We all have very high standards for ourselves and we don't like to see
ourselves as not meeting our own expectations. We naturally try as hard as we
are able to meet our own goals, so "trying harder" is not a solution. We
certainly don't want to lower our expectations either, so instead of living with
the feeling that we haven't reached our true potential, and feeling powerless,
people tend to adjust their image of themselves instead. This temporarily solves
the crisis; our expectations are intact and we don't have to try and improve our
behaviour and performance to a level above what is possible for us.
Unfortunately, this image shift has some rather undesirable side-effects.
Whenever we have thoughts or feelings that do not fit in with our superior self
image, when we are ashamed of our thoughts, we shove those thoughts and feelings
out of our conscious attention. We are afraid of such thoughts, they threaten
our self-image at a fundamental level.
These thoughts do not go away, they are still in our minds. Thoughts have
their own energy whether we are paying attention to them or not. Similar
thoughts attract one another and form structures. People who are involved in
creative mental tasks experienced this constantly. When they work with related
thoughts and ideas, these thoughts begin to form themselves into hierarchies and
patterns. Thoughts that we fear are no different; they create mental landscapes
of what we fear the most within our own minds.
When something reminds us of these fearful thought structures, we experience
a sudden surge of hatred, fear, or disgust as our conscious attention is
momentarily focused on our unacceptable thoughts. Because we cannot accept these
thoughts as part of ourselves, we assume that the feelings they generate are
coming from whatever or whoever reminded us of them. This is called projection.
Anyone that seems vaguely menacing can cause us to project our own suppressed
anger onto them. This anger seems to be separate from "our own" thoughts, making
it easy to believe that the anger or threat is coming from the other person.
Someone with different ideas or customs can prompt us to project any anti-social
or simply unconventional thoughts of our own that disturbed or disgusted us,
making the person before us seems disturbing or dangerous. Depending on the
force of our suppressed feelings, people who are in fact harmless can appear to
be capable of bringing down civilization.
Well, that was a long exposition, but it boils down to this. The more you
accept your own thoughts as normal and natural, whether they offend your sense
of decency or not, the more clearly you will be able to see the world.
Convincing others of this could be a problem, however.
When the projection turns to violence.
There is one thing that makes people feel enough rage to commit violence, and
that is a feeling of powerlessness. If people feel that they have no control
over their destiny and environment, if they feel that they cannot act
effectively, then they can reach a point where they believe that nothing short
of violence can change their situation.
Acting effectively requires you to influence other people and to control your
environment. To influence other people, they must respect you and be willing to
listen to what you have to say. To control your environment, you must understand
it, have the skills to affect it, and be permitted to act on it.
It should be clear that these conditions are not met very often in our
society. Many people in our society are alienated from one another and have few
opportunities to exert any real influence on one another. Many poor and
uneducated people do not have any control over their environment whatsoever.
However, powerlessness is not the only ingredient in violence. The real
question is not why people are violent, but why so many men are violent.
Although women are just as capable of violence as men, crime statistics show
that it is not women who are turning our urban environments into war zones.
Both men and women must abide by certain expectations. Even though people
have few instincts and all of our adult behaviour is learnt, we labour under
the misconception that men and women are biologically destined to behave
completely differently. Women are supposed to be yielding, they are not expected
to forcefully express their own wants and needs. Men are supposed to be dominant
and commanding, and are regarded as weak if they express any tendencies to yield
or to behave in a "feminine" way.
As psychologists have discovered, however, the most mentally healthy people
express emotional and behavioural characteristics traditionally assigned to both
sexes. The fully functioning human can be either forceful or gentle, commanding
or submissive, strong or yielding, as the situation requires. Unfortunately, the
acceptable range of emotions for men is rather narrow, and what happens is that
men must express all of their emotional energy through the few emotions
available to them. This leads to rather exaggerated expressions of strength and
virility.
Now, couple this self-image men have of strength and domination with the
feelings of powerlessness rife in our society, and you have a recipe for
disaster. Men must express their exaggerated sense of dominance, but they are
rendered impotent by their inability to act with any effectiveness. To these
men, violence seems to be the only way to affect their environment.
This will continue to be a problem until men are raised differently, or do the Great Work.
