Corruption is an addiction, living in peace is a skill

digitalfirehose (58)in #life • 6 years ago

At some point in the last few years, I've taken a different view towards politics. I'm bored with the old politics because most of it is about one faction imposing their will upon another. And the solution often offered is to push back and gain an advantage so that one faction will have control over the other. All of this is about power. Power struggles, concentrations of power, building moats around power and so on. It just seems like there is never enough power to go around, is there?

In my observations of the use and abuse of power, I see what could best be described as addiction in action. With every abuse of authority, comes a hit, a rush of adrenaline, an endorphin. What follows is an effort to cover up that abuse of power, and with that comes another rush of endorphins. There is a certain cycle of abuse, a ritual, that is followed by the abuse addict.

And all of that abuse and secrecy is enabled by people we call, "enablers".

One example of abuse is human trafficking organizations. These are organizations dedicated to capturing children or adolescents before they have fully formed identities, before they can take care of themselves. Once captured, the people engaged in human trafficking, can sell kids as if they are just property. It must be a strange sort of existence as a person who can find a way to justify this behavior. But all human trafficking organizations operate on secrecy, complete with the endorphin rush and the enablers to make it happen.

Similarly, I've seen two stories in the last 20 years where men took young girls into captivity and enslaved them. Elizabeth Smart was one of them, kept captive by her abuser for 9 months. The other, Jayce Lee Dugard, was held captive for 18 years by her captor. In both cases, the men involved had enablers, wives who knew what was happening, but did nothing to stop it for fear of their own lives.

The purpose of this article here, is not to criticize the perpetrators, for enough ink has been spilled upon that topic. The purpose here, is to briefly explore the cycle of abuse, how the cycle can be terminated, and how that cycle of abuse can be replaced with a cycle of peace. To be fair, I'm not even sure that the topic can be adequately covered in a book, let alone an article, but I want to give it a try. To get something done, one must at least start, and I hope, once started, the inspiration will come.

In my experience, and over 25 years of reading, exploring, and introspection, I see most of humanity, engaged in action based on external motivation. Most of us are doing something for something else that somebody else has. A 4 year-old kid sees his younger sibling with a toy and takes it from him. An adolescent boy steals a bike. A politician takes a bribe to give an unfair advantage to a local business over the residents near the business. All of this behavior is based on external motivation.

Similarly, when we work for money, that is, to do work that we find no meaning in, but we do it to get paid so that we can in turn pay the rent, buy our food and clothing and other necessities, that is also externally motivated behavior. Consider the plight of the prostitute, the drug pusher, the grunt for the mob. They are doing work for the money without regard to conscience. They are selling dignity for money.

We learn to be externally motivated by our parents. We are taught to believe that if we do "X", an act that is forbidden by our parents, we will get "Z", some form of punishment. We also learn that if we do "A", approved behavior, we will get "$" or some other kind of reward for said behavior. Through this system of punishment and reward, we are conditioned to operate based on external motivation. Punishment and reward does not teach us to look inside to see what we really wanted. Punishment and reward does not teach us the skills to achieve the desired goals, either.

Punishment and reward makes us susceptible to unwanted or unwarranted influence. Ever heard the phrase, "selling influence"? I see it often when reading stories about corruption in politics. The conditioning of ourselves for external motivation, either through punishment or reward, can make young people susceptible to cults, gangs and other organizations that exercise power without justification, upon others. Power over others appeals to people who have been raised on punishment and reward.

I read somewhere that "the exercise of power requires justification", or something to that effect. A culture, even a world, raised on punishment and reward, will not question the exercise of power, even abusive exercise of power. They are only interested in avoiding the punishment and getting the reward. There is nothing in between (the ears).

Although I have been raised in this system of punishment and reward, I was raised by parents who at least had the presence of mind, to teach me to think for myself. Satire, humor, and other forms of expression were encouraged (though timing was important). I learned to find and do the things that I enjoy the most. I learned that it was important to consider how I felt when I ate something or did something.

My humor is not personal. It is intended for you and me to laugh together. I choose to act based on how I might feel after doing something. Will I feel guilty, shameful or remorseful? I avoid doing those things that bring those feelings. I can recall being in school fights and feeling my hands shake after the fight, adrenaline still running its course through my body. I learned to avoid actions which brought the adrenaline.

I am, for the most part, internally motivated. I am hard of hearing, so I tend to go inward to seek peace. I have learned, after many years of experimentation to err on the side of peace. I have learned to talk through conflict, to avoid issuing ultimatums or threats that I have neither the capacity nor the will, to carry out. I just keep talking with the other person until the storm in their brains passes so that we can have at last, a conversation.

I now believe that for every instance of corruption exposed at the top, we can, with enough insight, drill down to child abuse, drill down to a life of reward and punishment, a life where a child was told to give up dignity for some reward or for some peace from the aggressor.

With every act of aggression comes that hit, that adrenaline or some other endorphin. Likewise, with every act of kindness, comes an endorphin, usually, oxytocin. Oxytocin is used to induce pregnant women to give birth early. Oxytocin is the hit you feel when you get a hug from someone in your life who is important to you. Oxytocin is what you feel when you shake someone's hand. What would life be like if we directed our actions towards the peace of oxytocin instead of adrenaline or fear?

What if, instead of enabling the abusers so that we can have our peace from the aggressors, we enabled our kids to think for themselves? I believe that it entirely possible to raise our kids without violence, to think for themselves and to seek no advantage over others. Rather, we can raise our kids to be internally motivated, to have a conscience without subscribing to a religion (punishment and reward again), and to simply err on the side of peace.

Kids raised in this way will not tolerate enabling behavior. They will be willing to talk about abusers and enablers. This is a requirement for anarchy to work, by the way. Reputation matters if you have a conscience.

So every time I see a headline about how someone was caught with their hand in the cookie jar at the White House, the UN, or the Communist Party in China, I see that reward and punishment is alive and well. Every time I see someone attempting to effect change at the top by exposing corruption, I am reminded of the following quote:

Real change always comes from the bottom up. Grassroots activism, community leadership, and organizing at the state and local level - this is how we will win. --- Bernie Sanders

While I believe that he is mostly correct, I don't think he goes far enough. Real change comes from bottom yes, but the bottom is lower than what Bernie suggests. The true bottom, can be found in the people who have the least amount of power right now, to change our circumstances: kids. infants, toddlers, kids and even adolescents, have very little power because they are dependent on us for everything until they find their own power.

I believe it is possible to end the addiction to corruption. We can end that cycle of addiction by raising our kids through collaboration, not force. We can redirect that energy from a quest for reward to peaceful collaboration to solve problems. We can redirect that energy from seeking relief or shelter from the aggressor to collaborating together to solve the problem that aggression claims to seek to solve.

Unfortunately, to make this change, I think it would take a generation or two, of a large proportion of kids to be raised without violence. To be raised without conditioned behavior based on reward or punishment, we must raise a generation (or two) of kids who just enjoy what they do.

Love is letting another person grow, to the greatest extent possible, while doing no harm. Kids (and adults) exhibit challenging behavior when they lack the capacity to respond proactively to the demands of their environment. Living in peace requires skill.

Think of the last time you learned a new skill. I can. I had a bit of struggle with a tent I bought from Ikea. I had unfurled it at a park with my kids and was enjoying it until I hear one of my kids say, "I need to go potty" (there was no restroom at this park). I needed to put that tent away in a hurry. I looked all over the internet to find solution. I tried 8 times to put it back into the sack it came in. And when I finally figured out the key, I embossed the procedure into my memory somewhere. and every time I fold that tent, I feel joy in doing so.

Every kid derives joy from learning new skills and exercising them, and improving them. There are no exceptions to this rule. I would rather live in a culture where the people derive joy from learning skills and applying them to the problems they encounter than a culture bent on extracting every possible reward from everyone and everything else they can find at their mercy.

To have peace in the world, we must raise kids who find joy in solving problems and the exercise of the skills learned from solving those problems. That also includes helping others too. Yeah, that's peace.

Write on.