people like us...
6 minute. read
"People like us do things like this."
It's the root of culture and community, and it's compelling.
As far as I understand healing, if indeed I understand it at all, it is the process by which an individual can reconnect parts of themselves that have become disconnected - or to return to healthy function that which has become dysfunctional. This can also be true with how they might be relating to others or the world.
This process of healing is also true for smaller and larger systems as well.
My approach to therapy over the last few years has moved more and more in the direction of considering what helps to improves health, not only of the individual but also the systems in which they live. Hence 'Life Therapy,'
To my mind, personal transformation seems incomplete without systemic transformation. Fish can't live in a poison lake.
Systems are complex things though, while we can talk of the dysfunctional elements of a psyche, a family or a society, they can also provide much needed stability and order. The question of healing then is not a simple case of transforming the whole system to what we think would be healthier, but inviting the parts of it to recalibrate.
The current system in which we live is unlike any we have known before and you don't have to look far to see the very real threat of a type of corporate feudalism emerging: A post-democratic order where public choice becomes increasingly irrelevant regardless of which end of the political spectrum to which you might lean.
In truth the democratic process has been eroding for decades. Some argue that it was never intended for common people anyway. Just ask the ancient Greeks.
As it exists, modern politics seems all too often to be driven by opinion and rhetoric over manifesto and dialectic. The social and economic order seems more interested in 'who we represent' as with 'what we aim to do'. It plays to the gallery on identity, and the majority of vote cast seem to go to voting out a failing government in favour of an opposition, as opposed to voting in a more competent leadership or manifesto that stands as a step up in the game.
Both sides of the political spectrum seem more and more to be wings of the same bird, an established order whose flesh and bone shift little beneath the political rhetoric in which it is adorned. I'm not suggesting any particular conspiracy or elite puppet master pulling the strings here, I think it's much simpler than that. Once people accrue money in power they have a tendency to try and hold onto it for as long as they can. Alliances that benefit the wealthy and the powerful are no different from the alliances that groups of poor people make to support each other. People at all ends of the economic spectrum have a tenancy to work together when it's in their interest to do so.
If there is a nameless beast behind it all its blood is made of money and assets and it's heart is the pump of those who trade in it. And while we might not know the precise motivations behind the current global trends, we know that it is in the acquisition of resources - be that land, power, oil, or attention - that the ultimate power resides.
