(via radical-revolution)
When you complain, you make yourself a victim. Leave the situation, change the situation, or accept it, all else is madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
The river starts here too… And the water we need is better harvested higher in the watershed. Than drawing from the depths of the ground, than damming a river, or desalinating a sea.
O let them be left, wilderness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Inversnaid”
Ant mimicking jumping spider.
we were born in a broken house
our children in a broken garden
what do we dream
—rawjeev
“The forensic psychiatrist Herbert Thomas (1995) schematized the steps leading up to an act of violence as beginning with a rejection, which elicits intensely painful feelings of shame, to which the person responds with anger, which he then acts out with an act of violence.
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In other words, the most effective way, and often the only way, to provoke someone to become violent is to insult him. Eeshbach (1971: 285), for example, after reviewing the literature on this subject, concluded that “violations to self-esteem through insult, humiliation or coercion are … probably the most important source of anger and aggressive drive in humans.” (It should be stressed that coercion, as a violation of autonomy, also produces feelings of shame, as Erik Erikson stressed; that is, pride is dependent on being independent, and coercion is the direct negation of autonomy.)
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For example, two of the words we use to refer to violence are assault and injury. The Latin root of assault is the same as that of insult, and even in English insult means a physical as well as emotional assault (as when surgeons refer to an incision as the surgical insult), just as a physical assault is experienced emotionally as the most powerful form of insult. And the Latin root of injury, inuria, means insult as well as injury. One does not have to add insult to injury it is already there, in the word as well as in the emotional/ psychological experience. Iniuria also means injustice, which also links it to shame, since people experience feelings of shame when they perceive themselves to be victims of injustice (because they were too passive and weak to prevent themselves from being victimized).
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But violence is most likely to occur when shame is maximized and guilt is minimized.
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while shame is a necessary condition for the causation of violence, it is not a sufficient condition.
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For men in a patriarchy, there are many situations in which violence is honored and nonviolence is shamed. For example, in wartime (which means most of the time) we have for millennia given Medals of Honor or even dukedoms to men who killed sufficient numbers of other men, or elected them president, and ridiculed, imprisoned, or even executed men who refused to kill other men, shaming them with names like coward or deserter or traitor.
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It is only those who continue to see themselves as weak and incompetent who do not develop the capacity for guilt feelings. These are not just words or theories, nor do the examples given apply only to children. I was amazed to discover how many violent criminals still wet the bed, for example, over which their feelings of shame are almost unlimited. The relationship between guilt feelings and aggressive or hostile feelings and wishes is a positive feedback system, or vicious cycle; that is, an increase in the intensity of either leads to an increase in the intensity of the other. The same is true of the relationship between feelings of shame and of wishes to be passively loved and taken care of. “
