Gold

This is a painting I did in 1992 that seemed to go with the written post.

Competition

The struggle to be on top is part of the hierarchical model. Competition is lauded as a positive and exerts unconscious influence on every area of life. When it stimulates doing the best you possibly can, like in sports, or developing a product, it’s beneficial. But it’s invaded every area of life interfering with personal and social relations. People compete in conversation, making points and striking down other points, in friendships, how many and who they are as well as material possessions. Though competition is implicit in status, I’ve seen people compete in virtue, vice, and even piety. The closer to the top the more control one has, and control is important to the health of the immune system. The lower one is on the pyramid the more helpless one feels, one of the worst emotions for health. An executive of Goldman Sachs said the golden rule there was, “he who has the gold makes the rules”. The flaw in the system shows in the statement. Having the most money doesn’t make people more sensible in other areas, they would likely make rules that would make them more money- required safety features, unnecessary medicines and tests. He also said everybody at the firm was in competition to make more money than “the guy next to me”. When making money is the goal and ultimate good, the greediest win, and the greedy are not known for their scruples. Everyone else suffers. When a company that makes something and employs people, is bought out by a financial firm that sells all the assets and closes the firm to put the money in the stock market, they are doing real harm to society for the sake of making more money. They’ll point to the balance sheet and say they’re winning. And they won’t be wrong. The problem is the underlying model. Competition interferes with the pleasure in the process. If there is something to be won, then attention is directed to the outcome. Instead of paying attention to the thing you’re doing, you pay attention to results and to how you’re doing in relation to how someone else is doing compromising attention to what’s being done. Here are the roots of envy, jealousy, resentment and the other deadly sins that come with a competitive attitude. In their book, “The Mark of Cain”, Marguerite and Willard Beecher point out how jealousy makes a person feel like a nonentity because attention is on the object of jealousy. They write, “Keeping up with the Jones’s makes for a sterile, destructive condition, not unlike slavery.” And suggest that “addiction is a purposely engineered incompetence” making it impossible to compete. It’s hard to maintain a sense of community and connection to others when you look at those you’re engaged with as competitors. All the satisfaction that comes with involved activity is undermined by a mindset that heaps up individual accomplishments like points on a scoreboard. The actual experience is reduced and abstracted by the cultural obsession with quantification. When time is reduced to units on a clock there’s never enough. Yet the single moment, truly experienced, expands in all directions. The organs of community, society and region work best in cooperation, using true expertise to make common sense decisions instead of control from a top less knowledgeable and more prone to corruption.

Ridicule

This is a still from "CAVE", an interactive psychological adventure I finished in 2002

Negative Models

An image in the mind can have deep influence. When we hear about Mitt Romney at eighteen with all his friends behind him, holding down another teenager and cutting off his hair while the boy cried and screamed for help, we see it in our mind and it is the same, in character, as the images of bullying the media currently decries. Mean is mean. We know it when we see it. And meanness in a president could be very ugly. The video that went around the Internet not too long ago, showing a judge beating his daughter, is an example of why this country has such trouble with violence. If he’d been hitting a stranger on the street or even a non-family member in his home he could have been arrested for assault. Yet hitting a child or in this case a young woman brutally with a belt is justified as discipline. Even mistreating an animal in this way would get onlookers upset. In contrast, a student in my class said he was never punished as a child but never misbehaved because he had so much respect for his mother. This reminded me of another student from over ten years ago telling me that his father’s violence with him made him lose respect for the man. They say violence is the language of the inarticulate but it’s more than that. It’s a way of dealing with problems that has been modeled by generations of parents, a personal mental image that allows a man who is damaging his child on many levels to blind himself to his culpability. And unless she becomes an artist, the rage that builds in that young woman will either be turned against herself or she’ll release it in the culturally sanctioned practice of beating her own children. Parents are agents of the culture, embody the cultural standards for behavior and often use fear to coerce their children into behaving as their image of what a child should be. Violence is an expression of disrespect, and studies have been done that show self-esteem sinking as physical punishment increases. Having their noses rubbed in their powerlessness builds a pressure to assert power through violence themselves and looks for any outlet. People who bully have probably been bullied themselves in their homes, but that’s rarely part of the discussion. The title of one of Alice Miller’s many books on negative parenting, “Banished Knowledge” refers to this avoidance. The image of do-what-I-say-or-else is woven through every level where power differentials exist. The national tendency to bully other countries into doing what we say and being like us creates anger and outrage all over the world. Demonizing an outer enemy creates a target for all the unexpressed rage. The pose of righteousness is supposed to excuse the very behavior it condemns as we project our inner worldview on the other. Replaying the role of the childhood oppressor activates the need to punish. The beaten child will feel justified as an adult when waterboarding an offender, fueled by the rage at powerlessness in the face of cruelty. Changing the image at the onset, by banning violence against children by anybody, will eliminate the perverse exception for violence inside the family. This is where the model’s constructed. Parents should be required to attend classes with prenatal care and be shown the many ways their actions mold their children’s minds and future behavior. The way to set up a child for fulfilling life is to show them love and respect from the start by paying attention to who they are. As we create models that demonstrate connections to others, show willingness to see and understand, and find ways to further each other’s interests, we enjoy the pleasure of helping and learning from different points of view that could heal violence without “fighting” it.