Who Are the Meek and How Do They Inherit the Earth?

Photo by wisitporn.

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Matthew 5:5

There is an old joke that goes : “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth (if it’s O.K. with the rest of you guys.)”

Meekness is often exploited. It seems as if the aggressive are more likely to get what they want.

There are different interpretations of this passage.

Jeremy Griffith, the author of Freedom : The End of the Human Condition, says that “the meek” are “the more innocent”, by which he means those of us who have been more nurtured and are thus less insecure and more honest in our thinking and less aggressive in our nature. By “…inherit the earth” he thinks Jesus meant that these individuals will “…have to lead humanity home to a human-condition-free world.”

Jordan Peterson, on the other hand, claims that a better translation of the Greek word ήμερος usually translated as “meek” is “those who have weapons and the ability to use them but are determined to keep them sheathed”. Those who take the right path are those who integrate their shadow, who acknowledge the dark side of their nature but do not succumb to it, gaining strength from their encounter with it. He is afraid that we may assume that meek is synonymous with “weak” :

Here is a guide to how the Greek word is generally translated.

Here is some discussion of Peterson’s interpretation.

One problem I have with both interpretations is the failure to acknowledge the meaning of the word “inherit”. An inheritance is something unearned which falls to us. Now it may have been earned in some instances, in the sense that someone may put us in their will because we have been of service to them or we may be written out of a will because we have done something to offend a family member. But none of this is intrinsic to the meaning of the word “inheritance”. The passage doesn’t say “the meek will earn (or win) the earth”.

I think we have to look at the context to get a better understanding.

This is the third in what are known as the Beautitudes. Jesus tells us that eight particular classes of people are “blessed” or “fortunate”. He then tells his followers that all of them are “blessed” or “fortunate” if they are persecuted because of him.

He first claims “blessedness” for the “poor in spirit” and then for “those who mourn”. Clearly these are not those who are blessed with good fortune in the world as it currently stands.

I think that, to understand the Beatitudes, we have to recognise that Jesus was an apocalypticist, i.e. a person who believed that some event was going to occur which would overturn the established social order and usher in some kind of paradise on earth. (I recognise that it is more popular to interpret the concept of a “Kingdom of Heaven” as some ethereal place we go to when we die, but that doesn’t make so much sense to me.)

The Beatitudes make sense in the framework of two worlds - the social world we know, with its injustices, its dishonesty and its oppressive power relationships - and a potential world of honesty and love which lies buried beneath its repressions.

Sermon on the Mount 1 Le Sainte Bible Traduction nouvelle selon la Vulgate par Mm J -J Bourasse et P Janvier Tours Alfred Mame et Fils 2 1866 3 France 4 Gustave Dor
Engraving photographed by ruskpp.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” 5:3

Perhaps the “poor in spirit” are those who have been very wounded by their experiences of life. They have little spirit left in them. But in a world of love their wounds will be healed and they will be free of oppression. In terms of a transition to the new world, they have the advantage - “the blessing” - of not being invested in the old.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” 5:4

To be in mourning is not a form of righteousness that one pursues. As with being “poor in spirit” it is a disadvantage in the old world, but one which makes us less invested in it. We fixate on loving relationships which we have lost, through the death of the loved one or through a breakdown in the relationship. In a world where everybody loves everybody else, it will be easy to let go of the past and live in the present.

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” 5:5

No amount of power or aggression can keep the old world from dying. Terrible destruction can occur. Nothing can necessarily protect anyone. But, only a healthy society will not eventually fall. If such a healthy loving truthful world comes into existence, it will belong to the meek as much as to anyone else. The point is that the powerful and aggressive try to hang onto the world, and, individually, they always fail. They can postpone the new world, but they can never have a world of their own which persists.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” 5:6

Those who long for a world in which we treat each other well, are not invested in a world in which we don’t. So, once again, we have a group of people who have nothing to lose and everything to gain in a transition from the old world to the new world.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” 5:7

Again, things don’t always work this way in the old world. But mercy is clearly the path to the new world. Our divisions keep us trapped in the old world. As William Blake put it : “Mutual forgiveness of each vice, Such are the gates of paradise.”

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” 5:8

I think this is where we come to what Griffith calls “the innocent”. As very young children we were aligned to the world of love. If God is the creative theme of the universe which is manifested in human behaviour as love, then children can “see God”. This is the source of their “enthusiasm”, i.e. “the god within”. It is the wounds of life, which sow the seeds of internal division and breed resentment, which “hide the face of God” from us. In a world in which these divisions are healed with understanding, everyone will live in full awareness that they are manifestations of this creative force.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.” 5:9

This is similar to 5:7. Peace between warring factions is keeping us in the old world. Those who can resolve conflicts are architects of the new world. The reward falls to all, not just to those who behave this way. It isn’t about pursuing righteous behaviour in order to pass a test and get a reward, it is about being a manifestation of a social process from which the whole of humanity benefits.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” 5:10

The old world is threatened by honesty and is insecure in it’s sense of its own worth, so those who tell the truth or act in a way which shows up the old world’s corrupt behaviour tend to be persecuted. It is necessary to keep the vision of the new world in mind in order to not give in to this pressure.

Another interpretation could be put on this sentence. Some people are persecuted because of a false sense of righteousness (what William Blake called “Moral Virtue”). A good example might be people who are persecuted for their sexuality. Someone who is in a loving gay relationship is being honest and loving - requirements of the new world - and someone who tries to persecuted them in the belief that they are deviating from righteousness, by not adopting dishonesty and suppressing their love, is part of the old world. The new world is for the person being thus persecuted as it is for all who have been persecuted.

So how does this apocalypse, this death of the old world and birth of the new take place?

What makes the most sense to me is that the human race has always been engaged in a kind of collective improvisation to find the path to the new world. Art, philosophy, religion, science… These are all ways in which our minds and our hearts have been engaged in a process of trying to sort ourselves out. We make mistakes, we strive to learn from them and compensate for them. We examine the world around us and try to better understand where we come from.

Photo by smileus.

Think of us as a computer trying to work out the bugs in its own programming. We can even see this in the evolution of different religions. We can see Jesus as someone trying to compensate for the flaws in Judaism, just as Judaism was an attempt to compensate for flaws in various pagan belief systems. It’s all a part of a process of trying to find something which works. And, in the modern world, we have new abilities and new problems not dreamt of in Jesus’ time.

The advantage we have is that this collective improvisation is taking place at an exponential rate. We can share ideas very quickly and with minimum censorship.

What should we do? Participate in the process. Speak what we feel to be the truth. Listen to the ideas expressed by others and test them for flaws. The conceptual framework of understanding which ushers in a new world will be the one which passes the test of such scrutiny. And we will know it because it works, because it heals conflict and spreads wellbeing wherever it is expressed. “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” Matthew 7:16

Every day we see evidence of how rotten the old world is - lies and corruption are exposed. It’s time for the new world to find itself amidst the collapse of the old. It can only grow out of open, honest, spontaneous and generous interaction between individuals. Dogmatic utopias constructed through social programming or the impositions of more laws are part of the old world. We will know the truth by the fact that it sets us free from all that.

Photo by Gleb TV.

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.

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 Problem With Justice

I recently expressed the view that an holistic systems view of human society undermines the concept of free will as any individual’s behaviour (their output) is determined by factors arising outside of them (the system’s input) and playing out within them in the only possible way. This raises an obvious and troubling question. Does this mean that people should not be held responsible for their own behaviour?

What do we mean by “being held responsible”? Do we mean being judged in some kind of ultimate sense? This would seem to be inappropriate. Interestingly, one of the key principles of the Christian religion is “judge not that thou be not judged”. Judgement is something we humans impose on ourselves by imposing it on others. If we don’t acknowledge the mitigating circumstance of bad input in the behaviour of others we will be unable to acknowledge it in our own situation without compromising our intellectual integrity. We may judge others by a different standard to ourselves, but only at the cost of breeding conflict within our own psyche.

But withholding judgement doesn’t mean being complacent to destructive behaviour. Self-correction through feedback is a crucial function of any organic system.

We have a habit of punishing destructive behaviour. Punishment can make sense as a form of corrective input. When we were children we may have been sent to our room for behaving rudely at the dinner table. Our parents know that, if our habit of rude behaviour is not corrected, we run the risk of losing significant social advantage in adulthood. They could simply explain this to us, but sometimes a practical demonstration of consequences adds to the effectiveness, giving a kind of emotional anchor to any explanation.

When it comes to criminal behaviour, prison sentences are often given as a deterrent. Sometimes this may have a practical role similar to the behaviour our parents may have used with us as children. A career criminal will generally factor in the risk of prison when calculating the advantage of committing a crime. Without the threat of prison a lot of people might just steal other people’s property on a whim. But many crimes are crimes of passion and in this case, awareness of the threat of prison (or even execution for some crimes in some places), may have no effectiveness as a form of input repelling the individual from the act. It is our reason which warns us about the potential consequences of our actions, and powerful emotions easily push aside all reason.

This doesn’t mean that prison isn’t useful as a way of containing people whose current psychological structure causes them to be a threat to others. It may also be a way to compel them to participate in some form of rehabilitation.

When we contemplate these issues we quickly come up against the concept of justice. Punishing someone for their destructive behaviour is seen as a matter of justice - righting an imbalance.

Justice is a mechanistic concept which we try to impose on the organic system which is society. We need something more holistic, which acknowledges the connectedness and complexity of all things. Our symbol for justice is a very simple machine - a pair of scales. Scales enable us to make a comparison between two objects in terms of one aspect of their nature. They enable us to find out which is heavier. But objects have many different characteristics - size, shape, colour, consistency - of which the scales can tell us nothing. And the world is not made up only of pairs. Everything is not binary. Of course the scales are only a symbol, but when we think of our concepts of justice we find that they have similar limitations.

Copyright: olegdudko / 123RF Stock Photo

Lets look at the most primitive concept of justice - revenge. One person has harmed another person, so that person then seeks to right the balance by inflicting a similar form of harm on the perpetrator. This relationship is extracted from the wider social context and everything is simplified to a mechanical process - a heavy weight was placed on one side of the scales, so the answer is to place an equally heavy weight on the opposite side of the scales. An holistic assessment might find that the aggravating act was part of a gradually escalating negative feedback of offending behaviours between the two. It might find that many others were tangentially involved in the influences which flowed together to lead to that act. And such an assessment would be unlikely to find that the retaliatory act really righted any balance, as aggressive behaviour has a way of negatively impacting the person who engages in it and producing waves of harm that ripple out into the lives of others.

When punishment is not a simple educational technique, as in the example of a child being sent to their room to learn the disadvantages of anti-social behaviour, it is a refinement of the concept of revenge. Suffering, often in the form of deprivation of freedom, is imposed on the wrong-doer, because we feel that this rights a balance. They have inflicted suffering on others, so they must suffer, so that a kind of suffering equilibrium can be restored. But there is no actual equilibrium of suffering. Suffering may have been what drove them to inflict suffering on another in the first place. None of these things can be adequately measured, and, anyway, society can’t be calibrated like a machine, because its processes are organic. Machines and living organisms are different. Think of a television set. If the sound isn’t loud enough, you can turn it up. You can adjust the colour or the brightness. Changing the volume won’t effect how bright the colour is. Compare this the human body. Because it is an organic system, when we make changes - change our diet, get more exercise, take medication - these changes have a wider, and perhaps less predictable, impact than we intended. There are side-effects, because an organic system is dynamically interconnected. Changes in one part of the system lead to changes in other parts of the system.

For a system to function in a healthy way, it is important that the parts are responding spontaneously to current conditions. One of the problems with the concept of justice is that it encourages us to allow the past to have too much effect on our actions in the present. We need to understand the past and use what we learn from it to help us to understand our current situation, but it is our current situation which needs to be guiding our behaviour. The past can’t be changed. What we need to work with is the present, which includes the present manifestations of damage arising from past events. If we look at the revenge example we can see that the widest self-interest of all parties is that they be able to cooperate together to form a healthy community. It is in nobody’s long term self-interest that people continue to extract retaliation for past misdeeds. Now if someone burned another person’s house down, the fact that they have no house is a current reality. It would be better that their friends be motivated by this current situation to help them build a new house than that they be motivated by the past to go and burn down the perpetrator’s house.

Let’s take the example of a man who beat his children. There are two current situations to deal with here - his anger management problem and the trauma still being experienced by his children. Putting a protective distance between the man and his children is clearly important. Then therapy needs to be provided to the children to help them heal, and therapy needs to be provided for him so that he can learn how not to be violent. The concept of justice would distract us from these practical forms of help. It would encourage us to look to the past with the illusory idea that fixing things has something to do with balancing one infliction of suffering with another infliction of suffering.

There is liable to be a strong resistance in us to the kind of withholding of judgement I’m talking about. The concept that there are good people who chose to do good things and bad people who could likewise chose to do good things but, instead, freely chose to do bad things, is like a security blanket. It is part of our character armour. The character armour, according to psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, serves the purpose of protecting us from threats external and internal. When confronted with our own impulses towards malevolence, it may be important for us to keep telling ourselves we are good people and that those who behave malevolently do so by free choice. To recognise that the input we have been lucky enough to receive in the form of moral lessons, wisdom, capacity for clear reasoning, useful information, etc., only stands as a potentially fragile counter to our malevolence is disturbing. We want to be able to take credit for our virtue, and that means seeing other’s vice as a matter of choice. I think we can tend to guess from a person’s rigidity on this question, just how threatened they feel in the face of their own capacity for malevolence. If we have moments of inner peace, then I think our mind can open up to this more holistic vision, even if it may recede when we are caught up in the turmoil of life.

I’m not suggesting any plan for changes to the way our society deals with criminal activity. I wouldn’t know how to go about that. The control structures of society could be compared to the crutches used by a person with a broken leg. Some crutches may be better than others, but what is most important is that the person’s leg heal so they have increasingly less need of them.

I’ve talked about criminal justice, but I should also talk about the concept of social justice. There are many who talk of promoting social justice. This is a much broader application of the justice concept which suffers from the same mechanistic limitations. Social justice is measured reductively and quantitatively. How much money does the richest 1% of the population have compared to the poorest 50%? How many women are there in parliament? Now I’m not saying that these things are not important, but you can’t measure freedom or self-realisation simply in terms of money, and individuals are more than their gender. One of the key dilemmas for science is that there is a need for measurable data to provide objective evidence and yet we may lose the meaning of the whole by reducing it to its measurable functions.

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If thinking in terms of justice won’t make our society healthier, what will?

You might think that it’s all impossible. If the social system is so complex and dynamic then how can we know how to increase the health of its functioning? We’ve looked at how changes can have ever-widening unpredictable effects. The important thing is to think in terms of relationship. If we treat individuals as if they were parts in a machine, of course the result is not going to be what we expect.

What does health mean? A healthy organism is one in which the relationship between the parts is one which enables it to thrive. Relationship is communication. Most, if not all, social problems can be understood as communication problems. Violence is a form of communication. Money is a form of communication. The sharing of food and other necessary resources are communicative processes. When we behave in a malevolent way it is because of an internal communication problem. Our mind, which, when functioning in a healthy way, serves the purpose of guiding us towards our broadest self-interest, is providing us with faulty guidance. Think of it as a software problem.

So everything is about communication. Think of society as a circulatory system. Where problems arise it is because the flow of accurate information or needed material goods is blocked. So if we want to improve the health of the system we do so by trying to clear those blocks. Perhaps it is better to think of them as knots to be untangled, because the process is one of setting every individual free to experience the joy of healthy functioning. It is not a process in which one person has to be pushed down in order for another person to rise up.

I suppose there is in this a strong element of faith. If we are mostly tangled in some form of lonely and frustrated state, unable to find a joyful meaningful way to participate in something larger than ourselves, then all we need is for the seeds of a way out of our entanglement to be sown and flower in our mind and heart. All we need is new software able to replace the virus-contaminated version which has been turning us away from our own self-interest, holding us back from what, compared to our life now, would be paradise.

The bloodstream of a healthy society is love. Love is open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication. So untying the knots, clearing the blocks, means removing the obstacles to love. These come down largely to guilt and fear. You could say that selfishness is a major block to love, but selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering or otherwise insecure individual. If we are not suffering physically, our suffering is most likely in the form of compromised self-acceptance. This often takes the form of guilt. Or we may have had our ego wounded by betrayal or some other kind of mistreatment by others. In this case we may be afraid of being hurt again. Any kind of fear may cause us to close off to loving communication in some way.

So a significant part of untying the knots that hold us back from realising a healthy society is learning how to cultivate unconditional self-acceptance. We can heal the wounds inflicted on us. While we can’t live in a world where there is nothing to fear, we can gain the courage which comes through healing inner division. And gradually we can show the way to a society characterised by open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication. Insecurity is the norm and the insecure feel a need for the comfort of numbers. We see so many examples of this. Lots of people want to do something but feel inhibited. Then gradually people start doing it and soon it becomes the new fashion.

Of course I’m not making an appeal to your free will here. I don’t think you or I have one of those. The ideas I express here have a life of there own. I’m only the host. Whether they fertilise your brain and lead to the fruit of action is an open question. If they do, you won’t have had any choice about it. If they don’t, you won’t have had any choice about it.

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Why Do We Have a Dark Side?

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What produces the dark side of we humans?

Some think that we are instinctively competitive and that the roots of our dark side can be found in our underlying animal tendency to form a dominance hierarchy.

We are biological entities with biological needs. It makes sense that a shortage of something we need might lead to conflict in the absence of a very strong cultural structure to restrain that tendency. If there is a shortage of food we might fight over what is available because our desire to remain alive overrides any disinclination to deprive others.

Among other animals there is often a breeding imperative which leads to competition for a mate. Does this apply on a biological level for humans? That’s hard to say. As intelligent beings with imagination we don’t have to follow our instincts. If we don’t listen to what our instincts would tell us about what food is healthy to eat, why would we think that we listen to our instincts when it comes to striving to win the most biologically healthy mate we come in contact with? Of course we often do put a great deal of effort into winning a particular kind of mate, but is it for biological reasons or psychological reasons? A millionaire’s trophy wife will win him the envy of his peers, but she may not necessarily be the best breeding prospect.

One of the factors which has given us the power to dominate the global environment as a species is our ability to cooperate and to override our instincts with the use of our intelligence and imagination. When faced with a food crisis, I imagine that chimpanzees don’t have much option but to fight it out. We humans can come up with a strategy for rationing the food and setting off in search of a new home where food is more plentiful.

We are less likely to compete for biological reasons than other animals, and yet, as a species, we have been far more brutally destructive for reasons which are not immediately obvious.

We follow the pleasure principle and the pleasure principle, in the absence of the kinds of dominating biological factors which lead to conflict amongst other animals, fosters love. The most pleasant form of life for us is to live in a close community, easing the burdens of life through cooperative strategies and sharing the sensual pleasure that comes through affectionate interaction of all kinds.

So what is the darkness that plagues us, standing in the way of such a blissful existence?

Psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich points out that the stifling of natural drives channels that energy into malignant symptoms. Our instincts are to love, to engage in productive activity, to learn, and to enjoy an erotic relationship with another individual. Hatred is generated by the frustration of the instinct to love. This can be the self-hatred characterised by depression and other forms of mental illness or hatred felt towards others.

But it is not simple barriers which impede the loving instinct in this way. We can see plenty of evidence that love is able to stand firm in the face of the obstacles life throws at it. It is when the loving instinct is frustrated at it’s very base that it gives rise to toxic secondary drives.

Love is a form of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. Only if we are capable of being open, honest, spontaneous and generous in our relationship with our own self can we interact lovingly with others. Any lack of honesty with self will compromise our honesty with others. When we fear aspects of our self this compromises our capacity for spontaneity. We don’t trust ourselves to be spontaneous. And if we are not generous towards our self, then we won’t be able to be generous toward others without resenting the fact that we are treating them better than we treat our self. The ability to love our self is central to the ability to love anyone else.

So what threatens our ability to love our self? To love our self is to accept our self. Why would we fail to accept our self? What makes us feel that we are not worthy of acceptance?

From The Function of the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich

I think the answer is idealism. It’s necessary for us to have some kind of system of thought to guide our behaviour. We need to understand that some forms of behaviour will lead to bad results for us, either directly or because they lead to bad results for others, which will be disadvantageous to us as well. But it is possible for such a system to be so strict or so harshly imposed that it comes to oppress us. It is one thing to be guided by a gentle hand and it is another to be kicked and shoved and berated by the one who would direct our behaviour. There are times when doing what is right is intrinsically very difficult. The question is whether our guidance system helps to foster courage or leaves us weak by undermining our capacity to feel good about ourselves at all. If idealistic expectations, either personal or from peers, are too strict, they will tend to engender in us increasing levels of resentment towards them. This resentment will then spill over into our behaviour towards others, and, in the extreme, can manifest as a drive to inflict suffering or death upon the innocent and defenceless.

How does this work? Well, if you feel oppressed by the demand that you be good, if you experience this demand as something which gradually erodes the self-acceptance which is, metaphorically speaking, the floor of the house in which you live, so that you just get angrier and angrier as you are backed further and further into the only remaining corner, the one thing which might give you some temporary relief is to rebel against that demand, to respond to its demand that you do the best thing by deliberately doing the very worst thing.

How did I come to this conclusion? I looked into myself, into the heart of my own darkness. I remember once seeing footage of a group of men attacking a pod of dolphins with machetes. They hacked and hacked and hacked and the bay was filled with blood. Everyone was saying : “How horrible! What monsters those men are!” I was thinking : “Hacking dolphins to death might provide a kind of relief.” This was at a time when I was prone to depression. When we are depressed we don’t love ourselves and we don’t get any consolation from the love of others. It’s almost worse to be loved when we feel we don’t deserve it. Either the other person is a fool for not realising how unworthy of love we are, or we are a fraud for not disabusing them.

I could have identified with the dolphins. Many, including many depressed people, probably would. I don’t know why I’ve always had a tendency to identify with victimisers rather than victims when confronted with these kinds of scenarios. But this tendency has an advantage for someone who wants to understand human problems. If our imagination tends to take us into the position of a victim then we may have the basis for extrapolating what is going on in their mind when they are being victimised. But if we want to understand why it is happening we have to understand what is going on in the mind of the victimiser.

I don’t think that this impulse toward defiance of the good is the only reason for the victimisation of the innocent. Another element is the resentment of the unlovable for the loved. The individual whose self-acceptance has been eaten away until they are backed into that final corner, cut off from all capacity for joy, hounded by condemnation on all sides, unable to defend themselves because their behaviour has been genuinely destructive, is the rejected of the world. How are they going to feel when people talk about how much they love the cute dolphins? What about when they see the devoted mothers dropping their children off to the pre-school? Isn’t that the darkest point to which a human can sink? The point at which a young man may take a bunch of guns to that pre-school.

We can say that the school shooter, the terrorist, the child molester, is a individual starved of love. So what are we to do? We have barely enough love for ourselves and those closest to us. We can’t go throwing our precious love into the black hole at the heart of the sociopath. It wouldn’t do any good if we did.

So what can we do about the problem of evil?

If we understand the roots of the problem in the tendency of idealistic demands to undermine self-acceptance, then we can develop a culture of unconditional self-acceptance in our own lives. If such a culture really does foster love, courage, creativity and an enhanced capacity for problem solving, then it will spread quickly. Eventually it will spread even into humanity’s heart of darkness, bringing the redemption which is urgently needed to free us from our capacity for evil.

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Thoughts About "God"

Reading the Bible has led me to think about some of the ways people think about God.

Some say that God is perfect. What does it mean for something of which there is only one to be perfect? Where there are two of something we can look for flaws and decide that one is closer to perfection than the other.

Why is this relevant? If our view of God is of the absolute grounding of reality as something perfect, then this becomes a mirror for our own very personal conceptions about what is or is not perfect in ourselves or others. We may become less accepting of our own apparent flaws or those of others if we believe there is a grounding of perfection from which we and they have deviated. The Bible contains many laws expressing what is or is not considered acceptable to God, yet why should the absolute grounding of reality give a shit?

Religion is a human institution with a human basis and a human purpose. The purpose of religious laws, as with any laws, is to try to resolve or prevent conflict in society. It doesn’t begin with something abstract, but contemplation of the abstract may give the lawmaker some of the required distance to make laws for the common good rather than his own. What we find in the early parts of the Bible are flawed attempts which we may look on critically from our own position, but we would probably find similar flaws in most indigenous systems of law - a mix of wisdom, superstition, intolerance and brutality.

My own definition of “God” is the creative principle of the universe which we see in operation in the increasing complexity of life’s development and which operates in human affairs as love. Something holds energy in the meaningful pattern that we call “matter”. And some principle allows some of that matter to organise itself in what we call “life”. The comparable meaningful arrangements of humans are what we call “families” and “tribes” and “corporations” and “societies”. What holds these together is love, i.e. open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication. Sure tribal selfishness may be a motivating force, and all groups are diluted by intra-group selfishness, but if there were no love the group would fall apart.

We put a human face on impersonal forces with which we are in a relationship. We think of nature as a “she” for example. This can be helpful, but also misleading. We may be Mother Nature’s children, but she won’t necessarily protect us the way our real mother would, in fact she may slaughter us without hesitation.

If “God” is the creative principle of the universe, then we have everything to be grateful to “him” for, but a principle doesn’t need us as individuals. This is not a “Father” who cares one way or the other what happens to us. It is we who care what happens to ourselves and, hopefully others, and only we who need to care.

One thing we see in the Bible is that God is used as a conceptual tool for widening one’s concept of self-interest. God is presented as a personification of what Hindus and Buddhists call Karma. If you behave selfishly, recklessly, dishonestly or against the legitimate interests of others, God will bring you down, but if you act generously, honestly and practice frugality, he will protect your long term interests even if you may be persecuted by others in the short term.

Of course, in reality, there are no guarantees. You could live a spotless life and get some terrible disease.

But the principle of enlightened self-interest is still the best basis for guiding one’s life. Don’t trade current pleasure for future pain, and recognise that, as long as we are social beings, our wellbeing is nested in the wellbeing of those around us. If we sow enmity in those around us, then we will also reap it. And those who profit by an unjust society will have to live within walls which prevent them from enjoying the warmth of its community. We don’t need to believe in a personal God to come to these conclusions, but historically many have found it useful.

They say that we are made in God’s image. Clearly we are not omnipresent, omniscient or invisible. So in what way might this be true? We are not just products of the creative principle of the universe, we are expressions of it. It operates through us as surely as it does through anything else which exists. Our capacity for reason gives it a whole new level on which it can operate, through culture and technology.

Our sense of alienation from God, that God is to be feared and that we are to be ashamed of ourselves, comes from our awareness that our creative potential - our expression of love - is held in check by our selfishness. But our shame is not appropriate. 

The creative principle doesn’t operate by forcing chaos into a preconceived orderly mould. The natural intrinsic potential unfolds through spontaneously occurring connections based on the mutuality of self-interest. (We can see this most clearly in ecosystems which are balanced, orderly networks built from the individual self-interest of the constituent organisms.) 

To decide what is good and try to force it into being is the root of evil. The ends don’t justify the means. It is by embracing healthy means and not thinking too much about what the ends will be that we become faithful expressions of the creative  principle. 

And this applies also to our relationship to ourselves. If we fight with ourselves because we don’t conform to an ideal we will only make ourselves more self-obsessed. But look for ways in which our own longterm self-interest aligns with that of others and we see the seeds of a more creative way of living. If we concentrate on fostering what works, we may find that what wasn’t working has disappeared while our attention was elsewhere.