Why talking to yourself is a good idea and how shouting into the void helps
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| John Barrett - Between us, 2020, spray paint, acrylic |
Someone close to me opined that there's all this writing about the current state of affairs, that people are angry and protesting but it's not doing any good. That we know all this stuff and still the Republicans with their Stooge-in-Chief are wreaking havoc on the country and the world. But that none of the outrage matters.
I took issue with that assessment.
I still do.
Look, no one reads this blog, a few people engage with me on FB but for the most part, I prefer using the blog as a way of making sense of the issues around us. It's my sandbox that I leave up in case people want to discuss, teach me a few things, maybe even talk among themselves. To be sure, to be redundant, no one reads the blog, so sure, it winds up with me writing into the void.
Facebook is a little more active. I've used the platform to get some discussions going and enter a few online. FB has saved one life I know of, so it's not a completely useless platform. However, many would say that FB is essentially a bubble. Perhaps that's as it should be.
If you have any intelligence, you can research plenty of views on the interwebz that differ from yours, you can trawl for data from differing sources, and I know that many of us do. My reasons are to see how diverse news sources report on the same event, how much space they give to a story, and details of interpretation/spin each resource employs. So yeah, I check out Fox and Breitbart. I swallow and hang out with The National Review. In most circumstances (all?), I disagree vehemently with their editorial agendas. That's also part of a discipline; can I disagree, still understand where they're coming from, and not react emotionally or emotively after all that? Sometimes yes, more often no, because the ideological frameworks are at basis, very different from my own.
I want to return to ideological differences in a bit, but I want very much to address the idea that writing or expressing outrage on social media is ineffective. I don't need to address whether public protest is effective because, well, it is. Purely and simply, mass protest is effective or you wouldn't have the government responding with force. I don't know if this is her original statement or if it's a quote, but Alexandria Ocaso-Cortez wrote recently that "when you speak truth to power, power speaks back." You protest, you draw fire, but you are moving the chess pieces and forcing the elite's hand when you do.
Writing, however, can seem useless, or an exercise in impotence. Who's listening? Who cares? So what? Here's the thing, though: if no one wrote, if no one said anything, and if - as seemed to be the sense behind the words I heard - we just show up at the polls in November, then the outcome would be the same whether we bloviate on readerless blogs or Facebook echo chambers.
I took exception to this, because we - each of us - need to keep ourselves informed, we need to share with each other how we're feeling, how we're doing, what we're thinking, our insights. We need to keep our energy going even if it's only for ourselves. In one sense, it's a kind of on-going pep talk (of desperation and anger sometimes), in another it is catharsis, and in yet another, it's self-care.
If none of vented, or expressed how we feel or what we've learned, and decided to clam up, then I can almost guarantee you that we'd be in very dark places come November. Not everyone is an optimist, not everyone is so internally together that they're going to hold silence and their spirit is going to remain shiny and bright during these times.
These times require our attention. These times demand our outrage, our anger. These times call on us to respond daily, if not more frequently, to each provocation with awareness, with care. It's this last word that I'm using as intentionally as I can.
Not that I'm a huge fan of the man, but as a philosopher Heidegger has made some genuinely good points and his sense of "care" is a matter of how Being-in-the-world attends. I don't think this is how Heidegger would express it, but in Being and Time, he does note that Being as dasein, as individuated existence, demonstrates its dispersion (and/or that individuation) as caring for projects, actions, the objects of those actions, surrendering, keeping, etc. It is in attending to the matters at hand, of interest, that require our attentions and responses/responsibilities, that Being-as-we/-as-such/as beings-for-ourselves and as beings-for-others expresses itself. In other words, care is an ontological function, it is a primary endeavor to being in the world/Being-in-the-world.
Thus, to silence our expressions of care, of concern regarding the events about us is to silence the thing itself. In other words, this concern, this caring requires expression. Sure, it's more fruit-bearing if shared with others but even if it's only among oneself, attended to fully, understood more deeply, then that awareness is more lively, more alive. One is less overwhelmed by the situation and one's caring does not diminish.
If you are one of the rare ones who claims that this is nothing but a mere passing condition, I would agree with you about the "passing condition" part - all things are, indeed, impermanent - but "mere"? I have not truck with you. "Merely human" is a trope used by only the most metaphysically removed from feeling the sufferings of others. The minute "mere" or "only" is used to characterized suffering (we also hear this in "it's only the suffering of a few against the many" or "well, compared to the world's total population, this is only X%"), then the speaker needs to reset their priorities.
Priorities are often dictated by values and ideology or ideologies. We cling to our -isms, our religions, our political parties, as though these are integral to our essences as beings in the world. They are, at best, indicators of how we choose to represent to one another. As such, for the most part, they are not unlike clothes or hair styles. Most people rarely question why they continue clinging to these means of expression.
Sure, in religions, there is the sense that if you believe enough in the right doctrine or deity or deities, all will be well. Often, mostly in the next life, but many find solace in the present one through reliance on faith - until/unless something occurs to cause them to rethink/reset. This, I think, is rare, as most or at least, many religious people seem to be convinced that there is an eternal, substantive Self behind all this phenomena. The problematic aspects of this are often in the soteriological dimension and/or mandates to "spread the word"/"share the good news" which has often translated into colonialist/exploitative projects.
As for political viewpoints, many of the same conditions apply; politics is often seen as a monolithic field of which party is right and how the rest are wrong, instead of a field populated with shifting ethical and behavioral norms and values, tensions of power and disenfranchisement, and the tensions between personal and shared values as espoused and/or practiced.
Politics and religion are fertile ground for cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy.
They also result in dangerous situations such as we are facing. Some would say it's senseless to keep addressing why we in the United States have come to this point, but it needs to be addressed repeatedly because so many turn a blind eye and will continue to do so, regardless of the election's outcome.
Do I feel that the Republican Party is a death cult? On a person by person basis, no. Indeed, my assumption is that most Republicans and others like them want the same thing that every sentient being wants; to be happy, and hopefully, have a roof over their heads and food in the belly. However, to listen to their party politicians and indeed, some folks I know, the desire for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is either only for a few or are to be fought for in some hellish octagon of daily life. Their idea of survival of the fittest is often very much more like "The Lord of the Flies" than "American Gladiator." It's certainly not related to Darwinian natural selection because many of them don't seem to understand science.
It's this last part that is the greatest tell of what the power elite under the guise of a political party seems to be about. This is an ideology that denies science where the findings of science conflict with a larger process of gaining and securing wealth and power. It is an ideology that promotes social division so that the middle and lower classes continues to increase. In other words, it's less about party affiliation than party manipulation and here is where the political divide is a false flag.
Some would say that as Americans, we all want the same thing but we disagree on how to go about achieving it. This would have been a fair statement up until 1980. It's more exact to see where - with the rise in corporate power, increase in deregulation, and decreasing in funding for health, education and welfare - this is no longer the case. Most Americans cringe at the word "socialism"; they have no or an imperfect understanding of what socialism is an equate it with government overreach, the so-called "nanny state", and other shibboleths. Therefore, many Americans feel that any discussion of a social safety net, universal healthcare, and free education is wrong. Not just unrealizable, but wrong, because they see those things as signifiers of a socialist agenda.
Consequently, we now have a population so confused, so ill-educated about power politics, social inequity, and history, that political division is driven by some vague idea that one party is right and the other is wrong. Republicans are for the most part, convinced that Democrats want to turn the U.S. into Venezuela.When, in fact, we are now in straits as dire as those in Venezuela currently. Most Americans don't know it and they sure wouldn't want to recognize it.
Ideological differences are not necessarily between parties, but between forced assumptions of what is right and wrong and these assumptions are forced upon the public by a ruling class of corporate demagogues and their representatives at various levels of government. The superficial divide is in the two-party system (perhaps by design), but the actual divide is between two divergent set of values. The me-and-mine-first is one such set; the what's good for one is good for all (or as long as one person suffers, we all suffer) is the other. There are certainly gradations within each, but this seems to be where we are.
How do we move forward? I think we continue to do what we're doing; talk to people from the other side; if they are listening and receptive, great. If not, then end the conversation. But there's something even more important and this is more challenging. And you can't do it in writing; it has to be done in person. Listen.
We do need to listen to each other. Deeply, attentively, and with care. We also need to do so without any agenda, without expectation. Listen to the other person's story, listen to what they're saying and rather than try to change them with words, lead by compassionate action. See where there is commonality. Is there a neighborhood project you can work on together? Maybe signing up to work the polls together? But most of all, it's about listening.
It doesn't mean agreeing with them; it means acknowledging differences and moving on from there. I would draw the line at racism, sexism, and xenophobia; these should be met immediately and in whatever degree or kind is appropriate to the moment. However, the point stands that many people who espouse the so-called conservative values we see around us are mostly afraid. Ignorance and fear may be the greatest disrupters to progress in the human emotional inventory.
We need to continue writing, we need to continue sharing posts and we need to continuing caring. Keep the energy going within yourself, keep your attention on the issues at hand, maintain awareness, hold the space.
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