Tag: white supremacy

The Psychology of Privilege.

My mate Kevin was a privileged white boy. He was so privileged that none of the rules applied to him, like wearing clothes in the street or pissing behind the dumpster if he had to go for a leak and pretty soon he got in trouble with the law. Last time I saw him he’d helped himself to my apartment while I was out and ‘rearranged’ it. It just seemed trashed to me so I threw him out..

oh the ingratitude..

but I was pretty pissed off so I went round to his house at the crack of dawn the next day to find him standing naked in the living room, knee deep in shredded paper, with a can of kerosene in one hand and a box of matches in the other.

Another day in the psychopathology of white privilege.

When I was old enough to look over the steering wheel my father bought me my first car, no MOT, no insurance, no license. Every breach of the rules lost in his bestowing gift.

I abandoned it on the road side within a month. It wasn’t running right so I left it mounted up on the curb, got my stuff out the back and went off to buy a motorbike instead. No license, no experience, no insurance, no helmet. I crossed the first junction on one wheel and very nearly killed a pedestrian on the far side.

I was privileged. I didn’t have to play by the rules. But the almost-accident bought me up short and made me begin to question my entitlement.

Entitlement was what held my parents together, and the racially segregated community of which we were a part. It was their legacy to me and so I soaked it up like you do…

…being all there was on offer.

I began to realize, not only that it was all a con, but that this special-ness and privilege and being exempt from the rules was compensation for lack of love. I was given a pile of ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ cards in lieu of affection.

It had a lot to do with the intensely patriarchal world in which I was raised. Colonial Rhodesia was an Edwardian garden party of Pimms, boaters and 9mm side arms. It was a man’s world in which women were pegged just a tad above livestock and Nature was just cover for gooks that hadn’t been cleared yet.

No surprise that the Sons of Empire mostly turned out pretty narcissistic, or completely barking like Kevin. Tin pot princelings who’d sell each other out, and their grandmothers, for any extension of rights and status, that would bring on suicidal gestures at the slightest frustration.

The motif at the local monument read, ‘ That Might have Right, and Have it More Abundantly.’

Thing is, such a compensation culture is only pitched a notch or two above what the rest of polite society is still up to. The Feminine is collectively devalued. Nature is there simply for the plundering and conventional religion is an old boy’s club that has been resting on its laurels for so long they’ve mashed it into the upholstery.

What all these Sons of Empire never got was that if the feminine is devalued then so is mothering. Their mothers. Their Ground of Being.

The problem for children in the West is that mother is invariably a dissatisfied woman.   S. de Bouvoir.

If mother is devalued but her face remains the primary mirror for a nascent sense of identity what is the child to experience of itself?

What a baby sees in its mother’s eyes is what baby takes itself to be. If the mirror is broken or distorted then baby is also broken/distorted.

‘The precursor of the mirror is mother’s face. What a child sees there is themselves. What she looks like is what baby takes itself for.’ Whitmont

Going-on-Being is interrupted. Baby cannot move forward. Its not safe enough. There isn’t enough containment. If baby is not in his rightful place, in arms, because Mum is drowning her sorrows, or back at work trying to prove her worth, or off at bingo trying to top up on some girl time, or holding baby but gingerly because she’s had her instincts and self confidence eroded to the point that she’s lost faith in her own abilities, then the need to be in his rightful place, is supplanted by entitlement as though it were the Promised Land…

Moreover, if baby is having to shoulder not only mother’s sense of inferiority,   but also projections of the Self (which mother must export given that society has afforded her no schooling or experience of owning this within her own psyche) then baby is landed with a heady cocktail of not being good enough on the one hand and Mother’s divine image on the other…

which is going to blow his own sense of self out of all proportion.

This ‘privileged child’ is then allowed to behave pretty much as he pleases,  desperate to make up for the very real but denied deprivation – and there you have a recipe for all the petty despotism imagination can conceive. Instead of individuation you have omnipotent fusion, feeling like you’re boss of the world whilst being too afraid to step out of doors, craving adoration whilst refusing intimacy, longing for love whilst not giving a shit about other people.

Its not sustainable and secretly the privileged child knows this. Which means the world feels hostile because something has to give and it sure as hell isn’t going to be himself. He’s managed to project all his shadow onto others but in the process has parted with all his decency and integrity into the bargain. So it seems like the next guy has all the goodies, even if he’s dirt poor.

The unfairness of it all eats him up till he just wants to bring the whole world crashing down in an orgy of envious spoiling. It looks like greed but actually its deeper and more dangerous, hate of anything wholesome, anything that doesn’t need or want his silver spoon, anything that can’t be bought and paid for, love, empathy, tenderness.

So its not just that he wants to be boss. He wants to burn the house down.

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The Soulful Sacrifice. 1.

When milk bottles were first introduced, Blue-tits learned how to take the tops off pretty quickly. But the truly impressive aspect of their door step robberies was that they managed to communicate the secret to one another faster than Blue-tits can fly.

How did they do it?

Whatever the answer, Blue-tits are not the only species to have this knack of manifesting collective change without crib notes or peeking over one another’s shoulder.

Give or take a few centuries, humans all over the world changed the structures of their societies without confering nicely or resorting to the pointy end of something more persuasive.

We invented kings and queens.

The characteristics of this new type of leader differed markedly from those that preceeded them. They may look like chiefs with their rides pimped but there are important differences that have an impact on culture and consciousness difficult to get your head around.

”This was not simply a quantative extension of a ranking system, it was a truly qualitative change by which society had entered a new realm.” P V Kirch

These new leaders emerged simultaneously in cultures that had no bearing or influence upon one another which suggests that something greater was at work than big hairy blokes with extra pointy beards wanting a crown.

But what?

Whether you take the Egyptian Pharaohs, or the ancient kingdoms of West Africa, early European lineages or the far-flung Aztec and Chinese emperors from whom they were entirely isolated, there are aspects of this new fangled system of resplendent dudes in metal hats so common to all that you’d think they’d copied each other’s homework.

All agreed, there was to be a fundamental change in how humans got on together with ramifications for Collective Consciousness we can scarcely suspect.

or is that scaredly?

or sacredly?

Superficially, kings meant centralised power, more rigid hierarchies, increased divisions of labour and more highly organised economies. But the most important difference, the most impactful on their subjects, was a shift in the value of human life and the rules about who you can kill without calling it murder…

so you’ll be pleased to know that Kings are only recent inventions.

”The way of life we now take for granted and on the foundations of which we have built civilizations, occupies but one percent of the time of the big-brain’s preoccupation.” R. Ardrey.

We tend to think of kings as something that belongs to history and by which we are no longer affected. In fact it’s the other way around. The institution is very recent and pervades the very viscera of modern life.

Far from being ousted by revolutions or the democratic aspirations of suitably frightened subjects, kings adapted as only the very youthful can. They went underground, as our serf like devotions to the rich and famous, as the farce of rule by deep state oligarchs, as the proliferation of corruption and being above the law whose daily tabloid shenanigins, violent exploits and eternal wars are just the kind of court intrigue you’d expect from period drama.

There are a number of important differences between chiefs and kings, with consequences for those grovelling nearest, but there is one that stands alone in its impact upon us because it affects our perception of what it means to be human.

Not only is the king a political ruler, he is also the high priest and most significant for those within reach, an incarnation of State-Your-Prefered-Deity-Here. Again, you might imagine this to be some amusing footnote of history, a witty anecdote from The Golden Bough and yet its widely accepted by considerable swathes of people in our time that might has right. The powerful are ordained by and represent God. In everyday life this trickles down and manifests in the wider populace as the feeling that, by virtue of your allegiance, you too are special and/or entitled to be exempt and above the law.

‘I like to be offensive”, said a Charlottesville supremacist. After all, what is the point of being above the law if you don’t demonstrate it once in a while? In fact what other way is there to make the point?

The archives of Ethography are rich in examples of how animals of all kinds obey a natural law which distinguishes between neighbour and stranger. This is so that the aggression necessary for survival within a species does not spill over into communal violence. Snakes won’t use their fangs when they fight. The anxiety of the young male baboon to join a new troop is not just for acceptance but for protection. Herring gulls will erupt into a frenzy of squawking and tear up great lumps of grass when anger boils over, without ever resorting to their rapier sharp beaks.

People are the same..

”All known societies make a distinction between murder, the killing of member’s of one’s own group – and the killing of outsiders.” G. Gorer.

In other words the Principle of Relatedness is more fundamental in its distinction of friend from foe than the inevitability of violent outcome.

”It is the effect of natural arangments, not the inoffensiveness of natural disposition that minimizes violent behaviour in a natural world.” Ardrey

Latent violence is there, but it’s subject to the natural law that distinguishes friend from foe. In a society run by leaders who are not ordained by the gods, nor  believed to be so special that they may not touch the ground, everyone in the community is protected from each other by this natural law. Contact with those who fall outside this protection can be made safer by rituals of politeness, exchange, intermarriage and stylised etiquette..

We shake hands, give gifts, let you have the seat furthest from the lavvy…

For folk who have been chosen by God and doing His Will, this natural law works against the majority because the king is removed from the community by a host of taboos which means that everybody, subjects and strangers alike, are now Other, unprotected by the rule which says that even an angry wolf will instinctively muzzle his bite if a pup merely shows him its belly.

No-one is safe.

In 19th C Buganda, not saying thankyou properly, with just the right amount of dust poured on your head, could get you killed. Oh, and also if you were vaguely related, or caused his Maj’ to touch the ground..or if you were unlucky enough to see him eating…. or caught his eye…

and so life is suddenly very precarious…

security and belonging eroded..

defences kicking in.

The rats start to turn on each other.

The advent of King-ship spills contained aggression into explosive violence. Not just between the king and anybody that looks at him funny but between the subjects themselves who are now also objects just a shade higher in worth than a non-believer and scrabbling to secure their positions.

If just deserts are your thing it doesn’t end well for the king. He is inflated and so must die. Tradition has it that he comes to a very bad end.  In Dahomey, if he’s lucky, he just gets murdered for the crown. If he’s not so lucky he has to be chopped up in bits, sometimes having to do the job himself, while he can, before being ritually consumed by the next incumbent.

Sometimes the king’s violent demise is ritualised at the end of fixed terms. Scandanavian kings ruled for twelve years after which they were put to death or a substitute found to die in their place, for just the right kind of sacrifice might appease the gods… sacrifices in their ones and twos all decked out in costumed finery, but then… maybe it would cover all the angles if they were also made in their uniformed millions.

Parts 2, 3, and 4 to follow.

Rape Culture.

I was raised a White Supremacist in Africa. I didn’t know that’s what I was when I was little. We simply lived apart from everyone else because we were better than them. Daddy carried shiny guns. Once, when I was eight, I met the children from the mud and corrugated compound nearby. I saw them from the tower window playing in our tennis court and went fuming down, the breaking of bounds half justified by my indignation. How dare they!

The boys were taking turns at rolling around inside old car tyres, all laughter and joy. A clear faced child of six, beaming and bright despite her rags, came towards me holding out something for me to see, her treasure. In her hand was a matchbox and inside that was a penny, protected in cotton wool. Her eyes sparkled, she was rich.

Troubled, I ran home.

A few days later, emboldened by this foray, I went all the way to the bottom of the garden and climbed the fence. Beyond was endless virgin savannah, amazing rocky outcrops, thorn trees and yellow grasses stretching infinitely to the horizon. I walked into the singing wilderness, half dazed with it’s immensity until I lost sight of the house.  I found a great termite mound, as big as a dinosaur. It was awesome.

Then, as I walked around this ancient beast, I saw in horrified amazement that some contractor had dug a trench straight through the middle of it, cutting it in half and killing it. I jumped down into the deep ditch and walked softly into the heart of the Great Mound, deeper and deeper into its Earth until even the African sun grew dim.

In the cool dark ground I found its beautiful central halls, its endless myriad passageways, its intricate chambers. It was a creature so ancient that it was made of Earth and I wept for its destruction. And then I realised that the reason we lived in such a big house and carried guns was because we pumped up white folks did this kind of thing.

What I was to discover was that we also did it to one another. Wanton humiliation and violation of one another were institutionalised in boarding schools like the one I was imminently about to be sent to. The masters carried semi-automatics and birchrods. Ritualised sexual shaming was part and parcel of the culture where boys were given the utmost power to threaten one another’s ontological security.

The masters felt that the only way to contain such collective feelings of being above the law, fostered and nurtured by themselves, was for these special boys to be debased on a regular, on-going and arbitrary basis. So they turned a blind eye to sexual violence because it was good for us. It was a kind of lottery for keeping folk in line with the Gulag understanding of, ‘you today, me tomorrow.’

The Dice fell against me one day. Twenty boys poured into my dorm, shouting and jeering, grabbing and pulling, yanking and tearing, making me strip and forcing me do whatever perverse thing they could dream up whilst they cheered and stamped and chanted.

And it had all been done to them. And would be again. It was normal. It had to be normal in order to equip them with a thick enough hide to strip the planet and its indigenous cultures of its value once they’d been spat out and fast tracked to positions of power in the world.

The end game of  Narcisisstic Sexuality is to wrestle the other’s humanity away from them. It’s done to strengthen inner defences against feelings of incipient, lurking inferiority and self-doubt. It takes the form of compulsively repeated denigration of others, best and most comprehensively expressed as sexual acts of contempt or humiliation.

Failing internal cohesion in the Narcissist is forestalled from disaster by appropriation of the other’s integrity. Its not such an alien concept. The Massai once hunted lion and ate their hearts to give them the strength of lions. Modern day spearing of others is done for the same reason, to magically fill oneself up with someone else’s manna.

You were supposed to be grateful and thank them for it afterwards, relinquishing your true self to the Hive forever in the process. It was about more than submission. It was about colluding with the utter loss of your humanity so that you were primed to do the same to others in a compulsively repeated enactment set to roll through centuries.

But I was saved…

strangely saved, by the Anthill I’d wept for years before as a young boy.

While they tried to extract my treasure, I somehow found myself magically returned to the Great Mound, was once more enfolded in its cool, secret chambers, its hidden protective halls, still and dry in the embrace of dark earth while the hounds snarled, unable to get in from above. It was not dead, after all. And nor would I be.

Rape culture is of more than the vulnerable or the unlucky. The West’s plunder of the third world and of Nature is a commercial form of rape culture. The more obvious motives of greed and aggression get the limelight because we normally stop at moral outrage and something having to be done. We fall short of imagining our need to demean entire nations, harvesting not only their material resources, but their stories, their gods, their connection to the ancestors, their pride and dignity.

Failed nations are named and shamed without reference to the context of that failure which is invariably white supremacist incursion and the sponsorship of internicene conflict. They are shamed in the same way rape victims are shamed. What were you wearing? What were you doing in the path of danger?

Rape culture is not about sex. Its about Supremacy. Its about the need to depersonalise, to demean, to siphon off a person’s qualities like stock, to enviously attack that which is not-me, to accrue that other’s humanity to oneself, which is why being around Narcissism for any length of time is draining and leaves you feeling in need of a hot bath.

Yet there’s something so compelling and charismatic about the suave demagogue, the self confessed pussy grabbers of this world. And what is that? They let us take the route of least resistance. We too can be pussy grabbers, have power over others, take a regressive holiday from our own suffering humanity,  and become perpertrators for a day. Someone to be reckoned with after all, tolerant now of the humiliations meted out from above, by meting them out on those below.

Much of the election aftermath has been about ‘angry voters marginalised by Washington elite” voicing their disatissfaction at being ”forgotten and ignored”.

I  see the proliferation of Rape Culture,…

I see the narcissistic end game of  ‘take what you can, give nothing back’, better suited to pirates and thieves than the land of the free.

”You should have more… and better, whatever you want..”

My mate Boz sports a T-shirt that says, ”Eat the Rich”. I pointed out that to 90% 0f the world he was ‘The Rich’. ”What will you do”, I asked, ”when they come banging on your door with their begging bowls?”

kick their frikkin’ heads in…

yep, that’s what I figgered.