A new world view
Speaking truth to power: 1, 2 , 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8a, 8b, 8c, 8d, 8e & 9
This came from ideas fomented in Re-evaluation Counselling, Extinction Rebellion and Quakers, in decreasing order of influence. It follows on this series’ fourth post, and contact me for a six-page detailed review not in public domain.
We’re born with full faculties and are curious about the world from the start. As we bump into our surroundings, we sometimes receive attention and sometimes don’t. When we can cry the hurt gets processed, when we can’t the hurt gets stored as a recording, which we’ll rehearse when it happens again. In the current regime we grow up feeling small, powerless and alone. And as we progress to adulthood, we do everything to avoid that feeling. We use small accidents that convey to us power through our privilege to keep hiding from our feelings. And when confronted with feelings, we act out or distress to stay away from them.
One way our of that tightness is to develop relationships with allies to support us in our struggles. Another way is to offer contradictions to the prevailing oppression that surrounds us, either to get support with friends or to cut through the oppression with foes. That helps us break the cycle of oppression, and rediscover relationships that we as humans normally have as social beings. If everyone stopped cooperating with the oppression, then the oppression would not be able to stand, as it relies on opposition to push against.
That oppression is a self-organizing construct that started in originally egalitarian small societies. When a random accident like famine or drought put external pressure, some few who happened to be nearer to, say, resources gained a slight advantage. They in turn gained further advantage by organizing others to protect them against fellow humans. That engendered the cycle of oppression in a group, where neither individuals nor system were ‘bad’ at the outset. Race and class grew out of that as systems to maintain the status quo.
No-one benefits from it really: the ‘haves’ trust neither themselves nor the ‘have-nots’, who in turn trust neither their fellows nor the ‘haves’. So a third way is to stop being fascinated by oppression’s dynamics — it’s an artificial construct that has no rational underpinning — so if we focus on our fellow wo/man and build relationships instead, the oppression will crumble. All it takes is to convince 3½% of the population to stand against the oppression, and the rest will grow organically. But to start that makes us face our feelings of being small, powerless and alone, which only relationships can help overcome.
I struggle to build relationships and to reach out of my envelope. My white male privilege means that the status-quo is stable for me — it’s metastable for, say, women and people of color — meaning I don’t have to work at keeping a balance like others must. That gives me blind spots I try to address by reaching out to diverse allies, and when I make mistakes in communications around that I have co-counselling sessions. And what I try to give is what systems thinking I can muster to start a form of reciprocity and help withstand oppression.
