11. Inhuman Interactions
If the President of the United States were to attend a disarmament talk with the Premier of the Soviet Union, we would expect the conversation to deal with missles and warheads, submarines and bombers, deployment of this, testing and development of that...
But how would the world react if the President (or the Premier) came in and said, "Let's talk about communism and capitalism, police state oppression and economic oppression, democracy, freedom, and so on. Let's see if we share enough values to reconcile some of our ideological differences and, perhaps, improve both political systems?"
I suspect that there would be a lot of very startled people. That is not the way people attempt to affect the thinking and behavior of others in a patriarchal order, but rather brings to mind a couple of squabbling neighbors trying to patch their personal affairs over a cup of coffee. It actually involves intimacy, a human comparison of values and worries and priorities, and, as I've already said, our political power structures, because they dehumanize intrinsically, avoid such personal involvement.
The politics of patriarchal communication follow the form "If you do this, I'll do that; if you'll do such-andsuch, I'll do blah-blah-blah; if you don't do these, I'll do those." The element of cause and reason, the explanation of why party A desires behavior x from person B, is rarely present. The method of eliciting behavior x, then, is not to create an understanding, empathic response on the part of person B, nor to establish enough rapport to work out mutually desirable goals which would lead person B to engage in behavior x through voluntary cooperation; all of these methods of communication involve personal rapport. Instead, negotiations proceed as if it were a game, like chess, where to fail to be adversaries would be breaking the most fundamental of rules. The methods all depend on manipulation of the opponent's perceptions of where his or her best interests lie.
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The opposite of depersonalization would be personification, the projection of human characteristics onto something which is not human. We do this in our animated cartoons and fairy tales, where animals understand our language and reasoning, and respond in kind.
In real life, though, to get an animal to behave as you desire, you reward the desired behavior and punish any undesired behavior. Our most familiar image is that of a mule in front of which dangles a carrot and behind which follows the farmer with a stick. Reward and punishment work in tandem (with the lack of either capable of serving as the presence of the other at times) to modify the behavior of the animal so as to create a behavior which the animal would not have spontaneously engaged in. This is a reasonable and not necessarily cruel way of dealing with animals (unless you oppose any domestication or training for animals). It would be irrational to try to explain to the mule why you want it to pull the harrow; that would be personifying the mule.
If, however, we replace the mule with a person (and hopefully the harrow with a less harrowing task), we should also replace the methods of eliciting cooperation, since we can explain matters to another human being. When this is not done, and the carrot-and-stick methods are used to the exclusion of such explanation, the person tends to resent it, and describes the situation as a lack of freedom. So freedom can be said to be in part an aspect of communication, and oppression the attempt to modify a person's behavior without their consent.
Officious impersonality is not merely a companion of tyranny, but necessarily is tyranny itself. You can't refuse to deal with people personally without stealing their freedom or doing without their cooperation. And, although in-depth communication and resulting accord and voluntary cooperation can occur without any inequalities entering the picture, reward-and-punishment modes of getting something done always involve someone in a position of dominant power over others in order to do the rewarding and the punishing. In any system bound up in these dynamics, leaders are not and cannot be simply wise people who lead by deriving their just power from the consent of the governed, but are actually enforcers who derive their self-justified power from the ability to control the governed without their consent.
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The dynamics of domination and the pervasiveness of inequality are often blamed on our innate natures, in other word, we start off as selfish savages, and the evils of society reflect our failure to outgrow that childishness. How true is that?
Childhood is a situation every one of us passes through, we experience it then move on past it, which is one of the reason so many people justify treating children according to the convenience of adults, dehumanizing them openly and denying that it's wrong since everyone has to do their time as a child.
But childhood is not some experience we all go through "sooner or later", it is the first experience, we start as children, and our initial concepts of life and people and ourselves developed in these formative years are vital to our manifested personalities and thinking for the rest of our lives.
It is during these years that the self begins to notice the effects of actions, assessing the desirability of those effects, and deriving a system of values from these observations. These value judgments are based on perceptions of where one's best interests lie, and if those perceptions are distorted, the ethical codes and values adopted as a discipline by the self are likely to be similarly warped.
In contrast, we often speak of values and morals as if they existed only in some sort of reasonless self-defined limbo and have properly very little to do with serving one's personal best interests. But these systems of priorities and values have to serve something or someone's best interests, since if they are just arbitrarily declarations that such-and-such is "good" or "evil", "right" or "wrong", they have no validity in real life at all. If not the best interests of the individual, then whose? God's? Society's?
Without trying (at the moment) to pinpoint what God might or might not want of people, we could simply say that it is in the best interests of any individual to align with God's will; so to successfully seek out one's best interests would by definition lead a person to the God-designed moral code.
As for the best interests of society, assuming we are talking about the community of people and not the abstract institutional system itself, the realization of these would always benefit the individual as well, since we are all social creatures whose existence depends on cooperation and whose happiness depends on pleasant interpersonal interactions. In short, what we usually are taught to think of as self-centeredness or greed -- the obnoxious failure to treat others humanely, to do unto others things you would never want to be done unto you -- these might more accurately be called poor perceptions of where one's best interests lie, since to live with "selfish" dehumanizing values does not bring one happiness. In psychological terms, the socialization process did not properly take place within such people, and the poor unfortunates never developed satisfactory interpersonal relationships or satisfactory social contracts. In religious terms, a sin is not a naughtiness that one gets away with at the expense of other people (or at the expense of God), but is rather also a violation against the violator' self. In feminist terms, seeking, insisting on, and obtaining personal individual satisfaction in life is the most socially constructive act of good citizenship an individual can engage in; our ultimate best interests coincide, as individuals and as a species in our entirety; the personal is the political.
But we introduce each new generation to life by cramming children with second-hand values, unaccompanied by reason, as if we were dealing with unprogrammed machines who would never develop valid concepts of good and evil from being alive and observing life. Also, only too often these spoon-fed values are not even our own, but those we think are appropriate for children to live by, or convenient for adults if they do so. We resentfully defy children's healthy curiosity that causes them to want to know why a given behavior x is being asked or prohibited of them, saying to them, in effect, "because I said so; and I will be benevolent only if you do so, and I may punish you if you don't."
Like any human beings deprived of explanation, and exposed to attempts to modify their behavior without consent, children stubbornly and righteously rebel, but because we have dehumanized children, we don't often sit and think, "Well, if it were me, I would...", that is, we don't empathize; yet we're quick to cite such rebellious struggles as evidence of the need to tame and civilize children and break their wild selfish spirit.
Perhaps we should blame our problems not on human childishness, but on "adultishness" instead.
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In any society where the image of communications and voluntary cooperation is lost, and institutionalized systems of reward-and-punishment are taken for granted as natural and necessary, freedom can only be visualized in a quantified, relative sense. People will not be able to conceive of a peaceful world of totally free people. The vast majority of people living in today's patriarchy are in this position; the connotation-loaded term for total freedom, "anarchy" (meaning "without a ruler", implying that an absence [of a ruler] is the distinguishing characteristic, not the voluntary cooperation of free equals), brings to most minds images of chaos -- indeed, undisciplined hell-raising, brute force, wanton destruction, rape, and other id-like uncivilized behavior. Our major institutionalized forms of reward and punishment are better known, respectively, as the economic system and the legal/judicial/penal systems of law enforcement. Upon declaring these obsolete and expendable, I've found people not just saying we'll never grow up that far, but actually fundamentally incapable of grasping the concept of a functioning society where no one keeps track of the desired and undesired behaviors of its citizens and shepherds them parentally. Even those who can visualize angels or a set of perfect people living like that quickly declare that to think that ordinary humans will ever ascend to such lofty altruistic heights is completely unrealistic.
But to be realistic is to insist that operating methodical concepts be rooted in operational reality, the damn things have to work, and it is not total freedom and elimination of patriarchal modes which is unrealistic, but rather the patriarchal forms. Not because they are cruel and inhuman, although they certainly are that, but because they do not accomplish their purposes, they do not even come close; in fact, the legal and economic systems are incredibly efficient only at encouraging hell-raising, destruction, and violence, and discouraging the performance of necessary functional chores on which the survival of the entire species depends! Our criminal justice system -- from legislation to police force to judicial system to penal system -- stimulates, encourages, and teaches antisocial criminal behavior so effectively that it would be virtually impossible for so much crime to continue to exist if we were to simply ignore and forgive and continue as if nothing had happened, and rely on the consciences and good citizenship of totally free people. Nor could a panel of geniuses devise anything as efficiently wasteful of human time and energy and natural resources, and as perversely opposed to human best interests, as the economic (money) system of incentive and reward, not in a thousand years. We would get more done quicker with less work for the workers to have to do if we depended on volunteers to do (only) the necessary and/or truly desired work, even if 80% of the world's population sat on their legendary butts.
Someone noticed these things a couple of millenia ago and pointed them out, and caused such a commotion they nailed him to a cross. Many today find such notions idealistic and naÔve, saying people are too wicked and greedy and that it will never happen. But our concepts of our own human nature, as well as our notions of greed and wickedness, need to be reassessed as well.
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