19. The revolution is in the hands of women

Women as indicators of social development

I read somewhere that the true level of development of a country is down to how well women and children are treated, and it normally comes in that order: women's movements and then issues related to children and -I would add- other minorities in the wider sense. We see these issues being discussed through its negative consequences: aggression, violence, sexual exploitation and degradation, as well as from a positive/progressive angle: fighting for recognition of individuality, respect and freedom.
These topics of discussion and public debate emerge when we are trying to resolve individually and collectively the most basic conflicts with the "other" and 'healing' the hatred of the weak.

So something must be boiling when we read:

• Breaking the taboo: The Moscow women taking a stand against domestic violence
• The Arab Spring failed women: we need a sexual revolution in the Middle East
• How Argentina rose up against the murder of women

That's why we also read:

• Chinese women's rights group collapses under official pressure

Even though women's power and influence should be discussed in all its multidimensional richness, in this entry I will focus in motherhood. Why? It is not because women and mothers are the same thing. No. First of all, probably due to the need to de-couple womanhood and motherhood, motherhood has become a taboo subject. But most importantly, it is because the narrative of mothers shape society, so the first step to a revolution is for us -mothers- to take ownership over our words and become conscious that what we say and don't say -if we are mothers- is crucial. In this sense, it is curious what happens with women politicians in Russia: "Female politicians always enter parliament as feminists and as representatives of women’s rights, but – because they need to pursue their political career – they become outrageous saviours of traditional values.", says Ekaterina Dementieva. Sadly, they lose their own narrative, their voice in a survival game. 
This is why one of the most revolutionary acts we can do are completely under our control: the first one, I argue, it is becoming conscious and reflective of what's the narrative that we are passing on (at personal and social level), how coherent it is with our reality and our acts, how coherent it is with our feelings and emotions, if the words we are saying are truly ours, why we adopt alien speeches and why do we keep silent in some cases.
The second one is ensuring our children are seen in their own individuality and recognised as individuals by this narrative so they have the right tools to break away from it and write their own version of the story when they are ready.

Mothers as architects of the world psyche

Mothers. We are the custodians of the next generation consciousness. We lay the foundations, we are the first organizers of the world psyche through our children's psyche. With our words we interpret our children's reality during the first years of their lives, naming what exists, what happens and what's important. 
Our children live this period of their lives tuned to our emotions. They express with their bodies what we don't say. Our children are attentive observers of how we feel, what we do, how we react to our environment, the amount of attention we give them, and all of that shapes them.

We are also the ones able to create a negative space in our children: our silences, our disapproval and our incoherence. Our lack of words will leave emotions unacknowledged and disorganized, floating in the unconsciousness; our incoherence will create a tension within them. We are also the first to point out the things they "should" not like about themselves, the things that "should" be rejected: we design our children's shadow. This shadow not only stores what we consider bad, but also talents that we don't acknowledge or value.

Etruscan bronze statue: She-wolf, Romulus and Remus

When we are present, in the moment, practising our perception, we are able to truly feed our children, connect to their reality, and realize what's going on, putting words to the situation, containing and channelling emotions to be used as a positive driving force.

We need to know that this is not always the case, and that when we are not present in ourselves it has a big impact on our children. We can be toxic, feeding from our children's attention, invading their spaces with an excessive projection of what we want them to be, instead of guiding them in their journey of discovering who they are. These mothers appear in fairy tales as witches (also a bad mother archetype) that eat children, the woman that appears when "the mother is not there".

We can be emotionally absent too, withdrawn in ourselves, distracted by other things, or living in auto-pilot unconsciously following our formed habits, leaving our children unseen, emotionally unfed. These mothers appear in many fairy tales as the step mothers (another bad mother archetype) that replaced the dead/absent mother.
Emotionally absent mothers in the past accepted and sustained a culture of "children are to be seen but not heard", which contributed to create a context that enabled child abuse to go unnoticed and unpunished. Children, hungry for attention, looking for love sometimes found (and keep finding) abuse instead, and felt they have no one to go to. They found (and keep finding)  those predators that appear in the fairy tales, the wolves. They automatically assumed no one will hear them...  "children are not to be heard". They weren't helped in interpreting what went on in the first place. There were no words, not understanding. They were left to believe that it was their fault.

Some mothers may think they don't know how to do it and look for a third party and send their children to boarding school, which may lead the child coping with the consequences of this virtual abandonment. See this short video from George Monbiot on the subject.

Some other mothers, disappear completely. With this rejection, children are left full of self destructive tendencies. Chunchi is a canton in Ecuador with the highest level of youth suicide in the world. It is also a canton where mothers left their children behind to go an make a living in the developed world after an economic crisis in 1999. 51% of school children live in a house without parents. They dutifully sent dollars and technology. But this is not what they needed. Children with dollars and an hole in their soul meant that drugs and alcohol became a epidemic, as much as suicide.  

"Not being able to receive the love of your mum is like being dead" Luis, a boy from Chunchi, says. 

This anger and self-destructive behaviour might be behind the Charlie Hebdo attack. Before making this tragedy an issue of millions against millions, we can also see it as the tragedy of two children that lost their father quite young, and then were abandoned by their mother soon after she got re-married and had another child. She decided she could not cope with the boys any longer and abandoned them in the moment that they needed her the most (their background story was researched by Der Spiegel). In religion, they found another 'mother' who offered them recognition and did something that expressed a deep rooted anger and ultimately enacted their self-destructive behaviour.

In this context, it's almost scary to think how many orphaned children have been produced during the recent conflicts, how many children are being born after rampages of rape, with mothers that despise them and the effect this will have on their future and our future. 

Being aware of the effect we have, as mothers, is the first invitation to work on our awareness of ourselves, our emotions, our own childhood, our auto-pilot, our absence, our shadow -as mothers and as women-. An invitation to work on the awareness of who we are, and more: accept it, and even more: love it. This very subtle work, almost invisible, will however have a huge impact on our children and the future generations. 

We can put words in what before was left unsaid; we can tell a different story and this can be truly revolutionary.

Hungry women, angry men and the taboo of imperfect motherhood

Women were for ages considered weak, irrational, even reduced to the level of property. One of the rationales against women's voting was that a married man would be voting twice. So what sort of mother is a woman that was taught she was "unwanted" and inferior? A rejected woman grows up hungry. She lives hungry of love and acceptance, but she is not aware of it because this hunger was never named. And how does she behave in front of a daughter who holds up a mirror of what she is? If she rejected or did not approve of her own femininity, she'd likely do the same with her daughter's, discharging more negativity to her than she would do on a boy, pushing her to turn to her dad for approval, becoming a bond in a trans-generational chain of hungry-angry women that can only find acceptance in men. Even if the effect gets very slowly diluted down the chain. 

And how does she behave in front of a son? She'd probably unconsciously teach him to reject what she rejected in herself too. So men have to learn to be men, strong and undoubtedly masculine. Emotions are bad. They have to suppress everything in them that is loving, caring, sweet. They have to hate it inside and hate anyone that manifests these qualities (in some cases leading to violence against them). She'd probably feed from this son that accepts her, leaving him angry-hungry for this reversal of roles, for this invasion. "I am the one that was supposed to be fed. Where is my tit? I want the page 3 of the Sun." and thus becoming a bond in the trans-generational chain of angry-hungry men. Even if this chain gets very slowly diluted. 

Motherhood, the untouchable institution

But wait a minute: on top of being labelled weak, inferior, unable to own anything not even our bodies, being paid less for equal jobs, having a glass roof, and all of that... we are now criticized as mothers??? Give me a break. Motherhood is an institution that no one can speak about. Whatever I do is my business, I've read this or that book and I'm on this camp of perfect motherhood and don't you dare to say a word, don't you dare to make me feel guilty.

Yes, of course. But guilt and responsibility are two different things. 

Louise Bourgeois - Maman

As Spider-man would say (digging deep into the rich realm of superhero philosophy) "With great power comes great responsibility" and our first responsibility as mothers and women is to discover who we are, becoming aware of our emotions and our relationships (with our own mother is usually a good start) and then talk about motherhood without taboos. Accepting ourselves, our attempts to do what we can and put words to our discoveries in order to make conscious what was left unconscious. Being aware is accepting responsibility. Being aware brings more coherence to the triad of what we think, feel and do. This will help us shape our lives with honest coherence instead of trying to fill in the space that a cultural stereotype has drawn for us. There are studies that show that the biggest is the mother ideal in a country, the lower the birth rate. It is difficult for young Italian women to see themselves as the traditional 'mamma', or for the German to see themselves as die perfekte Mutter that, by the way, cannot do anything right. So somehow we are leaving these stereotypes untouched and just avoid the whole issue altogether. Who dares to say that being a perfect mother is a bad thing? The point is that it is not real. Women cannot feed others with love and attention if they don't feed themselves with love and attention. 

And how women feed themselves is a mystery, some sort of divine source of food. (Some assume) They don't need to be paid fairly, or recognised, or given a job at the level of her capacity, or given assistance while she searches for her own food. Feeding women generates resentment if we haven't sorted out our own history with our mothers. 

Left and right politics are still shaped by traditional mother and father stereotypes

In the first entry of this blog, I argued that the world we live is an emergent result of what we are, built up in scale. We all carry a pattern of polarities within ourselves, we build it in our families, and every social structure upward. When we overcome our fears, when we resolve our issues, when we integrate our shadow and our polarities and we change, everything changes even if it takes a while to see it. 

Somehow mother and father figures -and how they have developed in history- represent the basic pattern that built up the model of any hierarchical structure we live in (it does not have to be like that, but that's what we -collectively tend to do). The State v The Private sector, Left and Right (plus liberalism as the child perspective), our own relationship with the Company that employs us (which gives us food) and our boss (which gives us directives and makes us accountable), west v east (and the developing countries), are all examples on the entities we usually project our own model of mother, father and child. We project it outside, usually we participate too in creating it and building it, to then see it, understand it and eventually to overcome it and create something new. 

Mother and child -
Fernando Botero

In politics, the left (frown upon in general in the West world), normally follows a mother pattern, focusing on education, health and giving equal opportunities to all (nothing wrong with that). Has a more holistic view but it can appear as "waster" of money, not smart in economical terms. The state, that is the embodiment of the mother, should be big.
Communism represents its extreme, becoming the toxic mother: where the state should be everything, control everything, it also stops the masculine to act (in separating the children from the mother, in guiding them to penetrate the external world through self mastery, in creating wealth).

The right focuses on structures, law abiding and efficiency, controls the money making process, the cutting dependencies from the state (nothing wrong with that either). However, under this ideology, the state cannot do much right, its economical activity is "spending" and therefore it should be as small as possible because "there is no money". And of course, feeding the state with taxes... we rather not. The private sector is said to be the income generator, somehow seen as the bread-winner, and should be left alone.

The liberals too were concerned about the individual and its rights (of men only) in front of the political power of the State -when it emerged it was against monarchies and aristocracy- (somehow representing the child trying to break away from its parents), seeking to maximize deregulation, but failing to acknowledge that the political is not the only power that can subjugate the individual. The concentrated, organized economical power has been largely ignored. 

We are not in front of a conservative set up of politics: we are in front of an old-fashioned view of the world, a view of the world that seems to have frozen sometime in 1950.

Even if in 1950s, the role of the state was much more active that what seems to be fashionable now. It is only in this context, this old-fashioned view, that Nick Clegg, the leader of the liberal democrats in the UK, can claim he would add a heart to the conservatives (right), and a brain to Labour (left).

See this article from Kofi Annan: The Global Order can only be saved if new powers are let in

The role of the state and the missing woman

In this old view of the world we are submerged in, women have to fight to be seen and recognised, left and right are antagonists instead of two important complementary roles. It also sees the state in negative terms whilst we see the rise of corporate power acting carelessly and unchallenged. We are constantly prompted to react to any crisis, quickly taking sides and condemning the other, with half truths making up full narratives.

It seems to me that this is no more the time to talk about how fat the state (or any woman) is, in the shape of austerity programs, but instead what it can create, what it does and how it will occupy the space it needs to be in without crashing anyone. It is not the time to speak about how much freedom corporations need, but how much responsibility and presence they should have in society. It's time to stop projecting our own shadow, our aggression onto others but look at the "what for" behind our rejection of the other.

I dare to think that this change will happen in the eyes of women and it will trickle up. Women that don't think like men but rather integrated their masculine side and accepted their feminine, that are not concerned about slimming down so she can fit into the good girl costume. Women that see themselves, her partners and her children (if there are any) for who they are, and not what they want them to be or they are supposed to be. Women that look at the calendar and shout "Come on, people, it's 2015, it's time to wake up!".

AB

If you liked this article, you may also like:

Women: invisibility or blindness?
The absent mother
Fear and power: owners of our fears, writers of our history

PS: 
Examples of concentrated unregulated economical power
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9wHzt6gBgI

Nawal El Saadawi

18. Civilisation v barbarism: Je suis tout le monde

Civilization v barbarism has been one of the biggest battles history books have fought against History.

From Greece and Rome, China and European colonialist powers to this post-colonial era, the barbarian label has been used to justify... well quite barbaric behaviour... This label is put -mostly by an imperial power- to foreigners and peoples that did not accept their rule. Barbarians are inferior, they are brutal, cruel and no worth of any respect, recognition or empathy. They are not equal. Therefore, they can be invaded, bombed, gassed, subjugated, raped, tortured, orphaned, enslaved or plainly killed. 

We find the "savage" outside so, so when we kill it, civilization wins, believing that this act of violence will be a proof of our superiority rather than a manifestation of our own savage nature.

The presumption of superiority does not finish in a war or an invasion context, see this segment from Jon Stewart's show, touching on this point:
http://www.upworthy.com/he-shows-side-by-side-photos-to-jon-stewart-and-asks-him-to-guess-the-country-mind-blowing-yes?c=huf1

Of course, believing in our superiority (or inferiority) is the biggest delusion. We project our own capacity for cruelty onto others, without being able to see it in ourselves. Under this logic, killing half a million children in Iraq is considered a hard choice, but "the prize was worth it", according to Madeleine Albright. 

See these articles from Guardian's columnist Gary Younge:

• "American sniper illustrates the West's morality blind spots" 
• "Churchill - The truth" 

Behind curtains- Jaco Van der Vaart

Churchill said "I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilized tribes", which was later used against the Kurds. Only a few years later, he had to face his own super magnified shadow in Nazi Germany-for which he was hailed a hero- and in that clash he produced something unexpected: words about the struggle, about bravery and freedom that ended up inspiring even the ones he would refer to as "savages".

So, what then? The West is barbarian? Who are the "good ones"? Who is the hero?

Here is where the real "Je suis" comes to play. "Je suis tout le monde", "I am everyone". 

Without seeing the humanity of it all, the unapologetic blind cruelty of the "civilized" and the unapologetic red-eyed rage of the "savages", the strength of the order and the hidden logic of chaos, we cannot connect with the totality of our own humanity. We won't be able to connect with ourselves.


At the end, the only difference between civilization and barbarism is the capacity to step aside the one-sidedness of any given position. 

AB

Other articles:
Robert Fisk, The Independent: "The West likes to think that 'civilisation' will defeat Isis, but history suggests otherwise"

17. When liberté and egalité don't get along

Freedom without love is just an expression of power. I do this, because I can. I am superior, my values are superior... it's a kind of freedom that makes us unequal. 

Freedom without love is false freedom. 

Religion without love is just an structure of power. I am superior, my values are superior... it's a kind of religion that makes us unequal. 

Religion without love is a false religion.

So... where is the love?

AB

16. I'm not responsible because I do not exist

In these days, when so many truths are coming to light, but when accountability does not come as a consequence so clearly or strongly, the memory of my favourite book comes back every time. My favourite book is not a big romantic drama or a deep Russian novel. The book that I was dreading to end, when I read it, maybe 20 years ago is Italo Calvino's The nonexistent knight. I remember turning each page with a mixture of eagerness and regret of leaving each page behind. I have to read it again.

  

Let me explain why I think of this book, when I read about the US Senate report of torture. There are a few passages that come to mind: one is the very beginning when Charlemagne was reviewing his paladins shortly before going to battle. He goes through them one by one, asking who they were, where they came from, who were their parents. Until he reaches the last of these knights. A knight in a bright, clean, unscratched white armour. After presenting himself, Charlemagne asked him to raise his visor and show his face. But the knight wouldn't do it. Charlemagne asked why. He responded "Sire, because I do not exist". He then revealed that the helmet was in fact empty. "How do you do your job, then, if you don't exist?" asked Charlemagne. "By will power and faith in our holy cause", Agilulf, the non existent knight replied. He was the model soldier, a bureaucrat that followed all the rules and procedures to the point and was always right. No one liked him. It came to be when a name, a rank, some duties and a story somehow condensed into an armour.

I don't think many people were surprised by what the torture report said. Even if we did not know the details, somehow we all knew. Guantanamo bay, extraordinary renditions, secrecy, no legal framework or accountability, some precedents like the School of Americas... come on, we all knew the Emperor was naked. What it was novel in this piece of news is the US saying it to itself. It was the admission itself. The "becoming aware of it". Now it's "out there" (see the RSAnimate below from a talk by Steven Pinker on language and what he says about mutual knowledge).

It is indeed difficult to face our shadow, particularly when we have spent years projecting it to others and pointing our fingers at them. So difficult it is, that we create a carefully crafted narrative that swirls around the unspeakable truth. The words of the President of the committee were somehow of a higher consciousness "Torture goes against the very soul of our country" and relating the greatness of the country with the ability to face these facts. The reaction of the republican Senator John McCain, victim of torture himself, was probably the most poignant when he said "enhanced interrogation methods stained our national honor". However accountability is still not on the table. Some empty armors did it. And Americans seem to be ok with this. If one piece of news was US admitting what everyone knew they were doing, the second piece of news is that it did not cause any major reaction. 

The second passage of the book that comes to mind is when Charlemagne was warning Torrismund that due to the fact that he was born out of wedlock, he would lose his rank. He should get his father to recognise him. "I can never be recognised", 'My father was no man". Charlemagne asked "Who then?". Torrismund replies "'Tis the Sacred Order of the Knights of the Holy Grail". Then he told the story of how his mother met the knights and spent a lot of time with them, until she became pregnant. Charlemagne saw the problem: "The Knights of the Holy Grail have all made a vow of chastity and none of them can ever recognise you as son". Torrismund then explained "My mother has never spoken about any knight in particular, but brought me up to respect as a father the Sacred Order as a whole".  Charlemagne then suggested "The Order as a whole is not bound by any vow of the kind. Nothing therefore prevents it from being recognized as a person's father". No one has fathered him. It was the Order. The Order did it. 
In this case, the CIA did it. Or the Bush Administration did it. And Obama's. Or the US did it. Let's turn the page. Never again. Let's look forward. We are awesome.

But how can we avoid it to happen again if we do not explore the existence of these empty armours and the functioning of these Orders? If we do not truly look at them? If they do not look at themselves? Can empty armours and faceless Orders truly "see" other people as people? 

AB

15. The absent father and our quest for freedom

The sense of how the social order works -and how to penetrate it- comes with the male side in our family: our fathers or anyone fulfilling a father role. They are the ones that invite us to go outside the world of mum to conquer other lands, we learn discipline (love is expressed in "doing" and completing something) and to rule ourselves; all of which gives us the sense of self-mastery and freedom. In a home with an absent father (or father figure), it is more difficult to separate the children from the mother. This may result in extreme frustration, even disgust, particularly in males who unconsciously occupy the male role of the house.

Fatherhood, and absent fathers in particular, has been a topic President Obama talked about in several occasions (there are several videos in YouTube), speaking a lot from his own experience of the challenges of growing up without a father:

In the most extreme situation, an unbalanced masculine (its absence or uber-dominant presence) can be destructive over the unbalanced feminine (the mother, the system). History has seen this at social level in the form of fascism, which represents a violent response against the feminine principle. 

This is somehow told in Pink Floyd's The Wall: the protagonist goes through childhood with an overprotective mother (unbalanced feminine, unable to see and feed the individuality of the child), a rigid school and an absent father. In this context, his Ego creates an internal fascist dictator, seeking to counter-balance the oppressive environment in which he lived, that was extremely invasive. In the film Pink, the child, the ashamed, the wounded, the unseen by the people that were supposed to see him, unfed with attention to his individuality, and unable to separate from the mother, gets replaced by the unbalanced masculine, a fascist persona who performs this separation with violence, and in a twisted manner reclaims what he did not get as a child: the unconditional maternal love and attention (that's not the same as control) in the first place and the paternal order and notion of freedom later on. 

This persona incarnates the power without the love, "the all for one"  without "the one for all"; still merged with the maternal, he fears his own masculinity cannot be expressed and see 'queers' as a reflection of this fear (his shadow); it objectifies all (because he had been objectified), judging, labelling and discarding, particularly women that now should be at his service.

But this fantastical story was inspired by his (and Syd Barrett's) own life, with the anger he felt growing up without a father:

In this video (it's only 4:46 so, worth watching), the philosopher Slavoj Žižek speaks about Freedom and more interestingly for this post, false freedom. 

From this, I'd to highlight a couple of passages:

"The most dangerous form of non freedom is the non freedom which is not even perceived as such.
Then there is another form of freedom, which I think has a disastrous impact and we shouldn't underestimate. I met at some point in Belgrade in the late 90s, when Milošević was still in power, some probably ethnic cleansers, nationalists. And -I'm even ashamed now for doing this- I got in conversation with them. And they gave me a wonderful short lesson on how nationalist fundamentalism worked. They told me "We experience your western liberal world as over-regulated... you know, you are all the time bombarded by messages of be political correct, don't be a racist, be careful what you eat, disciplined yourself and so on and so on.". And they told me openly "I want to eat whatever I want, smoke, I want to steal when I want I want to beat women, rape them and so on. Becoming a nationalist, doing some ethnic cleansing gives me this terrifying freedom".

This is why I was not surprised when I heard that in the area of Irak and Syria controlled by Isis, it is not just religious fundamentalism, there are also gang rapes, tortures, freelance killings and so on.

You see. This is the problem with fundamentalism. It is not just that there is no freedom. There is also this kind of false freedom. The explosion of this obscene freedom. For me the highest form of freedom is love. Here I'm a pathetic old romantic."

In the mystery of how the Islamic state recruits so many Europeans, we need to start to recognise how this seed of anger is implanted to then understand why it gets attracted to a promise of false freedom, so we can treat it differently. On the one hand: either a toxic mother or lack of a soothing mothering figure, on the other hand the absent father so no one is negotiating a detachment with the development of self-sufficiency and self-mastery. When not in the extremes, the separation from the mother does not require violence, but it tends to require a "masculine" force. That's why Princesses liberation from the mother -the stepmother being the shadow of the actual mother-, requires finding a Prince with a spade -the prince being their internal masculine-. 

However, after so many dictators, orphans turned terrorists, destructive regimes, drug addicts; after so many philosophers, spiritual leaders, politicians, movies like Star Wars, and Lord of the rings -to name a very popular couple-, after so many artists who all talked about this very subject, we still don't fully recognise the anger into the spectrum of human behaviour. Afraid of it, we demonise it. And because of this lack of acceptance, we leave people with this anger to explode or what it is even worse we let them be led by people who promise to unleash it. 

Anger is an emotion that is very useful, in fact. In a culture where only the rational is good, emotions are not acknowledged nor understood. They are simply judged, normally as something of an inferior nature. However, anger helps us build the strength to defend ourselves and our limits. With this I don't mean to condone violence, but rather pointing out that anger is an important, valid and useful emotion if it can be fostered to energise a constructive purpose. 

Rebelling 

When the official narrative is oppressive it is because it lacks self awareness (it does not see itself, it does not recognize its own failings),  and is fatherless: it lacks an equal force that limits the power of this mother-system to leave room for the individual to be and feel free. An oppressive system only leaves room to anti-system narratives and this initial natural anger to escalate into violence, the false freedom Žižek talked about.

Racism has long been unrecognised by the US institutions.

So it is probably because Barack Obama is the first black president, racism in America is more visible now than it's been for a few years. Most significantly, the racial tension and the bias of institutions against the African American community are being named, thing that did not happen for a while or at least not so clearly. 

First you see, then you name, both are significant and might be the first needed and painful steps towards a deeper change. 

However, while the system does not acknowledge this fact, and does not evolve into a father-led emancipation, it leaves room for the desperate violent separation. In Ferguson we can find a hint of this logic: one of the demonstrators -after demonstrating peacefully in August- concluded: "If we don't tear anything down, if we don't destroy anything, if we don't set fire to anything, they won't even pay attention". The New York protesters where highly allegoric too with their signs and chants "I can't breathe" these final words from Eric Garner quickly became their cry for freedom. 

The racial conflict in America won't go away, and won't be resolved but with the full transformation of society. We are all part of the context, we all build the "them, us" model. 

Here is where Obama in his symbolic paternal position could've helped to guide the change needed in the institutions, however, as the article in Der Spiegel "Racial divide: the tragedy of America's first black president" describes, the prevailing sentiment is of disillusionment.  

The final part of Slavoj Žižek video speaks says:  

"The lesson is true freedom means looking into and questioning the presuppositions of everything that is given to us by our hegemonic ideology. And by ideology I don't mean here, some explicit teaching, simply the way in our daily lives we experience our reality. To question everything including the notion of freedom itself."

In our own quest for freedom, we need to find the father within: the one that can separate us from the whatever is our construction of a maternal narrative (the ideology coming from the many mothers we adopted in our lives: our country, a political party, a company, our actual mother, etc); the one that can help us build discipline and self mastery and navigate the journey of "we love, we hate, then we become". So the systems we create and sustain will have also a father within, the one able to restrain the system itself and better negotiate the balance between the individual and the whole.

In this video, Russell Brand (another public figure highly critical of the system), who also spoke about his absent father, proposes his father to have a boxing match, but mainly his aim is to get some form of healing in this staged measurement of his masculinity. He also discusses it with the psychologist David Cohen (author of The Father's book).

Almost at the end of this 10 min part 1, David Cohen praises Russell and his mum. "Your mum did definitely something rather right as the main caregiver", he says. "You want to find out about yourself. You are taking quite a lot of risks". This example is particularly good for many reasons, because an absent father does not mean the mother is powerless, but the work is more subtle. And secondly, because the culmination of a "patriarchal drive", the emancipatory movement, is to beat the father. The father symbolically dies just to mark the end of submission and that the father role has been integrated.  

This is important because this first questioning is purely ours (sometimes with the help of self-aware mother). Following the path that leads us to the answers does not depend on anyone else, it does not depend on heroes or demons we find in the world. If it happens, if we find the father within, it will enable us to make new decisions, and then we are free(r), we become our rulers.
This process cannot be reversed and if many go through it simultaneously will emerge in society too, with better systems, that are self aware and have a Good Father within, to ensure that everyone has the right to feel safe, be cared for, looked after and free.

We might need a bit of resilience. 
And patience.

AB

PS: did I mentioned that J.R.R Tolkien lost his father when he was 3?
PS2: A "dad" made it tenth most popular Christmas list request for children
PS3: Absent fathers in music: Papaoutai by Stromae (Papa where are you?)

Lyrics in French
Lyrics in English


If you liked this article, have a look at:

-The absent mother
-Women: invisibility or blindness?

External links:
Anne Manne, The Guardian: Narcissism and terrorism: how the personality disorder leads to deadly violence
Der Spiegel, Racial divide: the tragedy of America's first black president
Der Spiegel, Terror from the fringes: searching for the answers in the Charlie Hebdo attack

14. 2014: Walls, World Cups, Integration and the lightness of being

Don't worry, this article is not about football. It's about integration, so even if I start with the World Cup... bear with me. 

I have to think twice to remember that 2014 was a World Cup year. An event that seemed to be omnipresent a few months ago, now it is a thing of the past. 

Sometimes it is interesting to see how the World Cup -and the emotions it generates- sit against the social context of the countries that win it and the countries that host it. World Cups, as many big events and rituals, can feed and synchronise the collective unconscious.  The most remarkable of all, probably was the Germany win in 1990 in Italy, as it was soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the reunification of Germany. This win became a celebration of having their country back to life, after fascism had killed it, the occupation had torn it apart and had built a wall to keep it that way. 

Germany is for some the corpus callosum of the world's brain. It is the place where connections between the two hemispheres happen (West and East). It is the country where strangely the sun is female and the moon is male. Where things flip. With a strong masculine personality, analytical, focused in planning and order but still connected with instinct, nature, a country that gave birth to some of the greatest philosophers. It is also the place where the conflicts and tensions were expressed in the point of history when the world was at its maximum polarity and, probably where many of those tensions should be resolved. 

As most of the world, Germany is too looking for its own identity. Not without problems. Not without fear. 

Fear of finding their Ego again instead of the self. In this fear, Germany used to hide behind the EU (up to recently many Germans were more comfortable saying they were Europeans rather than Germans). In this confusion, it constantly needs to negotiate very fine lines between helping to build a union of nations -respected on the grounds of their own power and individuality- and creating another big devouring Mother called Europe that in the name of integration, swallows. The fact that we should be all connected does not mean that we should be or act all the same. Recognition of individuality and difference is a step that cannot be jumped. For Germany to understand the difference, it is important that they find their own individuality, remember it and celebrate it. Funny enough, a string of Wold Cup wins helped them to do just that: right after the World Cup semi-final, Der Spiegel published an article called "The bearable lightness of being: the Germans are learning to like themselves", describing the evolution of Germany from its unification onward. 

Integration is a big word for Germany in this journey: integration of former West and East Germany, integration of the high number of immigrants, integration in the context of the European Union, and probably playing an important role in the resolving (integrating) the world biggest polarity: the tensions between US and Russia (Spiegel's article Germany's choice: will it be America or Russia?). Integration is not only a big word for Germany, it is THE word. Now, from the streets of Dresden, led by Pegida, we are hearing the old story against "others" again: "they are not integrating" and "what should we do with this hordes that milk welfare here and bleed our social state dry?".  This "they" is Islam this time and even if it will never be minor when Germany finds yet another religious group to call "they", the problem is less about religious intolerance that it may seem. Firstly: seeing the problem outside and not recognising it inside. Dresden, as the whole of East Germany is also in the process of integrating with former West Germany, which also at times talks about East Germany as "milking" the mother-nation (which in Germany is rather the Father nation). Secondly, speaking about integration without understanding what's about: integration IS acceptance. 

We cannot integrate what we don't accept. Moreover, integration is not something "the other" does. Integration is a work for all, and that's why it is a challenge, that's why sometimes it feels uncomfortable. 

Something similar occurs in the new battle against Greece. Germany is projecting the failings of the Union project on the weak nations, without recognizing that they were competitive all those years thanks to a group of weak nations, without acknowledging that fixing the interest rates the same for economies that were in structural terms  radically different was also a mistake. And it was not done by the Greeks, or the PIGS. Projecting the union failings onto others is denial. So if Germany wants to lead Europe, it will also have to own part of its failings.

Integration is also a big word for the world and for all of us. In the way of resolving our own internal conflicts, we need to integrate them: find what's stored in our shadow, accept it, own it, assume responsibility for it, find the potentiality in it, and use it to help us do what we want to do, become what we can be. We need to knock down our own internal walls, the ones that separate us from our shadow and the walls that separate us from the other. Haruki Murakami wrote about walls for the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall: 

"In some cases a wall may protect us. But in order to protect us, it has to exclude others - that's the logic of walls. A wall eventually becomes a fixed system, one that rejects the logic of any other system. Sometimes violently". 

Marina Abramović, the famous Serbian performance artist, spoke (somehow) about the integration process when she was preparing to perform The life and death of Marina Abramović, a theatrical piece. As a performance artist, she hated theatre "Theatre is fake... The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real". But then she realised that Performance was just a tool to express herself "When you really found your own language and you become secure of what you are doing, then you can accept anything else." Somehow in being able to detach herself from her love of Performance and the hate of theatre, she felt secure she could also use theatre and experience it. "I've learned patience". 

Apart from knocking down the wall, and integrating the other side, Germany is still working on integrating its past. With my former job, we had a lot of internal training, one of which was on leadership, which involved exercises questioning who you are as a leader, why people should follow you, etc. A colleague from India once commented: "It's definitely a challenging exercise...making yourself those questions, but I'm surprised how much the Germans in the course were struggling with it". "Well, it is clear, isn't it?" I said. "Why?" She asked. "if they translate Leader to German is Führer, a heavy word for them" I explained. Confronting the past takes time, and Germany needed many years to make its first mayor film on Hitler, Der Untergang (Downfall, Oliver Hischbiegel, 2004). Not only that, they wanted to portray him as a human being (see Demonising and Idolising), which is not easy and became big topic of discussion (New Yorker.The Guardian) as some people would consider this dangerous and would rather see the demonic narrative, which leaves you in no doubt that it was his fault alone. It is by no means a closed chapter, Oskar Groening was convicted only recently: one of the few 50 SS officials out of 6500 at Auschwitz convicted.  

Banksy - West Bank

Spain is taking a different road regarding its past: the civil war and the Franco years. The judge Baltazar Garzón was deemed wrong in investigating deaths during Franco's dictatorship according the the Amnesty laws, and the team looking for the grave of Federico García Lorca, killed by Franco's nationalist forces, faced many obstacles with the loss of public funding related to the Memory law. Of course, avoiding to look at the past is nothing new. Moving forward without looking back is a known coping strategy for severe trauma. We build a wall, "a wall may protect us", we fragment ourselves and give power to what we consider our strong side, hiding the weak, the ashamed, the bad, the not worthy behind the wall. In this article of The Guardian, Kate Connolly speaks about Dresden being at war with itself in this regard.

We fragment society and the world, separating too the weak, the ashamed, the bad, the not worthy, the sick, the poor, the immigrants, the old, the african americans, the PIGS, the third world....
However, walls can stand for a long time, but not forever. Hating and segregating the weak is hating our own weaknesses instead of accepting them.

There is a moment when a new generation comes that is able to detach themselves from the love and hate that built those walls, and just sees them as oppressive. The emotions sustaining walls are always dense and heavy. A new generation that can make questions, that want to see what's behind, that want to knock it down, challenge the beliefs, unveil the secrets, with the hope that through that density and armed with the ability to step to the other side, there might come a break to the wheel of eternal recurrence, and find a lightness of being.

AB 

If you liked this article you may also like:

• Demonising and Idolising
• Just war or just... war
• Fear and power: owners of our fears, writers of our history

PS: Leila Sansour, Open Bethlehem

13. Demonising and idolising

Demonising and idolising are the same thing. It is the transfer of the bad and good inside to an external being or thing. We put the devil outside so, if we kill it, it will take away our own evil nature believing that this act of violence will be an expiation rather than a manifestation of it. We put the hero outside so if he is saved, we'll believe we are elevated too, without risking much or ever confronting our fears.
Both are mechanisms of delegation of power and a manifestation of the lack of ability to see: to see ourselves and to see others and accept responsibility.

We demonise food (only in a time and place where food is not scarce we can call any food "junk"). We demonise sugar, McDonald's, Coca Cola, carbs instead of our habits or our inability to take care of ourselves, learn what truly nourish us, see what's our hunger about and look for help when we need it.

We idolise celebrities, footballers, rock stars, actors, instead of exploring our internal need of being looked at, and giving ourselves attention. Attention is like money somehow. We pay attention, we steal attention. Trolls do something similar to celebrities but from a negative place: they are stealing attention back in an aggressive manner.

We demonise the other, the immigrants that come to steal our jobs and our resources claiming benefits without recognising our own invasive attitudes, history or that we are accepting to play a game, but blaming the rival for the result.

We idolise the rich, believing they feel fulfilled, that they "own themselves", instead of looking at our inner hole and thinking what makes us feel empty and poor. In this chat, it is explained how even people belonging to the top 1% of society keep looking upwards without recognising their own wealth and feeling they do not have enough (or as much as the other).

We demonise dictators, with the need of elevating them to some sort of evil deity level because thinking of them as people would call for the reconsideration of our own obedience or recognition of our own capacity for violence and cruelty.

We idolise cool people, the sort of Steve Jobs, and we buy an Apple product hoping that some of this coolness will be spilled over us without thinking why do we need a white computer to feel good about ourselves.

We demonise people that believe "we are not right", because we fear that the system of beliefs we sustain is what defines us, so if we are not right, then what? We die? Protestants and Catholics (or Unionist and Nationalists) are still separated by a wall in Belfast, Sunnis and Shias are fighting right, centre and left, atheist think that people who believe in God are stupid. Communists and capitalists can equally use the antagonist word as an insult.

Some use and exacerbate these transfer mechanisms to concentrate power and wealth. Idolise me and give me your money. Idolise me and buy the products I endorse. Demonise him and surrender power to me so I can fight him.

When we are not connected with ourselves and our inner feelings, we don't connect with our own power and surrender it to a Idol/Hero to go and fight the devil in our name. 

However, sooner or later we'll realise that no one can do any of these things for us.

AB