But in sitting down for my first Kum Nye practice in a week or so, it occurs to me that our world is inundated with trauma, drowning in it, swimming in it. Substantially every person on every street has some unresolved trauma, has some invisible force within them pushing them in unhelpful directions.
I don’t recall if I have commented on this, but I wonder what Islamic child rearing practices are like. It is a very misogynistic religion: what sort of relations do young boys have with their mothers? At what age is physical punishment introduced? Are boys breast fed? How are they potty trained?
And for that matter, do Leftist practices differ from those of conservatives? It is hard to believe they would, it is easiest to assign these differences to cognitive differences and environmental programming, but COULD there be a difference?
It opens up a Pandora’s box to start to take psychodynamic considerations down to the primitive, to the infant level, but in my own experience I have found they are crucially important.
If we are going to build a truly better society, rather than a hell papered over in pastel and flowers, we have to start to look at all aspects of our cultural lives. We have to grasp the ENORMITY of our collective failure, how much better this world could be than it is. We have to understand that most people are thralls of experiences and fears that are largely invisible to them.
I think one could argue that religions evolved to keep people sane, to provide a web of meaning enabling them to surmount their traumas, and that ideologies serve the same purpose.
But this sanity is relative. It comes at the cost of an unblemished capacity to see truth as it is, to see what is in front of one’s eyes, to adapt usefully and easily. It merely creates a world within which one can live and breathe, procreate and die. It is not the territory, though; nor is it a very accurate map in most cases, in my view.
We can do so much better.