Jordan Peterson's ARC is Looking for Crew Members to Confront the Cabal. A Question of 'How?' Q & A 2
Q2: Responsible Citizenship: How do we facilitate the development of a responsible and educated citizenry?
Q2: Responsible Citizenship: How do we facilitate the development of a responsible and educated citizenry?
(Continued from Q & A 1; ARC Questions.)
A2: Short answer is by accepting total, so-called ‘radical,’ personal responsibility for how I experience my life.
How? That is comprised of two ‘simple’ changes. (The first is long the second is short. Both are both simple and challenging at the same time. [This is an edited version of the answer I submitted to ARC.]
1) Being Personally Responsible for the Power of Our Words
Peterson stressed that compulsion is not to be a part of this process. Great! ‘Oh frabjous day, callooh callay, [I] chortled in my joy.’ And yet we are awash with bully language, surrounded by it like fish in the water they do not see. That bully language exists invisibly inside and around us while showing itself as projection onto the ‘evil’ white man patriarchy or other cabal-like structures because our political, economic, educational and social, structures are at their core built on a bully paradigm. Because of that hidden core belief in the bully ethos that most of us have we are largely blind to its ubiquity and perniciousness until it becomes egregious. And even then, as covidian tyranny has shown, not even then.
We likely say we don’t bully, and that we aren’t bullies and maybe even that we hate bullying. And yet our everyday language is that of the bully. We are bullying ourselves and others scores or hundreds or even thousands of times everyday.
To a very large extent the propaganda that created covid panic, and with it a nearly full embrace of self-imposed tyranny and forcible tyranny on those ‘evil’ other ones, was only successful because the propaganda hooked onto the invisible bully belief lurking inside most of us. (I explore this more fully in my series of essays called “Obedience to Authority: A Rumination”.) Most did as they were told, as they have been indoctrinated to do. The bully system is our indoctrinated paradigm.
We can begin to remove the presence of that paradigm with the power of our words, by being 100% responsible for our bully language and removing the rampant, perhaps ubiquitous, bully/victim language that creates divisiveness and personal disempowerment. Doing so removes from the cabal and their ilk and their minions ‘their’ power to ‘mobbefy’ and stupefy the majority with fear. The cabal only have power over the fearful. Our language has been built, consciously or not, to keep us in fear.
In the beginning was the word, and when Peterson was faced with the bully law of compulsory gender pronoun speech in Canada he carefully and wisely responded with a single word to the government bully: 'No.' He knows that caving in to the bully leads to death. (And yet even he, aware of the poor outcome of bully law, is chock-a-block full of bully language.)
So, my vision would be to inspire, and/or with reason encourage, the citizenry into stopping their use of the words 'have to' 'must' 'should' and 'deserve'. These are all bully language words or are the words that set up relationships that allow bullying to live or, in some cases of stress such as we recently experienced, flourish. Their presence is a seed, or perhaps, nascent energy that can burst open and kill every evil other one.
Are 'have to' and 'must' the language only of the cabal? Nope. Woke use them a lot too, of course. Who else? Governments and their vaccine health bullies, er, I mean agents, er, I mean experts, of course. Just about every human in the western world and, likely the greater balance of the human world population, to a greater or lesser extent are fully of the bully. Most are oblivious to what these words actually mean and what kind of world they create. We are facing ‘Nuremberg 2’ because of that ignorance.
I suspect that the reason that these words are both prolific and invisible is because we are culturally suffering with bully Stockholm Syndrome: we have embraced the bullydom in order to survive having been bullied. Our language emulates our capture into the unconscious bullyhood of our dimly seen or sensed bullies.
In the beginning was the word because words are the beginning of creation. Well, it begins with wordless inspiration that becomes imagination and imaginary words. Creation happens when those imaginary words get expressed. So, to the extent that most of us use 'have to' and 'must' to compel others, or, perhaps even worse, ourselves, is to be no different than the cabal bullying us with you ‘have to’ and ‘must’ inject, eat bugs, stop travel, wear ineffectual masks, lock down, etc.
When I say to a friend, even with so-called ‘kind’ and ‘good’ intentions, 'You have to change your diet,' for example, I have bullied that friend. Even if it isn't quite conscious, my friend will want to say or will feel 'No I don’t,’ because of course my friend doesn’t have to. And so I have bullied that person and created a natural push back, even if unconsciously. And I have also created a division between that person and myself by setting myself up as a condescending judge, juror and executioner even if very subtly. So, I have hurt our relationship and created a push back that exacerbates separation, both of which are important antitheses of what may comprise 'responsible citizenship.'
I have energised the bully culture whenever I ‘kindly’ or ‘politely’ used ‘have to’ or ‘should.’
When I say 'Have to' to myself, I have bullied my Self. I will have created a push back from my Self too. This makes accomplishing things like exercise, changes of diet, unnecessarily difficult and demanding because of the additional energy required to overcome the pushback.
And when I have successfully completed my forced behaviour I have succeeded in bullying myself. Whatever ‘had to’ goal I completed will make part of me, perhaps even the greater part of me, a victim of having been bullied. My feeling of accomplishment after achieving that unnecessarily difficult goal will be at best ambivalent because I’ve succeeded in making myself a victim of my self’s ‘good’ intentions and actions.
Interestingly enough we also use 'have to' casually as a form of polite lying or as a means by abdicating choice and deferring action–ie, disempowering ourselves. For example, we meet someone we haven't seen in a long time, and we might say 'We really have to get together soon’. It is most often a lie, a way of saying I don’t really want to see you again. Or we will say to ourselves 'I really have to make time to write my book', which we use as a method of stacking that plan or intention onto the huge pile of the other 'have tos' knowing that we aren't going to get to it. In both cases we have debased our authenticity and with that we enervated ourselves in a way that can spiral us into total disempowerment and, at the extreme, anger and resentment.
Note: I checked ARC’s biographical snippets and statements of its founding organisers. For a group that is adamantly opposed to compulsion, I found many examples of the compulsory language of 'have to' and 'must' and 'should'.
‘Should’ is likewise a form of compulsion by guilt, as if the 'shoulder' has the wisdom that the 'shouldee' doesn't. It creates separation in ways similar to that of 'have to' or 'must', although perhaps with an even more pernicious inclusion of guilt and/or shame. It also disempowers us and energises the ‘have to’ energy of the bully culture.
I won't elaborate on 'deserve' here. If curious, please contact me or comment. (Later I will do a complete essay on these ideas.)
What are the replacement words? Some are ‘Choose’, ‘want’, ‘desire’, ‘suggest’, ‘act’, ‘yes’, ‘no’.
I repeat: the cabal are bullies that are having some success because we are living in a long-lived bully culture. We support a bully culture to a large extent because we in our daily language bully ourselves and each other scores or hundreds or even thousands of times a day with the bully language that is hiding in the open use of 'have to', 'must', 'should' and 'deserve'.
So, radical change: remove from our vocabulary the words ‘have to’ ‘should’, ‘must’ and ’deserve’ and we begin to embody mature responsible behaviour. Replace them with ‘act’, ‘do’, ‘want’, ‘choose’, ‘yes’, ‘no’.
2) The Power of Intention in Language: Cease all Blaming and Complaining
Stop all blaming and complaining. Both behaviours remove our power of choice and are a form of enervating laziness. If something is less than satisfactory in our lives we have an opportunity to change it by action or by leaving it as is with inaction. To complain and blame simply bleeds away the energy of that choice while ensuring nothing is actually done. Blaming and complaining are the ways we can lazily default to doing nothing while superficially feeling ‘good’ about it, as if blaming and complaining is an accomplishment.
When a situation isn’t so bad as to require from me action, then blaming and complaining is simply bleeding my energy away from the other choices of action I could take. And my action items will be different than those of everyone else.
Radical responsibility means change the things important enough to change, and choose to allow those things be as they are that aren’t important enough to change. Freedom to speak allows us to discuss what is and isn’t important, and freedom of action allows different people to take on different paths.
This process develops the wisdom of discernment. It is a practical practice of maturation. It has been well stated by Reinhold Niebuhr:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
This means the other radical action of trusting ourselves and trusting others. And that is a whole different conversation beyond this short answer. For now, simply stop all blaming and complaining and take ownership of action or inaction as an appropriate response to any given situation.
Conclusion
Both of these actions for full, radical, personal responsibility in our use of language are simple to understand and, ostensibly, simple to implement. Both are foundations of personal responsibility at the deepest and most grounded levels that scale up to a fully engaged and responsible citizenry without coercion. Well, they look simple. To enact them may require effort and time as they require a kind of rewiring of the brain that has had the bully wiring in place for a long time. Fortunately we know with neuroplasticity that the brain can be rewired, and that we are free to remap it. (The plasticity of the brain has been long known by meditation and prayer practices.)
And thus is a democracy made without coercion, collusion or corruption.
Words indeed have power and I agree that most of us in the West and probably any culture touched by Western influence has an overlay of bullying empire thought ways. Words used to coerce, to bully, to shame are powerful weapons but we can, using our consciousness disarm these mind weapons and free ourselves and our fellow humans from internal slavery.
Beautiful story to self - use kind words today
Permission to be honest and say no I’m not keen to do that
Stay in perfect timing
Manipulation and coercion are words to describe slavish behaviour - can I be free today? Can I allow others to be free today?
To love something, set it free
Covid certainly showed me the willing excluders and programmers
That was the scary part for me, not their virus stories
Aldi recently removed their flexiglass boxes from the checkout personnel, I was so happy to see it go - the fear induction device must have finished it role for now.