WORLD WAR 3 IN A CUP OF TEA ... The Family Lie vs The Family Truth
Banksy’s recent comment on that victory for the ‘Family Lie’ over the ‘Family Truth’ - Brexit.
The Family Lie ‘The only way to make a good cup of tea is with milk and two sugars’, was one of our family’s ‘basic family lies’. Another was, ‘if someone has an inordinate amount of money, they took a good proportion of it from someone else.’ And another, ‘unions are communist breeding grounds.’ ‘Basic family lies’ are more error than deceit, and usually unimportant. I mean, how to make a cuppa isn’t going to start world war three - or is it? ‘Basic family lies’ unfold naturally - unlike deliberate, sinister family-cover-up lies hiding, say, abuse. You’ll probably have your own ‘basic family lies.’ Rarely spoken directly, they become how things are, and under the cover of anonymity can spawn something deeper, more sinister … The ‘big family lie' is more insidious: “We are the normal ones.” Expanded - “What we do, and how we do it, is normal" … and unspoken - “if what they do and how they do it, is not what we do or how we do it, then they are different ➡︎ strange ➡︎ wrong ➡︎ bad”. In short, 'It's Us vs. Them'. Or put another way, 'You're with us or you're against us.' Planting the Family Lie At conception our mind is an empty canvas. Lesson #1: ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’.
As an infant I am totally reliant on those big things around me to keep me alive. Whatever they say, goes. Fear is my logic; need my reason.
Infants don’t do context, let alone nuance - it’s all reflex.
Reason and logic exist only in the future.
Lesson #2: ‘Don’t ask hard questions.’
In that future a question may arise… What if they’re right, and we got it wrong? Whoa! Too scary!
Such questioning can be seen as disloyalty to the family/tribe/nation, or just plain crazy talk.
So the child mind doesn’t go there; just sticks with the ‘family lie’, convinces itself that ‘it’s all good’ and over time learns to disregard others.
‘Belonging' is in our DNA. This is deep psyche, existential angst we're talking here. It's etched into the bedrock of awareness. More than just conform, we internalise the ‘big family lie’. Over time it merges into the background of my awareness - unnoticed yet inseparable, and protected by ‘confirmation bias’. The Family Lie Scaled Up The 'family lie' endures because it both supports, and is supported by, the protecting and nurturing clan. Our first culture is our family; our first society, our home. In taking on the 'family lie' we create a template for how we engage with our future cultures and societies. My family is ‘normal’; our town is ‘great’; people from interstate speak funny or have some decidedly dodgy laws; and those foreigners, well… On one hand, the Chinese can claim to be the best nation at speaking Chinese; the Americans, at playing Gridiron; and the Inuit, dominance in crafting seal skin kayaks. On the other hand, all claims to superiority in general, over all other groups, are an echo of archaic and deep infantile terror of being left out in the cold, to die alone and lonely. Played out on an international scale, a once viable childhood defence strategy, becomes a global threat. The ‘family lie’ can manifest as isms. Nationalism (with its uppity little cousin patriotism) and fundamentalism are born of the scared and scarred ‘inner child’. With their gang names like Alt Right or ISIS, they all proclaim sole ownership of rightness. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with loving one’s group - I love being an Aussie. However; "Being Aussie makes me a better person! - that’s just tribal vanity. Just more of the 'family lie', at a planetary level. And on the large scale, the 'family lie’ can turn fatal. Fatal Family Lie Following the first world war, Germany was seen as a ‘them’ by the rest of the world who pummelled her at the Treaty of Versailles. After a decade or so of this humiliation the German people were ready for someone to reinstate the 'family lie' - our way is the right way. Mr. Hitler was just the despot for the job. His first step was to find an easy target for shoring up the ‘family lie’ and that’s where the Jewry of Europe came in. As the first in a succession of others, they were labelled as different, strange, wrong, bad and therefore in need of dehumanisation, incarceration and extermination. After suffering a decade of inhuman abuse, sanctioned by the Nazi ‘family lie’, the newly formed Israel enforced her Jewish ‘family lie’ on the Palestinians and still give them hell, five decades on (and counting!). (At the end of this post is an excerpt from an ABC Radio interview with Peter Cundall, who speaks to this point from real world experience.) Arabs in many areas simply followed suit, ramping up the Muslim 'family lie’. And now large portions of ‘the west’ are succumbing to their own “us first” ‘big family lie’. Big surprise - the ‘big family lie’ is endemic throughout the human race. Opening Into The ‘Family Truth’ In all large families there are those who either grow out of, or don’t swallow, the 'family lie’. A few even see the ‘big family truth’ - each living thing is a member of the family of life. These people, have outgrown their family’s/creed’s/nation’s ‘family lie’. Some courageously support the humane treatment of non-members. They’re also often seen as traitors and punished for their compassionate wisdom. A Cancer In The System Rightist and leftist groups are infecting Europe like some cowardly amnesiac cancer. And let’s not even mention Brexit, Doh! Really chaps?! The European Union is a promising demonstration of large scale 'family truth’. Its early wobbly steps (born of the horrors of the 20th century), although under threat from the ‘us first’ mobs, are steadier than perhaps thought. France’s far right, were subordinated by the sensible centre, at the recent French elections, following the US capitulation to “US First” fearfulness . The US capitulation to scared bravado is pretty freaky. By ‘scared bravado’ I mean the aggression that arises from childish terror and masquerades as righteous courage. It’s almost as if Bannon/Trump took Adolph's 'family lie' play-book, deleted ‘European Jewry’ and inserted ‘Muslims and Mexicans’. 😱 If any single country could aspire to live the ‘family truth’ it is the ‘one big family’ of the US of A with their secure borders and diverse population. They have, it would seem, contracted ‘scaredy-cat’ cancer, a particularly humiliating disease that feeds on a diet of super-sized ‘family lie’. A Cure Education is the cure for these cancers. Education loosens the fearful bonds of childhood ignorance, allowing the development of skilful, confident adults who then responsibly apply their personal skills for the ‘greater good’. Alas, our education system, at all levels, appears to be directed by a polity that, in service of its profiteer masters, promotes production of more 'family lie' factory fodder and bottom-line feeders. [Too strong?] Okay, that's off my chest... education needs to be driven by those who ‘get’ the 'family truth’, i.e. those who have expanded their family from, 'the people who share my genes and/or turf’, to ‘all the living beings with whom I share the planet.’ Fortunately, the number of these rare jewels is growing. Many are already working on change within the established, beholden-to-the-‘family lie’, secular and sectarian schools. The Red Pill Let’s work towards aligning with the 'family truth'. You can do this at home, campers. Rather than, ‘my family is normal, right, good and they’re all different’, let’s look at a more accurate perspective:
Maybe we can learn from them.
We, all of us, are:
sucking the same air,
at the mercy of the weather, the planet itself, and even whatever rogue space rocks are wondering around out there;
members of one human race; a single branch of the tree of life on earth;
one big family - with the intra-family challenges that all families face.
Like all families, we have our black sheep. Interestingly, the black sheep role shifts to various family members over time. A great example of what family can do, on the international stage, followed the second world war. Germany and Japan had profoundly fouled their nests, becoming the black sheep of the human family. They were assisted back into the UN family. The results have been beneficial for all of us. We learnt from the kicking of Germany after the WW1, how dumb that was - it led to WW2. Who’s your current national black sheep? Summary
The ‘family lie’ only works for the young and scared. Adults lost in its thrall are caught in an infantile, ‘we’re right and you’re all poop heads!’ understanding of life.
As we grow up we start to see that others either have merit, or are troublesome, regardless of their race, colour, creed or sexual identity or… or… or….
Abhorrent behaviour is an individual trait - sometimes a group of like minded individuals band together in a shared pathology masquerading as established creed.
ISIS devotees lack mature understanding of the Q’ran, unlike those of the Red Crescent. The Westboro Baptists are deaf to the Christ’s call to love and acceptance, unlike those of the Red Cross.
It would be unskilfully inhumane to throw the babies out with the bathwater - far more rewarding all round, that they be bathed, dried and nurtured to become mature adults.
So:
let’s put our ‘family lie’ ass out to pasture,
learn to ride our ‘family truth’ steed,
re-cognise and thereby recognise, we’re all born of the one family,
and work in a supportive family way,
with the individuals whose suffering causes us all strife,
for the ‘greater good’.
The following excerpt is about ⅔ the way into the interview. The full transcript of the ABC Radio interview is here. “Peter Thompson: So Peter, after all of this, you're [still in the army], and you've in fact had some pretty tough experiences. Firstly dealing with some of those-being liberated if you like, out of the prison camps and concentration camps that you saw in Austria and elsewhere, and then you spent time in Tabatha. Peter Cundall: That's right. You must understand, when I was in Austria, one of the jobs I had in the army was guarding the SS that were awaiting trial. And the camps had been liberated and I was also able to talk to many of the people that had been in the camps, and they were also actually back behind barbed wire in a way, because they put them in what they called DP Camps-displaced persons camps. So they told me their experiences. They were Jews, communists, socialists, homosexuals-who'd all been...some of them had been there for years, and they told me their ghastly stories. But to be a Jew in Europe was a sentence of death under Hitler, there was no question about that. And let nobody ever say there was no such thing as the Holocaust. It happened and it was planned and it occurred and there were guilty people. So when I was then posted, of all places, to Palestine, I was bleeding from every pore, if you like, for what had happened to the Jewish people in particular, but also for the sheer horror of racism. I've always been against any form of discrimination, but what racism had done, and what discrimination had done, and the very basis of the Nazi philosophy. And yet when I got to Gaza, I then found something different that shook me again, because I started to meet some of the settlers. That was the Jewish settlers. They were so proud of their orange groves and I talked to them quite freely. I also found that the Arab people were extraordinarily courteous and kind to me and just wonderful people. But I'll never forget...another shock occurred-and I arrived just after the King David [hotel] was blown up and they'd just killed two of our sergeants, they captured them and executed them, in an orange grove. And it was a war, but I remember talking to this settler and he said, 'Look at my orange grove,' he said, and then he pointed to some Arabs nearby and said that scum like that, they just couldn't do that kind of thing. And I said, 'Well hang on, but how can you be saying, and calling them scum, when I've just come from Europe, where the Nazis referred to the Jewish people as scum and vermin.' 'Yes that's true, they did,' he said, 'but these people, the Arabs, really are vermin.' And then I started to get some balance and realised that-I used to think if a people had been persecuted, therefore they would be against any form of persecution. But I've since realised that there's no worse tyrant than an ex-slave, sometimes. And it's the same kind of philosophy. And the bitterness that many of these Jewish settlers in particular-not all of them, just a few-were often against the Jews in Europe because, they said, they'd surrendered so easily. They'd marched to the railway station to be taken up. They were almost contemptuous. And they were particularly contemptuous of those Jews that remained in Germany. They didn't like them. And it is a fact, that they were marched to the railway stations and taken to the camps, whereas the gypsies fought, every bit of the way. It was a different attitude. When the gypsy trains came in to Auschwitz, the guards there dreaded them, because they fought all the way. They were not docile. And so this was another angle; I suddenly realised that the human race-look, is divided up, in a way, into the cannibals and the Christians, if you like. To the people who are, most of them, decent, ordinary people-but there's also that group, tiny minority: the control freaks, if you like, we get them in every office; we get them in every school parents and friends organisation; and they are relentless. They take leadership and they lead people into trouble. They are often highly-skilled speakers, they're very persuasive people, and we find them today everywhere. You see them just everywhere. And this is what I'm starting to realise. I call them the psychopathic narcissists, that you seem to get, and seem to be taking control. And you see them in this world we're in now…everywhere."