The Beauty within our selves-correction 4

The Beauty within our selves-correction 4

This post was inspired by the previous one on discourses. I’ve deviated plenty! We must come back to the study of language and discourse soon!

This paragraph was missing from this post In Discursive Struggles Within Social Welfare: Restaging Teen Motherhood,[8] Iara Lessa summarizes Foucault’s definition of discourse as “systems of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and practices that systematically construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak.” He traces the role of discourses in wider social processes of legitimating and power, emphasizing the construction of current truths, how they are maintained and what power relations they carry with them.” Foucault later theorized that discourse is a medium through which power relations produce speaking subjects.[4] Foucault (1977, 1980) argued that power and knowledge are inter-related and therefore every human relationship is a struggle and negotiation of power. Foucault further stated that power is always present and can both produce and constrain the truth.[4] Discourse according to Foucault (1977, 1980, 2003) is related to power as it operates by rules of exclusion. Discourse therefore is controlled by objects, what can be spoken of; ritual, where and how one may speak; and the privileged, who may speak.[9] Coining the phrases power-knowledge Foucault (1980) stated knowledge was both the creator of power and creation of power.

Knowledge versus information is an aspect of being and as such gives power. It’s the being who decides whether it is a constructive or destructive power, the power of love or the love of Power. Power of love is “life giving” while love of power is “life sucking”. People exposed to the latter will tend to destructiveness towards themselves or others. Those in roles of authority will tend to destroy those in roles of submission but in our times this destruction does not need to be violent, the violence is very subtle and self imposed through behaviorism. People who submit eventually weaken their I and with their I, all positive emotions that renovate their self. They tend to self annihilate through illness, depression, suicide or various forms of those three. People exposed to the power of love will tend to flourish. The “life giving” power is culture. It can only come from community or the understanding of community in the giver even if he or she works alone. All individual creation, real creation, real effort, from the individual soul of any man or woman, is culture but just healthy “being” is also culture. People do not have to be “creating” a certain work to be part of culture. Just by being “cultured” with each other they “recreate” and breath culture. No one has to prove anything to be human. “Life sucking” power is imposition and works through dogmatic discourse and behaviorism. In the former people are free to act and act from their freedom, in the latter they act with an agenda usually within an institution. They use the power of the institution to abuse their role and submit others. It doesn’t matter where people are, the different discourses take place everywhere in society, wherever a human being stands for or against life, for or against humaneness, consciously or unconsciously. And most people are inhuman most of the time or human only to the one or two they love. Almost everyone in the “developed” world justifies their inhumanity if they notice it but most don’t even notice it. They are so crystallized in the behaviorism that they can’t imagine there being anything wrong with it and whatever their nation is doing outside is unconsciously justified in their comfort. The population of first world nations is the inner circle that supports the inhumanities of their nation’s leaders. Most people think that avoiding to participate socially, nationally and humanly is good enough and avoid other people, politics and world disasters while continuing to support the status quo with their work. Most people are just trying to live a decent life but their creativity is used to fortify the love of power because they are unwilling to question who and what it is that they are working for.

The Jews that have refused to work in Israel as a protest for the State of Israel and its crimes are practicing this understanding and not working to fortify the love of power. In every single institution in our days, the love of power is present and needs to be challenged. We cannot continue living and supporting life sucking institutions where the issue is not knowledge, life and love but power, privileges and separation.

Even the most altruistic foundations often perform from love of power. This has made us massively sick and the suicides and homicides that we are witnessing are only the beginning of a much more pervasive destructiveness. Industrialization must not continue to expand in the third world. The third world must be protected from that kind of “development” and the first world must do everything it can to re-educate their people. “Re-educate” them to recover the integrity of small communities within great communities. People must recover their connection with each other and life. They must recover trust in the human being and themselves. Trust is one of the most powerful emotions, it is the key to almost all the other real emotions: compassion, grace, gratitude, joy, truth. Truth is an emotion that belongs to the I. It is an objective quality of Trust. Each individual knows the truth but in our times we are not our selves, we are not acting like humans. We are acting like infra-humans because we have been living inhuman lives against each other and our selves for centuries now. For generations the family has been totally unprotected and children have to grow up in a world that they cannot trust in and must defend themselves from. 100 suicides daily in Japan and Russia are an expression of this madness. Criminals do not act from their truth or trust they act from their distrust that has become their truth. They act from the pain of their suffering. They “kill” what has made them criminals: “life sucking life” forms of life. Suicide is a renunciation to live that life and those social homicides of random individuals killing anyone in the streets or offices or schools is a protest to that life. We need to understand that this is happening amongst young people because the problem is so severe already that the young people are not being able to take it. They have not been programmed like adults to accept it, it has just been imposed on their lives and it is acting too powerfully against them to be able to process it with any other response.

Truth is life giving. Trust, compassion, are life giving. Grace, joy and gratitude are the experiences resulting from living in truth, trust and compassion. Truth is not a dogma that anyone can impose on another. No one can impose the truth. Truth is a quality of each human I, of each human being. When we trust our selves, we are capable of living in what is true to our selves. We impregnate our life with that truth. When we are in a reactionary mode defending our selves from the world with a deeply harmed sense of our own self, we are not acting from trust but from distrust. Distrust in others and no trust in their own self is what stimulates criminals to hurt themselves or others. If the quality of trust could be measured in quantity, we would see that it comprises almost everything we call I and when we are in a distrusting state we turn defensive and destructive. At some point an individual can be so hurt that it’ll take years for them to recover trust or their own healthy sense of their self and the world around them.

It is trust what allows us to give and receive. The “gift” happens in the “womb” of trust. It is this “trust” that innocent people carry and makes them prey of gurus and dictators as much as the status quo, but that same trust what turns them into impotent slaves if they give up their will. People, all people, all human beings want well being and if the status quo says that to be well they have to submit, they submit but submission is precisely what cannot help them to be well. The great danger that we are in today is that the majority of people in power have submitted for so long that they are more the victims of the status quo than the authors of it. Truly evil people wishing to harm others don’t exist. NO ONE is harming others because they find it fun! But millions of people are protecting the status quo convinced that if the status quo were to fail, they would be in great danger. The great danger that they are afraid of is having to take responsibility for themselves and their lives. That is why we keep running for gurus and supporting dictators hoping that someone else will take the responsibility. People are very much afraid of being themselves. They don’t know how to trust themselves or others so they make divas on which they deposit the responsibility and then lynch them or annihilate themselves at their service. The divas are not necessarily other human beings, each class has its own divas, sports has become a diva for many and different sports are the different “divas” of different classes and the people that represent them are drowned in money. Art and artists have become divas, health has also become a diva. These divas justify people’s lives and the energy they have to create and recreate themselves is wasted on watching the divas on television or going to see them live. In that overexposure and self surrender to the diva, people give up their creative energy just like they give up their productive energy in the submission in the work place. Look at that carefully, they are two sides of the same coin: individual’s energy is being sucked in both work and pleasure and all those massive events are processing the life sucking energy from each individual who is falsely reassured that it is alright because so many people are participating in it. “We can’t all be wrong” is the reflection but we are almost all wrong, we are almost all participating in our own destruction.

We are in a critical situation because we are weakening not a few individuals but whole generations. We should know this when we realize that our children are being abandoned to people who have little love and a good business in taking care of them and our old people are fading on their own in old people’s homes with pretty inhuman conditions for the majority. This madness of the first world should never reach the third world and it is already reaching it wildly. This madness needs to be stopped and people from the first world who understand, need to help the people in the third world to strive for a different form of life and hold on to their integrity without allowing their communities to be separated by so called “progress”. There is no progress in capitalism or communism but there is no progress particularly in the economic race for power. This is not life. We are killing life.

We have images of how this happens when we look at the films of Europeans killing the Indian tribes of America but what is happening today is exactly that but not by Americans on the rest of the world but by people in “power positions” everywhere on human beings anywhere, not just in the political institutions but everywhere. We are killing our own spirit. We are suffocating our selves and our Earth in the race for economic power. We are at the very beginning of the Age of Desolation and if we don’t stop it from advancing quickly it could very well reach a point of no return. Self-destructiveness is a much more powerful force than killing others in a war or stealing in imperialism. Self-destructiveness on a human scale works like a cancer on an individual scale and it will lead to subtle but gradual destruction. THAT is what is most dangerous about it: its subtlety. The fact that it remains unperceivable for too long just like cancer does and when the victim realizes what is happening it is too advanced to do anything to help them. We need to learn to love each other again. Knowing how to love a few people in our entourage is not enough. Knowing how to love a few in our class, race and nation is not enough. We are not in small communities that can survive if we do not embrace the community of mankind. We have been working for centuries to come together building roads and plains and bridges to greet each other’s culture, not just to kill or exploit each other’s goods and we must stand for that longing to meet our selves in our selves with perfect grace.

Each culture, like every human being is sacred. It is with awe that we must be able to fall into each other’s trust, for the beauty of each culture and each individual is beyond our comprehension. We must not be afraid of our own beauty. We must stop killing the beauty within each one of us and each of our cultures and help each other be.

It is always a pleasure to be with you in the Public Square.