Thrive, Charles E and Expression of Rage
written by Andrew Langford
The hot debate arising on the internet after the release of the Thrive movie has been enlightening. Charles Eisenstein has posted a particularly insightful response piece “The story is wrong but the spirit is right” that offers a fresh take on the cause of the heavily skewed power and money distribution in our current culture that is a main focus of the film.
In his analysis Charles remonstrates (politely) with the authors proposing to them that their propounded view, that the world is run by a small financial elite who own the banks and who we must unseat through withdrawing our support of their institutions, is just another chapter of the ancient ‘War against Evil’ script that has been misdirecting human culture ever since the emergence of agriculture and technology 15000 or more years ago. And that the cure, the cure of the righteous (hateful) war, he notes, has consistently and repeatedly been worse than the disease itself mainly because of a substantial mis-diagnosis.
In the Thrive case the diagnosis is that it is the imperial masters are at fault. Charles proposes instead that it is the beliefs that underpin our culture and give rise to such irrational designs as the current money system (for example) that are at fault. He says “the money system and its underlying mythology necessitate the roles that the power elite fill. Remove those people without changing the underlying beliefs, and new tyrants will rise to take their place”.
This discussion – is it underlying beliefs or the resultant systems (such as the class system for example) – seems to me to be very much the crux of the matter.
For example much of the energy that has fueled the Occupy movement has coalesced around the idea that 99% of us are dominated by the 1% of them. In effect then, The Occupy 99+1% slogan is invoking the same conclusion as the Thrive film and would need substantial adjustment to align with the view proposed by Charles Eisenstein.
It is a hard, hard adjustment to make, I think, partly because blaming others for our woes, pointing the finger at someone else and crying ‘it’s your fault’ is deeply embedded in the meme stack of our current culture. Finding fault with others and avoiding looking at our own contributions to the situation is a common pattern – just look at politics!
However, it may be an essential stage. When I am drafted in as a grief counselor from time to time I use my own 4 phase version of a model first described by Elizabeth Kubler Ross – first comes the denial or pretense phase in which the client is unable to even bring themselves to accept that (in this case) death is likely or inevitable in the circumstances. Then, when that phase has been worked through, the client steps into an anger and rage phase when they look for someone else to blame for letting the situation come to this awful place. It is at this point the counselor offers to take the blame and draw out the rage. Beyond the anger comes despair, a deep sadness that often brings copious weeping and frequent riffs on early experiences of overwhelm before the final stage, constructive action or acceptance comes into view.
The key point is that the desirable constructive action phase is not even visible at the beginning of the process and, it generally can’t be invoked intellectually. A person needs the space to do the raging, the weeping and to express the despair fully before they can access their creative intelligence with ease.
Joanna Macy has a similar model – her potent ‘Despair and Empowerment’ work is constructed around the need for people to truly allow themselves an immersion in those forbidden/hidden feelings of rage and despair in order to clear the psyche, to liberate the emotional blocks to our full intelligences so we can go forward to find routes to deconstruct the myriad awfulnesses of our current culture, to hospice the old and midwife the new as she says.
So, that’s my take – the anger, the rage and the despair need to be felt, needs to be expressed as fully as possible, by all of us, ready to allow the emergence of our fresh and flexible intelligences, liberated from the rigidities of our current culture, to get to work on designing the next evolution of humanity.
Maybe that’s a prime function for Occupy right now, to find ways help each other to safely express the anger and rage? I am up for helping with that.
I’ll be asking Charles what he thinks of this approach when he comes to talk to us, online at Gaia University on 13th December, 8 to 9.30 EST. Care to join us? All welcome. Tickets $15 USD.
by:
Andrew Langford
Joint Founder and President of Gaia University
