On Being Shown a Way to a Peaceful Global Civilisation

The great religious and philosophical influence in my life is the teachings and life of Baha’u’llah. Taking for himself the appellation, Manifestation of God, the fulfilment of the promise, Baha’u’llah’s life and teachings are of a consistent high-mindedness and ethic, that convinced me of the truth of the matter of His declaration and His mission.

His mission is expounded in over 100 volumes of letters, treatises and books, and include a book of laws (Kitab-i-Agdas), treatises on practical mysticism such as the Seven Valleys, and practical spirituality such as the Hidden Word, and a full exploration of His station in relation to the teachings and prophecies in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Kitab-i-Iqan).

As a number of hotspots of conflict around the world are uprooting millions of people, Baha’u’llah’s declared future and mission to the people might best be encapsulated by these exhortations:

“It is incumbent upon every man, in this Day, to hold fast unto whatsoever will promote the interests, and exalt the station, of all nations and just governments. Through each and every one of the verses which the Pen of the Most High hath revealed, the doors of love and unity have been unlocked and flung open to the face of men. We have erewhile declared — and Our Word is the truth — Consort with the followers of all religions in a spirit of friendliness and fellowship. Whatsoever hath led the children of men to shun one another, and hath caused dissensions and divisions amongst them, hath, through the revelation of these words, been nullified and abolished…

Of old it hath been revealed: “Love of one’s country is an element of the Faith of God.” The Tongue of Grandeur hath, however, in the day of His manifestation proclaimed: “It is not his to boast who loveth his country, but it is his who loveth the world.” Through the power released by these exalted words He hath lent a fresh impulse, and set a new direction, to the birds of men’s hearts, and hath obliterated every trace of restriction and limitation from God’s holy Book.

” O people of Justice! Be as brilliant as the light, and as splendid as the fire that blazed in the Burning Bush. The brightness of the fire of your love will no doubt fuse and unify the contending peoples and kindreds of the earth, whilst the fierceness of the flame of enmity and hatred cannot but result in strife and ruin.” (Bahá’u’lláh, “Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh”, Passage XLIII)

An important aspect of Baha’u’llahs exhortation is in the realm of our Being. One of his tablets is dedicated to a list of how we are to be to realise the greater mission of the unity of humanity. He is a part of what He writes:

“Be generous in prosperity, and thankful in adversity. Be worthy of the trust of thy neighbor, and look upon him with a bright and friendly face. Be a treasure to the poor, an admonisher to the rich, an answerer of the cry of the needy, a preserver of the sanctity of thy pledge. Be fair in thy judgment, and guarded in thy speech. Be unjust to no man, and show all meekness to all men….” (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, Passage CXXX)

On a personal note, I found over the course of a few decades of my adult life, that I seemed to have certain limitations to my development of the practical application of such virtues. I felt that I had, apart from the occasional outright failing, “hit a ceiling’. I felt that I had explorations in life and contributions that i could be making but which in some way I seemed lacking.

Nonetheless, in picking up the yoke of those contributions, especially in creativity, the arts, and theatre, I found an access, a gateway, to another world of human development – ontological coaching. This particular gateway lead me to the thinker, Werner Erhard and the offshoot of his work, the company now called Landmark Worldwide. The work I have participated in through Landmark including the Being a Leader Course in which I met and interacted with an ageing Werner, himself, has had a number of impacts:

i) a breakdown in regard to what i was unable to see regarding my own lack of integrity in the world;

ii) an simple, appreciative, caring acceptance of myself as cause in the matter of my lack of integrity and inauthenticity; and the real limitations of my mind that are a function of my genetical personality and a considerable number of physical and psychic assault events over the course of my upbringing; and

iii) An equally appreciative and exciting recognition of my capabilities and skills that were developed over many decades, including the lessons I learnt from what I failed or did not so well. From this recognition I could aspire to something bigger then who I wound up being that gave me a safer, more controlled, push through life, to participating more fully in the global landscape.

Werner Erhard’s most fabulous work since the 1970’s and the widespread impact of that work on millions of people, was influenced by his vast reading of philosophical and religious thought, a powerful epiphany, and conversations with other modern influencers of thought. In all that Erhard took on the philosopher of Martin Heidegger, a mid 20th century German existentialist, and member and sympathiser of the anti-jewish views of the Nazi Party during WWII and to the end of his life in 1976. Heidegger’s philosophical work and teaching at the University of Marburg in Germany in the 1920’s, inspired many students and fellow philosophers including Hannah Arendt, and the French existentialists such as Satre . By the 1960’s and 70’s Heidegger’s work was presented face value to the world without more than a nod to his Nazi history. The post mortem release of Heidegger’s diaries, showing his dedication to German National Socialism, has certainly un-nerved many who have come to appreciate his works on Being. As might be expected, the philosophical camp falls into those who reckon that Heideggers work can be separated from his Nazi attitudes, and those who reckon they must be entwined. One of the most recent explorations of Werner Erhards early mass coaching practice, “The Forum”, is Bruce Hyde and Steve Kopp’s book, “Speaking Being” ¹ that has an analysis of how Erhard’s work can be seen as a practice of the linguistic and existential philosophy of Heidegger,

I am personally of a kind who can sit with the work of another, regardless of their ideology, and see whether there is something I might find interesting, of wonder, or even true. For example could it be true that, as Heidegger says, there is a ‘throwness’ to human existence, a facticity, such that how existence show up to us is already informed (by ourselves) and is disclosed through our moods. In practice, from this type of view, it is only a short step to asking of anything we have an opinion and as such have an emotion or mood that comes along, “is (xxx) true”? However, developing my capacity for sitting with the diverse view has been also under Baha’u’llah’s encouragement, “Warn the beloved of the one true God, not to view with too critical an eye the sayings and writings of men. Let them rather approach such sayings and writings in a spirit of open-mindedness and loving sympathy.”² without which I may have maintained many of the cultural attitudes I was raised within, some of which are harmful in social practice to others.

While this can seem like a vicious circle of questioning the answer and never coming to a conclusion, indeed my experience is that there is a capacity for humans to holding the inquiry while also standing in an immediate working conclusion. This does require some deft cognitive ability and is not a strength of many people. For those of us for whom it is a strength, there is also an ethical response to also sit with other’s less complex opinions for as long as it requires. Under the practice of ‘consorting’, we might think of the action as providing a clearing or space of listening for anyone to express themselves fully and being ‘gotten’. While consorting is a moral exhortation of Baha’u’llah, “being gotten’ is new language designed by Erhard to express being able to authentically reflect a person’s expression back to them so they can see that indeed you ‘get’ what they are saying. Yet in asking why we do that, the existentialist would say, “in order to (achieve, consequence, avoid)” while Baha’u’llah would also say “for God”. Rather than “God” Erhard simply states, that “to be a leader (consequence) you will need to be given being by something bigger than yourself”. And the placeholder “God” if defined as what is ever unknown and unknowable, the fundamental essence of pre-existence, is as big as it gets.

On the other hand, in the world of action, Baha’u’llah is emphatic about the role of justice both as a personal response and attitude and a social and political response. “Justice and equity”, He writes, “are twin Guardians that watch over men. From them are revealed such blessed and perspicuous words as are the cause of the well-being of the world and the protection of the nations.” (Bahá’u’lláh, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, P23)

This brings me to Hannah Arendt, student and lover of Martin Heidegger, who fled to Paris in 1933 after arrest by the Ghestapo. Arendt was Heidegger’s friend to the end. In an interview about her book, “We can Change the World.”, Lyndsey Stonebridge, says Arendt understood that friendship was not transactional. Arendt laid out in a paper called “The Banality of Evil” that it takes a mass of a population to sign up to a progrom like the holocaust. And the people are not evil, they are just making ‘banal’ / ordinary choices given the sweep of a cultural message, and do not believe or see they are comitting a crime. She spoke of the holocaust as a crime against humanity on the body of the jewish people, not just one more anti-semitic progrom. Arendt was also influenced by Husserl who was fired by Heidegger because he was a jew. Yet fully from Husserl and Heiddeger we find a philosophy that can be a practical pathway to a greater human being, regardless that Heidegger himself fell into a narrow superstitious rut of it, perhaps in part to assuage himself of the existential nihilism he experienced as a lapsed catholic and an existentialist.

Werner Erhard, in noting this nihilistic quality in existentialism, discovered, and asks us all to discover, that nihilism is not to be battled, yet an inverse solution lies in moving through the nihilistic awareness of existensialism. To understand this, we must understand that nihilism is the idea that the world that humans understand is based in language, and particularly language that contextualised everything. If we take away the context, e.g. ‘a tree provides shade to humans’, we are left with ‘a tree’. It is the thing “tree” that exists, not any such meaning or context or purpose, we might apply. The existential provocation means that everything is meaningless. Werner Erhards, genius insight was that it is all empty and meaningless including empty and meaningless. Erhard in being able to express this, created a practice for building a ‘dasein’, a being as a clearing in which anything could show up, or could be created. In ‘getting’ that empty and meaningless is empty and meaningless, dasien (I-Me) can be a future that is really relationship(s) of my own choosing. Simultaneously, Erhard saw that all of our relationships were already of our own choosing. So instead of feeling we are choiceless or driven at times, of any of those choices we are driven by habit or upbringing, we can also move into the created future as our choices. In the clearing of empty and meaningless is empty and meaningless, all choices can be divested especially when they take on the complete attribute of meaninglessness. This is not to be mistaken with anything paranormal or super human. This is not about wishful thinking or fantasy. All invitations into a clearing can only be given as allowed by current states i.e relationships including those with ourselves e.g. our bodies and embodied states. In such clearing we can create a future for justice for the whole world, and see that future fully expressed in the world. Baha’u’llahs writings are replete with the created future of a global civilisation and the characteristics of humans and communities and governments required to see that future fully expressed.

In the life of Baha’u’llah and his son and successor, Abdu’l-Baha, certain religious and political authorities murdered many of their followers in Persia. While chastising these persons, they always invited said persons to correction of their moral behaviour. Indeed one such person, on accidentally meeting Abdul-Baha, did implore forgiveness and was accepted caringly and forgiven. This was an extraordinary act, overwhelming to witnesses who knew the suffering and who couldn’t quite grasp the response.

In this day of so many millions dispossessed by conflict, by so many who perform assault because they are provided political and even corporate approval, we must continue to chastise the bad players and the banal supporters, to step down, to reflect on their moral compromise, and to ask forgiveness. Some in the current conflict, like the Nazi leaders, will face war crimes tribunals. The rest like Heidegger will face a lifetime of tolerance. My hope is that the vast majority will face reconciliation and shame and be offered radical forgiveness. That is the only way to a peacful, just world. To those currently in authority I implore you take it.

1Speaking being, Bruce Hyde, Steve Kopp, Wiley 2019

2 Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, CLIV

Justice Accountability and Forgiveness

It is the season of Christian Lent and the Baha’i Fast. The wonderfulness of the teachings of Jesus Christ has lead to one signal cultural message down through the ages: no one is taboo by culture, love and care for everyone you come across, and who abides by that forms a brotherhood and sisterhood, a community, a church.

Baha’u’llah, founder of the Baha’i Faith, pulled justice, the expression of true brotherhood through the larger socio-political lense, into the centre of a religious framing that includes the acknolwedgement that we are a global civilisation that requires integrative tools beyond that of the individual or the community.

Two qualities lie at the interface of the moral individual and the moral society: accountability and forgiveness.

Accountability is the voluntary open and honest exploration of one’s personal life. Given that the culture of accountability by which a society can go about its business in a secure and confident manner requires formal processes social process of accountability, all issues regarding the conquest and subjugation of another people, the takeover of lands, and the expression of this the enlightenment colonial powers performed on many generations after the first conquest, layers embodied trauma (psychic and physical) on those generation until the epigenetic qualities are ingrained in the lives of people living in a more supportive social environment.

Accountability and justice cannot be performed without recognising the true nature of the impact to the conquered people. Indeed I would argue that it is so difficult to outlive this trauma over generations, it is the one thing that has taken generation after generation to war for the past several thousand years. Only the very hard work of accountability can give the conqueror ease even as their descendants carry the trauma of their murders down through many generation afterwards, also living tortuously in our epigentics. Only a full and willing accountability provides a pathway out of our social traumatised behaviours.

When a full and willing accountability has been formally established, what some call a truth-telling, then two redemptive actions can be motivated: a recompense for the losses caused by conquerors (true justice); and, because the recompense can never be fully made for genocidal policies or slavery, the victims across time might resort to radical forgiveness for the shortfall. I would encourage the victims to forgive or at least play with forgiveness even if for the rest of life, for in that lies a path out of the malaise of victimhood to a true empowerment. However we need to be honest with ourselves that forgetfulness is forgiveness (not the other way around) and forgetfulness is only induced by being offered a full accounting of wrongs done against us and a full recompense where it is needed both individually and socially. Such social acts of social integration allows the perseverating mind to rest and turn to other more developmental, transformative and productive living.

The Labels We use for each Other

Recently a person who identified themselves as ‘neurodiverse’, called me ‘ableist’. I got it that he meant something derogatory. For sure the wikipedia definition of ableism is: “discrimination and social prejudice against people with physical or mental disabilities. Ableism characterizes people as they are defined by their disabilities and it also classifies disabled people as people who are inferior to non-disabled people. On this basis, people are assigned or denied certain perceived abilities, skills, or character orientations.” What was quite strange about the conversation was that I was counselling the person that, unless there was some particular challenge they were having that they needed other people to know about, the self referencing as neurodiverse seemed to be avoiding the very real possibility that they were actually just a minor variation as most of us are in the ‘mainstream’.

I also got on some reflection afterward that, yes, as a physiotherapist I tend to the world view that humans live in a world as more able or less able to negotiate the circumstances of the world, and even survive. Nearly 100% of my clients have acknowledged that they need assistance to optimise their movement so they can negotiate as many of the circumstances of the world as they can. Those few clients who are unable to acknowledge their incapacity are also those clients who are not committed to the problem-solving and action they require to build a more capable life. They seem also more likely to make complaints about their doctors and other health professionals and are probably disproportionately represented in complaints to health professional tribunals. The great many of my clients have been on a restorative path and returned to near full capability. A lesser number have been on an adaptive path and not only require physical training but assistive devices such as wheelchairs or prosthetics.

I have worked with many people whose brains function differently than most of us, what might be called in the statistical tail of brain function. Of course, where on a bell curve someone might reside really depends on the characteristic being studied. If we studied running, some people with autistic spectrum disorder (ADS) will be in a long statistical curve of non-running. However if we were assessing a specific intellectual performance some of those non-runners may show up on the statistical tail that might be referred as genius or savant. And many people I know socially, including a cousin, a neighbour, a colleague, have a minor disability to do with social interaction and cueing. And while I’ve wondered about myself at times I have realised that socialisation is challenging, more so for the person who is more honest about what they know and don’t know about life, or who are empathetic even of the more difficult to socialise with. For many people assessed as ASD, their main handicap is that they come across socially as a bit weird. I don’t resile from using the word ‘weird’ even knowing some will only see the word as having derogatory connotations. I invite the reader to read it without derogatory connotations. Indeed I have often used it for myself both playfully and seriously. As the human world occurs to me mostly in a certain way, I occur to myself as weird in comparison. I occur to myself as weird, a lone wolf, a ready study, a powerful human. I also see that I am reassured with my way of working in the world and my work view while anxious that at anytime I have made a seminal error that will threaten my life work or my survival. I revel in the flourishing of diverse ecosystems and human life while knowing that food growing requires the management of natural competition, even cutting out most of the diversity, supporting the diversity only where that supports the optimisation of the food

I write these things about the way the world occurs to me, including myself, in order to bring out in the open, what I am trying to deal with in asking the question, What is it about labels?

It is clear that labels are very useful and perhaps the primary order of language in human beings communicating with each other, in setting up the primary relationships between one human and anything else. Me, tree, thee.

Modern science, through the fabulous invention of Latin, is the epitome of labeling language. Now that Latin is not common language, a comparison between scientific nomenclature and common words for things reveals an important feature of language. Nomenclature for most people provides stand alone words for an individual thing or set. The common word for that set inevitably comes with history and a number of social responses that are provoked from how we were taught that label from childhood. While flexor digitorum may not evoke much to many people, it’s common concept as the muscles and tendons of the grasping hand looms large in our embodied and literary lives.

You can note from the writing here that labels are enhanced by how we denote what they are doing. The hand grasps. The tree shades. The (grasping hand) looms large. In these three examples only one comes close to describing a real phenomenon. The hand does, indeed, grasp. The other two phrases are contextualised to how we humans perceive the world as given purpose to us and not how the object is. A tree only grows as it grows and has no purposefulness. A shadow is cast from the tree and we can find that useful on a hot day, but the tree has no purposefulness called making shade. Anything that ‘looms large’ is a subjective human experience and I used it to enrol you, the reader in my subjective experience in the hope that you will be a good social animal and go ‘oh gosh, of course, how amazing’. And again, while there is a little sarcasm in the flattening of the language here, I invite you to read this without any sense of derogation but as a nod to how we truly are and why we use language.

So how do we divine labels?

It is clear that labeling is identifying, discriminatory or distinguishing language. Me, tree, thee.

When we contextualise language, as we do even when we utter, me, tree or thee, the distinction is determining what belongs or doesn’t belong. Weed, wog, nerd, jock. I’m guessing each of these words provide a host of imagery, memory, emotions, to all readers unless you actually haven’t had them in your social life. And so from belongs or doesn’t belong, we have tribalism, propaganda and war. Some words are so tribal formed and provocative that I, as a white person, can’t use them while a person from another race can use them blantantly and often. It seems the use of the word in that tribal context is an attempt to impress something to other people of various ethnic groups in a social setting or audiences to an artform. I personally find myself disgusted such is my education for contextualising those words as extremely derogatory and lowly, just as I am disgusted by one particular scatological word whose reference is even more derogatory of a people. Thus I won’t write them here.

Yet it is equally evident that language’s utility for contextualisation has pre-verbal sensibilities. I do not ascribe to the theory that language is the defining motivator of human behaviour. I can only agree that language is a modulator of behaviour. That is not to say language isn’t a powerful tool. I would assert language is the most powerful tool humans have, even above the hand (although that relationship is particularly tight, anyhow). I have seen how language can be utilised to provoke a transformative movement in behaviour. Yet it can be misleading to imagine we are talking about common day speech as transformative. Transformative language is a whole host of linguistic, performative and artistic techniques that requires expert facilitation like any specialist domain. To bring this paragraph back to full circle, transformative language has it’s power in deriving verbal or artistic expression from pre-verbal sensibilities.

Pre-verbal sensibilites are those which human being evolved long before the human being found they could bring a vocal quality to express some of the things they were experiencing. The human being has evolved, not only to survive in a particular ecological world, but to become its dominator. The human being has dominated the world by dominating each other. From our pre-verbal ties, we have a pecking order based in physical power. The pecking order has been refined in the linguistic era as society itself became more complex. Labels that define social discriminations are a double edged sword. On the one hand, they can be support our human tendency to look after each other by language shortcuts through which we tell each other, this person requires assistance, adaptation, particular consideration etc. On the other hand, labels can be contextualised so as to impoverish the nobility of another. Whether it is to use white middle aged man to only mean, an inconsiderate power-monger, or low functioning to mean ‘can’t do anything responsibly’ or ableist to mean ‘horrible person who doesn’t agree with me about disabilities’, such contextualisation renders the label itself useless in the very real sense of what we need from language to make human society work better.

There are two important types of expression that we use in every day life: linguistic abstractions and phenomenal language. We often use these loosely in common day conversation such as to leave our hearers or readers bewildered, objectionable. Without understanding how these expressions work, we fail to manage them in a way that advances our human society. Linguistic abstraction, while not speaking about real phenomena, can certainly provide contextualisation of society and the future that can inspire societies e.g the labels ‘citizen’, ‘democracy’. Even the word ‘man’ and ‘woman’ provide powerful representations of something that doesn’t exist for the related thing that does exist – a man, a woman. This is better understood as asking, “how does a (specific) man be a (abstracted) man’.

Phenomal speech is the most useful speech for daily conversation. It is the speech of distinction and to be distinct must be specific and accurate. I do not agree with the objection to the use of well-defined words but rather object to the ill-defining of words. So it is quite relevant to distinguish between high performance and low performance, high functioning and low functioning with the addendum of specific performance e.g 100 metre dash or number of sales this week, or specific functioning e.g. high functioning downes syndrome will mean low IQ with significant capacity to engage in conversation and reason. Either way the Downes syndrome will point to a quite low level of intellectual and physical prowess, with a tendency towards openly expressed emotional states. On the other hand high functioning ASD simply has little usefulness as a distinction as it is just saying, ‘that capable slightly socially weird person’, while low functioning ASD has the usefulness of indicating that the degree of ASD is causing significant capacity limitations in communication, possibly intelligence and physical prowess. Ultimately in every individual case, these distinctions are only ball park references from which individualised evaluation of actual capability is essential is we want to adopt appropriate communication techniques so that the person can engage with anyone else in their social range, parents, siblings, school friends, disability workers etc.

It is clear people and even policy-makers have gotten confused about disabilities. The confusion has been introduced by able-bodied and intellectually high functioning people without fully considering the vast range of phenomena that we place under the linguistic abstraction ‘disabled’. It has been further advanced by highly intelligent physically disabled people who are also failing to consider the real plight of people whose impairments render them with limited agency and no possibility of improving such state, perforce of their intellectual and physical incapacity.

Being an Australian

This is not anything like the definitive article on being an Australian.

Today, 26th January 2023 is the official day chosen as Australia Day, the day when Australian’s celebrate our national identity.

I begin by acknowledging that for the First Nations’ peoples of Australia, this day does not reflect for them the possibility of being part of that national identity but rather reminds them of the confusion, conflicts, deaths, wars, cultural and family disruptions, loss of home and betrayals. I take a moment here to acknowledge that the First Nation’s peoples do not have a treaty with their English conquerors or the current other Australian peoples, nor have they ceded the lands known as Australia.

Take a moment, reader, to imagine the pangs you may have felt when first leaving the home and community you grew up, or a home you raised family for 20 years and then left. These pangs of grief are created by the embodied relationship we have to a place that has become an extension of our selves. We might say, the place is Us-I . Indeed if we take but another moment to quietly reflect who ‘I” am, it might dawn on us that who “I” am is all of the consistencies of our world, from the pathway to the door of our house, the way our family moves around in it, the rituals we have during the week and year from doing breakfast to organising special events. All these consistencies in life flow through, wrap around, bear down, and lift up, our own physical structure. They are who we become. And when another such as a grown child, leaves that place, a tendril of our own structure is pulled away. We might think it is like real physical pain. It is exactly real physical pain. The embodied life “Me”, “I”, “Us” is not a separation at the skin. The skin, and every other sensory organ, is a million dynamical attachments, keys, joints, between our perception of a discrete, contained and constrained, and controllable part of ourselves with what we perceive as the external, fluid, unstable, uncontrollable life. While we often think of ‘life’ as the thing we live in, this is just a perceptual comfort. WE ARE the life we life and everything that shows and has attachments with our attachments, that we draw ourselves against or that draws against ours. When a thousand of those attachments no longer exist to tag to, we notice it just as we notice with pain, the loss of a finger to a sharp knife.

Now imagine that the consistencies of Us is many thousands of years in the setting. Now in a very real sense, every rock, every blade of grass, every movement of air, every call of a bird, rustle of a lizard, enjoins Me-Us to rejoinder. In that place-time, where does my consciousness lie, where does my perception end? Perhaps Me-Us is the vast landscape the my hundreds of thousands of ancestors and me have roamed. Now imagine that every rock I can no longer evoke in my daily or weekly or annual ritual because some new intruder has pushed me back from rejoinder. And pushed me back. And broke the rock. And took me right away from all the landscape. Might not, at some time, the loss of so much of Me feel like I am dying, hanging on by the merest thread, perhaps not even a core, perhaps just a dissipated structure without connections, joints, attachments, really only 10% of who I WAS, perhaps less.

What would it take, then to restore Me to Who I AM?

With what capability is remaining of Me and what capability is available in the new space-time and the Others now here, I and Everyone and Everything is moving, feeling about for connection, and anticipating rejoinder.

Much of our landscape is now the landscape of our national population and the structure we have built, physically, politically and socially. Some of us, like many First nations people, have not been party to the new structures and find there are few places for attachment and connection, and the social landscape yet has offered few structures for attachment and less for wholehearted rejoinder. As a white fella I can only imagine from the resonances I feel in my own bones of ancestoral loss and tearing down and building up and other crimes against Me.

We are not yet, Australian, we who live here and only have a home, here. We are short by millions, billions, of attachments to the vital elements, the life within the geographical lines, each other, the First nations’ peoples.

We will vote for the Voice this year at referendum because we will want to have the whole of everything and everyone with the lines, in rejoinder. That is what it means to be an Australian.

We will move Australia Day to a moment when we saw that, indeed we were all in this national project together, as equals and in the possibility of ritual and rejoinder.

I will finish this reaching out and seeking new attachments by this more lighthearted but so very true reflection on who We are, Australian, Not yet Australian, even Un-Australian. Enjoy.

WHY MEN ARE VIOLENT and WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

Domestic violence and depression are companions of unresolved anger. That men hit women partners is because they can dominate the woman physically; and they often have the woman isolated with them.

On the first issue, I have dissuaded much bigger men from hitting me because presenting in rage is an unknown for men even when faced with a smaller man. A man in rage can be very dangerous, and many men know this and can read it because they have experienced the effects of rage as they grew up.

Violent men are ignorant cowards when it comes to expressing their anger, anxieties, mistakes, to others and their partners. I write this without malice. It is what it is. Violent men are also ashamed of their actions. They avoid talking about their shame because, as long as no-one else gets to know, they can maintain a facade of ‘nothing happening here”. Keeping up that facade leads to more effort, more anxiety, more anger, more violence.

By the time a male is an adult, violence is addictive and should be treated like alcoholism: once given to violence , always given to violence. On that, we males do have violent tendencies and some of us are even trained by our governments to disinhibit those tendencies and go to war. In a ‘peaceful’ society, on any given week many males are training to be violent towards each other in constrained rules called rugby.

It requires a lot of training in respect and calmness and being around women and listening to them, to mitigate these effects. There is a huge social and political responsibility around this that is not being met and so many men are disinclined to believe there is another way of being. TEven suggesting thatthey have an excuse to continue their behaviour is a disempowerment of the most damaging type. It is a complete failure of leadership.

Men need real men to lead them and lead them out of their cowardice around emotions and relationships. The cycle of violence can only be broken by: the woman leaving immediately and without return no matter how redeemed he become – it’s time for another life; and the man to enter an anger management program immediately and for the rest of his life. While he may not have hit a woman for 10 years, the man must consider himself at risk to others for the rest of his life and continue to be grateful for his non-violence and continue to talk with other men about his ongoing shame and guilt around domestic violence. We do need structures to bring men into. We are at a loss on this matter however I was given an inkling when talking to the bartender of a biker bar about a Men’s anti-dv event. The bartender, in welcoming the invitation, said, “Here, when we are aware a member has committed an assault on a woman, he gets banned.” Men need an explicit place in male society, and, through that, society and relationships with women. From that place, when a man commits assault, he becomes exiled from that society for a period in which he has provided or shows he is providing adequate recompense and safety fro the woman. This would go for assault on other men. As I intimated above, we shouldn’t believe in ‘rehabilitation’. Rather we should believe that a violent adult male is always a violent adult male. However, we only need it to be proven that his behaviour is manageable. And of this we can place measurable criteria. That’s not to say I don’t believe in the transformed life. Yet there is nothing for society to add in measuring the behaviour. A transformed life is simply one in which the behaviour requires no attention, it is created by the tranformed internalised context of the perpetrator. While that means their life is peaceful by the internalised context, and that requires no effort to maintain, to society it is the peaceful and recompensed behaiour that is important.

We absolutely need to make women safe and give them lifetime support towards realising their potential and raising their children to reach their potential, in the context of the loss and heightened responsibilities in their life. Exile into a gaol, of men, fathers, is a punishment to their partners and children. It is a loss of presence, relationship and resources from their lives while a man gets free shelter and food. Rather the violent man should be exiled in community, in a known house under productivity, service, and educational orders. If this is implemented in the first case of a man assaulting a woman, the knowness about that man assists the community ensuring prevention of escalating violence. Likewise it engages that man with his incompetence and set him on a path of emotional competence. Anyone should have a right to maintain a proximity order for as long as they wish, of anyone who has assaulted them. We should all give up the shame of being assaulted. And when we see someone breaking a proximity order with another, we should immediately intervene, call for policing support.

Can we, as a culture, find our way to a straightforward process to mitigate all human violence, resolve all justice issues associated and keep people, especially women and children, safe. I believe if we can be straightforward about the lesser cases of domestic violence, we can begin to save women’s lives by also mitigating the worst excesses.