6/22
It's pretty horrible, because the Self/Other-destructive ways of Being-- those processes by which we commit the essential act of Violence that is the psychological, physical, social, et cetera severing of "self" from "other" and that are implicit in and simultaneous to the more visible manifestations of these acts (such as imprisoning beings in factory farms, or dropping bombs on them, or consuming pornography):
The ultimately alienating ways of Knowing that undergird all destructive ways of Being are rooted horribly (and i write this in the active sense of something purposefully rooting them there) in the personal pain of each human being who has been subjected to this culture.
It has for a while seemed to me that an innocent human response to an environment that is assaultive to the Self is to become, in that wondrous propensity of living beings to harmonize with their surroundings, Self-destructive on some level. Here we have a summary of human childhood and growing-up.
To harm Self is to harm those labeled Other, and vice versa-- but here i need to add that when I write Other I refer to whatever aspect of genuine Self that may linger or, rarely, burn brightly within the bounds of culturally/socially/economically enforced deathlike roles, that divine spark that has no physical presence and encompasses galaxies, that alone traverses the spaces of Aloneness and is the only vehicle to true connection with other living beings.
We have all been initiated into the cult of Self-destruction, by virtue of an exposure to massive evil that is at once terribly personal to each of us, as well as the most fundamental, perhaps the first political/social act. Our hate is not just intimately linked to, it is our neurosis, as we move, animated by that seed of oppression now lodged deeply, forcibly within our hearts, to commit The Act of Self-destruction-- which is the violence, psychic and physical, that rends Self from "other".
To harm another is not to fulfill the requirements of that Otherness, but to create Otherness.
We cling with terrified tenacity to our hate, which is our Self-destructiveness, as the key to easing the cognitive dissonance of that first experience of what will always be agonizingly unjustifiable violence. And it is so that we are assimilated into the cult of death that is this culture, and become its minion, fragment of a faceless legion of undead servitors.
The ultimately alienating ways of Knowing that undergird all destructive ways of Being are rooted horribly (and i write this in the active sense of something purposefully rooting them there) in the personal pain of each human being who has been subjected to this culture.
It has for a while seemed to me that an innocent human response to an environment that is assaultive to the Self is to become, in that wondrous propensity of living beings to harmonize with their surroundings, Self-destructive on some level. Here we have a summary of human childhood and growing-up.
To harm Self is to harm those labeled Other, and vice versa-- but here i need to add that when I write Other I refer to whatever aspect of genuine Self that may linger or, rarely, burn brightly within the bounds of culturally/socially/economically enforced deathlike roles, that divine spark that has no physical presence and encompasses galaxies, that alone traverses the spaces of Aloneness and is the only vehicle to true connection with other living beings.
We have all been initiated into the cult of Self-destruction, by virtue of an exposure to massive evil that is at once terribly personal to each of us, as well as the most fundamental, perhaps the first political/social act. Our hate is not just intimately linked to, it is our neurosis, as we move, animated by that seed of oppression now lodged deeply, forcibly within our hearts, to commit The Act of Self-destruction-- which is the violence, psychic and physical, that rends Self from "other".
To harm another is not to fulfill the requirements of that Otherness, but to create Otherness.
We cling with terrified tenacity to our hate, which is our Self-destructiveness, as the key to easing the cognitive dissonance of that first experience of what will always be agonizingly unjustifiable violence. And it is so that we are assimilated into the cult of death that is this culture, and become its minion, fragment of a faceless legion of undead servitors.