Avariciousness…

[Slightly edited October 1]. Quickly written after a long day at work: The Swedish leader-writer and priest Helle Klein writes in her blog that she thinks the economism gets both material and existential consequences.

She wonders how what’s now going on in the current financial crisis will end.

“The greediness digs its own grave – unfortunately many small-savers [??] are drawn with in this crisis.”

In a leader chronicle yesterday she writes about that “The Capitalism Destroys the Love.”

The Swedish debater and journalist Dan Josefsson said at the book-fair in Gothenburg recently that:

“Loneliness is a malignant tumour on our society.”

He and a psychotherapist have written a book together called something like “The Secrecy –from glance to lasting relation” (if we just "take ourselves in the collar" as we say here and become the clever girls and boys we will manage it!!! My interpretation from what I read about the book. Of course; all who haven't been so badly hurt will manage this, but those who were more badly treated... What about them?). Addition October 9: the home site for this book, see here.

In the book flood from this year’s fair (mass?) the need of help with relations appears. The human beings of today seem to have difficulties with the love –not with sex, kicks of happiness or enjoyment, but with lasting and deep relations.

Of 9 million people in Sweden 2, 5 million are living in one-person households. Over 1, 5 million of these have hardly any contact with their families. 200,000 say they don’t have any friends.

A lot of people call help-phones. All sorts of people are calling: young, old, people born in Sweden and abroad, men and women. Many carry a huge agony. The dismounting of the psychiatry is shown clearly. Other people are struggling with their addiction(s). Strikingly many women are drinking too much. But obviously many are merely alone. They have nobody to talk with. They are longing for connection beyond themselves.

Loneliness is the Western world’s big problem child. We have everything, but not. The affluence of things has to compensate for broken relations (but more and more people don’t have material things either, we are returning more and more to the class-society again).

However, all those offers of therapy, lifestyle coaching and self-realization say that we have to change ourselves, not the society * (the tendency to blame ourselves is strengthened! Very practical for the ones in power on all levels).

If one topic of conversation in our time is the loneliness, the other is the financial crisis. The bank system in USA is breaking down and the confidence for the societal economies is crashing.

The greediness, avariciousness has dug its own grave.

Maybe these two societal phenomena – the loneliness and the greediness - belong together?

“The capitalism is a condition in the world and in the soul”

Franz Kafka once claimed.

His provoking metaphor hold things together we use to hold apart – the economic and the existential aspects/things.

One of Klein’s teachers at the university, Per Frostin, once wrote an essay with the heading “The Capitalism Chokes the Love.”

He searched for the talk in society and church about the economism’s and consumism’s influence not only on the societal solidarity but also on our ability to maintain loving relations, enter into marriages and devote ourselves to family life.

This essay, published more than twenty years ago, feels more burning today than ever Klein thinks.

Our quarter-of-a-year-capitalism is not only a neoliberal economical system but also an ideology with a view on man which says: go in for, invest in yourself, and seek for the largest profit for your own sake.

Those ideals are the opposite of solidarity and love. The calculated egoism is breaking both the societal economies and human-between-relations down.

What has Alice Miller said about these things?? Is material things a substitute for other things? For instance love?

* In many circumstances quite moralistic - and not least unemphatic.

"I can - why can't you???"

Addition October 1: read this article too (in Swedish). And earlier posts on self-justification (the right to abuse?). And under the label moderators. See the blog Freakonomics on "In the Battle of the Sexes, Partians Outearn Peacemakers."

The American psychotherapist Jean Jenson writes that

"And the best is that the better our mental health becomes, the more we dissociate from power exercise and violence [in whatever form]."

And it was that with perverted needs and substitutes... Denial of needs "I don't need..." And as I don't have any needs I can't get hurt. And see the phenomenon divide and rule. Something we probably learned as children: siblings were played out against each other, more or less deliberately and/or consciously. A power-tool.

Read George Montbiot in "Congress Confronts its Contradictions."

How would we have reacted and resonated and how would the society and world have looked like if a sound development had occurred, i.e., if we had been truly and genuinely respectfully treated as very small kids and up? If more people had been? Because this kind of truly respectful (non-authoritarian) treatment is very rare?

A Swedish journalist said something about conservatism...

Arthur Silber wrote something interesting:

"When people say adults behave and think like children, what they more properly mean is that they behave and think like children who are profoundly damaged -- children who are already made emotionally numb by the typical kind of emotional abuse to which most children are subjected many times a day, children who have been forced to deny their own pain simply to survive, and who are therefore unable to grasp the pain of others. Most adults were once such children; one of the ways the damage reveals itself when they become adults is the denial described above... /.../

Many children believe that 'wishing will make it so,' just as they believe that there are no consequences for their actions that cannot be undone. But again, children who believe this are those children who are already damaged. Healthy children do not think in this manner. But most of us were greatly damaged as children, and most of us deny what ought to be unavoidable truths because we learned to do this in our earliest years of life./…/

…most Americans -- and our entire governing class and almost all commentators and bloggers -- refuse to grasp them. It is as if these ideas are written in a dead language. Certainly, the language is dead to them, for they have made themselves incapable of understanding it. To recognize a truth of this kind threatens the mechanism of denial that lies at the very center of their sense of themselves, at the very center of their identity. So the truth cannot be acknowledged.”

You can - if only you decide you will!

photo S. Thomas.

Writing further, furiously: More from Wikströms' book (see earlier postings). In the popular self-development literature it is said that the human being just can’t blame her misfortunes on unfortunate circumstances (!!!), a sad and unfortunate childhood (!!!) or existential weariness (!!!). Who and what is she then to blame? (Herself? Her genes? Her unwillingness to do something or to change? Or what? This ought to be said out in plain words!? Shouldn't it?)

Talk about moralizing! What about what’s lying behind? Is anybody interested in that, in bringing this to light? Bringing both this and that to light! For instance how it is with many emperors' new clothes!?

The human being therefore has to “take hold of her life” and see so she is steering her soul’s bark [herself], realize (or as one says today “implement”) her innermost dreams of success. But what about the American dream?

And she shall do this “now,” live now, instead of just planning for to live, to not having to realize when she is old that she hasn’t really lived. And this is nothing wrong with actually I think. There are a lot of contradictions – and confusions here and there.

Wikström thinks the lust-principle has started to rule on a cultural level, not the postponed drive-satisfaction’s gloomy reality principle.

But what are those needs about, maybe those urgent needs, needs that have to become filled immediately? And what are those bottom and endless needs about, which can never become filled? Surrogates, substitutes? See Alice Miller here.

The lightness in the existence has disappeared for many in everyday life’s trivial treadmill, confused home situations, children’s demands (justified and/or “perverted” needs because of earlier unfulfilled needs), relations that aren’t straightened out. All those things together make one want to maximize the small zone that’s left for oneself. No wonder!

Moralizing or being ironic over life style literature and dismiss it as drivel is too simple. But I want to take a step further he writes. And ponder over what those dreams are an expression of.

For some this reading leads to a lot of improvements in those particular persons’ lives.

But despite many people are trying to think positively, take command over their lives or are striving for a conscious presence, they fail. And that the popular culture constantly reminds them about that it is only on themselves the whole existence (AND success) is lying, the feeling of lack of satisfaction and self contempt increases. As self blame and shame (convenient for the power and power abusers!?).

My addition: And also the shame over how incapable and incompetent you are. So the one in question stops questioning the state of affairs out of shame (keeping silent of shame), or as she is told: has no right to complain, she has all tools and options to succeed she is told (if she is legitimately complaining she can be called spoiled)?

Blaming the victim.

We are on the one hand treated like children and on the other we are demanded taking responsibility as grown up! Damn if you do and damn if you don’t. See Berit Ås on Master Suppression Techniques.

Addition in the evening: read Oscar Flowe in "The hitting stops here!".

Substitutes, hypocrisy, inequality…

the Swedish sculptor Carl Milles and Ellen Key.

“The renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright has received much historical attention, but author Nancy Horan turns her gaze on Mamah Borthwick, Wright’s lover -- their long-term affair scandalized the public -- who deserves attention in her own right for her work as a feminist. Loving Frank tells the story of Cheney’s affair with Wright and her struggles to mesh her own independence and intelligence with the traditional roles of wife and mother. (the text is taken from here).”

Taliesin the home Wright built for him and Mamah.

Mamah Borthwick Cheney.

Frank Lloyd Wright.

[Updated in the evening with a PPS]. I don't really know what to give this posting as heading (actually many times I don't really know what to use as titles)...

I have been reading the book ”Loving Frank” by Nancy Horan (in Swedish) for a while, now reaching the end of it, about the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his love affair with Mamah Borthwick Cheney which occurred in the beginning of the former decade (I am reading many books in parallel, phew!).

They were both married when they got in love. This love caused a scandal and a lot of emotions in the society around them and was written about in the newspapers even.

Here is a review in New York Times "Notes on a Scandal" (also see here). There it stands for instance:

“Public outrage followed Frank and Mamah across the Atlantic in 1909, endangering the young architect’s career and destroying his companion’s good name. Wright’s legacy has been retroactively protected and buttressed by his work, but Mamah Borthwick Cheney’s reputation didn’t survive their romance — and neither did she. Horan follows the couple as their relationship travels from its anxious, ecstatic beginnings, past doubts and compromises, through renewed hope, and on to its tragic close./…/

Mamah Borthwick Cheney wasn’t just any woman, but Horan makes her into an enigmatic [mysterious, puzzling or "gåtfull" in Swedish] Everywoman — a symbol of both the freedoms women yearn to have and of the consequences that may await when they try to take them.”

In the end Horan writes about Wright that (in my amateur translation from the Swedish text):

“This was Frank in a nutshell, conductor out into the fingertips.”

Frank had thought about every single detail about the impression his "creations" would give (even when it came to Mamah's dresses, at least atone occasion)… He had his sides. As Mamah had.

This made me think.

“And this is more okay when it comes to and is about a man still!? Or one has to oversee with it at least!? They lived in a system that allowed some people (men for instance) to play their childhoods out, both in the family (the smallest system) and in the society. Even on the highest level. And in this way these persons (preferably men) didn’t have to do anything about their problems, issues.”

We grant them irresponsibility. They don't have to grow up!? They can still go on being like grown up boys!? My mom used to say that she had one big child and six small children. The child reacted with astonishment, because he didn't give him any opportunity to grow up either. Or was this HER responsibility? I don't know, maybe she also had interests in keeping him like a small child, not to loose him (with a tired smile)??? Because she in turn didn't really believe in her value and real, true rights?

Men don’t have to take responsibility too many times still, didn’t have to do anything an are still more accepted just as they are - in a/many way/s. They could continue to play things out. Women fell back on a false hope to change their men (making them stay in the relation. Hoping an trying and struggling year after year after year, as did Mamah, when she bu time discovered Frank's different sides, for instance a "spoiled child side", his mother's favorite, before Frank's two sisters. Whom accepted their roles)?

Women haven’t had those opportunities. Where have they played their things out? Yes, on their children (if they had any)!? And if they didn’t have any? How do we stop this vicious circle? That only one part/side take responsibility?

And this is still true to a high degree: men are ruling the world (false power - anger? Anger expressed in many different ways give them a sense of power? A need for power that actually have with their childhoods to do?). And can still play all their unprocessed things out, and thus take no responsibility for them. Aren’t really forced to do anything about them. They aren’t compelled doing anything because of how the society still functions!

Here in Sweden more women seek help with therapists, psychologists… And also get abused sometimes by their so called helpers… On top.

And as the society now and still functions the ones loosing most are still women and children and poor people. Who still have least power and status.

But men also looses on this in the end. All men do? But in slightly different ways? They may have more status only by the fact hat they are men (and usually physically stronger) and/or actual power, money etc., but problems with near relations, with closeness.

Filling their needs with substitutes, like power, money, drugs of different kinds (as do women), independency (I don’t need, giving them a sense of power, actually not a true power!? Also going back to their childhoods?).

So women have the strongest immediate interests in changing the state of affairs – still, 100 years later!??? They loose most on the current situation still!?

But men ought to be interested too, for their and the ones sake they maybe love?? And for the world's sake and how things develop in it?

Yes, mothers (AND fathers) can treat their sons badly in many ways... Hating them, not seeing their (justified) needs, using them for filling their own needs (for abreactions for instance)... And give their sons problems later in life. Sometimes tremendous problems. As much as daughters are given problems from their parents... But in slightly different ways?

PS. My postings have looked strange for a while. I get a message about a faulty HTML-code or something. I know nothing about HTML and haven't done anything... But never mind...

Anyway, it's a wonderful day...

Nancy Horan's website see here.

PPS. After fixing up here I took some fika out on the balcony and read the last pages in the book mentioned in this posting, and couldn’t help getting tears in my eyes, actually running down my cheeks, when I read it.

Got three new books on Friday. One of those was Susan Faludi’s “The Terror Dream. Fear and Fantasy in post 9/11 America.” In a meeting summer 2005 with her friend, the Swedish journalist and author, Maria-Pia Boëthius the seeds were sowed that resulted in this book she writes.

I won’t have time reading this book the coming weeks or months I think, so I read words here and there.

The last paragraph made me spontaneously think:

“The whole nation regressed! As its leader(s).”

And that’s what has happened through history here and there, even if we perhaps haven’t thought in those terms.

When we are placed or put before repetition(s) of an experience that formed us we have a possibility solving the old story in a new way. Go back to the future (in the best cases) and turn the long-term denial upside-down.

Faludi talks about a national identity not built on some sort of virile illusion, but on the talents we all, women and men, have to the same degree.

According to wikipedia:

“In her 1999 book ‘Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man’ Faludi analyzes the state of the American man. Faludi argues that while many of those in power are men, most individual men have little power. American men have been brought up to be strong, support their families and work hard.

But many men who followed this now find themselves underpaid or unemployed, disillusioned and abandoned by their wives. Changes in American society have affected both men and women, Faludi concludes, and it is wrong to blame individual men for class differences, or for plain differences in individual luck and ability, that they did not cause and from which men and women suffer alike.”

A physician’s conscience – more on the Nanny-pedagogy and demands on harder grips…

"In TV-programmes like 'The Supernanny' children are taught to do as the parents say – without understanding why. This sort of 'poisonous pedagogy' goes against an upbringing characterized by humanism."

[Slightly updated August 18]. Threats and punishments are not the recipe to get more order in the school and in the homes the physician Lars H. Gustafsson means. He is critical to the ”neoauthoritarian movement.” And says that he sees a trend where it is said that children shall learn to obey and follow the grown ups’ order.

He is worried for a return to old times where children and adolescents were taught to obey for to get away from punishment(s) (something they didn’t get away from how much they even tried I think).

This kind of treatment (with punishments) can lead to that we get “obedient soldiers” without personal responsibility to lean back on in difficult situations Gustafsson says. Blind obedience (and what has such obedience led to?).

My addition: and probably also people with a need for revenge and for to punish other, weaker, people!! And today the society approves of this too!!! Why do so many approve of this? And see what the American neurologist Jonathan H. Pincus writes in the chapter “Hitler and Hatred” in his book “Base Instinct – What Makes Killers Kill.”

Gustafsson (who has been working as child and school physician) says that it has become more and more common with being put in the corner. But today this is called something else: put on “timeout benches” or “rowdyism mats.” Benches and mats where kids have to sit for a couple of minutes (or more) if they have done something “wrong.” Nobody really asks (or dares to??) ask seriously why children are behaving as they are!! And call punishments as the right method in question!! If this maybe isn’t more of the same.

And in the British TV-programme ”Supernanny”, which is sent in Sweden too, the parents are taught to use a “naughty chair” where the kids are placed if they aren’t doing as the parents say.

People supporting methods like these are probably defending methods that once (severely) harmed themselves, but this is too painful to admit to. They had to believe this was done for their own good and thus they are probably the strongest advocates for methods like these, and this is really horrible and very tragic. And even more horrible when they get power positions, the higher the worse (as becoming ministers in governments, or leaders for schools etc.).

And why do they get those positions? Why don't more people oppose to this? Is it because so many have been badly treated as children in turn? And not only by grown ups around them, but not least at home? I think that IF we grew up under ideal circumstances we would be more immune (or even totally immune) to later bad treatment, or recover quicker from later bad treatment. But such ideal circumstances don't exist? But this is no excuse for not trying to improve our treatment of kids. With that ideal circumstances don't exist. And for anyone (therapist, psychologist even less) to say that "Each generation has to recapture its own." Because the recovery is so hard, so we should try to avoid as much as possible from the first beginning. Even though recovery is possible to that degree so you can live a decent life. But in too man cases with A LOT OF hard work! A work that COULD have been unneccesary. And should be unneccesary.

Instead of passing this forward those people should get help to call their own experiences in question by a society that started to talk much more openly than is the case about those things. And we ought to be a much more enlightened society today really. But it seems to be a backlash in the whole society (all over the world) not only in this respect, but when it comes to human rights and respect for each other in all.

Of course programmes of this kind influences the debate in Sweden and how grownups are behaving towards kids Gustafsson means (but why were they accepted from the first beginning I wonder???). The last years many licensed programs for education of parents with the roots in the same philosophy have become introduced in Sweden. They are building on the same thoughts on tighter reins and a firm discipline.

He refers to older times when corporal punishment strengthened the verbal imposing of shame. Children were also confined in the own room, in a basement storage space or a dark wardrobe to think over its sins!!! What ”sins” I wonder??

The child advocate Andrew Vachss thinks that

“...of all the many forms of child abuse, emotional abuse may be the cruelest and longest-lasting of all.”

"Emotional abuse is the systematic diminishment of another. It may be intentional or subconscious (or both), but it is always a course of conduct, not a single event. It is designed to reduce a child's self-concept to the point where the victim considers himself unworthy—unworthy of respect, unworthy of friendship, unworthy of the natural birthright of all children: love and protection."

To avoid the pain of such bad treatment we tend to use defense strategies, for instance by blaming ourselves, and thinking it’s something wrong with us, instead of calling the received treatment in question. And by this we tend to reenact the same thing with those with less power than we have later, and think we are doing this “for their own good”!!

Gustafsson says further that the darkness in the wardrobe should remind us of how dark we were in our souls. And even in homes that were more humane there existed “whining-wardrobes.”

Gustafsson says that he becomes sad when he hears all the demands on more order in school and home, all the talk about rougher treatment and punishments as the solution to (all) problems. But this is something that permeates the whole society is my addition!!! To moralize and put yourself on high horses.

We are on our way to return hundred years back in time he thinks. I agree.

A personal conscience isn’t created through demands on order and discipline, through orders to feel more empathy and understanding for other people. Such things can only grow from inside! Yes, I agree, through genuinely respectful treatment of children from the first beginning of their lives. But you CAN recover later, if you meet people that are able to confirm you and show you what true, genuine respect and love is. And we CAN become more respectful in our way of meeting young people, but it’s probably a very painful work.

The examples on how bad things can turn with peoples’ consciences through an upbringing built on threats and punishments are in fact many. But we don’t really discuss them or talk about them!!!?? We still believe that some people are born evil (or at least with bad genes).

Right to the WWII the German school (and the treatment at home) was characterized by blind discipline (see about blind obedience and its consequences), where threats and punishments were pedagogical tools for creating obedient students. Those young people later defended their support and cooperation in the Holocaust with that they only obeyed order.

And their suppressed anger (from the early treatment) got an outlet in the annihilation of Jews etc.

The personal conscience can never become formed via threats and punishments. And therefore the blend of new and old views on the bringing up of children that is growing stronger and stronger in Sweden is unfortunate he thinks. I would say it’s horrible. What sort of human beings are created by this way of treating young people – and very small children??

We should instead settle account with our own individual and personal history to the degree that is possible, but yes, this work is a tough work for many, many because of the pain that such treatment caused in our early childhood. To recover from such treatment is a hard work in many cases. And isn't this a reason as good as any to treat kids better?

And that people became harmed has nothing to do with a special vulnerability, i.e. the roots don’t lie in some genes that makes us more sensitive than other people (and by the way; is sensitivity bad).

And what sort of problems, and to what degree we get problems later in life from those early experiences, has with how badly treated we were and if we had the luck or not to encounter one or more person that could help us realize on some level that we were bad and unfairly treated by people who in fact didn’t show love, and not with genes I think (but it's eaier to blame genes than our parents or their substitutes). But we had to believe that they (our early caregivers) loved us and did what they did for our own good.

And it’s awful when people act this out - in politics for instance, as I think happens today, with our current government and (too many of) its supporters...

Addition after lunch: see about Corporal Punishment in the United States of America; Number of Students Receiving Corporal Punishment, by State School Year: 2006-2007, and Number of Students Receiving Corporal Punishment, by State School Year: 2006-2007 (students with an without disabilities).

Addition August 18: And how is it with emotional punishment (and manipulation)? Why is manipulation needed?

See what Alice Miller writes about conscious and unconscious manipulation in therapy for instance.

And also see the interview "Violence Kills Love: Spanking, the Fourth Commandmentand the Suppression of Authentic Emotions."