On the Politics and Ethics of Empowerment

Sign me up for JOHNNY’S ASTRAL ESCORT SERVICE! What a thread…

My attention was elsewhere for a couple days working on “magic spells”—which is very hard work, actually, but very enjoyable when the mind can relax (especially the strictly mental, time-bound, rationalizing mind) and enjoy the play of healthy energies, images, sounds, and words.

That our various “sandboxes” for mindplay have been poisoned—the diabolical is everywhere!—is lamentable. But this conversation is literally en-couraging. We don’t have to play in the toxic quicksand of fake narratives and fake consciousness. The ever-multiplying reproductions can fold back into origin, which reproduces itself through our metaphors, as well as concrete experiences, in regenerated spaces of intelligent communion.

The Tricksterish Generative Self is more interested in experience than mentation, I think, but not opposed to reason and logic, and can use reason and logic toward a desired outcome. At the same time, I think we can admit that nobody’s unslimed, “uninfected” by the emotional contagion of modern power-logic (coupled with strategic disinformation campaigns, neuromarketing, etc.) and the resultant pervasive state of confusion. A certain plodding, thoughtful, slowness, a deliberate not going or getting swept along, seems like an antidote to me.

When I go to work, half the battle is just filtering and “disinfecting” the words I use—for which, @johnnydavis54, I’ll just mention, I’m finding a “clean language” approach to be quite helpful, though I’m a bumbling beginner with it, a queerly buzzing, and sometimes buzz-killing, mis-spelling bee. But it’s essential because words “have power,” and our communication acts (or fails to), and so it needs doing with love and care.

But the filtration process, to really get out the micro-contaminants and communicate cleanly (and vitally), takes time. You can’t just zap or irradiate your language without creating some crap that takes like corporate cardboard. No way around the purification process I’ve found yet. Might as well learn to love the torturous path.

Our predicament reminds me of the Walking Dead—which I watched a couple seasons of, rapt, a few years ago (then abruptly lost interest). At one point, the band of living human survivors discovers from an NIH-CDC biologist, who has been trying to understand the disease and find a cure, that in fact everyone is already infected. They’re all carriers. Blood contact with an actual zombie only activates an infection which was already present. This is a highly disturbing revelation in the context of the show.

So I do think extra caution is required when working with the magic and mythic. I think this is what Ed is getting to with his statement that “Too many of us are too willing to do too much with too many things that we know too little about.” And it’s behind @JDockus’ gift for calling bullshit bullshit. This is an essential “immune system” response.

I realize that “biology” is only a kind of metaphor, too. We are dealing with objects that aren’t easily represented. Yet the idea that a “protective sheath” has been burst reminds me of Peter Sloterdjik’s contention, in Bubbles (which I would like to read with a group), that society and history can be interpreted through both spatial and immunological metaphors. From cellular structures to architectures to media ecosystems, “bubbles” are created (or spheres, or foam) and we live (and die) in these. Interestingly, Sloterdjik positions his work contra the 20-century temporal focus of Heidegger, et al (though I doubt he’s read Gebser; it would be interesting to read them side by side).

Looking forward to checking out Jordan Peterson as well. Thanks for that, @bradsayers!

So much to work with in this thread! And I do think much of what has been shared has something to do with “empowerment,” although I think we might need to question this word. What does one want “power” for? What would it mean to have this power? To seek empowerment is to presume disempowerment, no? But is this real—are we really lacking power—or is it part of a fake narrative that certain entities have great power (usually based on money and fame) and so we play along with the rules (or deep logic, even if we oppose the overt rules) that reinforce this perception?

And yet: clearly there is something in play we can call “power.” A “will to power,” even. We all have it. @Mark_Jabbour argues, over at the election thread, that Trump “gets it” (which is something we might learn from his admittedly negative example). Yet…what? Do we disown it? Do we trick ourselves into “giving away” our power? What do we give it to? “When” do we give it? What stories, and what feelings, hold sway?

I like how @care_save (who talked about rotting “in a forbidden cell” and a “coup to reclaim our time from the Total Capital Consolidation Machine”—both Space AND Time are critical dimensions) began to frame it here:

To help someone go to where they need to be is the essence of empowerment,
it is the essence of conversation and discourse too.

I’m going to start a few new topics to follow up on specific directions we might explore toward concretizing some of the ideas here on Clean Language, a Gebser course, etc. I hope this “empowers” some of us to take these considerations further (to the infinite!) and beyond…

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Awesome response, Marco! Absolutely delighted and indeed encouraged by this. You have a genius in summation, and for pointing to where the rich areas are for future exploration. I’m checking out for a little while, though occasionally I’ll be checking in to read. I love also the sense of individuality I feel more and more around here, which could only enhance the dynamics, feeling gratitude in getting to know Ed, Johnny, Caroline, Brad, others at other threads, though the number is still modest, and of course you, Marco. You are the diviner, wearing the lodestone around your neck.

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“Yet the idea that a “protective sheath” has been burst reminds me of Peter Sloterdjik’s contention, in Bubbles (which I would like to read with a group), that society and history can be interpreted through both spatial and immunological metaphors.”

I would love to read Bubbles, but would prefer to start with Volume 2, which focuses more on political philosophy and Globalization. There is also Volume 3 which looks interesting too. I am often, when reading non fiction, jumping to the part that most interests me, then read from there. backwards or forwards. Volume I I believe spends a lot of time with Freud and I know a lot about Sigmund already. That’s my preference, however, I would love to work on any of volumes with a group. Let’s do it!

Also, I appreciate your continued interest in Clean Language. I recommend Caitlin Walker’s presentation here for anyone who is curious about this approach. We have already experimented, Marco, a little bit with this process and I imagine we can develop this further. We could do a session, you and I, using zoom. You could work on a desired outcome for our group or something for yourself. It might be of interest to explore modeling a shared reality. Clean Language makes explicit what we are already doing unconsciously. I think this would be very helpful for writers, artists, visionary types.

Hey Johnny and Marco, I have so much stuff backed up in my head, stored in the dusty file cabinets of my memory, I forgot that I know somewhat of Peter Sloterdijk. I never read Bubbles, but after looking up Sloterdijk and realizing who he is, I went under piles of books in my apartment, and pulled out my hardbound copy of his Critique of Cynical Reason. Man, I dipped in and out of this many years ago. I found it in a used book store. I pulled it off the shelf and bought it because of the provocative title, and because one of the main influences at its foundation, informing the irreverent and caustically witty spirit of its writing, is that great character from antiquity Diogenes the Cynic, who lived in a tub, whacked off in public, went into the marketplace during broad daylight holding a lantern, saying he was in search of an honest man, and to Alexander the Great, after he asked Diogenes if he needed anything, dared to reply, “Yes, stand a little out of my sun.”

Of this last encounter, author Diogenes Laërtius in his Lives of the Philosophers goes on: “It is said that Alexander was so struck by this, and admired so much the haughtiness and grandeur of the man who had nothing but scorn for him, that he said to his followers, who were laughing and jesting about the philosopher as they went away, 'But truly, if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.’”

Sloterdijk’s book is quite varied and textured, the warp academic, the woof cheeky and irreverent. I’m not sure how to characterize it. It turns the world on its head but is well researched and retains a scholarly flavor. Maybe it’s in the tradition of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly.

Human folly or the world on its head

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Thanks for posing these juicy questions, Marco. I’m eager to jump in here! I feel like you with the posing of these questions you were probably knowingly throwing a line back to the island of the post’s topic, and to me, like a sidelong glance, suspecting I would bite. And true to my nature, here I am, chomping at that bite and thrashing on the line…

This is an unpolished thrashing, people… fair warning. In talking about power, I cannot help but broach subjects of current forms of oppression, namely, racial oppression. If anyone gets fired up by my language or those topics in particular, branching into another post may be warranted.

We have power, but we often trained to not recognize it or to believe that it rightly belongs to someone else. Kings couldn’t eat without serfs producing food, yet the serfs are taught (and threat of violence reinforces) that their productive capacity to work the land is possessed by somebody else. That is, the serfs may only exercise their power, but not own or control its fruits. Our power extends beyond our mere physical labor, of course, to any expression of our inborn potential–our intellectual, creative, relational, etc. capabilities too, are our power and our currency in this embodied existence.

I have noticed that, in most cases, people who seek “empowerment,” as it were, do not seek anyone else’s power, rather they seek to own and control their own power. In cases of institutionalized oppression, such power is siphoned off systematically and in ways so entrenched and normalized as to be almost completely invisible–well, invisible to those who benefit.

And this is why people of privilege (white, middle & upper class, male, etc.–I will use white privilege for the remainder of the post for convenience’s sake in making my points) have such a hard time processing the message that they could be at fault for something that they barely even have the language to acknowledge.

I’d wager that the #alllivesmatter asshats are not, per se, opposed to ending racial profiling and reforming the criminal justice system, thus protecting against unnecessary killings and harming of black citizens. I think more than anything these white folks are so threatened by the notion that they don’t get to control the narrative anymore, which narrative has always exemplified cops are the good guys and–c’mon–that white people are the good guys. They don’t want to live in a world where cops aren’t the good guys! …Even though that exact world is currently inhabited by millions of other Americans living right down the street from them, and this has been the case for many, many generations.

So really, the point becomes that we are not willing to, and we don’t practice, visiting with others’ realities–even those who live right next door.

The indignance when that is pointed out–the “are you saying I should have already known what I didn’t know?”–is known as white fragility. The sense of loss of esteem is visceral! It’s that sense of losing something (white fragility), while being ignorant to the material, deep-cutting losses that others actually experience every day, that makes for such a maddening recipe. White people (as a social institution) are oblivious to others’ oppressions because, unlike people of color, they don’t have to understand such systems in order to survive. This “I’m more comfortable when you don’t confront me” is a pose of insularity; it’s how segregation reiterates itself in social structures even to this day, because to some degree, for a white person to be friends with people of color means to be regularly confronted, firsthand, by injustices. This “I’m more comfortable when you don’t confront me” coupled with “And my comfort is more important than your needs” is totally a dysfunctional pattern in intimate human relationships, amiright? Now scale that up to social relations and institutions.

This pose of deliberate ignorance–of choosing my personal comfort over personal growth–this is not a behavior that we should be tolerating nor endorsing. It’s time for us grown-ups to act like grown-ups–and that means especially people of privilege who have been, effectively, coddled [by consumerism, social narratives, etc.] and exhibit behaviors not unlike pre-teens, children or toddlers (Donald Trump is a prime example, in fact). We can’t let our privileged comrades choose that, or it will be their demise and others’ and ours (see: rise of white supremacy).

We have seven billion people on planet Earth–yet for all our communications technology, have we ever communicated effectually with one another? Our biological, linguistic and cultural (including intellectual/sense-making) diversity is diminishing. Yet those of us with access to screen media, are being divided ever further by the pointed weapons of soundbites, headlines and echo-chamber channels and algorithms. At the risk of becoming integrated enough to overthrow stodgy bureaucratic governments and self-organize for a better future–the planet’s elite (Russia and Trump) move to double-down on their consolidated power. And emotional/mental manipulation is their tool of choice towards an aspiration of inescapable control–see 1984.

This is why we have got to build up and champion the means for conversation and communion again–actual relationships. You can disagree with my beliefs, you can oppose my tactics, you can dislike my style–but we cannot let ourselves deny one another basic human respect and dignity. Gravely: that is the one thing we mustn’t do.

The structures by which power is transferred, co-opted and leveraged do reside only in our collective consciousness–so in that shallow sense, they are “unreal”. But are our memes ever really unreal? Is an emotion–or a prolonged depressive state–I’m experiencing really unreal, considering that it can be represented by patterns of neurons firing electrically in my brain? That’s where the memes live… and we also make them real by manipulating material reality to reflect and reinforce these views. The threat of violence makes power real. A dead or caged (imprisoned) resister is a neutralized threat to the concentrated-powerful–except, since the advent of mass media, no one–strangely–ever really dies, if their story can live on and be reinterpreted.

People can have the immense personal liberty to believe some truly wackjob things… the horrible fact is that they can act on it, and take others with them. Like the Jonestown massacre, or the Oklahoma city bombing, or the Orlando Pulse nightclub massacre. Ed’s excellent quote captures my own sentiment so well: “Too many of us are too willing to do too much with too many things that we know too little about.”

A possible antidote…

I present in this logically-ordered list of Some Very Important Realizations I have had:

  • I am not my beliefs. No matter how fervently I believe something to be true–If I am proven wrong, if I am forced into revising my assumptions–somehow, I still remain. In that sense, Marco, the psychic is not real, but more like a dream state. Even amidst massive psychic shattering, the self/the body remains. I am BEYOND my current assumptions.

  • Our beliefs from early life, through adolescence, into early adulthood–those arise automatically, from unconscious conditioning. (Just to give one innocent yet not-OK example, as early as age four, I had absorbed the assumption that blondes are intrinsically/inviolably more attractive than brunnettes–thanks Barbie and cable television! [Yes I can remember inventorying and analyzing my beliefs from an early age, but that’s another story…]) However, beliefs can also be deliberately experimented with. You can “try on” different viewpoints for size. You can toy with your operating assumptions, “Well, if I believe this, how would I act? If I act thus, what will happen? Observing what happens, what lessons can I derive? Gee, this thing I feel really strongly about does not seem to be working out for me, objectively, pragmatically, in this life… what if I tried simply doing its opposite?” The Earth is an infinitely generative laboratory secreting profound lessons/insights for us, if we learn how to do this well.

  • The intuition/inner self/integrated-subconscious is the phenomenally adept compass that will guide you through the morass of the possible divergences in the above activity. If it feels right, move towards it. If it feels bad, move away from it. Basic survival instinct–use it. (We have all the tools we need to live well–we’ve just repressed them, generally.) Just remember to never get trapped in your of-the-moment beliefs. Study your feelings, too–Buddhist teachings & meditation is a superb resource for groking the subtle mechanisms of how the ego, mind, and self work.

  • Empathy looks like a willingness and skill for trying to see things from others’ standpoints. If you have a strong sense of who you are (that is, the tether to your true-self is sturdy), then you don’t feel super-threatened simply by the process of experimenting with “trying on” others’ viewpoints for size.

  • Ultimately, in the “feels right” direction, walking that path… you can gradually unlock bigger and bigger “feels SO RIGHT” moments by attaining deeper/higher integration of operating premises through exploring others’ worldviews (through relationship, conversation, reading, listening to music, having outrageous experiences, etc.)

  • Frankly, the process of learning something new is intrinsically rewarding (yay oxytocin-release!) We gotta wake the haters up to the built-in joy of discovering more and more integrated ways of understanding the world.

  • Everybody–every single human being alive right this instant–has unfathomably vast potential. We embody exhilirating, breathtaking potential! And we squander it every day in countless ways. See this wrenching Stephen Jay Gould quote: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” Yet we unleash that potential when we learn to effectively work with our inborn skills and tools set–such as our hypothesis-generating and experimenting-with-reality processes as described above.

So when I think about and talk about empowering people, I’m talking about teaching/learning to wield one’s innate power of consciousness, identity, and praxis, and, like refining a tool, get to the point where you make it sing… and a world like that would be a world more beautiful to live in, by definition. If we could only get into a cycle where the empowering of oneself influenced the empowering of one another, and vice versa, in which the basic gist of human activity circulated around this purpose, if THIS were our “bubble”…

Life is definitely not the problem. Humans are not the problem. The ways in which we are manipulable or vulnerable are not the problem. That a few of us would endeavor to use our vulnerabilities against us–although this impulse may derive from evolutionary processes–well that kinda is the problem for where humanity is at right now. We have got to choose the memes we cultivate, discerningly. We gotta work on ourselves, but we have all the tools for doing so, in a dusty, dormant, obscured shed, resting lonesomely in the heart of each of us.


For some reason, when I sent this through email earlier, and included a dash in the text under the term “warranted,” it cut off the entire rest and bulk of my post. Which I discovered because I came to add on this addenda: Now, several hours later, I am watching this video on youtube about Clean Language by Caitlin Walker, and I’m only two and a half minutes in and it’s UTTERLY APROPROS of the main points I’m making in this post. Gotta share.

“Rules aren’t true. We should have the power to make up ones that work for us.” <3 <3 <3

PS - Marco, all my emphatics (bold and italics) and hyperlinked text were lost from the original email when copying and pasting here. :cry: Thoughts on how I could avoid that problem in the future?

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I am reading Genser at the moment and it gives me rather the same feeling as I have coming here - a sense of excitement, and homecoming, and pure delight. And also complete overwhelm - - completely too much and too good so that it sends my nervous system into a spin.

I have MECFS and it’s at times like that thst I realise how brainfogged I am and how incredibly frustrating it is to be held back again today when there is so much in me wanting to burst out through my keyboard and through all the messing about creatively I’ve done in the last decade that opened me up more to how full the empty void is. So many days I’ve had to say, “I can’t play today” that it’s quite seared my soul.

Which is why it’s so good to have found this place. I haven’t participated as much as I would like but hop3fully I’m in a more stable space now that I can join in here. I’m still not got my head around what you guys are doing here but what I’ve seen ive loved. We are all so bloody thirsty.

My condition causes inflammation and it’s been interesting and hellish watching the world burn while my body does the same. And then there’s those days where it’s still, and inside I’m so quiet, and there, it’s that giant empty void full of yin, and it reinforces to me again the difference between heaven and hell in the same body. Some days I think the renewal of the world is so close that we could fall into it without much provacation because it’s just bloody well everywhere and the prevailing story is so shite and the daimonic is rampaging out where we can’t deny it any longer that it is getting easier to see the same on the inside even while it’s unloosed, taking us by surprise. I feel we’re ripe and it’s easy and closer than we think cos we’re all so thirsty.

Other days I think we’re shot to the shit. Perhaps we are. Maybe we’re too late. Or maybe it’s just that the new story, which we can all smell, is still small. Isn’t that olemustard seed tiny but its tree fast-growing and leaves large and shady?

Anyway, I do rave. It’s past midnight :slight_smile:

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Great that you jumped in here, Sue. My name is John (I bow, gentleman that I am, but don’t let that fool you - I’m clown too). I love that you have “Contradictarian” in your little profile description. I don’t know what the heck I’m doing half the time either. Part of the attraction here is the acceptance of exploring. Just letting rip whatever comes to mind. Once one jumps in, the cold of the water cuts straight to bone, but one grows used to it. Marco employs a covert team of hybrid monkey-man fish, which were developed by his team of scientists in the lab to have extra-large bladders, for the explicit purpose of going pee in certain key areas, important to him, and keeping the water warm there.

I like most of the time to swim alone. I have no doubt that my words often give off a chill, but they’re out in the open, not seeming but coming as they are, often breaking off from me to take on a life of their own, climbing ashore and waddling like penguins across the snow or off in the distance sporting like dolphins, leaping out of the water, the sun glistening off their backs, and splashing back in.

Gebser is quite new to me too. I’m having the same gigantic waves in exposure to him, crashing over me and pulling me under, my head popping up like a cork, that you’ve described of yourself. Have you seen the thread “Idea for a Jean Gebser online course”? It’s recent and in “Creative Studio". There’s some skepticism that there could even be a course made of Gebser’s work.

P. S. My sympathies hearing the struggles you’re undergoing with MECFS. Gosh, I can’t say I’ve ever really heard of that before. I need to be educated on it. Interesting what has popped into my mind reading your comment, with the Youtube video that Johnny Davis posted in this thread of the wonderful Susan Sontag and John Berger “To tell a story” discussion. I haven’t read it in a long time, not really recalling details, but Sontag wrote a fascinating essay entitled “Illness as Metaphor.” She argues, interestingly, against using metaphors for describing illness.

I like your particular kind of raving. :slight_smile:

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Thanks for your warm welcome, John,

And for your description of the waters warmed by Marcus’s urinating fish. How could I not want to swim in such a place as this?

I think a space where you can let rip and wax lyrical is a kind of grace, really.

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