The selection of life over death -- the first dynamic (of biological evolution) -- constructed in us certain patterns of wholeness. These patterns -- of love, and kindness, of cooperation within the social group, of "the sacred space of lovers" -- can be passed along. ("Pay it forward" can be considered not just a moral injunction, but also a description of what happens in the human world.)
But then a second evolutionary process -- unleashed by the rise of civilization -- imparted an impetus of brokenness then is imparted into the human world: this process entailed the selection, among the cultural options, of whatever maximizes power and the elimination of those cultural options that expose a society to elimination by more powerful neighbors. The ways this fosters brokenness include these:
- The war of all against all inevitably makes the historical experience of trauma ubiquitous among the world's peoples. Trauma is a form of brokenness.
- That struggle for power just as inevitably creates unjust outcomes of domination and exploitation (enslavement, social class divisions, unequal distributions of power, top-down rule, etc.). Injustice is a form of brokenness.
- The inescapable requirement for societies to organize for power-maximization leads inevitably to societies' exploiting the capacity of the humans within them -- a capacity required for any cultural animal -- to be molded into the form that their societies impress upon them. As there is a substantial difference between what a power-maximizing society demands of its members and what humans' inborn nature and needs would have them become, civilized peoples have inevitably been torn between the two (external and internal) sets of demands. The internalization by the young of the demands of (power-shaped) civilized societies inevitably -- to one degree or another -- sets people at war against themselves. Intra-psychic war is a form of brokenness.
This suggests the many ways in which the pattern of brokenness -- originating in the inevitable disorder of the overarching system -- gets transmitted through the human world.
Some of the shape-shifting ways that this pattern gets transmitted have been suggested in previous installments (such as #9 and#10).
As one dramatic current example, we have traced the brokenness that is the presidency of Donald Trump back to the degraded state of the consciousness of that part of the electorate that could look at a lying bully who picks fight and relishes humiliating people and like what they saw.
And that degradation of the consciousness of those citizens, in turn, can be traced back to the deliberate efforts of a system of right-wing propaganda -- whose major figures have included Limbaugh, Gingrich, Rove, Fox News, and Republican politicians generally -- to inflame people's resentments, to persuade people of a false picture of the world, to focus on enmity, to turn off their critical thinking, etc. (See here and here.)
(Trump is Trump, but when it comes to Trump being elevated to the presidency by the American electoral process, Trump must be understood as but a flagrant manifestation of the shape-shifting pattern of brokenness that has been moving -- with growing strength over the past generation -- through the American power system.
Here's another large historical perspective on how the pattern of brokenness changes forms, and moves from level to level, as the force of brokenness moves through the human world over time.
This perspective shows how that core dilemma of civilization -- the unavoidable and traumatic struggle for power, and all its implications for the warping of society and the inflicting of injuries on their human members -- primes people to feed back into the world the brokenness that the world has imposed on their experience.
(The following are the ideas that around which my 1988 book --Out of Weakness: Healing the Wounds that Drive Us to War--was organized.)
The Wounds That Drive Us to WarAs the parable of the tribes argues, there need not be anything inherently wrong or evil or crazy about human beings for their breakthrough into civilization to unleash a chronic and pervasive force of destruction.
But the experience of being in such a world -- as the unavoidable struggle for power generates chronic strife and, out of that strife, injects tyranny and injustice and oppression into the human world -- has been traumatic. And trauma is damaging to the human psyche.
It is the very essence of trauma that it entails experience that people cannot integrate within themselves in a whole way. So trauma can drive people into a broken state. And from that broken state, people transmit brokenness back into the surrounding world that traumatized them.
Consider three ways that the trauma inflicted by the (inevitably) disordered system of civilization can drive the traumatized to compound the world's disorder.
- Such trauma can readily generate a craving for power, control, superiority: Winning, in its various forms.
We would accept being weak in a safe world. But it is unacceptable to be weak in a world where the mighty rule by force. Where weakness has been experienced as exposing on to intolerable pain and danger, some people will feel driven to impose their will upon the world. The inevitable rule of power drives some, who have been wounded by power, to worship power.
People can gain some feeling of safety by compelling others to play the role of the weak and victimized. People will seek occasions where they can impose their will to compensate for the epidemic experience of impotence.
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