Created November 20, 2020
On November 6, 2020, my blogpost was entitled Both Sides Are Protecting America in their Own Minds, and in it, I wrote:
“We all grew up with the same values. Other countries were corrupt, we were taught, but here we had the privilege of living in a democracy, where there is concern for every individual.”
A wise executive at a top advertiser company wrote me to say “I think that perspective misses the values piece. When some are raised with values of hate, bigotry and selfishness we don’t come from the same starting point.”
In other words, despite being taught the same American values, we are all also programmed by the other “values” our parents taught us by word and example, including such things as hate, bigotry and selfishness.
There is no denying the truth of the reader’s point.
Why is it that parents let themselves pass on any form of negativity to their beloved children?
It is because they don’t realize they are doing that. They may not pay attention to the process at most times, and when they do notice their own behavior and the effect it is having on their kids, they see it differently than an objective outsider would see it.
In other words, when a parent teaches hate and selfishness they are not able to see reality objectively. What they themselves have been taught has become so deeply ingrained they have perceptual biases, like a fish not being able to see water.
In this way, hate and selfishness are passed down from generation to generation like a great chain that can never be broken.
In my blogpost of November 2, 2020, entitled The Follower Type, I quoted from Wikipedia’s coverage of The Authoritarian Personality, a 1950 book which showed the link between authoritarian leaders and their followers. Both the leaders and the followers learned the same negative “values” from domineering parents. Children of domineering parents have an almost unbreakable tendency to become domineering parents and domineering people themselves. The neurosis brings along with it cultish blind followership, anti-intellectualism, superstition, and the projection of all of one’s own repressed perceived weaknesses (the shadow self) onto a scapegoat group.
All great psychologists and deep thinkers have spoken and written about the process of clearing out the mind and emotions of conditioned neuroses formed in childhood. Abraham Maslow in particular described the emergent new person cleansed of imposed leftover deficiency feelings as being Self Actualized, freed from being motivated by deficiency compensation and free to pursue the manifestation of all the positive creative potentials within the individual self. No longer a robot of his or her self-limiting early conditioning, this person has then broken the great chain of non-forgiveness (of self, of parents, of the scapegoat group, of intellectuals, et al).
I call this mentally and emotionally cleansed state “the Observer state” and my book MIND MAGIC is a collection of stimuli designed to help bring about the Observer state.
What should we do if we wish to break the chain of passed-down divisive “values”? We ought to communicate with our children, whatever age they now are, confronting this subject courageously and non-self-protectively. Ask them if you taught them anything related to hating other people, if you encouraged them to think selfishly. Talk it out. Reach agreement if you can on a FRESH START. Age does not matter, a FRESH START is always a freeing new way of being. It puts away the past and does not dwell upon it, bringing almost all attention into the present with a little bit left for the future. The future you and your children want to have, and want America and the world to have.
With what is facing us all today, the “six tidal waves” as I call it in To the People of the World, if more of us can give ourselves and our children a FRESH START and focus on solutions in a collaboration with all people of good will, we will overcome all of these threatening situations we ourselves have caused due to our conditioned neuroses that have been our baggage for all of history.
And as individuals, what we can in our own private alone spaces, is to contemplate our own upbringing, and our own domineering, hatreds, and selfishness if any, and where it might have come from, what good or harm it has done us so far in our lives, and whether we want to carry that baggage any more, or if we would feel refreshed to have a FRESH START ourselves. If you would like more structured help in such contemplation it is available in the book MIND MAGIC in Chapter 5, “What Do You Want? Stripping Away Imposed Limitations To Find Out What ‘The Me That Was Born’ Wants”.
May The Center Hold. Some have suggested I change this to “May The Center Re-Form”, suggesting that we have all moved further left or right, but I suspect this is an illusion; I agree that we are definitely more vocally on one party’s side or the other, but not that Democrats have become communists and that Republicans have become fascists. I still feel that most of us are closer to the center than depicted in our actual views of what actions need to be taken in the world, but have become angry at the opposing political party per se. This is not a distinction without a difference. It implies that if the parties disappeared overnight (as George Washington had strenuously advised) and we were all individuals again and we met to discuss what to do about health, education, foreign affairs, etc. we would find that we are not that far apart at all.
When this election is behind us, I hope that this is the reality that appears in front of us all as we pull together to solve the substantive action issues that are not inherently party power related.
Best to all,
Bill
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