cell913blog.com #8

 In the last post while walking on Mandela’s shoulders, lifting his exhortation to free both the oppressed and the oppressors, we challenged ourselves and our readers to elevate our challenge, and indeed our responsibility not only to become a ‘freedom fighter for the oppressed’ but also to become a freedom fighter for the oppressors.

And from the perspective of political and ethical and moral and idealistic aspirations, those words and that perspective are reasonable, honourable ethical and aspirational.

Hidden in all of that, however, is another dimension. Contained in a compact epithet attributed to Carl Jung, this dimension can be captured in his phrase: inside every saint is a monster and inside every monster is a saint.

In our rational, disciplined and conventional mode of ‘perceiving’ and of orienting ourselves to our world and our place in it, we dichotomize, we divide, we compare, we identify with and dissociate from, we embody the beliefs and the rituals of our tribe and “look” out from our ‘home turf’ psychologically to attempt to ‘make sense’ of the chaos around us. And when we enter a ‘storm’ of personal biographical, psychological, emotional and perhaps intellectual turbulence, we reach for some kind of steadying ‘anchor’ or a dock where we can tie down our little skiff, hoping to ride out the storm.

Conventional perceptions, collected and curated in what we call a culture, or an ethos, offer a kind of social and political and even relational vocabulary, including the stories of the accomplishments and ‘falls’ of others who provide that vernacular nugget of so many cocktail parties, when discussing the ‘falls’ of others, ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. At some level, we are all to some degree conscious that our own good fortune is fragile, subject to winds and storms, including the insensitivities and lapses in concentration and attention of both ourselves and others. And in the midst of that consciousness, we press on in an ambitious and we believe honourable and worthwhile pursuit of personal and professional goals, relationships, accomplishments and legacies. In that ‘light’ as well as in the ‘light’ of our own apprehensions and fears that we might be ‘more’ than our training and profession, or more than our role, we ‘move into’ what might be termed our ‘picture’ of how we would like our life to unfold.

The storms that inevitably crash in our little ‘skiff’ are frequently, if not primarily, perceived as coming from the outside, from an enemy, or from a natural disaster, or from a drop in the market, or a failed examination, or a failed marriage. Flip Wilson’s ‘the devil made me do it,’ is a classic ‘flip’ of coping with an ‘ooops’ of some kind. We have stubbed our toe, in what might be a socially inappropriate word or observation; we have failed to live up to a parent, teacher, spouse or supervisor’s expectations. We failed to ‘see that coming’ if and when, for example, the interest rates dip or spike in a manner that did not seem likely from the previous research and evidence that we had collected, interpreted and disseminated. A wide-body Airbus 350 is cleared to land on runway 3-4 in Tokyo only to encounter a much smaller aircraft about to take off from that same runway at that same moment, as happened only yesterday, resulting in the deaths of four on the smaller plane while 379 men women and children (8) escaped without injury from the inferno that exploded inside and outside of the Airbus. There will be extensive investigations about the ‘missed’ piece of information of a small plane preparing for take-off to supply help and resources for those already stranded by an earthquake on that same island of Japan. Inevitably, too, those investigations will generate audio tapes, black boxes, interviews and a full mock-up of the ‘accident’ leading to the proverbial, predicted and demanded diagnosis and then the assignment of responsibility.

Professional performance, if it is determined that a single air traffic controller’s assignment and responsibility was ‘dropped,’ will bring about what those in authority consider appropriate punishment, dismissal, or even sadly, given the personal trauma that might be continuing in one person’s psyche, something we have come to call ‘self harm’ or even suicide. There will be attempts to probe into the private personal circumstances of those piloting and ‘tracking’ those planes. Financial angst, relationship breakdown, grief from a loss of a loved one, and any combination of such factors will be considered ‘ameliorating circumstances’ in any decision to sanction. There will be rare yet real instances of ‘deliberate’ malfeasance that will have to open up public consideration of motives like revenge, excessive ambition, criminal associations, illicit deals in the business or illicit trade sectors. And in those situations, there will be a search for a person or persons whose culpability is demonstrated and proven by the evidence deduced and then produced for prosecution.

We have anatomized our lives into a kind of ‘personal responsibility/culpability’ chart for those whose responsibilities include the safety and security of others. We have produced lists of ‘right and wrong’ behaviours, including verbal expressions, that are deemed both ‘professional on the one hand and unprofessional on the other. The backstory of each of our lives is considered ‘off limits’ unless and until we ‘screw up’…and then, nothing is off limits.

Lifestyle, as a backdrop for health ‘storms’ is considered one factor among many, that might have played a part in the development of a specific diagnosis. And yet, as the tobacco companies have argued in years past, and the polluting coal and fossil fuel companies argue today, there is no determinative proof that tobacco ‘causes cancer deaths’ or that fossil fuels cause air pollution and asphyxiation. Of course, the mountains of evidence gathered, curated and disseminated ‘after’ the public relations campaigns denying responsibility have been seeded, funded and creatively implanted as corporate propaganda have become embedded in the public consciousness. And the mantra of preserving ‘jobs’ in various industrial sectors has provided waves of votes for political candidates to ride into office.

However, the nexus of our personal psyche with the public ethos or culture has never been more evident and more investigated than it is today. And while the preponderance of public attitude and perceptions continues to hold ‘individual responsibility’ as the primary force in any situation that grabs our attention, whether it be another racist or sexist or deceptive or criminal or abnormal ‘thing’ (behaviour, word, attitude, belief or some book or curriculum defined as predatory). And then, following our ‘chosen’ diagnosis of the problem, for which the enemies of that ‘problem’ always promise a ‘fix,’ the public war of words and threatening actions ensues with each side self-righteously defining itself as ‘ethical’ or moral, while the other side is ‘evil’ or …pick your most abusive and demeaning and penetrating and destroying epithet. Righteousness, once considered something of aspirational merit, has now become a self-anointed crown, as if each side were the champion of truth, righteousness and the second-coming, but from opposite perspectives.

We are all aware that this ‘game’ that has and will continue to cost lives, through deaths, maimings, threats and withdrawals from public service of millions of otherwise honourable and healthy men and women who refuse to enter the kind of character assassination combat that much of our politics has become. Debates are no longer based on the shared foundation of evidence, but rather on the level of radioactivity of the words and their context in exterminating the enemy. Scorched earth has come to governance where it has no place to exist.

And yet, there are multiple signs that, in dividing our universe into good and evil, into right and wrong, into opposing political armies armed with necessary propaganda (not evidence, nor a commitment to a common cause of the public interest, and certainly not of the planet’s habitability) that our personal dark side, in being projected onto the public stage, is unconsciously being denied by the individuals who have completely given themselves over to the political game of ‘thrones’.

Inside of each of us, whether we are conscious of its ‘existence’ (and this is a metaphoric existence, not a scientific or medical or legal or biological existence) of both a monster and a saint. We are all both oppressed and oppressor, in different and various degrees of separation and history, in relationships and in our imagination. And whether we perceive this fundamental paradox within as a religious or spiritual matter, or as an educational matter, or as a medical or legal matter, or even as a political or personal matter, the basic notion is inescapable.

For this scribe, (submitted previously in this space), I encountered my own paradox in a conversation about the theme of public betrayal, following the death, by suicide, of a clergy in a congregation that was continuing to grieve. Without previous thought, or reading or reflection, words tumbled out of my mouth, more surprising to me than to the dozen or so people who heard them. “If we are going to acknowledge that we have been betrayed by this act, we have to acknowledge our own betrayer and for me, while I never intended to betray my daughters in leaving my marriage of twenty-plus years, there is no doubt that, both in their minds and in the wider cultural perspective, I betrayed them.” Silence followed, and the next morning the presiding bishop, upon learning of the conversation, declared it to be ‘evil and must be stopped’. Gratifyingly, those few parishioners in that meeting 'grew' into a full appreciation of the 'freedom' to dig into and to acknowledge the depths of their own hurt, betrayal and their 'betrayer.'

Here is the convergent moment of the interior and the exterior life, not only of our personal lives, but also of our public consciousness. If we are even to consider, both intellectually and emotionally, and thereby to any degree effectively, ‘freeing the oppressor’ we have to ‘free our own internal oppressor’….And that means we have to first acknowledge that we ‘are’ that oppressor, that we are no better and no worse that the oppressors whom we daily and hourly denigrate, show contempt for, and even eliminate from our public consciousness and even from the public arena. Inside of us lies both a saint and a monster, a puer and a senex, a male and a female, a success and a failure, an activist and a critic, an Apollo and a Dionysus, from the perspective of our imagination. And it is through the lens of our imaginative ‘eye’ that these deeper and wider and more subtle and nuanced and complex images can be revisited.

And such a revisitation is not dependent on a moral/ethical determination of which of these images is ‘right or wrong’….at least not as a starting point of our consideration, our perception and our integration into our ‘image’ of who we are. It may well be that our sensibilities about how we ‘see’ others in a world exploding in bombs, missiles, fires, draughts, migrants and refugees, starving children and desperate mothers and fathers, is altered in a direction of identification with the oppressed; and yet, in our deepest empathy with the oppressed, we tend to become even more contemptuous of what or whom we consider to be the oppressor. While allies and enemies define the playing field for the military and the diplomatic corps, and while our demons and our better angels define the vernacular about our aspirations and our anxieties, our openness to embrace both sides of our character not merely in a play-acting mode, but through an imaginative lens.

An analogy that might be useful, (borrowed from James Hillman and the Archeaypal Psychology lexicon) is our dream life over which we have literally ‘no apparent control’. Images come into, enact their respective scenes and dissipate off stage from our dream-life. We are neither ‘writing their script’ nor taking responsibility for the ‘hurt’ they may inflict. And yet, these interior dramas are a significant part of our psychic life. Their specific ‘dream interpretation’ has to be left to those whose training and insight far exceed that of this scribe.

Nevertheless, being conscious, to a degree perhaps previously inaccessible (note “inaccessible” rather than avoided, denied, or perhaps even considered evil) that each of us, if given the appropriate situation, in the convergence of our fears and anxieties and circumstances we consider so ‘overwhelming’ has within us a dark voice the depths and vehemence of which we are totally unaware in our previous experience. What happens in such moments when we are all potentially ‘broken’ and ‘overwhelmed’ and dessimated, (images of lying unconscious in a ditch, or on a floor of a friend’s apartment, there is at that moment a kind of ‘break’ between what we face and what we believe we are capable of handling, managing or overcoming.

And ironically,  we consider such a moment to be absolutely unique and solely ours, in a universe of billions of people, now and in the historic past, who, themselves, have also either  through direct experience or through some ‘connection’ with the experience of others, have also sunk to the ocean floor psychically, when, in our more conscious state, we know we are experiencing something akin to what others have experienced.

We do not have to act out our oppressor in order to identify with it; it is enough to acknowledge that we are like all others in that, when pressed, and pressed and constricted and constricted and oppressed (in whatever of the plethora of iterations that oppression takes), we are more complex and nuanced that a ‘fight or flight’ slogan would envision. We do, however, have access to a different way of ‘seeing’ or ‘perceiving’ our complexity, from an imaginative ‘eye’ (another of our shared and yet ignored or denied capacities). Freeing our own oppressor, with all of the subtleties and complexities of such a process, is a step available to each of us.

It will require our imagination to begin to consider the possible waves that might emerge from such a ‘stone’ of revisioning dropped into the pool of our psyche.