Over the past few weeks I have been having a series of conversations with an individual I know online regarding the existence of privilege and its relevance of recognising the pattern of privilege to the unfolding of planetary evolution that needs to happen: it was interesting to experience because this particular individual becomes incensed at the concept of male privilege and essentially eventually ended up taking the position that there can’t be a conversation about privilege because that equates to a conversation about victimhood: victimhood is bad and therefore anyone discussing privilege is actually discussing the evidence of their own disempowerment and can thus be dismissed.
This resulted in me getting quite passionate on the thread they’d started on it and I responded as I usually do, with emphasis and a flow of ideas based on that passion; naturally this was taken negatively and used as an opportunity to distort both my essential Being and my work which, I’d like to point out, the individual has been quite happy to appropriate elements of and incorporate into their own work after my extending them much time and energy both in written and skype communications expanding on and explaining the elements of my work that they didn’t comprehend.
I sat there in fascination, watching elements of the culture of privilege being blatantly displayed and acted upon while the refusal to see that behaviour continued and was supported by other commenters; I watched my Self in fascination as my internal distress rose and I wondered what was the root cause of this distress. Why is it that I find these actions and interactions with individuals so jangling? Given that part of my whole purpose and intention is my own evolution I went and started poking around in my internal landscape to discover what was actually at the root of it: as I did so, another story unfolded in another part of the world that entwined the two elements in a way that led me to some great internal clarity.
A few days ago a disgruntled young man- who himself was a product of the culture of several streams of privilege- decided to take himself out into the world and end the lives of six random strangers; he left a trail of online messages that indicated the source of his motivation was that he was 22, still a virgin and furious at women because they weren’t putting out for him. He saw himself as an alpha male and a fantastic guy who was being oppressed and denied his ‘right’ to women’s bodies because of the evils of feminism; this led him to conclude that it was his right to get some guns and a knife and go take out his discontent on others.
There is absolutely no denying the source of his viewpoint because he wrote about it: women had an obligation to serve the needs and desires of men and if they weren’t meeting that obligation then they were failing in their duty. In the wake of his killings and subsequent suicide, thousands of men have commented online in support of both his viewpoint and his actions; thousands of men believe the things about women and their duty to be there only to serve the desires of men that this young man believed.
This individual did not form these opinions in a vacuum. He did not represent a small group of ‘mentally ill’ individuals who, in their delusion, will do things such as shoot and stab strangers; the thousands of men (and in some cases Stockholm Syndrome women) who comment online in celebration and support of his actions are not a small group of mentally ill individuals, they represent a vocal group of a large portion of society that actually believe these things, that women are in the world to serve the needs of men regardless of what those needs might be.
That is, in its purest form, a culture of privilege and entitlement. It is precisely the culture of privilege that I was striving to point to in my initial discussions online, where I was attempting to triangulate the many headed hydra that this arena of privilege is: my passion for the sui generis of all Beings leads me into the arenas of feminist dialogue and linguistic analysis, searching and sifting through the nuanced and varied mechanisms by which the Virus perpetuates and nourishes these states of conflict between different groups.
One of the things that was supported by the naysayers was the concept that “everyone suffers” and therefore that all suffering is equal. I sat there with this one for awhile, pondering the state of mind and distortion that it takes to suggest that the suffering of those in famine countries, holding their dying children in their own stick-like arms while in their heart they know no help is coming, is the same as the individual in the first world angsting over the state of their bank balance and ‘why can’t I have what that guy over THERE has?’: I watched as the cult of New Age Thinking was trotted out, the now standard ‘we all create our realities, all individuals are equal, there is no harm here’ that justifies the continued inaction and disinterest of the speaker to shifting from passive to active in the face of the continued practices of economic and cultural disenfranchisement. It’s a poisonous plant, that one, wherein the suffering of individuals is shifted from something that is actively being done through a complex series of events that fundamentally rest on the belief of individuals that if someone is suffering it’s somehow their own fault: if individuals are starving in Africa it’s not because individuals somewhere else are standing by allowing corporate and economic domination and privilege to occur, it’s because the starving individuals have manifested this for themselves and they need to ‘empower’ themselves, get up off their non-existent butts and change their situation- or die, that’s ok too because there’s no such thing as death really so it’s all karma working out perfectly.
The main thing is to avoid the idea that it might be something the speaker is doing to passively support a corrupt system: that is unacceptable because don’t you know, THEY are as much a victim of the system as anyone else and so there can’t be any group that’s at a greater disadvantage than as another, because it’s all individuals creating their own realities-
and so the wheel turns. The rhetoric and stance then becomes that any discussion of the disenfranchisement of others, the possibility that there might be some kind of unconscious belief system that we’re carrying that could be contributing to this culture of entitlement and disenfranchisement of others, the suggestion that it might be worth exploring the cultural bespelling that occurs through the use of language and embedded concepts, is drowned beneath the need of those from more privileged spheres to justify their privilege. New Age concepts have succeeded in absorbing and recycling the Judeo-Christian view of the moral or spiritual basis of poverty: if you are poor it’s either because you’re too lazy not to be or because it’s a sign of some kind of moral lack on your part, some indication of past life imbalance that’s working itself out, anything other than the reality of a system of manipulation and control that, in part, continues to succeed because those that could influence it otherwise do nothing.
The insistence that individual empowerment and examining the nature of the virus mechanisms are exclusive is one that is hideous to me: the dogma that says to consider the tactics of the virus is to declare my Self a victim, is evidence that I’m ‘expecting others to come to my rescue’ rather than looking at how the virus succeeds in reinventing Empire over and over again is to me an indication of the immersion of the speaker in the virus rather than an accurate statement about my Self.
One of my interests is in the area of trauma rehabilitation: out of the many areas of study in this arena are emerging some brilliant insights into the nature of how the physiology of an individual contributes to and is the root cause of such conditions as PTSD and chronic anxiety disorders, conditions that effectively render an individual unable to evolve; I view these insights as part of the evolution signal and pattern itself, that these researchers are being led by inspiration and insight to discover a more wholistic and comprehensive model of physical wellbeing than has previously existed. These things occur because individuals ask questions outside the previously accepted box; they challenge existing ‘truths’, things accepted as normal and unquestionable and as a result they move into a totally different part of the hologram. If the individuals who insist that other parts of the cultural hologram cannot be questioned, examined, brought into the light because of their own biases and discomfort wish to be consistent, then they must ignore and eschew any such examinations of dominant paradigm thinking: there can be no discussions regarding advances in knowledge in physiology, energy medicine and the like because to do so is to indicate an individual’s victimhood to whatever their body or their mind is doing.
This is how my mind works: it’s not acceptable to me for a group with a particular privilege- in this case, economic- to use pseudo moral or spiritual judgement disguised as philosophy to excuse the actions and inactions of others. Privilege does not exist in a vacuum: no cultural practice or belief exists in a vacuum, there is always a miasm of nutrients and support to keep the practice or belief alive because without that support the practice or belief dies: where are the Chinese girls these days with bound feet? Is it enough to point to the lack of bound feet when what has happened is that the virus has moved underground and now acts to bind the souls of girls in a spiral of body loathing and self hatred? Is it acceptable to stand back from these actions of the virus and declare that any girl who succumbs to such programming by starving herself to death or committing suicide is to be dismissed because of her victimhood, her obvious inability to see her Self as the ‘creator’ of her life and therefore the culture of oppression that she’s experienced isn’t at least a solid part of the problem? And from where exactly does that culture arise?
It arises from the refusal of individuals who can do something, who can speak out, who can refuse to support it, to do those things.
I absolutely agree that individuals have the opportunity and possibility to be the Creators of their lives; when, however, an individual is caught within an internal loop of virus programming they are not creating their own lives, the virus is. Those who know this, those who are able to see what is happening, know that such individuals are not able to create their lives in the sense of create something positive; these individuals are not assisted by the notion that they are ‘creating’ their pain, their anguish, their circumstances, because such assertions only heap more weight on their already weighed down heads. While it may very well be absolutely so on a quantum level that such individuals are, in a sense, ‘creating’ their own misery, it is not the same kind of creativity as an individual who knows the cultural and energetic manipulation that is being done to them and can bypass it. These two things are NOT the same, although the mechanism by which they occur has its roots in the same quantum process.
When individuals like to suggest the New Age theory of how all suffering is the fault of the individual who is suffering, I like to offer an alternative theory- that such individuals are actually indicators of where action on the part of those that CAN see needs to take place: I see these individuals as the eyes of the evolution watching those who could be acting as the voices of the silenced do nothing at all, or even worse, pontificate as to how those who are suffering are the direct causes of their own suffering and how, if they’d just activate their empowerment, there’d no longer be a shortage of food caused by the machinations of a greedy and materialistic corporate and banking hegemony and held in place by the apathy and self interest of the majority and the poor would no longer exist.
I see the existence of suffering in part as an indictment of the continued self indulgence of individuals who experience a level of comfort and safety that they don’t want to risk: there is absolutely a spiritual question being asked but it’s not being asked in the way that New Age religionists like to frame it: the Virus is the Shadow created by and for the planetary community created by all Beings, not just those that the ones experiencing certain kinds of privilege like to feel spiritually superior to. And this is where my explorations of the new Church of Entitled Privilege- under the guise of the cult of New Age Religion- got really interesting.