No Contest

So I was checking out Alfie Kohn on Youtube (Alfie Kohn, the educator, author and advocate of progressive, "intrinsically" rather than "extrinsically" oriented Learning and child rearing), when I decided to check out the reviews of "No Contest; The Case against Competition" on Amazon. In the process I read some reviews that annoyed me so I decided to write one of my own under my nom de plume there (nom de pixel?) of T. Community.

here it is--spiffed up a little bit and minus a few typos;

*****Really Essential!

I read this book many years ago and it was such a heartening experience. The truths in it were obvious to me and always had been even without all of the copious documentation (which more than adequately addresses all of the objections of the negative reviews I have read here). I think people's defense of competition (and of rewards and Punishment as well) is irrational--a form of denial really. I think this denial has to do with the ubiquity of child abuse and the kind of "Stockholm Syndrome" that can be involved with it. It might be easy for some to see that they were unjustly punished as children, but it seems to be much harder to separate the concept of punishment itself from that of justice itself, and so recover completely from the experience. Once one accepts punishment as even potentially justice, one implicitly accepts Reward as such also and equally the necessity of Competition to acquire the latter and and avoid the former (failure being a variety of punishment as "success" is of reward). The result is just a bunch of alienation and phoniness which over time we begin to mistake for "human nature" if not for our own true selves.

I think education itself (as it has been historically) is really a form of impressment; a kind of forced draft into an alienated state of competition against one peers (Just like with the navy and other military in the old days, and with child soldiers even today). Think of it: in both cases young people are forced (initially against their will) to compete against each other both as individuals and as members of various teams (nation states among them) all to the ultimate "profit" only of the Bank which loans money to both (all) sides.

 I guess in the global economy everyone is more or less supposed to be their own sovereign state (notwithstanding nationalist rhetoric about "American jobs"), but you can ask just about any college graduate with outstanding student loans for confirmation about the Bank part of my thesis. (I suppose an exception would be ifthe "Stockholm" thing has kicked in that is, which does seem to do, especially if one manages to land a well paying job).

If anything, Kohn doesn't go far or deep enough. But I still give it five stars (even though such a "reward" is as stupid as any other). After all I had to rate it somehow or else they wouldn't let me write this review! And if 5 stars and this review will get someone else to read this really essential book, the decision between not writing the review and to compromising by rating it at is...well...no contest...

{end of review}

Well, besides wishing I had edited the above better before posting it on amazon (I especially dislike the title, though haven't come up with anything else so far), it occurs to me to see if I can extend and elaborate on, some of what I wrote in the above review.

Punishment (and Child Abuse)

Briefly and somewhat oversimplified, this is my theory about punishment; I think it has to do with bullying, and specifically with being bullied by a parent or parental figure at an early age (ie; with some kind of child abuse). I think that, being mammals (I don't mean this in a reductive sense--that we are only mammals) we all have that mammal thing in which we are more or less programmed to bond with and trust, whoever happens to be the parental figure in our lives.  Now if we, as human mammals,  instinctively do that with our parents or care givers, and one of these physically (or emotionally) hits us (for, lets say... doing something at 7 that only a 10-year old might have been expected to know better than to do), we must, at least in part, internalize that violence, not only as punishment, but as just punishment since we as children are not old enough to fully distinguish feeling bad, from being bad and, as I said, are sort of programmed to take the adult as an authority. Given then that, to some extent, the child necessarily internalizes the message that it is bad, that it is guilty of something, what, really can it possibly understand itself to be guilty of? I think its ends up accepting as bad simply the state of being younger, weaker, and inexperienced relative to the parental abuser. The child has thus received  the transmission that being younger and weaker etc is itself a punishable offense; that it is even a kind of righteous moral duty to punish anyone showing such qualities. Thus, when this abused kid hits the playground and runs across someone who seems to be weaker etc.., this internalized lesson will be triggered in the form of the urge to violently punish that individual for the crime of being so. This of course is just the same complex that, more or less, was originally triggered in the abusing parent--who was evidently just transmitting to the child what someone had transmitted to him or her at some earlier point in their lives. Of course this is, like I said, a bit of an oversimplification, but I think the gist of it is valid as a general rule of thumb.

I think that a lot of people who have experienced something like this (whether the bullying was physically or emotionally violent is immaterial here) eventually do learn that the treatment they received was unjust punishment, but, like I suggest in the review, the essence of what was transmitted was not so much the justice or unjustness of this or that particular punishment, but that justice involves some kind of punishment at all. This aspect of what has been transmitted through violence seems to be much more rarely made conscious and healed. Thus one is likely to believe that, rather than oneself, it is ones bullying parent that deserves punishment (rather than just restraint and some kind of effective healing) and the thought that "Punishment itself is unjust or stupid is not likely to stick as a realization even if occurs to one.

I think there are a lot of reasons for this, one of which is that our culture does not offer really much of an alternative model of what Justice actually is if not punishment. The idea that Justice involves everyone "getting what they deserve" certainly does not transcend the idea of punishment, though it does seem to more explicitly include the complementary Idea of Reward as well.

Justice as "Right"

"Justice begins at home: be fair with yourself"--healthy culture proverb

Come to think of it, the idea of "getting what you deserve" as a conception of justice seems to imply some kind of acquisitional metaphor, as though Life or the World itself is essentially a kind of plunder, and the only consideration being that each person receive that part of the plunder that is theirs by "right" (this usually being decided by some kind of competition). This makes sense given the war-and-plunder generated culture that currently exists (what would the modern world be without the plunder of the new world and the third world--and even of the old world, after all?--well a lot healthier I think but that's another blog post). 

Anyway, its clear that the conception of "right" and "rights" implied above is closely associated with the general association of the idea of right with that of "might" (as in "Might is Right") , which also sort of goes along with an order of things established by a culture of war and plunder--and with the inevitable competition for plunder known as our economic system.

The problem is of course that if might is right, then rapists have the right to rape, and child molesters and abusers have the right to molest and abuse, any child or other person they happen to be "mightier" than. I don't know about you, but this implication has always been enough for me to reject the whole premise (though if this doesn't settle things for you, there are a lot of other reasons to reject the idea which I will I am sure I will go into elsewhere). 

But you can see how such a point of view is very similar to "punishment is just" conclusion that is inculcated in a child by parental child abuse. Its really  the same "conclusion" (though the word "conclusion" clearly implies more choice and volition than existed at the time; perhaps I should say the same "compulsion"). It makes sense then that the reason people are willing to swallow the "might is right" implication publicly (explicitly in Fascist States, more implicitly everywhere else) is that they have been forced to swallow it privately as children.

Justice as Relationship and (inner/outer) Responsibility

I think a good alternative for what justice is is this: that justice is nothing more or less than a situation in which everyone is in recovery from there own particular version of sick culture (they way I usually say it in person is that "Justice is a situation in which everybody is acknowledging and dealing with their own sh*t").

When you think about it, an unjust situation exists between person A and person B when B has to Deal with A's ...sick culture...but not visa versa. This is your typical "Power-over" situation of heirarchy structurally and though it doesn't have to be taken advantage of, power tends to corrupt as they say. When it does, this means that person B has to deal (if they are not going to be just like Person A) with there own sick culture (my contention is that everybody born in to a sick culture suffers from it in some way) as well as A's sick culture, and the likelihood is that sooner or later this will seem to be too much and that the "B's" in such a situation will (consciously or unconsciously) pass things along to someone "weaker" than themselves (becoming the A's this new situation") .

Now there is more to Injustice  than this, because people are habitually unjust to parts of themselves, and the outer injustices they enact and participate in when they have the power over others to do so are generally proportional to this ongoing inner state of injustice and self betrayal. This, (as I show in my current post on the other blog using there the example of "education", of formal, rather than informal, child abuse), has to do with the inner state of denial and dissociation that a culture of coercion and competition (and coerced competition) inculcates and makes it necessary maintain.  In fact, ones ongoing attempts at dealing with  ones own sick culture are the same thing as being fair (being Just) with oneself; of protecting the "B" parts of ourselves from the "A" part of ourselves, but also of trying to heal--rather than punish--the "A" parts. This cultivation of inner as well as outer justice is what it means to be in recovery rather than in denial and the conception of justice implied is essentially "Responsibility-based" rather than Rights based. 

Though its possible to say that, for example ones inner animal (ones body) has the "right" not to be abused, and indeed has an equal right to be respected and well nourished, just as much as ones Inner Child, Inner Adult, and Inner Elder, It makes more sense to me to say that as an Individual-Person (and a recovering alienated-phony), I have the responsibility to do what I can to see that all of these aspects of my individuality, are well nourished, since, among other things, my Individual self-betrayal must immediately be reflected in my Personal betrayal of all of four social venues (Familial, Local, Civil, and Religio-Philosopical) which constitute the "objective" aspect of my coexistence. (see my current blog post at cointegrative.blogspot.com for a clarifying chart illustrating this). There are other things that justify accenting the responsibility aspect of justice over the rights aspect, but I'll save going any further into that subject for another post.  

Denial, Projection and Unconsciousness

"Sick culture is like a building on fire in which those who are not yet being burned alive are stupefied by the smoke..."--Healthy Culture Proverb

Of course this conception of justice in terms of inner and out responsibility is potentially neutralized in a situation in which I don't have to be confronted with the reality of the existence of my own sick culture (and so with the responsibility of dealing with it), because I have the power to keep others from reminding me of it, or to separate myself from anyone who might do so. Not only does my sh*t  get worse in this case (the reality of entropy as well as of the extant conditions of sick culture will see to this), but  ultimately I will begin to think that it (my sh*t) doesn't even exist--or at least that it's nothing to speak of. At which point--to paraphrase Jung about the denial of the existence of Evil--, my sick culture will then have me securely" in its grip".*

Once this happens the chronic Projection of my own sick culture on to others--and usually also the corresponding need to punish these others-- is pretty much inevitable. To be clear though, its its not like those others do not have sick culture and are not (very likely) in what amounts to denial about it to a large extent, it is that the reason they are in denial is that they are doing the same thing I am (or you are) doing--namely projecting their own sh*t on "others".

Ironically enough, denial and its attendant projection is often maintained by doing what are called "good deeds" as a way maintaining a sense of "righteousness"  and so of staving off  awareness of ones own alienated phoniness and of the urgent need to begin ones own individual and personal recovery process. I think of the various "charitable" actions of the "upper crust" as they indulge in their "pet virtues" and charities in evident self-righteous obliviousness  to the way in which their (usually presumptuous and selective) attempts to treat certain outer symptoms of sick culture is actually only helping to delay indefinitely our collective diagnosis and the effective treatment of the real underlying (and shared) disease.  Since the disease (as opposed to this or that symptom) is both inside and outside ourselves, the result of such gestures will necessarily be new symptoms or, (after a while the same ones as before only worse), if it goes untreated. Certain kinds of Activists do the same thing but in a different way and with a different feel to their denial and self-righteousness.  Of course, no real sustainable changes happen either inwardly or outwardly as a result such attempts at bribing, drowning out,(or just confusing), ones conscience. At best things may seem to go a little more slowly--or by a slightly different route--in the wrong direction. It does seem to be a way for certain people to get to pretend for a little longer that they don't (like everybody else), have serious "sh*t" to deal with.**


But having said that, I have to disabuse the reader of any implied advocacy of political or economic quietism on my part (its the self-righteousness and factionalism of politics I am objecting to, not the part about concern for the present and future state of things in the world beyond ones neighborhood or doorstep). Narcissistically focusing on "private" problems in private (especially when feeling righteous, or "sensitive" or "spiritual" about it) is as much a form of denial as the forms of denial that manifest more publicly. The dichotomy of the Public and Private, (or of the "Worldly" vs Spiritual), healing is itself a false and unhealthy dichotomy (a form of "unwhole" and uncoordinated thinking) without which I imagine Denial itself could not long survive. You might actually say that the essence of our Shared Sick Culture is Shared Denial of its own existence and nature (by the means discussed above or by many another one), just as the essence of Recovery is in the (responsible, resolute, and unashamed) acceptance of this shared situation.

But why (to bring things back for a second to the inciting reason for this post) is there the need for this alienated and phony pretense? This public and private "Denial of Denial"? At least in part,  because of the ubiquitous presence of Competition in a sick culture and its way of encouraging phoniness by forcing use to conceal, ignore, deny and eventually dissociate all together any aspect of our experience of ourselves not consistent with "competence" in terms of whatever "Identity Uniform" we are wearing. Competition also hurries us along, giving us no time and no inclination to check-in with our inner adult, child, elder or animal as to the value, nourishment, meaning, or lack thereof, of any given action,  whether for it and for our individual-personhood as a whole. Competition is essentially a phenomenon of shared self-betrayal that keeps us so busy playing the game, distracting ourselves from and numbing ourselves to, the pain of its meaningless destructiveness, that we lose both the time and the sensitivity necessary to really be aware of and appreciate the insanity and stupidity of both the game and out own role in it.

This mention of lack of awareness, of  insanity and stupidity, points out the way in which the word "denial" can be a bit misleading in this context, in that it makes it sound like something fully conscious and truly deliberate is going on when the denial I am talking about its based on relative unconsciousness, "unawareness" and a in kind of ignorance. Its like the attitude of a person who has been too long in a room with a gas leak; you yourself can come into the room, notice the situation immediately and with the appropriate sense of urgency and, in telling this person, find that, though they seem to understand and can repeat what you have just told them, are already too far gone to really understand or care about what is happening (care is itself a sign of understanding and consciousness awareness). Even in such a situation, though, since consciousness is latent in everybody who is not literally dead, it not always a waste of time and energy to try to reach the core of consciousness in someone, especially if for some reason directly solving the problem oneself or with some other, more coaware person, is not an option (and if the effort does not result in ones becoming ever less conscious oneself; the "gas" is still presumably flooding into the room after all).

It still needs to be said that as a definition of Justice; "each person dealing with his own sh*t" needs to be qualified a little bit more. For one thing, sick culture is really shared sick culture, and any idea that we each have to deal with it in some kind of private isolation is the wrong idea. Thus, real justice involves am inclusive and shared recovery process in which people use their diversity--the fact that they have different symptoms, different blind spots, different patterns of denial--as way of helping each other stay on the path to recovery. And it is a (non-rectilinear) path or process, and not any kind of permanent or pure state anyone is ever going to be able to  constantly maintain or take for granted. Any complacency from such a false assumption is just as much a threat to the progressive process of inner/outer recovery-- which is conscious coevolution really...as despair and shame are.  After all new and improved kinds of "sh*t" are coming at us all the time from the dominant culture we all still have to live in, triggering and revealing previously unmanifest and unconscious symptoms of our own sh*t in the process. Ultimately the cultural recovery process is the ongoing process of continuously "recovering" Balanced, Coordinated, and Resilient Coevolution inwardly and outwardly; because inner/outer conditions are always changing such a culture will always be necessary with complacency as well as shame always and equally being signs that one losing ones balance and dynamism and falling into denial and dissociation.. 

The R.A.P.-Group and the Check-in/Life-Dance Walk

Finally, since this is the blog in which I am supposed to be describing experimental rituals of healthy culture, I think I''ll end this post with the briefest of outlines of one that seems most relevant to the above.


So one healthy culture ritual I do is called The "Check-in" or R.A.P. session. (R.A.P. stands for Recovering Alienated Phonies"), which sometimes takes place around a table and sometimes in the form of a Life-Dance Walk.

Basically it is sort of like a AA or twelve-step meeting in which people who have already admitted to suffering from sick culture and alienated phoniness get together to check-in about their progress (or lack of same) in facilitating healthy culture and "Justice" in each of the 4 venues of Personhood and in the "vertical" dimension of individual "cointegrity".  This includes things like how often we fall into the phoniness of factional Identity-politics of Race or Gender or Species, or what have you.

This last mention of the "Individual Cointegrity" check-in topic is about checking in on how one has been able to counter, (resist, reverse), the effects of the inner and on-going "Home invasion" that is imposed by the coercive nature of our present culture (see the current post in my other blog). It is about how we are progression (or not) in being fair to ourselves about how we have (or haven't) been able to progress in the conspiracy against the "invader", that is comprised in the secret inner "family meeting" which I call Inner Conference, and which has as its goal inner consensus as to how to challenge and begin to heal the very sick culture which presently has us all held captive. As a part of all this it's also a check-in on how we are or are not making any progress in the coordinated, quality nourishment of the Inner Elder, Inner Adult, Inner Child, and Inner Animal over our tendency to either starve or feed "junk food" to, one or another (or all) of these aspects of our subjective selves.


The overall point (and effect) of this these "R.A.P.--Sessions" is of course mutual support in our shared recovery process,  the ritual being itself a conscious ritual of recovery meant to acknowledge and address the unconscious default rituals of denial and dissociation, that otherwise go unacknowledged (as unhealthy) and at the same time encouraged in a sick culture. Since the rituals are meant to happen regularly, the idea is also to brainstorm in between time more specific ways to support our own and each others (inner and outer) healing process via experiments based on the details of what we hear in the check-in.

Its important to understand that the idea with all of this is not any level of "achievement" on the part of the participants; as I have implied above, besides complacency and shame, nothing ends the process of recovery quicker than a spirit of competition, either with others or with ones past self.
The bottom line with all of this is never a noun; a fixed, finished and fundamentally separate state or image of being but rather a verb; a fluid, unfinished, and fundamentally shared process and experience of becoming which, at any given moment is a process of denial or recovery inwardly and outwardly ( this process of  shared recovery being sustained only to the extent that,(and for as long as), the process of  shared denial is being acknowledged and addressed.  The dynamic then, is rather one of inner and outer friendship which is meant to have a cumulative nonlinear (and at a certain tipping point hopefully exponential "field  resonant effect" inwardly as well as outwardly (about which more later).

Now when this check-in takes place sitting down, it is with the use of a kind of tray divided into 5 parts (the 5th part in the center) which (in conjunction with a of 5 pieces/objects for each participant, acts as a kind of fancy "talking stick" in which each person marks their (lets say 10 Minuit) check-in on the topic of the signified by each of the trays 5 sections (the central section representing the status of ones "coming-together as an Individual and the outer 4 sections representing each of the four "Personal/Social" venues. Doing the Check-in this way has a lot of aesthetic potential (the tray I have for it is pretty beautifully carved, though the sets of pieces have been just random objects chosen on the spur of the moment in the few times I've used it with others). There is also the possibility of doing such a ritual in"public" (though not in a "public" mindset)--at a coffee house for example, as a piece of civil healthy culture activism.

The other way of doing this check-in is via the Life-Dance Walk, in which the land on lives on is divided into places that are symbolic of the 5 check-in topics. One then goes on a walk with ones "fellow RAP-ers" and takes turns checking in at each of the different spots. Where I live the Grave Yard represents the Soul/Religious Venue, the house where I live--including the yard outside--symbolizes the Familial Venue,
The Communities Conference Center (or sometimes the road) symbolizes the Civil Venues, the "Court Yard" (oldest part of the community) symbolizes the Neighborly Venue of Twin Oaks, where I live and The Individual Venue is symbolize by a place in the woods where I have done most of the Vision Quests that I have done here.

This way a doing it is cool because, since it takes place out of doors, it underlines the fact that none of the venues of healthy culture we are checking-in about are exclusively Human venues; that, for example, our Familial venue includes All the Beings--all the individual-persons--we generally see everyday, human and otherwise.  The ritual also foreshadows a process which I think of as "Shared-SelfNaturalization", which  I'll explain more in a future post. 

Now there are a lot of details to the Check-in that I haven't mentioned. Also, while I am making disclaimers; lest you get the wrong impression and think that all of this Recovery business is a thriving collective process shared among the (human) people I live with, the truth is that only very very occasionally over the past 12 years, I have done this ritual with another human being who was living here (or visiting) at the time, and none of them were committed to any of the ideas in the blogs (I think they were mostly just curious). This ritual--and all the others I will describe in this blog--are currently just things that I (for lack of any fellow "Healthy Culture Nerds/ Cointegrative Science Colleagues/Recovering Alienated Phonies) experiment with and do myself of the sake of my own "cultural sobriety".

That's it for now, I'll try to give a more detailed account of this and other rituals (with pictures perhaps), in future posts. This little description will have to do till then.

 

*Lest I be responsible for reinfecting the reader with certain prevailing delusions around the concept of Evil, I think it is appropriate to quote the "Healthy Culture proverb which says that "Evil is just Glamorized Stupidity."

**This is an example of one of many "life-logical fallacies" that people reduced to such "creativity abuse" will come up with to remain in denial about the need to be in cultural recovery. I describe a related fallacy the latter part of my "myopia" post on my other blog here:

 http://cointegrative.blogspot.com/2014/12/myopia-and-technologies-of-denial.html

There are many more such fallacies which I intend to discuss in future posts

 I am going to post this now but I don't think I am done with it yet. I'll be editing and adding stuff in the near future..

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