The Anti-Christ May Come As a Social Justice Warrior

Drawing by vladischern

I’ve reached a crossroads where I realise that I need to take a stand and make my position clear.

I was telling a Christian friend yesterday that I’ve come to the conclusion that predictions of the rise of an “Anti-Christ” in the Bible refer to the domination of the world by a particular dogmatic cluster which has been described by various people as “critical theory”, “identity politics”, “postmodern Marxism” or “cultural Marxism”. The latter two terms may not be completely accurate, but what matters is what is being pointed to by them, not how accurate the name is.

There are other people who are much better than me at dissecting and critiquing these ideas. I recommend Jordan Peterson or Bret Weinstein.

The reason I have come to identify these belief systems with the figure of the Anti-Christ is that they promise what Jesus promised - an end to the injustices of the world - but it is not what they deliver.

For me, as an unbeliever, Jesus represents a principle of truth, love, non-judgement, forgiveness and generosity. Love - open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication - is the answer. But I believe that the dogma of identity politics, which has spread through our culture, brings lies, hatred, judgement, vindictiveness and selfishness, all the time claiming to fight those things.

When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:)

Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains:

Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house:

Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes.

And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days!

But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day:

For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.

And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened.

Matthew 15-22

The “abomination of desolation” refers to offerings give to a false God. To me the significance of this expression is that we are coming to a time when “social justice” replaces love as our highest good. Justice is important, but, by its very nature, it can only be achieved by force and control. Love, the attitude which allows us to treat all our fellows as equal embodiments of the divine, leads us toward healing and a better world for all naturally.

The rise of the “Black Lives Matter” movement has made it all so clear. The cat is out of the bag. We have a movement which claims to be about saving black lives, but it calls for the defunding of the police. Since far more black lives are lost to violent crime than to police brutality, this means it is promising one thing and delivering the opposite. If you point this out you may be labelled a racist. This thought virus is powerful and deadly. The sensible approach to reducing police brutality would be to spend far more money on the police so that they can spend more time training and so that enough police can be employed that it is very easy to fire any police officer the first time they show signs of racism or a propensity to use excessive force. No matter how dissatisfied anyone is with the police, they should be able to realise that any power vacuum created by a reduction in the effectiveness of the police will be filled by violent criminals.

When I went onto Twitter today I found someone who appreciates my writing saying : “If you've ever heard me say that heteronormativity is a product of patriarchy, this is where I got the information from. The book is called "How to Be Free" by Joe Blow.” The following pages of my book were attached to illustrate this.

So here is my crisis. What do I do when I find my writing being associated with that which I identify as the Anti-Christ?

I don’t blame anyone for making this connection. I talk about some of the same things that are talked about in critical theory. I talk about the psychological basis for patriarchy and fear of homosexual desire. But I don’t support calls to “smash the patriarchy” as those in the grip of identity politics sometimes do. I talk of patriarchy mainly in the past tense, because our society no longer excludes women from positions of power.

What about “heteronormativity”? It is defined as “the belief that heterosexuality, predicated on the gender binary, is the norm or default sexual orientation. It assumes that sexual and marital relations are most fitting between people of opposite sex.”

I don’t really disagree with that. Gender is binary. Biologically there is male and female. There are psychological characteristics which we identify as masculine or feminine. There isn’t some third gender with which we identify characteristics. Of course there are men who exhibit more feminine characteristics and women who exhibit more masculine characteristics, and there some people who have about an even mix. It is like colour. There are only three primary colours. All the other colours are mixtures of those. All gender identities are mixtures of the masculine and the feminine. And heterosexuality is the statistical norm, and heterosexual families are the organisation best suited to producing healthy children - all other things being equal.

None of that is to say that we should idealistically insist on that which may be the statistical norm. There are many ways of doing things effectively in the world.

In my book I posit that bisexuality is the underlying form of sexuality. I arrived at this conclusion as a result of what I learned about our close primate relatives - the bonobos - who engage in erotic exchanges irrespective of gender. Also because we have the biological capacity to share erotic physical pleasure with others irrespective of gender. And because many heterosexuals are uncomfortable with homosexuality, which implies, to me, that there is a contrary desire for it buried beneath the public face. All of this is just speculation on my part.

Another incident which has focused this problem in my mind has been the treatment of J. K. Rowling over her discussion of transsexuality. I read her blog post on the topic, which I found to be remarkably sensible, well-informed, open-minded and compassionate. Yet, she has been roundly attacked. This tells me that we are at a very dark time. To speak the truth in a way which challenges this pervasive dogma is dangerous, but necessary.

Some may think me paranoid to use concepts like thought virus or even demonic possession to depict what is happening, but I think it helps to visualise how it works - the way that it has a life of its own, which operates through people without them being aware of what is happening to them.

I’ve said that idealism is the root of all evil and is a thought virus. Identity politics (lets stick with that term) is the most dangerous form of idealism which has ever existed, because it has spread most broadly to the global community. Religious groups have often done terrible things because of an idealistic insistence on imposing their dogma on others. And communists and fascists have slaughtered millions as a result of their idealistic dogma. If the current lie can be exposed in time, it may not come to that. But I have no doubt that, if not exposed as the lie that it is, this current dogma will lead to even worse horrors and, in fact, the end the human race.

So, there, I’ve explained where I stand. If anyone wants to quote my writings as a way of supporting this dogma, they are welcome to. That is their business, not mine. From the very beginning I’ve renounced what I call “the control strategy”. I take no ownership of my ideas. They are offered to be used as the person receiving them sees fit. To my mind this is how I differentiate myself from what I call “the Anti-Christ”. You will see those who are in “his” thrall trying to control others expression through intimidation or censorship.

I am, and have always been, on the side of freedom and love.

"Ye shall know them by their fruits." Matthew 7:16

It's O.K. If You Hate Me

Photo by Denis Pepin.

It seems that the battle between the conscience and the insecure ego is playing itself out around us all the time. It is the theme of our times and it has been the story of our history from the very beginning. And, surely, it is not just around us but within us that the battle rages.

I feel myself torn. Those who play the conscience of our times articulate the realities of our situation ecologically and socially. While they may not always get it right, they are pointing to things which cannot be dismissed without burying one’s head dangerously in the sand.

On the other hand, when such individuals inspire even violent hatred, that is not something alien to me. I identify with those who feel this way. I feel it in me too. Preach at me. Tell me what is wrong with me. Remind me of the things I deep down know are true but desperately wish were not true. And I’ll wish you were dead.

This dilemma is the story of our species. What we need in order to behave lovingly towards each other is self-acceptance. From this comes our ability to be generous, open, spontaneous and honest. But an unforgiving insistence on such behaviour means that our self-acceptance is progressively undermined by feelings of guilt. Beyond a certain point, the more the conscience insists, the more the ego resists.

Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering or insecure organism. Thus guilt, far from correcting the totality of our behaviour, makes us selfish.

And the dictatorial demands of the conscience on the selfish individual generate malevolence - the desire to revenge ourselves on the critical voice by doing something ever worse.

Of course we couldn’t do without the conscience. We needed to have some concept of what loving behaviour would look like which could continue to exist in our minds long after the love needed to realise it had died from our hearts. If we had been able to forgive our failures to meet that standard, then that love would never have died, but we have never been able to forgive ourselves enough.

The history of the human race has been one of great courage, determination and initiative. When we think back at the dangers and challenges our ancestors met head on and the terrible suffering they experienced, and inflicted upon each other, it is remarkable that beings of mere flesh and blood could persist through all that.

As Hamlet said, “…conscience does make cowards of us all.” Historically we persisted against the odds partly because we repressed our conscience. Our conscience would tell us that it was wrong to conquer, to steal and to oppress. But we did it anyway. If we had followed our conscience exclusively we would probably be living in huts in the jungle eating nuts and berries - without science and without the benefits of technology.

This doesn’t mean we could or should continue to live a life of conscience-suppressing domination. We just don’t want to lose the spirit and courage which we will need to meet our current crises. If we are to find a new relationship with the conscience it mustn’t be one in which our spirit is broken, crushed beneath it’s unforgiving jackboot.

If we are to have a sustainable new way of living it will have to be an expression of exuberance arising from an unalloyed love for ourselves. It can’t be some humiliating act of penance for past misdeeds.

The courage that brought us through the nightmare of history was the courage of divided beings. We were carrying the burden of a condemning conscience. If we can heal this conflict and all of the social divisions it gave rise to, then we will find a courage and determination we have never known.

How do we do this?

We need an understanding of this underlying human dilemma.

We need to unconditionally accept thoughts and feelings, recognising that they are the inevitable product of our current situation and that, the more we acknowledge them consciously, the more easily we can chose appropriate behaviour in the light of them. To accept a thought does not mean to believe that it is a truth. And to accept a feeling does not mean to act upon it.

We need to be able to honestly articulate our psychological position.

Acceptance is what shrinks the dark side of us. It was inflamed by unforgiving criticism, and criticism open or implied continues to exacerbate it.

So what if someone hates me? I say : “It’s O.K. if you hate me. If I were you I know I would hate me too.”

Hatred is a cover emotion for underlying feelings of guilt or shame. If we can feel that our feelings of hatred, as an emotion, are accepted, perhaps the feelings of guilt or shame can come into consciousness. The idea that an emotion is accepted acts against the impulse towards repression, while criticism of that emotion encourages repression of whatever lies beneath it.

Sometimes sadism masquerades as righteousness. Sometimes the sense of humiliation which we experience when we look at our own sins makes us need to point out the sins of others and glory in their humiliation.

Instead we could realise that we are all in the same boat. If we can feel love and behave benevolently in the world, then we are one of the lucky ones whose situation in that world has not been one that killed our love and drove us to malevolence. If our love is real and our benevolence not a show, then we will have no interest in the egotism which would take credit for it.

The path towards healing for society is the path of honesty. That means acknowledging our own darker emotions and accepting them in others.

Photo by Bram Janssens.

Is Objective Truth Possible?

Surely we are all in denial about something. That's why our social world is so divisive. Partial truths warring against other partial truths. If only some deity would come along and force us to see where we are full of shit. As an unbeliever, perhaps I'm suffering from Apocalypse envy, but sometimes I wish the world could just be blasted with a thunderstorm of incontrovertible truth that would put us all on the same page.

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The Economy of Love

Gentoo penguin colony on the rocks and glacier in the background at Neco Bay, Antarctica
- Photograph by Vadim Nefedov

Love is a mode of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. It is also the bonds and emotions which accompany such a mode of being with others. The underlying message which it conveys is one of unconditional acceptance.

Love is the default relationship mode for humans. This may be hard to believe when we look around us at all the evidence of selfishness, prejudice and malevolence. We might believe that love is a precariously artificial thing which we only achieve by transcending our more basic nature, but that is not the case.

Love is what occurs when there are no barriers to it. If it is the exception it is simply because there are many barriers which can impede it. Think about the Antarctic. All you see is ice. Now that ice rests on rock. For us to see that rock, the ice would need to melt, but the fact that the ice is what we see doesn't mean that the rock is not the more basic and pre-existing phenomena.

Love is what happens between us when we feel truly safe. Not just safe physically, but secure in ourselves psychologically. It happens because if feels pleasurable.

It is a very basic principle that organisms, when all else is equal, open up to what is pleasurable to them and withdraw from what threatens them with pain or injury. If our existence is threatened then our attention may shrink back to ourselves and focus on meeting the challenge or we may reach out specifically to someone who can help us to meet the challenge. This is a conditional exchange. Our connection with them is dependent on their ability to help us to meet that current challenge.

For me the pleasure principle argues against the idea that we are essentially competitive. Where competition arises it is a temporary barrier to love. If we lived in a village during a time of food shortage, then our hunger might drive us to fight over what food is available. But as long as there was enough food, our tendency would be to return to a loving mode of relationship, because it feels most pleasurable.

What I'm deliberately ignoring here is the barrier to love provided by chronic emotional disturbance. This is the Antarctic ice which keeps the rock of love in us buried. If we are lucky, in our intimate relationships, we are able to thaw out enough to uncover it for a while.

The essence of this chronic emotional disturbance is compromised self-acceptance. What undermines our self-acceptance can be varied - suffering abuse at the hands of others, being heavily exposed to unreachable ideals of one kind or another which make us feel that we are unacceptable by comparison, being harshly judged by others, feelings of guilt about some of our actions, etc.

The message of love is unconditional acceptance and its expression requires that, for the moment, we feel unconditionally accepting of ourselves. To be focused on some aspect of ourselves which we feel to be a flaw is to not be fully focused on the other person. In love we forget about ourselves even as we give full expression to our essence.

This chronic emotional disturbance is really love deprivation. But it is important to remember that such deprivation does not necessarily lie in not being shown love by others. We need to be able to received love, and this is where the barrier tends to lie. Love, as I've said, is a mode of communication, and communication is a two way process.

To receive love we have to feel safe. We have to be able to open up to it. Our compromised self-acceptance leaves us feeling insecure and defensive, and for this reason we develop character armour - a rigid structure of self-perception and mode of interacting with the world. The aim of the character armour is to provide protection from external threats - to feel safe we need a practiced form of response - and from internal threats - a way to bottle up any feelings of hostility or despair.

The character armour is a barrier to giving or receiving love, because it stops us from being open and spontaneous. How would we do trying to make love with a suit of armour on? Our flesh would not touch and our movement would not be sinuous. Our bodies could not meld into one. The same is true psychologically. Love is a spontaneous dance. It can't be rehearsed.

Compromised self-acceptance takes either a passive or an active form.

Depression and other forms of mental illness are examples of mostly passive compromised self-acceptance. The message has been communicated to us - either directly by one or more others or more pervasively by some aspect of the culture - that we are not good enough. We passively take that message to heart. We may battle with it, but the battle is mostly internal.

What happens with the active form of compromised self-acceptance is that we set out to defend ourselves against the message that we are not good enough, or, in the extreme, to get revenge for having been subjected to it.

We may become obsessed with "proving" something about ourselves, by seeking status or material extravagance or something like that. We are thinking about what we do and what we have says about us. We are self-centred.

When severe insecurity about self worth combines with exposure to idealistic moral "shoulds", we may be so desperately cornered that we feel compelled toward some kind of revenge for our state. The "shoulds" require us to behave lovingly, but our severely compromised self-acceptance makes this impossible. If we were to take onboard the "shoulds" then they would destroy what is left of our self acceptance, leaving us suicidal. Hence the savagery with which we may attack those "shoulds" or anyone or anything our mind associates with them.

Photograph by Vadim Guzhva

This is the origin of malevolence in all its forms. Malevolence is clearly one of the major barriers to love.

Let's look at an example. Our self-acceptance has been undermined to such a degree that we feel the need to be comforted by sameness in those around us. People of a different race or culture leave us feeling insecure, because they give us a sense of uncertainty about whether they accept us. But then someone criticises us as being racist. The ideal is that we should feel about and behave towards others the same way irrespective of race or culture. This may set up a negative feedback loop. Our sense of insecurity in the presence of "the other" is grounded in our fear that we are not good enough. It leads to behaviour which causes us to be judged not good enough. Thus the insecurity is increased. The presence of "the other" becomes, in itself, a condemnation, which, if we are to keep from total loss of self-acceptance, must be resisted. This can lead to violently hostile feelings toward "the other", ironically generated by the insistence that we feel and act benevolently toward them.

The ways in which hostility between groups and individuals in our society, and all the other barriers to love, are generated are multifarious, but the underlying principles of the process are simple. Self-acceptance is undermined by mistreatment by others and exposure to unreachable ideals. Undermined self-acceptance makes us more likely to mistreat others. The only thing which can solve the problem is the cultivation of self-acceptance. The message of acceptance from others can help in this, but only if we are able to receive that message, something that our character armour impedes. Simply showing love to those who have hostile feelings towards us may actually increase those hostile feelings if they see our loving behaviour as a criticism of their unloving behaviour.

My aim here is not to directly suggest strategies for removing the barriers to love, but to provide a simple articulation of the phenomena which may be helpful in arriving at those strategies.

We need to understand that love is the default and that the barriers to it are outgrowths of compromised self-acceptance. The message which needs to be communicated is one of unconditional acceptance, not of behaviour but of the individual who betrays that behaviour, because hostile behaviour is, ultimately, a defiant response to what the individual experiences as an unjust withholding of that acceptance. It is acceptance that we are not unworthy because we are scared or angry that heals. When we act on our fear or anger in a way which harms others, the likelihood of our receiving that acceptance from others or ourself recedes. Thus the means for redemption and reconciliation where the damage has already been done are the Holy Grail we must seek.

Photograph by rawpixel

The Meaning of Life is Integration

Meaning arises through context and relationship.

The letter “O” doesn’t necessarily mean anything on its own, but when it is placed with three other letters to form the word LOVE meaning arises from the relationship between the letters.

If we disintegrate the word, it loses its meaning.

Thus integration is the path to meaning.

If we anthropomorphised the letters we would say they are cooperating to produce the meaning. So cooperation is the path to meaning.

We discover the meaning of data by integrating it into a coherent framework.

We integrate data through association. We make a distinction between same and different and assess the qualities of that which differs. We look for patterns in the data and seek to draw conclusions by looking for elements of sameness in the larger patterns. By seeing ways in which things are the same, we establish our categories.

The way that we associate data can be affected by the story by which we understand ourselves and guide our actions. We can, consciously or unconsciously be asking ourselves the question : “How does this data fit in to what I already 'know'?” or “How can this data be useful to me?” This tendency will interfere with our ability to associate the data, because we will tend to filter out details which would challenge our current theory or we will ignore what seems useless.

Nature’s thrust is toward the formation of living systems which function as integrated wholes. Her progress can be measured in terms of successful integration. Our body is a success because it has the capacity to operate as a successful harmonious system for as long as a hundred years. It is on this success that the formation of a larger whole, that of human society, rests.

Where there is a flaw in the integration of a natural system, conflict tends to manifest, and there is a fixation on that flaw. Sociality is the route to a larger whole for animal species. Competition for food and/or mating opportunities is generally the flaw, or impasse or “unfinished business”, in this process. Achieving the next stage of organisation means finding a way to integrate food sharing and mating into the cooperative functioning of the group, so that they cease to be a fixation which warps the healthy life of the group and leads to confllct.

The same principle can be applied to political theories and theories of human psychology. They are attempts to achieve a functioning whole conceptually that will improve the functioning of the individual and the social group. Once again, it is at the point of their flaws that fixation and conflict occurs.

You could say there is a survival of the fittest between theories, but the one which survives is not the one whose advocates fight the hardest (the social Darwinist model) but the one which is best adapted, the one which most accurately models reality. 

If we are fighting to have our theory acknowledged then it is not complete. The conflict that it engenders in others is the evidence that it is flawed, that there is something we have as yet failed to integrate into it. When we have arrived at something that goes past theory and can genuinely be called understanding we will know because it is the sea that refuses no river. We will know because it makes us whole - ending our internal conflicts - and spreads its calming and revivifying light throughout all humanity.

The Vultures and The Lightning

“For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Where there is a carcass, there the vultures will gather”. Matthew 24:27-8

Copyright: ottoduplessis / 123RF Stock Photo

Are we vultures? And, if so, what are the carcasses around which we gather?

So much of our behaviour is an expression of our insecurity about our own worth - a desperate quest for reassurance or to prove ourselves.

Let’s take religion. When we were at school we were taught that 2 + 2 = 4. We were shown evidence that it was true. We retain that knowledge and use it, but we don’t have to be reminded on a regular basis that it is true. The knowledge is secure with us and we are free to only call it to mind when we need it. But if we believe in God and we go to church on a Sunday and are told God loves us, do we believe it? Can we be shown evidence? Is it knowledge that is secure with us? If it were we would not have to keep going to church every Sunday to be told the same thing. Where we don’t trust that something is true, we may feel the need for it to be repeated to us on a regular basis.

Now we may not believe in God, but still we doubt our own worth. We become depressed or we try to prove that we are worthy by the the clothes we wear, the car we drive, our score at golf or the fact that we give money to the needy or fight against injustice. But this world of the ego trying to prove itself is a dead world. It’s a carcass. Not because there is anything wrong with pretty clothes or playing golf or helping people, but because it doesn’t fill the underlying need.

Love is life. Our insecurity is our inability to love ourselves. If we could love ourselves we wouldn’t need to be told every week that God loves us. We wouldn’t have anything to prove.

There is a famous Chinese proverb : “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.”

If we are unable to love ourselves then we are like that hungry man who doesn’t know how to fish. We are dependent on other people (or other things) to feed our hunger. And, unable to take care of ourselves, we may be easily led by those who throw us the occasional fish.

While there is a famous story of Jesus feeding the multitude with two fish, I think his main aim was not to feed us but to teach us to fish - to liberate us from our insecurity about our worth, and thus to unleash in us the life-giving love that motivated him. The church that grew up in his name - providing reassurances of our worth which need to be endlessly repeated - is just a fish market.

Copyright: madrugadaverde / 123RF Stock Photo

This is why he gives the above prophecy about a time when we will achieve that liberation. He presents it as a decentralised process. Something which is visible across the whole world - from the east to the west. It won’t be a case of people gathering around some leader. It is only around the carcasses - the dead ideas and those who purvey them - that the vultures flock.

For me, none of this is supernatural, even if Jesus had a tendency to use poetic language which conjures up fairy story images.

At some point in our history we arrived at the concept of idealism. We divided forms of behaviour into good and evil and sought by self-discipline and social pressure to foster the former and restrain the latter. In so doing we unwittingly undermined our unconditional self-acceptance, and thus our capacity for love of others. To the extent that ideal standards became oppressive to us as our capacity to love ourselves and thus be generous to others was eroded, we felt compelled to retaliate against them, sometimes being driven to acts of extreme cruelty. The more we suffered from feelings of guilt the more selfish we became (selfishness being the natural self-directedness of the suffering or embattled individual) and the more selfish we became the more guilty we felt and the more guilty we felt  the more selfish we became. It was a negative feedback loop.

Central to Jesus’ philosophy was “judge not that thou be not judged”. This is a call to self-acceptance. When he says we are not to judge, he doesn’t say that we are to exclude ourselves from this attitude of non-judgement. It is we, not God, who are holding ourselves unworthy. If God is love and love is held back in us by our lack of self-acceptance, our tendency to feel ourselves to be unworthy, then the greatest good is achieved by giving up striving to be good and holding ourselves accountable when we fail.

So how could this dramatic liberation of humanity (“the coming of the Son of Man”) take place? We arrived at this point via the accumulated damage inflicted by a negative feedback loop that began before the dawn of civilisation. The fact that we have lived with it so long without it destroying us shows just what a powerful and resilient force love is in us. Replace the negative feedback loop with a positive feedback loop, which works with what is strongest in us - our underlying capacity for love - rather than against it, and the kind of wall-to-wall awakening of humanity from the nightmare of history symbolised in Jesus’ prophecy doesn’t seem so inconceivable. At the moment the world seems very polarised, but we are driven to our angry condemnation of others by our desperate need to distract ourselves from our own self-critical voice. We will find that the more we come to accept ourselves, the more accepting we will become of others, and in time even the bitterest and bloodiest of conflicts will cease as it becomes clear that there is nothing to gain by shutting oneself out of paradise.

Copyright: Irochka / 123RF Stock Photo

Freedom Vs. Political Correctness

Copyright: lightwise / 123RF Stock Photo

Idealism is the root of all evil. The fact that this is so counter-intuitive gives some idea of why evil has been with us for so long.

This is how it works. The better we feel in ourselves the more generous and loving we are towards others. To feel good in our selves we must be self-accepting. Idealism, i.e. an unforgiving insistence on certain standards, undermines our self-acceptance. If someone says to us “I will appreciate it if you do your best” then that encourages us to do well. But if someone says “You must meet this goal” then any inability to meet that goal will be interpreted as failure and this will undermine the good feelings that would feed our efforts in the future.

What we term “political correctness” is a form of idealism. It involves an insistence on certain forms of behaviour and particularly certain forms of expression, based on whether or not they reflect a sense of equality.

A society in which all members treated others as their equals would be a very healthy society.

But does the kind of idealistic insistence represented by political correctness move us toward such a society or away from it?

The roots of injustice lie in fear. It is not for no reason that we describe intolerance towards homosexuals as “homoPHOBIA”. Very often the fear is not of the person themselves but of what they represent to the discriminator. A sexually repressed white man may fear that black men will rape his wife. He is seeing in them a reflection of his own disowned self, rather than seeing them as individuals. And embattled men often fear women because they see them as an embodiment of their own critical conscience. This doesn’t mean that black men never rape white women or that women never nag men over their unethical behaviour. What it does mean is that the fearful individual will focus on those instances where these things happen, and ignore the massive amount of evidence which demonstrates that these are exceptions.

Authoritarian structures of social organisation, such as patriarchy, take the form of a rigid defence against such fears. Much of the emotional energy arising from these fear-based feelings of hostility is channelled into maintaining the social order. Some may also be channelled into aggression against other nations. What is left may feed open acts of aggression against the underclass who represent what is feared.

Since these feelings of hostility arise from fear, any sense of threat will increase them. So one of the problems faced by social reformers is that fear of change increases the level of hostility of those whose insecurities were accommodated by the old order.

So where does political correctness come in? It is intolerance of the expression, in any form, of these fear-based feelings of hostility. It is the new Ten Commandments. One big “Thou Shalt”. And the fear of God is instilled by the threat of ostracism.

Political correctness can’t expel hatred from someone’s heart and replace it with love. All it can do is to intimidate someone who has these feelings into pretending they don’t have them in return for social acceptance.

I’ll give a personal example of the effect of political correctness on myself. My tendency has been to be very open to transexual culture. Diversity of sexual behaviour fascinates me and I get great inspiration from movies about gay men, lesbians and transvestites because they illustrate the struggle involved in being true to oneself in the face of demands for conformity. On the other hand, I don’t share the view that most transexuals have of themselves, i.e. that they are “a woman in a man’s body” or a “man in a woman’s body”. As long as I recognise their right to have this self-perception, it seems to me that I have the right not to share it. (A recent viewing of the movie The Danish Girl tended to back up my view that transsexualism arises from a fixation on an aspect of the individual’s nature which they feel is not accepted. Einar felt that his father disapproved of his feminine side, as evidenced by his response to finding Einar wearing an apron and being kissed by his male friend, and so he fixated on this part of himself for which he desperately desired acceptance. When he got that acceptance in the form of Gerda wanting him to dress as a woman, it was intoxicating to the extent that it overwhelmed and destroyed him, replacing him with Lili.) Now I find it harder to access my warm feelings towards transexuals because I feel I may be accused of being “transphobic” if I have an heretical belief about their psychology.

Freedom is essential to progress. That especially includes the freedom to be mistaken and the freedom to have negative emotions.

If we see a particular way of thinking as correct and unquestionable then we will never learn whether it is the truth. All ideas have to be questioned. They must prove themselves to be the fittest if we are to evolve towards greater understanding.

The word “emotion” contains the word “motion” for a good reason. Emotions are indicators of change occurring in our psyche. The natural movement of the psyche, when give its freedom from cultural expectations, is towards wholeness. So it is important to accept our emotions. This doesn’t mean acting on them if that would be wrong or counter-productive. Who among us has not felt like punching someone at some time when we’ve been very angry? We don’t have to do it to feel our anger and let it flow out of us.

So if someone thinks differently than you, don’t condemn them. Challenge them to a debate.

If someone expresses feelings of hostility towards someone, don’t judge them as a person. Express understanding of why they may feel that way and encourage them to give expression to those feelings in a way which won’t be hurtful to others.

Recognise that the hostile and intransigent are frightened and in need of reassurance. It isn’t always easy to find a way to give them what they need, but it is at least worth thinking about.

This is addressing political correctness for what it is on the surface. For many I think it is something else again.

For many of us, to push political correctness is an outward expression of our internal battle with our own dark side. This explains the vitriol and contempt many of us express towards those we find incorrect in this way. We need a scapegoat for the stew of hateful feelings we feel building inside us.

What is needed most is honesty. If we try to deny that we are frightened and insecure, then our fear and insecurity will divide us. If we admit that we are frightened and insecure, then we will be united by this recognition that we are all in the same boat.

"Thou Must" vs. "Fuck That!"

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I’ve always experienced a tension within me between feelings of frustration and the imperative to “do the right thing”. When the frustration dies down, “doing the right thing” comes naturally. But when it builds up, there is a part of me that doesn’t want to “do the right thing”. To do so at such times requires discipline. But it is right. This I don’t question.

When I feel at peace and full of generosity, I just want to be kind and helpful. But at other times, reason and conscience act like an electrified fence to keep frustration from bursting through. And just as an electric fence is hardly likely to truly pacify the herd, but rather make them feel resentful and oppressed, so the feelings of frustration can be exacerbated by the pressure to “do the right thing”, even when it would come naturally in a peaceful state of psychological freedom.

We are surrounded by messages of what not to say about people. How are we supposed to referred to the intellectually disabled? What kinds of things should a man say to a woman, and what should he not? What are we to call people of particular races? How are we supposed to respond to people’s religious beliefs, especially if they seems silly to us or we feel that they are hurtful to others? What about personal appearance? What if someone is really obese? What if we find someone physically repulsive?

There is no doubt that being polite and tolerant is the right thing. But when the pressure builds there is a little man inside me that wants to say the cruellest thing possible. He’s fed up with “doing the right thing.”

There is no problem when I feel at peace, and that is most of the time these days, but when I feel this contrary spirit well up in me and yet I continue to “do the right thing", I feel like a liar and a hypocrite, because I’m putting on a false, socially-acceptable front. This in spite of the fact that nothing would be achieved, and much would be lost, by not doing so.

And it seems as if this contrary spirit can be conjured up where it didn’t exist by the preaching of the well-meaning. Tell me I mustn’t be racist, sexist, homophobic, or whatever and I want to use terms like “nigger”, “slut” or “faggot”. Because “doing the right thing” feels like oppression when you are implicitly threatened with punishment if you don’t do it.

I think this is why offensive humour plays such a role in our culture. We’ll “do the right thing” as long as we can let off steam by watching Borat do everything we know we mustn’t.

At the moment, I think this contrary spirit is contributing to the popularity of Donald Trump. He’s a real-life Borat. The only problem is that he is a politician who wants to lead one of the most powerful nations on the planet. I love Borat, but I wouldn’t vote for him. To many Trump no doubt feels “honest” for the same reason that I feel like a “liar” when I don’t allow myself to express the offensive things that are going on in my head.

Photo from Reuters

Now I’m not suggesting that we stop being polite and respectful, or that we just give up hope of the Trumps of the world ever finding that inner peace that would enable them to be polite and respectful themselves. But I do think we need to try to come to a better understanding of the relationship between that part of us which says “thou must” and the part that says “fuck that”.

I use my own inner life as a way to try to understand the world around me. If I find that the “fuck that” feelings are increased when the “thou must” comes on strong, is it not possible that the way we push for greater tolerance in the world may not be generating more intolerance? The “fuck you” may be offensive, but it is also defensive. It is a response to what feels like oppression. And if it feels like oppression then it is oppression. The problem is that we can’t see internal psychological oppression. Haven’t we all felt it though at some time, in some way. That point where there is just too much exploding in your head and someone tells you you shouldn’t be unkind and you just want to punch their face in.

There are no easy answers, but if we want to avoid social disintegration - if we want to achieve a society of sustainable equality and respect - if we want to be able to work together to solve the problems which face us - there is a commodity we really need to make our number one priority and that is what I would call “psychological space”. When we feel pressured to “do the right thing” it makes us want to do the opposite. This is especially true of those who do the wrong thing most of the time. Instead of concentrating on arguing about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, it would be more useful to view every human being as a resource the efficient functioning of which is in the interests of us all.

We could think of ourselves as cars. The people who do the wrong thing are like cars which are very short of petrol. We try to get them to go down the road. We stand in front of them giving them a lecture on which road to take. If they don’t move we get behind them and we try to push them. We get frustrated and we kick them. But the reason they don’t do what a car is supposed to do is because they are all out of gas. We tell someone off for their bigotry or selfishness or violence, but if they don’t have the psychological room needed to do any better, then we are wasting our effort.

When we confront the terrible conflicts raging through the world, from the battlefields to the boardrooms to the bedrooms, it may seem that what I’m saying is impractical philosophising. If someone is trying to make your life a misery, you can’t just say “I know it’s just because you’re out of gas” and expect that to make things better.

But I think that acknowledging that we are all in the same boat, that each of us behaves only as well as our psychological space allows, is a good starting point. Then we can work on what opens up that space within us. How can we find a way to let out all of our frustrations in a non-destructive way? How can we learn to be guided by the principles that foster community without feeling oppressed by them? How can we learn how to unconditionally accept ourselves?

The more space we make in ourselves, the more capacity we will have to help those who are "out of gas".

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Thoughts on the Male Feminist

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I want to sketch out some rough ideas which have arisen from contemplating the behaviour of some men who support feminism. There are risks involved in speculating about what goes on inside people’s heads. But it is also dangerous to leave ideas unformed and unexamined in our minds. Laying them out on the table and assessing them seems the way to go.

When trying to understand a phenomena, sometimes the best place to begin is with its most exaggerated manifestation. If we can see meaning in the bold shape of the extreme, then it may enable us to see the same pattern, but with softer edges, elsewhere.

I’ve noticed that there are some men who, having adopted the cause of feminism, become almost rabidly savage in their condemnation of any signs of sexism they find in the speech or behaviour of other men. This is the relatively rare extreme. That someone with a generosity of spirit and ethical integrity should decide that equality between the sexes is a goal worth pursuing enthusiastically is understandable enough, but where declared support for that aim takes a form in which generosity of spirit to one’s own gender seems seriously compromised the behaviour makes less immediate sense.

I have misogynistic thoughts and feelings. I have racist thoughts and feelings. I have homophobic thoughts and feelings. None of this is much of a problem for me, because I accept these thoughts and feelings when they arise, and so they quickly depart.

Life and our interactions with other people involve a degree of frustration. When we feel frustrated, the process of interacting with someone of a different mindset or culture than our own may be a little more difficult and low level hostile feelings may be generated. If we accept them, they will quickly dissipate, but if we feel ashamed or guilty about them they may become a fixation and grow.

Misogynistic feelings, from the fleeting to the ingrained, have clearly been common in men from the beginnings of civilisation down to the present day. When we men have oppressed and mistreated women it has been an expression of such feelings.

Now if a man takes  up the cause of feminism, doesn’t it make sense that he would take this approach in interacting with other men :

“Look, guys, I know you have these feelings of frustration with women. It may have got to the stage were you feel embittered and hateful towards them. I understand. I’ve had those feelings too, maybe not as strongly as you do, but I know. The thing is, though, that allowing those feelings to determine how we interact with women isn’t doing us any favours. I’m not talking morality. Stuff that. I’m talking about our own self interest. We share this planet with women. The happier they are, the happier we’ll be. Happy women are generous women. And no amount of power or wealth is more valuable than being surrounded by people who are fond and supportive of you in a way which comes from the heart.”

There may be some men who take that very approach to promoting the cause of female equality. But what of the guy who is screaming at his fellow men about what sexist pigs they are?

Let’s skip to another cultural phenomenon in which someone becomes very angry and contemptuous in support of a cause. I was watching a video recently of a man who considers himself a Christian. He was strutting around a stage, spittle flying from his lips, as he condemned homosexuality and called for the state to execute all gay people. Why the extreme hostility? Does it not seem likely that he is caught in a negative feedback loop arising from the anti-homosexual beliefs he has either adopted or been indoctrinated into? It seems likely that most non-gay men have at least passing homosexual urges from time to time. Some may indulge them, others will let them slip away and go back to lusting after women. But if you believe that homosexuality is an abomination, you don’t have the luxury of taking twinges of this kind so lightly. There may be a moment of horror when you face the possibility that you yourself may be the abomination, then you shove that thought deep down into your subconscious, and you begin to build a wall to keep the horror contained. You can’t accept this part of yourself, and thus you fixate on it, but because you can’t even bare to face the fact that it is a part of you, you split from it and become deeply paranoid, going to battle in the world around you with anything which resonates with the monster within. You would slay all the gay people in the world if you could, but it could never satisfy you, because that monster within would not have been slain. The irony is that all that it takes to make the monster go away is to own it. It is denial which feeds such monsters, and acceptance which slays them.

Is it not possible that the angry male feminist is in the same position as the gay-hating preacher? He has gone to war against the misogyny of his fellow males (something which, unlike homosexuality, is genuinely a problem) as a way of maintaining his denial of his own repressed misogynistic feelings.

Generosity of spirit requires what we might call psychological room. If we are caught up with internal battles we have little room to really listen to others or accommodate their needs or desires.

I think that most of we men have a battle going on within us (often one of many) between our misogynistic feelings and our conscience which tells us that it is wrong to have these feelings and even worse to act upon them. If we could tell our conscience to back off a little, we might be able to simply accept the feelings and allow them to dissipate. The more our conscience crowds us, the less room we will have and the more likely we will be to accumulate further misogynistic feelings.

And the more insecure we feel because of the turmoil of this kind of battle, the more we need to cling to some kind of “proof” of our worth. We may try to “prove” ourselves by some kind of competitive activity or by accumulating material goods or whatever. One way that we may try to demonstrate our worth is by taking up a cause. At least with regard to this cause we are on the side of the angels, we tell ourselves.

Just as Saul of Tarsus, having been battling the Christians, renamed himself Paul and tried to leave his angry self behind by taking up their cause, so the man who feels guilty about his misogynistic feelings may decide to rise above them (i.e. repress them) and become a champion of women’s rights.

This can seem like a good idea. He doesn’t have to view himself as the bad guy. He may get superficial acceptance from feminist women (I say superficial because they are accepting only the front he is putting on and not the repressed misogyny which really needs the healing touch of acceptance). And he gets an outlet for some of his frustration, in the same way the preacher does, by expressing anger towards men who give outward expression to the feelings he is repressing in himself. But this won’t bring him healing. It won’t give him the room for generosity of spirit, even to women, let alone his fellow men.

If he could own his own dark side, then he could bring to other men the release that they need. He could show them how to make the monster inside go away. And so doing he could be a part of melting away the barriers to equality for women, rather than leaving women to have to break them down, as no doubt they do have the capacity to do.

Now you may be thinking “Hang on a minute. I know men who accept that they are misogynists and that misogyny hasn’t disappeared, rather they aggressively and unrepentantly act up on it.” This is bravado, not acceptance. Such aggressive, arrogant behaviour is defensive. An army is not needed when there is no insecurity to protect.

The Achilles heal of feminism has always been the tendency for its criticism, real or implicit, to make it harder for we men to learn to accept our misogynistic feelings and thus let them dissipate. Generosity of spirit is the natural state of the non-embattled human, but we, men and women, have been so embattled - so troubled by all the things we have found it next to impossible to accept about ourselves - that it has been easy for us to fall into conflict and drive each other deeper within those battlements.

We tend to view the concept of confession of sins that we find in the Christian religion as a form of reparation through the humbling of oneself before God. But I wonder if that is how it was originally intended. I have a different vision. I see a bunch of people sitting around in a circle. A woman says, “I’m pretty lustful you know. All I think about is sex.” Another says, “Wow! What a relief! I thought it was just me.” A man says, “I get so angry at my wife I just want to sock her in the face.” “I feel that way, too,” says another man. “And I want to kick my husband in the balls when won’t listen to what I’m saying,” says another woman. “You and me both, sister,” says another. No-one feels particularly repentant, but as they open up to each other in this way their self-consciousness, their selfishness, melts away. They laugh about their aggressive feelings and they don’t feel aggressive any more. And once their sexual feelings are expressed they no longer have the selfish, i.e. self-directed, quality which comes with hiding and repressing something. A key aspect of this is that nobody is judged or expelled because of their confession, because it is understood that the process is a healing one, if they are expelled because they admit to bad behaviour then they will most likely return to that bad behaviour, but if they are shown acceptance and remain within the community the acceptance they find there will heal the motivating force behind that behaviour.

Perhaps this is too simple, too naive, a fantasy for our troubled world, but sometimes things have to begin with unrealistic dreams.