Judgement and Parental Guilt

There is a Christian principle “Judge not that thou be not judged.” Some people no doubt believe that the usefulness of this advice hinges on a belief in God. After all, is it not God who would judge us?

I interpret it differently. If we have a framework of judgement, then we will subject ourselves to that framework of judgement whether we like it or not.

I was thinking about this today as a result of a controversy which has erupted about a cartoon by the controversial Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig.

The cartoon depicts a baby falling out of its pram unnoticed by his young mother because she is too busy looking at Instagram on her phone.

This is a pretty extreme situation. There is no need for anyone to identify with this mother simply because they are a mother with a mobile phone themselves. It is not as if the cartoon is about a baby in a crib looking up accusingly at his mother on her phone. It depicts extreme social media addiction and neglect. If you don’t have a serious social media addiction and you are not a neglectful parent, then it isn’t about you.

But the cartoon has made a lot of people very defensive.

Controversial feminist Clementine Ford responded :

“Hey Leunig, you f**king gronk. I bet you never spent hours walking babies around in a pram, feeling isolated and alone and terrified. After my bub was born, I walked him around and around for hours in the pram or the carrier trying to get him to sleep. I spent much of that time on my phone. You know why? Because I was f**king WORKING. Sometimes I was tweeting sh*t or scrolling Instagram... and sometimes I was just looking for anything to distract me from the internal screaming about this incredibly traumatic physical and emotional thing I had been through. If a woman is on her phone and pushing a pram, it's nothing to do with you. Keep your f**king bullshit cartoon nonsense to yourself, you f**king judgmental prick.”

Clearly the cartoon touched a raw nerve. That’s what it was meant to do. If Ford didn’t feel guilty, she wouldn’t respond in that way. But it isn’t a judgemental cartoon. If judgement comes, it comes only from the conscience of the viewer. The cartoon is using imagination to suggest what an infant’s eye view of the world might be. An infant doesn’t know if you are on your mobile phone for work or sharing pictures of him, he only knows that your attention is elsewhere. Leunig is depicting something which already exists in our subconscious, so it is no good shooting the messenger.

Parental guilt is a major problem which exists with or without Leunig’s cartoons. What makes it so insidious is that it is a negative feedback phenomena. The more guilty a parent feels the more they turn inward or need distraction and ego-reinforcement to deal with the pain, and thus the less available they are for their children, which leads to more guilt.

There is also a feedback link between our judgement of others and being prone to judging ourselves. Ford is someone who is known for being judgemental - for calling people “cunt” or “creepy fuckface”. Standing in judgement of men, in particular, is her stock in trade. So, of course, she has a guilty conscience about her parenting. Not only do we judge ourselves if we are locked into judgement mode with others, but the judgement of others may be our way of getting some relief from the torture of our own conscience. Thus it can be another negative feedback loop.

So, once again, we see the need for cultivating unconditional self-acceptance. Only this will unleash our full capacity to be there for those who depend on us, and enable us to respond to the destructive behaviour of others without judgement of the wounded individual who lies behind that behaviour. And it will make us into people who can’t be hurt by a cartoon.

What Is The Conscience?

Photo by Holger Harfst

Most of us have a tendency to feel the emotion we call "guilt" when our behaviour fails to conform to an internal vision of how we should behave. We call that internal vision our "conscience".

But what is the source of our conscience? Is it an instinct we are born with? Is it something we learn from others? Or is it the voice of a supernatural being speaking through us? There are many advocates of each of these theories.

What inspires me to try to make sense of the conscience is some debate on the discussion board at Jeremy Griffith's World Transformation Movement website. I'm banned from taking part in the discussion there. Dr. Anna Fitzgerald says : Our conscious self does feel criticism from our instincts, we call it our CONSCIENCE. Everyone knows that, and being shared by us all means it’s instinctive – which Griffith reiterated with Darwin’s affirmation that “the moral sense affords the highest distinction between man and the lower animals”.

This concept that the conscience is simply an instinctive program is one of the key problems I have with Jeremy Griffith's theory that our disturbed psychology is the result of a conflict between the conscious mind, and its need to experiment with self-management, and the dictatorial demands of such a gene-based moral programming.


It may be that everyone, with the possible exception of psychopaths, has a sense of right and wrong. But what is right or wrong differs from culture to culture and individual to individual. While the conscience may not be entirely learned, there is certainly a learned element in the way in which it manifests itself.


Let's see if we can learn something by trying to strip human existence back to its basics. What does it mean to be an organism? The key motive of the organism is self-preservation. It may be that the breeding instinct provides a self-preservation motive on the level of species which supersedes that of the individual, but most of the time our base-line objective is to stay alive, all other things being equal. I may be saying "all other things being equal" a lot, because the less basic motives for our behaviour can override the more basic. Our basic impulse may be one of self-preservation, but that doesn't mean that our mind, freed from the task of keeping us alive for a while, may not arrive at a bad idea which drives us to take our own life.

It is hard to argue with sensory experience. Pain and pleasure speak to us directly, free from the clouding of language and concept. All other things being equal, the first repels us and the latter attracts. Once again, less basic factors can interfere with this. We can arrive at a psychological state in which we shrink from some pleasures and glory in something painful. But that isn't where we start.

So our most basic intentions would be to stay alive, to avoid pain and to experience pleasure.

But we are born into a social context in which we are cared for. If we are one of the lucky ones, we are born into a context in which we are loved. But even the most harshly treated are looked after sufficiently to be kept alive.

Clearly there is an instinct for love. A mother abandoning her baby because its care imposes more suffering than pleasure on her is the exception rather than the rule. And, once again, if we wish to understand such exceptions we need to look to factors which interfere with the natural - e.g. drug addiction or mental illness.

What feels best to us as infants? To have our needs met within a harmonious social context in which there is plenty of affectionate touching and verbal communication.

Our myths  have their grounding in our experience. If we experienced a loving infancy, then it is the basis for our concept of Paradise. All-giving mother Goddesses and stern but loving father Gods also are concepts which carry into adult life the infant memory.

So an instinct for love provides parents with the motive to care for their child, and no doubt shapes the way the child bonds with them. I have said that love can be defined as open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication. It almost doesn't need saying that this is the mode of communication of an individual who is operating in a healthy, unwarped manner. It is not hard to understand how the processes of learning and becoming a social being will be impeded if a child is closed off, a liar, habit-bound or greedy.

All other things being equal, we don't want to abandon paradise. Sometimes we can see directly when we have breached the laws of this paradise. It requires a harmonious social context so, if we upset someone, then we may reasonably feel we have breached those laws. We want to be accepted. To be accepted by those around is to remain in paradise. Parents and teachers may also teach us the rules we must seek to follow if we want to remain there. What makes it difficult is that we can't please everybody. There are times when we are damned by someone if we do and damned by someone else if we don't.

So, I think, there is an instinctive element to the conscience - the instinct for love provides the crucible in which it takes form. But that form is socially determined.

The conscience is that part of our ego - our conscious thinking self - in which we store our expectations about ourselves, those expectations very often being an internalisation of the expectations of others. This is to the extent that the conscience is conscious. It is also possible that some of our expectations are repressed to the level of the subconscious by the fact that they are so painful to look at. But I would contend that they have sunk down from our mind rather than risen from some genetic substrate.

Even if we assume that the reluctance to do something we perceive to be harmful were genetically-based, the intellect is often required to tell us what is harmful. We can't feel guilty about our carbon footprint unless the intellect has worked out how global warming works.

Is there a battle with the conscience going on within the conscious mind? Absolutely.

What I call "the human neurosis" is the divided state of the ego. Paradise lay in being accepted and being able to accept ourselves. To not be accepted, in some way, by others, can inflict a wound upon the ego, and the ego will become focused on a counter argument as to why it is acceptable, or not to blame for what has led to the rejection. But even more painful is the sense of self-betrayal, when we find ourselves unable to avoid breaching the rules and so we split into a fiery accuser with the pointing finger - "you fucked it up for yourself" - and the cringing supplicant - "I couldn't help it!" In either case response to the critical voice can go either way - contrite depression or defiant anger.

What is the nature of malevolence? Why are we capable of inflicting cruelty for its own sake? I believe malevolence is conscience-driven behaviour. If our self-acceptance is undermined to too great a degree, we can end up feeling totally backed into a corner, our conscience making demands of us which we no longer have the generosity of spirit to fulfil. The more self-accepting we feel - the more relaxed and carefree within ourselves - the more enthusiasm we have for generosity. But current suffering tightens us up. Think of some time when you were suffering greatly and somebody asked something of you. Did it not make you angry that they would ask for something when you had nothing to give? The darkest place we can go is that corner where we hate the dictatorship of our conscience so much - for having eaten away all the love we have and still be wanting more - that we have to have revenge - we have to try to stab it to death by doing the one thing which it says would be the worst thing we could do.

If our conscience were in our genes it would always oppress us. Our ego and our society are adaptable, they are capable of adjusting to new knowledge. Genes can't forgive, and healing lies in the power to forgive. It is the intellect which has the power to make sense of our dilemma and find the way home. 

When the conscience's criticism causes a level of insecurity which drives further breaches of its dictates, the negative feedback loop which results spreads a social poison far beyond the individual. If we can find an easily replicable way of untying this knot, the world will be swept with an enthusiasm for solving all other problems. 

The Christian religion talks about redemption. Our sins are forgiven and we are instructed to go and sin no more. If following the conscience is an act of will, we will always tire. We need to return to our awareness of how it worked in our first paradise. The joy of accepting and being accepted was the source of our enthusiasm. Our mistakes needed to be both learned from and forgiven. Where things went wrong was when we stopped being able to forgive ourselves and thus became split into prosecution and defence in our own internal trial.

In the scheme of things, those trials are trivialities. We are looking to the past and concentrating on our "sins", giving them primary importance. What really matters is what we want and how we can get it. If we want a world in which we thrive together, then we need to concentrate on finding ways to untie the knots that impede the flow of loving communication between us, and the malfunctioning conscience is the king of such knots.

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 15

His Psychosis

Presumably being well-nurtured would make it easier for values of cooperativeness to be imprinted on the blank slate of a child’s uncritical acceptance, because frustration would not have yet built up in such a way as to lead to rebelliousness against this programming.

But eventually life does provide frustrations to the growing individual. If Griffith tried to hang on to his “good innocent little boy” persona, then the source of frustration would be two-fold - that others didn’t behave according to these principles, and that his own frustrations, including anger at others for not behaving cooperatively, threatened to undermine his own ability to be cooperative himself.

These kinds of insecurities would require the adoption of a form of character armour, so the “good innocent little boy” became his increasingly rigid embattled perception of himself. It was how he would prove himself.

This persona needed to be maintained by self-nurturing - remaining close to nature, for instance. If it were really the genetic basis of the human individual, as he would come to believe, it would be far less fragile than that. You might block out your genetic orientation mentally, but it would be much stronger, and any time the mind lost its strength it would return to that orientation.

When our psyche becomes split - when we hang onto one aspect of ourselves in such a way that it requires us to repress all that is contrary to that aspect, e.g. cling to cooperativeness by repressing feelings of anger, those contrary feelings will only tend to build up more strongly in the subconscious.

So “good little innocent boy” Griffith gradually became more troubled by the aggressive and uncooperative behaviour of those around him, because their aggressiveness and lack of cooperation resonated with his own repressed aggressive feelings and resentment towards his cooperativeness-demanding character armour.

And the “good little innocent boy” isn’t sexual, so Griffith became increasingly troubled by other people’s sexual behaviour and felt the need to repress his own sexual feelings in order to hang onto that persona. Thus he came to view sex as essentially an “attack on innocence”, because other people’s sexual behaviour resonated with his repressed sexual desires which threatened to undermine his “good little innocent boy” persona.

Eventually, if he were to live in the world, and not hide himself away in a monastery somewhere, he had to seek some kind of reconciliation between the extreme idealism of his character armour and the contrary tendencies which he saw all around him and felt within him.

He built a theory, but it was a biased theory intended to normalise his position. He took his own position as the normal inborn condition of all humans and tried to work out why everyone else had diverged from that.

His battle to transcend selfish tendencies is evident throughout his theory. “Love-indoctrination” overcame the horribly competitive nature of other animals. What is “indoctrination” but learned alienation? In just such a way, the “good little innocent boy” persona Griffith has nurtured in himself alienates him from acknowledging the selfish impulses which lie beneath it.

Of course going down this path has made Griffith angry, egocentric and alienated, so when he looks into the mirror of the world he sees his own face staring back at him. And he rails against what he terms “pseudo-idealism” because his own idealism is “pseudo”, i.e a cultivated form of egotism. He also identifies now strongly with the right wing, because their embattled state, in a world in which their selfishness is causing great suffering and endangering the planet, resonates with his own.

In his first book Free : The End of the Human Condition, 1988, Griffith predicted, about its reception : “We will suspect it to be an expression of some form of disguised psychosis and will see its authority, its sense of conviction, as offensive arrogance.” Now we can see that that is what it was. The truth does carry its own authority, but that authority is intrinsic and does not need to be accompanied by big claims and promises.

The “Human Condition” Personified

Griffith says we set out seeking understanding of the human condition. In adolescence we resign ourselves to the fact that we are not going to achieve it. We adopt a false front and become angry, egocentric, selfish and alienated. Alienated in that we block out and angrily deny any truth which criticises us.

Griffith set off to find understanding of the human condition. He was unable to, because to do so he would have had to be able to confront the fact that the social phenomenon of idealism, which has no basis in our genes, was at the heart of the problem. He would have had to confront the fact that the idealism expressed by those he admired and the idealism he had been in the habit of expressing, was the source of all the manifestations of brutality and cruelty which troubled him. This is the central insight of any holistic systems view of the problem of good and evil, as Oscar Wilde acknowledged when he said : “It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.”

Trying to reconcile his “extreme idealism” with “reality” he came up with an evasive explanation for the human condition, one which tried to reconcile the two by providing an appeasing excuse for the “non-ideal”, a “defence for humanity”.

This theory became central to his character armour. In his state of increasing insecurity about his own worth it became his way to prove himself. He became increasingly aggressive and egotistical about the way that he tried to push it on the world. And became more and more alienated, placing more and more effort into collecting bits of quotes from famous thinkers to reinforce the blocks that prevented him from truthful thinking.

All of this is evident in his projections. It is humanity which suffers from a “psychosis”. It is humanity which is “evasive”. He thinks that simply thinking about how the conscious mind works would be enough to quickly lead us to think : “‘Well, if I’m so cleverly insightful why can’t I manage my life in a way that is not so mean and indifferent to others; indeed, why, if I am such a brilliantly intelligent person, am I such a destructively selfish, angry, egocentric, competitive and aggressive monster?’” But is it not possible that this is what his subconscious mind is saying about himself? “What if my theory is wrong? What if my behaviour in support of that false theory has, in truth, been destructively, selfishly, angrily, egocentrically, competitive, aggressive and monstrous behaviour”?

He says that our attitude to the truth is : “‘I don’t believe the criticism is deserved, and in any case it’s too unbearable to accept, so I will never tolerate any insinuation that I am a bad person.’” But hasn’t that been his embattled response to criticism of his work or behaviour?

Griffith is not a bad person. He lacks insight into his own madness. The road to his Hell has been paved with good intensions.

An holistic systems view of the universe sees that everything unfolds in the only way that it can. Thus any judgement of individuals as “good” or “evil” is inappropriate. Griffith has done something which had to be done. Just as Jesus is reputed to have taken the sins of the world onto himself, Griffith has absorbed all of the destructive poison of idealism into himself, so that, by his downfall, he can forever end humanity’s contamination by that poison. In William Blake’s philosophy Satan was the Accuser (the accuser of sin), i.e. idealism. So Griffith, in this metaphorical sense, is possessed by “Satan”. And his battle to have his ideas accepted is “Satan’s” last stand.

But, as I say, nobody is evil. Evil resides in destructive ideas which “possess” us. In time, Griffith’s “demons” will be cast out, both to his relief and the relief of us all.

We can see that the mythological figure Satan represents idealism, i.e. the accusation of sin. “He” is known as “the father of lies”, and it is because of idealism (that original distinction between “good” and “evil”) that we first began lying. When the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis says that we became ashamed of our nakedness and began wearing clothes, I think this a metaphorical way of saying that we became dishonest, we began telling lies as a way of trying to protect ourselves from the criticism which idealism brought with it. Nakedness is a powerful symbol for honesty. Dishonesty to protect ourselves from criticism was the first kind of character armour. And today, still, what keeps us in our various “closets” is the fear that aspects of our thinking, emotions or behaviour will be exposed to criticism. (Of course idealism would eventually cause us to become afraid of our erotic feelings and part of the process of repression that led to would be the literal wearing of clothes because idealism’s intolerance of our natural bodies and natural sexuality eventually made us ashamed of them.)

We can see in religions that they contain intertwining threads of the “Satanic” (the accusation of sin) and the “Godly” (love and forgiveness). This has been religions great flaw, the reason that it has failed to heal or liberate humanity. The disease has generally been a part of what was offered as a cure.

Read Part 16

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condtion" - Part 7

Francis Bacon’s Study for self-portrait, 1976

I don’t know where I heard it, but someone once said that whenever we are presented with an idea we should ask ourselves if the exact opposite might be true.

Griffith believes that we are born expecting an ideal world and ideal behaviour from the people in it and that it is the shock and bewilderment of finding the world so lacking in ideality which eventually breaks us, leading us to resign ourselves to adapting to it.

Of this self-portrait by Francis Bacon he says “there is really no mistaking the agony of the human condition in Bacon’s death-mask-like, twisted, smudged distorted - alienated - faces, and tortured, contorted, stomach-knotted, arms-pinned, psychologically strangled and imprisoned bodies…”

Bacon was a homosexual. As a child he was shy and effeminate and liked dressing up. In an obituary in The New York Review of Books, Caroline Blackwood wrote : “I was told by a homosexual friend of Francis' that he'd once admitted that his father, the dreaded and failed horse trainer, had arranged that his small son spend his childhood being systematically and viciously horsewhipped by his Irish grooms.”

When I look at Bacon’s painting I hear his voice crying : “Daddy, I can tell that I disgust you. To you I’m a freak. You look at me as if I were the fucking Elephant Man. Now I see myself as you see me.”

Is it really a lack of ideality that scars us? Or is it the unforgiving ideals to which we are expected to conform? Because a young Francis Bacon doesn’t fit his father’s ideal of masculinity he is not only denied self-acceptance, he becomes the innocent victim of the insecure adult’s capacity for brutality.

What we need, both as children and as adults, is unconditional love. That in us which is rejected tends to become a warping fixation. To accept ourselves unconditionally and to be accepted by others unconditionally is what brings our creative affectionate cooperative nature back to full health.

Being Able to See the Truth

As Griffith points out, it has been very hard for us to look deeply into the subject of our own troubled nature. I think this is because idealism has always been at the heart of the problem, and, while we may adopt limited forms of idealism in order to meet our conditions of self-acceptance, there are always forms of idealism which, if we are insecure, will feel painfully critical of us. To look at the truth of our situation without pain requires a very high level of self-acceptance. Idealism has power over us only if we think that it is a healthy thing to which we should try to conform. Once we recognise it as a form of collective insanity we can look at it with the cool regard of a scientist peering through a test-tube.

Our character armour is our ego-embattlement, and it take many forms. When our self-acceptance becomes conditional there are various things around which we might build our structure of self-esteem. It may be some form of competitiveness - the struggle to be richer, more famous, etc. Given Griffith’s battling spirit, is it not possible that being more idealistic than everyone else is his form of character armour, his way of competing? If he were not armoured, as a result of his supposedly ideal nurturing, then one would expect him not to be idealistic (troubled by people’s lack of ideality), but rather the opposite of idealistic, unconditionally loving (accepting of all those around him regardless of their behaviour.) Of course the latter would not preclude concern about the effect that behaviour might have.

Often it takes an act of will to fight against seeing a truth. If we see it it is not because we are strong, but because we are too weak to fight it off. To the degree that I may have learned something about the deeper questions of life it is because of my history of mental illness. For a long time I suffered from endogenous depression, later from bipolar disorder. My defences against hurtful ideas were very low. As egos go, mine has always been relatively weak. This method of learning is a precarious one. Glimpses of the truth come through the shattered armour, but the unstable mind lacks the clarity to make coherent sense of it all. It takes patience and application in the periods of health to gradually integrate what has been learned. 

What makes someone an extreme idealist in their youth? I don’t know. But Griffith clung to that idealism and then, by a massive act of will, assembled a theoretical framework to account for our deviation from those ideals. If he had actually discovered the true and complete explanation of the human condition then it would have spread and healed the human race quite quickly. Griffith likes to quote Pierre Teilhard De Chardin : “Truth has to appear only once, in one single mind, for it to be impossible for anything to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze.” Not only has it not been impossible for anything to prevent Griffith’s theory from spreading universally, it has, I’m sure, appeared to him as if it were impossible for anything to make it do so. Nevertheless if being the liberating prophet of humanity from the horrors of the human condition has grown into the breastplate of his character armour, a non-negotiable condition for his self-acceptance, then he has no choice but to keep shoring up its failing flanks and surging ever forward.

But the situation for him is not as grim as it might at first appear. If the human race is an interconnected system thrown into chaos by the interplay of diverse ideologies, Griffith may be conceived of as the knot at its centre, the untying of which is the impasse necessary for all of those streams to flow harmoniously together. As the example of Francis Bacon makes clear, Griffith’s explanation of the human condition is the opposite of the truth. I think this will become increasingly clear as I discuss the rest of his book. What happens when we find we are our own worst enemy? When a person is caught up in projection what they say about others is very often really about themselves. Griffith warns of the shock that will come with “Exposure Day”, the day when we have to face the reality of our corrupted state, but emphasises that it will really be a day of understanding and great relief. The real “Exposure Day” is the one when Griffith and his followers finally have to admit they’ve backed the wrong horse. (Griffith’s extreme reaction to being rejected by Scientific American suggest that this point may not be far off.) This could be very painful, but it needn’t be. There is the example from the Bible of Saul of Tarsus doing a 180° turn-around on the Road to Damascus. Liberating understanding could strike like a bolt of lightning.

Read Part 8

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 6

The Test of Experience

He quotes Albert Einstein : “Truth is what stand the test of experience.” I love that quote. This is the test I apply with my own tentative speculations. But we should always remember the history of cults, conspiracy theories and fanaticisms. Our capacity to be persuaded by something which later turns out not to have been true is fairly high. What I look for in myself and others is the fluid and spontaneous application of a would be insight. If ideas can be used easily and flexibly to illuminate phenomena and can be assimilated relatively effortlessly and used in independent ways by others, then all bodes well for their soundness. We should be wary of ideas which require a hard sell to get people interested, repetitive exposure to be assimilated and are applied to phenomena in a simplistic way which relies on regurgitating the rhetoric of the originator. All of these things are suggestive of dogma.

What Griffith’s ideas have not done for me is to stand the test of experience. Since I rejected them and began to follow my own path my mental health (which had troubled me since adolescence) has improved to the point that I haven’t experienced any depression or other symptoms of mental illness for at least eight years. And I have found an explanation for the human condition which can be shared fairly simply. I know how accountable I find this explanation, but readers will arrive at their own conclusions.

The  “Deaf Effect”

Griffith explains his need to repeat himself and the fact that people find it so hard to really take in what he is saying by referring to what he calls “the deaf effect”. He claims that the subject of the human condition has been so daunting, so off-limits to our brains, that we have had to protectively block it out with denial. In reading his books our brains sense we are being asked to enter forbidden territory and therefore they put up defences which interfere with comprehension.

As I’ve said previously, I think there is some truth to this in the sense that his books are drenched in extreme idealism and since idealism is corroding of our self-acceptance, we may well try to block it out.

He says that watching the videos on the World Transformation Movement’s website will help with this process, because the sight of someone calmly talking about this forbidden territory will reassure us that the danger of going into it has been addressed. It may be true that watching the videos will help readers to feel less defensive, but the argument that it would not be possible to talk about the topic so calmly unless one had achieved full understanding of it and thus made it safe is not true. The calmness would also be there if the speaker had an unshakeable faith in a dogmatic unfounded explanation of that subject. Whether understanding has been achieved has to be judged according to the explanatory ability of the theory, not by the calmness or self-confidence of the person espousing it.

If we learn the habit of unconditional self-acceptance then we will be able to read any book without any fear that anything in it will undermine us - thus we will be able to see it clearly and without bias and assess what it does or doesn’t have to offer us clearly.

One thing that worries me about Griffith’s work is that it contains two principle ingredients :

1. Exposure to extreme idealism. This is what Griffith describes as its “necessarily confronting” content.

2. A defence for our non-ideal condition and behaviour.

If exposure to the first ingredient undermines our self-acceptance, what is the chance that we will be fussy about the accountability of the latter. It may be a case of “any port in a storm.”

So, while I feel that Griffith’s work is a useful exploration and forces us to address serious issues, there is a danger that, if it is not a truthful explanation of the human condition (and I don’t believe that it is), it may be acting like a kind of conceptual parasite fastening onto readers by virtue of their insecurities about their own worth. Does this “information” offer genuine liberation for them or only a way of “proving” their worth through their faith in Griffith’s theory and support for it’s dissemination (what Griffith calls “holding the key aloft”.)

A Praising Review?

Griffith quotes this passage from an Amazon review of his book A Species in Denial :

“tears stream down my face, so overcome have I been by this book. It is the greatest book on the planet, no wait, in the universe. In fact it is the greatest anything in the universe”

It is interesting to look at the full review from which this extract is taken. At the time there were a number of rapturous five star reviews of the book on Amazon, including some by members of Griffith’s organisation. Am I wrong to interpret Beta’s review as a parody of the praising reviews? If so, why does Griffith’s seem oblivious to this?

Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters, 1796-97

Griffith interprets the title of this painting as meaning that “reasoning at a very deep level” confronts us with depressing thoughts about the issue of the human condition. This seems to me to be a twisting of meaning to suit his purpose. “The sleep of reason” clearly refers, not to “reasoning at a very deep level”, but to the cessation of reasoning. When we sleep our reason shuts down and we may have nightmares. Likewise, in waking life, we use reason to defend us against that which we fear, and those fears (“monsters”) may overwhelm us if we let our reason slip. This might actually fit in well with Griffith’s argument that much intellectual activity, including many scientific theories, act as “evasions” of things we are afraid to face, but the way in which he uses it to illustrate the issue of resignation from the struggle to find understanding of the human condition seems inappropriate in spite of the fact that Goya’s painting looks as if it could be depicting a depressed individual.

Resignation

There is no doubt that most of us have a pretty rough transit through adolescence. Griffith puts this down to what he calls “resignation”. The idea is that we are born with this instinctive orientation toward selfless behaviour, but we are born into a world in which people don’t obey those rules. Why? The wrongness of it all is a mystery to us. Towards the end of childhood we might express our frustration and confusion by lashing out. After that we realise that that is no use. We have to find some understanding of this state of affairs. During adolescence we go through the agonising process of trying to do this while gradually realising that the problem is now inside ourselves as well. Resignation is the final reluctant decision to give up the fight to understand, in order to avoid suicidal depression, and adopt the false alienated existence of most adults.

The way I look at the same process is that maturation from infancy to adolescence involves increasing repression. The rebelliousness in later childhood is an attempt to keep releasing our feelings of frustration rather than bottling them up, but generally we are made aware that we have to bottle them up to some extent to fit in with society. And we are given our moral values. The war between our frustrations and our conscience tends to have a corrosive effect on our self-acceptance. We may well be trying to make sense of this, and of the behaviour of others, especially adults.

And during adolescence our sexuality comes fully on stream. Griffth downplays the significance of this, claiming that talk of “puberty blues” is an evasive excuse for what is really happening. Puberty he says “has been going on since animals first became sexual.” But this is itself an evasion of the fact that fear-based sexual repression has been the norm for our species since the dawn of civilisation if not before. The enjoyment of erotic pleasure is a basic part of our biology. Foetuses sometimes masturbate in the womb. It seems likely that our proto-human ancestors were like the bonobos, engaging freely and indiscriminately in erotic activity with their fellows. But, as our self-acceptance was undermined by the arrival of idealism, we became insecure and jealous. This meant that we had to exercise restraint on our expression of our erotic desires in order to maintain the stability of our newly neurotic society. The more discipline-based, hierarchical and patriarchal our society became, the more of a threat was posed by the erotic. What happens during adolescence is that our sexual straitjackets are applied by the adults around us. Our erotic impulses have to be contained lest they cause discomfort to these neurotic adults. This can be pretty stressful. I remember at high school, the natural desire of we young boys to enjoy the erotic sight of naked women in magazines was treated by the teachers at our Catholic school as a kind of sickness. We were encouraged to feel shame about this aspect of our natural innocent biological nature.

Unaccountable shame about masturbation was an early symptom of my troubled adolescence. I wasn’t told that I shouldn’t masturbate, in fact my parents had given me a sex education book to read earlier which made it clear that it was a healthy natural activity. I suspect the shame I felt could not so easily be reached by this rational explanation, but that I was picking up on and absorbing the sense of shame that my fellow students and my teachers felt about their own masturbatory activities.

I did ask myself about the human condition. Why did we spend so much effort on seeking wealth, fame, power, or whatever, when, at base, what we most wanted was to be loved? All of those pursuits were poor ways to find love, but if we all decided to love each other we could be happy. Something seemed to be blocking that from happening, but what?

Next I developed an obsession that I was going to gouge out my own eyes. Was this Oedipal? Oedipus put out his eyes. Was it because I read in the New Testament “And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.”? After all, I was ashamed of my lusts, and looking at sexy women was what inflamed those lusts. I don’t know.

The next major stage in my troubled adolescence was when, after a bout of the flu, I had a thought about killing my baby niece. This was the time when I really had to battle with the human condition. Was I evil? Was I a monster, that I could even think of killing an innocent baby?

In Griffith’s scheme this would be me encountering the inevitable evidence of the “upset” caused in my ego by the blind criticism of my genetic conscience. My resentment at the criticism of my innocent conscience made me want to attack innocence in the world around me, in this case in the form of an infant.

That is not what was happening. Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual. I was run down because of the flu and the stress of trying to reconcile my natural instincts - including my erotic desires - to society’s restrictions and judgements while maintaining a functioning level of self-acceptance. Being in this state naturally made me selfish and desirous of the attention of those around me. But the baby was getting all the attention. So I fantasised briefly about killing the baby. At first the thought carried little emotional weight. But then I began to think that it was evidence that I was a bad person. It began to undermine my self-acceptance. The more I fixated on this unacceptable thought, the more power it gained over me. I was transfixed by fear and came to feel I might actually act upon it. So what was going on was not a relationship between my conscious mind and some genetic orientation to selflessness. What was happening was that a conceptual negative feedback loop had arisen as a result of my intolerance towards my selfishness and a harmless violent fantasy.

What I needed as an adolescent wasn’t some grand story about the heroic nature of the human race’s need to defy the unjust condemnation of it’s genetic orientation toward selflessness during the search for liberating understanding. What I needed was a more sex-positive attitude in the adults around me and an understanding that thoughts and feelings, no matter how anti-social, in and of themselves do no harm and should be accepted unconditionally.

It is true that we tend to adopt a false self during adolescence. This is our armouring brought about by the erosion of our generalised self-acceptence and the dependence of what is left on the maintenance of a fixed self-image. For instance, in females, this is the time when they may adopt a sex object self, where the ego-reinforcement (condition of self-acceptance) which comes from attracting the sexual interest of others becomes more important than the healthy enjoyment of erotic experience itself.

Read Part 7

The Psychology of the Right Wing and the Left Wing

The state of mental health for humans is one of unconditional self-acceptance. When this state is compromised we become selfish, that is our attention is naturally directed away from the interests of others and towards the problem of our malfunctioning psyche. It is just the same as when we are using a piece of machinery and some part of the machinery begins to perform inefficiently. We will naturally direct our attention there.

The compromising of our self-acceptance begins in childhood. We may be treated by some others as unacceptable in some way for long enough to come to believe it. And we will tend to come into contact with some form of idealism/perfectionism, approaches to life which bring with them the idea that self-acceptance should not be unconditional, but has to be earned. At that time, of course, we are learning the rules of civil behaviour. Criticism of our behaviour is often simply helpful feedback which, all other things being equal, we won’t take personally. What eats away at our self-acceptance, and thus sows the seeds of selfishness, is anything which gives us the message that what lies behind our behaviour - i.e. our thoughts and emotions - are unacceptable.

There are many ways in which we may try to fix the problem once our self-acceptance has been compromised. We may use material things. “I’m acceptable because I wear a Gucci dress.” We may use religious affiliation. “I’m acceptable because I’m a Christian.” We may use token acts of kindness. “I’m acceptable because I have a sponsor child in Africa.” We may use our political affiliation. “I’m good because I vote Democrat/Republican.” We may use sport. “I’m acceptable because my football team won this week.” We may use our own achievements. “I’m acceptable because I got my Phd./climbed a mountain/had a hit record.”

These methods of addressing the problem of our compromised self-acceptance, while often effective in the short-term, are generally not effective in the long-term. Like the junky we are fine when we get our fix, but when it wears off we need more. We are trying to fill the hole, but we don’t know how to heal it.

Healing the hole requires learning the habit of unconditional self-acceptance, learning to embrace all aspects of our thinking and emotion, no matter how frightening or repulsive some of what we find in ourselves may at first seem.

There are other things which can have a healing effect. Physical affection and physical pleasure (as long as it is achieved without causing harm to ourselves or others) has the power to reconnect us with the state of unconditional self-acceptance (and acceptance of others) which characterised our infancy. And anything which enables us to achieve a cathartic release of repressed emotions - of anger, sorrow, etc. - helps to drain off that which separates us from that emotional state. Anything from crying at a sad movie to pumping one’s fist to death metal may be a way of getting back in touch with our deeper humanity.

It is no wonder that we see so much anger and violence in the world. To lack self-acceptance is to be deeply needy. There isn’t enough attention from others, enough material goods, etc., to satisfy the ravenous hunger of our need. Imagine putting a pack of hungry dogs in a cage and only giving them enough food for a quarter of their number. There may be enough food to feed us, but not enough of the requirements of our ego-satisfaction. So our frustration and feelings of hostility toward others builds.

To what degree do we try to accommodate selfishness, and to what degree do we try to suppress it?

In politics, the right takes the approach that the freedom of the individual takes precedence while the left takes the approach that curbing the freedom of the individual is justified by the need to prevent the domination of the powerless majority by the powerful few.

Both of these approaches are compromises, and neither even attempts to do anything about the deeper psychological problem which makes a compromise necessary. The dialogue between left and right is a dialogue about how much discipline needs to be imposed within the cage of hungry dogs. The only way to provide more food is to address the psychological roots of the problem.

If we were to go all the way to the right wing, we would end up with a dog-eat-dog society in which the weak would be totally dominated by the powerful. If we went all the way to the left wing, we would end up with an oppressive and dishonest society in which feelings of frustration and hostility would build and build beneath the surface, unable to find any expression because of the need to maintain some illusory state of politically correct harmony.

Each end of the political spectrum represents a dangerous form of idealism. Political decisions need to be realistic and pragmatic - they need to find the best compromise between the two sides of our nature.

Compromised self-acceptance can draw us to either end of the political spectrum. “I’m an heroic defender of the rights of the individual!” we may cry. Or : “I’m an heroic defender of the downtrodden, the planet, the animals, etc.” Just two different brands of junkie-dope. And there are plenty of pusher’s selling both brands.

The unconditionally self-accepting individual has no desire to be seen as a hero or to view themselves as a hero. They may do something which others regard as heroic, but the desire to be perceived as heroic is a form of competitive thinking which makes sense only from the perspective of the neurotic character armour. 

From political leaders to church leaders to cult leaders, there are plenty of people offering up a steady supply of junkie-dope. To keep getting it you have to keep supporting them. None of them want to set you free, because they are junkies too. They’ve forgotten what freedom feels like.

In most cases this compromised self-acceptance leads to a division in the psyche between our repressed feelings of frustration and our conscience.

The conscience is that part of our ego where we store our learned expectations about ourselves which includes any form of morality that we may have been taught by our parents, teachers, religious leaders etc. Our conscience contains our ideas about what constitutes good behaviour. Of course the feelings of frustration and hostility, which grow out of the selfishness which is a product of our compromised self-acceptance, are often in conflict with our conscience. These feelings lead us to do things we believe to be wrong, and we feel guilt as a result. This is the war within us.

It's the villain who gives the hero his hero status

In trying to make sense of the conflicts in the world around us we come to see them as outward manifestations of this inner conflict. The individual on the left is trying to live according to their conscience, and thus will see the individual on the right as a representation of their own rebellious feelings of hostility to that conscience, a rebelliousness they are trying to tame. And the individual on the right identifies with the rebellious tendencies in themselves and identifies those on the left with the oppressiveness of their own conscience, which tells them that they should be more concerned about the welfare of the powerless, the planet, the animals, etc.

I’m speaking here of very general tendencies, so I’m grossly oversimplifying. Within every individual, right or left leaning, there is a complex of elements of conscientiousness and rebelliousness against the conscience. And the conscience of every individual is different. But I think it is worth considering how the individual’s view of and interaction with the world around them tends to be a reflection of conflicts going on within their own mind.

The central irony of this dualistic strategy is that, if the hero-status of those on the left is dependent on fighting against the right and the hero-status of those on the right is dependent on fighting against the left, then the continued existence of the opposition appears to be in the best interest of both, even though the conflict itself is damaging the survival chances of all.

Ideological dogmatism - left wing or right wing - compromises the effectiveness of any attempt to manage society, because such ideology is the warped product of our internal neurotic battle. It is not founded in a rational assessment of our situation, whether that be an acknowledgement of the psychological state of individuals, the way an economic system actually works, or what our ecological limitations are.

The key factors for effective politics are -

1. Accurate information.

2. Capacity for cooperation.

3. Pragmatic rather than ideological decision making.

1. We have an unprecedented ability to gather and process information, but there are those who, rather than assessing information honestly, will cherry-pick data and present it out of context to support a personally or ideologically predetermined course of action.

2. Our capacity for effective unforced cooperation depends on our level of self-acceptance. If we are a well-fed dog we will be able to work happily with others, but if we are hungry we will only cooperate if beaten.

3. What matters is whether or not something works. “By their fruits shall ye know them.”

Hurt-Proofing Ourselves

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The other day I was having a discussion with a friend about whether or not a particular song in a famous Broadway and Hollywood musical amounted to an offensively racist caricature. I was countering the arguments for it being seen as racist, but I knew that, for me, it was just a game. The song made my friend angry. To me it was just a song in a musical which I enjoy.

I thought about this further to myself, but didn't express my broader thoughts on the topic at the time. “Nothing offends me," I thought. “As far as I'm concerned someone could do a whole musical in blackface and I wouldn't be bothered by it. It wouldn't make me feel bad personally, and why should I be offended on someone else's behalf. Aren't we all able to be offended for ourselves without any help."

This may seem callous or selfish. I'm not saying that this is how everyone should view these things. But if we examine what is going on here I think we can learn something useful.

We have a saying : “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." But we know that this is not true. Other people's insults and putdowns do hurt us. Often they hurt a lot. But why?

To understand this we need to go back to our childhood. The reason we had greater emotional resilience and a greater capacity for joy when we were young children is because our self-acceptance had not yet been compromised. We seemed to ourselves acceptable because nobody had yet taught us that we might be unacceptable in any way. As we got older we were subjected to criticism by adults and other children. If we understood this as an expression of displeasure with our behaviour alone and not a sign that there was something essentially wrong with us, our self-acceptance would not have been compromised. But this can be a fine distinction for a child to have to make. Also we were taught a value system and a set of social norms. If these were unreasonably harsh then we probably developed unforgiving expectations regarding our own behaviour. We developed a conscience which was less like a friendly guide and more like an oppressive dictator who punished us for all failures to follow his orders by undermining our sense of ourselves as acceptable.

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The basis for mental health is unconditional self-acceptance. But what happened as our self-acceptance was eaten away is that it became conditional. We could accept ourselves if we were good. We could accept ourselves if we were successful. We could accept ourselves if other people accepted us. This is a very vulnerable position to be in because others can undermine our self-acceptance at any time by removing the conditions on which that self-acceptance depends.

We may not realise it but we live within a kind of psychological economy in which the traded commodities are the requirements for self-acceptance. Most of the control others exercise over us and of the control we exercise, or try to exercise, over others comes from the application of self-acceptance bribes and threats. When we treat someone well, we help them to bolster their self-acceptance. If we try to control another's behaviour by, for instance, making them feel guilty or shaming them in front of others, we are attempting to blackmail them into behaving in a way which conforms with our own wishes or beliefs about what is right or wrong by trying to take away the conditions for their self-acceptance.

The good news is that we can drop out of this sick economy. Or, if we chose, we can continue to use it against others while being invulnerable to it ourselves. I'm not saying that that would be a healthy thing to do, but it would be possible. The healthy thing to do is to hurt-proof ourselves and teach others how to do likewise. The more hurt-proof individuals there are in the world, the less scope there is for anyone to oppress others.

Of course not all forms of oppression are based on exclusively psychological transactions. Those in positions of power can make decisions prejudicial to those they don't like for whatever reason. And there is always the possibility of violence. But if we are hurt-proof we have a better base from which to deal with problems of organisational prejudice or violence. And there is more solidarity between hurt-proof individuals to stand against such forms of oppression because social relations between such individuals are not compromised by the inherent fragility of self-acceptance exchanges. The less we need the more we are there for each other.

So how do we hurt-proof ourselves?

Let's go back to that saying : “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." Why do names hurt us? If we are black, why does it hurt to be called a “nigger"? If we are gay, why does it hurt to be called a “queer"? Why does it hurt if someone says we are “ugly" or “pathetic" or “a  loser"?

Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce in the movie Lenny (1974) 

doing his infamous piece about racist words

The reason is that we don't fully accept ourselves. Our self-acceptance has been worn down by this kind of thing. We've taken the put-downs “on board". We have allowed ourselves to get to the point where our self-acceptance is dependent, among other things, on people not calling us these things. When people do so, it upsets our emotional equilibrium. It makes us feel angry or hurt or frightened. Of course the fear may sometimes be applicable if the behaviour is indicative of a desire to do violence to us.

The way to hurt-proof ourselves is to re-learn unconditional self-acceptance. I say re-learn because we knew how to unconditionally accept ourselves as young children. The learning process we went through was that of learning that we were unacceptable or could be unacceptable in various ways. So hurt-proofing can be understood as a kind of unlearning or deprogramming of the unhelpful lessons we learned growing up. We are not brainwashing ourselves to believe that we are acceptable. We are rediscovering a more accountable truth about ourselves.

This may all seem very theoretical, but there is a very powerful and simple strategy which can help us down this path. Unconditional self-acceptance is something we practice, and the more we practice the more proficient we get at it. It is like building up a muscle. This is an important analogy because, while we want to become more like our child self, what we don't want is the child's vulnerability to having its self-acceptance under-mined. Back then we had unconditional self-acceptance because we had not yet been exposed to the harsh realities of life among those whose loss of such self-acceptance also undermined their acceptance of others, including ourselves. For a few years we are usually protected from the full savagery of the neurotic economy of the psyche. We need to regain our state of health, but we also need to know what we did not know as a child, and that is how to protect that state.

Re-gaining unconditional self-acceptance can involve constantly reminding ourselves that we are acceptable irrespective of what we do, what we feel, what we think, what we have and what others think of us. You might question the inclusion of “what we do". Aren't we unacceptable if we do something really terrible? The problem with this way of thinking is that we are blackmailing ourselves. We are saying that the reason not to do something really terrible is that we will remove our self-acceptance if we do. But a shortage of self-acceptance is most likely the motivating force behind doing something really terrible in the first place. The natural state of the unconditionally accepting, and thus non-neurotic, individual is one of benevolence, love, clarity of mind and creativity. If we wish to persuade ourselves not to do something really terrible, the best argument is not that it would make us unacceptable, but that it would be against our own best interests. People who do really terrible things rarely have very rewarding lives. And past actions can't be changed, so to view ourselves as unacceptable because of a past action, no matter how terrible, would only be appropriate if viewing ourselves that way was going to make us less likely to do something like that in future. Since lack of self-acceptance is the root cause of destructive actions, this would be likely to have the opposite effect.

We might want to make use of an affirmation. In this case, why not use the simple affirmation : “I am acceptable." The problem with some affirmations, it seems to me, is that they can set up expectations. If we say : “I am as calm as the lily pad that floats on a tranquil pond," that's all well and good until the next time we lose our temper, and then our self-acceptance is likely to be undermined by the fact that we haven't lived up to our own affirmation. “I am acceptable," doesn't seem to have any short-comings and it is a simple expression of the truth with which we are seeking to reconnect.

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But this is not the powerful strategy. The powerful strategy is one which we can use when presented by anything which might emotionally destabilise us, especially things others might say which tend to leave us feeling angry or hurt.

In our state of conditional self-acceptance, what happens if someone says something to us which compromises that state? What if someone upsets those conditions on which our self-acceptance depends? The first thing which happens is that we take on board what they are saying. If it were a missile we would say that it hits home. Then, if we don't collapse in a heap, we mount our resistance. We tell ourselves why what the other person has said is not true or not relevant. Or we tell them, perhaps angrily. So we may fight back, but only after having been wounded. The habitual defences, conceptual and or verbal, that we use to defend ourselves in these situations are a fundamental part of our character armour. Character armour is a structure of defensive habits. It tends to come into play when we feel threatened, but it can also be something we hide behind in anticipation of being threatened.

If we think of the words or attitudes which might upset us as missiles and ourselves as a ship against whose hull they are aimed, then there is an alternative to the armour which only comes into play after we have been struck. That alternative involves making the ship itself so invincible that the missiles explode impotently like amusing fireworks rather than doing any damage.

This involves a trick which gives us control over the emotional transaction.

Let's look at an example :

Fred comes up to me on the street and he says : “Joe, you're a disgusting piece of shit."

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I don't respond. What I say to myself is : “Fred is a person who is saying that I'm a piece of shit."

Of course this is a skill which might take a little while to learn. We need to learn to take pause, and that in itself can be a challenge. But the more we practise the easier it gets. It won't protect us the first time, but it will after the point at which it becomes habit.

What are we doing when we take this approach? We are removing ourselves from the subjective situation and giving ourselves a way to look at it objectively.

What we would normally be doing is going through this kind of process :

“Joe, you're a disgusting piece of shit."

(I'm a piece of shit. Hey, wait a minute. I'm not a piece of shit. How can Fred say something like that. I'll get Fred for saying I'm a piece of shit.)

Fred has got to me.

Even if my response is modified somewhat by saying “Fred thinks I'm a piece of shit", this is still something which might make me feel less acceptable.

By thinking “Fred is a person who is saying that I'm a piece of shit" I am stripping the situation down to the bare facts. I am not validating the opinion that I am a piece of shit. I'm not even validating the idea that Fred genuinely thinks I'm a piece of shit. He is a person who is saying that. (Of course, it might be more correct to say "he is a person who said that" but somehow the present tense has a more powerfully distancing effect to the past tense.)

Rather than being a person who experiences themselves as being under attack we have put ourselves in a role comparable to that of a scientist observing Fred's behaviour as if he were an amoeba on a laboratory slide.

From this perspective our assessment of what has been said becomes evidence-based rather than emotion-based. Fred is someone who is saying that I'm a piece of shit. Is there evidence for his point of view? Why might he think this way? Is there something wrong with him? Are there factors not directly related to me which are influencing his current attitude? We have the equanimity to ask ourselves these questions because we didn't take on board what Fred was saying directly as a transaction in the economy of self-acceptance. And the more we practise this approach the more our self-acceptance becomes disentangled from what others have to say about us.

You might think I'm advocating a life-style of cold rationality. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a technique to be used where it is useful, not something adopted as an habitual approach to life. If I'm walking down the street and a pretty girl smiles at me I'm hardly going to say to myself : “There is a member of the female gender who is looking at me and curling her lips in a way traditionally associated with friendly feelings." It feels good to be smiled at. This strategy is aimed only at learning how to become invulnerable to social transactions which would leave us feeling disempowered. And it is aimed at disempowering those who would hold us to ransom over our own self-acceptance.

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This is also a strategy we can use on ourselves. Let's look at a way it might be used to help us beat addictive behaviour. Maybe I have a problem with chewing my nails. There I am chewing my nails and thinking “I just can't stop chewing my nails." I'm hardly likely to learn to stop when I'm arguing so persuasively against my own ability to do so. Let's try that again. “I'm a person who chews his nails." Not much better, because I'm tying my self-identity to the fact that I chew my nails. “I'm a person who is chewing his nails." Now I'm clearly faced with the situation, with nothing to undermine any strategy I might come up with to help me stop. And the situation seems much less overwhelming.

By following this strategy we can take ourselves out of the defensive position, and this brings tremendous benefits. Over time we find that we don't need our character armour, and it is only when we no longer need it that we discover just how much of an impediment it was.

When we are armoured we can only acknowledge reality to the extent that it doesn't seriously threaten our armour. Where to acknowledge the truth about something would destabilise us, because our self-acceptance is conditional on that thing not being true, we are forced to live in denial.

Let's say that Sally sees a beautiful clearing in the woods and thinks it would be the perfect place to set up a vegan donut stand. People say she is crazy, you can't sell donuts in the middle of the forest. But she goes ahead and buys the land and builds her donut stand. And it turns out to be a big success. She's never succeeded at anything before in her life. Everyone said she was a loser. Now people are travelling all the way into the woods to buy her delicious donuts. People don't call her a loser any more. They love her because of her donuts. But then, one day, an ecologist comes and tells her that the place where she has built her successful donut stand was once the breeding ground of the fluorescent woodpecker. As a result of her donut stand, this beautiful bird has become extinct. We will never see one again. What can she do but put her fingers in her ears and go "blah-blah-blah"? In her own mind her acceptability as a human being is dependent on the ideas that she doesn't harm animals and that her donut stand is a success.

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Many of us have our own vegan donut stands and our fluorescent woodpeckers. It is the truths we can't face about ourselves, because they would compromise our fragile self-acceptance, which lead to a spectrum of problems from failed marriage to war. Love is a form of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. If a relationship is between two people whose self-acceptance is not conditional, it will be a loving relationship. But a relationship of dependence based on fulfilling the other party's conditions for their own self-acceptance is bound to be fraught with tension and not conducive to love. Why does marital infidelity sometimes make us so mad that we will kill our partner and risk spending many years in jail? Because our self-acceptance has become totally conditional on having a faithful partner. We would view the incident as a trivial one if this were not the case. It is the damage done to our fragile ego which keeps it from being trivial. And for many patriotic individuals, the belief that their country is a knight in shining armour and any country which would attack it or interfere with its interests could not possibly have a legitimate grievance, is a major feature of their character armour. If this were not the case, peace in the Middle East would not be such an elusive dream.

Let's look at the subject of political beliefs. I'll keep it very simple. I'm not interested in how political beliefs differ, only in how we relate to our own political beliefs and those of others. So we'll just talk about one person who identifies themselves as a conservative and another who identifies themselves as a liberal.

How grounded a person's political belief system is, whether conservative or liberal, is dependent on their level of self-acceptance. If our self-acceptance is unconditional then we will look around us at the world and take in what is going on and listen to all sorts of different ideas. There will be no need to filter what we take in in the way of information or ideas in order to protect us from anything which might contravene the conditions of our self-acceptance. This means that, when we form our belief system, conservative or liberal, it will be founded on a lot of information and a clear understanding of what various individuals on both sides of the political spectrum propose. Such an individual will have stability when it comes to discussing politics as they will in all other areas, as a result of the solid foundations of their self-acceptance. But if someone's self-acceptance is heavily compromised and thus conditional, their political allegiance may quickly become a part of their character armour. I'm acceptable because I'm a liberal. I'm acceptable because I'm a conservative. This leads to two things. If I'm acceptable because I'm a liberal, that means that conservatives are not acceptable. So I am in a strongly adversarial position from the get go, where the vehemence of my opposition to conservatives may become a crucial element in maintaining my self-acceptance. Also, to maintain my position, in the absence of the grounded understanding achieved by the unconditionally self-accepting individual, I will need to filter out or deny any information or ideas which might call my insecure liberal position into question. I may also find myself focussing obsessively on the misdeeds of individual conservatives as a way of reinforcing my liberal-good, conservative-bad dichotomy. And, of course, all these things would be the same if I were a conservative whose conservatism was a crucial part of his character armour.

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We can get an idea of how armoured someone is in their political views by how angry they become at those with the opposite allegiance. This doesn't mean that a person whose political views are less armoured may not view the fact that so many people push for an opposite approach as a problem, but they will not feel it as a personal affront. A doctor recognises that cancer is a problem, but he doesn't launch into a tirade about the evil of cancer. He calmly sets about doing something about the problem. When we look around at a lot of the political conflicts that are going on in our society we can see just how many of us are so desperate to hang onto our fragile vision of ourselves as good guys standing in opposition to bad guys that we are not living in the real world.

So lets get back to where we started with the question of protecting ourselves or each other from racist musicals. Being subjected to abuse and prejudice because of one's skin colour can tend to undermine one's self-acceptance. A musical in which white actors wear black face, in this day and age, might be one straw too many for the camel's back, even though all that is happening is that a bunch of actors are putting a particular kind of make-up on their face. The thing itself is trivial. The effect it has may not be. To someone who has learned the art of unconditional self-acceptance, it's intrinsic triviality is clear. It is no skin off their nose how somebody else decides to comport themselves on a theatre stage.

Now I'm not advocating that we reinstate the institution of the Black and White Minstrel Show. I use this example in order to highlight a significant problem and two approaches to dealing with it. Racist musicals are not a common problem in our society, but other hurtful expressions are. There is hate speech and cyber-bullying on the internet. And many of us are subjected to verbal abuse at other times.

The main approach we take to trying to address these problems and protect those most vulnerable to them is by trying to control such expressions. We may legislate against them and/or we may try to shame those who engage in such practices into stopping. But control strategies never actual solve problems. They may contain them temporarily or they may push evidence of them from one place or time to another place or time. Laws and social pressure give us the ability to force individuals to repress expression of their hostile feelings, but repression doesn't make those hostile feelings go away. The roots of hostility can only be healed when everything is out in the open. The road to health is one which leads towards freedom not away from it.

I'm not arguing that we should abandon attempts to control expressions of hostility. I'm only trying to highlight the limitations of that approach.

The other approach is to promote an understanding of how we can hurt-proof ourselves. We can't possibly protect a psychologically vulnerable individual from all of the expressions of hostility or prejudice which might be painful for them, but we can easily teach the skill of hurt-proofing, so that they don't need such protection. And the same technique addresses other problems. Take body image. We can't protect a vulnerable teenager from seeing fashion magazines, but teach them unconditional self-acceptance and they can't possibly develop anorexia or bulimia.

But one word of warning. Don't try using the method I've outlined above out loud with someone. To have one's power taken away to such a degree must be incredibly frustrating. When having an argument with a friend I responded to his expression of a particular opinion with “You are a person who is saying that. Why should it effect me?" He ended up physically attacking me. Be aware that, if words cease to hurt you, some may resort to sticks and stones.

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