circumrambulations

[circumrambulations]

“When I was 15 years old or so I wore palestinian keffiyeh (scarf) in school and some guys would shout after me that I was a "fucking communist". I didn't know what that meant so I had to learn about communism, and socialism and marxism. For quite a few years I put great belief into thinking that if only the state was run by sensible, rational, utilitarian and altruistic people who put the needs of the masses first, we could create an equal society with no poverty, no greed, no violence, where the environment was protected. Even though (or because) I was quite un-read on these matters I was an authoritarian socialist. Around age 21 I started realizing that people have this urge to rebel to do what they want, even if there are laws and social conventions that try to permit them from that. If the need is strong enough, they will break the law, just to feel free. If the state is strong enough it will punish and trample human nature and create a society of cowering, stifled, inauthentic, unhappy people walking around with masks all day in order to fit in and not step outside the line. I started to see myself as an anarchist,because in the ideal circumstances I still believe that humans are able to make the right choices for themselves and co-operate peacefully together. That our most inner nature is altruistic, our emotions, when pure, guide so that we do not hurt each other.   The problem seemed to be that living in this society today we are not pure. Most people are born in to a skewered and messed up circumstance that has been handed down for generations, where our view of ourselves, of love, of care and trust are shaped by the people we interact with as kids. It sets patterns for the rest of our lives that sits so deep that they not only guide us more that we dare to try to understand. They actually control us and drag us along throughout our lives, from one insatiable hunger to the next. To establish an anarchist new order from one day to the next would fail brutally because our individual imprinting and the society/culture around us is not at all in sync with what that kind of organization would mean. We would get the most egoistic, oppressive and violent society imaginable if today's humans tried to live without laws, even a slow political process over decades would end up with the same result. It started to seem increasingly utopian to hope for such a thing.  In a way utopia is neighbor with nihilism, because if your vision relies to heavily on wishful thinking, speculation and if-only's it doesn't take long, if you are honest, until you lose faith in it ever becoming real. At the same time it seems that the forces of society is moving ahead like a steam roller while your ideas about practical resistance and community building in small groups remains futile and pointless. So you can chose to be a righteous dreamer, walking around with all your cynicism and judgement. Looking at society through the spectacles that is only seeing all the bad things, to keep re-convincing yourself that the libertarian revolution isn't happening anyway so what is the point to even believe in change.  Or you can rabbit hole into some relativistic worldview where there is no truth and the only principle that governs us is the lust for power. You can grow your resentment, your lust for a sort of revenge and your bipolar perspective of who's right and who's wrong. You can band up with others in the same bubble and maybe you gain momentum enough to force your view onto the world. To shoehorn your ideological solutions into existing institutions. Disregard what science says and what other people even want. They are of the enemy anyway, they don't know what's right, and they push the wrong way just by existing. Anybody who is not in your boat must be fought. Since power is the guiding principle you figure you need to use power to force the world to conform to your ideology. Without realizing you sacrificed your lust for "freedom" on the altar of authoritarianism and your whole project is now neither socialism, anarchism or libertarian. You convince yourself that the minority groups who you represent will be better of for this so it is all justified. I'm tired just by thinking through all this, I gave up most of my previous heavy beliefs just so I could stretch my back tall enough to see further, also into the past and future. And so that I could become flexible enough to have a look inside myself and see that I don't carry the good and honest intentions to make the world better yet. I need to work on myself and my relations, my own sense of place, meaning and morality.  No healthy structure will make good use of sick minds. My mind, our minds is the first place to heal and work with. That's where politics start and where the root of everything social and cultural resides.“

[circumrambulations]

—————————- With the obvious difference that the lettuce doesn’t have what we like to call “free will” and agency. Unlike vegetables, humans have a brain and our brains are on top of that neuroplastic (they are extremely adaptable, can even learn to get sensory data from the tongue to “see”). So in part I think this quote is correct and very beautiful. However, it would be ridiculous to try to make a lettuce feel responsible over it’s growth and progress.

But a human should feel this responsibility. Even if we often don’t have a lot of control over what’s going on around us, or what happened to us as children or a week ago even. If we only look at circumstances and surroundings as explanation to why someone is not doing well, we are robbing them of the only tool that they have consistent access to in order to try to improve things. This is their own mind and their own body, it’s not an external thing that’s at the complete mercy of others. Even if it can feel like it at times, and different people have different amounts of options and space to make changes depending on circumstances and their own mind body control/strength.

In my own experience I used to for a very long time feel trapped inside circumstances, personal experience, others peoples view of me, the things I’d told myself about myself through the years, past traumas, past mistakes, past regrets, cynicism, negative outlook and the sheer overload of trying to make sense of what life means in an ever changing society that continues to move the frontier further and further into the unknown, where no other generation of humans have ever tried to survive. This is not something a lettuce has to worry about, or reason with itself about, or numb, or distract itself from.

Slowly I’ve started to believe that a huge part of our own difficulties in life is due to own inability to find meaning and to heal ourselves from past traumas. Even if trauma sounds a bit of a heavy word, I think it can be used for something that isn’t the result of a single, dramatic and obviously hurtful event. It can also be something that happens in a slow and fragmentary way over a longer stretch of time. Somebody’s lack of confidence, as an example, comes from somewhere. We are not born with a certain amount of confidence. Life, culture, people and our own actions most likely taught us to feel “big” or “small” depending on many things that have happened to us throughout life. But all these things are in the past. Everything that has happened to you, and your experience of that, is nowhere to be found today. You can search the whole world and you won’t find anywhere those events today that taught you as a kid that you are not good, competent, worthy of love, pretty or smart. It’s only in your own self perception that you’ve held on to these things. I’m not saying you did it on purpose. But if you look for your ideas about yourself, about who you are or aren’t and what you can do or can’t, they are all situated inside of your own being.

So unlike the lettuce, we have our own mind stuff holding us back. There most often are factors on the outside too that we maybe don’t have a lot of power over, that we need to adapt to as well. As I see it humans have four distinct options, four strategies. They are often unconscious and deeply ingrained in our world view and perceptions, so we are not aware of them. They are hard to fully subscribe to. Even if we chose our way in one aspect of life, we might believe in a different thing when it comes to other aspects. The stronger we make either of these patterns, the harder they are to distance ourselves from and to see as our own perception and not just “how it is”.

1. We can say that all of our problems, be they internal or external, have been handed to us by the world. We can entrench ourselves in negativism, resentment, sadness and anger. We can even construct elaborate ideological explanations as to why nothing works out for us, why people are mean to us and why we don’t like ourselves and can’t do anything about it. In some sense these might be good explanations, that’s the dangerous part. It might be that the world does treat us differently because of how we look or behave. It might not be fair. But if we believe we have agency, whatever the world has done to us, we still have choices in what we do to ourselves. Even if the world has taught us to think certain things about ourselves, we chose the way we act, how we relate to feelings and thoughts (yes, they can be overpowering and hard to distance yourself from, but it’s a skill that can be learned) and how we spend our time and energy. Despite this, we can still wait for someone to come fix us, or someone to force us to fix ourselves. We wait for our surroundings to change, we can even start demanding that the whole “system” change so that we get the incentive to change ourselves. If it seems the world isn’t changing the way we want it to, we can use that as an excuse to spend all our time ruminating on our misery, we can complain, we can get angry, we can give up responsibility and we can let ourselves of the hook of having any power over our own happiness and fulfillment. Fuck the world.

2. This often can land us in strategy number two. Since the world is a shit hole and everything is conspiring to make me weak, and since nothing can be done about my own inabilities, insecurities, hardships and challenges, UNTIL the world has realized that it’s at fault and finally aligned itself to provide me with the things I am asking for: I need to numb myself. Since life is so horribly unfair and out to get me, I need to seek a kind of comfort and something to distract myself while waiting for others to finally fix my life or for my own death. There are many many ways do this. One way is to join some kind of ideology that explains things in very simple terms. Be they religious, secular or political. It provides a sense of meaning, structure, kinship with your group and most often you get a sense of where your place is in this cosmic drama. The world might be all wrong but at least you know where your place is according to the big plan of how things are or how things are meant to be in the future when the prophecies come true. Modern secularism isn’t very different from this. Science can’t prove to us what is moral and what is not. It can’t teach us what love is. If only described in language and numbers, the things that animates us humans isn’t very fulfilling. This leaves a vacuum. We got rid of all the religious “superstition” and we are left with a mechanistic model which isn’t very convincing in giving us the experience that our life is meaningful.

3. So one way is to hide from the world and from ourselves. It’s a strategy of numbing. We can seek the satiation of our bodily and socially learned needs and hungers. It’s doesn’t even have to be that we spend our whole life chasing money, sex, status and short lived pleasures, all though that’s seem to be quite enticing if we notice our own response to those things. Whatever stimuli that distracts us from our own unhappiness, stress and unease works just as well. That’s why we get addicted to anything that can occupy our minds, so that we do not have to listen to our internal voices. Drugs, relationships, praise from others, entertainment, food, drama, anger, competition, arguments, hoarding things, our identity, being liked, being good, being the person our parents wanted us to be, being the opposite of who our parents wanted us to be, being judgemental, worrying, distractions, being perfect, being safe, gossiping, being a victim, control. And the list goes on. Anything that gives us some excitement, that alters our mind state and takes us away from the here and now, can be addicting and a way to hide from ourselves.

4. Or we can use the last strategy called: do something about it. Get to know yourself. Get to know your darker sides. Practice sitting with your fears and hurt to see what they really are. Hold yourself responsible. Practice honesty and patience. Give up your ideas about who you ought to be. Be compassionate with yourself but don’t let yourself of the hook. Use discernment. Decide what you need to learn to accept, and what you can change without having to wait for anyone else or force others to act as if they believe you. Free yourself of the addictions and all the compulsive ways of numbing yourself. Let your old self burn, let the weak bits fall off and be in a continuous process of shedding skins.

5. Don’t join my cult ————– 19/3 - 2018