Simchat Torah Thoughts: We have met the enemy and he/she/it is us

It seems to me there is a tendency to project onto the psychiatric establishment, multi-national pharmaceuticals etc etc our shadow stuff...that they are the “baddies” who pathologise deviance and attempt to control the symptoms of deviance with money making drugs administered by a hierarchical system which has the power as gate keepers to define the sane, with all its attendant privileges, and the insane, with all its powerlessness and exclusion.

But this conceptualisation of “the problem” seems to me to be as futile as the war on drugs was futile when it ignored the demand side and only went after the supply side. There is no point in trying to get rid of Afghan growers or Jihadist drug networks or Mexican cartels when you have huge urban markets that demand recreational drugs...no matter how many producers and distributors are removed, new ones arise to take their place because their is a lucrative demand for the product. In the same way we create the demand that our appointed agents – doctors, psychiatrists, carerers, police – remove significant deviance (illness, old age, madness, dysfunction, criminality, extreme poverty) to the periphery of our vision. When we have soccer world cups we drive all the beggars and homeless people out of town, so as not to stain the eys of tourists with our city's blemishes. When we have V8 motor car races in Australia, we take the animal emblazoned on our coat of arms - the kangeroo - and shoot any of them that may possibly wonder onto the track and stop the mad racing around asphalt which is done in the name of entertainment and distraction.

We – you and I and pretty much everyone - collectively create and maintain the conditions for closed mental wards. In the same way as we banish abattoirs and land fill and sewage farms to the peripheries of our cities, to keep the under belly of our so-called civilization hidden from ourselves, so we banish our “criminals” to jails, our toxic waste to poor developing countries, and our insane to locked wards. As with the butterfly affect, there is a direct link between the numbed out signature which ends most commodified interactions in Australia (“have a nice day”) and the collective hiding from ourselves which gathers like a cloud of numbing anxiety and depression over large swathes of the Australian human landscape (and any other over developed society). 

It is our collective fear of significant deviance and diversity that creates police forces and psychiatrists. We give them permission to act as our agents, they do not derive their power from anything other than the collective permission we grant them to keep us safe by removing significant deviance from the public realm where we may encounter it and where it may unsettle our already tenuous hold on our own sense of ok-ness. Not only do we allow police to criminalize dysfunction, and psychiatrists and psychologists to pathologize otherness, we task them with doing this. They are no more complicit than we are. So let the work of integration begin with me...bring the killing fields, slaughter houses and locked wards back home, into my house. After all, my house is large, and has many rooms.

A decalogue (decablog?): ten upwellings

 1)Ask yourself at any given moment: "what would love do now?" Quite often the answer will be "the dishes."

2)Kindness which is only practised within your own belief community  is not necessarily kindness at all

3)In order to get free of the person you first "have" to have a personhood (personality, i.e a set of relatively enduring and characteristic responses)

4)The five most important needs of the body-mind:
breath
water
food
touch
validation

5) Money will go
Money will come
Adonai natan ve Adonai lakach
Yehi Adonai mevorach leolam vaed

6) Whether you dig down deep or climb up very high, either direction takes you back to where you started and never left: everywhere

7) There are many corrupt religions inside me: most of them teach that things and people are wrong the way they are; perhaps I should question my clergy

8)shame
no aclaim

is poetry lame?


9)suffering is like a ball
tossed from being to being
no sooner has one left the game
then a fresh pair of legs
comes on and runs with it
but no one gets to hold the ball
for ever

10)

Parenting Styles and Politics

Once I was on a plane – a domestic flight I believe – perhaps between Joburg and Cape Town. For some reason the plane was delayed. A toddler who sat next to her young mother became more and more distressed and began (or continued, she may have already boarded the plane crying) to sob and shriek very loudly...even ear piercingly. The shrieks and wailing continued as the mother tried, unsuccessfully, to calm her. Other passengers stared, and a succession of cabin crew offered advice. A dummy was tried, food, the mother held the child tightly and rocked her, but the shrieks just grew louder and louder. The mother, sensing the agitation and hostility of other passengers, and her own helplessness, seemed to me worthy of tremendous compassion.

My natural impulse was to empathise with mother and child, to give them some space, to see if there was anything that could be done to reduce their mutual distress. But not all the passengers, disturbed by the uncontained and persistent shrieking, saw it that way. “Giver her a warm klap” offered one. “She needs a good hiding....I’ll sort her out” said another. These comments evoked my own issues, and in my own timid way I semi-audibly mumbled “can’t you see she’s inconsolable, she needs help not threats.” In my psychologised mind the child was shrieking for all of us, and the disgruntled passengers were responding with however they as shrieking uncontained frightened or uncomfortable children had been dealt with: heard, soothed, contained or beaten into silence.

The real difference in politics – as in everything else – is not between left and right or fundamentalists vs secularists but between those who are conscious about their own process and projections and those who are unconscious about them.
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Imagine if there were mandatory ante-natal courses where young parents, instead of been taught all the technical stuff about breastfeeding and latching and nappy changing (not that those are not important) were taught the basics of surviving post natal depression, and how they could advantage their child by facilitating secure attachment, ie, a course training new parents to be effective "interactive psychobiological regulators" through physical contact (touch, feeding and cuddles), eye contact, and vocal tone (comforing sounds and lullabies), play, stimulation (arousal) and rest and disengagement, all in an intuitive rythm and dance between mother and child, and father and child. Yes a lot of input up front, and costly, but a stitch in time saves nine...and (as Mr Indivar Bilenko points out) lives.

 

Please Note

I think most men go to sex workers in order to be reminded that sex, or at least the purely physical mechanical dimensions of sex - are not really that important to them
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mean are sexually polygamous and emotionally monagamous
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Advice to middle aged men who are not in a relationship or who are temporarily stumped as to how to reinvigorate the sexualdimension of their relationship, and who over eat too much. Everytime you want to spend money on a little pastry or coffee or burger or shwarma or icecream in an attempt to nurture yourself, but which your spreading stomach and wasitline testify that your body does not need, instead put the dollars aside in a little money box. In a short time you'll have enough saved to go for a nurturing massage or to a sex worker for a hand job or anything else you agree upon... probably more nurturing , and much healthier than abusing the body with uneeded food.
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Resentment

We resent when we are trying to protect
the things that we love
(like our dignity or autonomy)
unfortunately
it often doesn't do the job
very well