39. Violence won't have the final word

Solving problems through political means can be frustrating. Discussions, technicalities, irreconcilable ideological differences that no logic can bridge, and time: it takes a long time. And even then, sometimes one idea must win (or is forced to win) over the other. Decision making, in many cases, can't follow logic and reason. There can be petrified beliefs, we simply don't know enough or in both scenarios there are pros and cons. Then the decision comes by weighing in priorities: we have to think which principle is the most important to us as we fully immerse ourselves into the emotional realm. But here is where we are utterly unprepared. The emotional world can be explosive if we are educated with the repression hammer as the only tool.

Somehow, both the Brexit debate, with the assassination of Jo Cox, and the Orlando massacre have something in common. Violence tried to get the final word between two seemingly irreconcilable positions: accepting or not accepting homosexuality (own or others'), in or out of the European union; these two positions could also be described as a world where a an idealised (toxic) masculinity rules (even through violence) or a world where there is free expression of sexuality, empowerment of women, where the "weak" aren't so weak or invisible or discarded nor they are the sacrificial lambs who will wash away our own weaknesses; a world stuck and under control or a world that is more fluid, dynamic, multi-polar and uncertain.

This week we were left shocked with these two cases in front of the brutality, the destructive power and the lives wasted... in front of the sheer uselessness of an explosion of a violent emotion to resolve "the" underlying conflict.

Nowadays we are going through a multilevel crisis: economical, social, environmental, communicational, political, judicial, educational, cultural, religious... a crisis in truth seeking at a global level.

Even though we live in a complex world, full of greys, we are being told all the time it is all black and white.

In the era of information, we can't say anymore we did not know. Therefore the fracture between narrative and truth is clearer than ever, particularly since the Iraq invasion. Facts are dismissed, distorted, invented. We only need to read two different newspapers to see it. Speeches are rustic and shallow. They avoid entering into any sophisticated area, simply because depth will no longer sustain this polarised view, this basic structure that tried to organise all of our lives. We read the news and do not know what to believe anymore. And then, when narrative does not work, violence comes to impose itself over social discontent.

In this sense, I am interested in the use of the word corruption, not only as a crime where someone is paid to be disloyal to their duties and favour a particular interest, a term that has been mainly used to describe the actions of the state or what's done by women. I mean corruption in a broader sense, as disloyalty to the original purpose, which requires a sort of "absence". Corrupted journalism as the one that -even if we all accept it can never be fully objective- it does not address its own underlying commercial problem and starts to follow easy sales or transform itself into a new sort of entertainment. Corrupted politics, that in order to ensure power (or personal economical gain) deviates from addressing social needs. Corrupted science, that in order to get published dismisses unwanted results, neglects entire areas of investigation and turns a blind eye to its own ideological bias. Corrupted religion, that in order to sustain the superiority of a group charges the rest with all the sins. Corrupted education, that stops trying to be an emancipating path and trap students into debt slavery, class labels and indoctrination. Corrupted agriculture that tries to control the sexuality of the land. Corrupted nutrition, that makes us dependent and fat. Corrupted law and justice, that makes corruption legal and protest and whistle-blowers illegal. Corrupted technology, that instead of being an enabler of inter-connectedness, is used to control us.  Ultimately our corrupted self: the disloyalty to ourselves, to our internal truths that even if they can be emancipating, we rather not find, so we might prefer to be absent, and not "occupy" certain spaces.

Slowly and silently we are being dragged into new cold black-and-white wars opposing US and China (in Africa and in the South China sea), Iran and Saudi Arabia, Nato and Russia, TTIP/TTP "aligned countries" and Brics, oligarchies and workers, Genetically Modified foods (lead by Monsanto) and organic (with its seeds in the EU and recently Russia), democracy and technocratic neoliberalism, secular and non secular governments, petrol dependent economies and climate change, speculative use of land and housing shortage, finance and real economy, rent and wages, etc, etc. We could expect violence trying to have a final word here too, with these "quick wars", drones, "carpet bomb" solutions and "the new right" that are being sold in a world that seems impassive in front of a permanent state of war and fear, and seems more at ease with fascism than with a moderate left challenging some of the workings of the modern world. 
However, at this point we must know already that no amount of bombs or arms or police state will solve the underlying conflicts.

We need to start putting words to emotion as a way of taking ownership and funnelling the emotional power towards a constructive purpose instead of an explosive non-purpose. Putting words to our mouth to participate in a dialogue that triggers action. Words to name and put light to spaces we decide to occupy and transform. Attention versus distraction. A world full of greys that does not simply balance itself out. We need to reclaim politics, internally and externally.

Andrea

26. Walls, language, resistance and adopting a new motherland

Chinese symbols for adopt, accept, naturalise

They don't speak our language! is one of the most common complaints when any European is arguing against immigration. Language becomes a wall between two equals, a way to shut the other out. "I'm in this country but I don't want it inside my head" might be the never-articulated thought of one of those immigrants. And thus showing a degree of resistance against the "adopted" motherland. From this point of view, it's probably a process of self-preservation, of not mutating too fast (or at all) and getting lost in adaptation.

In France, the language conflict is probably even deeper: the French criticise immigrants whilst the French themselves are also consciously or unconsciously resisting the imposition of English as the "universal language". So, I'll try to touch the two points of view with the hidden emotional significance they share as they touch our sense of self but also loyalty and betrayal.

video: RSA, Sudhir Hazareesingh on How the French think

Learning a new language 
Anyone that has ever taken a language course knows that language is not innocuous. It is not a tool that we use. It is a tool that by using it, it changes us too.

Grammar as the world interpreter
Grammar is not only the structure of the sentence, it is the structure of the thought itself, which then affects how you interpret the world. The article in the Guardian "Think your view world is fixed? Learn another language and you'll think differently" by Panos Athanasopoulus reports on a study conducted on English and German monolinguals and bilinguals. 

"We showed German-English bilinguals video clips of events with a motion in them, such as a woman walking towards a car or a man cycling towards the supermarket and then asked them to describe the scenes.
When judging risk, bilinguals also tend to make more rational, economic decisions in a second language.
When you give a scene like that to a monolingual German speaker they will tend to describe the action but also the goal of the action. So they would tend to say, “A woman walks towards her car,” or “A man cycles towards the supermarket.” English monolingual speakers would simply describe those scenes as “A woman is walking,” or “a man is cycling,” without mentioning the goal of the action.
The worldview assumed by German speakers is a holistic one – they tend to look at the event as a whole – whereas English speakers tend to zoom in on the event and focus only on the action."

The article explains that in English the Present Continuous exists whilst in German it doesn't, and somehow this may explain why the English speakers are happy describing an action in itself, whilst in German you feel you need a goal for the sentence to convey enough information.

But they also found that bilinguals who are given the test instructions in a second language "adopt" the perspective of that second language. So a German, performing the test in German would describe an action with its goal (eg A woman walks towards a car), but if he were performing the test in English, he would describe the action itself (A woman is walking). Participants were found also to change their opinions on how ambiguous some scenes were. So... we can wonder: Which of these different views we can have in different languages truly represents us? which one enables us to express ourselves? 

It makes me wonder how a language like Indonesian that -does not have future or past tenses, or that forms its plurals by repeating the same word twice- changes the way people think.

Hidden social codes
Beyond grammar, it is also easy to recognise that different languages come with different social codes. They are full of nuances regarding the choice of words, the formulation of an idea, the which words are emphasised, etc. We all know that when learning to write a complaint letter in English (British style), there is a specific structure. You are polite. You are not angry, but disappointed at most. In a German course, well... it is different. What Germans would describe as clear and to the point, British standards would qualify it as blunt. In the country where I can from, we wouldn't bother to write a letter. 

Beyond the course itself, when living in a foreign country these codes are almost as important as the language itself (I know it because I've lived in five different countries). You can get very frustrated if you don't learn the art of French confrontation even to discuss something utterly insignificant with a plumber. When trying to swim through the labyrinth of Italian bureaucracy, building a familial rapport with the civil servants gets you a long way -in fact this used to drive mad an american friend of mine that expected customer service american-way-. You also learn the multi-layered meaning of the word "interesting" in Great Britain, which is very commonly used to express disagreement subtly. 

It is not only through language but also through these codes that you "make things work". 

As a consequence, the emotional charge you put in certain transactions has to change when you are performing them in different countries. If you are very uncomfortable with confrontation, France might feel hostile. If you are uncomfortable with building a sense of familiarity with someone you don't know, Italy might feel difficult. If you are not perfectionist, Germany might feel too negative-focused.
There is a point, however, that you learn to see as a game you have to play, which has certain rules. But that requires you to disembarrass yourself of some of your own feelings and emotions which might bring a sense of loss and even betrayal. Normally the mother-tongue is the one that carries the most emotional weight, as behaving in a certain way is related to being accepted or rejected by your mother (your family, your clan). Even though maternal love is supposed to be unconditional, maternal rejection exists (even in nature) and we fear its potential toxicity. Allowing yourself to be confrontational -for example- when confrontation was frown upon by your mother (or culture), or ambitious, sometimes even being thin or fat... is an unconscious betrayal. You are running a significant emotional risk of being rejected by your own family and country and thus cutting that umbilical cord that connects you to your home and the possibility to come back. And here is where the sense of self is challenged. Do my emotions define me? Are they defending me, my sense of self? Are they defending my mother's and culture accepted version of me? Are these boundaries mine? Where do the boundaries of who I am are? 
All these questions are not easy to answer, and it takes time. Sometimes crossing too many of the internal boundaries too fast brings of sense of identity loss.

Beyond language: Conflicting narratives and codes

Let me start with the most obvious of the examples. For many years History books described the arrival of Colombus to America as the "Discovery of America". There are even academic discussions about who discovered America first. The Vikings! And we naturalised it. But of course America had people already who perfectly knew the land below their feet existed. The ones that added America to their cognitive map were the Europeans. It is an European subjective narrative. The native narrative would've been very different.
So what happens when we confront two or more narratives? 
Studies prove that pluralistic groups can detect lies better, confirmation-bias is reduced. Groups are more successful than individuals to find the "truth" (as opposed to a lie). However, confrontation of narratives sometimes forces a choice. The ban of face covering in public spaces (effectively banning the use of the burqa in public spaces) or of the use of religious symbols in schools in France generated clear conflicts between two social norms whose rejection/acceptance criteria contradict each other. Adhering to one of them implies betrayal of the other.

I'll go outside the world of immigration for a second, to bring the example of Argentina's stolen children documentary by RT. During the military dictatorship of 1976-1983, the Junta organized the kidnap, torture and execution of opposition militants, including pregnant women. The mothers were allowed to give birth (but were subsequently killed). These babies were placed in "right" families, many of them were families of members of the army. These children grew up not knowing their origin and many times were educated under the ideology that justified the killing of their biological parents. In the documentary these babies, now adults, tell the process they went through when discovering the truth. Some of them approached the truth by their own initiative, but some others by judicial searches. In the latter, they were asked to provide blood to run DNA tests. Even though they could understand that there was significant evidence to suggest they had been stolen, some of them refused to give blood. They were facing all these questions that affected their identity that had to be resolved in what it probably felt a split of a second. They knew too that it represented a betrayal towards the family they grew up with and there would not be a way back, even if some of them were directly responsible of their abduction. The sense of identity changes deeply in this sort of process.

A little less than 120 out of the estimated 500 were found. It is suspected that many of the missing ones are not coming forward for fear their adoptive parents would go to prison. This is based on the fact that many of them approach the authorities once their parents die.
This is -of course- an extreme case of having to integrate a very difficult past. 

But I think this example illustrates in its extremity how clan loyalty works, how difficult it might be for some to go against it, and how it affects our sense of self.

Immigration as rebirth
All immigrants face this moment, like Frodo in Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings, when we need to let go of our "given" sense of self, our dependent relationship with our mother and the possibility to go back. But this moment comes with doubt and with resistance, not learning the language is one of them. If I shed the old skin... Who is giving birth? who is being born? who dies? what's the essence that survives in this transition?

How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Jes’ like a rolling stone?
~Bob Dylan

By attempting to answer these questions the awareness of who we are, what is ours and not, increases. Opening the doors to different ways of thinking, learning new meanings through new words, observing and comparing, we are bringing down some of our internal walls and connect with new parts of ourselves. But in this greater level of awareness the connection to this new motherland is not blind.  

The other end
So what is happening to the observers of these transformations? The ones that point a finger and tell their motherland "they don't speak your language". What's going on with them? They too are faced with the realisation their view of the world is not as universal as they used to think. For them, these immigrants act like messengers. Then they also start to wonder then, am I right? is this right? They also build a wall of resistance for not getting lost in the adaptation. They also need time to absorb. With this comment, I don't mean to "excuse" racism or xenophobia. We are all part of a human race that has historically struggled with change and otherness. Self-preservation instinct kicks in, walls are built. In the past most of these questions had been only answered by the generations that came after. They were the ones that having less internal barriers, being freer from some narratives, were more able to work out "the integration part" of the story. They become culturally bilingual. 

Somehow President Obama is caught in the middle of the question of how to integrate narrative with reality (at least in what internal politics is concerned), particularly when he needs to tap into the cultural narrative of the american exceptionalism. As a African American president, he cannot turn a blind eye to dark chapters of American History or even dark corners of American present. He cannot repeat the prevailing narrative without adding new tones. In preparation to the speech he delivered in Selma these were some of the ideas that appeared in drafts: 

 “Even today we continue to have debates about what it means to love this country, to be a true patriot. But what greater expression of faith in the American idea; what greater form of patriotism is there than to believe that America is not yet finished; that it’s strong enough to be self critical; that each generation can look upon its imperfections and say we can do better.”

However, he has constantly faced republican criticism like what Giuliani said to Republican donors: 

"I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. . . . He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of this country.”  

Even if it is easy to say that one is right and the other are wrong (depending on which side you are), I described above that we all have a little conservative inside who is concerned with self preservation and prefer to build walls (the main difference is what it is exactly that thing each of us wants to preserve). Obama addressed this opposition directly in his speech drafts:

“Those who only understand exceptionalism as preserving the past; who deny our faults or inequality; who say love it or leave it; those are the people who are afraid. Those are the people who think America is some fragile thing.”

With these words I'm not trying to endorse this exceptionalism claim, only to illustrate how narratives feel that any sign of self reflection is a threat, somehow showing that the biggest threat is internal. The thing that no one should see or know about us is what we fear the most, what weakens us. 

I round the circle I started in a previous entry, when I said that strength that is based on the rejection of weakness is a false strength. So it is probably only by embracing these weakness, this vulnerable self, that we can complete this re-birth process stronger than before, which allows us to defend the permeable walls that keep our sense of self from falling apart: the ones that protect our essence, our uniqueness, the "myself-but-connected", and tear down the barb wired concrete walls we no longer need. 

Andrea

Interesting articles:
Laurie Penny: "Gender-neutral language is coming - here's why it matters", The Newstatesman

5. Fear and power: owners of our fears, writers of our history

Fear is one of the most powerful forces within us. It is wired to our physical response to a situation, overriding and disregarding any rational thinking. It is -of course- a good defense mechanism and being able to bypass our rational mind makes it extremely effective. You know, if a car is on the way to run over you, it's not time for a deep analysis, it's time to get out of the way.

This capacity of shutting down "superior thinking" is a treat that makes fear one of the 'entry' points to our minds and therefore one of the most targeted by anyone with manipulative intentions: politicians, corporations, religious orders, marketeers, our parents, our peers, etc. See this link

Beyond this external forces that can use fear for goals as "good" as making children go to bed at a reasonable time, as machiavellian as "mass manipulation" and up to quite superfluous of making us buy a particular brand of shampoo, we are ultimately the owners of our fears and we need to understand them better to be able to transcend them no matter what manipulative forces intend to do.

Through evolution our brain has added layers, making us more sophisticated entities with more survival resources. These added layers are built on top of the most primitive ones.

Some speak about the 'reptilian brain', the 'monkey brain' and the 'human brain' as the three main layers. 

The reptilian brain is the place where instinct (and therefore the primary response to fear) lays. It's described as rigid -it has to be-. In a moment of threat the most effective response is the quickest.

Most of our first fears -the ones we experience as truly vulnerable individuals- will be linked to our survival and therefore all the mechanisms we develop to overcome them will become survival mechanisms. Unconscious and mechanic. Quite rigid too. With active responses (such as Fight or flight) or passive responses (eg. seek safety in numbers or become submissive).

Protected against fear

In this simple set up, there have always been two weapons against fear: protection linked to the/a mother figure in our infant selves and the concept of faith and trust (to a certain extent positive thinking) in adults after we have effectively separated from the unconscious world we share with our mothers and experience our own power.

The mother figure is the one that can cast a sense of security in our early years, and the more secure we feel in this period of our lives, the least unconscious mechanisms we will need to survive. In most cases, however, even the best of mothers cannot really provide with this in full, partly because it might not be possible and partly because she also carries a baggage of fears that can play against becoming an effective mother.

Whilst we are still united with our mothers we are embedded in her psyche and we see the world the way she perceives it. This happens mostly by adopting her discourse (and her labels) as a true depiction of reality. Our choices are not so much an expression of our identity but hers. The more active is our fear, the more we will adopt and get attached to other mother figures that offer a discourse and an off-shelf identity. We "think" alike the company that employs us (which through a salary put food in our plates), we choose what a brand tells us is good (ensuring that we'll be recognised as good people with the label the brand put onto us), we buy into the news and a vision of the world that is scripted with a particular point of view, we repeat the words of history books that tell us the official history of the world according to our nation (or the winners), we align ourselves with the point of view of a group that we have joined, we condemn people our religion says are sinful. But this is a deluded discourse: it believes itself to be objective when it is subjective; it considers itself complete when it disregards some memories, hides our shame and only document the experiences that support the conviction "I am right"; it is incomplete, it has lies, secrets and misconceptions, it is the version of reality our mothers (or our nation, our culture or whatever authority) were able to process.

Powered against fear

True power develops through the separation from our mothers (and all the mother figures we adopted in the way). Our becoming only happens if we felt secured in the first place or when we are ready to face this separation consciously: when we are ready to write our own script. 

"Soup, right? From the ideological barrier to that side, please"
Mafalda by Quino

Mafalda is a cartoon character created by Quino in the 60's in Argentina. Mafalda is a 6 year old with a very critical view of the world. One of the things Mafalda hates the most is the soup her mother insists she should eat. Here, the soup represents the maternal narrative. Without recognising this narrative as "foreign", we live in infancy, de-individuated, absent of the here and now, at the mercy of fear and the (m)other narrative and making choices that are not entirely ours and, most importantly, not taking responsibility for them. 

In the words of Carl Jung

“Insofar as society is itself composed of de-individuated human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes – it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one.

Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally shortsighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman… People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations in the world can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans." 

We test our power during the patriarchy. The patriarchy is a stage that demonises the mother, invisibilise her and try to restructure her narrative by re-defying words. The patriarchy is castrating and we need to reclaim our history from the patriarchal narrative too. This is the true empowerment. Once we've done that, the spade turns to a pen and we become creators, writers, authors of our history. 

AB

PS 1: None of these dictators did what they did on their own:
(note: the list might not be comprehensive and some of the numbers seem to account for a wider range of the conflict they were involved in but nonetheless...).