I wish we were better. I truly want to know: why is our species so destructive? I think this question is pertinent any day of any week, but especially so today, as I read news of people, human beings like you and me, falling off airplanes in a last, desperate attempt to escape unprecedented destructiveness. We are intelligent creatures with the ability to terraform and create our environment just exactly as we would like, and we reliably don't get along. And though many of us enjoy watching fiction, where people live in beautiful and mysterious places, and wear beautiful clothes, and go on great adventures, the environment we live in, what we have made for ourselves, is quite different from what we dream, from what we hope for, from what we would prefer.
I hope to find some answers in this book. Here are some excerpts:
"Such understanding is of particular importance today, when sensitivity toward destructiveness-cruelty is rapidly diminishing, and necrophilia, the attraction to what is dead, decaying, lifeless, and purely mechanical, is increasing throughout our cybernetic industrial society. The spirit of necrophilia was expressed first in literary form by F.T. Marinetti in his Futurist Manifesto of 1909. The same tendency can be seen in much of the art and literature of the last decades that exhibits a particular fascination with all that is decayed, unalive, destructive, and mechanical. The Falangist motto, "Long live death," threatens to become the secret principle of a society in which the conquest of nature by the machine constitutes the very meaning of progress, and where the living person becomes an appendix to the machine.
This study tries to clarify the nature of this necrophilous passion and the social conditions that tend to foster it. The conclusion will be that help in any broad sense can come only through radical changes in our social and political structure that would reinstate man to his supreme role in society. The call for "law and order" (rather than for life and structure) and for stricter punishment of criminals, as well as the obsession with violence and destruction among some "revolutionaries," are only further instances of the powerful attraction of necrophilia in the contemporary world. WE NEED TO CREATE THE CONDITIONS THAT WOULD MAKE THE GROWTH OF MAN, THIS UNFINISHED AND UNCOMPLETE BEING--UNIQUE IN NATURE--THE SUPREME GOAL OF ALL SOCIAL ARRANGEMENTS. GENUINE FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE AND THE END OF ALL FORMS OF EXPLOITATIVE CONTROL ARE THE CONDITIONS FOR MOBILIZING THE LOVE OF LIFE, WHICH IS THE ONLY FORCE THAT CAN DEFEAT THE LOVE FOR THE DEAD." (Intro, p. 31, 32)
and,
"...the whole idea that one can "design" a better society on the scientific basis appeals to many who earlier might have been socialists. Did Marx, too, want to design a better society? Did he not call his brand of socialism "scientific" in contrast to "Utopian" socialism? Is not Skinner's way (behavioral psychology as opposed to depth psychology) particularly attractive at a point in history when the political solutions seems to have failed and revolutionary hopes are their lowest? ...In the cybernetic age, the individual becomes increasingly subjective to MANIPULATION. His work, his consumption, and his leisure are manipulated by advertising, by ideologies (the Media, and social media), by what Skinner calls "positive reinforcements." The individual loses his active, responsible role in the social process; he becomes completely "adjusted" (like a trained dog) and learns that any behavior scheme puts him at a severe disadvantage; in fact he is what he is supposed to be. If he insists on being himself, he risks, in police states (China social credit system) his freedom or even his life; in some democracies, he risks not being promoted (our political system), or more rarely, he risks even his job (have you had your experimental "vaccination" that was made by the big Pharma mob?), and perhaps most importantly, he risks feeling isolated, without communication (community) with anybody." ............ (p. 63, 64)
How can we be better... this is a difficult question.
Why do we perpetuate this? All of us. The Taliban, the United States. Corrupt pharmaceutical industries, military industry, and you and I, as we enable our evil overlords by buying their stuff. We are partners in this dance of destructiveness. This is ours. This is our mirror. How do we wash such a face? How do we stop the song of terror and make a single, truly constructive, healing, and beautiful sound?
This is an image from the documentary "the Story of the Weeping Camel." As the story goes, a mother camel has a newborn calf, and rejects it. Despite all the effort of the family to encourage the mother to accept her calf, it fails. The mother continually kicks her child and turns her back on him. The family finally hires a musician to perform a sacred ritual (a shamanistic practice still alive in Mongolia today), where the emotional feeling produced by the instrument in the hands of a masterful player are able to totally transform and transmute the backwards hate in the mother... into love. I cried, and the mother camel cried. After this magical transmutation, the mother accepts her baby.
In "On Aggression" by Lorenz, 1966 (highly criticized by Fromm), it is written: "there is no love without aggression" and "ugly little brother of love, ...hate." (p. 46) I can see how this could be true. When you look in the news at the Taliban extremists... do they not kill for the love of their God?
Another excerpt from Fromm: "Man cannot live as nothing but an object, as dice thrown out of a cup; he suffers severely when he is reduced to the level of a feeding or propaganda machine, even if he has all the security he wants. Man seeks for drama and excitement; when he cannot get satisfaction on a higher level, he creates for himself the drama of destruction." (p. 29)
I made a little painting of a white lily with red speckles. The white lily itself is a time honored symbol of love, fertility, purity, even Christ in the Christian tradition. The spattering of red...
It hangs in my studio over a 13th century map of the Mongolian empire. (Yes, the Story of the Weeping camel started in me an obsession with Mongolian history and music.) You may be familiar with "Genghis Khan", or more phonetically accurate "Chinggis Khan." (meant to sound like the striking of steel against steel... a sound, and element, meant to drive away bad spirits-- "ching") I will attempt to put into perspective a rough history of our destructiveness with our most impressive numbers.
Chinggis Khan: killed an estimated 40 million people
The Nazi holocaust: 20 million
Soviet union: 27 million
World war 2, overall: 75 million
Communist regimes, overall: approximately 60 million (according to the "Red Holocaust" by Steven R. Rosefield)
Chinggis' number is impressive. Given the mostly primitive technologically he had to work with. Swords. Tying branches to horses tails in order to stir up dust, making his armies seem greater than they were and thus more terrifying. Unlike Hitler, or the ideologies of communism, killers of men and of ideas, Chinggis was a destroyer of cities and, surprisingly, quite interested in and promotional of ideas. His destructiveness led the to largest contiguous land mass to be ruled by a single person, and later dynasty, in our known history. It is also said that he has an estimated 16 million descendants living today. I'm sure we all can understand, the forefathers of these descendants were not conceived gently.
Chinggis is not mentioned in Fromm's book, however he is a compelling great destroyer. The most inaccurate and brief, yet entertaining, story about Chinggis can be found in the movie "the Mongol." If you want more detail, I would recommend "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World", likely not completely accurate, but better than the movie. One of my favorite books on Mongolian history so far is "Genghis: Sacred Tomb, Secret treasure" by Robin Ackroyd, as it incudes an on foot, present day adventure narrative mixed in with careful study, thought and references.
Hitler and Stalin are, I find, easy enough to demonize and hate. They have gone mad. They are "bad men." They get pushed away into a sphere that is far outside of myself, my comrades, and my culture. After learning the story of Chinggis, however, a problem arises. He is a paradox. While he killed twice as many as Hitler, and with not even a fraction of the ammunition, I can't... and I bet you couldn't, pin him down entirely as a bad man. This opens a frightening door. Could it be possible that Hitler and Stalin weren't entirely bad men?
I listened to this audiobook while painting. It was surprising to me how many well thought and educated individuals decided that the Nazi regime was a good idea. The problem is that everything the Nazi's said and stood for wasn't bad. They were insightful, smart, and managed to convince a great many people that they offered the only solution to problem of mankind. Not an easy problem, and not a problem that has been solved yet... I think many would agree. Yet they were extremely destructive.
Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau, we should all read and not forget.
I wish we were better.
It's important to understand that Hitler, Stalin, and Chinggis Khan also wished we were better, and they took swift action.
The Taliban wishes we were better.
The Christians wish we were better.
Liberal Americans wish we were better.
We all wish we were better. Perhaps we should rewrite it as, we wish we weren't so destructive.
In conclusion, we need to understand ourselves. We need to study history, not destroy and try to rewrite it, if we really want to be better. History shows, even great and compelling minds were unable to make improvements. To the contrary. We dance together in the dance of our destructiveness. These are my thoughts, not necessarily conclusions, that have been stirred up at the start of reading "the Anatomy of Human Destructiveness" by Erich Fromm.
The tree of Life, by Carl Jung in the Red Book
