My maleness is an accident. Of conception. Of something that happened in the womb. Nothing I did. It just happened that way. Nonetheless I am a man. Male body.
and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society.
Heal that and we can heal everything.
Being biologically male or female is an accident of conception - time we got over it, don't you think?
My maleness is an accident. Of conception. Of something that happened in the womb. Nothing I did. It just happened that way. Nonetheless I am a man. Male body.
De-humanising Trump is a trap.
Understanding this is key to avoiding being triggered or manipulated into internal conflict among those of us who seek to liberate ourselves and our communities from oppression. The struggle for freedom from oppression is not equivalent to the taking of liberty that Libertarianism promotes.
This is a critically important dynamic to be aware of as the embers of hatred are, on all sides, are being deliberately stoked and fuelled by online political grooming operations, public News and Press media that plays to the biases and vulnerabilities of people, that seeks to exploited the reactions of triggered folk.
The people who are being triggered, by intentional action, on all sides, are vulnerable. They are all being exploited.
It is not that people are pulling the triggers, in the sense it is their fault or that it is somehow a flaw in their character - it is that their vulnerability is being studied and targeted - they are being victimised by others who know exactly what they are doing.
We have to seek to protect all, or the project to humanise our social power structures is doomed to failure.
The consumer driven 'New Age' tends to reduce the project of liberation to a work of self interest.
Admonitions to alter individual behaviour, such as recycling, do less shopping, buy electric cars, stop eating meat etc whilst those who produce the things we need to recycle, who reap vast profits from stimulating our consumerism by offering easy credit make no effort to pay the externalised costs of their profit making is a sleight of hand.
The term 'consumer' to describe a human being is as dehumanising a term as is 'consumer responsibility' without the necessary equivalents of 'producer responsibility' or 'extractor responsibility' or 'mining responsibility'.
The sales pitch is that if only the ordinary person who has no real traction on the action and behaviour of the larger institutional powers that drive environmental degradation and air pollution could do their bit, then improvements would naturally occur and save us all. That is a lie.
Hence the rapidity with which the various streams of consumer pop psychology have become
weaponised to support that lie, to normalise it so that ordinary folk cannot see the lie, cannot see the wood for the trees. The deployment of pop psychology to that end is a dehumanising act/
Paolo Friere
Paolo Friere's practical work, among the poor and indigenous of South America stands as testimony to the accuracy of his insight, the practicality of his approach, the humility of his perception.
Paolo Friere
Freire believed education could not be divorced from politics; the act of teaching and learning are considered political acts in and of themselves. Freire defined this connection as a main tenet of critical pedagogy. Teachers and students must be made aware of the politics that surround education. The way students are taught and what they are taught serves a political agenda. Teachers, themselves, have political notions they bring into the classroom. Freire believed that :
I offer my readers this link to one of his works, Pedagogy of The Oppressed, as a source of insight, reassurance and focus as we face the wide spread shouting match that is disrupting rational, deliberative discourse on matters that must concern us all - our very survival is on the line, and we need to envision a future not of mere survival rather a future of collective thrivival.Education makes sense because women and men learn that through learning they can make and remake themselves, because women and men are able to take responsibility for themselves as beings capable of knowing—of knowing that they know and knowing that they don't know.
The opening lines of this book are a clear and succinct description of a problem we face, right now.
This link below is to an online version of his book.
The website History Is A Weapon (HIAW) holds a lot of really good practical information and insight for all of us. It has as it's cultural locus a focus on The America's and their Histories. That said, the information is useful to everyone concerned with a healthy future for our cultures.
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/hiawsitemap.html - sitemap, a quick way to see what is available.
Dehumanisation and the struggle to resist and prevent oppression.
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon2/pedagogy/pedagogychapter1.html
"While the problem of humanization has always, from an axiological point of view, been humankind's central problem, it now takes on the character of an inescapable concern.
Antifa and Racists shouting at each other, threat and counter threats of violence, insult and spittle exchanged to lead towards more violence. Christians at war with Muslims. Older voters voting for Brexit 'betraying' younger voters. Younger voters 'ignoring' the problems of the older voters.
These memes are fully weaponised and are driving social and emotional divisions that undermine potential resolution of problems, the boat we are all in is rocking and cannot make head way to a safe port. We have to counter that.
Not so easy is the task of humanising the situation, of understanding enough to build the bridges that will connect our humanity - the less easy task is the one most critical to our children's children's futures.
I find this song, by comedian Katie Goodman, very humanising, heart warming and reassuring - please enjoy, and take on some of the gentle yet fierce wisdom of it. I like to imagine a large crowd outside a political administration building singing this, with joy and with sorrow, with humility and determination..
The responsibility inherent in Free Speech is to be as good a listener as a speaker and to acknowledge what is verified, reliable and true as such, and to also acknowledge beliefs as made up, as guess-work at the very best.
Is' Freedom' an illusion born of relative comfort within a violent hierarchical society.
Trump is not free, nor are the Iranians.
The Palestinians are not free, and neither are the Israelis..
They may experience relative differences in how they feel they are and conflate those with freedom or a lack of it, yet none in those situations are free.
They are all trapped by the psychology of hierarchy and violent power relationships.
The USA, as self-assigned 'champions of freedom' is not free at all.
It is locked into a global pathology that it is enacting.
Where is your freedom to stop the US wars?
What freedom did the Iraqi or Libyan people have to say
"No! You cannot start wars on our land, our peoples!"
Who spoke for either at the time?
No one did.
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.
The Greatest gifts we can bequesth our children and descendants
To change our culture, to bring empathy back to the core as the fundamental quality of our culture.
From the base, from how we frame ourselves as people, as parents and as children.
It WILL build as more people understand the importance of our earliest (and for most of us, forgotten) lived experiences.
The science and biology of empathy is now well established. The understand
Who can recall the DETAIL of their infancy - therein lies clues to our behaviours, our unconscious patterns and adaptations?
Vital information is there, about what we learned at the deepest pre-verbal visceral level, about Power, co-operation, empathy, sense of self.
Blaming parents for the ills of Society is a tactic that Institutional Society employs. To let itself off the hook.
That is not to say that abusive parents are to be let presented with excuses for behaviour that causes harm.
Rather it is a call to recognise that helping stressed parents understand their own infancy AND how the pressures imposed on them by work, economics, etc., increases the difficulties they face, is to recognise that helping parents to understand the natural emotional and psychic needs of their children and exploring how Institutional Society thwarts the meeting of those needs through war, indoctrination, poverty/concentration of wealth, media, marketing, coercive competitive schooling, hierarchical power will decrease the incidence of abuse for the majority of stressed parents.
Most parents do love their children, and many struggle with that love because the messages they received, that their grand parents and great grand parents and ancestors received about parenting were mediated by Institutional Society, and by Religion and by the adverse affects of unresolved trauma and there has never been a consistent effort to HELP parents resolve their own issues because those issues are often linked to how Institutional Power operates and thus affects so many lives.
Understanding that we all did not choose our families nor our society and have had to deal with any adverse affects by adapting, surviving, 'fitting in'. Understanding that intergenerational trauma patterns are a reality. Yet they are not written in stone.
We can break the cycle. We can recover our full humanity.
There is no greater gift to future generations.
There is no greater gift to oneself.
Some Adverse Effects of Compulsory Schooling.
The real danger in 'schooling' is in how the child's mind is slowly altered such that schooling appears normal, and as parents these children will send their children to school as if it were natural, normal. Thus patterns of obedience, hierarchical acceptance, peer pressure and bullying endure over generations. These all destroy community.
This normalisation is
neurological and physiological as much as it is psychological. The
child's neurology and physicality slowly 'adapts' to the environment of
schooling (a natural enough process, it's part of growing and knowing
the world through the body as a total sensory entity - yet the schooling
environment lacks key experiential learnings related to embodied self
knowledge, and this distorts all who pass through it to greater or
lessor degree -)
In seeking to address this distortion,
regaining a trust of embodied self knowledge and self empathy is vital.
That process cannot be predicted, medicalised, therapeuted.
It cannot be packaged, sold nor can it become an ideological end.
It can be supported, mostly by honesty, healthful diet, good friends, closeness with nature, and it is truly a process that is the natural base of healthy community - a community that knows itself.
Well, this is much less a matter of natural instinct, and much more a matter of conditioning. a matter of the distortion of our innate biological mandate towards empathic self awareness; and with that, empathy as a perceptive ability.
The matter is too important to future generations, let alone those who live today, for it to be treated with any degree of flippancy, outside of using comedy to sweeten a rather bitter pill... the pill of truth.
It's not surprising so many do feel this way, that there's a human 'instinct' that is problematic since it's what the Christian nations have been telling themselves for thousands of years.. "You must beat the devil out of the child to save the child for God."
It takes time for such a corrosive pathology to heal. It takes, above all, honesty. Scientific honesty. It's time that all 'schooling' be made subject to some Scientific Honesty.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe
The Corruption of The Curriculum.
It states the following :
After all, it was issued by Civitas, who are pretty much a right wing think tank, and why would I be impressed by what ever spewed forth from such an establishment. So I gotta put that right. I am not at all impressed, because the article itself is tinkering, and while it makes a critique that has some substance, it fails (as intended) to set things in context.
Has anyone mentioned to you that it is known, and proven, that State Education was initially instigated by intensive and long-term lobbying from business?
"Perhaps the greatest of school's illusions is that the institution was launched by a group of kindly men and women who wanted to help the children of ordinary families—to level the playing field, so to speak."
It was of course, presented as philanthropy, the trojan horse of modern social engineering effected by the use of wealth, by stealth. And yes some people really did believe they were genuine seeking to help others and to help 'mankind'.
In fact there was close to a century of lobbying at local, national and international levels of Industrial Society, and a huge, vast amount of money was spent over that time in this project to introduce Compulsion Schooling for all children.
The primary driver was of this project was the power and control of business, mostly the coal business, which with coal being the first fossil fuel, has a certain resonance with corporate power play within Governance by the petroleum industry. that we know today ... the coal and steel business was or became the central power in 'Civilisation' and one of the most aggressive in terms of 'expansion' (globalisation) and in terms of infiltrating Governance. The project to compel all children into education started in the 1750s.
And what has happened is that for a while it worked, as all training does, then some people started to see through the system, and found ways to use it as the basis for real learning outside the system, and began to resist the indoctrination and worse, actively self organise.
Power cannot allow that. For two reasons.
!. To many power players is dangerous if they are all equals. There has to be manageable limits.
2. "If some 'poor' people learn to do what we are doing, we are out of business. So let us 'educate' them such that they cannot really learn, but can remember what they have been told, and they'll confuse memorising for learning. And we will set the psychological limit within the education SYSTEM, the systemic process does the work, not merely the curriculum."
The curriculum can be tinkered with, both by Power and by those Power allows, within limits and under their watchful eyes.
The article I quoted is complaining about the tinkering, and not the system. It prefers the 'traditional tinkering'. That's as far as it goes.
Not impressive.
The SYSTEM must remain, even as it's façade is ever changing as either genuine empathic understanding emerges (they can't fool all the people all of the time) which Power will always seek to co-opt, by systematising whatever emerges organically, thus neutering any potential threat to Power it might represent.
Any right winger knows this. Well,the ones who dictate policy. Who ever they are..
This is partly why John Taylor Gatto says we must disestablish the SYSTEM, retaining the infrastructure and applying and modifying those infrastructure so that they can be used as places of self motivated learning, where the full person is allowed to grow, as such to truly meet the needs of the children, and indeed of all of us, as natural learners.
"After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves."
Self motivated, self organised. Self Governing. Common Sense. Biologically mandated.
The article is a brief overview of a book, by Frank Furedi...
'The Corruption of the Curriculum' by Frank Furedi, Shirley Lawes, Michele Ledda, Chris McGovern, Simon Patterson, David Perks and Alex Standish is published by Civitas, 77 Great Peter Street, London SW1P 2EZ
Kindest regards