To conclude: I have so far been speaking only of wars between nations; what are known as international conflicts. But I am well aware that the aggressive instinct operates under other forms and in other circumstances. (I am thinking of civil wars, for instance, due in earlier days to religious zeal, but nowadays to social factors; or, again, the persecution of racial minorities.) But my insistence on what is the most typical, most cruel and extravagant form of conflict between man and man was deliberate, for here we have the best occasion of discovering ways and means to render all armed conflicts impossible. I know that in your writings we may find answers, explicit or implied, to all the issues of this urgent and absorbing problem. But it would be of the greatest service to us all were you to present the problem of world peace in the light of your most recent discoveries, for such a presentation well might blaze the trail for new and fruitful modes of action—Albert Einstein, in his famous 1931 letter to Sigmund Freud
Reading the news can bring on an emotional roller-coaster. A lot of people don't keep up with current events while others can barely pull themselves away from ubiquitous news media. We unconsciously brace ourselves for the impact of uncontrollable and frightening threats and realities that surround and permeate our lives—all the while dissociating from them just to be able to function. But no matter how we treat these stimuli, exposure takes its toll.
Our political world leaders perform caretaking routines designed and marketed to the citizenry as guarantees of safety. And we—the consumers of these caretaking routines—act the part of credulous audiences, telling ourselves that we are safer because of decisions made by equally powerless men and women hundreds or thousands of miles from where we sit in front of our computers and televisions.
And for the most part it works—we are able to sleep at night. How can this be? Perhaps we are more accepting of our politicians than we like to believe we are—that we're prepared to act as if the "care" we're receiving from our leaders is effective when it isn't. Growing up in environments that television news told us were unsafe may have taught us to create routines that allowed us to dissociate from our anxiety. Then we acted out that anxiety with caretaking routines that distanced us far enough from the scary things around us to allow us to keep functioning.
But at the same time, we're kept jacked up by news media that make sure we're saturated with information that can't but make us worry about where "things" are headed:
- The Ebola virus, which we might initially have thought of as an "African" disease not likely to affect us, has, in fact, found it's way into the West. Incidentally, they think African jungles may be natural reservoirs for Ebola, and that deforestation brings human beings into contact with the virus when people are logging.
- Are we in a chronic state of war? The beginnings of World War III? At the moment, the most visible theaters of violence are Iraq and Syria, Israel-Palestine, Russia and Ukraine. A civilian airliner apparently shot down and another airliner inexplicably disappears; ugly internal conflicts drive large numbers of Africans and Latin Americans out of their own homes, communities. even out of their countries.
- Cyber-incursions: Chinese hackers breaking into American commercial and military electronic infrastructure, while we, loudly indignant, are found out to have been hacking even our closest European allies at the same time.
- Cyber-crime is discovered to be affecting such power-players as Home Depot, Apple, and even Chase Bank!
But the news, we tell ourselves, isn't all bad: we try to balance our fear with pride in our accomplishments. We note with relief that the red ink in our national budget doesn't look as bad as it did a few years ago. We hope that our ingenuity as a species will produce solutions to our national and international challenges before all our score cards read "zero"—or worse. We rightly take pride in the almost geometric progression of technology: a probe sent to Mars and another planned to land on the surface of a comet; telescopes that can see water on planets light-years away; new technologies that harvest and store the essentially limitless energy of the sun; astonishing new types of computers and artificial intelligence; seemingly impossible medical technology that will apparently be able to extend the ability of our minds to communicate and to replace diseased parts of our body with high-tech artificial ones; and to eliminate terrible diseases with highly sophisticated antibiotics and other chemotherapies—these are not futuristic fantasies: these are just a few of the technological breakthroughs that have already been created and "proven" by researchers using laboratory computer models. Our capacity for creative use of our minds seems virtually limitless.
But the use of technology isn't an unalloyed blessing. Yes, our new connectedness causes barriers to collapse and makes us more accessible to one another and makes possible resumption of dialogue and relationships after generations of cold hostility and isolation. At the same time, however, our valuing of openness and privacy facilitates development of terrorist cyber networks that are difficult to track. Yet Twitter is credited with a vital role in bringing about revolutions in politically-repressive countries. The ambiguity of the reality created by electronic communications media generates in us an individual and corporate ambivalence about Edward Snowden's dedication to improving the transparency of the affairs of our government—and of private corporations. At the same time, the world learns almost instantaneously about beheadings of aid-workers by "religious" extremists in a part of the world that, two generations ago, was regarded as hopelessly remote, and certainly irrelevant to "our" way of life.
Clearly, our accustomed notions concerning community, safety and vulnerability are outdated.
The authors have some thoughts about the crossover between our individual emotional state and larger cultural and societal responses to what sometimes feels like chronic war and unaddressable chaos.
Irrelationship is about creating—co-creating, actually—the delusion that an unsafe world is actually a safe one. Or, at least, safe enough. A child doesn’t know what to make of a parent who is depressed, anxious, distant or ineffective in some way. So, out of perceived necessity, the child turns the tables and starts to blame himself for whatever is causing his parent’s distress or distance.
Next he will devise a remedy for his unease by treating his parent’s distress. In other words, he becomes his parent’s caregiver: he will make it his business to make the unhappy parent happy, the ill parent feel better, the ineffective parent to believe that he, the child, is okay.
As the child learns to manipulate the world in this way, he will come to believe that the world is manageable and can be made safe. In his eyes he himself becomes the necessary force for keeping chaos at bay. Without either child or parent realizing it, they're struck a pact whereby the child keeps himself feeling safe by improving his parent's emotional state. If either breaks this tacit agreement, the child will ultimately come to view the world as at least potentially unstable, hostile, violent. His response to this is that he will continue to hone his powerful defenses to keep the world safe either by manipulating the people around him, or by dissociating from their experiences and needs. Whichever technique he uses, its purpose is the same: to distance himself from awareness of how scary the world is.
Perhaps this is how we manage to keep walking through a world that feels like it's becoming more chaotic almost by the hour.
Or maybe we use those astounding technological advances mentioned above as evidence that, all in all, the world is actually getting better, safer. And who wouldn't want to believe that? Who wouldn't want to believe that the people of the world are becoming more intelligent, more wise, more conscious of the importance of our caring for the planet and the people in it? Yes, we allow that "growing pains" are part of the process of becoming more inclusive, more pluralistic in our treatment of one another.
Except that the images and You-Tube videos we see reveal to us almost in real time how extravagant our mistreatment of one another continues to be. And so we return—we must return—to our denial. For those of us living the extraordinary lifestyle of wealth first popularized in the West, we have the option to return to recreational consumerism that we take for granted as well as myriad forms of non-stop entertainment. If we don't have access to such privilege (if privilege is the word for it) then merely trying to survive fills our awareness sufficiently to block awareness of anything else. In another theater of WWIII, gigantic "climate-change" marches are helping to establish yet another beach-head in the battle for a safe world.
And it may well be called World War III—though it's not necessarily the type of war in which firearms are used to kill "the enemy" located in discrete, politically defined geographical regions. WWIII is a chaotic international struggle that results in routing our neighbors from their homes, poisoning our food, water and air; a struggle in which, for many, "different" is and evil to be destroyed, whether it be different color skin, language, citizenship, sexual orientation or religion.
Perhaps it has always been so among the peoples of the world; but now the effects of our hatreds are easily exportable thanks to communications technology. Thus we can be preyed upon by anxiety over events in countries or diseases or sects we didn't know existed until we read the Huffington Post this morning. In short, we no longer have the luxury of imagining that the terrors affecting my neighbor are "his" but not "mine," even if that neighbor lives 15,000 miles away. Perhaps this is World War 3.0?
Paradoxically, we like to tell ourselves that the world is changing for the better; that we are more intolerant than ever of disease, hunger and religion-based killing. The human rights culture, we want to believe, is growing at a rate approaching the speed-of-light pace at which we can avail ourselves of videos of cold-blooded beheadings. We want desperately to believe in a Digitally Augmented Collective Human Intelligence, ("DACHI") (okay, we made it up) with the potential to bring about a new world community before we've destroyed the one we live in.
How does irrelationship fit into all of this?
The result of growing up in unsafety is the development of a kind of self-sufficiency that does not allow others to matter—to become essential. It is a system of self-care where we are constantly imposing “care” on others to keep them at a safe emotional distance from ourselves.
Irrelationship cheats us - all of us.
Through irrelationship, we protect ourselves from this risks that come with allowing ourselves to care about others and about each other. What happens when we see this on a global scale? What happens when our psychological defenses prevent our caring enough about each other to take risks that may advance the safety and well-being of others?
Recovering from irrelationships can't happen in isolation: it's work that we do together. Perhaps the end of our endless war begins with dropping our defenses and learning to care for—and be cared for--by those in our immediate surroundings. When we see how guarded we are against those most closely connected to us, we can make the choice to begin to learn to take care of each other properly and with mutuality. This is what the peace Albert Einstein was pleading with Sigmund Freud to address looks like when two (or more) of us make a decision to created and sustained it. It is a good start--probably the only possible start.
The alternative is to continue pretending that the “care” provided by Performers of violent routines can rescue us from the end of the world - that air strikes, drones, endless war mongering will give us peace and save our children. In reality, however, this alternative is the choice to be the Audience for a bloodthirsty charade whose outcome is anything but peaceful. Until we make a different choice, we, our children and their children, are doomed to repeat the same insanity with the same result.
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*"Flag Bodypaint Make Love Not War Bodyart (8498597667)" by Eva Rinaldi from Sydney Australia—Flag Bodypaint Make Love Not War