What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

If you haven’t been reading all of the blogs or comments you might have missed this comment on my last blog:

“Fuck the comfortable. They won’t be comfortable for long. We just need to make sure they don’t take us down with them. ‘Drowning people are often full of panic and can drag rescuers down with them. Do everything in your power to avoid this danger.’”

Tim suggested that this comment might be a good starting point for a blog. So I’ll give it a shot.

My immediate reaction to the comment was to feel protected. Someone had offered to put an extra layer of skin on me, so that I don’t have to feel so raw and exposed. I want to scoot up next to that comment and let that intention to be protective put an arm around me. This time the anger is on “my side.” It feels good. I had far too little of that kind of protective anger on my behalf when I was a kid. So I’m just going to sit with this for a moment and bask in that feeling of protection.

Of course it’s not as simple as that. Anger - feeling it, expressing it, utilizing it – is a complicated issue. It’s tricky to express anger without its dark cousin, blame, rearing her spiteful head. Blame has not served me. Blame has in fact kept me less powerful than I can be.

Fifteen years or so ago I flipped a switch inside myself. This is the switch: I went from looking “out there”, to find someone to blame for my unhappiness, to looking “in here”, to examine and acknowledge my own part in whatever it is about life that does not work for me. It has been a powerful switch. It has made it possible for me to finally have a long-term, stable, loving, collaborative and fulfilling partnership with Tim. And that is possible because Tim had flipped the same switch in himself. We are, both of us, committed not to identify ourselves as victims, especially in our close relationships. Whenever - and I mean that literally - whenever the two of us are in conflict, we both immediately look inside ourselves for the source of our part in that conflict rather than going on a search and destroy mission into the other’s territory. This has made all of the difference for us. I’ve learned what it means to have a best friend: someone I am utterly transparent with, someone who will not abuse my vulnerability but who will instead use it to fuel his own inner work.

I wrestle with the idea of unilateral disarmament. As a principle it appeals to me. I know there is power there, as I experienced in the post-screening discussion I wrote about in my last blog. The courage and ability to avoid defense and to simply show up have been things I’ve worked to develop.  I remember reading Scott Peck many years ago and being touched by what he wrote about what might happen if the U.S. were to unilaterally disarm in order to stop nuclear proliferation. I wanted to be part of a country that would have the courage it would take to unilaterally disarm. Sadly, that idea never really caught on here in these last days of Empire.

I have watched the movie Gandhi many times. It is one of my favorites. I watch it at times when I’m discouraged and need to remember there is something good in humans. I am always deeply moved at how the Indian people faced courageously and willingly into certain pain at the hands of British soldiers and thereby touched something, not only in the British but also in people worldwide, and how that caused the British Empire to withdraw.

I have an intuitive sense that the courage and willingness to receive blows, physical or emotional, is nothing to dismiss, that there is authentic spiritual power in that.

But I also have to be honest that I experience palpable relief when someone steps up and says, “Fuck the comfortable.” I don’t imagine Gandhi or Peck approving of that comment, but they’d probably understand the reaction. So there it is. I experience relief when someone stands up and directly expresses anger and disgust at the unconscious, but comfortable, privileged classes. What is this all about? Is it just my fragile ego that wants protection? Ought I discount my sense of relief and admonish the commenter to examine his own ego, to see if he uses anger habitually and to question if anger is really working? I don’t know.

I do not settle for easy answers to anything anymore. I don’t throw out the bathwater without putting it through a sieve first. Because there is almost always a pretty interesting baby, even if it is tiny, in that dirty bathwater.

So I’m not going to throw out either the anger or my sense of relief when anger is expressed on my/our behalf. And I’m also going to advocate for scrupulous examination of anger.

I believe there is value and resolution possible in real dialogue between conflicted parties. But I do not try to be in a dialogue process unilaterally. It has not worked. It has been a draining, disheartening struggle every time I have attempted it.  Until others have the willingness to flip their own switches, until they agree to look consistently inside themselves for their part in their pain and angst and anger, for their unexamined assumptions and reactions, it is not possible to enter into a true dialogue.

But there is a danger in only looking inwardly as well. The danger is that we blame ourselves and then do violence to our own truth by assuming that what we have to say is coming only from our wounding and conditioning. We err by trying to be so scrupulous about taking responsibility for our own part in things that we forget that everyone else also has a part. And, perhaps even more importantly, the very culture we all swim in has a huge part in every conflict we experience. To do real dialogue means all parties have to be willing to look at their own part and the part their unconscious cultural programming plays in the positions they take.

Dialogue is not for amateurs. It takes real digging to find one’s truth amidst one’s conditioning and habitual reactions. It takes the courage to be wrong and also the courage to be right. Mostly what it takes is the courage to be open and to not know.

When it comes to genuinely working through conflict, not just masking it or avoiding it, the disarmament has to be bilateral or, in the case of a group, multilateral. The difference is that when all sides disarm, there is the possibility of intimacy, vulnerability and real understanding. If you want to make fun of this and stereotype it as holding hands in a circle singing Kum Ba Yah, be my guest. But you will be missing a very amazing baby in the bathwater of New Age, touchy-feely philosophy. When people are willing to do the ego work entailed in true dialogue, the veil of separation drops. And if you think that’s flaky, that’s because you’ve never experienced it. And that in itself is understandable, considering what we are handed in our childhoods, in our schooling, and in the mainstream world of capitalist culture. Who ever learned to treat each other as colleagues and examine and suspend one’s assumptions in school?

So here it is, what feels like a piece of my truth in that comment: “Fuck the comfort-addicted aspects of people’s wounded egos, and their unconscious, privileged lifestyles that support and maintain those wounded egos.” Those egos and that addiction to comfort will not serve us either individually or collectively. Trying to remain comfortable will not see us into a new paradigm. In fact, it may be that only extreme discomfort will be enough to kick us up a notch, the notch necessary to avoid extinction and to move into, to quote my daughter “a whole new way of being” on the planet (Sarah Erickson in What A Way To Go.)

Has that not been true in your life? It certainly has been in mine. It has been when I have faced consciously into those extremely uncomfortable experiences that I have discovered resources inside me that I didn’t know were there, that have pushed me out of old, ego-based, childish ways of thinking and being and into a selfhood that was more fully adult.

Anger can be a force for good, an expression with the intent to protect that which is true and tender and real. That is what I experience that feels right in the above comment. But anger can also become a comfortable habit, a place the ego retreats to when vulnerability seems, and may be, unwise. When anger itself becomes comfortable, an unconscious habitual response, then we are in danger of sealing ourselves off from the very thing we really want, which is the opportunity to be our whole selves, vulnerable, fallible, but also often brilliant, willing and open, with others who will meet us there. As the mystic poet Rumi says:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

I am cautious about basking too long in the protection that I experience in the “fuck them” comment. Ultimately it is not protection that I want. At least, not the protection of my ego. What I want is connection, collaboration, companionship, and shared creativity. Habitual anger, along with blame, has in the past protected me from the very things I wanted most.

None of this is for amateurs. But I am convinced that those of us who don’t want to be dumped out with the polluted bathwater are going to have to birth something really new.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Sally's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.