Derrick Jensen interviewing Darcia Narvaez, Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, IN, on child rearing in primitive and civilized communities, and how the differences affect the moral development of human beings. To me this is one of the Wow! sources with regard to the human condition.
Truth doesn’t hide behind acronyms
I thought I had seen them all; all those groups which run by pompous names that they choose to disguise with funny acronyms like STOP and DENY and CASH. I have been lucky enough to not having been stopped by STOP, and not having been denied what I needed by DENY (though I couldn’t avoid getting mugged by CASH), but I have become aware of enough other cases to understand that this has actually been a matter of chance. This has become pretty clear while I was attending meetings of KING and BOSS, two institutions at the mentioning of which almost everyone is rolling their eyes. All of us have made our experiences with them, and all of us have been shaking heads over how these people operate affairs.
To begin with, it already makes you wonder how a seemingly decent person becomes a snooty ignorant bitch the very moment he or she joins one of these groups. It almost looks like, on entry, some part of their brains get lobotomized, making them completely incapable of rational thought, reasonable action, and feeling compassion for others.
E.g. the first person to file a complaint with them is regarded as “the victim”, per definition, the other, of course, must become ” the villain” who can expect to receive strong scolding including elements of intimidation. The basis of the groups’ decisions is hearsay, throughout, upon which opinions get built which have everything to do with personal preferences and nothing to do with facts.
In case a “villain” is unwillig to surrender another institution called COWDUNG comes into play which uses progressive methods of manipulation like ‘Neuro-Linguistic Progrmming’, Mediation, and ‘Non-Violent Communication’ to determine that “the villain” is actually the villain.
And so it goes on.
As I said, I thought I had seen them all. At least enough of them to have an educated guess at how all the others are operating.
I was wrong.
By the end of last week I have been attending a meeting of what could be regarded as the secret crown of all the other pseudo-governmental groups, and their acronym might as well have been HELL. If you have ever been walking in the hallways of power, if you have ever lingered among members of government or high finance, this is how you may imagine it felt to be there with HELL. Their field of activity is within the realm of financial assets and immovables, and immovable, indeed, were their. stonelike faces and the notions that guided their decisions. One of them impatiently twitching a finger was as much as they allowed themselves to give insight into their actual thoughts about some petty farmer explaining his being passionate about his work and being concerned over what happens to the land that is supposed to get sold to some mining company. HELL must have come to the conclusion that these peasants were suffering from an incurable delusion about the value of money — the stuff you can use to buy food from elsewhere — but as it was unlikely that these poor souls could be talked out of their misinformed condition the obvious answer was, Thanks so much for sharing with us; we assure you that your worries are baseless, and that we will Inform you in case the situation changes.
With that we have been dismissed.
The very instant the door closed in our backs, the feeling of suffocation immediately stopped and fresh air filled my lungs again.
Dude, was I just thinking, Occupy Townhall?
If only that were the solution…
Terror Show
You call your lifestyle “spiritual” and “holistic” and “permaculture” and “energy-conscious”, and then you go to a foreign country and spread false allegations about a native person you don’t even know and who is just doing their work; and then you convince another foreigner who has nothing to do with anyone around here to carry the lie to the officials, and you abuse your membership and your friends in major administrative bodies to push your case, and you do this over and over and over again – how much more can you taint your spirituality?
I used to get mad at you. But that was when I still thought there was some sort of intelligence in you that could respond to my rage. From what I understand today, you are a sad case of someone being helplessly possessed by hate, and you don’t even care whose livelihood you destroy in the name of “love and light”.
You leave me confused. I don’t know how to deal with all this falsehood. I don’t know how NOT to deal with it.
I used to get mad at you. But that was when I still thought there was some sort of intelligence in you that could respond to my rage. From what I understand today, you are a sad case of someone being helplessly possessed by hate, and you don’t even care whose livelihood you destroy in the name of “love and light”.
You leave me confused. I don’t know how to deal with all this falsehood. I don’t know how NOT to deal with it.
And yet, I love it so
After hours of nightly contemplating the immense depth and amount of corruption, incompetence and insincerity I have the doubtful honour of being allowed to witness and which affects my life on a daily basis I felt like I needed a shot of Heavy Metal to keep my mind from further spiralling into negativity again. Metal has always been my drug of choice which helped me kill the pain of living in this age, and I am aware of it for quite some time. As a consequence, I stopped listening to music almost completely for a few years.
There is yet another quality to Metal that I was not aware of, which I was constantly seeking to apply, though: to have someone scream at the evil in man and to have them shout with rage, and spit in the faces of the gods that failed.
There is yet another quality to Metal that I was not aware of, which I was constantly seeking to apply, though: to have someone scream at the evil in man and to have them shout with rage, and spit in the faces of the gods that failed.
Seeing things a bit different today, my return to screeching guitars, galloping basses, thundering drums and voices like air-raid sirens became sort of an amusing bed-in which presented me with the question who these people were shouting at. The greed, the ignorance, the imposture, the make-believe, the displays of incompetence in compensating for incompetence*, they are all rather laughable than enraging. We are players in a charade called Auroville, and if we didn’t have it all backwards it could be such an enjoyable experience, like a child’s birthday. And you out there who would smirk or snort at my utterings, you are completely right, though probably for the wrong reasons. For you are like us, because we are like you.
(* German = Inkompetenzkompensationsinkompetenz. I accidently found this in a dictionary and just couldn’t resist. Yays for compound words!)
