As Mature as a Newt

Last night we had the pleasure of having dinner with a group of people who un-school their children. One of the father’s was an Italian guy who mentioned something about children drinking wine with their meals over in Italy. There was a kind of surprised pause in the conversation at this point. (There would have been outright shock within other circles of people I can think of in this country).

He then went on to explain that despite, or maybe because of this, people where he grew up never get drunk. If someone does get drunk it’s big news and people remember it for a long time. It’s like – ‘oh you’re the guy that got drunk that time 5 years ago’.

Contrast that with the New Zealand (and generally Anglo-Saxon) approach which is that there is something soft about a person who isn’t a hard drinker. They’re a bit of a girl’s-blouse as we’d say here.

This guy, Ricardo, said that the first time he saw someone drunk was when he was 27 and had just shifted to a university in Wales. It was at a party which he thought was very boring because people were turning up with six-packs and were only interested in getting drunk. He also said that there were no events or games planned for the party which had clearly surprised him.

He said that students in Italy do not get drunk but that they still have a lot of fun, we all looked enquiringly at him so he explained that they often play games like Hide and Seek.
If it weren’t for the fact that I was in a large armchair I’m sure I would have fallen off my seat! This seemed extraordinary. “Do you mean university age people?” I asked in a state of bewilderment.

He insisted this was the other case before describing another game which he clearly had enjoyed playing. I couldn’t figure out how to explain what the New Zealand Student’s attitude to this would be without being insulting. Students here would think it was incredibly childish and immature to play hide and seek and would prefer the much more adult pastime of getting blind drunk, vomiting on the couch and waking up the next morning next to a person they didn’t recognise. Err…

I proceeded to quiz Ricardo about what life is like for Italian children in an attempt to find some explanation for this. He added the observation, based from his experience as a university lecturer in New Zealand, that students here are incredibly self conscious, always checking what everyone else is doing to make sure they’re fitting in and insisting that ‘Hey, I’m cool’.

To be clear this attitude never quite goes away as our own attempts to live outside the mainstream have shown us. People just don’t know how to cope when they’re confronted with people who don’t take care to remain in lockstep with their neighbours, especially as we’re neither apologetic nor aggressive about it like younger people tend to be.

Anyway I seem to remember a disparaging comment I once read (in English since that’s the only language we New Zealander’s can speak) about how young Italian men are so close to their mothers, preferring to live at home rather than move out into the flatting type situation we have here. I have to assume that in Italy it’s normal for parent’s to not separate themselves from their children as much as we Anglo-Saxon’s do and perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. It is our cultural group that has dominated the world for the last two centuries at least, and we should probably expect to find strong civilised traits like separation and emotional numbness the closer we get to centers of power. As well as the concurrent coping mechanisms of drinking, risk taking and general stupidity.

I think it’s pretty well known that Southern Europeans are much more emotionally expressive – able to have steaming arguments and then leave them behind – and someone at this gathering last night mentioned how our own culture is so uptight that it’s virtually impossible to have a social gathering with out also having some alcohol there to loosen people up.

Maybe things are changing though, our gathering last night wasn’t like that and I remember when Karen and I got married, we considered having the wedding reception at a venue that didn’t have a liquor license. We thought it would be no problem because none of our friends would care either way but a few members of our parent’s generation were so upset that in the end we had to change the venue to accommodate their desperate plea’s.

On the other hand maybe things won’t change until we learn to emotionally loosen up as a culture. Getting drunk is a coping mechanism that undoubtedly provides those moments of living purely in the moment that I talked about in my last post. I wouldn’t necessarily describe it as healing but it’s probably no coincidence that young people here often talk about getting ‘out of it’ at parties and drinking sessions.

Healing

Coincidences between blogs are always interesting, while I just wrote a piece called Climax Culture the Archdruid was writing one talking about Climax Community. We were of course coming at the issue from very different places and the respective articles don’t look that similar but we were both talking about a more successful way that our culture might operate. The implication of what the Archdruid was saying is that the time is right to be building toward a k-selected culture and that the short term, ‘me-first’ thinking of our current culture is ready to burn out and be usurped by a different approach.

Another implication was that looking back at stone-age or climax cultures is a good place to go to figure out what our future cultures might be like. Stone-age cultures meet the definition of climax community due to their success at maintaining their lifestyle for who-knows-how-long but I’m not sure the Archdruid will like me making that conclusion. I’m not a hard core primitivist though. I’m not interested in actually living in a jungle and nor do I think that I am capable of doing so, at least not on an emotional level. I am however, interested in what I can learn from primitive, climax cultures about how it’s members inter-relate, and of course how they treat their children..

It’s not just theory driving that thought for me either but the observable fact, as evidenced in the likes of The Continuum Concept, that many primitive cultures provide a very happy and joyful life for their individual members.

Also coincidently Ted has been writing about Soul Wholeness and the shamanic process of soul retrieval – I think we’re both agreed that this is verging on new-agey territory but the need to repair ourselves from the trauma of our lives, be it the sort of abuse our culture acknowledges or the ‘normal’ low level abuse that we all suffer as children, is a strong need in members of our society.

One Ted’s posting reminded me of was this fascinating paper Technoshamansim: Spiritual Healing in the Rave Subculture, which took raves, and the people who attended them, seriously enough to investigate claims by participants that they enjoyed ‘meaningful spiritual experiences’ during a rave. The author writes:

References to shamanism and catchphrases about self-empowerment and spiritual healing permeate raver discourse and invite an anthropological perspective similar to that applied to nonbiomedical healing in small scale, non-western societies.

before embarking on an analysis of rave culture from just such a perspective.

Specifically, I argue that the DJ acts much like a shaman who, aided by key symbols, guides the ravers on an ecstatic journey to paradise–a presocial state of nondifferentiation and communitas. It is this return to paradise through altered states of consciousness which brings spiritual ease to ravers facing an anxious and uncertain society

I’m going to tie this back into the same part of The Continuum Concept (Chapter 5, Deprivation of Essential Experiences) that I referred to in my previous posting where the issue of achieving high degrees of serenity was discussed. Jean Liedloff writes:

…it appears that there are two separate contributors to the to the feeling of wrongness that is so general in us. One is the individual’s sense of the continuum in him acting as a gauge of what is up to it’s expectations; the other is an even more primordial one.

That we are so universally subject to a conviction that serenity has been lost to us can not be accounted for solely by the loss, at an early age of , of our place in a continuum of appropriate treatment and surroundings. Even people like the relaxed and joyful Yequana, who have not been deprived of their expected experiences, have a mythology that includes a fall from grace, or bliss, and the notion that they live outside that lost state.

Considering that we have been referring to some primitive cultures as living in an Eden-like, pre-fall state this is a comment that should force us into a major rethink. Perhaps the The Fall was less a metaphor for a decent into civilisation than a descent into self awareness and the ability to worry about the future – and perhaps some of us have fallen further than others. You’ll often hear people around here saying that our current mess became inevitable the day we invented agriculture but maybe agriculture became inevitable the day we acheived self-awareness. Maybe that’s where all this began.

Anyway, despite primitive cultures now appearing to be on the same side of the fence as us they are still a good place to go for pointers on how best to go about healing. In fact they may be an even better place to go than I first thought because not only do they have the same goal in mind as we do but they’re also better placed to do something about it being as they are in a climax culture.

I have to confess that prior to this I had been somewhat put off by the discussions of shamanism coming out of either primitivist or (sort-of) sixties drug cultures head spaces. I not sure what it says that it’s taken an academic paper and comments from someone who has moved away from primitivism (Ted) to get me to look closer at it, but this healing aspect of shamanism is something that interests me. A lot of healing is, and still will be hard work but the virtues of healing by dancing or merely laughing shouldn’t need any promotion. Jean Liedoff goes on:

It would seem that in the enormously long period…before our antecedents developed an intellect able to reflect on troublesome matters like our mortality and purpose, we did indeed live in the only blissful way: entirely in the present. Like every other animal, we enjoyed the great blessing of being incapable of worry. There were discomforts, hungers, wounds, fears and deprivations to be endured even as beasts, but the fall from grace, invariably described as a choice made the wrong way, would have been impossible to creatures without mind enough to make a choice. Only with the advent of the capacity to choose does the fall become possible.

So perhaps it’s not just civilisation that we need healing from but the even deeper unmet need of being unable to live in the moment. Maybe ignorance really is bliss. Jean Liedloff again:

In the age old pursuit of this sense of unalloyed being… unconditioned by choices or relativities, men have sought and found disciplines and rituals by which to reverse the tendency to think. Ways have been discovered to still the galloping thoughts of man, put him at peace, leave him not to think but only to be. Awareness has been trained by various means to rest upon emptiness or upon some object or word, chant or exercise…

Meditation is the word usually given to the procedure of dethinking [Un-thinking perhaps?]. It is at the centre of many schools of discipline that seek to raise the serenity level. A commonly used technique is the repetition of a mantra, a word or a phrase as an eraser of thoughts of the associative kind that the mind tends to pursue. As the procession of thoughts is slowed and stopped, the physiological state of the subject changes to resemble, in certain ways, that of the infant. Breathing becomes shallower, and recent experiments have shown that brain waves are produced of a sort that are unlike those of either adult wakefulness or adult sleep.

For those who meditate regularly, there is an apparent increase in serenity…which also lends a stabalising influence to the rest of their time….It is as though they were, in the case of the civilised, in-arms deprived persons, filling in the gap in infant experience which would have provided greater serenity, by putting themselves into a state like that which was missed, that which possibly is also attained through the use of opiates. The most deprived people, those of our western cultures, if they meditate, would be putting in a great deal of time moving up to the centredness of a year-old continuum-complete baby. It would take them a vastly greater amount of time to catch up on the missed doses of serenity than people of other cultures whose infancies included a larger proportion of in-arms experience.

When I knew them the Sanema Indians – more than the neighboring Yequana – were engaged in active cultivation of this extra serenity, or spirituality. Their method includes the occasional use of hallucinogenic drugs, but consists mainly of chanting. The chant, begun with the repetition of a single short musical phrase of three or four syllables, is continued, like the mantra in an effortless manner until it commences to elaborate itself with added notes or syllables, with no conscious effort on the part of the chanter.

…With a fulfilled personality based solidly in a sense of his own rightness, the Sanema who reproduces the mindless bliss of the infant in himself with frequency and at length, can build a freedom from the fringe liabilities of the intellect with far greater speed and effect.

And from that point the book continues into the passages I quoted in my previous posting.

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Naturally after reading this I cast about in my own life looking for similar experiences much as I did after I read about the healing nature of true-community. Usually I find music is involved. There is a song by Ben Harper (‘God Fearing Man’ off the album, Fight For Your Mind) which disappears into a dream-like jam state for most of it’s 11 minutes, that has the potential to take my mind away from itself, especially if I am feeling sleepy. I know I found the last U2 concert in New Zealand to have a minor healing quality to it, although I should admit to being a huge fan of theirs, and I have always found that sitting in while friends of mine jam on various musical instruments to be a particularly enjoyable experience. Much better though if I could play and join in myself .

The last thing it kind of reminds me of is rock climbing. There is nothing like clinging to the side of a rock face high above the ground to make your mind focus on the here and now and I’m sure it had a lot to do with my recovery from the somewhat oppressive time I had at Architecture School ten years ago.

They’re all rather fleeting moments and compared to my work in the building industry, which is all about the burden of making decisions (with expensive consequences if you get it wrong) it pales into total insignificance. At the very least I may look at music differently now.

Truth & Paradox

In A Different Drum Scott Peck made the point that the truth always has a paradoxical quality to it. He used the example of the bible stating that being Christian is simultaneously about doing good works and having God’s grace save you from the need to do good works. This is observably a big issue for Christians and I’m not sure I’ve met any who have a good handle on it. They’re hardly an exception though.

This idea that real truths are inevitably paradoxical has stuck with me and it’s been particularly interesting watching the recent debate about cities with Jason and Ran. It also occurred to me that we’ve been this way before, with Jason behaving in a relatively rude manner and the other party extending him some grace so the debate can continue.

The first time I saw it was early last year when we were trying to decide whether being a hunter-gatherer or a permaculturist was a better way to get through the impending crash. I think it was all prompted by an essay by Toby Hemmenway. As I recall Jason told Toby his thinking was ‘dodgy’ on the subject – a tad unnecessary but Toby let it slide.

While it was true that Toby’s initial argument lacked hard academic rigour what he was trying to do was find his way forward to a new understanding about the crash. I’m thinking the same thing about Ran’s idea now as I said about Toby’s essay: Let’s not attempt to close him down because the argument is a bit loose, at the core of it is a really important idea that needs exploring, and that’s much more important.

Like it or not people are going to try living in cities for a long time. Things will be hard enough psychologically during the crash and the last thing city dwellers will want to do is shift out to country living. They will feel psychologically more secure in a city and will be drawn back to that environment – so we’d better figure out how to make it work, for a few generations at least.

Ran quoted an email of mine the other day:

“You could always decide to call these sustainable cities villages, or maybe large villages, and still keep the definition of cities nice and clean.”

“Never!” said Ran in his reply back to me and then used it to make a point about disliking nice and clean thinking. What I was really trying to say in the email was; fine give Jason his clean definition of city and lets get back to the debate and see what we can learn.

In actual fact I totally agree with Ran about that and what he said gets to the core of what this posting is about, if we try to keep things nice and clean we close off the other side of the paradox and lose sight of the real, complicated, messy truth. Ran seems to have a good instinct for this, and I loved that out of the debate he, the archetypal anti-civ blogger, produced an essay entitled How to Save Civilisation.

Getting back to that earlier debate, after insisting that I needed an answer to whether permaculture or hunter/gathering was the answer to post-crash life I ended up posting this article full of wonder at how we ever came to be in an arguement:

….Not surprisingly it soon became apparent that a combination of the two might prove to be the best solution of all but what I wasn’t expecting was that it would turn out that both approaches already combine elements of the other to such an extent as to make the debate almost pointless. In fact, the opposing concepts of either being totally in charge of our food production or totally leaving food production to mother nature existed only in my head. In the real world it turns out that:

(a) Many of the cultures that we thought were hunter/gatherers were actively managing their environment to increase levels of natural food production and…

(b) The aim of permaculture is to create an environment where food can be ‘grazed’ at leisure.

Put like that I can barely tell the difference between the two …

The same thing happened recently with the issue of whether people should expect chaos or community post crash and of course the answer turned out to be that we should expect both.

Then there was; are eco-villages a better option than forming a tribe and disappearing into the forest? In the end I concluded the best way to form a tribe was to form an ecovillage first and lo; Jason (coming from the opposite direction) said that Anthropik’s path would be to buy some land next to a forest park and use that as the tribes base to get themselves started.

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THE COMMUNITY APPROACH V THE ACADEMIC APPROACH

Yes, I’m frustrated by the futility of the way these debates proceed, they’re too destructive and too exhausting and they seem to produce false dichotomies.

Scott Peck (from A Different Drum again):

“…because it integrates diversity, in community partial ideas tend to become whole ideas, and the initially simplistic thinking of community members tends to become complex, paradoxical, flexible and sane.

In all honesty I don’t think that Jason values the relationship as much as the need to win a debate, I’ve seen him leave mile-long responses to people on blog comment sections which can be a very overwhelming experience and not especially helpful.

The need to close down EVERY SINGLE ASPECT of an opponents argument is a profoundly different approach to trying to zero in on the core of the debate. It’s about obliterating your opponent and it’s very forceful – essentially the literary equivalent of a good thumping.

This destructive approach is both a cause and a result of a person’s desire to keep their argument unchanged but the destruction of the relationship (community) ensures that debaters remain isolated and have less of a chance of nuancing their views with an understanding of the paradox.

Of course combat seems to be the very nature of academic debate. It doesn’t surprise me that academic methods are destructive since academia’s first priority is to reinforce the hierarchy and it’s values (including separation from self, community and land), and this means avoiding communal style collaboration. I remember a lecturer at architecture school who taught design in a genuine collaborative environment – he was universally reviled by the other lecturers.

Ironically it was at university that I learnt the concept of synergy and it’s that ‘greater than the sum of it’s parts’ thing that I love about this circle of blogs. However as I learned at the time you need at least an element of community for synergy to work.

I have to admit to a feeling of trepidation every time I visit the Anthropik site – in fear of what new calamity I will encounter there. Not so at Ran’s site, even when he uses my comment to bounce a debate in a particular direction it’s not done in an insulting manner.

Where I’m going with this is that I believe that the academic method is a very flawed way of chasing the truth, not just because it zeroes in on the details and loses the big picture but also because it uses combat as a debating method.

Whilst it’s true that an argument that can withstand immense criticism must be a good one, the war-like nature of the debate puts the proponent of any new idea immediately on the back foot and they have to ‘dig themselves in’ to withstand the assault.

It’s a real waste of time and energy in it’s own right but also because the proponent of an idea is the person in the best place to be critiquing it – after all, who else knows it so well. I know this is a strange idea for our culture, I’m expecting most people will be pretty sceptical of it and I would be too if I hadn’t observed Ran doing this very thing in some of his writing.

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I’m aware that this posting includes quite a bit of implied and direct criticism of Jason Godesky. Initially I was (and still am really) quite hesitant about doing this and I realised that I was feeling some kind of pressure about it. I don’t know how stuff like this can work across the internet but it happened a lot in the Derrick Jensen discussion list so I’m kind of familiar with it. In any case we should always respond to pressure like this and work to free ourselves of it, regardless of whether it is a small or a big deal.

I don’t have or want a problem with Jason, I gain immensely from his writing and there is far more to be gained from keeping the peace – but not at any cost. His behaviour errs on the destructive side at times and I’m hoping he will get the opportunity to see that sometime. It’s true that I wasn’t a lot different ten years ago so there’s hope for everyone.

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In the permaculture v hunter-gatherer debate I referred to above I remember Ran linking to one of my postings on the subject with the comment that he was burned out by the whole thing. How would it be if we could debate in a way that energised people instead of wearing them down? How would it be if the debate could be effective without having to be so damned ‘robust’.

Zeitgeist – two out of three ain’t bad

After seeing the film Zeitgeist mentioned in quite glowing terms on a few other blogs I decided to check it out myself and I have to say that it is one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever watched.

Calling your film Zeitgeist is a pretty daring move – you need to make sure you do a damn good job if the film is to deserve the title. The reason I’m feeling frustrated is that parts two and three live up to the title but part one falls flat on it’s face.

I think they really dropped the ball with the first part by giving in to their own prejudices in an attempt to deconstruct and discredit Christianity. I used to share the world view of the film-maker(s) regarding Christianity and there was a time I would have loved part one of the film. There came another time though when I began to see that my position was basically one of reverse bigotry.

Because there are a lot of people associated with Christianity who are clearly hypocrites I thought it was OK to openly disparage that whole sector of society. I remember the little rush I used to get every time I discovered something that discredited the religion but eventually it dawned on me that my dislike of them was no different to their dislike of people they didn’t approve of. I was as much a bigot as them, I just faced a different direction.

These days I have a much more nuanced view, I can see the difference between the people and the book they say they are following and also the difference between the people and the institutions. Organised Christianity is no different to any other institution, be it government or corporate or whatever.

The truth is I actually found part one to be absolutely riveting, it was full of fascinating information that I’d never heard before, (which I haven’t tried to verify incidentally) but if this is to be the film of the spirit of our times then part one needs to go in the trash and the film maker(s) need to return to the drawing board.

The exceptional bias of the film maker was readily apparent due to the gleefully patronising narration of part one and if that wasn’t bad enough the whole thing began with a grand five minute montage that included a telling of the evolution fable. I’m not trying to be provocative using the word fable to describe evolution I just think that’s the way it’s used by a lot of people. I don’t know if the film makers were aware that they were putting their own religious views up front and I don’t know which is worse: That they knowingly attempted to bludgeon us with ‘their’ story or that they were completely unaware that they had put their religious viewpoint in first before attempting to debunk another religion.

Another mistake they made was that of mistaking connection for causality. I was fascinated by the astrological relationship with the story of Jesus’ birth but to present it as if the astrological patterns automatically begat the story from the bible is quite misleading.

Obviously I can’t prove that their claim is wrong but then a Christian could argue that the patterns of the stars are put there by God to confirm the story and I wouldn’t actually be able to disprove that claim either. Which is my precisely my point.

They makers of the film also do not have a handle on the spirit of Christianity (although neither do a lot of Christians for that matter). They say nothing about the central theme of love running through the New Testament nor the idea of grace. It’s a pity really because a brief understanding of these ideas would tend to suggest that the acts of the church in the middle ages were not consistent with the bible and that maybe something else was going on. As it stands at the moment we have both the institutional church and it’s attackers insisting that the institutional church represents Christianity in the face of a great deal of evidence, via the church’s behaviour, to the contrary.

Something else I have a problem with is the lack of understanding of the effect that Emperor Constantine had on Christianity. Briefly; he took what was a kind of underground movement and turned it into the official religion of the empire. All of a sudden Christianity went from being an enemy of the state to an excuse for the state to go on library destroying crusades etc etc etc, you know the rest. To tie early Christianity in with the oppressive church of the middle ages and not mention this change would tend to indicate a pretty superficial understanding of the subject.  The middle ages was the result of the usual lust for power on the part of the elites, the difference this time round was just that they had found a particularly powerful voodoo to control the population with.

These are only some of problems with part one that have occurred to me, I’m aware that there are other areas that people will say that I need to deal with before I can really claim that the film makers dropped the ball but I don’t want to waste any more time going down that particular track because there’s a much bigger problem with part one of the film.

It’s irrelevant.

The power of the church began to wain, ever so slowly, with the creation of the King James version of the bible several centuries ago. Though unintelligible today it was written in the language of it’s time and took power away from royalty and the clergy who controlled what the population knew of the book my only printing it in Latin. Here I agree with the makers of Zeitgeist, by controlling the truth of their religion the church was able to control the people, the only thing was, it was the truth of the monstrously hypocritical difference between the institution’s behaviour and it’s book that they were hiding.

The institutional church was still powerful for a long time afterwards and many of the break away groups of the last few centuries themselves became institutionalised but the Christian scene today is characterised by a comparatively high degree of diversity with a lot of growth in independent and egalitarian churches, as well as more and more people meeting in their homes. There are still people out there trying to recreate hierarchical church models in an attempt to grab power but frankly the Christian landscape reminds me of the model of a post crash world that crash bloggers regularly describe. Which is to say a world in which it is no longer possible for any one group to dominate the globe and in which each country has devolved into a bunch of little fiefdoms with lot’s of uncontrolled territory in between. This is certainly not the nature of an institution that has us by the balls, nor is it an institution we should be overly worried about.

As annoying as many visible Christians are in the US they are no more than a sideshow – much like the bible-thumping US President himself. We would do well not to be sidetracked by them.

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So if they don’t use spiritual voodoo to control us, what do they do now? Ironically enough in part three there’s an excerpt from an interview with the late Aaron Russo who knows the answer to that question. In this interview he recounts how Nick Rockefeller told him that one of the elite’s goals was to separate children from their parent’s at a very young age, enabling indoctrination to begin as early as possible.

We should be on the lookout for other ways they cement their power by pitting us against each other. For instance: black versus white, Christian versus Muslim and Christian versus Evolutionist.

Zeitgeist talks about how religion is used to separate us from nature but I would say that the separation starts from a much earlier age in modern times the child is separated from the mother at the very moment it is born, I don’t know if hospitals still smack a child to make it cry out but they do still often whisk it off to be weighed and prodded as soon as the cord is cut, only returning it to the mother after it has been cleaned and swaddled in blankets. Even when the mother gets full control over her child her cultural conditioning is such that she will likely attempt to feed it with a bottle and almost certainly leave it alone in the dark to sleep by itself while attempting to ignore it’s terrible plea’s for help.

As bad as all that it for a child it is only the beginning. Separation from the parents is further enhanced by our coercive parenting styles and the coup de tat is delivered via 13 years of hard-labour at our penal-like educational institutions.

This should be the real story of part one of Zeitgeist – the story of our times. How the treatment of our babies and children sets the groundwork so that people always gravitate toward strong authority figures no matter how irrational they may actually be. It sets the groundwork so that they feel powerless even though en masse they could topple any government. It sets the groundwork so that people are ineffectual zombies struck dumb by the myriad of entertainment distractions passing by their eyes. Little wonder that almost all any of us can do is sit slack jawed on our couches mesmerised as we watch planes fly into buildings over and over and over again.

As for the small percentage of us who actually get off our couches, well it appears that it’s relatively easy to distract us with a myriad of false activism issues like, oh I don’t know, the Evils of Christianity?

There is also the small matter of the mainstream media… however I imagine that anyone who is reading this blog is on to that particular game so I’ll leave that untouched for the moment.

So if we were to remake part one of this film how would it look? Very briefly, In order to examine how we are shaped as subjects of the Rockefeller empire I imagine we’d be looking to interview people like Jean Liefdloff, John Taylor Gatto, and Derrick Jensen…. Hmmm, who else?

Connection

We’ve been having a hard time lately, I’ve got several blog posts that I want to write up that I can’t get near (and I’m about to make it harder by writing this instead).  Karen reached a point of mothering overload last week, and a friend stepped in to help her out. The friend is a good friend but parents more or less in the conventional manner. It’s fair to say’s she tends toward our way of doing things but most of the help consisted of the mainstream idea that at times like this you need to get the mother away from the children.

Basically the maintream solution to this problem is through separation from the children. I want to be clear that I’m not criticising this friend in particular, she took on an extra load herself and has indeed given Karen a break but I suspect that if we’d had friends in town who parent like us their instinct would have been toward building connections instead of creating separation. They probably would have descended on the house to take some of the responsibility away while still enabling us to maintain our relationship with our children. 

As parents I think that a large part of the stress we’re loaded up with comes from problems in our relationship with our kids. We are tired and don’t want to attend to their genuine needs or they are feeling fractious and are acting it out in ways that certainly bring their needs to our attention but also press buttons from our childhood that cause us to back off from our kids like our parents did to us. So our parent’s bad relationship with us begins to repeat itself. 

I believe the solution to these problems is to work on the relationship and to strengthen it. I confess that sometimes I don’t know how to do this and at other times I just don’t have the inner strength but I still think it is important because it’s really apparent that when the relationships are suffering our kid’s behaviour really goes downhill. 

Our oldest is someone born with incredible persistence, she never waits until she is sure she can do something before trying she just starts doing it. She started walking at 9 months and fell down about a million times learning but she got their quickly. She learned to ride a bike without trainer wheels over a period of about three days when she was 3 years old – she just never gives up no matter how hair-raising it got. Unfortunately when her emotional needs are not being met this same level of persistence amounts to total harassment for us parents. We’re lucky their’s two of us so we can tag-team her when there’s a problem. She’d be a nightmare for a solo parent or for a school, especially as all the co-sleeping and non-coercive efforts we have gone to have made her a very strong person. I think she’ll be an amazing person when she’s an adult (yes, I know this is her father talking :-) but right now she can be really hard for us. 

With all that in mind, when our kids got back home yesterday afternoon after having spent the second day in a row away from us she was incredibly difficult, the worst I’ve ever seen. I also got the angriest I’ve ever felt at her because of it and it wasn’t a nice evening. We were at our wit’s end. 

After we’d managed to get them off to bed we sat down and to figure our where we’d goen wrong and decided to try to get back on track. 

Basically she went to bed and slept in physical contact with Adi (oldest daughter) all night, told her she loved her a million times and (this is very important) apologised for the things she hadn’t got right without making excuses about it being hard and this morning when we got up Adi was back to her normal self again. Just like that.

Honestly it feels like someone has waved a magic wand over the girl. It’s a testament to the bedrock strength of Karen’s relationship with our kids that she can do that even when she’s under stress. I suspect that conventional parenting techniques cause the parents to have to shut off their feelings for their children while they teach the child to ‘cry it out’ and that it leaves them permanently numbed to one degree or another. Staying connected to your kids means you have a really deep love to draw on when things get tough. 

Karen is still in need of a break for a few more days but we’re going to do it by having me come out of the office for parts of the day and she’s going to take them out for things like bush walks because it is also apparent from our fussy-baby (now five) that time spent in nature has a very soothing effect.

The Root

Via Idleworm a great video, Money As Debt by Paul Grignon, explaining the economic system we live/serve in. If the economic system has never quite made sense to you or seemed to beyond comprehension this will put it all in perpsective.Basically though, you were right. It doesn’t quite make sense.

I’d imbed the video here if I could but Blogspirit is not yet part of the Google empire and I’m no hacker.

Piggish Sexism

What I think is, a women’s place is in the home. But only if she’s got kids right? That’s fair.
Howl’s of outrage anyone? What about if I said a man’s place is in the home too. Would that make a difference?

I work at home and now that our oldest is five is obvious that if I was away from them all day they would be missing something. They notice if I am out for more than a few hours and ask Karen where I’ve gone,  and they like to be able to come and visit me in the office regularly throughout the day.

So if it’s clear that I should be at home it must be true that the mother, who small children are more attached, to should also be at home.

I’m especially happy to be saying this since I saw this interview of Aaron Russo. Russo was asked to join the global elite by Nick Rockefeller after they had known each other for a few years. He of course chose not to but before they parted company Rockefeller told him that the elites helped promote feminism – for two reasons. One was so they could tax women. All that work they did in the house couldn’t be taxed but now that women go out to work someone else gets paid to clean the house and look after their kids and very probably the family eats out a lot more too.

The second reason to promote feminism was to break up the family

In a later conversation, Rockefeller asked Russo what he thought women’s liberation was about. Russo’s response that he thought it was about the right to work and receive equal pay as men, just as they had won the right to vote, caused Rockefeller to laughingly retort, “You’re an idiot! Let me tell you what that was about, we the Rockefeller’s funded that, we funded women’s lib, we’re the one’s who got all of the newspapers and television – the Rockefeller Foundation.”

Rockefeller told Russo of two primary reasons why the elite bankrolled women’s lib, one because before women’s lib the bankers couldn’t tax half the population and two because it allowed them to get children in school at an earlier age, enabling them to be indoctrinated into accepting the state as the primary family, breaking up the traditional family model.

I’m not saying the stated goals of feminism were wrong. I totally agree that women should have the same rights as men. I also think children should have the same rights as well, but clearly the whole thing has been hijacked to the elite’s advantage. Ironic as it may seem now the most radical act a women could make these days is to stay at home.

I’m still making my way through Hold on to Your Kids by Gordon Nuefield and the one area I would disagree with him on is that he proposes an attachment village as the solution to children being away from their parents a lot of the time. He’s trying not to rock society’s boat and point the finger at anyone, which is fine, a lot of people will listen to him because of it.

I think this sort of thing is partially why the conservative Christian right has appeal to some people – because they can see where left wing movements have gone wrong. Of course their response it similarly one-dimensional nad probably plays into the hands of the elite in a different way.

My instincts tend toward the left but they make it hard and harder for me, so much of what they do contributes to the power the state has over our lives. In New Zealand we have a child-less (rumoured to be lesbian) women as Labour Prime Minister . All this fair gets the Christian’s in a lather – especially as lately she’s been encouraging women to leave the home and go and join the work force to help the economy. Of course the more noise the Christians make the more galvanised the activist community on the left gets. It fair drives me nuts, they’re supposed to both be fighting for the rights of people on the bottom of societies heap – according to their respective manifestos – but are much more interested in squabbling with each other.

I seem to have digressed. What I want to say is, fight the bastards by loving your kids and staying in their lives. Hold on to Your Kids is a great resource for that, as is anything that promotes non-coercive parenting and co-sleeping. And remember, by staying at home you not only deprive the system of your children you also deprive it of your economic input.

Isolation

It’s a regular occurrence to read comments on the anti-civ blogs (and from the bloggers themselves) about how people don’t know anyone else nearby who they shares their views. I also see people on email discussion lists making this same complaint. 

The internet is great at connecting people up but ultimately it is all promise and very little delivery and there is something slightly worrying about how it moulds my behaviour. Initially there is a great flush of excitement upon discovering this wonderful anti-civ corner of the web and this conditions us to keep coming back to the computer for more. 

Unfortunately the connections made online can only ever be made at an intellectual level. Maybe sometimes someone will write something that will get you on an emotional level but ultimately the sense of community and acceptance I keep trying to get out of my computer is not forthcoming. 

I’m currently spending most of my day working in a room by myself working so it’s even worse right now but what happens is that I get online and start browsing blogs looking for something meaningful.  I’m well versed in anti civ thinking these days so it’s harder and harder to find something to give me that old hit,  plus I probably only just ‘did the rounds’ recently and there’s hardly anything new. I usually begin to stray further and further past the edges of my blog-circle in the hope of  finding something that interests me. 

I end up skim reading a bunch of stuff that doesn’t excite me and finally when I feel completely flat and empty I stagger out of the room in search of real people. Luckily I have a family and there’s usually a real person somewhere in the house when I need one. 

So is this a zero-sum game? Does the fantastic information and insight I gain from the internet make up for the appalling effect it has on my social life. I mean, if I didn’t spend all this time online I wouldn’t be on this whole new ‘plane of existence’ that separates me from my real life peers and instead I’d probably be out there hanging with them. Is it really worth it when the only thing that really gives meaning to life are the real-life connections I make? 

Hold on! I hear you say. Aren’t you forgetting about spiritual and mental development in that mix? – What about the search for insight and truth? Isn’t that important? Don’t we need that too?. 

I’m not sure.  Some of that can be quite self indulgent that questing for truth. We can also get spiritual development out of rubbing up against other people in real life situations  – if we aren’t too careful about keeping a safe distance that is. I think it’s the type of development humans are supposed to have too. 

‘Course, I’m not ready to give up the net yet but I do think I need to find a way to put all this stuff to practical use. I think that’s why I like Comrade Simba, in a single posting from him you can usually get a bit of philosophy mixed in with instructions on how to build a water pump. There’s something kind of grounded and even soothing about that. 

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Meanwhile back in the real world we still feel incredibly isolated – our crazy extremist ways seem to upset people no end.  I’m starting to understand why people who do unusual things are so dogmatic about what they do, it’s because they receive so much grief from their family and friends. They’re forced to erect a big rapid response defence mechanism because of the very people who should be accepting them unconditionally. 

Surely it’s not wrong to expect that those close to us will accept us unconditionally?   I see unconditional acceptance so rarely that I sometimes wonder if I am wrong. After all I can count on the fingers of a hand with two fingers how many people there are in our family who can actually do that – and I expect we should be thankful for small mercies.

I’ve also been hearing from other people about our unsupportive culture. I’ve heard so much that I’m kind of channelling their collective frustration at the moment (lucky thing I have a blog).  

I know this is a familiar pattern of the world but isn’t there something really, really wrong with it?  How can I put this in perspective? 

We, in our nuclear family, decide how we want to live our lives and the people we depend on for emotional support and a sense of belonging start to shun us or criticise us because of decisions that have absolutely no effect on their lives? 

This is clearly bonkers but it seems like no one can see it.  I could come up with a complex psychological explanation to explain this – hell I’m great at that stuff – but it would do nothing to dispel the sense of bewilderment  I feel that people are like this. They care less about their relationship with us than they do about…      about… 

What is it they’re so worried about exactly?  

Tell me, someone.  Why do you people try to make us feel bad because we choose to co-sleep, or home school with our children? These are loving things to do and they don’t hurt or even affect you one bit but you still can’t help yourselves. 

Why do you care so much about what we do with our lives if you seemingly care so little about your relationship with us that you damage it by acting this way? 

We can’t have people close to us who are trying to undermine us all the time – especially when the only reason you do it is because what you’re feeling a bit uncomfortable.  We don’t want this to happen any more. 

Except we need to have someone close to us. 

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Like I said, I’m painting a picture on behalf of a lot of people there, and it’s only half the picture too – here’s the good news: 

After giving up the dream of ever living in a village, some friends of ours recently revealed to us that they want to start a village too. Isn’t is always this way?  It doesn’t actually matter if we don’t start one with them because now we feel like it’s really possible again – only this time the fanatical edge has disappeared. I was always aware not to get too carried away but there’s something about letting go of a dream that makes us much more reasonable when we the dream comes back. I’m cautious too, I don’t want to push too hard anymore, or prescribe too much for others. 

We’ve been discussing all this stuff on a New Zealand Unschooling list. It’s a great place for support and what I like about it is that not only are there people on there who have gone before us but the members comes from a reasonable wide range of backgrounds so there is a lot of balance to the group. (Scott Peck says that’s one of the characteristics of true community incidentally). 

Through the list we have been delighted to discover people nearby who have chosen a similar lifestyle – and are suffering similar, probably worse problems – hopefully we’ll get to hang out with them soon. 

I’m looking forward to it.

Hold on to Your Kids

I’m reading Hold on to Your Kids by Gordon Neufield and Gabor Mate. Ostensibly about how to parent children it points to an issue that seems capable of bringing about a total societal failure – if it hasn’t already. 

I’ve always been suspicious when people complain how each new generation of teenagers and young adults is worse than the last, in some ways my view is justified because those sort of statements have an element of washing a person’s hands of the problem but Hold on to Your Kids is showing me that there is an awful lot of truth behind it as well. 

The basic thesis is that parenting is a lot easier and flows a lot more naturally when a child is properly attached to their parents. They say big problems arise when a child becomes peer-oriented and that we are seeing this more and more amongst our teens but even amongst children as young as seven. 

The book is referred to a lot on the Continuum Concept list and I was interested in it because it discussed the issue of how poor parenting (read; excessive discipline or control) could destroy attachment with the result that parenting would become a lot more difficult. It does indeed do this but what has really grabbed my attention at the moment is the discussion of what happens after the attachment is broken and a child changes from being parent oriented to become peer oriented. 

Gordon Neufield says that the attachment between parents and their children has a double purpose of making it easier for a parent to handle the immense difficulties of parenting and it ensures that the child stays oriented on the parent who’s behaviour they model and who’s cues they follow. It also ensures that the child never strays far from the parent so making it easier for them to look out for their child, and that the child is instinctively wary of strangers (people who they are not attached to) and likely to reject or ignore them in some way. 

What happens when a child becomes peer oriented is that they start to seek the company of their peers and to reject the parents, all as a natural part of their attachment instincts. They no longer place any value in what their parents think and will probably actively dislike anything to do with their parents or their values or tastes. 

The authors go on to say that the normal transmission of culture from generation to generation is short circuited by this phenomena and that instead of the children learning their parent’s values (which are usually not picked up until adolescence) they pick up on the values of their peers. More  specifically they pick up on the values of whoever the dominant members of their peer group may be, regardless of the character of that person. 

Worse still the biggest influence on them now becomes whatever is being fed to their peer group via the mass-media in the form of pop icons, meaning that at the crucial point in their lives when they are cementing their values in place they are effectively being parented by Britney Spears. 

So all those fears about the state of the new generation are true – they really are a scary bunch. Quite what is going to happen to society when they achieve a measure of power as adults is hard to predict but it doesn’t look good. 

To look back to my generation I can see that a lot of people did sort themselves out and became functioning members of society, however we can be a pretty unforgiving and un-empathetic bunch. I find it easier to look at the generation before mine, the baby boomers, where we see a narcissistic bunch of people fixated on staying youthful and divesting themselves of their responsibilities at an age when they are supposed to be fulfilling the roles of elders. According to Gordon Neufield no one actually wants them to be elders but they could at least try. 

The boomers may be scorned by me and many others but at least the hippy culture they came from, while hopelessly shallow, did champion ideas of peace, love and brotherhood. Presumably my generation will be much worse and that we will likely achieve total societal failure at the hands of the generation who are currently receiving their values direct from the music videos of MTV. 

Maybe. 

The other possibility is that they will eventually become responsible workers when the need for money to survive becomes an issue, they’ll toe the line in a grumbling sort of way but they will also be the sort of easily-led, soft-willed individuals that the powers-that-be really like to see forming the bulk of society’s herd. 

Anyway, I thoroughly recommend the book, it has introduced me to a new, much deeper understanding about the relationship between parent and child and I’m looking forward to learning how to prevent the imminent implosion of western society.

Stupid Stupid Stupid Scientists (an objective assessment of what they can teach us about raising kids)

Warning: Contains some ranting.I keep seeing the phrase ‘development of empathy’ used in a way that implies that empathy starts off at a ‘zero’ level in a child and gradually builds up as they get older. A possible conclusion you might reach from this is that the people who say this have never met any children – except that there are too many people who say it. They’re so wrong that I would suggest to them that really we need be more concerned about the loss of empathy that seems to occur across a person’s life span in this culture than how to develop it inthe young.
I’m sure every parent reading this can think of a hundred ways that their children have displayed empathy. I’ve found an article by the American Psychological Association summarising the science in this area and basically I’m going to tear it to shreds – but in a fair and balanced kind of way.

First problem; it’s called “What Makes Kids Care”.

Stupid! You can’t make anyone care, you can only LET them care. Trying to force a person to care will almost always have the opposite result.

To be fair to the article the use of the word ‘make’ is so ingrained in our culture that we don’t usually notice it – but then that’s the problem isn’t it? We can only ever conceive of getting something to happen in our culture by using an element of force – or if we’re advanced, trickery.

The news is not all bad about our scientists though, they are beginning to cotton on to this empathy in children idea.

Researchers used to believe that a sense of real caring about others came as people grow into adulthood. But now studies are finding that children can show signs of empathy and concern from a very early age.
For example, a study by psychologists Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, Ph.D., Marian Radke-Yarrow, Ph.D., and Robert King, Ph.D. observed children whose parents were hurt somehow — either physically (e.g. father having a bad headache) or emotionally (e.g. mother received bad news and was crying). They discovered that even very young children had a pretty well-developed sense of empathy.

So now they have real evidence that even young children have a pretty well developed sense of empathy.

Stupid!! The evidence exists in every child that was ever born. You’d have to surmise that scientists lack any kind of useful people skills (including the ability to empathise) if it’s taken them several centuries of research to uncover the easily observable fact that children do in fact have empathetic skills.

Next comes the What Can Parents Do? section. To their credit they have bought up the issue of modelling and it’s supreme importance in the scheme of things but…

They also want you to praise your child for showing empathy.

Stupid! Other scientific research has shown that praising a child for any task or action replaces their already existing intrinsic motivation with ex-trinsic motivation and basically they lose interest in doing whatever it is you have praised them for. They will still do it of course, but only if you are around to praise them for it.

Next they deal with Effects of the Outside World. This includes advice about monitoring TV and movies which is undoubtedly a good idea. Unfortunately it also advises parents to give their kids books to read that ‘promote compassionate behaviour’ and to educate them about famous altruists by taking them to museums.

Huh? Alright, it’s not stupid but it is very, very lame. If that’s the best way we’ve got for getting to our kids then we’ve already lost.

The article ends on a good note by pointing out that none of the approaches they’ve suggested will work unless there is a pre-existing ‘indestructible link between parent and child’.

But then they don’t tell us how to make the link indestructible.

They’ve just mentioned the most important aspect of bringing up an emotionally healthy child and then they drop the ball and forget to mention specifics.

The truth is they probably don’t know. Since we’re not allowed to mention co-sleeping, long term breastfeeding, non-coercive parenting, home schooling or the idea of picking up a crying baby in the mainstream there is little chance they were going to go there. The concept of non-coercive parenting, which all those issues contribute to, is probably the most dangerous concept of all to the establishment since they rely on parents beginning the work of breaking in children and disconnecting them emotionally from other people. In actual fact society in it’s current state couldn’t exist unless efforts were made to destroy empathy in children.

The reason the article mentioned this disconnect issue but couldn’t go anywhere useful with it is, as discussed in Disciplined Minds, that the professionals and scientists consulted in this article will be incapable of coming up with anything that will produce a healthy child unless it doesn’t conflict with the first priority of meeting the needs of the people who run our society.

Another irony in this is that we hold scientists up to be the most priestly members of our society. They’re people we go to for advice and yet they aren’t allowed to use empathy or people skills in their work. In fact they often display a very poor ability to cope with social situations themselves. How on earth are they going to tell us anything really useful, like how to be happy and fulfilled? Or how to build connections between people and how to build genuine community?

The only ‘scientist’ I’ve found who knows how to build community, M Scott Peck, learned his stuff by combining science and religion – to howls of outrage on both sides I might add – but not from normal people, who buy his books in droves.

The other problem with scientists (And I’ll have more to say about this issue later) is that their position at the top of the tree and the corresponding arrogance that comes with it only serves to further compound their blindness of what’s important

It should be no surprise though, that in civilisation we should revere the very worst state of the human condition. Cold emotionless scientists serve ‘growth’ and ‘progress’ very well, but they are unlikely to do anything good for us normal people.