Showing posts with label self empathy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self empathy. Show all posts

Working Mothers, Hard Working Families and Power Establishments

Working Mothers and Hard Working Families

"Working Mothers" implies that Mothering is not work worthy of remuneration or reward or support. The mother must also work and pay taxes and contribute to the 'economy'. Otherwise she is a 'shirker'.

Healthy empathic parenting is a profound contribution, not only to our social economy, (albeit a different kind of economy) but also to world peace, human dignity and the creation of a loving society. It is probably the most important contribution of all.

"Hard Working Families" implies putting the children to 'good' economic use... that the children must submit to the demands of the 'economy' as a matter of primary importance. They must be trained, from the earliest age possible, to work hard for the economy.

"The psychology of any given family, community, Institution or Society is both revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat the children and the most vulnerable. Change that and you can change everything."

The question then is what changes does Government policy intend in terms of long term outcomes?

There is a biologically mandated experiential process of bonding between mother and child that is absolutely the core of how the child develops self empathy, empathy for others, and that most healthy sense of self and of autonomy which underpins true co-operation and nurturing, and the degree to which this process - attachment - is stressed or disrupted correlates very strongly with adverse outcomes in later life, often emerging as behavioural issues in youth, dysfunctional relationships or serious health issues in mid life.

This affects both men and women. We are all born of the womb. All of us.

Within the womb, if our mother is subjected to chronic stress or trauma our physiological and psychological development is adversely affected. Mothers are advised by Government Health Departments to quit smoking, to cease drinking alcohol. This is healthy advice.

Research has revealed that any air-borne pollutants the mother is exposed to are concentrated in the developing baby's body by up to 100 times the levels within the mother. The same applies to any pollutant, such as pesticides, additives, colourants and so on.

Why then does Government enact social and economic policies that have been proven to induce chronic stress for mothers rather than enact policies that not only reduce chronic stress but also increase dignity, peace, safety and happiness for mothers, and their children, knowing full well the adverse outcomes of chronic stress on both mother and child?

What is the effect of the Iraq Invasion and war on the mothers of Iraq and their children? Ask this question in relation to any war mongering, in relation to the Arms Industry which is so heavily subsidised by Governments.

The Dominating Society - the Ruling Elite, Corporate, State and Religious Institutions - feel threatened by that natural process of empathic development because it is also part of the development of the clearest sense of justice, and it is part of the development of personal autonomy, and empathy and it is clear that the intent behind Government policy (and much Religious Indoctrination) is to deepen the Governments ability to exercise control over people by inducing chronic stressors that will reduce empathy, making people more susceptible to psychological manipulation and further atomise communities, thus reducing the perceived threat.

Mothering is a critical role in human relationships, and deserves full evidence based support, which should include support for empathic fathering and parenting in general.

We do not need to work more and parent less.

There is more than enough wealth  in our systems to go around to cover all living human beings true needs, and then some.

The then some is the intentional creation of a kinder, more empathic and robustly just social reality where people are nurtured, given dignity, enabled to live lives that are peaceful, loving, co-operative and nurturing, even across variations in culture, faith, outlook, mirroring the natural diversity and creativity and fecundity we see in biology, in nature.

What's not to like about that?

Power and languaging.

"Under Disability Living Allowance, applicants who could not walk 50 metres unaided qualified.

But as a result of David Cameron's benefits cull, the threshold has now been reduced to 20 metres."

Those alterations were made by accountants, financial advisors and statisiticians suggesting that a reduction in the test length would create savings in expenditure which is the bottom line of the Governments actions.

The effects on real human beings is omitted from that analysis.

When those effects become apparent, the refusal to adjust the limits becomes an act of Institutional Cruelty.

The psychology behind this is known as 'Scientific Management', a factory based management approach that is wholly unsuited to real human beings. Hence the language of 'benefits units'.

In Nuremburg a new wording was heard - 'office language' aka bureaucratic language - which the German bureaucracy used to ignore the human realities.

"In Hannah Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Eichmann was asked, “Was it difficult for you to send these tens of thousands of people to their death?” And Eichmann answered very candidly, “To tell you the truth, it was easy. Our language made it easy.”

His interviewer asked what that language was, and Eichmann said, “My fellow officers and I coined our own name for our language. We called it amtssprache – ‘office talk.'” When asked for examples, Eichmann said, “It's basically a language in which you deny responsibility for your actions. So if anybody says, ‘Why did you do it?' you say, ‘I had to.' ‘Why did you have to?' ‘Superiors' orders. Company policy. It's the law.'


The Nazi's won WWII. The ideology won, in spite of the rhetoric.

The same psychology, languaging and approach dominates Government in the UK and the US, and in many other places.

As this example reveals....

Changes to benefits rules mean Kayleigh Haggo, 16, no longer qualifies for her car - because she can walk 20 metres unaided.




Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Empathy and a sense of justice : the true threat to hegemonic Power.

I think that Empathy is a biologically mandated ability, a complete embodied sensory capability, that enables an organism to read the world, the environment that is lived in.

It is learned,through experience, initially, in human beings and primates, and probably all mammals, through the experience of being treated with empathy as an infant...

Self empathy in human beings is self understanding in a complete, embodied and pre-verbal way that can also be verbalised or expressed or articulated, as well as projected into others as a sensory capability. The feeling comes first, before the words.

Very useful indeed in the bush, jungle, desert etc in terms of discerning what is useful, nurturing or harmful.

Absolutely necessary for healthy human relationships.

Hunting demands empathy and calm.

Parent demands empathy and calm.

The core of empathy is in self empathy, from which empathy for others develops out of the acute sensitivity that self empathy is.

With that sense of self comes a sense of autonomy and of course, a sense of justness (or justice).

In terms of optimal human biological health for individuals, families, communities and societies, these qualities are core components, essential in all respects.

In terms of Hierachically Violent Societies and Institutions, these qualities represent a direct threat to the psychology of Power that Rules over the people.

It is this that lies underneath the exclusion of Aboriginal peoples from any decision making process on matters that affect their lives enacted by conquests inheritors who rule today across the Earth, and it lies behind the careful manipulation of selected assimilated Aboriginals to push for deeper assimilation.

The 'good indian' vs the 'bad indian'; 'hard working families' vs 'benefits scoungers'. We are at 'war'; they are 'terrorists'.

And it's also why so many so-called Democracies refuse to move towards a truly participative Democracy that empowers the shared responsibilities of Power across the grass roots.

Empathy and a sense of justice : the true threat to hegemonic Power.

And with the emergence of the internet as a forum for exchange and dissemination honest experience and insight, as well as leading research formerly locked away from public view within Academia,  the democractisation of information has led to a surge of empathy and a greater articulation of the felt sense of injustice.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Herod, Christ and the Evolution of Empathy.

Jingle Bells, and all that - 'tis Christmas, a time of good cheer to all men.


Logos of the companies exploiting parents and children to make profits whilst polluting our Earth home.

So here's a thought I present as a present to all readers.


Survival is not the same as Thrivival

These are two images I have crafted express the difference I sense that lies between thriving as a human community and merely surviving. Modern consumer culture is clearly not thriving, and it is close to not even surviving. Egalitarian cultures have thrived for many, many tens of thousands of years across this Earth. I know which state I would prefer we were living in. It is possible to live well, to be comfortable and truly happy as a community, to thrive without causing intense damage to our shared habitat. It is not thriving to live comfortably, worried, stressed out, dimly or acutely aware that we are causing irreversible long term harm and irredeemable short term harm.

"Survival of The Fittest" is in reality a meme created by the philosopher, economist, sociologist, writer and  academic, Herbert Spencer, in a book he wrote, Principles of Biology,  after having read Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection: Or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life  which Herbert, and the majority of his class took to reflect their cultural assumptions in regard to their comparison between African, South American, Asian and Indian cultures and the White European Imperial culture from which the Industrial Revolution and their wealth and status emerged. Spencer was a white supremacist seeking to justify his stance.

It became a common re-interpretation (misinterpretation)  or re-positioning of Darwin's central thesis, and was never used by Darwin in the manner most commonly attributed today, aka that the strong (the most favoured races) naturally prevail over the weak in 'The struggle for Survival' - a phrase so beloved of Malthusian enthusiast David Attenborough and others less savoury, whose sense of the phrase is probably better articulated in the term 'might is right': people such as George Bush, Dick Cheny, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Jimmy Savile and others.

Darwin first used Spencer's new phrase "survival of the fittest" alongside "natural selection" in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, published in 1869, intending it to mean "better designed for an immediate, local environment"

Darwin was referring to the evolution of life enhancing traits in response to environmental changes, which he observed in some detail.

It turns out that empathy is one of those traits or capabilities that has emerged in the human organism, as well as many others, as a life enhancing trait that facilitates and sustains long term existence really, really well.

Optimal Human Well Being is an Evolved Default.

Empathy, and indeed love, lies at the base of both effective co-operation and accurate responses to environmental changes. It is a bio-logical mandate.

It is also true that this behavioural trait is vulnerable, and under chronic stress can be undermined. The architecture is genetic, yet the development of active empathy is experiential, it is cultural...

Some cultures are more empathic, egalitarian, others are hierarchically violent. James Prescott's research reveals this dynamic spectrum and shows a correlation  between egalitarian societies who demonstrate high nurture of babies, infants and children, and hierarchically violent societies where typically there is a disruption of biologically mandated child mother bonding processes.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is another diligent researcher who has looked deeply at the evolutionary biology of the egalitarian cultural human. 

Her work has been presented in books such as 
The Woman that Never Evolved, selected by the New York Times as one of its Notable Books of 1981, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection, chosen by both Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal as one of the "Best Books of 1999" and, her latest, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.

Hrdy has challenged, and transcended, many of the flawed assumptions that biologists have held dating back to the Victorian era. It is a body of work that continues to provoke and inspire a new generation of scientists..

Her key insight is that alloparenting - where parenting was a task distributed throughout the group - was a key shift in pre-hominid primates, and in early hominids that drove the evolution of a larger brain, the brain that can manage the detail of layers of co-operative relationships, that can manage self regulation that is required for peaceful, effective conflict resolution and bond building over generations.

Disruption of the biological default for optimally healthy behaviour changes behaviour.

Which is the logic or reason why torture (topical subject these days) and politically and ideologically based economic pressure upon vulnerable communities and people remain consistently utilized  tools of Hierarchically Violent Power - the bullies understand the effect, and it's utility.

Herod and Christ, and the people they have been portrayed as.

I am not at all religious, nonetheless I find their stories instructive. The crucifier and the crucified.

What was Herod's childhood like? We can only guess!

But we do know something of Hitler's infancy and childhood, as we do of Pol Pot, George Bush, Tony Blair, Stalin and many other leaders who exercised power that deployed massive organised violence and caused untold harms to largely innocent people (Herodianesque) and none appeared to have had the kind of nurturing experience that would have laid the foundation for caring empathy.

Alice Miller's book 'For Your Own Good'  touches on this subject, with regard to Hitler, Stalin and 'traditional parenting' in European culture, and is a classic in this regard.

No excuses, yet understanding the roots is essential.

This is not to suggest they - Hitler, Stalin, Bush, Cheny and any other abuser - are thus excused from accountability and responsibility for their actions and the harms and consequences imposed on others by their actions. Far from it, as there are many examples of people who had dreadful childhood experiences who emerged to become kind and caring adults.

It is to suggest that there is a way to understand, and thus prevent the abuses of Power we see as a fundamental pattern of what is known as 'civilisation'. And that lies in how we parent, how we as a society related top and treat our children, and the most vulnerable people within our Society.

Abuse and bullying are, at heart,  cultural problems. Some cultures avoid those problems by the way in which they parent and relate, others do not. The choice is ours, as we have the information, and the responsibility.

The choice is yours. It is mine.

Let us all make that choice as our daily Christmas present to ourselves, our families, our communities and our culture.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

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The BBC and an Empathic Civilisation, from the cradle...

The roots of a genuinely humane and empathic Society are to be found in how we parent, as individuals, families, communities and Societies. Likewise the roots of a violent society.





PROTECT THE CHILDREN, NOT THE BBC

The psychology of any given family, community or society is both revealed and perpetuated in how that family, community or Society relates to and treats the children. Change that and you can change everything.

There is a spectrum of Societies ranging from egalitarian empathic to totalitarian violent, ans the best predictors of the evolution of either end of the spectrum, and everything in between is in how the natural child-mother bonding process mandated by our biology is either supported or undermined.

The biology and neuroscience of the natural development and utility of empathy as part and parcel of the human species adaptation to and position within a nurturing biosphere, one which incrementally increases environmental fecundity through the behaviour and action of all it's constituents, is quite well understood, yet Governments, Religions and Ideologies and many 'great Institutions' are consistently ignoring this data, because it is now amongst the greatest threats extant to their Power, their status and their image.

If the majority of people we aware of this data, and could both comprehend it and recognise aspects of it within themselves, based on their own visceral lived experiences, a primary source of information about the world, then Hierarchical Power which abuses those within it's 'mandate'  as we know it would soon fail, because inert compliance would not be forthcoming from such people.

The BBC has a role to play in this. Only we, the people, can create the pressure necessary for that role to be fulfilled in such manner that all our children's futures may be prepared for in ways that will guarantee the best possible outcomes for their lives.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

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



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The Essence of the Jimmy Saville story




This is the essence of the Jimmy Saville/ The Pope/ David Cameron/ George Bush/Tony Blair/ Saddam Hussien etc etc etc story - those who use Power do so because they lack empathy, and respect - the basis of love.

They were not born thus, but became thus largely due to their earliest childhood traumas... this is not to excuse what they do - they are adults, and adults are always, always accountable for any harm they cause to others - it is to say that as a society, as individuals and parents we must address who we relate to children, how we treat them...

As Charlie Chaplin is reputed to have said : "You need power only when you want to do something harmful. Love is enough to get everything done."

We all will do to our own, to a greater or lessor extent, what was done to us if we cannot resolve what we went through in those earliest days and months. Few can recall what occurred because we learn by experience, by feeling and by emotion at depth. That learning is the primary relational information we have, and it is mostly unconscious.

This that leaves a majority of people open to direct manipulation .... which is essential for Power and Mass Media to operate..... without that, they would fall.

The psychology of any given society, community or family is both revealed and perpetuated in how the children are related to and treated. Change that and you can change everything.

It cannot be change by Government dictat, as all dictats run counter to this change towards empathy, it must be changed at the grass roots and grow from there...

We are at across roads, in that so much information is emerging about abuse, and about the natural development of empathy in early childhood..




With this information, which concurs with common sense we can move forwards.....

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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



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The Greatest gifts we can bequesth our children and descendants

It will take some time.

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
ing of how human behaviour is mediated is likewise well established, though the mainstream still ignores it, as do most Power linked Religions.

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.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

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



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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.
There are many people who assert that humanity is threatened not least by a 'herd' mentality, a 'primitive instinct' that wants to follow, to 'fit in', which has no place in a superior individualistic world-view. 

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.

Trauma related behaviours such as poverty, war, schooling, marketing, religious indoctrination, ideological indoctrination are all exercised in the most part through the agency of Institutional Power....

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.

'Herding'  as the term is used most often, is not a human 'instinct' - it is a LEARNED behaviour...it is pure scientific flippancy to assert otherwise.

It is also a a term when used too often is one that dehumanises people, and this inevitably leads to a dulling of any sense of empathy, which itself feeds the system of Power.

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






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Mitt Romney : Cycles of abuse, Remorse or Denial, and Power

In The Rumpus, Steve Almond wrote a wonderfully clear piece about Mitt Romney, a Republican Presidential Candidate in the USA, concerning Romneys abusive behaviour (high school pranks) as a teenager. It is called THE WEEK IN GREED #6: To Behave Like the Fallen World

This piece is not so much about Romney as about the lack of empathy which we see all the time in those who assume or take power into their hands, be it national, international or at the local level or even within our own families, and the great difficulty the rest of us have when it comes to dealing with this, and the adverse outcomes for so many people of this dynamic.

Alice Miller wrote many books about how, if as  child, one is bullied or mistreated by parents, by Institutions, by society, or by circumstance and one is unable to resolve the situation, that suppression of one's true feelings becomes a mechanism of psychic survival, and this leaves the feelings anger, grief and sadness still alive, yet masked, buried, hidden from awareness.

These hidden, buried feelings then start to colour how one behaves towards oneself and others. The anger can be directed against oneself (shame, self loathing) or against the next generation, or against one's own children or against some 'other': the enemy 'created' by those in power as the receiver of these unresolved feelings, especially the anger and rage.

The problem is compounded by the fact that until these feelings are resolved, they remain alive within, and that even if a person acts out that anger, it will remain available for re-stimulation, again and again.

Alice Miller showed how this experience of mistreatment, abuse, trauma can become an intergenerational pattern, (the children of traumatised parents will grow up within that PTSD psychological environment, and whilst not all turn out with such adverse behaviours, many do, usually due to the lack of an ameliorating presence, what Miller calls an 'enlightened witness', certainly enough to populate systems of power and oppression, to fill the ranks of armies and paramilitary groups, often claiming 'it is for your own good') and others have written about Historical Trauma to show how any community that is traumatised can find itself traumatising it's own children, or each other, in a cycle of abuse and neglect.

This is akin to Lateral Violence, where violence erupts between those who have been subject to abuse from a more Powerful source which they cannot counter. Lateral Violence also occurs in hierarchical bureaucracies, in care systems.

Others have shown how Power can utilise that distressed behaviour to lay blame on those who show the signs of distress in addiction, obesity, psychological distress, inability to conform to 'standards' - people who are used as examples of how not to behave in conformity with 'a fallen world'.

And then there's the history of Power creating enemies to bind the people over whom Power has traction.

This is a very large part of what drives politics and power.

The writers own admission and remorse is the healing of all this, and is the kind of response required to lead towards ending the intergenerational re-traumatising cycles.

It is based on self-empathy.

For to feel the pain of another, beyond mere intellectual comprehension (compassion), is based on one's own sense of pain. And to feel remorse for hurt caused, is to understand that the others pain is real and visceral; it is a living sensation that pain has the same effect on the other as it does to oneself, and that one would not wish that upon any other any more than one would wish it upon oneself.

Expecting those who seek Power to have empathy is folly. Recognising this, it becomes essential to heal this dynamic in oneself as a personal praxis and study of power and oppression, and where it truly matters and where it can be extended is at the grass roots, in one's own life, one's own family and one's community.

If this can be done, then Power will find itself without the necessary accomplices, without which it cannot act.

From the comments on the piece (and elsewhere when such matters are raised), we can see that some people are yet willing to minimise what happened in Romney's case as being in the past, as being high school bullying, as being minor in comparison to the larger issues.

This is not the case. These events are linked in the lives of so many Power leaders, from the Kings of England, the Emperors of Rome, from Hitler to Stalin. And they are linked in the lives of the many people who populate bureaucracies of power.

The Vatican's 'response' to the testimony of courageous Survivors or clerical abuse is another example of this dynamic.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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




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The Heart Brain and Biological Self Empathy.

The Human Heart is a organic biological wi-fi router, designed to help you 'get' the content of the world around you.

It generates a large Electro-magnetic field, which interacts with Electro-magnetic fields of all that is around oneself. It is connected by organic fibre optic to the Amygdala, at the core of the brain.

Signals from the heart arrive for processing in the brain even before signals that come via the eyes.

The brain, amongst other things, models what is perceived and helps in the articulation of this so that what is perceived can be expressed and worked with.

However if the flow of information is disrupted, such that it is reversed, and the mind, subject as it is in this society to conditioning and conformity, the essential information from the heart can be lost, distorted or otherwise missed.

Google 'heart-brain coherence' for more information on this that YOU can utilise to nurture yourself. Rather than direct you to a specific page, I urge you to follow your own learning path, and discover for yourself what is true about all this.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

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





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The Corruption of The Curriculum.

I read this rather clear and yet short piece, on the 'corruption of the curriculum' and it's a damning indictment of Educational policy and tinkering with teaching practice, learning 'styles' and course content.

It states the following :

 "The school curriculum has been corrupted by political interference, according to a new report from independent think-tank Civitas. The traditional subject areas have been hi-jacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the government's social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students."

The article then outlines in concise language some of the 'corruptions' and their adverse effects.

The describe 'educational apartheid' (subjects excluded for some students based on income and class), 'history without dates' (without a coherent narrative), a policy of behavioural change that reduces

It's well worth a read, and I would like to put it in context, "join-the-dots" so to speak. To go further. To clarify.

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 real makers of modern schooling were leaders of the new American industrialist class, men like:

Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron...
John D. Rockefeller, the duke of oil...
Henry Ford, master of the assembly line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular dynasty...
and J.P. Morgan, the king of capitalist finance...


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

Corneilius

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

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The Generation Gap. Mind the Gap. It's a bridge back to nature.

Adults!

Are you tired of dealing with surly, uncooperative, sarcastic young people whose attitude has everything to do with not being accepted as seen, as valid, as complete and whole, unless they conform to the values of others, whose example and behaviour is not necessarily seen as being worthy of much respect, through they might love the person, the parent, they cannot mask what they see.

And it has to do with a masked and subconscious parental jealousy of the emerged young adults potential for freedom, a freedom many parents mortgaged, a freedom which voting and working atrophied, a wound not of their own making, for it is intergenerational. 

If it is not really talked about, the hurt is great indeed.

Generation after generation..... the trickle down effect.

They were told it was the 'right' thing to do. So they did it, in good faith, and the system betrayed them.Most unfortunately do not realise what they have been put through. Their identification with the system had penetrated too deep, and self empathy is replaced with fear or certainty.

Generation after generation..... the trickle down effect.

I have learned to accept it all, not fatalistically, but in order to observe, and to see then what happens, and perhaps sense how the resolution might be nurtured, within myself. This has taken some time. I was listening to me as I was, when others were not, and remembering. And connecting that to the fact that my life experience certainly left me wounded, and lacking self empathy and so it must be for so many others, just as intensely as I experienced it, and for many much worse indeed.

The least measure of a life of all measures, is the intensity of self loathing, (which is really the introjected loathing of society for the natural child, and the degree one has internalised that so deeply determines to some degree the intensity of it's external expression). Yet it is crucial in all power relationships.

We need to listen to our children, we need to get used to living lighter, on less cash, and understand the immense benefit of the experience of being present, with much more time to be, and to be with the children, more than at work. To be with life, more than with the 'economy'.

Parents and children need more free time together, and we need it across the generations, to help recover from this intergenerational re-traumatisation, be it from the adverse affects of hierarchical power structures behaviour, or laterally,  amongst us as people ..... we must see the setting into which we were born and have now to deal with.

Power Relationships vs Empathic Relationships?



this




has been


for decades, elsewhere .........

Of course, it has to be said, this applies across all generations .... the same dynamic occurs when a gap is perceived and 'us' and 'them' becomes the sense of the generations, rather than it being perceived and felt as a continuum - a healthy functioning empathic family, community or group.




Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

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Self empathy is the source of Wisdom.

Self empathy is the source of any 'wisdom' .... because from there genuine empathy flows, and it is a genuine empathy that is not an absorption of others feelings and content, but an accurate felt, sensed perception of these from a place of knowing oneself, where one is.

Genuine empathy accurately perceives both nurturant and non-nurturant realities, and responds as needed. The prey flees, not merely out of blind fear, but out of knowledge. It's what legs, eyes, ears, the sense of smell are all for.

And it takes psychological control over people to ensure that people remain attached to a system, to hierarchically imposed values and judgements, when we could have run, or walked, or said "NO!". That psychological control is engineered through the internalisation of the values of the system, such that we become judgemental, moralistic rather than empathic perceptual. This engineering is done by indoctrination, by marketing, by abuse and by trauma.

So all 'teachers' ought to lead us back to ourselves, and do so with a deep trust that from there we will know where to go.

There is no religion or spirituality that is for all: each person is their own way of spirituality.

There is no ideology in Nature.

There is one ethic of life, and that is to nurture life for all life. That's what nature does and we have emerged from Nature.

That's how I see it.....

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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







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I Don't Fit In!

I am working on a song entitled "I Don't Fit In!"

I don't fit in to a Society that accepts War as a tool of State Policy.

I don't fit into a Society that tells children what to think and applies sanctions against them for dissent against the prevailing ideology.

I don't fit in to a Society that segregates children and elders from the activities of Governance.

I don't fit in to a Society that accepts poverty as a necessary outcome of the concentration of wealth.

I don't fit in, and I am glad of it.

After many,  many years of self criticism because I felt that I did not fit in, and was therefore somehow inadequate because so many others seemed to 'fit in', and also because of the frequent criticism from many others, not least people in positions of Authority such as politicians, clergy, social workers, media pundits etc,  who use the term 'misfit' all too frequently,  which appeared to corroborate and support that self criticism, I can finally say with utter clarity that I know why I don't fit in, and that my knowledge is absolutely evidence based and accurate.

This is not to say that 'the world we live in is rotten or horrid' - it is to say that the Earth has at this time a Dominant human Culture that is abusive, and that the self criticism I and many others experience is an internalisation of the values of that Dominant Culture, and that that internalisation is part of the self policing that culture depends upon to maintain itself.

From my experience and perspective, I say that Earth is a biologically nurturant environment, where natural processes function to improve the conditions of life, for all life, in a manner that can best be described as responsive learning leading to precise adaptations to the variations in the environment.

Here is an essay by David Smail (short video of David Smail speaking about psychological distress and depression) entitled "The Experience of School: Empowerment or Oppression" that looks at this, and contains some valuable insights into the dynamics of 'not fitting in', the aggressive attitude directed towards those who 'don't fit in', by both friends and family, by co-workers, and by Institutions and how to counter it....

What kind of human being would even want to fit it to such a Society?


Kindest regards

Corneilius

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





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Common Sense

Ignore the ideologists, the dogmatists, the fear mongering divisive 'theorists' - stick to pure humane common sense.
ABUSE DOES NOT END ABUSE, IT NEVER HAS, IT ISN'T WORKING AND IT WILL NEVER WORK!






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Occupy! NO FEAR!



Kindest regards

Corneilius

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





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Self Empathy and Power.

Having studied parenting for some time, I note that parenting occurs in a context determined by  very powerful Societal Influences which are masked - the Vatican harbours abusers to protect it's status (even though we KNOW that many tens of millions of children over the past 150 years have been abused) : States operate 'secret services' that utilise organised criminal networks, launch wars under false pretexts : Schools and education systems use reward/punishment as a coercive technique : Marketing uses psychological techniques known as 'aspirant' advertising which key in on known psychological insecurities in the target audience : all claim to be 'beneficial' and refuse to address the adverse affects of their behaviour. When confronted they mitigate, spin and scapegoat.

A classic denial situation.

A profound lack of empathy.

I have outlined a process that is simple to comprehend.

Let's start with an infant. Take for example the practice of training a baby to sleep alone, by letting them cry themselves to sleep.

The infants needs are not met, and the infant has to 'cope' by ignoring his or her feelings: this process leads directly to a loss of self empathy, because one cannot shut down ANY feeling without compromising the entire feeling ability, and of course it follows that this leads to a loss of empathy for others. Because children's sensitivity and constitutions are massively variable, some survive with some empathy intact, some recover, some 'adapt' and others go crazy....

It must be said here that letting a child cry themselves to sleep is but one of a myriad of practices Society induces that have the same adverse affect.

Nonetheless, if this process occurs to the majority, then that lack of empathy becomes part of the societal norm.

Furthermore this induced lack of empathy leads to a lack of felt connection, and for an infant that is a disconnection from that which nurtures in the natural sense..... this leads directly to fear and that fear drives the urge to over-control. ANY control imposed on any natural organism will generate resistance, and this is where violence enters into the picture.

When any person or population endures a trauma, they will also have to cope, (by suppressing feelings, emotions and memories) and if they cannot resolve they will remain in the coping mode.

Any societal structure they build will have those elements of fear and control built into them.

This is the modern Institutional World, as it was the ancient 'civilisations'. Most Institutional Religions utilise processes that disrupt the natural mother-child bonding. They KNOW what they are doing.

They have studied this for many thousands of years....

James Prescott, Alice Miller, Bowlby and others have mapped out apsects of this.

What we HAVE to recognise is that there are influences in Society that apply this as a technique to embed their control. This is difficult for most to face up to. Nonetheless, it's absolutely essential that we do.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

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


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Loss of Self-Empathy and the Urge to Power.

The disruption of the naturally mandated child-mother bonding process sets up a chain of events, leading to emergent violence.

The flow is as follows : if the child is not related to in ways that nurture self-empathy, then the development of a loss of empathy occurs.

With that loss, a sense of disconnection is felt and with that comes fear.

The fear leads directly to a perceived need to control others and to control the environment.

As all natural organisms are autonomous, self directing growing beings so too they will resist, to one degree or another, efforts to control them.

That resistance generates violence to impose or retain that control.

In human family or society, if this pattern starts, and is not resolved, then each successive generation will impose that control, and their children too will grow up in an environment that they will 'adapt' to the situation, internalising that psychological need to control.





What baby would not be angry at not being met with the experientials our biology has mandated? Think of the child left to cry himself to sleep in another room, to scream and cry until exhaustion brings sleep. Is this not a common practice in our culture? What of the resignation, the suppression of that rage, the loss of self empathy which ensues from that suppression which is the outcome of such a practice?

That need to control then gets transmitted into the structure of that family or society and over time becomes codified, normalised, embedded.......

Not all children respond or react to the situation in the same way, thus variations arise in the need to control and the levels of violence used to retain control will emerge, with some retaining their basic empathy.

Some will resist the controls. They will be subject to the efforts of others, by violence or by other means, to control them. This resistance leads directly to violence on the part of the controlling parties, because the fear is that if they are not controlled at all costs, then the safety of the controllers is at risk. This is of course unnecessary.

If the issue of empathy is resolved, nurturant co-operation is the natural outcome. We are at our happiest when we meet each others genuine living needs.





Kindest regards

Corneilius

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




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Thrirteen Points.... the hidden dangers of belief systems...

Thirteen signs that one has replaced what one has been indoctrinated with, with other similar 'qualities', all of which are unconscious internalisations of the messages of Power and the loss of self empathy..... well, 13 signs I experienced.... others might have experienced or may well experience more or less...

This is what I went through when I first 'ditched' Christianity - I took the same psychological memes (or hidden woundings), and applied them in different ways...

1. I looked outside of myself for a saviour.

2. I still felt shame at my own body, and it's functioning...

3. I still bullied my own children 'for their own good'.

4. I still feared some nebulous EVIL FORCE.

5. I still feared Nature

6. I still acted to protect myself from the fear based illusion that my after life might be in a hell like reality... I feared for my soul.

7. I still saw the world in a dualistic, simplistic way.

8. I still feared the Apocalypse.

9. I still bowed to Guru's and imagined Gods.

10. I still had difficulty enjoying myself, as myself.

11. I still lacked self empathy, for myself as an adult and for myself as a child.

12. I still feared Women.

13. I still judged myself unworthy of love.


I also spent many years replacing one set of BELIEFS with another set of BELIEFS, all the time lacking self empathy, trying to be 'good', avoiding the deeper layers of my conditioned self....

Quite a lot of the so called 'New Age' and many other belief replacements are made up of this.... the Emperor is wearing different style of clothing, yet remains in charge...

All this baloney 'spiritual enlightenment', when all that is really required is self empathy, for the here and now .... not some imaginary future.....

Does a tree need spiritual enlightenment?

Is a tree any less a child of nature than a human being?

There's so much of the New Age that is really the class room psychology in other forms. Tests, grades, approval..... yuk!

Be careful out there and avoid belief.... be with what you KNOW and have tested in some depth.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

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





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