Village Blog

After seeing the film Zeitgeist mentioned in quite glowing terms on a few other blogs I decided to check it out myself and I have to say that it is one of the most frustrating things I ever watched.

Calling your film Zeitgeist is a pretty daring move - you need to make sure you do a damn good job if you’re to deserve the title. The reason I’m feeling frustrated over it is that parts two and three live up to the title but part one falls flat on it’s face. It’s a case of almost, but not quite.

Basically I think they really dropped the ball with the first part by giving in to their own prejudices in an attempt to deconstruct and discredit Christianity.  I used to share the world view of the film-maker(s) regarding Christianity and there was a time I would have loved part one of the film. There came another time though when I began to see that my position was basically one of bigotry – or rather, reverse bigotry.

Because there are a lot of people associated with Christianity who are clearly hypocrites I thought it was OK to openly disparage that whole sector of society. I remember the little rush I used to get every time I discovered something that discredited the religion but eventually it dawned on me that my dislike of them was no different to their dislike of people they didn’t approve of. I was as much a bigot as them, I just faced a different direction.

These days I have a much more nuanced view, I can see the difference between the people and the book they say they are following and also the difference between the people and the institutions. Organised Christianity is no different to any other institution, be it government or corporate or whatever.

I actually found part one to be absolutely riveting, it was full of fascinating information that I’d never heard before, (which I haven’t tried to verify incidentally) but if this is to be the film of the spirit of our times then part one needs to go in the trash and the maker(s) needs to return to the drawing board.

The exceptional bias of the film maker was readily apparent due to his gleefully patronising narration of part one and If that wasn’t bad enough the whole thing began with a grand five minute montage that included a telling of the evolution fable. I’m not trying to be provocative using the word fable to describe evolution I just think that’s the way it’s used by a lot of people. I don’t know if the film maker(s) was aware that they were putting their own religious views up front and I don’t know which is worse: That they knowingly attempted to bludgeon us with ‘their’ story or that they were completely unaware that they had put their religious viewpoint in first before attempting to debunk another religion.

Another mistake they made was that of mistaking connection for causality. I was fascinated by the astrological relationship with the story of Jesus’ birth but to present it as if the astrological patterns automatically begat the story from the bible is quite misleading.

Obviously I can’t prove that their claim is wrong but then a Christian could argue that the patterns of the stars are put there by God to confirm the story and I wouldn’t actually be able to disprove that claim either. Which is my precisely my point. Don’t assume anthing.

They makers of the film also do not have a handle on the spirit of Christianity (although neither do a lot of Christians for that matter). They say nothing about the central theme of love running through the New Testament nor the idea of grace. It’s a pity really because a brief understanding of these ideas would tend to suggest that the acts of the church in the middle ages were not consistent with the bible and that maybe something else was going on. As it stands at the moment we have both institutional churches and their attackers insisting that the institutional church represents Christianity in the face of a great deal of evidence, via their behaviour, to the contrary.

Something else I have a problem with is the lack of understanding of the effect that Emperor Constantine had on Christianity. Briefly; he took what was a kind of underground movement and turned it into the official religion of the empire. All of a sudden Christianity went from being an enemy of the state to an excuse for the state to go on library destroying crusades etc etc etc, you know the rest. To tie early Christianity in with the oppressive church of the middle ages and not mention this change would tend to indicate a pretty superficial understanding of the subject.

The middle ages was the result of the usual lust for power on the part of the elites, the difference this time round was just that they had found a particularly powerful voodoo to control the population with.

These are only some of problems with part one that have occurred to me, I’m aware that there are other areas that people will say that I need to deal with before I can really claim that the film makers dropped the ball but I don’t want to waste any more time going down that particular track because there’s a much bigger problem with part one of the film.

It’s irrelevant.

The power of the church began to wain, ever so slowly, with the creation of the King James version of the bible several centuries ago. Though unintelligible today it was written in the language of it’s time and took power away from royalty and the clergy who controlled what the population knew of the book my only printing it in Latin. Here I agree with the makers of Zeitgeist, by controlling the truth of their religion the church was able to control the people, the only thing was, it was the truth of the monstrously hypocritical difference between the institution’s behaviour and it’s book that they were hiding.

The institutional church was still powerful for a long time afterwards and many of the break away groups of the last few centuries themselves became institutionalised but the Christian scene today is characterised by a comparatively high degree of diversity with a lot of growth in independent and egalitarian churches, as well as more and more people meeting in their homes. There are still people out there trying to recreate hierarchical church models in an attempt to grab power but frankly the Christian landscape reminds me of the model of a post crash world that crash bloggers regularly describe. Which is to say a world in which it is no longer possible for any one group to dominate the globe and in which each country has devolved into a bunch of little fiefdoms with lot’s of uncontrolled territory in between. This is certainly not the nature of an institution that has us by the balls, nor is it an institution we should be overly worried about.

As annoying as many visible Christians are in the US they are no more than a sideshow – much like the bible-thumping US President himself. We would do well not to be sidetracked by them.

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So if they don’t use spiritual voodoo to control us, what do they do now?  Ironically enough in part three there’s an excerpt from an interview with the late Aaron Russo who knows the answer to that question. In this interview he recounts how Nick Rockefeller told him that one of the elite’s goals was to separate children from their parent’s at a very young age, enabling indoctrinate to begin as early as possible.

We should be on the lookout for other ways they cement their power by pitting us against each other. For instacne: black versus white, Christian versus Muslim and Christian versus Evolutionist.

Zeitgeist talks about how religion is used to separate us from nature but I would say that the separation starts from a much earlier age in modern times the child is separated from the mother at the very moment it is born, I don’t know if hospitals still smack a child to make it cry out but they do still often whisk it off to be weighed and prodded as soon as the cord is cut, only returning it to the mother after it has been cleaned and swaddled in blankets. Even when the mother gets full control over her child her cultural conditioning is such that she will likely attempt to feed it with a bottle and almost certainly leave it alone in the dark to sleep by itself while attempting to ignore it’s terrible plea’s for help.

As bad as all that it for a child it is only the beginning. Separation from the parents is further enhanced by our coercive parenting styles and the coup de tat is delivered via 13 years of hard-labour at our penal-like educational institutions.

This should be the real story of part one of Zeitgeist – the story of our times. How the treatment of our babies and children sets the groundwork so that people always gravitate toward strong authority figures no matter how irrational they may actually be. It sets the groundwork so that they feel powerless even though en masse they could topple any government. It sets the groundwork so that people are ineffectual zombies struck dumb by the myriad of entertainment distractions passing by their eyes. Little wonder that almost all any of us can do is sit slack jawed on our couches mesmerised as we watch planes fly into buildings over and over and over again.

As for the small percentage of us who actually get off our couches, well it appears that it’s relatively easy to distract us with a myriad of false activism issues like, oh I don’t know, the Evils of Christianity?

There is also the small matter of the mainstream media… however I imagine that anyone who is reading this blog is on to that particular game so I'll leave that untouched for the moment.

So if we were to remake part one of this film how would it look? Very briefly, In order to examine how we are shaped as subjects of the Rockefeller empire I imagine we’d be looking to interview people like Jean Liefdloff, John Taylor Gatto, and Derrick Jensen…. Hmmm, who else?

We’ve been having a hard time lately, I’ve got several blog posts that I want to write up that I can’t get near (and I’m about to make it harder by writing this instead).  Karen reached a point of mothering overload last week, and a friend stepped in to help her out. The friend is a good friend but parents more or less in the conventional manner. It’s fair to say’s she tends toward our way of doing things but most of the help consisted of the mainstream idea that at times like this you need to get the mother away from the children.

Basically the maintream solution to this problem is through separation from the children. I want to be clear that I’m not criticising this friend in particular, she took on an extra load herself and has indeed given Karen a break but I suspect that if we’d had friends in town who parent like us their instinct would have been toward building connections instead of creating separation. They probably would have descended on the house to take some of the responsibility away while still enabling us to maintain our relationship with our children.

As parents I think that a large part of the stress we’re loaded up with comes from problems in our relationship with our kids. We are tired and don’t want to attend to their genuine needs or they are feeling fractious and are acting it out in ways that certainly bring their needs to our attention but also press buttons from our childhood that cause us to back off from our kids like our parents did to us. So our parent’s bad relationship with us begins to repeat itself.

I believe the solution to these problems is to work on the relationship and to strengthen it. I confess that sometimes I don’t know how to do this and at other times I just don’t have the inner strength but I still think it is important because it’s really apparent that when the relationships are suffering our kid’s behaviour really goes downhill.

Our oldest is someone born with incredible persistence, she never waits until she is sure she can do something before trying she just starts doing it. She started walking at 9 months and fell down about a million times learning but she got their quickly. She learned to ride a bike without trainer wheels over a period of about three days when she was 3 years old – she just never gives up no matter how hair-raising it got. Unfortunately when her emotional needs are not being met this same level of persistence amounts to total harassment for us parents. We’re lucky their’s two of us so we can tag-team her when there’s a problem. She’d be a nightmare for a solo parent or for a school, especially as all the co-sleeping and non-coercive efforts we have gone to have made her a very strong person. I think she’ll be an amazing person when she’s an adult (yes, I know this is her father talking :-) but right now she can be really hard for us.

With all that in mind, when our kids got back home yesterday afternoon after having spent the second day in a row away from us she was incredibly difficult, the worst I’ve ever seen. I also got the angriest I’ve ever felt at her because of it and it wasn’t a nice evening. We were at our wit’s end.

After we’d managed to get them off to bed we sat down and to figure our where we’d goen wrong and decided to try to get back on track.

Basically she went to bed and slept in physical contact with Adi (oldest daughter) all night, told her she loved her a million times and (this is very important) apologised for the things she hadn’t got right without making excuses about it being hard and this morning when we got up Adi was back to her normal self again. Just like that

Honestly it feels like someone has waved a magic wand over the girl. It’s a testament to the bedrock strength of Karen’s relationship with our kids that she can do that even when she’s under stress. I suspect that conventional parenting techniques cause the parents to have to shut off their feelings for their children while they teach the child to ‘cry it out’ and that it leaves them permanently numbed to one degree or another. Staying connected to your kids means you have a really deep love to draw on when things get tough.

Karen is still in need of a break for a few more days but we’re going to do it by having me come out of the office for parts of the day and she’s going to take them out for things like bush walks because it is also apparent from our fussy-baby (now five) that time spent in nature has a very soothing effect. 

Via Idleworm a great video, Money As Debt by Paul Grignon, explaining the economic system we live/serve in. If the economic system has never quite made sense to you or seemed to beyond comprehension this will put it all in perpsective.

Basically though, you were right. It doesn't quite make sense.

I'd imbed the video here if I could but Blogspirit is not yet part of the Google empire and I'm no hacker.

What I think is, a women’s place is in the home. But only if she’s got kids right? That’s fair.

Howl’s of outrage anyone? What about if I said a man’s place is in the home too. Would that make a difference?

I work at home and now that our oldest is five is obvious that if I was away from them all day they would be missing something. They notice if I am out for more than a few hours and ask Karen where I’ve gone,  and they like to be able to come and visit me in the office regularly throughout the day.

So if it’s clear that I should be at home it must be true that the mother, who small children are more attached, to should also be at home.

I’m especially happy to be saying this since I saw this interview of Aaron Russo. Russo was asked to join the global elite by Nick Rockefeller after they had known each other for a few years. He of course chose not to but before they parted company Rockefeller told him that the elites helped promote feminism - for two reasons. One was so they could tax women. All that work they did in the house couldn’t be taxed but now that women go out to work someone else gets paid to clean the house and look after their kids and very probably the family eats out a lot more too.

The second reason to promote feminism was to break up the family

I’m not saying the stated goals of feminism were wrong. I totally agree that women should have the same rights as men. I also think children should have the same rights as well, but clearly the whole thing has been hijacked to the elite's advantage. Ironic as it may seem now the most radical act a women could make these days is to stay at home.

I’m still making my way through Hold on to Your Kids by Gordon Nuefield and the one area I would disagree with him on is that he proposes an attachment village as the solution to children being away from their parents a lot of the time. He’s trying not to rock society’s boat and point the finger at anyone, which is fine, a lot of people will listen to him because of it.

I think this sort of thing is partially why the conservative Christian right has appeal to some people – because they can see where left wing movements have gone wrong. Of course their response it similarly one-dimensional nad probably plays into the hands of the elite in a different way.

My instincts tend toward the left but they make it hard and harder for me, so much of what they do contributes to the power the state has over our lives. In New Zealand we have a child-less (rumoured to be lesbian) women as Labour Prime Minister . All this fair gets the Christian’s in a lather – especially as lately she's been encouraging women to leave the home and go and join the work force to help the economy. Of course the more noise the Christians make the more galvanised the activist community on the left gets. It fair drives me nuts, they’re supposed to both be fighting for the rights of people on the bottom of societies heap - according to their respective manifestos - but are much more interested in squabbling with each other.

I seem to have digressed. What I want to say is, fight the bastards by loving your kids and staying in their lives. Hold on to Your Kids is a great resource for that, as is anything that promotes non-coercive parenting and co-sleeping. And remember, by staying at home you not only deprive the system of your children you also deprive it of your economic input.

It’s a regular occurrence to read comments on the anti-civ blogs (and from the bloggers themselves) about how people don’t know anyone else nearby who they shares their views. I also see people on email discussion lists making this same complaint.

The internet is great at connecting people up but ultimately it is all promise and very little delivery and there is something slightly worrying about how it moulds my behaviour. Initially there is a great flush of excitement upon discovering this wonderful anti-civ corner of the web and this conditions us to keep coming back to the computer for more.

Unfortunately the connections made online can only ever be made at an intellectual level. Maybe sometimes someone will write something that will get you on an emotional level but ultimately the sense of community and acceptance I keep trying to get out of my computer is not forthcoming.

I’m currently spending most of my day working in a room by myself working so it’s even worse right now but what happens is that I get online and start browsing blogs looking for something meaningful.  I’m well versed in anti civ thinking these days so it’s harder and harder to find something to give me that old hit,  plus I probably only just ‘did the rounds’ recently and there’s hardly anything new. I usually begin to stray further and further past the edges of my blog-circle in the hope of  finding something that interests me.

I end up skim reading a bunch of stuff that doesn’t excite me and finally when I feel completely flat and empty I stagger out of the room in search of real people. Luckily I have a family and there’s usually a real person somewhere in the house when I need one.

So is this a zero-sum game? Does the fantastic information and insight I gain from the internet make up for the appalling effect it has on my social life. I mean, if I didn’t spend all this time online I wouldn’t be on this whole new ‘plane of existence’ that separates me from my real life peers and instead I’d probably be out there hanging with them. Is it really worth it when the only thing that really gives meaning to life are the real-life connections I make?

Hold on! I hear you say. Aren’t you forgetting about spiritual and mental development in that mix? – What about the search for insight and truth? Isn’t that important? Don’t we need that too?.

I’m not sure.  Some of that can be quite self indulgent that questing for truth. We can also get spiritual development out of rubbing up against other people in real life situations  - if we aren’t too careful about keeping a safe distance that is. I think it’s the type of development humans are supposed to have too.

‘Course, I’m not ready to give up the net yet but I do think I need to find a way to put all this stuff to practical use. I think that’s why I like Comrade Simba, in a single posting from him you can usually get a bit of philosophy mixed in with instructions on how to build a water pump. There’s something kind of grounded and even soothing about that.

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Meanwhile back in the real world we still feel incredibly isolated – our crazy extremist ways seem to upset people no end.  I’m starting to understand why people who do unusual things are so dogmatic about what they do, it’s because they receive so much grief from their family and friends. They’re forced to erect a big rapid response defence mechanism because of the very people who should be accepting them unconditionally.

Surely it’s not wrong to expect that those close to us will accept us unconditionally?   I see unconditional acceptance so rarely that I sometimes wonder if I am wrong. After all I can count on the fingers of a hand with two fingers how many people there are in our family who can actually do that - and I expect we should be thankful for small mercies

I’ve also been hearing from other people about our unsupportive culture. I’ve heard so much that I’m kind of channelling their collective frustration at the moment (lucky thing I have a blog). 

I know this is a familiar pattern of the world but isn’t there something really, really wrong with it?  How can I put this in perspective?

We, in our nuclear family, decide how we want to live our lives and the people we depend on for emotional support and a sense of belonging start to shun us or criticise us because of decisions that have absolutely no effect on their lives?

This is clearly bonkers but it seems like no one can see it.  I could come up with a complex psychological explanation to explain this – hell I’m great at that stuff – but it would do nothing to dispel the sense of bewilderment  I feel that people are like this. They care less about their relationship with us than they do about…      about…

What is it they’re so worried about exactly? 

Tell me, someone.  Why do you people try to make us feel bad because we choose to co-sleep, or home school with our children? These are loving things to do and they don’t hurt or even affect you one bit but you still can’t help yourselves.

Why do you care so much about what we do with our lives if you seemingly care so little about your relationship with us that you damage it by acting this way?

We can’t have people close to us who are trying to undermine us all the time – especially when the only reason you do it is because what you’re feeling a bit uncomfortable.  We don’t want this to happen any more.

Except we need to have someone close to us.

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Like I said, I’m painting a picture on behalf of a lot of people there, and it’s only half the picture too – here’s the good news:

After giving up the dream of ever living in a village, some friends of ours recently revealed to us that they want to start a village too. Isn’t is always this way?  It doesn’t actually matter if we don’t start one with them because now we feel like it’s really possible again – only this time the fanatical edge has disappeared. I was always aware not to get too carried away but there’s something about letting go of a dream that makes us much more reasonable when we the dream comes back. I’m cautious too, I don’t want to push too hard anymore, or prescribe too much for others.

We’ve been discussing all this stuff on a New Zealand Unschooling list. It’s a great place for support and what I like about it is that not only are there people on there who have gone before us but the members comes from a reasonable wide range of backgrounds so there is a lot of balance to the group. (Scott Peck says that’s one of the characteristics of true community incidentally).

Through the list we have been delighted to discover people nearby who have chosen a similar lifestyle – and are suffering similar, probably worse problems - hopefully we’ll get to hang out with them soon.

I’m looking forward to it.

I’ve always been suspicious when people complain how each new generation of teenagers and young adults is worse than the last, in some ways my view is justified because those sort of statements have an element of washing a person's hands of the problem but Hold on to Your Kids is showing me that there is an awful lot of truth behind it as well.

The basic thesis is that parenting is a lot easier and flows a lot more naturally when a child is properly attached to their parents. They say big problems arise when a child becomes peer-oriented and that we are seeing this more and more amongst our teens but even amongst children as young as seven.

The book is referred to a lot on the Continuum Concept list and I was interested in it because it discussed the issue of how poor parenting (read; excessive discipline or control) could destroy attachment with the result that parenting would become a lot more difficult. It does indeed do this but what has really grabbed my attention at the moment is the discussion of what happens after the attachment is broken and a child changes from being parent oriented to become peer oriented.

Gordon Neufield says that the attachment between parents and their children has a double purpose of making it easier for a parent to handle the immense difficulties of parenting and it ensures that the child stays oriented on the parent who's behaviour they model and who’s cues they follow. It also ensures that the child never strays far from the parent so making it easier for them to look out for their child, and that the child is instinctively wary of strangers (people who they are not attached to) and likely to reject or ignore them in some way.

What happens when a child becomes peer oriented is that they start to seek the company of their peers and to reject the parents, all as a natural part of their attachment instincts. They no longer place any value in what their parents think and will probably actively dislike anything to do with their parents or their values or tastes.

The authors go on to say that the normal transmission of culture from generation to generation is short circuited by this phenomena and that instead of the children learning their parent’s values (which are usually not picked up until adolescence) they pick up on the values of their peers. More  specifically they pick up on the values of whoever the dominant members of their peer group may be, regardless of the character of that person.

Worse still the biggest influence on them now becomes whatever is being fed to their peer group via the mass-media in the form of pop icons, meaning that at the crucial point in their lives when they are cementing their values in place they are effectively being parented by Britney Spears.

So all those fears about the state of the new generation are true – they really are a scary bunch. Quite what is going to happen to society when they achieve a measure of power as adults is hard to predict but it doesn’t look good.

To look back to my generation I can see that a lot of people did sort themselves out and became functioning members of society, however we can be a pretty unforgiving and un-empathetic bunch. I find it easier to look at the generation before mine, the baby boomers, where we see a narcissistic bunch of people fixated on staying youthful and divesting themselves of their responsibilities at an age when they are supposed to be fulfilling the roles of elders. According to Gordon Neufield no one actually wants them to be elders but they could at least try.

The boomers may be scorned by me and many others but at least the hippy culture they came from, while hopelessly shallow, did champion ideas of peace, love and brotherhood. Presumably my generation will be much worse and that we will likely achieve total societal failure at the hands of the generation who are currently receiving their values direct from the music videos of MTV.

Maybe.

The other possibility is that they will eventually become responsible workers when the need for money to survive becomes an issue, they’ll toe the line in a grumbling sort of way but they will also be the sort of easily-led, soft-willed individuals that the powers-that-be really like to see forming the bulk of society’s herd.

Anyway, I thoroughly recommend the book, it has introduced me to a new, much deeper understanding about the relationship between parent and child and I’m looking forward to learning how to prevent the imminent implosion of western society.

Warning: Contains some ranting.

I keep seeing the phrase ‘development of empathy’ used in a way that implies that empathy starts off at a ‘zero’ level in a child and gradually builds up as they get older. A possible conclusion you might reach from this is that the people who say this have never met any children – except that there are too many people who say it. They’re so wrong that I would suggest to them that really we need be more concerned about the loss of empathy that seems to occur across a person's life span in this culture than how to develop it inthe young.

I’m sure every parent reading this can think of a hundred ways that their children have displayed empathy. I’ve found an article by the American Psychological Association summarising the science in this area and basically I’m going to tear it to shreds - but in a fair and balanced kind of way.

First problem; it’s called “What Makes Kids Care”.

Stupid! You can’t make anyone care, you can only LET them care. Trying to force a person to care will almost always have the opposite result.

To be fair to the article the use of the word ‘make’ is so ingrained in our culture that we don’t usually notice it – but then that’s the problem isn’t it? We can only ever conceive of getting something to happen in our culture by using an element of force - or if we’re advanced, trickery.

The news is not all bad about our scientists though, they are beginning to cotton on to this empathy in children idea.

Researchers used to believe that a sense of real caring about others came as people grow into adulthood. But now studies are finding that children can show signs of empathy and concern from a very early age.
For example, a study by psychologists Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, Ph.D., Marian Radke-Yarrow, Ph.D., and Robert King, Ph.D. observed children whose parents were hurt somehow -- either physically (e.g. father having a bad headache) or emotionally (e.g. mother received bad news and was crying). They discovered that even very young children had a pretty well-developed sense of empathy.

So now they have real evidence that even young children have a pretty well developed sense of empathy.

Stupid!! The evidence exists in every child that was ever born. Well, maybe not quite every child, You’d have to surmise that scientists lack any kind of useful people skills (including the ability to empathise) if it’s taken them several centuries of research to uncover the easily observable fact that children do in fact have empathetic skills.

Next comes the What Can Parents Do? section. To their credit they have bought up the issue of modelling and it’s supreme importance in the scheme of things but…

They also want you to praise your child for showing empathy.

Stupid! Other scientific research has shown that praising a child for any task or action replaces their already existing intrinsic motivation with ex-trinsic motivation and basically they lose interest in doing whatever it is you have praised them for. They will still do it of course, but only if you are around to praise them for it.

Next they deal with Effects of the Outside World. This includes advice about monitoring TV and movies which is undoubtedly a good idea. Unfortunately it also advises parents to give their kids books to read that ‘promote compassionate behaviour’ and to educate them about famous altruists by taking them to museums.

Huh? Alright, it’s not stupid but it is very, very lame. If that’s the best way we’ve got for getting to our kids then we’ve already lost.

The article ends on a good note by pointing out that none of the approaches they’ve suggested will work unless there is a pre-existing ‘indestructible link between parent and child’.

But then they don’t tell us how to make the link indestructible.

They’ve just mentioned the most important aspect of bringing up an emotionally healthy child and then they drop the ball and forget to mention specifics.

The truth is they probably don’t know. Since we’re not allowed to mention co-sleeping, long term breastfeeding, non-coercive parenting, home schooling or the idea of picking up a crying baby in the mainstream there is little chance they were going to go there. The concept of non-coercive parenting, which all those issues contribute to, is probably the most dangerous concept of all to the establishment since they rely on parents beginning the work of breaking in children and disconnecting them emotionally from other people. In actual fact society in it’s current state couldn’t exist unless efforts were made to destroy empathy in children.

The reason the article mentioned this disconnect issue but couldn’t go anywhere useful with it is, as discussed in Disciplined Minds, that the professionals and scientists consulted in this article will be incapable of coming up with anything that will produce a healthy child unless it doesn’t conflict with the first priority of meeting the needs of the people who run our society.

Another irony in this is that we hold scientists up to be the most priestly members of our society. They’re people we go to for advice and yet they aren’t allowed to use empathy or people skills in their work. In fact they often display a very poor ability to cope with social situations themselves. How on earth are they going to tell us anything really useful, like how to be happy and fulfilled? Or how to build connections between people and how to build genuine community?

The only ‘scientist’ I’ve found who knows how to build community, M Scott Peck, learned his stuff by combining science and religion – to howls of outrage on both sides I might add - but not from normal people, who buy his books in droves.

The other problem with scientists (And I’ll have more to say about this issue later) is that their position at the top of the tree and the corresponding arrogance that comes with it only serves to further compound their blindness of what’s important

It should be no surprise though, that in civilisation we should revere the very worst state of the human condition. Cold emotionless scientists serve ‘growth’ and ‘progress’ very well, but they are unlikely to do anything good for us normal people.

I was just reading an old copy of the New Zealand Listener and was surprised to learn something very insightful. I'm pretty sure it was an accident because not only does the Listener sets the limits in New Zealand for acceptable leftism but the author in question, Russel Brown is a case study in what happens to the integrity of a radical young person as they pursue a career in journalism. His column is almost not worth reading anymore but read it I did.

It started off rehashing the old 'are video games turning our kids into murderous zombies?' debate with quotes from an Utne Reader article pointing out that the average IQ has continued to rise while an entire generation of gamers has been produced. It also pointed out that the murder rate has declined in the same time. So far, so respectable liberal.

But then, apparently unwittingly, Russell dropped this little bombshell;

Whether you find the content of video games inoffensive or grotesque... their structure teaches players that the best course of action is always to accept the system and work to succeed within it

 

I'm not particularly excited about video games and haven't paid much attention to either Ran's or Jason's thoughts on the matter but I don't remember seeing anything like this. (It's times like this that Jason usually pops up waving a link but I'll press on).

The article then goes into yes-but mode. And rightfully so, as it points out that there is plenty of opportunity for hacking and modifications and that these considerably increase interest in the video games in question.

As usual it's hard to know whether the sum total of experiences here comes out on the side of training people to stay within the system or training people to hack the system but it could be something worth considering for anyone building a game to teach about the perils of civilisation.

I’ve often harangued my father’s generation for their poor performance as elders but aside from giving me the opportunity to pour out my own feelings on the matter it hasn’t ever been very constructive. I must have done enough pouring out though because recently I’ve started wondering exactly what is that happens to our men. When we see them doing their jobs they are often dynamic, purposeful and engaged but the rest of the time they are often tired, humourless and lost in a world that seems to exist only in their heads.

I should warn you now, If you think you’re going to get a solid explanation about this from me you’re going to be sorely disappointed, I’m only at the stage of figuring out how to stop it happening to me.

When I was a bit younger I used to be known amongst my circle of friends for my wisecracks (quality not withstanding) and I also remember the group of guys I used to hang with amusing ourselves by competing to make the most puns on any given topic. Naturally people listening to us would start off groaning at our efforts but as the number of puns increased they would begin to laugh and cheer us on. We took great delight in exercising our brains this way but now if I were invited to join in something like this I just couldn’t be bothered with the effort.

I’m worried that I, like many who have gone before me, might disappear into my own head and become estranged to real things -  like my family for instance. This is no little thing either - I often see my father drift off (and sometimes even walk off!) when people are trying to talk to him. Not just my father either, a lot of men of his age are like that. I’d like to be the opposite, I’d like to be engaged and really listen to people who talk to me but it seems to require such a lot of energy to do that – to be specific it seems to require a lot of emotional energy which I just don’t have.

Probably the emotional energy thing is a part of our problem. If we’re being honest though another part is that we shouldn’t have to bother with unimportant people when, as men, we have so many other important things to do (like, you know, keeping the wheels of progress rolling). But back to the emotional energy thing – where’s it gone?  For a bunch of people who don’t show any emotions you’d think it would be a non issue – or maybe we’re all just hoping it’s a non issue.

Maybe that’s the problem though, maybe denying our emotions is what uses up the energy. Maybe it will just get worse and worse as we get older. Maybe there will be more and more to deny until we can’t actually do it any more. Karen’s grandfather was a fighter pilot and  POW in a German camp for most of WW2, he was shot down three times and had never told anyone about it until a few years before his death when Karen (my wife) asked if she could do a high-school project about his experiences. He told her things then that the rest of her family had never learned in the fifty years since he came back from the war. I hope he really is resting in peace now, because I don’t think he lived that way.

Of course being shot down is some heavy stuff for people to deal with but there must be still be heavy stuff happening to our men. Sometimes I wonder if might be their wives that’s happening to them. And please don’t think we’re about to get into some good old fashioned women-hating here. A tempting as some people may find it, real life’s a bit more complicated and a lot more confusing than a simple answer would suggest.

I see it in their eyes though. Some guys, they’ve lost their will, they’ve lost the battle and they’re just going through the motions until the day they leave the house in a box. They’re sad but they don’t really understand what happened because they don’t have a clue about the emotional landscape they live in.

I’ve talked before about how, as parents, we all take advantage of the power imbalance that exists between ourselves and our children. It seems it’s impossible not to at some level. and likewise, I think there is such an imbalance in emotional comprehension between men and women that men are at a distinct disadvantage. They just have no idea when they are being emotionally manipulated. This is not to ignore or discount the physical imbalance that men have over women, like I said it’s complex but I think it’s an issue for a lot of guys – maybe all guys in our culture. For me, I’ve got to the point when I can sometimes tell when I’m being manipulated or tested and I’m really sick of it. I just won’t stand for it anymore – and yes that is buried resentment you see coming out in my language there.

Some of you are probably wondering what the hell I am talking about. That last link (here it is again) discusses a small part of what I mean but I’m aware that you might think it’s perfectly normal and acceptable for women to ‘test’ a guy by deliberately putting doubt and confusion into the mind. After all she’s got to have something in her armoury right? Well maybe, but doing this to someone you love (or might come to love) is not the road to happiness, it’s the road to resentment and confusion.

Here’s a tip for single women though, if you do try testing a guy and he walks, chase him and don’t let him get away because he might be one of the few guys you’ll ever meet who does understand emotions. (And yes, I do recognise that some of the stuff in that article is just harmless flirting).

I think though that even if a guy develops a relationship with an amazingly well-balanced woman he will still find it a draining experience. Logically, it’s much easier to run your life when you only have yourself to consider but there is more too it than even that. A great metaphor for a relationship I once heard is of two stones being jostled together in a container - each stone gradually has all the rough edges knocked off it by the other one.

It takes a lot of work to make a relationship function and clearly a lot of guys are not prepared for it. I think they find it much too daunting and would rather immerse themselves in their job which, in comparison, is probably a lot less confusing and easier on the ego.

One of the results of this is that the woman takes most of the responsibility for making the relationship work and the guy stops maturing at about 30 (if you’re lucky). So know we’ve got men who have lost their youthful spark but are still immature at the same time. If only they’d work through it they’d come out the other side into a great relationship that functions really smoothly, they’d be more mature people themselves and younger men would finally have some useful role models.

Now that I’ve mentioned work we’d better delve into the effect that has on us.  Even for those of us who don’t feel defined solely by our jobs we still have to do them well enough to stay employed and to be good at a lot of jobs you have to operate in a very different headspace to the one your family lives in. Once again it’s one where emotions don’t count. Only ‘getting the job done’ counts and you must put everything else aside to do it and it changes you. Well, it changed me anyway.

So have I escaped this future? I spent 5 years in an office learning business patterns of living before getting out but I still had to keep using those patterns for the next 6 years while we developed our piece of land in an attempt to be mortgage free – I was once again putting much of myself aside in order to ‘get the job done’. I don’t really know the answer but I can tell you that last week (after not having worked for over a year) I took on some paid work and it was a bit of a mind bender.

I’m currently doing some architectural working drawings at home on the computer. Now I admit it’s one of the worst things I could do, I don’t particularly like it and I’m working by myself but even so, the whole attitude of working quickly and efficiently didn’t suit anyone else when I came out to the dining room for lunch with my family. Kids are amazing though, they ignored my abrupt behaviour and on the second day dragged their chairs as far down the dining table toward me as they possibly could because they hadn’t seen me all morning. I guess I must be doing something right if they miss my presence that much.

So I don’t know what will become of me but what about younger men. You’ve probably already seen the blogs of Dan, Devin, Scout, Mathew, Tom and Archangel. Derrick Jensen talks about how we spend our twenties vomiting up the effects of our childhood but these guys seem to be actively purging it from their system. I especially recommend Devin’s recent posts for an insight into that process.

Will they become tired men though when the kids arrive and the responsibilities increase? Who knows? I’ll probably never find out unless the net stays up longer than we’re expecting. Maybe it’s too late for them to escape this future as well, maybe a childhood spent in school has already written some aspects of their future.  Maybe not. Maybe tertiary education and/or a career are the final nails in our coffin. Maybe if they can just avoid becoming ‘proper’ adults it’ll be OK. This is all conjecture but obviously the sooner we leave the beaten track the better. Maybe it’s never too late though, maybe if the stars are aligned we can hit reverse well into our dottage.

I know that all I’ve done here is go round in circles in an attempt to sum up the situation but one thing that I’ve noticed keeps coming up is the emotionally retarded characteristic of our men. This may be where the problem - and the solution - lies, I just wish Casemeau was still living in a van down by the river because I can’t think of any other men who’ve gone to work on that particular issue like he did. If you are one though, please feel free to introduce yourself.

This is a really strange time in my life. We spent the first 6 years of our marriage attempting to become debt free so that we would be able to do whatever we wanted with our lives except now that we have achieved that goal are a few problems. Apart from the fact that we don’t really know what we want to do there’s the added dilemma that we may not be mortgage free as we first thought.

Six months ago, after selling our house we went on a bus trip around New Zealand. During that time there the pre-existing property boom in our town went into over drive and we got back to discover that houses in our price range had gone up by about 30%! While the money in our bank account had not. We could go somewhere else, downscale or do another house renovation to get back where we were but mentally I am at a point where I thought I wouldn’t have to do that anymore.

Naturally readers who don’t own their own home (and possible never will) are laughing at this terrible predicament, but that’s what having money does to you – gives you new things to worry about – like what would become of you if you lost it.

The answer of course is that we’d only be back where we had been previously but somehow this goes against the myth of perpetual progress that underpins much of our value sytem.

Our next problem is what I will do to make a living – I can’t even begin to answer this question. There are a few options, most of which I don’t feel very excited about and most of which don’t meet a criteria that I have set myself: That I should work with people instead of by myself because that suits my personality type and I tend to go a bit crazy when I’m by myself.

Next is where we are going to live. We spent that entire 6 months of our bus trip trying to decide between the areas of Nelson and Northland.

In Nelson we have my extended family (my parents, who currently live near us were both born there and would move back if we went there) and close friends who raise their kids the same way as us and have been very supportive in the past.

In Northland we have my wife’s family and other friends who are very close to us and who are homseschooling their kids as we plan to do.

We decided we couldn’t chose either because then one of us would be permanently seperated from their family and ended up deciding we should stay where we were. Except we can’t do that because no one is homeschooling in Raglan, and the two families who might have are our two sets of friends who moved (one to Nelson and one to Northland) so we thought we’d move to the nearest large town (where my parents live) Hamilton. But then we tried and…

This must be a problem at a kind of spiritual level, I have this theory that Raglan (which could be described as being alternative) exists because of Hamilton, which is to say that Hamilton is so conservative that Raglan was forced into existence to kind of balance it out. Anyway the end result is that we’d rather die than live near Hamilton. So….

Now we’re up north staying at my in-laws for a week while we try to find a piece of land where we can build a mud house, grow a food forest and maybe have a few animals. Except….

I have found that I am severly attached to Raglan. My parents shifted about every 3 years while I was growing up so I’m really surprised to find that the thought of leaving town really really hurts. Yes, I have immersed myself in the community there but our best friends no longer live there and I though this would be easy to do. To make matter worse moving up here would take me even further away from my extended family to whom I am also greatly attached. I have already mentioned my uncle who is important to me but I also have become very attached to my cousins now that they are all adults and it tears at me that I will see even less of them. I’d quite like to move down to where they are except….

Karen would never be able to live away from her family (especially one sister in particular) so I couldn’t ask that of her so here we are with everyone important to us scattered to the four winds (my brother is in Japan too) and we don’t have a good answer.

I don’t know why this affects us so badly when it clearly isn’t affecting anyone else. Both my parents and Karen’s fourth sister (also in Hamilton) said we shouldn’t stick around just because of them and that we had to ‘live our own’ lives but they don’t understand that they are our lives.

I have at least worked out that whatever I do with my life in the future it should have people and community as it’s first priority but moving away from family and places where I have put down roots in order to do that seems to be something of a contradiction.

Lastly, I hope this post hasn’t bored everyone senseless, I tend to find writing like this helps clarify things for me but right now I’m along way from knowing what that right answer is.