Failing Relationships

between humans and institutions, other humans and nature

the wood heater - cooking our food, heating our house, warming our water, the focal point of our home (but if you use one, you are a dissident); natural energy sources, parallel polis example no. 1

A note: I want to be clear about an anomaly I see when reading this essay over before posting it…it sounds as if in the first half of the essay I am holding up an ‘us vs them’ scenario of the People vs the Institutions and in the second half I am saying we need to do away with the binary role of ‘us vs them’. To be clear, I am saying that institutions exist that are based in wrong relationship and it is our duty to step out of those and create a better way - ‘the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible’. We must first recognise the wrong relationships between humans and institutions, other humans and nature in order to make positive change in the world.

---

Lately my life as been truely slow. My partner had been ill so I dropped most things and just stayed home to support him, making bone broth and fresh sourdough bread, keeping the fire going for warmth, making thyme and licorice cough syrup, changing the bedsheets to make him feel better….all the things you do for those you love when they are unwell.

It is also Winter school holidays here in Australia; we have three weeks off to rest before the second half of the school year - what a blessing. I find organising my life around 10-week periods is do-able. After about ten weeks of school/work everyone feels a bit ratty and needs a break, including me.

Maintaining a slow and quite space allows for time to ponder, to think about all those oddities you notice in the World, but don’t have time at address in that moment. I’m sure I have said this before here but I don’t have a TV or a radio so the ‘noise’ is only ever of my choosing (or the animals that share this space with me). I also don’t buy the newspaper or popular magazines; I do purchase books, though (it’s my addiction, I will admit). I don’t drive into town unless it is necessary either. I am trying to paint a picture of the ‘quite’ I have here, the lack of constant input and influence from the larger culture. It is such a blessing to just be here with those I love in a safe space filled with only what I/we want to bring to it.

As I sat near the fire, looking out onto the garden, I thought about the crises of our times - the perpetual emergencies and catastrophes in Western cultures. The distractions that are meant to keep us in a state of fear, anger and confusion. Mattias Desmet articulates it thus…

In a way, the major social crises of the 21st century all reflect a problem in the relationships in which humans are caught: they all stem from problematic and failing relationships between humans and institutions (banking crisis), between humans and fellow humans (war on terror), between men and women (MeToo crisis), between humans and nature (climate crisis).

homeschooling, parallel polis exampe no. 2

A Solution: create a parallel polis

This slow, safe space I have created here at home is a counter to the culture/society I feel so averse to. This culture sems to have ‘blinders’ on, focused only on the Culture Wars raging around us (or so we are led to believe). The problem with this kind of focus - always being discussed on the TV and in your news feed, is that we start to fall into the Culture War. Catastrophy after catastrophy (or the new pending catastrophy) becomes our focal point, real or not, and the building of good, harmonious relationships with others (whether it be fellow humans, nature, institutions) has no space in our lives.

The focus, as Desmet points out above, is on all the negative relationships in society - the war on this and the war on that, not on ‘the focussing on myself and my contribution to the wars’; not on ‘how do I remove myself and my thoughts (and my energy) from these beliefs so that I can pursue right relationships with institutions, fellow humans, the opposite sex and nature’.

My response to the constant, yet ever-changing Culture Wars is to remove myself from them and to ‘unplg’ my energy from that system as best I can, to create a separate, parallel culture that focusses on ‘right’ relationship to these entities…a parallel polis.

By this I mean a system that sits alongside the Machine, not inside it. For example, I run a homeschool group for teens which came about because of the desire to educate our children, not indoctrinate them (an example of the “failing relationships of humans and institutions”); to teach them to think for themselves, not to ‘regergitate’ facts (which I would argue is what happens in mainstram schooling - schooling being the opposite really of learning/education).

“School prepares people for the alienating institutionalization of life, by teaching the necessity of being taught. Once this lesson is learned, people loose their incentive to develop independently; they no longer find it attractive to relate to each other, and the surprises that life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition are closed.” ― Ivan Illich

This homeschool group is a parallel polis. Other examples are initiatives like food swaps, trading schemes, sharing out of childcare, pooling of resources (tool shares, car shares), etc. Basically, moving from the public sphere to the private sphere. By shifting the focus in this way we are in control of these relationships, not the bureaucrats, not The Machine. We, the People, are in charge.

Now, this is not to say these things are perfect, but they are real and they are fit to purpose, meaning they are tailored to the needs of the local Community. This is deeply important - we must be allowed to have autonomy over our local decisions, over the initiatives in our Communities. If not, we will not be able to meet the needs of those within the Community. Only we know the needs, desires, shortcomings, resources, etc. of our local Community, and only we, the People, can build this framework. Only social cohesion can bring about right/positive relationships within the culture.

“A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system (who has) no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society.” -Vaclav Havel

I encourage you to take the time to really think about what you want in your life, how you want life to look, what you have to offer, then to start to unplug from the Culture Wars and start to implement the things you have identifed as important in your life - and, might I say, with a focus on what you can offer to others, not so much about how you will make your own life easier/better because this human life we are living is about giving, about love, about ‘do to others as you would have them do to you’ (or to your child/ren, or to the Earth, or the….). Consider what kinds of parrallel polises you could create in your Community and start them!

local food share, parallel polis example no. 3

The Consequences of ‘Us vs Them’ Thinking

What keeps us from being able to set up right relationships with others and creating better systems that serve everyone? The Culture War is enbedded in the deeply entrenched belief in us vs them, good vs evil, hero vs villain stories we tell ourselves. When we act in this way though, we are doomed to become that which we most despise….

“Having convinced the world that he exists, the Devil watches in satisfaction as everyone mistakes for him anyone with whom they have a conflict of interest or opinion…Once given life, the demonized other quite often fulfills one’s worst expectations.

Any entity, whether nation or individual, that has convinced itself of its moral or racial superiority has license to use any means to achieve its vaunted ends: tyranny in service of freedom, repression in service of democracy, war in service of peace, cruelty in service of human rights…

The drive toward totalitarianism requires an internal or external threat of some kind — but not to frighten the population into submission. The threat is necessary in order to coalesce the population into the zealous us of fascism. That us requires a them to define it. The fear of the communist, the Jew, the virus-spreader, the “domestic extremist,” or the foreigner in our midst merely primes the pump of mass formation; the real fear is of being cast from society into the ranks of the out-group, the untouchables, the unmentionables.

That is the most primal fear of humans as social beings, and that is the cultural patterning we must change if we are going to come through the next four years with hope intact. The great theologian and anthropologist Rene Girard described the pattern in terms of sacrificial violence. In times of crisis, as internecine tensions between rival social factions threaten to tear society apart, society unites in murderous violence against a scapegoat individual or group, expiating its tensions and reestablishing cohesion. In such times, one must take care not to be identified as a member of the sacrificial group — not to be identified as a Jew, or a communist, or a witch, a Tutsi, an infidel, or whatever the mob has chosen as its target. You must not associate with the Devil, or his taint will infect you too. Even insufficient enthusiasm in persecuting the scapegoat will draw suspicion. Safest course is to outdo your neighbor in the vehemence of your denunciations.

This is the ancient social force that fascists have learned to ride to power. It is nothing new, and as long as we conform to its patterning, the human condition of war, oppression, and other forms of artificial misery will continue unabated. Ruthless, power-hungry people will exploit it, if it is there to be exploited. To achieve the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, we have to remove the fuel of division, war, and fascism by cultivating a different pattern in our social relations, a fundamentally different prism through which we recognize the world.

….when the many dimensions of virtue and vice collapse into a good/bad binary, society is ripe for hijacking by politicians who can steer it toward fascism at home and war abroad. (The two always go together.) Our society is teetering on the edge of both...” - Charles Eisenstein

Us vs them mentality creates at first a fissure then a chasm in society culminating in the Culture War we are in today. Is the answer to this problem a political one? Or does the answer sit in the social domain? Eisenstein is suggesting here that the realm of the social is political - it is in the social realm that these patterns of division are set up and encouraged.

He goes onto suggest that the alternative is to view the world from the lens of interbeing - in which we are all interconnected, where your fate is my fate. In this view of the nature of mankind we are unable to project evil onto others as there is no separation, no division between us and them - “as without, so within.” I would suggest that the mental issues our culture is experiencing today are due to the fact that in seeing others as evil and flaming the fires of hatred, we inadvertently project those views back onto ourselves. The world ‘out there’ we see as evil is a mirror to what we see ‘in here’, inside our own being we are them, we are evil, we are the villain; there is no way to make this congruent if we are interbeing.

“A constant on both sides is that the evil is primarily projected outside oneself. And to that extent, one cannot help but fall into aggression and powerlessness. The way out of this powerlessness is not in dimming sunlight with technologically controllable mirrors in space or exploding nitrate bombs in the stratosphere; our fear of terrorist attacks will not go away by introducing a surveillance state, racial hatred will not disappear by rewriting history books, sexual drive will not become less problematic through the woke ideology, and diseases will not be prevented by mRNA vaccines and nanotechnology in the blood.

And the way out of powerlessness is not in a violent uprising against the elite either. The elite is a mirror of the population. They are part of the same overarching organism. As long as the view of humanity and the world does not change, the population will repeatedly create the same elite. The main conclusion is this: the rationalistic worldview has had its time.” - Mattias Desmet

It is time for us to shift into a new era. An era in which the view of humanity and the world changes through the stories we tell ourselves. To move forward with right relationships between humans and institutions, between humans and fellow humans, between men and women, and betweem humans and nature we must unplug from the story of ‘us vs them’ and accept the reality of interbeing. This shift must start inside each and every one of us. We must adopt it into our moral structure, then practice it in the world through our ethics. This can start by coming together with your Community, setting aside your differences and giving of yourself to create parallel polises that begin to cultivate ‘the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible’.

Nx

PS Let us know what kind of parallel polises you have created in your Community on the comments below….