Free Speech is a Social and personal Responsibility, it is not a propaganda truism.

Free speech is a responsibility, and the primary responsibility inherent in free speech is to speak truthfully.

A healthy family, community or Society treasures honesty and fairness in all matters.

We have a personal and collective responsibility be honest and fair because we do live together and our action or inaction affects each other,and feeds into the future to affect lives of people as yet unborn.

This responsibility is a constant. It is a fundamental standard. It's the very essence of adult maturity.

Free Speech is a social and personal responsibility, a response ability; we must not let it be sullied by those who are turning it into a propaganda truism, with an ideological agenda.

The men who took their guns into the offices of a French satirical magazine and murdered those people showed nothing other than their own deep and ugly dysfunction. Their actions cannot be defended or qualified or 'explained away'. They are utterly wrong. They are extreme bullies. It was not an attack on free speech. It was an attack on humanity, on humane values and on innocent people. It was and is terrorism.

Yet one has to challenge the manner in which the idea of free speech being undermined by these attacks is being used as a tool to drive deeper divisions amongst the grass roots of Society and to mask the realities of State terrorism. It's not that simple.

When the mainstream media and Government can prove to me that they are speaking truthfully, then the concept of free speech might have some real material meaning and value.

When mainstream media and Government actively support Survivors of many kinds of abuse in their desire for justice and resolution, by releasing all the files they have on various matters, ranging from colonisation to pedophile rings operating within Institutions, corporate lobbying that finances political parties and influences their decision making for commercial purposes, through to covert military operations, torture programs initiated and maintained by Governments and much else besides, then free speech might have some meaning.

As it is, people's emotions are being intentionally manipulated into supporting a false meme, into portraying free speech as an active process that defines this so called ' Western Democracy' as practiced by Power, which is, if we are honest enough to admit it, the deliberate propaganda of a power structure that is willing to exercise extreme violence to retain, enhance and expand it's power over people and land.

It is blatantly obvious that 'Free Speech' in this context is of the same calibre as 'Bringing Freedom and Democracy' on the backs of a Military invasion, when it comes to how Power actually operates.

Ask the Survivors of the Parliamentary pedophile ring, of Jimmy Savile where their free speech was, when they reported crimes committed upon their minds, bodies and souls, to UK Police forces, and were dismissed, ignored or intimidated.

Ask the young women of Rotherham where their free speech was when they reported crimes committed against them?

Ask the Iraqi relatives of the 350,000 children under the age of 15 who died extremely violently in Iraq between 2003 and 2006 how their free speech was nurtured by the 'bringers of Democracy' and the Western media.

350,000 Children who died in 'counter insurgency' initiated by the occupying powers, after they had annulled local elections held successfully all over Iraq in late 2003 and early 2004, once Saddam and his power structure was deposed, a counter insurgency which was aimed at destroying Indigenous multi-cultural Iraqi Nationalism, which produced the successful elections that undermined the occupying powers unspoken intent. A counter insurgency that traumatised an entire country, and from which the likes of IS have emerged.

Ask the aboriginal peoples around the world where their free speech or their cultures and land tenures that pre-date the creation of State systems are being respected.

It must also be said that deliberately goading someone, in order to stimulate their anger is not free speech, it is antagonism; just as the antagonised violently attacking someone who has goaded them is not free speech.

Both are equally irresponsible and avoidable actions. Neither is driven by a real need, in human terms.

Those who antagonise others with an ideological agenda behind it do not deserve violence served against them. They need help. They need to be confronted with the negativity of their behaviour through rational and honest discourse intended to nurture understanding.

The appropriate human response to any abuse of free speech must be honesty, clarity and fair mindedness, not violence.

Those who would stoop to violence to get their way, to serve their agenda need to be exposed and stopped from being bale to act out their violence. I doubt that there is much that can be done to help those who are truly predatory, mercenary or professionally violent.

Such violence is psychologically immature.

The intentional manipulation of peoples emotions is predatory.

Do not fall for it.

Think For Yourself, Question Authority.

Don't make it up. Be honest and fair, above all else.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Pedophlia, Hierarchically Violent Societies and Political Attack memes.

Pedophilia is a part of a set of behaviours associated with dysfunctional Power Relationships within Hierarchically Violent Societies.

20th Century Indian Residential School in Canada - hierarchical, and violent 'child care'

 Child Abuse cannot be examined in isolation from the culture within which it takes place, or on it's own as some separate human flaw, with any degree of accuracy.

Paedophilia  should never, ever be used  as a meme or leverage point to attack the current status quo of power, as a political lever.

Instead we must work to understand it as a dynamic trait, as expressing the essence of intentional abuse of a power disparity, expressed through sexualised violence.

To use CSA as a political attack meme targeting one group among many, as we see deployed with online conspiracy narratives. undermines the work of Survivors, their advocates and their communities  everywhere.

Demand accountability, everywhere, equally. Demand prevention, at it's very roots.

Pedophilia cannot be understood without examining the psycho-social context within which it happens.

The problem of abuse of Power pollutes human relationships across all sectors and levels of any and every Hierarchically Violent Society.

From the organised rape of children to local extortion, from War as a tool of State Policy to Pimping, from FGM and MGM to Guantanamo Bay Detention, from Bhopal to Fracking, from Domestic Abuse to Ad Hominem attacks within discourse, the central issue is the same..

A psychology of Power that ignores the costs born by those who are most adversely affected by the exercise of Power over others. A psychology of Power that uses distraction to avoid the truth. A psychology of Power that claims an exclusive right to use violence. A psychology of Power that determines that indoctrination is an essential component of maintaining that power.

The issue is coming forwards in part because there is a growing understanding of this situation, not least as an outcome of Survivors testimony, brought before the public domain with great courage and determination from Survivors of organised sexual exploitation of children, to Survivors of State torture, from Survivors of colonisation and invasion to survivors of domestic abuse,  and many more besides.

And also because the best research in Anthropology, Neuro-biology, Neuro-Chemistry, Child Development, Optimal Human Biological Health, Permaculture, Psychology, Endocrinology, Honest History and Survivors insights all point in this direction.

When the natural bio-logically mandated processes of nurture are disrupted, pathology ensues.

This applies equally to the individual and to the society within which the individual lives.

It cannot be used to excuse or mitigate abusive behaviour, rather it must be integrated into the understanding of the situation as part of the process of an accurate recognition and description of the problem and in time, the resolution of that problem.

This is, in effect, the unspoken central plank of all single issue activism. The one understanding that must underpin all activism that seeks to be both effective and meaningful. Without this, healthy activism is lost in the rough and stormy seas of ideology and 'debate' with people taking sides and 'arguing' for their side rather than attempting to openly and honestly get to the truth of the matter in order to plan approaches that prevent further abuses, that mediate the harms caused, and that lead directly to much more healthy, functional and nurturing social organisation.

___________

A chart of social behavioural characteristics of different kinds of aboriginal cultures...

https://www.violence.de/prescott/letters/Profiles_Peaceful_v_Violent.pdf

This chart outlines some of the results of a survey of 49 different societies carried out by James Prescott, Phd in the 1970s and notes a correlation between Hierarchical Violence as a social 'norm' and incidents of abuse and the degrees to which child-mother bonding and other empathy learning experientials mandated by our biology are disrupted. The greater the disruption, the more violence and abuse is seen in any given society.

Further research in Anthropology and in a number of other scientific disciplines as mentioned above, and referenced throughout this blog (and there is so much more than the limited amount that I have referenced) corroborates Prescott's insights.

The way in which Power Institutions have sought to 'manage' the revelations of Survivors of child abuse within areas under direct control of those Institutions demonstrates both a lack of caring empathy and a wilful mendaciousness that most people at the grass roots of Society, and many activists, find difficult to grasp or truly understand.

In very simple terms, if one grows up in an environment where low level bullying is seen as being within normal ranges of behaviour, it's that much more difficult to see the behaviour for what it really is - a dysfunctional pathology that has a root cause that, even as it is socially masked, is tractable, that is to say it is an problem that can be resolved.

There is a lot of anger as a reaction and response to inequity, to abuse and violence, of course there is, and most of it is understandable and justifiable, yet we need much more than anger to address the issues we are faced with; we need an accurate understanding of how such behaviour emerges, what kinds of social conditions underpin such behaviour, how it can be stopped where it is discovered and what kinds of social relations will serve to break the cycles of this kind of behaviour, which has to be the ultimate aim of all activism : prevention of further abuses, nurturing healthy human relations in all areas of concern.
 
We also need to understand how Power, by triggering anger and rage in the grass roots, through media reporting, conspiracy theories, the 'blame game' and suppression of Survivors who come forwards to testify as to their experience,  is deliberately influencing what we are attempting to do as activists in order to co-opt and undermine the emergence of solidarity across the grass roots of Society.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Activism : keeping it human and humane.

Keeping it Human and humane.

The questions before us all as we move into 2015, unexplored time as yet, a future we have some plans for, a future that is certain to contain challenges, set-backs, discoveries, new experiential learning’s, insight and much else besides that is the stuff of life, will remain questions that are largely concerned with optimal human biological health.

Be it ‘the Economy’, ‘The War Against Terror’, ‘Austerity’, The Environment, or any number of other serious problems current in today’s world, there are two generalised approaches open as we seek the answers to the problems facing ‘ordinary’ human well being.

The first approach, which currently dominates the way Governments and other power Institutions behave, which is associated with adversarial political alliances and far right/religious based political action and mainstream media is largely ideological – that is to say it is coming at the problems with a sense of ‘destiny’ that seeks to impose a certain value system upon the people, irrespective of the adverse outcomes for many people, and as such is void of the concept of optimal human biological health, which is quite willful.  

It is the systems ‘health’ that dominates this discourse. And by this I mean to say that it is the status, power and ability of the system of power to project itself into every area of our lives that is considered the ‘health’ of the system. If a majority appear to do ok, and a minority are oppressed, that’s the ‘price’ that power deems acceptable.

In as much as this approach reflects systemic thinking and tends to ignore, deny, dismiss, misinterpret or obfuscate on any area that exposes the ideological values as being hypocritical whereas the lived experience tells the truth, this approach tends to compound pre-existing problems, thus making matters worse. Lacking empathy it tends to make things worse as it shores up the failings of Power as a modality for human relationships and a caring community.

The second approach, which is emergent from peoples lived experience and it’s meanings, is empathic – in that we seek to understand a problem at it’s true roots, from inside the lived experience, taking into consideration what it is like to be that person or community going through that experience and clearly identify that which is truly unacceptable and to confront Society with that as the basis of it’s challenge.

“Enough! This (whatever experience is being described) must cease because the pain in the lived experience is unacceptable. It cannot be called a ‘price’ for some which then assumes a ‘gain’ that has value for others.

When the peoples trauma, pain and distress is so intense,  that in and of itself ought to be enough reason to cease whatever it is that is causing that trauma and pain, immediately. No ifs or buts.

The second approach takes optimal biological human health as its base, because that speaks to the lived experience, the ‘real’ real world.

The second approach allows that resolution of that confrontation will be a matter that develops, once the abuse of power has been stopped in it’s tracks, that cannot be imposed or predicated by ideology, because it is a response to an immediate situation that will also clear a learning ground that comes from each of us, as individuals and as communities as we tell our stories in all honesty and gain insight.

The material answers will emerge from honesty, and nothing else, because it is through acknowledging the truth we will set ourselves free to act as humane beings in a difficult situation, and this process will be all the more creative in the sense that the drivers of the solutions will be the people ourselves, and our own emergent sense of who we are, what we share, as we acknowledge an awakened sense of each other as people.

Whilst recognising who we are as people in experience will be a commonality, I expect to see a natural diversity that fine tunes solutions to local conditions.

That way the differences of Religion, language, currency, typography become irrelevant because they are not the problem.

The problem is abuse of Power: within that the co-opting of natural differences, natural cultural variations and so on by power in order to generate oppositional, adversarial behaviours at the grass roots, and the horrific outcomes for those people who are most adversely affected by such division and other abuses of power that are amongst the symptoms.

Charity aimed at symptoms is no longer a valid response on its own.

This must be articulated, again and again, in clear terms.

Irrespective of creed, ideology, skin colour, language we all bleed red. We all hurt in pretty much the same manner. And the solutions to the problems we face must reflect that understanding above all else. That must be at the very core of our activism.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Herod, Christ and the Evolution of Empathy.

Jingle Bells, and all that - 'tis Christmas, a time of good cheer to all men.

Logos of the companies exploiting parents and children to make profits whilst polluting our Earth home.

So here's a thought I present as a present to all readers.

Survival is not the same as Thrivival

These are two images I have crafted express the difference I sense that lies between thriving as a human community and merely surviving. Modern consumer culture is clearly not thriving, and it is close to not even surviving. Egalitarian cultures have thrived for many, many tens of thousands of years across this Earth. I know which state I would prefer we were living in. It is possible to live well, to be comfortable and truly happy as a community, to thrive without causing intense damage to our shared habitat. It is not thriving to live comfortably, worried, stressed out, dimly or acutely aware that we are causing irreversible long term harm and irredeemable short term harm.

"Survival of The Fittest" is in reality a meme created by the philosopher, economist, sociologist, writer and  academic, Herbert Spencer, in a book he wrote, Principles of Biology,  after having read Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection: Or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life  which Herbert, and the majority of his class took to reflect their cultural assumptions in regard to their comparison between African, South American, Asian and Indian cultures and the White European Imperial culture from which the Industrial Revolution and their wealth and status emerged. Spencer was a white supremacist seeking to justify his stance.

It became a common re-interpretation (misinterpretation)  or re-positioning of Darwin's central thesis, and was never used by Darwin in the manner most commonly attributed today, aka that the strong (the most favoured races) naturally prevail over the weak in 'The struggle for Survival' - a phrase so beloved of Malthusian enthusiast David Attenborough and others less savoury, whose sense of the phrase is probably better articulated in the term 'might is right': people such as George Bush, Dick Cheny, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Jimmy Savile and others.

Darwin first used Spencer's new phrase "survival of the fittest" alongside "natural selection" in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, published in 1869, intending it to mean "better designed for an immediate, local environment"

Darwin was referring to the evolution of life enhancing traits in response to environmental changes, which he observed in some detail.

It turns out that empathy is one of those traits or capabilities that has emerged in the human organism, as well as many others, as a life enhancing trait that facilitates and sustains long term existence really, really well.

Optimal Human Well Being is an Evolved Default.

Empathy, and indeed love, lies at the base of both effective co-operation and accurate responses to environmental changes. It is a bio-logical mandate.

It is also true that this behavioural trait is vulnerable, and under chronic stress can be undermined. The architecture is genetic, yet the development of active empathy is experiential, it is cultural...

Some cultures are more empathic, egalitarian, others are hierarchically violent. James Prescott's research reveals this dynamic spectrum and shows a correlation  between egalitarian societies who demonstrate high nurture of babies, infants and children, and hierarchically violent societies where typically there is a disruption of biologically mandated child mother bonding processes.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is another diligent researcher who has looked deeply at the evolutionary biology of the egalitarian cultural human. 

Her work has been presented in books such as The Woman that Never Evolved, selected by the New York Times as one of its Notable Books of 1981, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection, chosen by both Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal as one of the "Best Books of 1999" and, her latest, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.

Hrdy has challenged, and transcended, many of the flawed assumptions that biologists have held dating back to the Victorian era. It is a body of work that continues to provoke and inspire a new generation of scientists..

Her key insight is that alloparenting - where parenting was a task distributed throughout the group - was a key shift in pre-hominid primates, and in early hominids that drove the evolution of a larger brain, the brain that can manage the detail of layers of co-operative relationships, that can manage self regulation that is required for peaceful, effective conflict resolution and bond building over generations.

Disruption of the biological default for optimally healthy behaviour changes behaviour.

Which is the logic or reason why torture (topical subject these days) and politically and ideologically based economic pressure upon vulnerable communities and people remain consistently utilized  tools of Hierarchically Violent Power - the bullies understand the effect, and it's utility.

Herod and Christ, and the people they have been portrayed as.

I am not at all religious, nonetheless I find their stories instructive. The crucifier and the crucified.

What was Herod's childhood like? We can only guess!

But we do know something of Hitler's infancy and childhood, as we do of Pol Pot, George Bush, Tony Blair, Stalin and many other leaders who exercised power that deployed massive organised violence and caused untold harms to largely innocent people (Herodianesque) and none appeared to have had the kind of nurturing experience that would have laid the foundation for caring empathy.

Alice Miller's book 'For Your Own Good'  touches on this subject, with regard to Hitler, Stalin and 'traditional parenting' in European culture, and is a classic in this regard.

No excuses, yet understanding the roots is essential.

This is not to suggest they - Hitler, Stalin, Bush, Cheny and any other abuser - are thus excused from accountability and responsibility for their actions and the harms and consequences imposed on others by their actions. Far from it, as there are many examples of people who had dreadful childhood experiences who emerged to become kind and caring adults.

It is to suggest that there is a way to understand, and thus prevent the abuses of Power we see as a fundamental pattern of what is known as 'civilisation'. And that lies in how we parent, how we as a society related top and treat our children, and the most vulnerable people within our Society.

Abuse and bullying are, at heart,  cultural problems. Some cultures avoid those problems by the way in which they parent and relate, others do not. The choice is ours, as we have the information, and the responsibility.

The choice is yours. It is mine.

Let us all make that choice as our daily Christmas present to ourselves, our families, our communities and our culture.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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Questions every social worker, every civil servant, every carer and every parent (to be or active) ought to wrestle with

There is a genuine need to protect society from some people whose behaviour is dangerous,  by incarceration, and  not as a 'punishment' or ‘revenge’ or 'paying the price' but as a safety of the community measure, and this must be done as humanely as possible.

There is also a need to see where rehabilitation can be efficacious, and what best facilitates this.

Abuse does not answer abuse, and violence tends to be cyclical......I have NEVER come across a Survivor who would urge violence against abusers.


It horrifies me the way Survivors voices and insights are brushed aside by people who claim to be supportive yet also declare they'd be happy to 'hang 'em'.... those people are making life for Survivors harder rather than easier because they are clouding the discourse with their rage and hatred.

I do understand that there are reasons why so many people react in this manner.

Social conditioning, inter-generational trauma behaviour patterns .....

How many people were flushed with stress hormones whilst in the womb?

How many mothers are subjected to stress by external events?

How many fathers have been trained to be 'tough'..?

How many men return from war, with wounds they mask, that their children are affected by?

How does chronic stress (12 years of schooling, relative poverty, religious indoctrination) alter the growing child, in schools, where bullying, peer pressure and submission to authority are constants?

These are not excuses for adverse behaviour, but an attempt to understand that dynamic that flows through time within Hierarchically Violent social systems where Power has a massive influence on peoples lives, and the emergent psychology of society, at the grass roots.

How many 'leaders' learned bullying as a power transaction in private boarding schools?

Is Social Services, as a State Institution, concerned with regulation over healing?

These are all questions EVERY social worker, every civil servant, every carer and every parent (to be or active) ought to wrestle with... as by taking that role on, they also take on a response-ability to those the intend to serve, and more so to the children yet to be born from those they serve....

Where is the nurture?

And importantly, the question of what best represents optimal human biological health must be tackled with a back ground in science, anthropology, history and personal growth..

These are the questions that Survivors have had to answer in their path towards resolution.

The State has yet to step up to the plate on this, as is the case for the mainstream media.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe