Enough, Already! Taking sides in inter-State violence is dysfunctional. (HIroshima edit)

around 8am, 6th August.

this:

peace requires a basis in experience, and "Peace is more than the abscence of war."

Peace is not an abstract, nor is it relative.

Peace is the fundamental state of a loving human community, living as biologically healthy creatures, as part of the biosphere, the livingness of and on Earth, without ever being bullied, or ever becoming bullies, in any shape or form, from cradle to grave.

Peace is simple, and leads to complex diversity across a planet as varied as this. (there are no comparables, of course, it's just a turn of phrase.)

So.

Let's have some honesty here, before it all goes silly.

The dynamic known as competing militarised powers is a human, social, societal ecological pathology. 

The institutionalisation of what amounts to lethal bullying has be to be seen for what it really is. Lethal bullying. Inappropriate behaviour. Harm causing behaviour. A social disease.

Taking sides within that dynamic, absent any formal recognition, let alone a diagnosis, of that state of pathology, merely perpetuates the dynamic.  Having diagnosed the situation, taking sides becomes redundant.

Such people - the side takers - cannot ever bring peace or resolve the situation because by taking sides they perpetuate that struggle.

"One cannot solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it."

A. Einstein.

It is a matter of logic. 

It's a priori stuff.

Taking sides in an environment of organised violence is insane.

That said, in the existing situation, that's a choice deliberately removed from millions of men world wide. they stand armed, and ready to follow orders.

It's not healthy.

Part of my approach is to address the question - what is healthy human behaviour?

To focus not on the brutality to resist it, rather to focus on the health dynamic, to quell that brutality, to ease it's insecurity, to heal the situation, long term.

Long term means delayed gratification, it means thinking of generations of diverse people yet to be born in terms of what we will leave for them to deal with. It means humility - that is the acceptance of the wonder of biological life as a philosophical realisation that is also experiential,  and this sensitivity enables access therefore to the riches of the biological habitat, the wonder that is 'aboriginal land lore'.. it means doing your bit now, and surrendering the future to the continuation of adults doing their bit.

These ancients were masters at healthy human living. They were happy people. Until conquest.

This culture is a pup of a thing, a runt.

Immature, narccisitic, self serving and prone to bullying.

Self harming.

Cease taking sides, and start confronting the truth of the situation. 

All of it, all sides, and as we examine each, pick apart the truth and the lies, based on the evidence.

The existing system of competing militarised powers is unhealthy, it is harm causing on a massive scale. It is not a welfare system, and is barely social.

The evidence is in, and it is well understood, and the adverse outcomes, the harms are clear to all.

It amounts to institutionalised bullying.

Call it out for what it is, do not be terrified of it.

Name the behaviour.

Name it. Calmly, technically, clearly, without ad hominem, evidence based. Information.

.. if only because the system of competing militarised continues to be perpetuated by lies and accepted myth.

this is about us growing up, rather than rising up, let us do!

Political Power Health and Safety Check required, immediately.

 

Milosovic

 

Blair

 

The Vatican

These three images are just a hint at the dynamic of how insitutional power is reflexively defensive of it's position and manages harms that are exposed in ways that ensure they remain in power. The individuals at the top have usually internalised that power, and identify with that rather than the people over whom they have that power.

Loss of empathy is inherent. Hubris is common. Arrogance is the norm.

Established Power needs to be submitted to a full health and safety check, by the people.

That is pure common sense logic. However, there is a problem….. we have a problem.

Institutions, power and honesty.

“School tends to be a dishonest as well as a nervous place. We adults are not often honest with children, least of all in school. We tell them, not what we think, but what we feel they ought to think; or what other people feel or tell us they ought to think.

The fact is that we (the adult world) do not feel an obligation to be truthful to children.

We are like managers and manipulators of news in Washington, Moscow, London, Peking and Paris and all the other capitals of the world.

We think it is our right and our duty, not to tell the truth but to say whatever will best serve our cause – in this case, the cause of making children grow up into the kind of people we want them to be, thinking whatever we want them to think.

We have only to convince ourselves (and we are very easily convinced) that a lie will be ‘better’ for the children than the truth, and we will lie. We don’t always need even that excuse; we often lie only for our own convenience.”

Written in 1964, by John Holt who had thousands of hours of observation of children in schools across America. He wrote a few superb books on children and learning, and energised the homeschooling/unschooling movement in the USA.

How much does this insight resonate today, in 2017, in the UK?

Institutions are power centres.

Schools are also power centres.

It’s where we learn how to behave within an institutionalised power hierarchy.

‘No child left behind.’

Power Centres will always reflexively seek to defend that Power. Those who hold high office will often internalise that value completely. To the exclusion of healthy common sense and empathy, to a psychologically unstable degree.

There are examples in every area of society – Religion: the Vatican and Pedophilia – Politics, War and indoctrination : HiIlsborough, Chilcott, Levenson I – Health and Safety : Amoco Cadiz, Bhopal, Flint Water Supply, Fracking. Can you begin to see the pattern of behaviours?

There are plenty of examples in schools where matters of abuse or negligence or bias have been hushed up.

There are plenty of schools where teachers have been ‘convinced’ to support the diagnosis of ADHD and the subsequent drugging of children as a class room management strategy, etc etc - (more than my job/income, food, shelter, family is worth to challenge this is understandable, the teacher is being bullied institutionally and knows not to irk the masters).

And, in all of this activity, in so many areas of civic and commercial insitutional culture we see minor officials, lower ranks coerced to comply with the instructions of the powerful, to defend the institution rather than acknowledge the harms and be exposed. Iraq.

This is an easily identified pattern, with a massive evidence base that is quite reliable.

Established Power will use its power to protect itself.

The People are not to challenge that.

We see the powerful hire the best and most expensive legal teams to oppose ordinary people with relatively little comparative power, where the battle is one of financial resources, with one side far wealthier than the other….

We see out of court settlements.  “It could take years, take the offer!”

We do not see the full evidence.

We do not see justice.

Fines.

No criminal indictments.

The powerful will defend their position of power at all costs.

That is why Public Inquiries have failed to deliver Justice.

Power Hierarchies impose pressure to perform downwards, upon all subordinates, and failure to follow instructions by higher ranking personnel leading to loss of job for the lower ranking personnel is one of those intentional pressures.

Even when an order or instruction is illegal, amoral, destructive, negligent or corrupt, that pressure remains a potent leverage in today’s public and private Institutions. Who wants to be a whistle blower? Who would brave that storm?

Cover ups and mitigations do happen, and never by accident.

Political, economic, ideological and religious power demands that the holder be a bully, and bullies are more attracted to power than those who are not bullies.

The bully who is driven by the institutional environment to be more effective becomes professionalised. Fully committed.

That degree of committment to gaining and holding power is a social problem, a root dysfunction, a foundational malady.

Only when power is taken up as a shared responsibility of the grass roots tax payers, the people who both fund and who work in Civil Society will we have a safe, honest social political system.

Those who hold too much power will not yield it willingly.

Teresa May is demonstrating that right now. She is for the bullies. She backs Trumps call for Air Strikes against Syria, whilst the nation reels from a horror the Government (New Labour, Tory and Lib-Dem) created in Grenfell Towers. Air Strikes against urban areas with social housing..........

What does that really mean?

I am also talking about the culture at the lowest ranks in the hierarchies of power.. how debilitating and threatening the presence of poverty and disdain is, how corrosive it is.

There are many people who will seek to defend their bias, internalise their opinion as fact, deny the evidence, mitigate the responsibility at all levels.

I am interested in the psychological experiential root, rather than then violence itself, and I want to understand how that afflicts us all, and how do we recover from that, to what degree is recovery possible in the current environment?

We here at the grass roots must work for our own recovery as part of the resolution.

We also have to organise and protect our civil society, administer our shared resources with wisdom and enhance the environment of our community.

We cannot wait for the Established Power to awaken, to come to it’s senses, to re-humanise, to recover.

We must get on with it.

If we do, and I think many of us are, and more are joining in every day, then perhaps it is more likely that Established Power can be submitted to a full health and safety check by the people.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

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.

The core responsibility of Healthy Governance.

When it comes to Governance, that is to say the administration of a community's shared resources - for example, taxation, which everybody contributes to - opinions are inadequate as a basis for decision making.

Only the data, the evidence, all of it, the whole picture, all that is reliable, available and assesed quantitatively and qualitatively can be utilised to meet the requirements of effective, just and sustainable Governance.

Miss out any one part of that available data, evidence or picture, for any reason or bias and we will generate problematic policies. That much ought to be rather obvious.

This is the discipline required, and frankly, too few people, anywhere, are prepared to exert that discipline on behalf of the entire community to deliver genuine equity.

Taking ideological or religious 'sides', the left/rightism of political discourse are all based on fundamental biases that will omit or ignore or play down any evidence that challenges their core beliefs. News Media and Schooling all function to embed these biases, in that they are top down, hierarchies of information.

That is immature, and honestly it is an abysmal failure, of due diligence and duty of care. We are all part of this problem.

I do understand that bias emerges in any system where forms of hierarchical violence are perpetuated and 'sides' within that structure groom people as 'supporters'.

To me, from my perspective, the 'sides' are irrelevant, a distraction.

I think the millennials get this in a way that previous generations do not.

They all grew up watching the adults around them allow a war against other young people their age, in other countries, be prosecuted .... in Iraq and Afghanistan..

.. and that showed them the immaturity of the adults around them who failed to confront the bullies in Power, the bullies in the media, the bullies in executive roles across society and as a direct outcome people, millions of people died and were maimed and traumatised, entire civilian structures destroyed.

Because we failed them.

I am 57.

I am of that generation.

They are rightfully appalled at that.

We should be ashamed of that at the least, and we should be honest about this.

We should be doing what we can, where we can, to remove that shame, by being honest, by taking no side but the truth (the available evidence in full) and to do that we need to up our game, seriously, to meet the duty we owe all the children, across the world, each and every one of us, as adults.... and get involved, get informed, get real.

We fund Government. We are paying for it. Those bombs are our bombs, and where they fall is our responsibility. Indeed it goes without saying that they ought not fall at all, even if they exist.  That they exist at all  speaks volumes. A bomb is a bullies extension , a mechanism to project power through murder and destruction.

The millennial's know this. Imagine how frustrating it must be to have parents who refuse to look at and see this.

The 'generation gap' is a culture gap. The difference between a culture acclimatised to violent bullying and a culture that refuses to bully.

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.

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

Syria, the failure of the Institution of The State. Does it have to be this way?

The system of States, Nation States as we know them,  as legislative entities, as ratifiers of International Treaties and as maintainers of both The Law and The Peace are abject failures. They make Laws yet they refuse to obey them, or ensure they are obeyed. They do no preventative work. It's a charade.

What is happening in Syria is so clearly immoral, illegal, horrific on all sides.

And it's getting worse.

However as 'it' - the actions of gun-men and of statesmen and biased 'reporting' - is politically motivated..

That makes a difference. It's justified.

Struggle for liberation. Defence of The State.

And the statesman and pundits will proclaim that one side is proven to be far more immoral than the other (which is the subtext that sells the war) and that's all that anyone needs to know or think about the matter.

No negotiation is what that means.

The rest is just business.

The idiot Statesmen, the absurd 'civil servants' send in the Israeli's on airstrikes, arm the rebels, and 'win' the war only in terms of ousting the legal and constitutional Administration, - the Objective - and again, the gun men will take over civil control, with 'democracy' no-where in sight, other than this kind of violence harms all of Syrian's people. It is nothing less than collective punishment by both sides, by all gun-men.

Change of gunmen. Privatise the gun-men. Job done. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Egypt. Same old, same old. There IS a pattern here.

This pattern suggest strongly that the current paradigm and actions of Governance are failures, because all of this is avoidable, preventable .... once might be accidental...
 

That fact that some aspects of Governance does do *some* good, in *some* places does not mitigate the impact, with regard to these patterns, which are continuing, upon lovely ordinary citizens, families, villages, etc etc who are  living where the gun-men are engaged in live fire street war with a State Army.

Imagine that kind of violence outside on your street? I shudder to imagine, to think on that. And I cannot turn from it and ignore it. It is more truth about Syria for me than anything written about it, or on the public record, or in Academia....

I feel that the Political State is a failure, and I am only saying this because it needs to be said. It is the way it is, and it is sad.

And please understand that it's not about the State, it's about that FAILURE. The impact.

It's even more about the lives of all those who die violently, who are injured and otherwise traumatised in these patterns, these cycles. The objective is that no such experience could be considered under any circumstance within the State system.

That's the only sane and honest objective. That then would determine how peace is approached.

The State infrastructure could of course be used for ensuring peace through negotiations, which is not impossible, if they are genuinely transparent, and include full participation of the people as a collective, local and national. A dream, perhaps?

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Syria, oh Syria!

All I can say of Syria is this. I know nothing of life in Syria, and I don't trust one word of what the mainstream media is uttering on it.

I DO KNOW that there are people, lovely, warm, vulnerable, open active, and that there are children and elders too, all of them so human. And that irrespective of 'politics' they will be the ones who are hurt the most of all of this. Again. It's nauseating now to me to talk of 'Libya', Syria', "Iraq', 'Afghanistan' and any other place that is labelled by some few in Power as a 'failed' or 'dictator' or 'axis of evil' or 'banana republic' State as objects, rather than places filled with real people, to talk of Britain or America (the 'bad" ruler states) and include all those people born there through no choice of their own as part of that same object, with responsibility for what that entity, The State, did? 

People we can so easily call the 'enemy'. People like you. People like me. Like our children. Our parents. Our grand-parents. Whole streets, estates, villages, towns, cities....

And I know too that their trauma, pain, loss and hurt is not a price worth paying to sustain the current dominant cultural paradigms. A price they did not choose for themselves. Who would?

It never was worth paying, ever. That 'sacrifice' is another false myth.

 
Kindest regards

Corneilius

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