Challenging THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TOTALITARIANISM

Sorry I’ve not posted to this group till now. I took this course even though it conflicted with a very busy harvesting schedule that is finally slowing down now. This is a general comment I just want to make because I think about this a lot when I hear podcasters I listen to or others I respect talk about returning to or finding Christianity. There’s no one to say what I'm thinking about out loud at the time. So here goes. We here in this group recognize that others have been brainwashed/ hoodwinked and it’s been extraordinary to witness this proceed before those of us who are able to have our eyes open. But we too have been gas lit by another group that took control and subjugated the majority of team human a long time ago. Patriarchy reshaped humanity in the most extreme ways possible over the last let's say 8,000 years ago - give or take a couple of thousands years. Before the coup of patriarchy we were a people without hierarchy who lived with an understanding that we were all part of the one, equal to (at best) nature in all her aspects. We lived as if we revered our Mother Earth because we did. All of team human; not just women, understood that we were whole beings capable of and responsible for experiencing the unity of our collective power and well-being in an egalitarian and cooperative way. We still see evidence of this other way of thinking/being/living/knowing in indigenous cultures ( Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass conveys this so well). And we “know” this truth to be true in the way humans used to be allowed to “know” things -- you know, before the patriarchy came along and said - nope! you only get 5 senses and knowing/intuiting that’s not one of them. So no more knowing or sensing outside of the 5 we’re allowing you, or else- well you know - burn at the stake. I too have felt the pull to a spirituality that transcends this current nightmare we are bearing witness to. In addition to seriously kicking up my meditation practice, I daily and actively try to be in communication with the plants and the trees and the earth and what’s under the earth and to feel whole in that connection. So I get it when others too are pulled to the other religions of our times. I understand the impetus to return to the source/the divine/god and I understand how Christianity or some written religion makes sense if it’s all we’ve had in our history. And that’s my point. History is just another narrative, framing our thinking such that we disregard all understanding of what it meant to be human before the patriarchy came in and rewrote that story. But our story - team human’s that is - or our narrative if you will - didn’t start a few thousands years ago. Christianity and the other monotheist religions were an imposition of and by the patriarchy. And those biblical writings are a major part of the narrative that got us here- to this moment. I am positing that it's important to not allow our blinders to stay stuck on the poisonous distortions of "history" and to recognize that pre-history, as it's termed, isn't something to be disregarded as if it didn't exist or demeaned as prehistorical. Below is a quote I pulled from a book published in 1987 called The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth by Monica Sjoo, Barbara Mor. It makes the point I'm trying to get to here. The authors are describing how patriarchy intentionally undermines human existence: "For this is precisely what patriarchy sets out to do: to split material production from spiritual experience, science from magic, medicine from herbal knowledge and psychic/ seasonal environment, sexuality from the sacred, art from craft, astronomy from astrology, language from poetry—and to place the resultant “specialized,” abstracted, and mechanistic knowledge in the hands of a privileged male elite organized into professions, hierarchies, and classes. To reduce the ecstatic dance of muscle, blood, and soul to factory assembly lines, production output schedules, and the gross national product. Patriarchy divides life into higher and lower categories, labeled “spirit” versus “nature,” or “mind” versus “matter”—and typically in this alienated symbolism, the superior “spirit/ mind” is male (and/ or white), while the inferior “nature/ matter” is female (and/ or black). This false dualistic symbolism arises from an enforced order of male domination. With the aid of such phallic psychology, men can then go about the earth raping nature, exploiting resources and human labor, manipulating and “improving” her with technological-mechanical inventions and “progressive goals.” In patriarchy man separates from earth, emulating some aloof and disconnected Sky God of his own creation, and this intellectual separation makes him feel “free” to devastate the natural world without any sense that it belongs to a common ecosystem with himself. He exploits “it,” totally alienated from the fact of his own continuity with “it.” For the deluded profit of the few, and the existential pain of the many, patriarchy exists by destroying the original holism.”

The narrative that was begun under patriarchy has unfolded to what is horrifyingly before us, but it is also the predictable trajectory. So let's not just stop at the last great reset of patriarchy. There is a greater unity that exists for this team that is far grander than any religion which says there's only one god and mine is better than yours. Now is an excellent time to unpack the boxes within which we are restrained and look to find that earlier, unifying religion. And I highly recommend this book as a great start. Thanks for reading this and please excuse the length but if you break it up into 6 weeks it’s not so bad. :) andi