Cross-posting: Post No. 1,064 - Challenging and Reversing the Neoliberal Grooming of the World

This is an older post, from a couple of years ago, on my main blog, originally published at https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/2017/08/post-no-1064-challenging-and-reversing.html. 

An article that has strongly influenced me of late, in part because it matches my life experience, is "Grooming the globe: denying fairness, complexity and humanity", by Julianne Schultz (which I saw here, reprinted from here). This article describes the way that selfish, self-interested, unspiritual (in fact, anti-spiritual) people chose, in the 1970s, to change their nation, the USA, and through that, the world.

It was in the 80s that the evil philosophy known as "economic rationalism" appeared in Australia - a philosophy subsequently re-branded to join in the neoliberal movement seeping out of the USA; it was then that ideas of social responsibility and caring started to leave our power elites.

I actually don't consider this was solely the result of the evil actions of a few in the USA and elsewhere: there were failures on the progressive side as well - notably, perhaps, the failure to take people along with them (which, in turn, can be said to have grown out of the refusal to allow enough change on the part of conservatives - which condemned women to domestic abuse and servitude, indigenous people to white supremacism [aka "racism"]. and the world to war and violence and climate change).

From a psychic point of view, there was also powerful nonBPM influences at work - and they still are, not only in the individual struggles that far too many people are limited to being comfortable admitting, but stronger forces - not the neochristian struggle between light and dark, but a struggle between balance and unbalance that comes out of millennia of war and violence and detritus and damage that such has created.

This struggle that the article alludes to is not just a struggle over most of the last century for the fabric of society: it is a struggle for - to go a little gauche - the "energy soup" of the planet.

And it is a big job.

It's a little like trying to clean up after major oil spills - there is a massive amount of small, tedious work to do. Every nonBPM unit that is cleared as part of this work is a drop of oil that has, in the Cure Violence model, been removed from contaminating others - prevented from spreading violence and selfishness and suffering. Every BPM unit that is helped is like a bird or seal that has been helped recover from an oil spill.

There are bigger things to do as well: the equivalent of holding (a) people and (b) companies accountable for an oil spill is (a) clearing / rescuing uncooperatives and (b) doing the work in the physical to counter and reverse the manifestations of the energy soup created by millennia of violence on this world.

It is the latter where the calls for spiritual workers to take action are so important, as well as articles such as the one I began this article with.

I'd also like to take a moment here to promote John Beckett's latest article: "A Weekly Ritual of Focus and Protection".

Going back to undoing the harm of directed evil, one of the aspects I have often thought about with this is the benefits and disadvantages of formal movements. There unquestionably can be benefits in working together, and being organise is one of those benefits ... but that can also slow responsiveness, and make a movement vulnerable. In the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, having known leaders gave the white supremacists clear targets, and the basis of a strategy. To some extent, that was overcome by the movement to end apartheid being an amorphous, universalist movement. For now, the work against the evils of neoliberalism is probably going - for better or worse - to be an amorphous, "organic" movement (provided there is management id idiots like violent anarchists); an organised movement might come about, a bit like I tried to organise the Rangers a few years ago (which wasn't helped by my refusal to join the facebook cult) - I just hope that, when it does, it includes things I had proposed for the Rangers like a formal conscience and an acknowledgement that its time would eventually pass ...

And now it is time for my meditations. This is one of the times where I make my positive contributions to the world's energy soup. Later, as I travel to work, I will probably do more reflection on the articles I mentioned, including parallels to my life (which does, incidentally, show that part of the problem is an off shoot of the issue of every generation thinking they discovered sex - that is, not acknowledging the validity and experience of those who have gone before, which leads to cycles ... Something I hope to one day write a novel to illustrate :) ).

PS - in case you think this is too big a job, look at the decline in rates of extreme poverty in the last half century. And if you want a way to measure progress, look at the amount of gossip in the world (most of which is on social media).