25. Predators and Trojan horses

It is naive to think there are no predators in the world. Detecting predators is so important that fears and traumatic experiences are being found to be passed on in our DNA to the next generations. However, it is one of the areas where justice and the political system struggle the most. 

Today I found in the newspapers the news that Bansky opened last Thursday a new art show in Weston-upon-Mare called Dismaland which included some works on the theme of predators. According to The Guardian, Dismaland includes "a “pocket money loans” shop offering money to children at an interest rate of 5,000%. In front of its counter is a small trampet so children can bounce up to read the outrageous small print drawn up by artist Darren Cullen.". There is also a Cindirella crash scene being photographed by papparazzis, which is a stark reminder of something we all remember.

Even though conservative thinking claims some sort of ownership over the rule of law, it tends to dismiss and turn a blind eye on anything related to predatory behaviour at any level. From child abuse to economic predators. Under the conservative narrative they don't exist.
The left, on the other hand, is prone to portray predatory behavior in conspiracy terms, where everything is consciously and machiavellianly orchestrated to work in favour of the predator whilst allowing the predator to remain in the shadow. Under this narrative the full system is predatory. 
None of these positions offer full clarity on how to recognise and respond to a predator. In one, there aren't any and we should accept whatever is going on because that's reality, in the other the task is simply too big and too shadowy. In both we are powerless.

Predators feed from the vital energy of a situation, a person, a family, a country or the world itself. They suck up their victims out of money, youth, creativity, attention, beauty, physical strength or innocence. They make others fall into their hunger.

Not listening to our negative emotions
So why is it so complicated dealing with predatory behaviour? There are many cultural nuances that play a role here. The first trap we often find is the denial of what's negative, like shutting down our self-defence systems. We ought to be always positive and optimistic. If we feel a negative emotion, we have to suppress it. We are the owners of this negativity so we must be wrong. Finding or even sensing something negative is somehow a proof of a lack: lack of emotional balance, lack of drive, lack of proficiency or lack of understanding the world. 
This authoritarian positivism got so far that there are discussions on whether mindfulness or meditation are being used as control mechanism to soothe people and make them more accepting and submissive, instead of a tool to achieve the clarity we need to act and resolve our problems. 
We need to start to revalue the importance of negative emotions and how to use them. Fear, anger, sadness, etc. For instance, anger can be an explosive reaction or even malevolent but it does not have to be. Anger gives us the strength we don't normally need or use to reassert a limit, to say no, or to demand something that it is due. But we need to educate our anger for it to become an assertive negotiating tool that works for us, without violence or malevolence.
In the case of fear, and even though it can be paralysing, it is also a basic traffic light in our self-preservation. 
Whatever the emotion, sensing that we are being drained of vital energy in any way is an important signal to recognise to be able to defend ourselves. You can sense a bit of this dynamic in the chat Owen Jones (a journalist writing for The Guardian and The New Statesman) had with one of his online trolls. The troll admits on calling him a racist just to get his attention. And although he does not like him nor agrees with any of his views, he repeatedly asked to be unblocked on twitter. Something Owen Jones did not do.

Victim blaming
The second trap is the complex land of victim blaming. Why is it complex? There is a psychological exercise that illustrates this complexity. The exercise consists in presenting a crime situation to a group to discuss blame. I could not find the original exercise so I'll describe what I recall from it: a 18-year-old girl is walking home at 10 PM alone when she is raped in a park. Her father had told her he could not pick her up from her friend's home. Her friend knew there had been cases of rape in the neighbourhood but failed to tell her friend about it. The policeman who was supposed to be patrolling the area at that time had stopped for a coffee. Someone saw the scene but failed to react. Who is to blame? You can pick only one.
I was hugely surprised to be part of a discussion where there was no anonymous blame on the rapist (the only character not mentioned in the exercise, ie the girls "is" raped). The girl was to blame for walking alone so late -and probably she was wearing a mini-skirt someone might add-, the father for not protecting his child, the friend for not warning her, the policeman for not being in the area, the witness for doing nothing... Our sense of blame is very subjective and is rather aligned with cultural and personal structures, values and expectations: we expect a lot from a father, a friend, a policeman. Of course, we have responsibility over our alarm systems working, but we cannot and should not lose sight of who is the actual perpetrator of the crime. However, the force of public opinion tends to get dispersed when dealing with blame and guilt, and so loses its strength to put on pressure onto politicians.

In predatory lending we see the same phenomenon. Banks -highly professionals- offer credit cards or mortgages to people who don't have the financial strength to engage in a risk-free debt. On the contrary, the bank knows they are quite likely to fall behind payments. Culturally, people who took on debt bear the weight of the guilt if they cannot pay back. The missing due diligence of the highly educated experts in finance who work in those banks, who were payed bonuses for achieving the related targets, is minimised. 
In the following video, Prof. Joseph Stiglitz discusses blame on the financial crisis of 2008. He argues against those making a case to lay blame on the regulators and the central bank for lending to banks at a very low interest rate instead of looking at the banks and the role in the out of control private debt accumulation.

The legal and political system struggled to do anything after the financial crisis of 2008. Banks had to pay some fines, and accept to take part in some stress testing but no significant structural changes happened. Structural changes is what should happen after a crisis (the emergence of a new paradigm). Otherwise, the crisis "purpose" (and opportunity) is lost and another one will be needed.
Only Iceland took a strong position after the crisis and is now pursuing further changes in the banking system, building a case to prosecute banks for counterfeiting. When being able to give away loans sidestepping capital requirements, they argue, banks were effectively creating money out of thin air, violating the mandate that only the central bank can issue money.  
The rest of the countries, with public opinion confused, dispersed and misinformed, and politicians that don't do much if not truly forced, did not resolve their own tragedies. Similar things happen when dealing with crimes against humanity when local systems fail to judge criminals and end up only prosecuted at the international court of law. In this sense, and only due to the inability of local political power to act, there are initiatives to include economic and environmental crimes under an universal jurisdiction. 

Letting the Trojan horses in
When discussing why it is difficult for the legal and political system to deal with predatory behaviour, we have to touch the issue of how they sometimes operate as door openers. 
In his Confessions of an economic hitmam (a best-selling book - there are also many videos available in youtube), John Perkins describes how through loans and conditionalities, transatlantic corporations manage to get countries to devaluate their currencies and thus being able to buy assets for a fraction of their value (the current version in Greece is that creditors are able to switch bad bonds for actual assets), to impose or remove existing laws, to open up the economy to foreign goods to compete against sometimes not fully developed local companies, to allocate large contracts to foreign firms, etc.

Europe is preparing the ground to sign the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement with the US. Beyond the typical negotiating points in any trade agreement (ok-let's-agree-that-bananas-can-have-different-curvatures-here, you might-need-to-drop-this-ban-on-animal-testing-there), they want to impose an Investor State dispute settlement, which is a parallel, closed and secret judicial system which also allows corporations to sue countries for anything they regard as affecting their profits.

Reclaiming power

Unfortunately I don't think there is an easy answer. 

We need to recognise our own hunger, our internal predator. At the end of the day, a hungry paparazzo is selling his pictures to a hungry magazine which is selling its magazines to a hungry public. As long as we are blind to this side of ourselves, we'll struggle to see it outside. What are we willing to sell ourselves for? and our children? For a cheaper tablet? cheap clothing? a promotion? what's the price tag we put on our country? 
And then address this hunger. We might need to connect to other sources of human or spiritual "food" to domesticate our inner predator. 

We need to have our alarm systems up and running. But this cannot be done if we don't learn to listen to our instinct, and to understand our negative emotions. We also need to use our intelligence to dig out the true meaning of what we are feeling, what's the true motivation and then dare to have adult conversations -with ourselves and with others-. We cannot live with a Facebook or Linkedin etiquette where no real discussion can ever happen. You only "like" what the others say; you say things the others won't be afraid to say they "like".  We sign this unwritten deal of inflating each others egos and not having any real conversation (I'm discounting bullying or any sort of trolling out of the definition of real conversation).
We need to be aware of our inherited fears to ensure that our alarm systems are actually working against our reality instead of memories that are not ours.

We need to put pressure on politicians and encourage young people to ask questions, to use their alarm systems and to be politically active.

As we were born out of the concentrated state power (the matriarchal state), we need to be born out of the concentrated corporate power too (the patriarchal sector). States and corporations are important, only they need to operate within democratically drawn boundaries. 

Andrea

External links:
Helen Thomson, The Guardian: "Study of holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children's genes". 
Ashifa Kassam, The Guardian: "Spain's campaigning judge seek change in law to prosecute global corporations".

24. Creditors v creators: matriarchy, patriarchy and then... the almost happy ending

What on earth links the responsibility of a creditor with concepts of matriarchy and patriarchy?? The short answer is the creation and extension of dependency. 

If you got it by now, you can stop reading, because what comes next is the long answer which I'm not so sure clarifies the topic any further. 

This entire entry will focus on the problem of the creditor and its responsibility to make a deal of equals as very closely related to the problem of parenthood and the patriarchy stage in which we are all immersed in. With this I don't mean to say that the debtor is not responsible for their part. But the debt crisis is the "approved narrative" that gets repeated and goes on unquestioned.

Looking down on the debtor: the guilty one

I find this article in The Independent "Greece referendum: the Monty Python sketch that (sort of) explains the Greek debt crisis" very interesting in many ways. I'll pick upon one of the minor comments it makes: 

One of the key economic ideas in German philosophy — and, to be fair, that of other cultures as well — was that there was something unnatural about debt, indeed immoral. The German word schuld means both debt and guilt. As Foreign Affairs pointed out this year, one of Nietzsche's big works looked at the relationship between shame and debt. "In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche looked back to the 'oldest and most primitive' personal relationship between creditor and debtor as the origin of how 'one person first measured himself against another,'" author Kenneth Dyson wrote.

When we look at debts, the cultural narrative (not the pure economic one) points out at the debtor as the one that is inferior, the guilty, the one that "needs", that can't provide for himself and owes. It is the creditor's narrative, which will always exclude itself and its behaviour of lending too much and thus creating debt as means of creating dependency instead of being a genuine investment. Watch Ann Pettifor Interview by the Renegade Economist.

Beyond this, when a language shares the same word for debt and guilt, we should reflect on how this language construction affects the way we perceive and build our inner narrative, the one that explains the world. At the end of the day, a word is a brick.

(What follows is a big leap, but bear with me, it will all come together at the end).

Matriarchy, Patriarchy and then...

When thinking about dependency, we should think at the oldest, most primitive personal relationships of dependence: the matriarchy. Here I need to clarify that I consider myself a feminist and the matriarchy a stage on the individuation process, as much it is the patriarchy, even if the latter comes with a heavy bill for women to bear.

First, the matriarchy
Since we are in our mothers wombs we are fused to their psyches. From the moment we are born, a long process of individuation starts: the one in which we slowly realise we are our own person and are free to make our own decisions and to write our own history. But it takes some time. For the first years of our lives, our mothers organise with their words our consciousness, with their silences and disapproval, our shadow. Her narrative (even if it is patriarchal script) is the virtual womb in which we are immersed until we are born out of it by recognising it as foreign.
During these first years, she provides food, comfort, attention. We are dependent and she has the power. This is the matriarchal stage. Eden. 
During this stage, she is perfect to our eyes. This is "the reign of the perfect mother". 
But of course, the mother is not perfect and we need to be born out of the matriarchy to develop our own independence to become free.

Then, the patriarchy
At this point the perfect mother dies. The patriarchy kills the mother (the good mother). 
God expels us from Eden. We fall. 
In almost every fairy tale, the real story begins when the "good mother" dies because this is the beginning of the hero's story, when we have to learn to make decisions and earn our bread. We cannot separate ourselves from the good mother and that's why this false perception of perfection has to die. We need to challenge the narrative we have received from her so we can build our own.
In fairy tales, the good mother and the stepmother (or witch) are two halves of the same person. When the good mother dies we start to see our mother's shadow, the side she does not acknowledge of herself: the stepmother (not completely emotionally invested) or the witch (eating children, a narcissist "feeding" from children). In this demonisation, we find the strength to destroy some of the things we have inherited and are not ours or are not useful to us. Up to this point, fused to our mother's psyche, we could not see this shadow because our mother was blind to it. If she could not see it, neither could we. The fact that we start to see it, is a sign that we are becoming independent.

This stage is the patriarchy, because a father figure is the one the invite us to go outside the world of mum and penetrate the external world. During the patriarchal stage (which is by no means the final one), we need to learn four main things:
-Listen to our instinct 
-Re arrange our unconscious world, our beliefs 
-Feed ourselves (our basic needs... you shall earn your bread)
-Learn to use our resources through the development of self-discipline and self-mastery
Basically, to become independent.

(all these steps tend to appear in stories as animals talking, Goddess guiding the hero, princesses doing a lot of cleaning up, battling evil forces, finding food in the forest, etc).

When a princess marries a prince at the end of the story it has little to do with "only a man can rescue a woman". It is in fact the princess integrating her masculine side, the one that allows her to focus her energy and with a sword cut the dependency with the evil stepmother.
But of course, the mother is NOT evil. And the father is also castrating figure and we need to be born out of his narrative, which is blind to its own shadow too. We need to integrate the father role by being able to build our own structures instead of depending of external ones.

And finally... the almost happy ending
Of course here comes the happy ending for the hero. We did our hero's journey: "we loved, we hated and we became". And we are all at the verge of the end of the patriarchy.

But this entry was about the creditor's point of view. The step-mother and the King in our fairy tale. What happens when they see the empty nest? Do they know how to create again? What's their own mission and purpose? Do they remember how to feed themselves? 

Patriarchal inertia - Creditors v creators

For a while, there is a patriarchal inertia that will try to extend dependency through debts. A king needs feudalism and the rentier economy to feed from. Or else, it will empty the coffers. It will keep on demonising and disempowering anything considered social (maternal), citizens and democracies (accusing any policy of populist if it works in their interest), and crashing start-ups and entrepreneurs, that if left unchecked will destroy countries. Mothers under patriarchy (and states under current thinking) are left lost, disconnected, not knowing where to feed from (austerity, austerity). The patriarchs (bankers, insurance companies, hedge funds, private equity firms, big corporations) will pass a bill to the next generation, to the children. 

These creditors create a unpayable debt to extend a state of dependency and avoid addressing their own emptiness. This is not "conspiratorial" thinking. It's mostly survival behaviour, that in some cases turns into predatorial eg Hedge Funds arguing in favour of sacking teachers and close schools in Puerto Rico to avoid a default that would affect them. This behaviour is only possible within a particular structure of institutional and social order. I said before: The creditor's narrative will always exclude the creditor and its behaviour of lending too much and thus creating debt as means of creating dependency and concentrating power instead of being a genuine investment, with its rewards and its risks I should add. 

Blue scream - Survivor series
Jaco Van Der Vaart

The first problem with this creditor is that does not know how to create himself. Does not know his own purpose. He depends on extraction of wealth or others creating for him. He has the resources but in reality does not know how to use them or what for. The liberal tragedy is that it fought to become independent from the monarchy, only to concentrate as much wealth as the monarchy and start to behave similarly: unquestionable, with some sort of divine right.

These creditors do not lend to equals. They need "empty" people fearing for their survival to capitulate their power: 

• a robot/slave (the one that does not think for itself and follows orders), 
• a "prostitute"/a corrupt (the one that sells him/herself to survive), 
• a coward (the one that fears the fight/cutting the dependency), 
• a child (the one that is/feels dependent).

The second problem is that this creditor does not assume the responsibility nor the risk (s)he took. During the development of capitalism, there were many steps taken to lower the risk of investment in order to encourage it (Societies with limited responsibility were created, the figure of stake holders that can own stakes only for minutes, isolated bankers etc). In the case of Greece, they were able to issue debt at the same rate as Germany (even if the difference of strength of the economy was always big), because banks assumed Germany would bail out Greece, should it ever defaulted.

It's what Zizec described as the age when we want a soft drink without sugar, bier without alcohol, love without the fall and -I would add- sex without children and investment with no risk. But we reached a point where responsibility is almost out of the picture entirely, producing a social fracture. Watch Gillian Tett interview by Renegade Economist.  

The third issue is that they are unable to see their own emptiness (or insolvency).

Translation: The blue child (by Rep)/ Hole / The temptation of falling into the hole / But who was the first to fall into the hole? / The hole.
Blog de Rep: NIÑO AZUL

The true economist knows this. They know that sometimes creditors lend too much and borrowers take too much. Debts must be restructured with a clean cut, insolvent banks need to fail as it was done many times before. 

But we are not looking at economic issues with economic lenses. We are looking at them with cultural narratives that are passed on with trans-generational codes that are castrating the next generations and their ability to be and create for themselves. 

At this stage the narrative must be reversed: we need to stop speaking about debt crisis and start to speak about the lending crisis and the issue of lending as a false production.

Only speaking about the lending issue will turn the mirror to the narrator which will enable us to make progress.

Andrea

23. Visible women versus the Twitter beast

Lately, there were several articles in the media about on line abuse against women, particularly on Twitter.

Visible womanhood and motherhood provokes a reaction in some that is hard to understand. In the article "Women: invisibility or blindness?" I argued that women's invisibility in today's society is a consequence of the unconscious blind spot we have for our mothers and the influence our mother's narrative have in our lives. Our psyche is first structured by our mother's words and labels in the first years of our lives. What she names is becomes the basic structure of our consciousness. But rarely any traumatic or negative feelings towards her (including blaming her for the pain of separation) will be named and will remain in our unconscious mind, getting projected onto any visible women that appears in the way.

So the Twitter beast is unleashed: women who express themselves are labelled bitches, witches, deserved to get rapped, are gross, disgusting, you name it.  A pregnant meteorologist in Canada is called gross, women avoid appearing in University Challenge in fear of the exposure in the twitter era.

Somehow the internet starts to behave as the world's brain, and its labyrinth of unconsciousness where the most arcaic behaviour still exists, where there is no "no". 

It is as if there is a part of the collective unconscious that need to make sure women wear a symbolic burqa: reports show that women chose to hide under a ambiguous pseudonym or simply avoid commenting.

However the internet is doing something at the same time: by bringing things to the outside world, where there is an "other" that reacts, where there is conflict, it's making them to start to become conscious. In this sense, the best thing women can do is simply respond. JK Rowling, a woman who has received several waves of twitter abuse, believes in standing up to bullies. Beyond the actual, very smart and funny tweets, it's worth pointing out that she is one of the long list of female writers that have been published with male or androgynous names showing that this issue is not new, it only changed format. Having said that, the evolution from hiding and ignoring to responding and confronting is interesting. It's about leaving behind the victim survival archetype. It's the real sign of women empowerment and the equalising power of the internet (at least for the ones with access to a computer...).

Andrea

PS: Remember the bullied teen who made the amazing prom dress? She's now doing red carpet designs

22. Education: Freedom of being v system architecture

Just reading the papers today, I was struck by reading the same news in the UK and in Switzerland: there is a shortage of doctors.

This is the article from the Independent for UK, written from the point of view of a parent of a rejected student: "The big NHS question: Why are there so few new GPs when so many of our keenest brains want to study medicine?" by Peter Stanford

This is the article from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: "Man muss das Medizinstudium überdenken" (Medical studies need re-thinking).

There are many factors: higher degree of specialization in medicine (fragmenting more the profession), advances in science that opened up new opportunities for treatments, longer life... and most importantly not enough medical students. In most cases this is because the number of university places is highly restricted: on the one hand it is down to the investment required, but on the other hand there is an ideological reason: education should categorize pupils and only some will be allowed to study medicine.
We may prefer to ignore elitist tendencies in our society, but it might be worth at least acknowledging that we are not that good in predicting the future: 20, 30 years ago no one could foresee or imagine how much Medicine would progress, how much longer people would live, etc. In Germany, for instance, currently 20% of the population is over 65 years old, by 2030 this figure will increase to nearly 30%.  People were making political decisions on this regard with the fear that allowing everyone who wants to study medicine to do so not only would be too expensive but it would produce an excess of doctors that society wouldn't be able to absorb. Universities too build their prestige and their excellence narrative by filtering who is allowed through their doors.



All of these reasons have one thing in common: they come from the point of view of the system, a rigid system that is focused on the past.
A system that is too rigid cannot adapt to an unforeseeable future or changing circumstances. But what worries me even more is how a rigid system undermines children and youngsters and restrict their options, and ultimately their freedom: the freedom to become who they want to be. Education is being used as a labelling and filtering machine for children and teenagers. The ones that are allowed to be part of a sort of elite and the ones that are not. A machine that is so inefficient that even students with straight A*s in GCSE in the UK don't have the freedom to choose their own vocational path. This must feel like the ultimate irony after excelling in what it seems a never- ending sequence of exams, what did they do wrong? Even more, imagine what's left for late developers and youngsters that have less support during their teenage years. And this is not only for the ones that want to become doctors. The education is not being used to explore their potential and the tools they could develop themselves but rather is condemning them with learning to use old tools to solve old problems. 

In this sense, education is failing children. The system is failing both ways.

AB

Other articles:
Secret teacher: Sats stress is crushing children's love of learning 

21. Stranger than fiction: The rejection of the weak

Many of the latest* science fiction TV series and movies picture a futuristic dystopian world that has involved instead of evolved. Instead of peace, harmony and more tolerance, there is more separation and conflict. Either chaos or the system itself alienates the poor, the weak, and build walls to separate the uncivilized who need to fight for their survival (eg The Hunger Games series). But why are we collectively fantasising with this sort of future? 

Science fiction experts often point out that it is a genre that is actually based in very real aspects of life: our anxieties, fears, our view of the world. For example, they describe Star Trek as an optimistic 60s vision of the world, tolerant and diverse (a team composed by men and women of different races), going out to space as Victorian expeditioners to teach others about civilization. 

• Invasions in general were a reflection of the anxieties over the tensions between empires first, the cold war later on and terrorist attacks to this day (the latest invasions attacked big landmarks, creating an subconscious link with the attack to the twin towers). 
• In particular, aliens are mostly about our view of the "other", our fear of the other: other nations, foreigners, terrorists. Alien is of course a very scary other with a parasitic life cycle that ends up killing you. One of the exemptions was ET. ET is a positive take where the "other" was the hostile adult world seen through the eyes of the child: we cannot see the faces of most adults, adults are holding guns against children (only a re-masterisation done later changed many of the guns to look like walkie-talkies) and even the camera is at a child's height. But the child, Elliot, gets in contact with ET, this short-but-adult alien, who turns out to be someone who's lost and just wants to go home. Through this encounter with the ET, he also meets an adult, "Keys" -the government agent- who remembers how he felt as a child: an alien-adult that becomes an adult with a face, a dream and a story. 
• The change of the millennium, or even the mystic 2012, brought a lot of apocalyptic movies, etc, etc. 
• You see the point, right?

The so-called migrant crisis, with people fleeing from civil war zones and extreme poverty, seems to come close to the dystopian worlds of some of these sci-fi/SF stories.

This cartoon has been shared on social media. Simon Kneebone, the Australian cartoonist who drew it, tried to explain why people are sharing it: 

"The issues are complicated and complex. I think that we perhaps have mixed emotions, that we might not always be comfortable with. We feel for the refugees but are threaten a bit as well. The cartoon sidesteps getting bogged down in the angst, and says simply that we all fellow humans on this planet… And where we happen to be on the planet isn’t that important. I think it is being shared because it resonates with our inner human."

How much complex can it get? Has anyone ever come up with a good solution to a civil war? An authoritarian leader to unite everyone in fear? External intervention that imposes itself violently and denies self-determination? Let the war take its course and accept that mass killings will happen?
How complex can it get when the countries shutting their doors to the people fleeing these areas are seeing the sales of the weapons to the war zones going up 25%?
How complex can it get when the argument to reduce the budget for the rescue missions in the Mediterranean is that rescuing people actually encourage more to take the risk? Of course that meant, deaths should work as a deterrent.
How complex can it get when people feel pity or even mercy but does not want their country to receive migrants?

The premise of this blog is that everything that is happening in the world is somehow a fractal representation of what goes on at all levels of society, down to our own minds. There has always been a divide between the weak and the strong. And the strong tend to show no mercy, even cruelty towards the weak. Ethnic cleansing, racism, child abuse, chauvinism and violence against women, animal cruelty. There is always a weak one**.

It's curious to see how economic theory tried (and keeps trying) to justify tax cuts (increasing benefits) for the rich as a way of providing stimuli to do their jobs of creating more wealth better, whilst also justifying reducing benefits (taxing) to the poor as a stimuli for them work harder. Of course, here the words tax and benefits are important to the narrative but basically the paradoxical logic seems to be "we need to make things more difficult for the weak for them to try harder, and easier for the strong... for them to work less hard(?)". I don't know. I said it was paradoxical.

But of course, this is false strength. It is strength defined by the rejection of what's weak, instead of the acceptance, integration and the resolution of weakness.

Ai Weiwei's son, 6 year-old Ai Lao who lives away from his father in Berlin***, said to him by phone: "In fact, your persecutors aren't that much better off than you. You may have to run away from them -- but they have to run after you all the time, too." Through his son's insight, Ai Weiwei concluded that the angst and insecurity he feels reflects the state of China angst and insecurity, instead of its strength. Read the Spiegel's interview to Weiwei here.

When trying to understand any of these issues, past or present, the immediate thing to consider is our weak, vulnerable, poor, hungry side we tend to hide from the world. And reflect: How do we treat it? Are we rejecting it as a way to build up a (false) sense of strength? Are we hearing its needs, feeding it with love? Do we know what do we need?What's our lack? How do we feel in front of someone who can see it? Are we willing to stand for it or do we hide in shame? How do we treat ourselves when we get sick? When we failed? When we get rejected? Do we treat ourselves with love or try to build a wall around that experience to hide the shame? In the age where people are "branding" themselves and only present a perfectly curated version of their lives in social media, these questions are very relevant. 

Are we strong enough to offer a helping hand to our own weaknesses? So how do we ever expect society to do it if we are not able to?

AB

*I mention the latest films, but not forgetting films like Metropolis (Germany, 1927) that touched similar topics.

**Stories about slave classes rising (clones in Cloud Atlas, robots in i-Robot, Terminator, Matrix) are also related to this separation of weak and strong, but seen through the eyes of who's in control: the ones in power fear the rise of the ones that follow orders -the unconscious- they fear losing their supremacy and power. It is not very difficult to pair these anxieties with actual pieces of news: a few days ago, Johann Rupert said he cannot sleep at night at the thought of a social upheaval. In any case, the theme of slavery is surprisingly recurring in fiction and more and more in the news.
Let's bear in mind that robot's etymology: derived from the word robota, meaning forced labour. Even if this theme literally deals with the fear of technology, it is also about the fear of creation and parenthood, more specifically "imperfect" creation, responsibility and recognising the individuality of what's created. 

*** After the publication of this post, Wei Wei had his passport returned by the Chinese authorities and have reunited with his family.

Other links:
The Guardian: Italian coastguards: military action will not solve Mediterranean migrant crisis
Russell Brand - The Trews: Australia: still a prison colony?

20. The crisis of Masculinity and corporations trying to play a social role

In the last few years, we've been witnessing corporations and brands trying to appear more human, more social. They are spending big money in developing a social soul and in showing it. Sometimes the show comes before the actual development, though. In some cases, the appearance of having a social commitment is more important that the commitment itself. The story takes over the facts. The hashtags are more important that the actions. This seems to have been the case of Starbucks' attempt to drive a conversation about race.

Starbucks, as a business concept, was inspired by Italian coffee houses. In one of his latest trips to Italy, Mr Schultz, Starbucks' current CEO, noticed how these coffee houses are places of conversation. They have a role in Italian society: they are familiar places where people go regularly, know who is going to serve them coffee and can tell the difference between a barista and the other just by looking at how the coffee was served. Mr. Schultz wanted to copy&paste an authentic, emerging phenomena from a country were conversations are more central to its culture than mass communication, to the US and to a huge coffee shop chain... .  So he's been trying to manufacture this personal experience with baristas misspelling your name in coffee cups, so you feel "recognised" and with whom you're supposed to have a 30" debate about race. -"Racism is bad. Agree?", -"Yes", "Here's your cappuccino".

Corporations are lacking self awareness. They certainly know they have to make money and that's the priority. "We provide products and services to consumers and customers", they may attempt. "We are in the business of beautiful hair", a hair manufacturer may say. They may even try to turn beautiful hair into some sort of statement, some sort of idea for people to buy into. Will using Panthene as a shampoo help women to disregard the labels they are faced with in their professional life? No. Will opening a bottle of Coca Cola help people "choose" happiness? Really?  
Even if I am not offended by brands spending their advertising dollars in reflecting back to society the ideas that society feeds them with in focus groups, there is a feeling of self delusion, of self importance, that is slightly disturbing. Because, while people work under the spell of a well written story and a snappy hashtag, they do not connect with the reality that surrounds them and, believing their own narrative, don't assume the responsibilities that truly correspond to them. See this animation based on a a talk by the philosopher Slavoj Zizec.

Corporations seem to have forgotten what they are there for. 

This comes at no surprise with the current crisis of masculinity and "traditional masculine values" as a right wing american TV channel would describe it. This week we've  seen Jeremy Clarkson's "kind of fall" and read about Russell Crowe wondering where are those men he admired as a child. 

It is no surprise because corporations represent the masculine force in society. A pure masculinity principle focuses its energy and creativity in a single outcome (to make money). In a polarised world, they represent the dual opposite of the state (the female principle), where its creativity needs to multi-task to provide improvements in education, wellness, health indexes, take stands on civil rights, gay marriage, abortion, urban planning, infrastructure, climate change as much as improve GDP. And which is also, by the way, questioning what is -in today's society- the role of the state.

In the past, when the only overwhelming power was the state (ie monarchies), liberalism tried to establish a balance between the individual (even though it was mostly about white men of a certain class) and the authorities, establishing the freedoms that the "individual" should be granted and limiting the power of the state and its invasive potential. Corporations are not equal to the individual, though. People have to face an imbalance of power in front of concentrated corporate power too. But corporations hid (and hide) behind the "individuals" to push neoliberal ideas to demand more "freedoms" that actually weaken governments more than ever before. Not surprisingly, it was mainly corporations the ones that truly benefited from weaker governments. That's why when corporate responsibility is mentioned by the right, the left tends to look at it as another dubious rhetoric that leads to the foggy lands of self-regulation; while, if it is coming from the left, the right sees is as another attempt for the government to over-regulate. 

Famously, Milton Friedman fused and defused the individual and the corporation at will. He claimed that corporations are false persons so they cannot have social responsibility or social consciousness, in an article that he titled "The social responsibility of business is increase its profits". 

 "What does it mean to say that "business" has responsibilities? Only people have responsibilities. A corporation is an artificial person and in this sense may have artificial responsibilities, but "business" as a whole cannot be said to have responsibilities, even in this vague sense."

Corporations don't have responsibilites but have -apparently- interests and if it pretends to play a social role, it is only in the pursue of its own interests.

"To illustrate, it may well be in the long-run interest of a corporation that is a major employer in a small community to devote resources to providing amenities to that community or to improving its government. That may make it easier to attract desirable employees, it may reduce the wage bill or lessen losses from pilferage and sabotage or have other worthwhile effects. Or it may be that, given the laws about the deductibility of corporate charitable contributions, the stockholders can contribute more to charities they favor by having the corporation make the gift than by doing it themselves, since they can in that way contribute an amount that would otherwise have been paid as corporate taxes. In each of these--and many similar--cases, there is a strong temptation to rationalize these actions as an exercise of "social responsibility." In the present climate of opinion, with its widespread aversion to "capitalism," "profits," the "soulless corporation" and so on, this is one way for a corporation to generate goodwill as a by-product of expenditures that are entirely justified on its own self-interest.

It would be inconsistent of me to call on corporate executives to refrain from this hypocritical window-dressing because it harms the foundation of a free society. That would be to call on them to exercise a "social responsibility"! If our institutions, and the attitudes of the public make it in their self-interest to cloak their actions in this way, I cannot summon much indignation to denounce them. At the same time, I can express admiration for those individual proprietors or owners of closely held corporations or stockholders of more broadly held corporations who disdain such tactics as approaching fraud. " 

In this point, Milton and Zizek seem to agree (!) that window-dressing self-interest as social responsibility is close to fraud.

However, in these neoliberal ideas, the concentrated power of corporations was never seen as a threat or in contradiction to the principle "free to choose", when they usually are a threat as in the long run. These ideas support more oligopolies and monopolies in detriment of SAMEs and entrepreneurs.  

Something is missing

The question is, why then the CEOs, obedient of Milton Friedman, go and maximise the profit of a company and find every possible loop holes to avoid paying taxes, every possible regulation to pay as little as possible, then go outside and in their private lives turn to philanthropy and even call for all billionaires to give away most of their earnings? Are they recognising that this exuberant accumulation they fought so hard for is -at some point- useless or purposeless and needs to be put to better use? Do they need to fulfil some sort of god instinct and want to become saviours of the world? Are they bored? What's missing?

On the other side of the spectrum, men are seeing increasing levels of suicide. Some of them cannot longer deal with stress, with not being able to fulfil the provider role of the family and cannot ask for help.

and consumers? why are they asking these corporations to show they care? that they care for the environment, feminism, the farmers in a different country? Is it because we care or because we don't want to care? Superficially, we recognise that the values of the brands we choose reflect on the fabricated image of ourselves we want to project to the world. So we want to be seen as if we care. So brands and big multi-nationals run around trying to make something up to keep people engaged, which in many cases it ends up being just... make-up. 


Masculine archetypes

The point is that it would be a disaster for a society if the masculine principle disappeared. What we need instead is masculinity in its best expression, the one that emerges when men (and corporations) are self aware and connected to their centre. In this article, John Walters cites a book on masculinity and two different models: the masculine man and the macho man:

 ...the dichotomy outlined by Robert Bly in his seminal book Iron John - between the 'Wild Man' and the 'Savage Man'. For Bly, the two were opposites: one a benign archetype which every man must access if he is to become an adult; the other a weakling affecting hardness. The Wild Man has, through pain, discovered his own centre, the Savage Man is filled with rage because his heart is numb. According to Bly, the Wild Man's vital qualities have been caged in the modern male by the processes of capitalism, industrialisation and organised religion. Most men tend either to remain chained or burst out into savagery.

And more: 

There's a world of distance between alpha-male masculinity and the macho man. A masculine man is steadfast and rooted, centred within himself. A macho man is emotionally and existentially incontinent, spewing his insecurities in every direction via the codes of aggression and narcissism. A real man could survive on lettuce for six months; a macho man needs a large steak in front of him, less for nourishment than to announce his manhood.
A macho man is a weak man pretending to be masculine - and is generally found to be someone who has spent too much time around women, trying to ingratiate himself and attract their attention instead of burrowing into his own soul. Deprived of a convincing male mentor, he has never learned how to be a man, and so must project a fake masculinity to conceal his deficit. An alpha-male is something different, being a man who has gained control over his masculinity and father energy, and is therefore able to instil confidence in others and suggest himself as a potential leader if the effluent hits the extractor. 

As a feminist, I would argue, that men are not pure masculinity. And that feminine functions have been denied and externalised in women to the detriment of men: 

• Nutrition, feeling we are worthy of food and receiving attention. Hunger, leads to anger or an obsessive pursue of accumulation and traps individuals in an infant estate where they can never assume responsibility over another person. They cannot become effective fathers.
• Processing of negativity: denying weakness opens up to violence. Weakness is subjected to violence to make it "disappear". When there is no legitimate target, this ends up in self inflicted violence. 
• Expression of emotion: linked to being weak, emotions are not recognised as vital forces to be used and to be named.

Rescuing corporations

In a constructive spirit, I'd say that corporations should look at the archetype of the good father or the wild man for guidance of what's their role in society:

1. They have to have a healthier relationship and better partnerships with the states in which they operate. They should not see them as enemies but complements. They cannot continue to turn the blind eye to them, dis-empower them, corrupt them, find ways to avoid responding to their tax responsibilities nor expect the state to be at their service. In a kind of institutional feminism: feminine entities also need to be recognised and set limits whilst connecting through dialogue to corporations in touch with their centre. 
In this sense, a response like Bill Gates' on tax avoidance feels instinctively wrong (towards the end of the video). 

Denying the duty of a corporation in taking part in the collective projects of the country in which they operate, is social neglect. Without disregarding that, very commendably, he chose to expend some of his personal fortune in very efficiently run world saving projects. However what he does as himself (giving money away in the projects he alone decides are worthwhile) and what he does as a leader of a company (not paying tax to fund the projects that a democratically elected government decides are priority) cannot be added up together. They are not the same. This is not at all about negating the freedom and the benefits to pursue philanthropy, but rather to question that when philanthropy happens at the expense of taxes, there are consequences.  A fragmented personality does not offer a neutral balance to the world. In any case, we can always argue that no government was paying attention to -say- Malaria vaccinations in Africa and it is fantastic that the philanthropic projects of Mr. Gates, the person, looks at that gap. But that fact, does not exempt, Microsoft, the company, from its duties. Microsoft is, of course, only an example of a long list. Starbucks, Amazon, etc, they have been all in the news for these matters. 

But to do this, they have to respect and integrate the femininity that lives within men and masculine entities. The one that is nourishing, comforting and able to deal with negativity, so they do not need to keep in captivity feminine entities to work as their external organs. Playing a social role cannot mean subject, disempower, occupy or replace the state. 

2. They have to assume the due responsibility for the working conditions they create: for every individual working in their ranks, directly or indirectly, in the headquarters as much as the most remote third party that has been subcontracted in a corner in China. In this sense, Apple's response to the BBC Panorama documentary showing the working conditions in China feels utterly insufficient: "We are aware of no other company doing as much as Apple to ensure fair and safe working conditions". The implied excuse "China is like this, not us" does not work when working in China it is their most central strategical supply chain decision and they just had a year with record profits. But, at the end everything that was overlooked will be forgotten, all sins will be expiated when Tim Cook donates his personal fortune to charity when he dies (yes, another one). The same happens with tea producers procuring tea from the Assam region in India. Even if they very proudly include a "certification" logo in their packaging, somehow reassuring consumers that an independent body has verified that biodiversity and livelihood of communities are being protected, the reality is different. This also shows the increasing "Ivory Tower" syndrome, where everyone is seating in their office buildings and 5-star hotels happy with themselves because they have an email, a trendy presentation or a cute video saying that everything is ok, but no one bothers to see if the narrative in their screens reflects reality.

3. They have to assume responsibility on the full outcome of their activity. The products and their waste, as much as the resources they consume in the process. 

4. As a good father, they have a role of promoting non-dependence on the state (the mother) by paying living wages for example, through developing self discipline, showing the expression of love through 'doing and achieving' and the development of self mastery and self confidence (ensuring equal pay for equal jobs, equal opportunity and equal recognition for example). 

5. As the wild man, steadfast and rooted and centred in himself, their role in society is also create, express themselves meaningfully, explore freely the whole spectrum of the ambiguity of masculinity and be. 

And it is only here, through demonstrating how they do all these things, where a true social mission can emerge for any company. And if they want to talk about, that would be fine for me.

AB

PS:
1. In conversation of Ian Mason, touches some of this point from the wider angle of the economical system.

2. Even traders are starting to speak about this. Even if what is being proposed does not tackle the core of the problem.

3. An interesting article from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung by Thomas Beschorner and Thomas Hajduk: Corporate responsibility in Switzerland. The article is in German but readable in English using the translate function of Google Chrome.

See also:

The absent father and our quest for freedom