Domination makes it impossible to ignore the dominator.
Poverty consumes lives because of the way it forces us to spend all of our attention just trying to get by.
Domination does a similar thing. The same thing. It’s actually the same mechanism. Living under domination we are impoverished whether we have enough to make ends meet or not. It’s a great leveler, forcing us all to the bottom. Once there; consumed by threats, real and imagined, concrete or theatrical; the dominators live, as they say, “rent free” in our heads, pushing aside whatever we might otherwise concern our selves with.
The Big Lie; the total abandonment of the self to the shriveling selfishness of Ego; acts like a Black Hole whose sheer mass of imbecility pulls everything into its maw. Its event horizon marks the limit of where truth can be seen by sucking in all light, all intelligence. Nothing escapes intact. As Life and possibility is crushed by its mass all that escapes is its blinding cruelty, a Gamma Ray burst, destroying whatever it touches.
Most people around the world have had to live this way for a long time. Those few of us who have found ourselves to have been unwitting participants and recipients of empire’s “protections;” and have been both drawn into its violence as it reaches this stage of consuming itself; and horror at what we see coming; and what we now begin to realize has been done to so many others for so long in our name and on our, witting or not, behalf.
Poverty is not a natural state. It has always been a creation, a “necessary” part of the brutal equations of “wealth extraction.” No “wealth” has ever been “created.” It has always been the result of skimming the rendered fat off of a segment of the Living World brutally destroyed so a temporary and relative advantage could be “owned” by those arrogant enough to align themselves with destruction.
Before now; a telescopic moment, coinciding with my life span, stretching from the second half of the Twentieth Century to today; it was possible to not see what was truly going on. There were fewer and fewer patches of undamaged Life. There were fewer and fewer opportunities to be able to “forget,” or displace the blame for what was being destroyed and by whom. But there was a constricting window of plausible deniability.
This is a time of revelation because those excuses no longer work. This provides us with the closest thing to an opportunity we may ever have. It has also driven those whose internal damage has left them unable to resist diving deeper into the Big Lie. There is an alternative to being enlightened by confronting difficulty. We see it consuming our world. When revelation cannot be accepted we turn to its rejection. This rejection then consumes us and leaves nothing but an animated shell incapable of anything but magnifying and compounding the destruction.
Hubris. A fancy term for, “Just get over yourself!” The story seems at once both too big and too pedestrian. A sign of its ubiquity. Hubris dominates our world. It also marks the boundary crossed that has led us to this point. The foundations of the pursuit of power and wealth have always been built upon Hubris. It requires that we set aside every truthful insight into the way Life works and take a willful turn towards an acceptance of the Big Lie. Like RFK Jr’s brain worm one must at some point realize that taking in this parasite condemns us to self-destruction. The point of realization is pushed aside and the self-destruction is embraced.
We all suffer from whatever level of intentional or just associative complicity living in the bosom of empire has brought us. We also; those of us with some iota of vitality remaining; suffer from the way the Big Lie dominates our attention. It is inescapable. Any attempt to slip away just takes us deeper into its maw. Once again we are trapped in a double-bind.
And this is where my particular difficulties lie. Raised immersed in double-binds, having them ground into my being from infancy, I “know from” double-binds! I’ve got a nose for them. I also suffer from this immersion. Double-binds paralyze us. Given mutually cancelling “choices” and feeling compelled to “choose anyway!”
I know that self-preservation demands that we stop rushing from one impossible option to its opposite and that the best first step is to just stop. It’s the way a fawn survives in a forest surrounded by threats. This can keep us from blundering into greater danger. It also keeps us from self-destruction we would otherwise court through ever more elaborate and costly machinations, jumping through hoops to no purpose until we succumb from self-exhaustion.
While part of this adaptation to the double-binded nature of our reality is helpful it is also, as with any adaptive reaction. Think of the whole realm of auto-immune reactivity. This immobility can lead to a deadly paralysis. Remember that our fawn in the wood’s last line of defense is total disassociation. As the predator’s jaws close around its neck; or begin gnawing at its haunches; it goes numb. A final expression of inherent kindness we can find even at the heart of harsh, true necessities within the cycles of life and death.
Few return from this point to tell us of the benefits of this final tender mercy.
Finding ourselves immersed in double-binds we need to stop thrashing. The thrashing will likely kill us. Remaining trapped in a reactive mode will certainly kill us one way or another. It takes stillness and the changes in perspective this can bring us to have any chance at all.
It also requires attention. And this brings us back to our double-bind du jour. The grinding nature of poverty and domination leave us with scant attention left. Our compassion, struggling to survive within us, leaves us raw in the face of the willful violence and cruelty on parade all around us, threatening us with solemn certainty, the promise that what we are witnessing will be done to us all if the dominators maintain their control.
The curse of living in interesting times….
Returning to music and the guitar after giving up fifty years ago I’ve been exposed on an almost daily basis to the way the simplest bits and pieces of what is required to make music feel totally impossible the first time we try to accomplish them. Even the first twenty, the first hundred, sometimes even the first thousand times; but at some point; by virtue of neuro-plasticity and Grace; they become second nature. There is an opening of possibility. We are no longer “working.” We are playing.
Greed, Ego, would seek to burden me with regret that I was unable to do this when I was young…, younger. Grace gently demands that I refuse this pull into zero-sum, reactive thought. I am grateful to have had this opportunity and to experience creativity in this way. An unbroken, while it lasts, immersion in the moment, co-creating what is both a fulfillment and expression of connection with all that is whole.
Beyond the joys within this practice it has brought me a much more profound realization of the ways frustration and imposed urgency destroy any possibility of real achievement.
The frustrations and the desire for immediate recourse to change our present moment inhibit our capacities to discover any genuine response to domination. Every pull towards jumping into any form of reactionary willful acts; every desire to dissipate our discomfort through merely performative actions; keeps us stuck in the double-bind. Every refusal to admit the truth that our Predicament cannot be reduced to a checklist of “actionable items” pulls us deeper into the maw of the Big Lie.
It’s been increasingly difficult to find ways into writing about our situation. I feel bound by two major restraints:
To be kind. Not to add to suffering by focusing on the provocations towards anger that do nothing more than amplify the reach of the Big Lie itself.
And, a self-imposed imperative to avoid beating dead horses. There are plenty of sources for information concerning atrocities and play-by-play narratives of its scope and spread.
My first and last question to myself before the keyboard and the “send” button is always, “What can I contribute that I’m not hearing from other sources? What is being done better by someone else? How can I genuinely contribute?
This has led to a slowing of the flow of essays here. I’ve been thrown back on posting older fiction that appears to have some fresh points of contact with our current condition.
I hope this piece somehow fits the criteria. It’s at least an honest representation of where and how I find myself at this moment.
A beautiful reflection. xxx