Is it Not Insane?

How to get Back to Being Human

This piece was created in response to a conversation where I didn’t feel heard as a woman. It is about things I think about all the time and need to be said. What is writing for, if not about how we feel and what we see.

Here is What Needs to be Said and Heard:

There is this idea, that humans are naturally violent, aggressive and greedy. I disagree. Those behaviors are the result of trauma. This philosophy is European, and a very Christian way of viewing humans. This thinking has had destructive results.

Europeans experienced 2000 years of trauma by the Catholic Church, which spread its message of fear and performed its cruelty across the indigenous people of Europe. They burned people at the stake, imprisoned them, tortured them, created holocausts against the Cathars, Jews and Moors due to heresy and then there were the years of the witchcraze, where some villages in Germany burned nearly all the women. The church colluded with nobility to control the population. That has an ongoing impact us to this day, psychologically and epigenetically. Traumatized people traumatize other people, especially other people that are different and threaten the patriarchal world view. These are things I studied in my Master’s Program. My theory about this is grounded in my understanding of both our history and of trauma.

How else do you explain what European settlers did to Native Americans and to African’s they enslaved? While our government (an extension of Europe) was busy breaking treaties, taking over land, creating multiple trails of tears; regular people, settlers and slave owners, were doing their own unspeakably brutal acts. I was at an interpretive center about The California Trail along the freeway in Nevada this summer. In the museum, one of the exhibits about the natives showed how often settlers would invite the native people to their camps, share dinner with them and then murder them. Lynchings are another example, and although they don’t happen so much like they used to, black men are frequently lynched by the police in this country. This is not sane behavior. So many ways European Americans behaved cruelly, dehumanizing themselves and others. How does one become so disconnected to their humanity that they can perform these acts? It is not normal or sane. If it is, then we need a new definition of sanity.

The Mechanism of Unspeakable Acts

I am reading Carol Gilligan’s Why Patriarchy Persists, and what I am reading only confirms what I have thought about often. She says patriarchy persists, because of power dynamics AND loss aversion, which circles around our need for belonging. The research shows boys giving up intimacy in peer relationships between the ages of 4-7 to fit in. Girls run into this in adolescence in a different way. The outcomes are girls shutting down their voices and boys shutting down feeling. Connected relationships are replaced by inauthentic relationships, as the threat of being real, empathetic and vulnerable would lead to “nobody wanting to hang out with me” as one girl in the study said.  The choice is to give up deep connection to conform. That loss is painful, so the psyche creates barriers to intimacy to hedge against further loss, but by doing so, chooses loss.  I remember this, being mute and afraid to be authentic for fear of being ostracized. I remember not trusting anyone, shutting down my authenticity, losing myself. This loss of self and the disconnection that comes with it is what makes unspeakable cruelty possible

I feel a deep truth in this. We also play this out on a larger scale. We are so afraid of facing the ongoing destruction of the planet and the loss that entails (which facing might lead us to take pro-active action) that we avoid thinking about it at all, and thus ensure an even more unspeakable loss will occur. We are all culpable. When I bring up predictions about climate change in conversations, I often watch people deflect, shut down. People don’t like Cassandras. We prefer to remain in denial. We cannot face our grief. Our only hope is in embracing it. It feels overwhelming, but what else will make us stop the destruction?

Patriarchal Hierarchy Targets Women

The indoctrination, which upholds hierarchy, is not knowing what we know, not knowing ourselves. To me, this is also insanity. The type of thinking that is so disconnected that one doesn’t care if people get hurt. Everyone is getting hurt in patriarchy, but women’s voices and bodies are especially targeted throughout our entire lives. My awareness of this is a painful long path of experience and research and trying to understand. I know I am not off track, as it is confirmed by the research by Gilligan, Brene Brown, Gabor Mate, and many more who have researched and written about it. I read a lot. In ways I feel driven to learn and understand why we are where we are.

The eradication of Roe IS about the control of women’s bodies despite the other nuances of how people feel about it. I know those nuances, I have lived them, made choices around them in a way that no man can experience. In my case, I had an abortion because it was my life or the life of my fetus. I chose my life. It hurt. I didn’t choose it easily. The choice to abort and remove a life is difficult for everyone. However, if the movement was about that, it would be finding reasonable ways, like birth control, education, encouraging men to change behaviors, to reduce abortions, because those  would lead to far fewer abortions. Their way only pushes them underground. You don’t see any calls out there for vasectomies (even though many conscious men are choosing this option), or any other means to educate men around their behaviors. They want to eliminate sex education and all the responsibility for “purity" is put on women. Why? It is clear they want to control women. That is their real goal. For the most part, ‘Pro-lifers” don’t care about the babies after they are born, especially if they are black or brown, or they would be doing something to eradicate poverty, etc. They aren’t. They lie about their real intentions and convince good people they are “pro-life.” Some are in a panic about not enough white babies being born. It’s about maintaining the hierarchy. Period.

The creators of Project 2025 want to stop women from voting. There is a whole influencer movement to push women back into Trad wives. There are organizations across the world working to take education away from girls. Misogyny is rampant.

A Telling (Common) Event

In Patriarchy rape is common. In the last few weeks, news about the Pelicot rapes in France came out. A man drugged his wife and filmed 80 men raping her. This is an abhorrent crime. These 80 men were local. One has to ask, how can this happen? How can 80 local, small-town men think it was okay?  It speaks to a kind of insanity in our culture. It’s not “just” one sick man here and there. That story, along with the revelations about P Diddy and older revelations about Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, et all are telling. It is too many men, maybe more men than not. Those crimes would not happen in world where women (and children) were important. It would not happen in a world where what is human in us is cultivated. Instead, patriarchy cultivates the ongoing promotion of trauma responses as a necessary tool to uphold the hierarchy.

I know the history inside my bones. Is it any wonder I am terrified?  Can you understand my rage? I want to sometimes express that rage and feel heard.

What Can We Do?

In the midst of all this, Harris and Walz are spreading hope, and I hope to God they win. But the insanity will not go away even if they do.  Look what happened after Obama was elected, a huge backlash that has done 10+ years of damage, taking us backwards.

Dialogue will work to change some minds, and it is important for us to reach across aisles. However, the only thing that will work in the case of some people is real consequences. I learned that in my work with the formerly incarcerated.  Many men I have worked with got there due to domestic violence and the only thing that stopped them was the consequences. They went to prison where they were forced to take classes and learn. In that case, it was constructive to have compassion and help them sort through their trauma, which as stated earlier, all men have in patriarchal cultire. Of course, not all of them stopped the violence, even after all that.

I don’t think “punishment” is an answer. However, well thought out consequences and removal from the ability to do more harm is necessary. It will be necessary for some of the people at Trump’s rallies, as they intend to do harm, to kill people. They intended that on Jan. 6 and we are fooling ourselves if we don’t see the real danger we are in by these people.

Is it Not Insanity

Is it not insane to destroy our world, to pretend nothing is wrong, to think the fires, hurricanes and disasters are not consequences of our actions as the science shows?  Is it not insane to brutalize the women men say they love? Is it not insane to control women to the extent they are dying because they can’t get help when they miscarry, and that so many other pregnant women live in Ob Gyn deserts, risking the babies they carry which “pro-lifers” profess to be saving? I could keep listing the insane, the list is long. Our behaviors are insane because they hurt everyone and everything.  Even those who benefit the most financially from these crimes against humanity are hurting themselves.

The lack awareness of the self and what it really means to be human, that is insane: insanity created by trauma, which is endlessly recycled, and which has been going on for centuries. It started somewhere, it was ramped up by the Romans, then by the Church and it has spread across the world. It’s depressing and hard to look at. I feel it is my responsibility to look at it in solidarity with the people most harmed by it: indigenous, people of color and people in poverty.

Hope?

I don’t believe we humans are meant to be this way, and therein lies my hope. The small pockets of tribal people left are for the most part not like this. They remember how to be human. It is going to take a lot to change things. Electing Kamala is a start, but only a start. We have to be willing to face our grief and trauma head on.

Maybe it doesn’t matter where or how it started, but I think it does. We need to understand ourselves to get beyond the shame of what we have perpetuated. The theology of Patriarchal religion is ultimately anti human, leading to disconnection and unfillable holes inside us, and it is destroying us and our world. It has already destroyed so many people in the America’s and around the world. People that could have taught us how to come back to our humanity.

I reserve the right to call the things I have written about here and see around me insane because they are so disconnected and so destructive. All of us carry that insanity on one level or another, because our society is not well, and some among us carry it to an extreme.

Being Human Again

To be Human is to be empathetic, connected, compassionate, to be in relationship and authentic to ourselves, to have our unique voice in relation with other unique voices.  In Why Patriarchy Persists, the author’s explain research where mother’s are instructed to hold a passive face and not respond to their infant for two minutes to observe the infant’s response. The infants immediately felt the disconnect and screamed and cried, working hard to reengage their mother. The mothers felt intensely uncomfortable and couldn’t wait to re-engage and repair. Those infants are showing us how being in relation, being connected, being seen, is core to who we are. Empathy, compassion, love are our natural endowment. Only honoring that, and grieving the loss of it has the power to bring us back from the brink.