mass distress does'nt challenge power structures that cause emotional strain

[undergroundpanther]

Civilisation, with its social hierarchies, meant a changed relationship to the emotions

With the emergence of social hierarchies and social authority the original function of human emotions were radically changed. Individuals or institutions with social authority cannot tolerate the anger of their subordinates against them for that is tantamount to accepting the right of subordinates to challenge their authority. Authority is protected often by violence, by armed forces that must obey orders. Fear cannot be accepted as a valid reasons for running away. Sadness and despair are no longer seen as a reason for helping someone - these signs of distress are now taken as indications of weaknesses, of vulnerability, where strength is what is admired and aspired to. In the new emerging civilisations social order meant at best that the weak must be 'protected'. (The word that describes the attitude of the patriarch to women, the feudal lord to his serfs, the colonialists to subjected peoples). At worse the vulnerability of the weak is taken as evidence that they are inferiors who can be used and /or exterminated. This is nakedly evident in fascist ideology - an ideology for the overt persecution of minorities, a means of passing emotional stress 'downwards' against more vulnerable people, thus 'earthing' the social system (to use a metaphor from electricity). This works because mass distress does not challenge the power structures whose operation has caused the emotional strain.. In times of social stress showing weakness and despair is to set oneself up as a victim. People who feel despair therefore tend to hide themselves.

For these reasons the expression of despair loses its original social and interpersonal function - to evoke sympathetic feeling and, therefore, mutual aid. Only in the case of child rearing is fear, crying and distress seen as a reason for support, sympathy and comfort. (And frequently not in this case either. Children are told to grow up, to stop crying. Their fear and terror is ignored. They are prepared as early as possible for adult behaviour in which tears are a sign of weakness and to be avoided. It is not surprising, then, that as Melanie Klein reports, a phase akin to psychosis is common in childhood. Our culture ordinarily starts us off in life with a period of madness in which we disconnect from the original experience and use of our feelings, our emotions become re-programmed to match power and authority structures)

In this process despair not only loses its expressive function- (the expression of despair no longer gets us support, indeed it may get us the reverse) it may also be the case that despair may loses its function in making us give up. If our despair is due to us being forced to pursue the agendas of our masters we may not be able to give up. Permanent despair is therefore the feeling of slaves - the only alternative is to dream of liberation or to plan it, which in certain circumstances may mean almost certain death.

In contemporary society despair is often held at bay with hope - defined in dictionary as the combination of expectation and desire. Hope is illusory to the extent that expectations fail to match the real probabilities of realising our desires. This partly depends on how much power we have - or how much our desires match that which is convenient to those who have power. In my Concise Oxford Dictionary of 1964 to desire not only means to long for something. It has the more active sense of 'ask for; pray; entreat; command'. It will be noticed that the first three terms imply subordination to people or institutions who can grant (or refuse) that for which one longs. The fourth terms implies that the wish of a person with power is someone else's command.

If one's feelings are tangled in the power system despair may therefore be that which is felt when the illusion of hope is abandoned because it is realised that what one wishes for does not suit the agendas of the powerful and one does not have the power oneself to make it happen. (Where power is the availability of free energy sufficient to carry through an initiative to realise one's purposes).





http://www.citrushealth.org/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=392