Elena-(Chomsky)

18. Elena - April 15, 2010 [Edit]
Hi Ton my friend!

The night is creeping in gently and there’s a cool breeze. I’m back home and can take you more gently.

This is just great! You’re like my brother when we were kids that we could go on and on never granting each other anything but always together without threatening each other to leave or get banned! That overt manipulation of people’s state telling them we’ll abandon them because they are not good enough. That’s what you just said: “you’re not good enough and I’m not going to stick around here, I’m taking a spring break but don’t give yourself so much credit that I think it’s worth being here”

Well, why don’t we take advantage of the fact that you’re here now and try to talk just this little more.

I think that what you’re saying is that I am not Noam Chomsky. He’s great isn’t he? And yet even if we take Chomsky with all his amazing experience when we come to religion he will say that he doesn’t believe in anything that is not reasonable and that while he respects all people’s religion he is simply not religious. That’s absolutely respectable of course and yet what that is telling us is that Chomsky never took the problem of inner work seriously into his socio-political discourse even if he practiced it every single second of his life, which he must have done to be such a clear and great author. The incorporation of THAT discourse needs to be seriously taken on in our times because politics and religion need to be understood as two sides of the same coin. Chomsky has done what he had to do for his times, we have to do what is necessary for ours. What makes you think that we cannot have a dialogue about Chomsky or with him? I’ve been meeting him for the past week and every word he says opens a Universe in my life but that does not in anyway discount the possibility of my stating what I’ve learnt about the problems at hand. He in fact teaches me more about religion in society and politics than I’ve learnt in the past fifty years. In just one sentence he takes care of cults:

QUESTION: What is one to make of Clinton’s comment in his recent State of the Union speech. He said, “We can’t renew our country unless more of us, I mean all of us, are willing to join churches.”
CHOMSKY: I don’t know exactly what’s in his mind, but the ideology is very straightforward. If you devote yourself to activities out of the public arena, we folks [in power] will be able to run it straight….

I needed to understand that! That is what I’ve been saying that WE needed to understand to know why we joined a cult for so long. His analysis of historic recent events that left no room for political public action and threw people into fundamentalist religions in America and the affirmation that America is in fact the most fundamentalist nation of the world is such an eye-opener to understand why the Fellowship exists and why you’d ban people like me no matter where. If you took the four or five posts I put up on him yesterday in the other blog, you would, I would hope, find so many great ingredients that haven’t even been touched on in the fofblog.

The fofblog was dying when I asked to return, hopefully it will go on with me included. As long as people dialogue there is hope. Of course, there is no dialogue there, you just pat each other in the back and run along like children in uniform. No wonder you banned me again.

But this was just one of the things I was hoping to say: that we’ve been all too used to believe that we are not enough to look straight in the eyes at all great men: That we are not good enough. That’s what you’re telling me and I don’t have that inferiority complex but it was powerful just a few months ago. Had I not had it in the Fellowship I would have whipped Robert out of my life as soon as I met him.

What I believe you were also trying to tell me is that the tone with which I had been speaking on the blog before I was banned the first time was extremely arrogant and that THAT is what makes people run away from me. That is what I understood in this six months and that is why I apologized when I arrived. But no matter how much I apologized and accepted what you said, went to look for the authors you suggested, said yes, I’ve been very arrogant in my vulnerability, you wouldn’t stop, you just kept screaming at me and asking me questions and ridiculing me until I realized that it was all a manipulation to make me believe that if I complied to your demands you would accept me but no, you can’t accept me nor could the blog. You have to humiliate people like me to be able to accept them and keep them in that rank. If they don’t comply, you’ll leave them. It is a good thing that I can accept myself now with or without your approval.

You weren’t just happy with my joyful acknowledgements, reading the authors and giving you feedback, accepting my mistakes, asking for forgiveness, repeating my apologies, no, what you wanted was to see me humiliate myself and beg you to love me and accept me and then you would have equally thrown me out because abusers hate the abused when they comply because it reveals the victory of their tyranny and they hate it as much as themselves. Heroes are heroes because they are willing to die before allowing to be humiliated even by kings. A real king never humiliates anyone. Was that not what you and Dragon and Crouching Tiger already did here? When I finally accepted I was bipolar after you insisted on it for months, didn’t you just run and abandon this blog? It was the greatest lesson I’ve had in my life so I thank you sincerely for having given it to me. It’s all here if you want to look at it again.

So since we are already here and we only have a very short time as you are leaving soon, let me convey to you what I also understand you are telling me. I think that what you are trying to say, but can’t quite say it because you’ve never actually practiced it and particularly not in the past week, is that no matter how good my posts are, as long as people talk with arrogance and aggression no one will listen. That as long as I separate myself from others and point at them for doing what they are doing, people will run. That as long as I keep hurting people because I am hurt, there will be no audience.

I understand very well this reasoning and am still hurt enough to be speaking to you with some arrogance aren’t I? Can we agree at least on that my friend? Or enemy if you’d rather?

I guess we each get the piece of pie that we are able to eat so that we can actually process it and send it back to the logos as dung so that other’s can grow healthier. People who have been hurt cannot avoid hurting others and arrogance and aggression are simply a way of showing how incapable of doing anything else they are. They are begging for help and help is not sending people to the grave or the lunny bin, it is allowing them to be in the public square where the life of life, where the logos can live itself out, where culture can redeem every individual’s suffering by embracing them again in the community. The more I look the clearer this becomes and the abominable aggression of criminals reveals the tremendous suffering and horror other people are put under so much worse than our selves. All those arrogances are little forms of crime but when the damage is bad enough real crime ensues towards one’s self or others. I know that the first time I was banned by the fofblog I had reached a level of aggression that was unacceptable but I had equally received unacceptable levels of aggression. This was actually recognized by one of the bloggers who wrote after I was banned but nothing was said about it. When others got aggressive with that blog for banning me, I dissuaded them and I admitted that I was a pain in the ass but you never hear me when I say those things, you want me to humiliate myself much deeper. I have recognized my excesses by asking for forgiveness and in not ONE single post in our recent encounters in the fofblog can you find aggression in me but there is that in every single one of yours.

But it was I who was banned. None of you treat each other like that but you think it is a lot of fun to treat me like that. Of course what you were actually doing was giving me a lot of my own medicine: question personally a person; a lot of my own medicine when I’d been on that blog before without giving me a chance to be anything else. It was already fixed: you weren’t going to let me be.

The difference between us Ton is that I don’t manipulate you. I’m not threatening with banning you or leaving you because you’re not good enough, because you scream at me and insult me, on the contrary I love you all the more for fighting and struggling on issues that matter not only for you and I for we are already bound to each other, but to society at large. We must learn to speak to be able to communicate. We must understand the vices in speech so that we can guide conversations when people begin to truly speak to each other as equals and not just from a pod and a hierarchy. We must learn to moderate each other and not just allow for every abuse like the fofmoderator allowed in that blog while people applaud generously. We must LOVE each other no matter how hurt we are because there is no other way out of this violence.

Even Chomsky could not teach us that.