Most of the time I am surrounded by so much love and community that it's easy for me to forget the rampant discord reverberating throughout the collective zeitgeist. This week was a dousing of the reality of how our species is really, really good at checking our cognitive processes at the door when we are scared, angry, or feel justified in our position when inflamed by the spirit of righteousness for our tribal cause.
The demonization of the the other is an easy pool to swim through, the waters of discord lapping against you a comfortable presence, reinforcing your contrived hate. The sad thing is, we are all the other.
What really surprised me was how many people I am acquainted with, people who I know to be kind souls, justifying authoritarian behavior, violence, and hate, just because someone said things they don't like. We've been preached at by the apparatus for years that we don't victim shame, but apparently victim shaming is okay if you deem a person an "other."
Me, I believe speech only becomes hate if people act on it. I welcome discussion, even discussion that goes against my values or makes what I feel to be are horrible claims, because I realize that my emotional response elicited from my own unique perspective and subjectively held values does not give me the right to decide what others get to think, say, or do. If we lived that way then all speech could be considered hate if we go around dictating who we believe can speak, or even has the right to live, based upon our ideas of who deserves to.
Speech, talking, is just that, an emanation of sound, an expression of ideals. It becomes action when people decide to act, and as a person who believes in the sanctity of autonomy, I do believe that individual people should be held accountable for their actions if those actions harm others. Other's words can only harm you should you choose to let them. I've felt terribly harmed by words, it was only when I realized that I had the choice to let them harm me that my entire world changed.
The second someone bleats, but those words made that person do that, I reject that premise. Each person chooses to act. Period. Last time I checked, words cannot physically harm you. In fact, words can only harm you if people act upon them. Which is usually out of emotion.
We all have emotions. How we feel about those emotions is up to us. How many times have you had an emotion flare up and you acted upon it, only later to realize that the assumptions you made while feeling and acting upon that emotion were erroneous? I know I have trod down this path.
These days, I sit with emotions for a bit when they float to the surface. I don't push them down, I allow myself to feel them. To examine them. What I try not to do is just give into the them without thinking about them.
And therein lies what I have been thinking about lately. Executive Functioning is the ability to manage one's thoughts, behaviors, and emotions effectively. It shows the ability to have cognitive flexibility, and throughout most of recent history many people had a form of weekly cultural reinforcement of the development of these skills. In America it was largely Sunday School. You were taught moral lessons by an adult once a week and those lessons were reinforced by your family and community, and that helped build pathways in your brain that helped you function. Now, I am not saying there is a correlation between the decline in executive functioning skills and the decline of of religious instruction in our culture, but it is an interesting line of thought to examine. I mean, I am lapsed heretical Christian myself, a person who isn't fond of organized religion at all because of all of the horrible human behavior I navigated while trying to serve my community, all done under an authoritarian cloud that couldn't be questioned. But that also doesn't mean there isn't good in that realm.
What I am thinking about is what quite a bit of research has affirmed; structured routines, positive reinforcement, and value-based narratives line up with evidence-based interventions for the plague that is Executive Functioning Disorder. If we have a large group of our fellow people going around believing that people who say things with which they disagree with or label hate must be silenced, we have a huge problem. It is the height of entitlement to take someone's life because you feel offended by what they say. A lot of the behavior I saw this week reminded me of the time I babysat this little boy for the first time when I was twelve. He was so upset I was there that he pulled a .22 on me(he was three). I remember looking at him, his entire form an emotional trainwreck, and calmly told him he should do what he thought he should do, but me and his sister were going to bake cookies (After sniveling for a bit he joined us and we enjoyed the rest of our day). I expect three year olds to not know how to regulate their emotions. It's a different story to see multitudes of adults acting so cognitively impaired.
There's a blight upon our society. That people are so algorithmically edified in their own subjective opinion via curated echo chamber and tribal enhanced righteousness that they cannot distinguish between acts of hate due to their own hubris and sense of misguided virtue is more than concerning.
And the Divisionists love this. There are always people who seek to foment hate so they can gain power. I refuse to play their game.
So, I will continue on in my training, listening to those around me and trying to converse with them, and most of all loving people, because as cheesy and cliche as it probably sounds, love really is it. The greatest of all these.
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's nowhere near as pensive as the author is these days, iPhone.