cell913blog.com #11

 Rolihlahla, the Xhosa name ascribed to Nelson Mandela by his father, literally means, ‘pulling the branch of a tree’…colloquially, it would mean ‘troublemaker.’ History will consider Mandela, in the light of Congressman John Lewis’s memorable epithet, ‘good trouble,’ a conscientious as well as a contentious change agent and troublesome burr in the shoes of his apartheid adversaries.

And while the narrative of his struggles to overthrow white supremacy details the events, the personages, the trials, the bombs and the prison cells and court rooms, as well as the many and various communications including secret travel and meetings, sequestered letters out of prison, even courses in politics and the law, as well as his own pursuit of and acquisition of his LLB from the University of London, while he was in Robben Island, the purpose and goal of his life was to fulfil a dream of erasing white supremacy and replacing it with the legitimate, legal and political freedom through democracy of all South Africans.

Seeing the negative space on the canvas of the South Africa in which he was born and raised, Mandela vowed to replace what was then the positive space on that canvas with the negative space. Overturning what is considered ‘positive image’ (and privilege) in the conventional cultural perception with its inverse, its opposite, is not either easy or frequent in human history. And if the overturing actually occurs, often it takes a long time, the loss of many lives and the suffering of many and the relinquishing of long-held convictions. What became evident, even obvious to Mandela and his growing number of compatriots, was that the system of apartheid, rather than the personalities of those who espoused and enforced it, was the enemy. Governments of different stripes came and went, leaving different and often invasive measures that ensnared the black Africans in surveillance, unwarranted and illegal arrest, house burnings, imprisonments and endless legal conflicts with the ‘state’. A new and different ‘state’ with a very different set of laws, regulations, perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and the necessary institutional framework to sustain those changes had to be installed.

The vision of enslavement, oppression, repression, racism, and impoverishment haunted all of the freedom fighters, while those in power dug in their heels, as it were, and defiantly and deliberately determined to uphold their white power.

In any attempt to imagine bridging the honour, the courage, the discipline, the imagination and the profound compassion and generosity of those, including Mandela, in their fight to eradicate apartheid with anything even close to such a historic goal and purpose in the first half of the twenty-first century has to approach the ‘windmill’ of change from current global oppression, repression, enslavement, racism, impoverishment in all of their many forms and faces, by attempting to connect the dots of the many ‘public issues’ into a common and imaginable system, or at least the positive space on the canvas of our time. What that sentence is ‘trying’ to say is that, today, the ‘perceived enemy’ is far more disparate, with each of its many ‘components’ seemingly intractably resistant to being herded into a common image, so that a concerted ‘freedom movement’ might even be envisioned, let alone launched. So long as the many interests that oppose and confound the common good, as a shared value and a shared responsibility for addressing, remain disconnected in the public mind and debate, a ‘freedom fighter movement’ like the one launched by Mandela and his cohorts will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to mount.

It may seem quixotic, and certainly idealistic, if not naïve and foolhardy, even to begin to imagine that the current situation might be considered, perceived and assessed as a ‘gestalt’ of oppression on millions of people around the globe. Nevertheless, that is what these pieces are engaged in conceiving, imagining and then in engaging in confronting. While there are multiple ‘positive space’ images on the global political canvas/landscape, it is the negative space of indolence, complacency, paralysis, avoidance, denial, pettiness, narcissism, whereby little to nothing is being ‘accomplished’ to remediate, moderate, and certainly not eliminate any of these problems, each of which overlap, compound and confound the others. And part of our problem is our shared ‘perception’ (and indoctrination, media coverage, and political escapism) that ‘divides and separates each of our serious and potentially existential issues into cells too complex and too long-standing that they must each be confronted separately.

We cannot hope or conceive that by resolving a single issue, all other issues will be resolved. Nor can we proceed, with courage and integrity and collaboration to address how power itself and its abuse lies at the core of all of our issues. We can no longer tolerate political leaders’ determination to poison our minds with their own personal narcissistic agenda, nor with an agenda of ultra-nationalism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and illegitimate military invasion. We can and must no longer tolerate corporate malfeasance in manipulating politicians with cash to subvert the needed changes to forestall and, if possible, prevent the catastrophe that comes from temperatures rising beyond our capacity to survive. We can and must no longer tolerate impunity, immunity, and criminal negligence in the operation of any government, irrespective of its political ideology. And we can no longer secure the personal safety and dignity of all people on the planet through a political and cognitive and emotional and psychological perception that focuses on the malfeasance of an individual human being (or a gang) or a corporation. The world can and must no longer tolerate the imprisonment of political prisoners, granting effective impunity to those in office whose criminality screams from their illegitimate incarcerations. Personality politics, regardless of which country or region it is the norm, has to give way to a global politics and governance that elevates all human beings to a minimum standard of the provision of basic human needs.

Some of the various and more obvious issues facing the planet, and all of the 8-9 billions of people living in this shared space, breathing the same air, drinking the same water, fishing from the same oceans, and seeding the common earth are listed below. This is neither a comprehensive nor a complete list, but rather a first draft.

Prominent on that imaginary canvas are some obvious pieces of data:

·        Dollars and the economy are prominent in our public discourse and perception

·        Politics has become a zero-sum game, in which political opponents seek to destroy each other, rather than to debate, discuss and compromise with each other for the larger public good

·        Words, language, has morphed from a rather nuanced and sensitive deployment of a means to express perceptions, ideologies and values, into an arsenal of bullets, toxic adjectives and ad-hominums

·        Paralysis, rather than measurable and legitimate and sanctioned governing, afflicts governments of many small-l liberal governments, themselves often held hostage by the forces of any one or more of a number of forces: white supremacy, capitalism, tribalism, nationalism, and the proverbial hypocrisy, whereby playing ‘nice’ and then betraying, deceiving, attacking, lying and conspiring in secret renders the public ‘information’ both incomplete and dangerous.

·        The planetary issues, shared by all humans, not only get minimal and superficial attention, rendering them virtually out-of-sight and out-of-mind, in terms of concentrated, disciplined, committed and enforceable international action: war, rising temperatures, rising waves of refugees, migrants and the concomitant smuggling operations, starvation, political corruption, pandemics, masculine ‘supremacy’ and human hopelessness.

·        Numbers of bombs, deaths, missiles, drones, killed and wounded, along with the dollar costs of various international crises dominate the mass media coverage, along with the personal headline-magnetizing vocabulary of extremists, whose determination to ‘deconstruct’ and destroy the historic and traditional institutional framework puts them and the public on the defensive.

·        International forums, legal, environmental, human rights, medical and health, educational, labour and digital/communication have yet to be seeded, at the public level, although there are numerous projects at the academic and corporate and non-profit levels.

·        Underlying all of these dynamics is a human concentration on ‘empirical’ and ‘literal’ and ‘nominal’ perceptions and the attitudes and convictions that support those perceptions, at the expense of what is not amenable to the human senses: the unconscious, the imagination, the archetypal the mythical. Indeed, for the most part, these latter concepts are often if not always relegated to the fringes of the arts and the artists, dependent on the philanthropic with support from both government and corporations, largely in a pursuit of enhancing reputations.

·        STEM, the study of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, has risen to a wave of both research funding, academic conceptualizing and enrollment patterns, in order to ‘full the jobs of the future’ while the faculties of Arts, Humanities, Classics, Philosophy atrophy from decreasing enrolments, drying-up funding, political silence, and perceived cultural obsolescence.

·        Artificial Intelligence and the future of cyber developments have dominated and will continue to dominate the public consciousness, for good and/or ill for the next century, and the foundational elements of human critical thought can not and will not be sufficiently instilled in the public consciousness and unconsciousness, in order to discern, debate, discuss and decide the appropriate boundaries, limits and deployments of all of the many advancements we have yet to design and implement.

·        Effectively, the 1% who hold 98% of the wealth (at least) and who control the levers of power and influence in the West and in the developed world, if we choose to consider their influence this way, can be considered our inherited analogy of the apartheid governments of South Africa, not necessarily in their motives but in their impact. Increasingly, government agendas rely on the infusion of cash from the 1% whose agenda, not unnaturally, focuses on the enhancement of their stature, their wealth and their power. No longer, can the victims/the masses/the 98% be identified by a single race, or a single religion or a single ethnicity, or a single geography or a single political ideology. And this disperate (not desperate) diffusion means that, those without wealth, without political influence, without corporate power, without post-graduate educations, many without work with dignity, many without access to quality health care, many without even a residence of their own not only can not but will not find a ‘Mandela’ and his band of freedom fighters, to give them a voice in the pursuit of the basics of a life with human dignity and respect.

Aside from the political analysis, including but not restricted to, the above agenda, at the personal, human, social and community level of both communication and psychology, we live in a culture determined to avoid and/or deny death, determined to put on a mask of success, sociability, and normalcy, all the while covering very deep and painful and shared psychic injuries, wounds, memories and self-defeating perceptions. Many of those self-sabotaging habits, however, are considered ‘fitting in’ to the fabric of the culture, the family, the school, the church and the corporation, or the military, the church or even the various professions. Surface, superficial and empirical data flood our airwaves, and our minds, to the near exclusion of many of our private fears, anxieties and failed hopes and dreams.

As Hillman reminds us in a piece entitled, City and Soul, included in A Blue Fire:

Welfare, mainly an inner-city phenomenon, is not only an economic and a social problem, it is predominately a psychological problem. The soul that is uncared for- whether in personal or in community life- turns into an angry child. It assaults the city which has depersonalized it with a depersonalized rage, violence against the very objects-storefronts, park monuments, public buildings—which stand for uniform soulnessness. What city dwellers in their rage have in recent years chosen to attack, and chosen to defend, (trees, old houses, and neighbourhoods), is significant. ..Once the barbarians who attacked civilizations came from outside the walls.. Today they spring from our own laps, raised in our own homes. The  barbarian is that part of us to whom the city does not speak, that soul un us who has not found a home in its environs. The frustration of this soul in face of the uniformity and impersonality of great walls and towers, destroys like a barbarian what it cannot comprehend, structures which represent the achievement of mind, the power of will, and the magnificence of spirit but do not reflect the needs of soul. For our psychic health and the well-being of our city, let us continue to find ways to make place for soul. (P. 106-107)…If our society suffers from failure of imagination, of leadership, of cohesive far-sighted perspectives, then we must attend to the places and moments where these interior faculties of the human mind begin. (p.111)

Given our conventional perceptions of how power must operate, in a epistemological framework that places a high, even exclusive, premium on the ‘positive space’ of actions, numbers ‘attained and demonstrated, and the praise or guilt of those whose actions we judge, depending on our private perspective, we have to begin the conscious process of focusing on ‘the negative space’ on our shared global canvas….Just as Mandela and his ANC and other organizations committed to the common goal of eradicating apartheid, now we too must gather both our individual imagination and courage, join others in a common ‘freedom movement’ that seeks to set free everyone attempting to exist under intolerable, unsustainable, unjustified and illegitimate conditions. And we must set our sights not only on freeing those millions ensnared by whatever chains, under the abuse or negligence of others, as well as those suffering from conditions like global warming for which no single person, corporation or government wants to or will claim responsibility.

‘We are all in this together’ is no longer a mere bumper sticker; it is no longer tolerable to act as if ‘someone else is going to fix whatever is wrong’; it is no longer acceptable to sit back and watch this beautiful planet, inhabited by billions of creative, imaginative and idealistic humans atrophy into such chaos that not only millions do not survive, but that hope itself withers. Our issues are no longer containable and manageable by a single government, or a single political leader, or a single United Nations. We need new imaginative perceptions and creative initiatives, from both government and the private sector, both for profit and not for profit…and these initiatives need to be co-ordinated.

Just as we have left our personal health care slip away from the necessary co-ordination of our family physician into the hands of balkanized specialists, we must not concede to our shared global ‘health and wellbeing’ being commandeered by the 1%, no matter its geographic or national, ethnic, religious or linguistic religious or linguistic roots.