What’s the opposite to love?

the complex picture.

[Updated September 26]. A Swedish journalist writes in the review "What's the oppostite to love?" about a book with the title “Our Era’s Fear for Seriousness” that came 1995. In this book of thoughts the author tilted at a spirit of the time refusing to set about the large questions of society and life. To express it simpler: people (or the society in all) refused to discuss any deeper issues the author thought.

And this is still valid, and has become even worse the author thinks as you can read below. And some are wondering where all the intellectual are in debates. Why they are so silent and not reacting. They are only talking and writing about what's opportune?

But talking seriously doesn’t exclude laughter the reviewer thinks. On the contrary, these two parts have to go together. Roy Andersson, the author of the book in the review, wrote his thoughts down in a decade lined with a long neoliberal era and a gigantic retreat to the idea that "alone is strong."

And once again see what Owe Wikström writes about the individualism and the negative effects of individualism. The idea about alone is strong is that a defense mechanism, namely denial of needs, a denial that gives you a false sense of power - and strenght. Which doesn't mean that we don't have (can't have) a natural, genuine strenght.

We were in a deep economical crisis. The gulfs between the classes had started to grow again. The belief in the future was gone with the wind. The humanism was on retreat. The humor that ruled was above all the ironists, the ones making fun of seriousness and engagement. See what Alice Miller writes about irony.

There was an increased contempt for moral values, a contempt that was attacking the fundamental or basic content of the notion solidarity – to see yourself in other people. My addition: but at the same time there exists a new morality. People joked over the notion solidarity, over people who believed in solidarity and were trying to uphold such ideals, people who believed in seeing yourself in other people. How many damaged people do we actually have I can't help wondering, who have to make fun of people who try to be empathic and compassionate? What does this phenomenon say? I have my ideas.

What’s concealed in the wake of this if not a slowly growing belief in the übermensch-ideal (a super-human-being ideal) once again, which means a contempt for weakness. People blowing their trumpets: I can indeed! But this is problematic, because there are also people hiding their light under a bushel. And that's the other side of the coin. The lack of people with a sound selfesteem?

Back to the reviewer again: a contempt for weakness that once upon the time formed the breeding ground for racial biology, Nazism, concentration camps and gas chambers. There are new self-appointed master races in both Sweden and Europe today the reviewer thinks (and yes, that’s actually true, but they look differently than older times’? And see what the Swedish journalist Maria-Pia Boëthius writes about narcissism).

Now a new edition of this book comes, and Andersson establishes with distress that the content in his book still is valid. No, the development has changed even more to the worse.

The simple black-and-white conception of the world begins to see its chances again.

In those musty mud puddles the extreme right is growing once again.

Profiting on a powerlessness and frustration among many of the exposed people – not least among young unemployed men.

But it’s not the patriots' hate that frightens the reviewer most, but the widespread drowsy indifference in the broad middle class. He thinks that Elie Wiesel is right when he says that

“The opposite of love isn’t hate. The opposite of love is indifference.”

Yes, it was this with the back leaning indifference.

Vehicle testing in Sweden...

The car owner comes there gladly and unsuspectingly (?) driving, to the music from "Peter and the Wolf" by Sergei Prokofiev, the doors open to the testing hall - and who stands there waiting? I don't say more...

I forgot the time I had booked on Saturday morning for vehicle testing (a defense??), and this made me need to cheer myself up a bit? It's really a lot going on now at work, and maybe not only there... Some very important (and nice) things too.

Addition: My car went through with no problems...

With a (very?) low status…

In a review on a dissertation “Att leva som utbränd” or “Living as burnout” by Mia-Marie Hammarlin it stands (my maybe a little free translation):

“Being burnout is feminized with the help of media, where the word ‘burnout’ gets a clear low status face – the middle age woman in public sector. Men retire to loneliness [solitude] and seem to be afraid of the connection with shame [and nerve weaknesses]. ‘Real chaps don’t get stricken with nerve weaknesses.’”

This review triggered a lot of thoughts and emotions, not only connected to the topic burnout. Here are some of those reactions and thoughts. It resulted in a lot of threads. And will maybe result in more postings than this one. So this posting is loudly thinking once again, and in many directions.

Even if it isn’t straight outspoken one can hear (or is this projection, a symbolic reaction/interpretation from my part?):

“What weakling you are! Why not just… One can seek oneself to other environments! To get more healthy and sound you have to seek yourself to a healthy and sound environment![what that is? If it exists and where.]”

The contempt for weakness - and for all those incapable of controlling themselves!! Something we have seen here around the debate about social insurances, things I am reacting very strongly and angrily at.

Women are since long schooled to stay (vistas) in powerless places it stood in the review. 35 years ago women overly trained in a traditional patriarchal pattern went right out into the public sector and was locked in there. Their own fault? How stupid of them! Blaming themselves too: How stupid of me! My own fault! I should have been able to handle it better! See the Primary defence.

The author of the dissertation seems to mean that being burnout is deeply embedded in sex and class problems. And wonders if depression and diffuse aches and pains can be an expression for female dissatisfaction, if these things can’t be seen as downright political actions, as a sort of demonstrations.

I don’t know, maybe they are, but if so not consciously?

And the reviewer writes that she wants to scream

“OF COURSE!”

as a reply, and she also hear a choir of female anger, furiously filling in in her scream.

Yes, reading this triggered a lot of thoughts and probably emotions around things that have happened and things I have experienced recently!!

About blaming the victim, false power denial of needs, lack of empathy and understanding/enlightenment - and once again - contempt for weakness.

And all these phenomena are there for to protect the ones reacting (reacting with contempt and rejection, wanting to educate and maybe also punish the ones not having any “stake” as we say) against the truth, a too painful truth, a SO painful truth so we need to protect ourselves against it. Seeing it from the Miller-point-of-view!

But these protections (or defences) turn to problems, not only for ourselves but also for other people (self-destructiveness and destructiveness), so if not sooner we ought to work on this now as adults. Because they can result and have resulted in political decisions with grave and severe consequences and continue to result in such things.

Thinking further and loudly in an attempt to understand and grasp these phenomena (how can people be so stupid and insensitive?): And contempt for weakness is also a protection: a protection against the realization and to this connected feelings on HOW in fact powerless the child once was and how this power and helplessness was used by the ones that were/are supposed to care for us the most. Realizations we and many want to avoid at all costs. With all what that means.

In circles where people are supposed to be enlightened I have heard things in the style and with the meaning (in my feeling and interpretation):

“But take yourself in the collar!! The question is about seeking oneself to an environment which is healthier, with healthier people.”

And if one doesn’t succeed in this… Then one is only to blame oneself?
And I have heard from those (men) that it’s the mothers’ fault how things are. Yes, that’s true, the mother is the first one in a child’s life… Does this mean that dads – and men – have no responsibilities thus?

But don’t we all have responsibilities each one of us, and the same responsibilities and should also have the exact same demands on us, no more or no less, whether we are women or men? And especially as or if we are grown ups! We all have responsibilities to contribute in making things better, and each of us have a responsibility for ourselves? And exactly the same responsibility?

But then, if we actually have those means in all circumstances is another question and to what degree? The structures can contribute to less power – in some circumstances? Oh, what am I after?

The more power you have the more harm you can do? And some don’t have any other power than the one over their children!

Fields of Gold.

You'll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You'll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we walk in fields of gold
So she took her love for to gaze awhile
Upon the fields of barley
In his arms she fell as her hair came down
Among the fields of gold

Will you stay with me, will you be my love
Among the fields of barley?
We'll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we lie in fields of gold
See the west wind move like a lover so
Upon the fields of barley
Feel her body rise when you kiss her mouth
Among the fields of gold

I never made promises lightly
And there have been some that I've broken
But I swear in the days still left
We'll walk in fields of gold
We'll walk in fields of gold

Many years have passed since those summer days
Among the fields of barley
See the children run as the sun goes down
Among the fields of gold
You'll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You can tell the sun in his jealous sky
When we walked in fields of gold
When we walked in fields of gold
When we walked in fields of gold

The Wall of Silence…

Cherry Bird at my work place, picture taken with my cell phone camera.

Apropos punishments… What we regard as punishment? And what we maybe deny being a punishment? Thinking further on ”See No Evil -- A political psychologist explains the roles denial, emotion and childhood punishment play in politics,” the pschologist Michael Milburn interviewed by Brian Braiker in Newsweek, May 13, 2004. Earlier posting on this here (in Swedish) and here.

Miller writes in her book ”Breaking Down the Wall of Silence” (“Riv tigandets mur”) that she experienced the Wall of Silence already in her childhood. Her mother used to meet her with silence whole long days on end for to demonstrate her absolute power over the small girl and force her to obedience, "for her own good" of "love for her small child." She needed this power to mask he own insecurity to herself and to others, but also to withdraw from the relation with her child, a child whom she had never wanted (though maybe denied both to herself and to the environment, not actually knowing what love is probably, because she hadn't experienced true, genuine, real love herself from HER caretakers when she grew up. No excuse though).

And the mother didn’t have to defend her sadism surrounding the small girl with silence, as if she didn’t exist.

The mother saw her attitude as a fair and well deserved punishment for offences the small girl had committed, as her duty giving her a lesson.

This was awful (we can probably not imagine how it feels) for the child. The small girl Miller was couldn’t feel this really then probably, but these feelings (or most parts of them) became suppressed. And so she in turn became insensitive to HOW awful this actually feels, not only to grown ups but not least to a powerless and helpless child. See Berit Ås on the Master Suppression Techniques, where "making invisible" is the first she mentions.

But what was even more painful, Miller writes, was the child’s hopeless efforts to get to know the reason(s) for this punishment. In this omission, negligence a message laid she writes: If you not even know for what you have deserved this punishment you have no conscience. Search (look for), ransack yourself and do your utmost till your conscience says what sort of guilt you have brought down upon you. Not until then you can TRY to exculpate or excuse yourself and dependent on the mood of the one in power you can, if you are lucky, MAYBE be forgiven.

Miller thinks she was exposed to a totalitarian regime and that she was despised (looked down upon) and sadistically treated.

She had to believe that the fault lay in her that her mother didn’t’ speak to her but surrounded her by silence day after day, it must have been her meanness (see Bosch on the Primary defence) that made her mother behave like that (not that the mother was mean!!). That her mother didn’t answer her questions, didn’t care when she wanted an explanation, avoided her looks, so the chikld understood what she had done and change her destiny, being included again in the community, so she could understand her mother (and her strange and very mean behaviour in fact, a fact she should have needed help seeing, a behaviour she should have needed help questioning and seeing as wrong).

As the actual truth was so brutal and unbelievable she had to deny it. For this she had to pay a VERY high price: namely her full awareness was limited and she has been obsessed by guilt feelings since then (for her inherent badness, for which she has to pay her whole life, the rest of it?). Probably reinforced by other people she has had around her to whom she has been drawn?

She escaped this truth by searching the fault in herself, blaming herself (see later how we blame the victims here and there, and meet them with contempt - for weakness!! And for having drawn things upon themselves), and getting blind for her mother’s mendacity (förljugenhet) and thirst for power.

Later she tried to weigh this loss and truth up by philosophical speculations about “the unbelievable truth.”

From the chapter “Ut ur förvirringens fängelse” (“Out of the prison of confusion”) at pages 23-26 in “Breaking Down the Wall of Silence”.

PS. I will probably update this later. A lot at work this time of the year… But I need to reflect upon things too, even if I don’t really have the time.

Concert this evening with our piano-pupils, with rehearsal before it. Now 12 pupils first!!

A lot to organize here; informing all and everyone, practicing with students, I can’t name it all.

And it is over 35 ears since I read English. I didn’t read it the whole gymnasium. I regret it! But I wonder if I was prepared then either…

A church-concert Thursday May 29 in the evening with a group I am co-responsible for and I am accompanying many of them. In June we are going to have a teacher’s concert too, where I am involved. With only a handful of my colleagues.

Silence makes the violence possible…

A Swedish man Jonas Doll has written a debate article “Tystnaden gör våldet möjligt” or ”The Silence Makes Violence Possible.” He thinks the responsibility lies heavily on every man speaking loudly where it usually is silent; in the barrack-room, in the changing-room, on the school-yards and in the staff’s rooms. He says that

“We [men] need to dare talking about the connection with the manliness culture.”

He is thinking on and referring to two cases in Sweden recently and the case in Austria where a man held his daughter as prisoner and sex slave for 24 years. “Constantly this violence that can’t be explained (can’t it?)”he writes.

“Constantly these men, enclosed in what could be madness but which through its perpetual presence of course is an expression of something which is much more difficult to keep at distance, a perversion which reaches deeper, nearer.”

What’s characterizing these men is that their violence takes place in isolation, a sort of “illiteracy” [not literally], and at the same time a sort of acceptable normality he thinks. They are differing, diverging, marginalized, but lives under both an inner and outer pressure not to see or give expression to.

Jonas Doll thinks these men are powerless men. The only power they have is the physical strength over the victim and, what’s more important, an inability to relinquish this power.

He writes about a manliness that has become deformed, that has been shaped into this. Yes, what is this about?

He wonders

“Whose is the fault? Who is the guilty to this inability handling the power?”

Long ago he met a bird (tjej) he says. They saw a film together about two women, but also about power and powerlessness, over and under order, and the woman spoke about structural oppression and patriarchy… Being stuck in the structures, structures ruling. Which he said he damn wouldn’t accept.

He thinks a man is born to power. To give this up is to discipline the impulse to be first, be obvious. The responsibility lies heavy on each of us (men) speaking loudly about these things, everywhere where it usually is silent (se above).

Not speaking up is to give space to the structures which makes power abuse possible, to the manliness culture which makes violence possible, a sort of school yard terror where the weak succumb.

It’s above everything, around the silence little by little closing, that these tragedies becomes possible: nobody knows, all that is violence has happened “by the side of” so to say, but, nevertheless, in a kind of perverted way becomes part of a normal and respectable identity, as in those three cases mentioned above.

The darkness’ heart is the lack of courage; not daring to see the connections, not putting oneself up against them, but instead fall into them, passively confirming them. Of course this doesn’t always lead to unbelievable crimes, but it's always a risk being the first step on the path there.

See earlier posting on psychotherapy, power abuse, blaming the victim, Freud, Melanie Klein… Though mostly in Swedish. I would like to blog about this again I felt when I reread this posting.

And the posting "Seeing, Hearing or speaking no evil..."

A blogger also writes about the case in Austria, angrily and ironically. Some people think men are the new witches in modern witch-hunts...