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.

Bias versus Subjectivity

Everything is embedded in a specific, particularistic set of circumstances. Seeing only what you see from your corner of the universe is not necessarily about bias, (although the deliberate refusal to consider other points of view may be) it is about human limitation – our conditioning is linear and non-repeatable, so we cannot authentically be products of multiple cultures and circumstances, although we can acquire a superficial knowledge of other cultures.

The word “biased” is itself a “biased” (or loaded, not value neutral) term. It seems to me – and perhaps this is my “bias” – that subjectivities are inherent and inescapable in any particularistic assertion about reality. It is not possible to talk about anything without the subjective, point-of-view of the speaker(s) informing their discussion. Perhaps the only differences can be found in the degree to which speakers are willing to own their “biases” i.e subjectivities, vs their pretence that they don’t have any.

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polarity and subjectivity: The balance between polarity and equality as far as the genders go: we want to achieve the latter without losing the former; homogenisation serves no one. the same is true for ethnic, linguistic, faith and cultural groupings in a mosaic of co-existence, how to achieve functional equality without emasculating / defeminising complex traditions....

BDS and Political Correctness

Is the BDS (Boycott Dirty Semites) campaign just another vehicle for people to express their resentments without having to own that that is what they are doing? Does it offer people a way to express and nurture and feed their resentment of Jews while supposedly doing it for the sake of Palestinians? Does it allow its groupies to express profoundly visceral and irrational and ugly predjudices in a cloak of pseudo rectitude as if they were serving some noble cause? Possible payoffs are:the togetherness of communities built around shared resentment, the avoidance of one's own real issues, the false self esteem that comes with sanctimoniousness, the chanelling of agression and violence towards a relatively safe target (if a few suicide bombers attacked protesters outside a Max Brener shop you'd see a marked fall in attendance by the recreational protestors who are the mainstay of these events) but as it is at the moment there is no overt personal cost for anti-Israeli protestors. (Other than that blindness of lemmings who sacrifice clarity and personal power for the safety and abdication of reponsibility offered by the mob.)

For those who say that the central organising principle of the BDS phenomenon ( I wouldn't dignify it with the name "movement" - is pornography and the millions of people engaged by it a movement??) is a concern for human and Palestinain rights, and not simply a conscious or unconscious visceral resentment of Jews, then why are these same fervent 'campaigners' not organising similar boycotts against Turkey for its ruthless supression of the Kurds and its denial of an autonomous Kurdish homeland, Russia and its brutal suppression of Chechnya, China and its repopulation of Tibet and supression of The Uyghurs (a mainly Sunni Muslim group found throughout Xinjiang Province), Morocco for its occupation of Western Sahara etc.

And how would robbing Israeli Jews of their statehood serve Palestinian interests? Obviously it would only create an enduring passion for Israelis, robbed of their autonomy and rights, to subvert any Palestinian state errected on the ruins of the Jewish one. Are there calls for the dissolution of Turkey so that the Kurds may be free? Or of Russia so that Chechnya can gain its indepenence? Clearly the triumphalist paradigm of BDS does not emerge from real compassion for anyone, but from the desire of people to handle their own psychic garbage via projection, disassociation and splitting.