Evidence, David Smail and the facts before us.

I have just completed my first reading of 'The Origins of Unhappiness : A New Understanding of Personal Unhappiness' written by David Smail.  It is an astounding work, and I must say, I now believe that it is essential reading for anyone interested in psychological distress, justice and economic equity.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27133657-the-origins-of-unhappiness

"It is the main argument of this book that emotional and psychological distress is often brought about through the operation of social-environmental powers which have their origin at a considerable distance from those ultimately subjected to them. 

On the whole, psychology has concerned itself very little with the field of power which stretches beyond our immediate relations with each other, and this has led to serious limitations on the explanatory power of the theories it has produced. 

To illustrate this, typical cases of patient distress in the 1980s are examined. The decade when the right-wing of politics proclaimed there was no such thing as society gave rise to psychological distress across social classes, as long-standing societal institutions were dismantled. 

This is as much a work of sociology, politics, and philosophy, as it is of psychology. Fundamentals of an environmental understanding of distress are outlined. A person is the interaction of a body with the environment."

What I got from this book : realism and honesty.

I live in England where poverty is deliberately maintained and the poor are dehumanised in media representations, where the symptoms of that distress are used as signs of a flawed nature in order to blame the impoverished for their impoverished state, which protects the Wealth Extraction systems, externalising the cost of low wages and inadequate social care provision. 

"We need to realise that, rather than the patient being a problem for the world, the world is a problem for the patient. We are embodied products of environment space-time. To make a difference in our lives we need to be able to exert what little influence we have on the environment, to make it, from our perspective, a little more benign. It is not we who need to change, but the world around us.Or, to put it another way, the extent to which we are able to change will always depend upon some material change in the environmental structures of power which envelope us (and insofar as these cannot be changed, for example because they are in the past, neither can we be wiped clean of their effects).

The difficulty with this is immediately apparent: how do we, relatively powerless creatures, bring effective influence to bear on the environment?"

David Smail (goes to wiki page on David Smail) wrote this :

"Hardly any of the 'symptoms' of psychological distress may correctly be seen as medical matters. The so-called psychiatric 'disorders' are nothing to do with faulty biology, nor indeed are they the outcome of individual moral weakness or other personal failing. They are the creation of the social world in which we live, and that world is structured by power.
    
Social power may be defined as the means of obtaining security or advantage, and it will be exercised within any given society in a variety of forms: coercive (force), economic (money power) and ideological (the control of meaning). Power is the dynamic which keeps the social world in motion. It may be used for good or for ill.
    
One cannot hope to understand the phenomena of psychological distress, nor begin to think what can be done about them, without an analysis of how power is distributed and exercised within society.

Such an understanding is the focus of this web-site. "


You can go to David Smail's Website here via wayback web archive.

I respectfully suggest this as a genuinely useful resource base, to find tools and insights that relate to how power operates and behaves in this culture.

The psychology of power hierarchies. The psychology of people adjusting to this unhealthy social institutional structure and culture. Some home truths. Radicalisation. Grooming. Social meaning. Our lives in all of this.

Evidence based.





Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

*If you like this post, if you found the themes resonant, if you agree in part, would you be kind enough to let others know about it? I would really appreciate that. You could drop a comment too, if you felt the urge. Or not. I will moderate contributions, and block any that are abusive. For obvious reasons. Thank you for reading.

Remember, Remember the 5th and 11th of November.

Remember, remember the 5th of November, then Remembrance Sunday.

It ought to be grief, horror and outrage rather than Nationalism and Celebration of Sacrifice. Guy Fawkes was Terrorist, a Catholic Jihadist. Tony Blair is a Catholic Jihadist. Both liars and psychopaths.

Joe Glenton speaks of war from direct experience and reflection. Watch this and forget about my polemic. really.

 The theme of violence and the State's appropriation of 'our violence is a patriotic and civilising violence' and therefore moral, whereas the violence of 'our enemies' is always barbaric, primitive, dysfunctional and amoral.

What history tells us is that when a movement emerges within any population that seeks to strike parity between the State and the Grass roots of society, the poor, the vulnerable, the working for a living, the State introduces and escalates violence on all sides.

Northern Ireland, a different perspective.

In Northern Ireland, the Civil Rights movement was less a Catholic or Independence phenomenon than it was a civil rights awareness phenomenon that emerged as a direct result of the Civil Rights movements in the US, from African Americans to Women and Children's rights.... a matter of common decency and humane respect.

The State perceived this as a threat, rather than the healing it was offering.

The UK State infiltrated violent militia on all sides, and it's agents escalated the violence, and this put the matter of Civil Rights to one side, and allowed the UK State to alter the discourse, to make it about Irish Nationalism vs Unionism.... that was a strategic tactic.

It was already in practice in Yemen, in Korea and Vietnam, in the Philippines and many South American countries, in Africa and Australia and Canada, in Russia and China, across the Middle East.

Remember, remember.

So remember, remember the realities - that State violence, in the competing powers perspective, is the primary source of warfare, of trauma, of inter-generational psychological and emotional dysfunction and the preservation of mass poverty (war impoverishes all but the makers of the tools of war).

The Monarchy and the State (Established Power) as we know it is altering the climate of human relationships in the most adverse ways, and has been doing so for thousands of years - that 'competition' is psychopathic, is a pathology, an illness, a self inflicted disease state and they continually make great efforts to indoctrinate their home populations into accepting war as part and parcel of human nature. It's not. It's a cultural distortion, born of hierarchies of violence.

Spot the difference?

I'd like to see THAT climate change addressed as part of the issue of 'Climate Change'. - I think that success in the former would help the latter, whereas failure in the former ensures the latter will not be dealt with.

Remember, remember. Think, question, analyse, reflect and grow. Or not.

Heroes

Heroes? The troops?

They would not call themselves heroes.

1. They are trained to be that way - to remain competent under fire, so they can better protect each other, and be willing and capable of killing the enemy. Iraq was not a matter of defence, it was a matter of offence.

2. Calling them heroic is part of how the conditioning, the acceptance of military violence is maintained. It masks the reality of applied organised violence. It papers over the reality of shredded limbs, displaced peoples, torture, rape, poison, mass destruction, industrialised killing, indoctrination and bullying, which is what war really is.

3. They never use the word themselves, and not out of humility - rather they know what violence is like, and that it is not heroic. Yes, there are times when courage is shown. Sometimes those who desert are the bravest.

Soldiers are human beings who have been conditioned, lied to, manipulated and placed in harms way. As soon as the violence starts, they have to take action. They have no choice if they wish to survive.

To truly support the troops, we do not need to wave flags as they depart, we need to prevent that departure and that entail breaking the spell The State/Established Power casts over the population, destroying the propaganda with logic, evidence, empathy, kindness and determination.

And that means honesty, truth, the evidence over opinion, ideology and spin.

Prevention

For me, this is the issue : the matter of the prevention of the creation of yet more veterans. It matters more now than ever, in as much as the past few decades we have allowed the Government of the UK to initiate and escalate wars and violence across the Middle East.

Whilst preciously little effort was put into prevention, or conflict resolution.

The logic of Powers competing for Hegemony and access to 'resources' still dominates politics.

This is insane, it is pathological and as we see, lethal.

How can it stand?

The hypocrisy is rank, the stench of dying by violence is blanked out, and we are opiated, sedated and disempowered intentionally so that the supply of potential candidates for combat veteranship is maintained.

Wear a Poppy. And if you mean it, then act to stop your Government from using War as a policy enforcement tool. And stop private companies from making profits from war.

Halloween

I don't celebrate Hallowe'en in such fashion as is current 'fashionable' : it is largely a post-Celtic Christianised bastardised version of much older shamanic practices, where the practice was to engage with and feel a part of and honour the ancestry, that long, long line of experience and living, a line of nurturing experience within which in the older egalitarian societies placed themselves in their present and looked to how they could nurture the futures ahead of them, as their ancestors did. To draw on that wisdom.

Fully conscious. Fully present. Fully mature.

The post-Celtic Christianised bastardised version revolves around the gargoyle, the fear of the dead, the fear of 'bad spirits' and bears no sense of one's responsibility to the future, nor does it carry forwards the example of the past as a role model.

It's shite, trite and painfully insulting to the ancestry and the future children....

The Celts were violent hierarchies, just as the Romans were, so the transition was all too easy an assimilation.

I have practiced the call to the ancestry, the call to the future, to place myself fully in the present, and have been practicing this for over 2 decades.

I am a bag of bacteria, an aboriginal humane being and I reject the culture of the bully in every aspect, and I embrace the culture of nurture because it is that culture that creates the very possibility of a life of great beauty without the need for 'additives' or luxuries, power or grandiose monuments.

Remembrance.

This is another reason I experience deep distaste, a disgust with the various War Dead Remembrance Ceremonies of the 'good and the great', the pomp and circumstance, and the political abuse of people's genuine concern for the dead, the maimed, the refugees, the sufferings of war.

For all we claim, we have done nothing to undermine the Governments willingness to use War as a policy enforcement tool. Successive Governments have piled more dead upon dead, created yet more refugees, maimed and traumatised countless innocent, beautiful human souls and destroyed the shared resources of many varied and functional living communities, rendering them un-inhabitable.

They are disgusting, cruel hypocrites.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Peace, Poppies and Honesty,

Peace

There can be no peace, no equality without empathy. Empathy for the children, the mothers, the fathers, the civilians who are forced to flee for their lives.

Empathy for those children whose best option appears to them to be to enlist in a State Military or a street gang, or a terrorist militia....

And empathy as a means to understanding the mind of that kind of power that rules, the social conditioning of that power that rules rather than governs. That too.

What I mean is that we must develop an accurate, evidence based understanding of those who bully, who abuse their power and we must understand their psychology and their techniques
.

Know the mind of those who would call YOU an enemy of the State because you desire and aspire towards a State that nurtures peace, community, egalitarianism, justice and kindness.

The Poppy

The people who wear the Poppy and hold Power.... are not the same as the people who wear poppies to commemorate and remember those who died of State induced Violence, out of sadness and regret, but are similar to those who celebrate the 'victory' of War, the 'sacrifice' of millions of people, the 'freedom won' .... because they have been taught to think that the myth of being slaughtered 'for freedom' is heroic, that it was a freely entered into choice of those who were slaughtered.

It was not.

No civilian population ever chose war against other civilians. The majority of troops did not choose war. A majority were conscripts, in one way or another because it is always the leaders, the political power players who chose war. They chose but do not participate, do not venture near any danger, do not share the burden of blood, guts, tears.

We ordinary folk are and were subjected to intense social conditioning designed to serve the needs of Power above all else, and so we bought and are buying the lies, we fought and died, and we will will continue to do so, and it was and is all needless waste, 100% avoidable and it is all predatory abuse.

The troops followed orders that were and are insanely incompetent. The troops in Afghanistan followed orders that were insanely incompetent. There is ample evidence of this.

The Poppy as a symbol was first used to commemorate the lives lost, to accentuate the needlessness of such mass death by violence, to urge a move away from such massive slaughter of both troops and civilians.... but it has been co-opted.

Our political leaders are intent on grooming us, on manipulating information and situations so that they can pursue war as a policy tool. Bearing in mind that there is a massive industry that makes immense profits from that slaughter. A massive industry that funds many of our leading politicians, directly and indirectly.

They who are in power who wear the red poppy, who celebrate 'sacrifice', who lie and cheat and bully, are a danger to the grass roots of humanity.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Syria, the Refugees, European Hypocrisy and cruelty..

Syria.

1. The Israeli Government has been at a state of war with Syria since the Golan Heights were taken by Israel, by Force, in the '6 day war' in 1967.

2. Syrian Government is recognised Internationally as a Sovereign State.

3. Saudi and US/UK inflitrated 'foreign fighters' into the pro-more-democracy movement protests (which were peaceful in intent and action). The violence started when they attacked Syrian Government police, then military. The groups attacking the Syrian Government are supported by Saudi, Qatar, Israel, UK, USA -- both covertly and overtly, Syrian was put into the 'axis of evil' by George Bush's US Government.

4. Once violence starts at that degree, the issues of democracy go out the window, The Syrian State fights to survive. It's fight is legtimate, given point 3.

5. ISIS started in Iraq, and was comprised of 'foreign fighters' and elements of the Death Squads set up by the US, through Colonel James Steele (ret) and Colonel James Coffman.

6. The pattern of Collusion or inflitrating violent militia was standard operational practice in Northern Ireland, and we know that they had agents active in stimulating violence in the IRA, the UVF and other militia. Same thing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya.

7. The long term solution is for US/UK and  Saudi to be stopped 'intervening' in the affairs of Arab States. The first step is to arrest Tony Blair and George Bush and all who operated with them to launch these wars against Arab States, apart from, of course, Saudi, Oman, Qatar, UAE.

At the same time, the US and UK and Sauds MUST BE STOPPED from interfering, overtly or covertly.

8. Without the honest facing of what has been done, as above, there will be no peace - 'no justice, no peace.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Steele
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/06/el-salvador-iraq-police-squads-washington


9. It is pure hypocrisy of the European States to NOT take in the refugees they are part of creating. It is also cruelty, Institutionalised cruelty, and our taxes are funding it.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe