Are you really entitled to self-determination?
Recently I had a very interesting conversation with a new client of mine and I told her about something I learned and how I generalized it actually in one sentence and then she added one piece.
Important note:
When I’m writing about the real reality, I don’t mean the things that surround us, like the trees, the birds, the houses ... etc. I mean the concepts that describe your identity and that make you as an individual person.
Before we can work together, I always have a one or two hours with my clients and both. For the field, I’m working in at the moment, this is a very crucial part, because if we decide to work together, it will become a quite personal relationship.
So, we talked about many things and the conversation almost inevitably turned into a path, where we talked about things we have in common, our experiences with ourselves and how we handle them and this is when I told her:
You cannot even think something, when you don’t have a word for it. Firstly, there is something that clots together in your guts and later you develop a way to describe this and only then, you can think it and then you still need to express it and speak out.
And then she added one crucial part, which I had ignored so far:
»First«, she said »you need to develop the ability to recognize your feelings at all.«
Big Boys don’t Cry
Many of us are conditioned from early childhood into ignoring and finally not recognizing our emotions and in the next moment we are pushing people into being oversensitive and express feelings they actually don’t have.
Individuals are basically coerced into a corridor of the permissible and this corridor runs somewhere outside of who and what you are.
Apart from knowing ones name and their date of birth, many people don’t know who they are. And this is happening in many fields. It’s a struggle of who is allowed to determine your identity. Is it you or is it any person who represents that “corridor”.
When I was young, it was big boys/girls don’t cry and things like that. Today, there is a bigger process going on, that is focussing on someone’s sex, something, which in my childhood and youth only was forced on an almost negligibly small minority. The only point why it wasn’t negligible then was the gravity of the measures taken against these few children - surgery, yet nobody talked about it. Today it’s worse! Children are confronted with it and brainwashed even at school and when parents speak out against the school board, at least in the U.S. they even may be linked to domestic terrorism.
Reality is redefined from ground up. It’s not only about determining, who are you, it’s also about determining every aspect of truth resp. reality, what you are allowed to think and, if possible, what you are able to think. Somebody else is telling you the truth and everything that deviates from this truth is “missinformation”, “malinformation”, “hate speech”…. and meanwhile violations of the outside imposed pseudo reality is even criminally persecuted. The more people are successfully subjected to this conditioning process, the more people will find criminal persection of deviators appropriate and necessary.
What we are seeing here, goes deep.
Decades ago it only concerned a small minority that somehow deviated so much from the naturally grown mainstream reality, such as gay people, transsexual people, …. no, it’s not only that. We had a time, when it concerned women in general.
You are a woman, hence you aren’t human. You can’t decide in your own matters, you cannot vote, you cannot use your own money as you wish, you are not allowed to travel…. your husband will be your legal custodian…. in Germany, until 1976, a husband could quit his wife’s job, if he claimed she neglected her domestic obligations.
See: “Haushaltsführung” - Der § 1356 BGB im Wandel der Zeit (The article is in German)
(English: “Domestic obligations” § 1356 German Civil Code in the course of time)
The Article is written in German
https://www.abendblatt.de/politik/deutschland/article107425384/Haushaltsfuehrung-Der-1356-BGB-im-Wandel-der-Zeiten.html
So, you have a reality
and
you have an imposed reality that complements the actual reality
And today,
this imposed reality often even opposes the actual reality.
Example:
A boy says, “I’m a boy.” and a girl says “I’m a girl”
and in opposition to that
Activists, politicians and state institutions say: “That’s not so sure.”
Cut-back a few decades:
Government, state institutions and society said: “You are a boy!”/”You are a girl!”
If you opposed that, and if it was only that you said “That’s not so sure.”, you were in trouble.
The pattern is practically the same, but the polarity inverted.
Today, this imposed reality is expanded. It increasingly hides and obfuscates the actual reality and vulnerable people comply with this imposed “new normal”.
It is really hard to rediscover the truth that lies in yourself and it becomes particularly hard, when there is outside pressure coercing you into concepts that contradict the truth that somehow clots together in your guts.
This real reality is there and even if you haven’t learned yet to sense it, it’s still having an effect on you. Not the real reality will make you sick, but the imposition of an unreal reality, which is irreconcilable, will finally cause you somatic and/or mental conditions.
The problem is that there is only one “you”. There is only one “your identity” and an identity is a very complex thing. As I already said above, it’s not only your name, your date of birth and your assigned sex or the gender they talked you into believing it was yours.
Your identity consists of large number (a set) of propositions about you:
I’m human (some dispute that)
I’m <my name>
I’m a man / a woman
I’m tall, short, athletic, obese, fit, set…..whatever
I’m young/old
I’m left handed / right handed
I’m caucasian / asean / black / …
…
to close this article, let’s look at this a little more:
When I was a child there were quite a few things that were imposed on me. Among others, I was trained to be right handed. For my environment, it was not permissible to write with the “wrong hand”. Teachers forced children to write with the right hand and only few left handed children, whose parents protected them from their intrusive teachers, were allowed to learn writing with the left hand. My parents shared the teachers’ view and so I was forced to write with the right hand. Consequently I had trouble writing, I was slow, it came so far that I couldn’t read my own handwriting and when I was 14 years old, I had to re-develop my handwriting from ground up. I still did it with the right hand, because I was conditioned for that and at that time, I was unable to think the idea that I could be left handed. There are things I can only do with the left hand and when I have to juggle tasks with my hands, I usually choose the left hand for the more complex one.
Bottom line as a 57 year old woman is that I’m not sure, if I’ll be able to address this issue of handedness
during my remaining life time.
There is an uneasy balance between real reality inside you, the discomfort, the dichotomy, the imposed reality it causes and the effort and undesirable consequences associated with any attempt to break out of the imposition and at least partially reach a sort of self realization (not self actualization). I mean self realization in a very basal sense:
Retraining yourself from an imposed handedness to your real handedness of your brain.
Telling a person that you don’t like them and that they please shall leave you alone.
as an intersex in the 1960s an 1970s, tell your environment, that they assigned the wrong sex and that the sex reassignment surgery performed during your early childhood was all wrong! (This is because after the wrong sex was assigned, these people were technically transsexual and e.g. in Germany, being transsexual was a crime until early 1982, so these few unfortunate people were considered potential perverse criminals and just like the very few normal transsexuals most of them lived in fear)
When you were young (at least in my generation) they made you to learn a particular profession and you actually hate it. Everybody considers you that optician or that economist….. but you actually wanted to be an electrical engineer or a carpenter …
It’s hard to successfully rebel against these circumstances, because your environment always will exact a toll for it and mostly it’s not lenient.
Associated topics
You may want to dig into the
During National Socialism in Germany, Communism in the Soviet Union and Fascism in Italy, all three regimes engaged in forming a “new human”.
Unfortulately the related articles here are in German (you may want to use a translator)The “New Human” during National Socialism (written in German)
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/der-neue-mensch-im-nationalsozialismus-100.htmlThe “New Human” during Italo-Fascism (written in German)
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/der-neue-mensch-im-italo-faschismus-100.htmlThe Soviet “New Human” (written in German)
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/der-sowjetische-neue-mensch-100.html
I found this today, and while I disagree with Max Blumenthal in some important topics, he does good Journalism and this Interview takes a interesting turn
youtu.be/tR3fEegpFws
(I cut the leading https:// to prevent SubStack from directly inserting the video)I’m not sure, if you’ll find this useful, but I’d like to suggest the reading of
Title: Maps of Meaning
Author: Jordan Peterson
Date of publication: May 2002 (I’m lucky, I’ve got the PDF- version)ISBN-13: 978-0415922227
And when I think about this and sometimes write about this, there always is this trailer of Mission Impossible 7 that comes to my mind. It’s only a short sequence and this time I dug it out:
There is something/someone that represents the outside and there is something/someone that represents the inside.