their work as revisionist history, a theory of masculine dominance that, like a criminal sentence has to be removed from the culture, while others point to the under-coverage, under-noted, and under-valued victimization of men. And  while the theories and the vocabulary of the extreme polarities reads like two deaf people talking past each other, and while debates about the merits and demerits of each side, even those calls for further discussion seem impaled in a universe dominated by a zero-sum, Manichean dichotomy, with temporary victors and losers depending on the skill and the artistry of the protagonists.

A man living in the twenty-first century who refuses to acknowledge not only the rights but more importantly the inherent strength, endurance, creativity, capacity for affiliation and community, leadership, mentorship and outright “value” of women is, metaphorically living in his own dark cave of denial. Similarly, a woman of the twenty-first century who refuses to acknowledge the capacity of men to experience deep and profound emotions, tender care for vulnerable babies, parents, and the elderly, as well as the strength, endurance and creativity, adventurousness and risk-taking of men is clinging to reductionistic archetypes of brute force.

Misandry, the contempt for and hatred of men, has been well documented in the evidence from the popular culture that needs men as buffoons, jerks, idiots, and the butt of such perverted humour. Similarly, although far more deeply embedded in the social consciousness, misogyny, the contempt for and hatred of women, is the subject of multiple court cases perpetrated by men against women, mostly of their own intimate association. While the legal system is one theatre for attempting to balance competing forces, interests and ideologies, the public square is the place where attitudes, perceptions, beliefs and even thoughts are tested, revised, and potentially transformed. Let others debate whether or not both misandry and misogyny warrant definition as legally actionable under human rights legislation. In our view, this is a no-brainer; both attitudes and the actions each provokes are reprehensible. However, having plucked those keys into this space will do little to accomplish that legislative development. Indeed, while ‘definition of rights’ is and can be a path to social and cultural change, much of the ink and the narrative of enhancing human rights serves as only one arrow in the quiver in the over-all movement toward equality and equity*.

Indeed, it is not only reasonable, but often overlooked, to argue that the campaign for human rights, while an effective consciousness-raising instrument dependent on the courage of oppressed and victimized individuals to take legal recourse in response to their victimizers, has another impact. This headline and narrative of this worthy initiative tends to pit victims against aggressors, and can leave an imprint that the ‘war of the genders’ like the Middle East, is not only interminable but intractable. Throwing up arms, however, is to relinquish hope, without which  nothing can or will move.

Having been reared in a home in which the dominant female (mother) exhibited  ultimate power and control, while the passive-aggressive (father) exhibited a compliant appeaser role, this scribe has been consciously and unconsciously wrestling with the issue of equality and equity in such a “nest” for eight decades. And while anger and disappointment to and for each has oscillated back and forth, often triggered by an incident, a comment, a piece of prose or poetry, any attempt to reconcile each parent the other, obviously hypothetically and posthumously and imaginatively and ideally, is and can be at best only subjective and tentative.

Personal narrative, as opposed to formal research required for doctoral study and public recognition, pales as just another personal story. And as such can easily, glibly and dismissively be trashed as just another person’s opinion. And in this case, when the overt abuse was imposed by the female, while the male provided the quiet, supportive, care-giving archetype, the story contravenes the demographic and statistical evidence. As a consequence, many would read any such account as reducible to the (male) victim, who is self-indulging in a pity-party. Respectfully, I ask you, dear reader, to suspend that specific judgement, at least for the moment.

Each parent’s strength, while evident and appreciated by two siblings, was largely un-recognized and definitely undervalued by the other. A kind of unwritten arrangement provided employment and income from both, a modest house, a bountiful larder and table, a verdant and energetic garden of fruits, vegetables and flowers. In retrospect, it was the hidden darkness of each parent, their unconscious that erupted in dramatic conflict, without triggers that were perceived or available to spectators. Indeed, the many conflicts were also keep as deep, dark secrets from the outside world, camouflaged by a religiosity and a public performance of upstanding citizenship.

Having been raised in what amounted to a ‘gender war’ long before the rise of feminism, and the interjection of the word misandry, I can still hear references to the former Ottawa mayor, Charlotte Whitton’s pungent and cogent epithet that “in order to be considered equal to a man, women had to be twice as good; fortunately, men have made that quite easy.” Power, in the service of busy hands to accomplish determined goals, primarily for the apparent purpose of public acclaim, seemed to be the operative principle, authored and enforced by the maternal actor. And “actor” while somewhat reductionistic, nevertheless attempts to capture the energy, the drive and the intolerance of ambiguity, uncertainty, challenge to authority and dominance of this woman. A partially ‘trained’ soprano voice that neither knew nor respected the context in which it vibrated, embarrassed this pre-teen sitting in the back pew on Sunday mornings. Beside her, a totally unmusical, tuneless and muted sound was creeping from father’s larynx. That scene and its sounds is metaphor for the drama of the family of origin.

Adding to the ‘sound’ metaphor, back home, were a somewhat shrill argumentative ‘forte’ voice counterpointed by a gentle, soft male ‘piano’ speech impediment, offering a manuscript of disharmony and dysfunction. Rin the 1950’s radio stations CKEY and CHUM from Toronto, along with WKBW, Buffalo and WOWO Fort Wayne were constant ‘companions’ offering a popular music version of harmonies and rhythms to ears weary of cacophony.

Navigating between these two sounds, attitudes, perspectives, personalities and Shadows, as a teen, in a neighbourhood populated by quiet, alpha-fathers and submissive, compliant mothers was another of the differences between life inside and life outside the house. And it is those imaginative guard rails, models of masculinity and femininity, the former warm and loving the latter cold, calculating and austere that have shaped this somewhat helter-skelter path.

Male teachers, both friendly and supportive, along with occasional female teachers whose need for control exceeded their good judgement, seemed to be a second act of the home-scene, or a reiteration of the only kind of drama I knew. From the perspective of 2022, in the 1950’s men in the classroom did not have to be concerned about their authority while women were the exception, and were paving a path for generations of women to follow. Strict, austere, detached and over-bearing are descriptors of at least two female teachers, while others were matronly, compassionate and friendly. Among peers, the boys hunted with their fathers, played hockey and drove and worked on cars when they reached driving age. The girls, scholars, and more compliant and rigorous in following instructions, were interested in choirs, dances, movies and guys.

Stereotypes among peers, however, differed from what happened at home. We never considered those adolescent stereotypes of masculinity or femininity to be a curtailment of either our attitudes or our potential. They were all that we ‘knew’. The question of our orientation to authority, however, is central to the development of adolescent psychology.

Rarely, did an incident occur about which I was familiar, that demanded an authoritative response. A single occurrence of a strapping, in grade four, an occasional bullying in the school yard, the occasional missed homework assignment, and the occasional inebriated male on the main street on Saturday evening in summer in this tourist town were about the only dramatic incidents of my experience, outside the house. Tranquillity in the community, during adolescence, was the norm. Neighbours, too, were polite, friendly and generally soft-spoken without red-flag opinions even if they harboured them. A modest, moderate, although never really questioned ‘brand’ of authority was the template to which most people were accustomed. A main street fire in the middle of the night, in the summer between first and second-year of undergraduate years, continues as the most ‘inflamed’ imprint in memory, with the exception of a litany of suicides of adult male members of the community, all of whom I knew at least superficially. And those suicides, in varying degrees, left a ‘scar’ on memory. One especially of the father of a classmate, continues to ‘pain’ my memory and conscience.

Both son and father, of that family, the latter a Christie’s Breadman, were among the most implacable, unflappable, composed and friendly males of my experience, then and since. I have since learned that the son, at fifty, died of a cardiac arrest. Something about family secrets, within my own family, and obviously in that family, struck a note, a minor and reverberating note, in my psyche, especially given my own experience at having to remove the .22 from my father as a pre-teen.

In a Bach Fugue, themes are detailed in then repeated in a different voice and pitch, in relatively the same rhythm, sufficiently similar to be unmistakable as an echo. Somehow, in a manner of composing, different, for example, from the effervescence of Beethoven, Bach’s strict discipline, and formal mathematical intellect was able to imitate in a creative and imaginative way, something very deep and profound about human existence: that we are part of the themes and characters of our ancestors, and our off-spring will be part of those same themes.

And family secrets, for reasons of pride, shame, fear and even convention have been a theme of humans for centuries. Literature is replete with appearance/reality tensions and our lives are no different in that way. Very early, we know and respect some deeply hidden notion that there are certain things we do not tell our parents. What they are likely change as we grow. We also become aware that certain ‘stories’ are for family telling and re-telling only. Among the ‘secrets’ for example, are personal answers to how we each envision, consider and worship God. Some are openly and earnestly willing to enter into such conversations, for their own reasons. Others, not so much. Our family was among the latter.

So, one of the earliest operational scales on which the notion of authority was applied, was the question of belief. What one believed, for instance, was a subject that could and would only provoke intense emotional reactions. In order to engage in public life, one avoided that topic. Similarly, sex was another subject verboten, among the public discourse, secret, and both metaphorically and literally sacralized/demonized, at the same time. Conventionally, however, the demonized aspects of sex far outstripped the sacralized in public morality. And morality, for adolescents in this tiny very conservative town reigned supreme.

Authority, then, was seeded in morality, and keeping family secrets was high among the list of acceptable standards.

                                          -----to be continued---

 *Equality means that everyone is treated the same exact way, regardless of need or any other difference. Equity means everyone is provided with varying levels of support depending on what they need to achieve greater fairness of outcomes. An example of equality occurs when a government subsidizes gasoline or food. The subsidy is available to all people, rich and poor alike. An example of equity occurs, for example, in affirmative action policies such a quotas for marginalized sections of society, and/or decisions by companies to consciously look for a female director of a board composed of all men. 

Wading into the turbulent waters of misogyny and misandry

 One of the most prominent ‘hot-button’ social issues, over the last decade in North America, along with the emergence of the LGBTQ+ community, is the issue of misogyny. Defined as contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women, the word and the publicly documented instances of its cruelty abound in shameful headlines, in court rooms, and sadly in homes and workplaces around the continent.

 Hopefully, the anthropologists with be among the number of researchers who examine critically the relationships between men and women in various cultures. Historically, traditionally, often liturgically and also religiously cultures  have perceptions of both genders, and the appropriate (and inappropriate) models of relationship. Functionality and need have been central to the ‘assigned’ roles of men and women in the communities. 

Rebecca L. Upton, in a piece entitled, Gender, November 19, 2019 (from oxfordbibliographies.com) writes an introduction to the anthropological lens on ‘gender.

Gender is a key concept in the discipline of anthropology. Sex and gender are defined differently in anthropology, the former as grounded in perceived biological differences and the latter as the cultural constructions observed, performed, and understood in any given society. Often based on those perceived biological differences…..Many early monographs in anthropology were grounded in perspectives determined by the interests of largely male ethnographers. Despite early female pioneers in the field, it was not until the1970’s and 1980’s and the real rise of feminist anthropology that gender as a distinct area of theoretical and methodological interest took hold within the discipline. Women were no longer sees as a category of culture and society outside of the realm of the everyday….The study of women, men and the intersections of gender across cultures has become a key aspect of any holistic study or methodological approach in anthropology today.

Meanwhile, while the scholars are conducting their research, and theorizing about their observations and conclusions. The Canadian Women’s Foundation, on their website, report:

More than 4 in 10 women have experienced some form of intimate partner violence (IPV) in their lifetimes. In 2018, 44% of women reported experiencing some form of psychological, physical, or sexual violence by an intimate partner in their lifetimes (Statistics Canada, 2021)…Approximately every six days, a women in Canada is killed by her intimate partner. The proportion of women killed by a spouse or intimate partner is over eight times greater than the proportions of men. In 2020, 160 women and girls were killed by violence. In 2021, 173 women and girls were killed by violence. In 2020, one in five women killed in Canada was First Nation, Metis of Inuit….Indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely to be murdered or missing than any other women in Canada, and 16 times more likely than white women. Women are more likely than men (39% to 35%) to report experiencing violent crime at some point since age 15. Women are five times more likely than men to experience sexual assault. Approximately4.7 million women, 30% of all women  5 years of age and older, report that they have experienced sexual assault least once since the age of 15. This is compared to 8% men.

On September 12, 2020, The Calgary Journal’s Bill Atwood writes, in a piece entitled, “Male victims are being left out of the domestic violence conversation:

(A)ccording to a Statistics Canada report), Family Violence in Canada: a Statistical Profile, men self-reported to have been abused by their partners at a higher rate than women—with 4.2 percent of men and 3.5 percent of women being victims….Experts explain that because these self-reported stats are often overlooked this can lead to male victims being left our of the conversation, and without proper support. They also explain that there has been an overuse of the police-reported statistics by both academics and the media. This has led to situations where male victims have not been believed by police, and in some cases even face accusations of being the perpetrator….The bulk of crimes within the family are never known to the police….The Canadians in the victimization survey were asked if their victimization was ever reported to the police, and 70 percent of them said no.

In our contemporary culture in which the “protection of women and children” is one of the most powerful motivators of both policy and perception, the public consciousness of the tensions and conflicts between men and women and the manner by which each gender is perceived, processed and supported reflect a playing field tilted in favour of women. And while all supports for female victims

continued support, both in financial and in policy and practice terms, a significant shift to a more balanced attitude, based on both a shift in perceptions about the various and complex varieties of conflict between the genders.

How we behave when we encounter a conflicting situation, will result in the convergence of a plethora of both external and internal forces. And some of those forces, for each of us, may well be beyond our conscious awareness. A study at the University of Florida, evinced data that tended to point to a high percentage of both men and women who inflicted cruelty on the opposite gender having experienced physical abuse, or had witnessed abuse between their parents. That is one of many contributing factors to our myriad of options including and between the ‘fight-flight’ classical response. Our experience of betrayal, abandonment, bullying, gossip, and our capacity to recover from those experiences, will impact however we perceive and act when confronted with cruelty subsequently.

Given that the vast majority of public information and public attitudes tend to shine light on, and thereby to tend to favour, the plight of women as a social and a political issue, the equality of the genders, a stated goal of both feminists and advocates for androgyny, remains a distant mirage. Remaining silent, for example, when enduring emotional, psychological or even sexual abuse by a female partner is a pattern explained by a number of militating factors:

·        men are proud and by sharing such a story, they expose themselves as being “less than a real man” especially to other men;

·        men are also insecure, and any form of abuse is undoubtedly going to trigger feelings and even a belief that one’s neurosis is not only real but perhaps even crippling, given the abuse that is taking place;

·        men, at least many men, resist getting in touch with their emotional energy, including ascribing names to complex feelings, listening to the messages of those feelings, reflecting on the patterns of the recurrence of those feelings, and envisioning the potential options that might be available to both share and deal with those feelings….most likely not with another man, especially a stranger, a therapist, or even a coach or mentor;

·        men are raised and imprinted with the psychic/emotional/social/familial archetype of strength, force, physical fitness, physical skill, endurance, athletic prowess, competitive obsession with winning/success, especially of the kind that brings physical rewards, trophies, medals, coloured ribbons, and cash.

·        men are inversely imprinted with the obsessive avoidance, resistance, denial of the opposite of strength, including emotions, physical pain, evidence of crying, withdrawal from a fight, ‘wimping out’ in whatever form and situation he faces

·        men are taught, both formally and informally, that physical structures, bridges, equipment, transportation devices, hockey sticks and equipment, golf clubs, memberships in clubs, teams, and a shared pursuit of a common goal (of winning) is a sign of maturity, inter-dependence, leadership training and social acceptance.

·        men are enculturated to train, to earn a living, to climb up various competitive ladders, for themselves, their families of origin and eventually their adult families…all of this a matter of action, leaving reflection as a mere after-thought if at all entertained.

Without attending to the inherent nuances of different perceptions, attitudes, training and enculturation of women, specifically, it seems fair and reasonable to attest that each gender has what might be termed an empty bucket of both experience and knowledge, cognitive and emotional, of the other primary gender. Both genders frequently attend the same schools, in both elementary and secondary levels, where the primary gender stereotypes are discovered, reinforced and imprinted. Through the literature, the history texts, and even the sociological texts and classes, (although this dynamic is shifting fairly rapidly), adolescent males and females enter at the beach of gender relationships, with the biology of each gender is in a hormonal tornado.

Enmity, cruelty, power imbalances are all included in both the formal and the informal maturational processes of both genders. The models of relational behaviour adolescents witness from the adult world, doubtless, are not as inspiring and uplifting as one might hope, especially as the dominance of male models surrounds all of us in North America. Even with the evolution of various academic and corporate and ecclesial and social organizations now experiencing a dramatic shift in female leadership, compared with only a few decades ago, it is only in the last decade or so that women have felt comfortable in leadership, not having to mimic the alpha male archetype.

In our employment and workplace protocols, men and women, in order to be truly considered as equals, we will have to abandon the stereotypical prohibition of workplace romances, based as they have been on the assumption that the male (power figure) had to be taking advantage of the female subordinate, and vice versa. In our transformation of our cultural archetypes we have to shift from a male dominance presupposition, to a perception and the concomitant attitudes that each man and woman is capable of making his/her own independent, ethical, moral and authentic decision. Our “template of abuse” based on masculinity’s perversity has to give way to a much more objective, empirically centred, gender-equal premise that resists the political rhetoric of instant assumptions of guilt, by men, and innocence and victimhood by women. Locked in stereotypes, again originated by a male dominated culture, in which men were attempting to “over-protect” and thereby to patronize women, perhaps in a manner that men themselves considered ethical, we have to confront such psychic and cultural snares of reductionism.

Shifting to a more complex, nuanced, and effective model of the perception of equality of intellect, of imagination, of resourcefulness, of ambition, of skills of endurance (even if defined differently and not exclusively physical) of both male and female, we have the prospect of potentially reducing the incidence of both misogyny and misandry, that word that is so rarely heard and so absent from our cultural vernacular.

In a 2014 piece in the Vancouver Sun, by Douglass Todd, entitled, “She’s fighting to bridge the gulf between women and men,” we read:

Katharine Young isn’t in the habit of picking fights. But the (then) 70 year-old Hinduism specialist didn’t like what she witnessed in the 1990’s when a hard-edged stream of feminist scholarship started gaining traction as conventional thinking in higher education and popular culture (And I might add within the mainline churches!)…While Young remains leery of the spotlight, she and McGill University colleague Paul Nathanson have found themselves in the past 15 years at the incendiary forefront of exposing a trend in North America—the sexist counterpart of misogyny, which they call ‘misandry’….Titled Replacing Misandry: A Revolutionary History, (the book) explains how technological advances have harmed men and boys, reducing the value of physicality….With ideological feminists, the only males who are granted approval are those Young terms ‘honorary women,’ which includes all males who agree all females are oppressed, as well as gays and visible minorities. (A) second book by Young and Nathanson is titled Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systematic Discrimination Against Men..explores ways males are discriminated against in the legal system in regards to sexual abuse, violence against women, workplace harassment, child custody, and prostitution. Legalizing Misandry ‘exposes how ideologies based on an assumed superiority..have no place in the quest for social justice and equality, (Edward) Kruk writes in  New Male Studies. Judges and legislators are basing decisions ‘ on the assumption that women constitute a ‘victim class (and are thereby devalued as inherently weak.)’

Clearly, it is not only ideological feminists who, alone perpetrated this misandry. They had, and in some cases continue to enjoy, the full support of those ‘honorary women’ many of whom, as self-emasculated men, served as leaders in organizations and churches that imposed their imbalance and inequality and injustice and unfairness in their desperate decisions.

More reflections on ubiquitous cruelty

 Looking a little further into this notion of cruelty and some of both the traditionally accepted motivations, we find some interesting findings.

In a piece in The New Yorker by Paul Bloom, November 20, 2017, entitled “The Root of All Cruelty? (subtitled) Perpetrators of violence we’re told, dehumanize their victims. The truth is worse”, we read:

As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss noted, ‘humankind ceases at the border of the tribe, of the linguistic group, even sometimes of the village.’ Today the phenomenon seems inescapable. Google your favourite despised human group—Jews, blacks Arabs, gays, and so on—along with words like ‘vermin,’ ‘roaches,’ or ‘animals; and it will all come spilling out….Such rhetoric shows up in the speech of white supremacists—but also when the rest of us talk about white supremacists….What about violence more generally? Some evolutionary psychologists and economists explain assault, rape, and murder as rational actions, benefitting the perpetrator or the perpetrator’s genes….On  the other hand, much violent behavior can ben seen as evidence of a loss of control. It’s Criminology 101 that many crimes are committed under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and that people who assault, rape, and murder show less impulse control in other aspects of their lives. In the heat of passion, the moral enormity of the violent action loses its purchase. But ‘Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships’ (Cambridge) by the anthropologist Alan Fiske and the psychologist Tage Rai, argues that these standard accounts often have it backward. In many instances, violence is neither a cold-blooded solutions to a problem nor a failure of inhibition; most of all, it doesn’t entail a blindness to moral considerations. On the contrary, morality is often the motivating force: ‘People are impelled to violence when they feel that to regulate certain social relationships, imposing suffering of death is necessary, natural, legitimate, desirable, condoned, admired, and ethically gratifying.’ Obvious examples include suicide bombings, honor killings, and the torture of prisoners during war, but Fiske and Rai extend the list to gang fights and violence toward intimate partners. For Fiske and /Rai, actions like these often reflect the desire to do the right thing, to exact vengeance, or to teach someone a lesson. There’s a profound continuity between such acts and the punishments that—in the name of requital, deterrence, or discipline—the criminal justice system lawfully imposes. Moral violence, whether reflected in legal sanctions, the killing of enemy soldiers in war, or punishing someone for an ethical transgression, is motivated by the recognition that its victim is a moral agent, someone fully human.

It seems there might be a significant shift from a conventional and detached notion of the perpetrators of cruelty to dehumanize their victims, in order to make it feasible for them to inflict their pain, some theorists suggest that it is the fully human, the moral agent, even the young child in a parenting situation, or an adherent in an ecclesial situation, that is the target of cruelty.

Families, schools and churches, taken together and also separately, and the individuals in each, again together and separately, have a responsibility to consider the use of power (force, cruelty, alienation, isolation, abandonment, excommunication) and the motivation for such deployment. Cruelty, as was noted in the piece on everyday sadism, (acorncentreblog.com, November 28, 2022) is ubiquitous, and not only on social media. Normalizing this cruelty, and even idealizing its “power” and the adrenalin high (approximating the orgiastic) has become an integral component in the entertainment menu. The American ethos and culture seems to luxuriate in the deployment of force, including the sophisticated methods and tactics in both the military and the justice system.

Indeed, the American national identity archetype is the “strong ALPHA male” that seems to be the defining image for all public discourse. trump rode to the Oval Office in his perversion of the archetype. And one of his central stump arguments was that he was “fixing” the “carnage” and “draining the swamp,” both phrases that struck the hot buttons of fear and resentment, first of street crime and the dangers of criminal immigrants, and second the alleged tyranny of the Democrats and the government generally.

In a culture obsessed with, if not addicted to, some external “pill” as the “fix” of whatever might be perceived as a personal, or a social illness, replete with agents ready, willing and able (at least in their own mind) to provide the right remedy for the right pain, both literally and metaphorically, we have, as James Hillman has noted, created two buckets of addressing human behaviour that does not comport with our (whomever might be in charge of the discernment of the specific non-compliance): the first bucket is a “medical” bucket, the second is a “legal” bucket.

With respect to individual persons who have contravened some law, rule, regulation or organizational norm, we consider the “problem” based almost exclusively on a series of observable, empirical symptoms that need to be sanctioned. And the sanction is allegedly for the purpose of “correcting” the offender, as well as to warn others against a similar offence. “Teaching them a lesson” is the underlying echo of justification. Similar to the Buddhist “anger/frustration—compassion” model, this “teach them a lesson”, modelled by those in high places of authority and responsibility, in our corporations, our  military, our governments, our churches and our health and social systems.

In the criminal justice system, we hear the word “rehabilitation” bandied about, as the primary publicly-stated goal of the system. Nevertheless, we all know that the statistics of rehabilitation pale in comparison to the graphs of numbers of incarcerated men and women who regress into even more criminal and abusive behaviour.

We all, as life-long-learners, have a portfolio of comments, remarks, criticisms and cautions from our parents and mentors, bosses and peers. The tone and the attitude of those individuals were implicitly and explicitly part of the context of whether and how we “heard” and “listened” and integrated those moments. If they were provocative of an attitude such as “I will prove you wrong” in your assessment of me, we undoubtedly determined to negate the criticism. If they came from a bitter and self-loathing, or a highly needy source, we grew to turn down both the volume and the relevance of what had become cruel projections.

And, indeed, the act of a cruel comment, is often if not almost always, coloured and heard in and through the relationship and the attitude of the perpetrator. It is the surprising source of an allegedly loving parent or spouse, whose need for power and control, even if camouflaged in that chestnut, “for your betterment, I am going to teach you a lesson”….

And here is where and when one’s personal experiences play a role in the interpretation we place on those acts that might be considered cruel, hurtful and debilitating. And, there is and can be no single note struck by any cruelty; sometimes, it is worthy of consideration, even if it hurts at the moment. Trouble is, for most of us, we are neither schooled nor experienced in recognizing this thing called “projection”*.

Not only do we live in a culture (in North America) in which we have an apparently desperate need to be “fixed”, we also live in a culture in which we almost absolutely refuse to acknowledge our errors, especially errors in judgement,   perception, interpretation and especially in the management/supervision/mentoring of other people.

Starting from a perverted concept of a “fallen human being” (original sin) perpetrated and propagated by the church(es), and then enduring a traditional process of ‘being reined in’ in the school system by pedagogues whose need for control exceeds most others in the community (this scribe bears considerable regret and responsibility for this blindness), we also live in a corporate culture in which both efficiency and profit have supplanted effective relationships and long-term human satisfaction, growth and well-being. People in power, thereby, are empowered to exercise “teaching” and “mentoring” concepts that favour the least time (and cost to the budget) and the most available ‘stick’ (and carrot for the occasional reward) in a classical conditioning model of organizational dysfunction.

And, given that millions have acceded to this cultural dynamic, in order both to earn a living and to ‘fit into’ the demanded patterns, we now suffer from a vacuum of health leadership, mentorship and the implicit ‘authority’ and ‘respect’ that is unconsciously awarded to such dysfunctional leadership.

The blatant hypocrisy, in the cry, that we are doing this (imposing cruelty of any form) to teach you a lesson, belies the lesson that is needed to be taught to those cruel leaders. Power and authority, without care and compassion, is, by definition another of the many self-sabotages humans perpetrate on each other and ourselves, every hour in every day at every level in every sector. Rather than considering care and compassion an inordinate cost, they are both highly instrumental in enhancing the bottom line of all for-profit enterprises. First, in order to consider care for workers, one has to get to know them on more than a functional level. They are must more than a “careful front-end-loader operator” for example. They are a brother/sister, a wife/husband, a father/mother, a hobbyist/athlete, an aspirant and idealist/mentor for colleagues…in short, each of us is far more than a widget in the organizational cogs and gears.

Compassion, too, as separated from empathy, offers consideration from a detached and professional perspective, and the benefits of such an approach devolve to both the agent and the recipient. Again, far from being an excessively soft and redundant manner in which to perceive and to operate a leadership post, compassion signifies a healthy, mature, integrated and aspiring leader’s fundamental character. (The “hard-power” of the alpha male model, too often adopted too by ambitious women executives, in the false belief that in order to climb the ladder of the hierarchy, they have to “out-male” the men.)

Impunity for cruelty, the glossed-over eyes, ears and attitudes that too often greet blatant acts of cruelty, (we do not wish to get involved in anything that might be messy, legal, or demanding our witness) seems to have rendered many acts of human-to-human cruelty to be referred by some ‘outside’ third party, as if it were resolvable only through a simulated court hearing. Admitting we are wrong, as something we each have to account for, and also to atone for, is not a pathway to chaos. It is a pathway to begin the restoration of the dependence we all have on the truth.

Indeed, shirking responsibility is just another way of deceiving both ourselves, and in our wildest dreams, the other who might punish, sanction, admonish, or even discipline us appropriately.

Critical parent-malignant child modelling of relationships among and between supervisors and their mentees, is not only malicious; it is profoundly counter-intuitive. The model itself, smacks of cruelty, blindness and narrow and narcissistic self-interest on the part of those in power. There are a myriad of nuanced positions between the extreme of ‘critical parent-child’ and “buddy-and-friend” that offer multiple opportunities for both mentor and mentee to grow and flourish.

 

*Projection is when someone tries putting their feelings, flaws, and other quirks toward someone else, usually someone they argue with. Someone who projects will shift the blame to ignore their problems. A politician, for example, will use projection to distract from their flaws and shift the blame….the biggest reason, conscious or unconscious, that a person projects is that they can’t admit they were wrong about something. (from mytherapist.com)

Reflections on "everyday sadism" on the harmless

 We found the following essay in the tcd.ie (Trinity College Dublin) website, posted on September 25, 2020, in an essay entitled, “From Psychopaths to ‘everyday sadists’: why do humans harm the harmless?

The piece opens with these words:

Humans are the glory and the scum of the universe, concluded the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, in 1658. Little has changed. We love and we loathe; we help and we harm; we reach out a hand and we stick in the knife. We understand if someone lashes out in retaliation or self-defence. But when someone hurts the harmless, we ask: “How could you?”

Humans typically do things to get pleasure or avoid pain. For most of us, hurting others causes us to feel their pain. And we don’t like this feeling. This suggests two reasons people may harm the harmless-either they don’t feel the others’ pain or they enjoy feeling the others’ pain. Another reasons people harm the harmless is because they nonetheless see a threat. Someone who doesn’t imperil your body ro wallet can still threaten your social status. This helps explain otherwise puzzling actions, such as when people harm others who help them financially….

The popular imagination associates sadism (those who feel other people’s pain and enjoy it, at least they do until it is over, when they may feel bad) with torturers and murderers. Yet there is also the less extreme, but more widespread, phenomenon of every day sadism. Everyday sadists get pleasure from hurting others or watching their suffering. They are likely to enjoy gory films, find fights exciting and torture interesting. They are rare, but not rare enough. Around 6% of undergraduate students admit getting pleasure from hurting others. The everyday sadist may be an internet troll or a school bully. In online roleplaying games they are likely to be the ‘griefer’ who spoils the game for others. Everyday sadists are drawn to violent computer games. And the more they play, the more sadistic they become…..Some speculate sadism is an adaptation that helped us slaughter animals when hunting. Others propose it helped people gain power. Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli once suggested that ‘the times, not men, create disorder’. Consistent with this, neuroscience suggest sadism could be a survival tactic triggered by times becoming tough. When certain foods become scarce, our levels of the neurotransmitter, serotonin, fall. This fall makes us more willing to harm others because harming becomes more pleasurable.

Research shows that if someone breaks social norms, our brains treat their faces as less human. This makes it easier for us to punish people who violate norms of behaviour. It is a sweet sentiment to think that if we see someone as human then we won’t hurt them. It is also a dangerous delusion. The psychologist Paul Bloom argues our worst cruelties may rest on not dehumanising people. People may hurt others precisely because they recognise them as human beings who don’t want to suffer pain, humiliation or degradation. For example, the Nazi Party Dehumanised Jewish people by calling them vermin and lice. Yet then Nazis also humiliated tortured and murdered Jews precisely because they saw them as humans who would be degraded and suffer from such treatment.

Do-gooder derogation

Sometimes people will even harm the helpful. Imagine you are playing an economic game in which you and other players have the chance to invest in a group fund. The more money is paid into it, the more it pays out. And the fund will pay out money to all players whether they have invested or not. At the end of the game, you can pay to punish other players for how much they chose to invest. To do so, you give up some of your earnings and money is taken away from the player of your choice. In short, you can be spiteful. Some players chose to punish others who invested little or nothing in the group fund, Yet some will pay to punish players who invested more in the group fund then they did. Such acts seem to make no sense. Generous players give you a greater pay-out—why would you dissuade them? The phenomenon is called “do-gooder derogation”. It can be found around the world in hunter-gatherer societies, successful hunters are criticized for catching a big animal even though their catch means everyone gets more heat. Hillary Clinton may have suffered do-gooder derogation as a result of her rights-based 2016 US Presidential Election Campaign. Do-gooder derogation exists because of our counter-dominant tendencies. A less generous player in the economic game may feel that a more generous player will be seen by others as a preferable collaborator. The more generous person is threatening to become dominant. As the French writer Voltaire put it, the best is the enemy of the good. Yet there is a hidden upside of do-gooder derogation. Once we have pulled down the do-gooder, we are more open to their message. One study found that allowing people to express a dislike of vegetarians led them to become less supporting of eating meat. Shooting, crucifying or failing to elect the messenger may encourage their message to be accepted.

The future of cruelty

In the film, Whiplash, a music teacher uses cruelty to encourage greatness in one of his students. We may recoil at such tactics. Yet the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche thought we had become to averse to such cruelty. For Nietzsche, cruelty allowed a teacher to burn a critique into another, for the other person’s own good. People could also be cruel to themselves to help become the person they wanted to be. Nietzsche felt suffering cruelty could help develop courage, endurance and creativity. Should we be more willing to make both others and ourselves suffer to develop virtue?

Arguably not. We now know the potentially appalling long-term effects of suffering  cruelty from others, including damage to both physical and mental health. The benefits of being compassionate towards oneself, father than treating oneself cruelly, are also increasingly recognised. And the idea that we must suffer to grow is questionable. Positive life events, such as falling in love, having children and achieving cherished goals can lead to growth.

Teaching through cruelty invites abuses of power and selfish sadism. Yet Buddhism offers an alternative--wrathful compassion. Here we act from love to confront others to protect them from their greed, hatred and fear. Life can be cruel, truth can be cruel, but we can choose not to be.

For many of us, perhaps most, we have been observers, deployers and recipients of acts of power throughout our lives. As young children, we learned the cautions and sanctions that ‘kept us in line’, both literally and metaphorically. We “knew” what was expected from collecting and curating the signals of both safety and tolerance, respect and honour and their opposites from those who raised us. In school, a similar kind of enculturation took place. We all knew who the school bully was and who was the most likely target of the bullying. In our homes, we all knew ‘which parent wore the pants’ as the cliché had it. As we embarked on part-time jobs, we encountered various models of supervision, direction, coaching and mentoring. One physics teacher of my acquaintance, while delivering an exam paper with a grade he considered less than adequate, remarked, in front of the whole class, “When are you going to start to work in this course?” His inverse psychology, absorbed silently will the full import of its social ‘sting’, prompted the student to raise the grade considerably on the next set of exams. Another supervisor, believing that the graduate student had left completing the assignments for the degree too long to be completed before deadline, provoked another surge of activity, to prove him wrong.

Is this kind of inverse psychology an expression of wrathful compassion, in the Buddhist example above? Parental disapproval, of even disappointment, expressed in a sarcastic manner, without inflicting a bruise, nevertheless leaves a psychic imprint with a long half-life.* In the parenting and in the education enterprise, even a frown from a respected mentor can and will have the effect of either motivating a mentee or perhaps turning off all motivation, depending on the psychic and emotional strength of the mentee. Never intended as a ‘cruelty,’ such a frown (physical or verbal, or even in an over-heard conversation of criticism) lingers in the memory of the aspiring student. These frowns, and their opposite, the smiles of approval, silently and imperceptibly imprint messages of approval and disapproval on those youth whose ‘skins’ are especially thin. Students in the ‘arts’ and ‘theatre’ and ‘music’ concentrations seem generally to be among the more ‘thin-skinned’ especially among those whose preferences run to the physical, the athletic and the physically competitive.

In a western religious sense, among Christians, the notion of suffering is an integral component of the life of ‘discipleship’. And those who are expected to inflict cruelty are deemed ‘sons and daughters of Satan’ as a way of constructing metaphoric moats of protection around the righteousness of believers. Diving the universe into believers and heathens is another example of the royal divide and conquer model of ruling. The model engenders comfort and approval for the insiders, and demonstrates a serious objective to convert the non-believers, as the principal role of the believer. Categorizing specific behaviours as “sinful” and “ungodly” and therefore worthy of exclusion from the community, whether formally or informally, socially and politically and psychologically, is considered by some as ‘wrathful compassion’ perhaps, in their justification of their exclusivity. However, one wonders if such a characterization is justified in the minds and the hearts of those on whom the ‘edification’ and patronizing is addressed or imposed?

The existence of cruelty and harm to the harmless has a religious history and a legacy of bloodshed that has been absorbed in the blotters of many battlefields. The textbooks and libraries, too, have become paper blotters of the ink used in recording, documenting, analysing and theorizing about those acts of cruelty, many of them justified as “according to the will of God”. We have been ‘steeped’ like hot tea in the degrees of suffering and death that have been inflicted on harmless, innocent and virtually defenseless people.

This is the story, on the human level, in Ukraine, for the last year plus. And while NATO members, for the most part, have been sending military equipment including trainers to aid Ukrainians in their resistance to the tyranny of this cruelty, the cruelty against the harmless continues.

Inside Russia, itself, just last week, laws condemning all signs of support for the LGBTQ+ community were declared unlawful, in another act of cruelty to the harmless. Terrorist cells in Africa are burning and killing harmless men, women and children, for their own sinister need for power in the name of some ‘religion’ or belief system that not only permits such acts of cruelty, but endorses and rewards them.

It seems time, if not long past time, for the human race to begin to confront the individual, everyday acts of cruelty that are imposed on various objects of harmlessness, the children, the ordinary individual who just goes about his or her daily life without seeking to hurt or harm anyone. While the criminologists and the legal establishment seek to adjudicate individual cases of malfeasance and injury and death, most of these cases the result of everyday sadism on steroids, the rest of us have to find ways to say ‘no’ to those acts of deep psychic and emotional hurt that are inflicted with impunity, because we never want to be seen and considered “weak” by protesting or resisting.

Those in pain, in the middle of personal life crises, especially, will be among those seeking, most likely unconsciously, to inflict pain and hurt on those whose only interest and motivation is to be available as support. And that very purpose, itself, can be a target on the back of those who seek to help.

We have a very long path to trod, as a species, if we are to not merely wrestle with the cruelty that is endemic among us, but also to understand our own complicity in the confusion and the impunity of the barely recognized incidents in which cruelty is inflicted on the harmless.