All We Have Is Each Other
Recognizing Change
It’s been difficult to find a way to write about our current situation. For my whole life my focus has been on where things were going wrong. How to awaken myself and others to dangers that seemed to be escalating and heading in a very bad direction. Under this, you could say; my motivation was; to understand what was happening. There seemed to be an automatic connection between understanding and changing course. It seemed that once things were understood to be bad and getting worse change would just happen.
Among the many things we’ve all had to mourn over the last…, ten? Thirty? Fifty years? I’ve been mourning the loss of this certitude. Something I never challenged and always just assumed would be the way things work. It’s been clear for a while now that understanding; at least the kinds of partial and shifting levels of it that we are capable of as humans; does not bring about change.
Internally, I’ve had many opportunities to experience the way change does work. As Krishnamurti would say, “Just like that!” This struck me the first time I heard him say it on a low quality video over crappy headphones. It struck me, “Just like that!” It fit. I re-cognized it. In fact there is no other way for true change to occur.
Part of it is the way insight can strike us and dissolve binds. But that’s not all of it. There’s Grace involved.1
Change happens when it happens and it is experienced, “Just like that!” If not, it’s not really change. It’s a wish, or one of many obfuscations arising from believing we have no choice but to accept a lie.
You could say that most, if not all our “problems” today revolve around our inability to resolve our relationships with truth. So much of my frustration with the institutions and systems that purportedly “govern us” has had to do with the way society has been polarized in such a way and to such an extent that no one is willing to see that so long as we hold onto and insist on conceiving of life as the result of discussion and wielding power we can never recognize our shared culpability and complicity in the escalating shit-show we see unfolding globally.
Everyone is happy to point out the lies and projections of their hated others. No one is willing to acknowledge that the whole thing has been mired in lies and that nothing can or will change so long as we refuse to see this. We seem to be condemned to face the kinds of unavoidable and fatal changes Nemesis will bring to bear if not heeded. Unless we all stop lying to ourselves and each other.
This is not a version of “Good people on both sides.” It’s not an excuse to join into a circular firing squad or any partisan reactive “answer” to the admonition to find the errors of our own ways.
What passes for a public sphere; as distorted and corrupt as our current, weaponized media is; has broad swathes of people divided into a few general modes of operation and none of them appear willing to acknowledge that the whole civilization scheme has been built upon genocides and that we are all paying for and helping to carry out a tremendous genocide that’s been ongoing for longer than I’ve been alive; and is at this moment heading inexorably towards the total destruction of a peaceful people who; as victims of abuse have always been; are being scapegoated and blamed for their own destruction.
This invisible in plain sight Holocaust is mirrored by the equally right in our faces but unacknowledged destruction of the only biosphere we know of. Along with an almost universal descent into a forced amnesia towards any advances in public health the last centuries may have given rise to. Almost everyone, including institutional medicine itself and its organizations and mouthpieces, acting as if wishing a pandemic was over was equivalent to ending one. All as we carreen towards an increase in both exotic and traditional health risks as a consequence of destroying our biosphere.
Compulsion is so powerful. Yes, there are very clearly powers that exist. What is a fallacy is that turning to the wielding of violence gets us, “What we want.”
There is a moral equivalence between active abuse and passive abuse. One requires the other. The self-identified “Bad guys,” and; yes, you know who you are and take pride in it! The “Bad guys,” and the equally self-identified “Good Guys, and Gals!™” are a team. Binaries dissolve out of existence unless they get us to accept them and we agree to take sides in their machinations. Some are drawn to one side or the other. Everyone feels tremendous justification. After all, once we fall for the ruse and see everything as something to be broken apart and that anything of value can be obtained and held by wielding power; then, we’re primed for the lie and ready to play our part.
Compulsion is so powerful. Yes, there are very clearly powers that exist. What is a fallacy is that turning to the wielding of violence gets us, “What we want.”
Compulsion.
It’s only been rather recently that I’ve come to recognize how relatively free I’ve been of the compulsions that drove me for most of my life. I’ve resisted many expectations, starting with the prison my parents had constructed for me in my childhood. Their expectation that I would then live the rest of my life as they had laid it out. The kind of fantasies of control currently being summoned by calls for “Daddy’s coming home!” Compulsions drove every aspect of my life. An underlying intoxification of what it means to be alive. An insistence that there has to be a Will behind everything. That it’s not enough to be. That “accomplishment” is hollow unless it can be summoned “on demand.”
Compulsion poisons our lives.
Compulsion drives urgency. Urgency fuels justification and drives us to wish power could be harnessed to this Will that drives compulsion. A vicious cycle.
You might say that I am under a compulsion to keep writing. To keep looking for insight. For understanding. Even when realizing that understanding doesn’t “solve” anything….
That could be true. But the way compulsion works, the way it always worked for me, was that I would put my head down and drive towards a conclusion. I wouldn’t stop when I was tired. Or let go if nothing was really happening. I’d insist and insist and keep at it.
I don’t do that anymore. If I don’t know. I don’t know. If nothing comes I don’t write.
Maybe the thing about compulsions is that for them to work they have to operate outside of our awareness. If we recognize them they dissolve. Those that remain tend to be invisible to us.
And this is why we need each other. Not as adversaries. Not as others to be abusive towards, to belittle, to demonize. We need each other to show us what we ourselves cannot see.
Truth isn’t arrived at through compromise. It’s not the result of any discussion or bargain. None of our customary modes of action touch the truth. No wonder we’re all suffering from the Big Lie.
Truth is.
Our task isn’t to decide what’s true. Agree on what’s true. Defend or fight the truth.
It’s hard enough to glimpse the truth. Hard enough to catch sight of it amidst the confusion and shared bad faith. Whatever we might settle on as being true is certainly not going to agree with what comes next. With what will be.
We are being led by the most broken people. Our total absorption into Thought has led to a system in which success equates with a profound lack of any connection beyond those that can be fantasized to exist between a super-inflated Ego and its unmet and suppressed needs.
We hesitate at accepting that this is the way things must be; but then we also hesitate to imagine that things could be any different. Every way we find a partial opening leads us right back into the belly of the beast. We fail to see that the whole edifice is corrupt and cannot be any other way. We keep falling for “Economic Necessities,” for instance. That the way to judge whether an action is worthwhile it must meet and satisfy the demands made by those who cannot see anything beyond increasing their own power. A power that is as deadly as it is a fantasy.
I’ve been wondering what the connection might be between Fascism and fascination. The term Fascist comes from the fascia, or bundle, of axes the Romans took as their guiding symbol. That power resides in being bound together into a unity imposed on those who would then enforce its desires. A single stick/axe-handle can be easily broken. A bundle of such sticks becomes stiffer. More able to resist being bent or broken. This is a celebration of Will and the Will to Power via control. It appears to be a fine definition.
Fascination….
There’s that same, rare, sci combination.
What does it mean to be fascinated?
The “sci” sounds like the sibilence of a snake. There’s a thrill there; but also a danger. A sense that one is being led astray.
We see evidence of power in nature. We confuse power with strength and assume that there must be short-cuts that will allow us to control what is beyond control. There are exciting and tantalizing early fruits to our endeavors. The connection between Will and Desire seems absolute. Or, at least, we wish it so….
And here we are, wedded to a lie.
There is no form of bundle that will make us strong enough to overcome the predicaments we’ve brought upon ourselves. No tying together. No form of coercive connection that will not suffer from the same underlying misunderstanding.
We hear how so many of today’s “historic blunders” have only recurred between eighty and one hundred years after their last great excrescence. There’s no mystery to this! That’s how long it takes to purge our collective, lived memory of how it went the last time.
Humans did not survive for hundreds of thousands of years by forgetting what was vital and of supreme importance not to forget. This is both a sign that “Human Nature” is not as limited and narrow as those who wish to control us would have us believe. It also shows us what alienation has done to us. People before us were not immune to the fascinations of Thought. What they were was connected. To each other and to the world of life in which they were immersed.
The history of Thought has been a path towards greater and greater alienation. The so-called “Freedoms” civilization has bestowed upon us have all been increases in alienation and have resulted from conflating the fascination of power with a limiting and narrowing of how we can imagine our lives.
We are always ready to declare what we could not live without. Funny how those declarations never concern what we truly cannot live without. A functioning biosphere. Connections built on trust and care and love…. And what we do declare can always be traced back to increasing the risks we willingly accept that increase the chances that we will lose all of what we cannot truly live without.
Fascination resembles a slow dance in ever tighter circles taking us further and further from any true agency and deeper and deeper into delusion. In this we find another toxic simulacra. To dance is to be swept up in life. Fascination is a Dance Macabre. A dance of death. A dance that strips us of connection and vitality.
We need each other.
This is as clear as anything. I would urge that you not take this as either succumbing to or aligning with any religious conception of Grace. In my estimation these lead us into confusion and tie us to authorities in ways that have taken broad notions like Grace, like Humility, like Love; and left us with toxic simulacra, twisted fossilzed versions of healthy and vibrant realities.