Recently, I shared some thoughts on prejudice. About the what's and the why's of The Different. Because Different is often the twin face of Guilt, let's talk about guilt-trip.
The moment we are born a pair of eyes is thrust into our faces examining our breathing, pulse, color, reflexes, sounds, i.e. our APGAR score is being assessed. "Hello! And welcome to Guilt-Trip!" Of course, we are expected to breathe normally, to exhibit stable heart rhythm, to manifest our sucking and grasping reflexes, etc, otherwise, our entry into this guilt-ridden world would justifiably need assistance.
So far so good. We grow, we sleep, we poop our diapers, we take in stable amounts of nourishment in a myriad of forms and somehow manage to exhibit expected growth on predetermined medical charts. All this is wonderful and magnificent and leads us on to our physical and mental maturation and formation of ourselves as human individuals. And then...
BAM!!!
It all begins at the potty, at the playground, at the daycare center or while visiting at grandma's and grandpa's or any with other social-caregiver group...Enters the expectation to per-form and meet a norm, to con-form, re-form, de-form, in-form. Spelled out alternatively, we learn to perform people's expected behaviors, traditions, mores, to conform to people's expected ideas/values, to inform them of our intents, report misbehaviors and malcontents, to deform our views to suit people's perceived systems of behavioral normality. In brief, we are asked to learn to reform. For, that which we are is not quite good enough. Is it ever? And, that which we are or what we could be, are not always socially acceptable. Especially in early age. But more so in adulthood as we grow conditioned, prejudiced, dependent upon opinions and approval, as we learn to navigate the tricky labyrinths of human relationships.
Enter teenage age. BAM! BAM! Boom! Boom!
The individual is born. Rebellion, blood, scratches, bruises, adulthood. Welcome. Now - survival.
Fight! ... if you can...Fight! but they didn't tell you how...All they told you was don't do that! ...Fight! ...but "you shouldn't, you mustn't, you ought not dare to"....
For the "good of society", in line at our front door, waiting patiently, await entry, in no particular order of importance or superiority, the notions of Looks or Self- Image, Education or Expertise, Job or Career, Profession or Skill-set , Marriage or Relationship, Childbirth or Child-rearing, Social Life or Integration into Social Circles, Traditions, Cultures, Legacies. Add, multiply, divide, subtract, square-root it, vector it, sine and cosine it, do whatever equation you need to (hey, I am not a mathematician!) - you end up at DIVISION. All members of society neatly divided and separated in clear, pre-defined, easily manageable, well-controlled categories and expected models of behavior. Divided, mind you, is not equivalent to Different. One is an imposed category, a pigeonhole, a cubicle, the other is a hard fought, hard-thought choice. Division truly doesn't work. It will inevitably reach a dead end - white but what shade of white, black, Asian, Latin, Eskimo? Gay, straight, in the middle, neither? Transgender, no-gender, multi-gender? "We don't have these categories here", or, as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad postulated - "there are no gays in Iran" :)
But what if...?
But what if we wake up day in and day out at a desk, or work space, or just at no particular place at all, and instead of pouring out our creative energies into the new day's labor, we are miserably stuck? Why is it that a particular painting or file isn't coming out well at all? What if the essay sucks, what if this music piece is too hard to finish, what if the person mom and dad want us to marry isn't "us" material, what if we don't belong at home, what if we find ourselves lost....?What if, instead, we are responding to years upon years of well-meant but guilt-laden instruction, of being told "good, but not quite", "proficient but not sufficient", "clever but not intelligent", "promising but unmotivated"...What if we have encapsulated so much opinion and judgment and advice from well-wishers-would-be-meddlers that one given day we find ourselves pointing the gun of accusation in the mirror, firing "you are worthless!", "you are nothing!", "you are no one!","you are not good enough!", "you don't matter", "you are wrong!", "you don't make enough!", "you deserve to be treated/talked to this way!"....
What if...
Or, is it that we are used to cultures and heritages where we perpetually kill the different in the individual, where any stray attempt at Differentness in thinking, viewing, in approaching, in taking an attitude is subjugated and stifled? We are masters of the art of killing the " I "with the guilt supplied by "them"...be it our own "I" or that which depends on us...
Why so much pain for so little gain?...
Guilt-trip is a very cruel, medieval thing. Especially when it is premeditated. Guilt-trip has no home country, nationality, race, religion, age, gender. It has one thing - the thirst for control. It is triggered by the loss of control. It becomes an attempt (or success) at regaining control. Why manipulate an individual's or a group's feelings, beliefs, energies? Why bring up a uniform society of children, mothers, fathers, men, women? For, here, room about third gender or no-gender does not exist at all...
Why, because it is important to think and feel in control (which we truly do not have). There are so many expectations aside from the usual necessary do-good/do-no-evil dichotomy, that make one's life miserable and are absolutely unnecessary. We are gendered and pre-conditioned to expect from others, in a way similar to that in which others except from us, certain behaviors that suit our tastes, beliefs, programs. All of us, without exception, are programmed to expect certain things (lucky guy or gal who still roams somewhere the wilderness raised by wolves!). Agreement should not be one of them. Yet we all want to be agreed with. We have the need to be superior, convincing, heard, understood, respected, and sadly feared (parental and/or patriarchal authority implies fear).We all want to find similarities and forget differences. Some differences are worth not shedding, while many others can be comfortably dispensed with (you like soda, I like cheese). However, once a disagreement arises, many times, out of prejudice or out of the fear of the Different, our control or the ill-perceived idea that we are in control, collapses and we intuitively rush to re-gain it by all the necessary measures at our disposal.
In fact, more often than not, these measures are negative, wrong, unnecessarily dramatic. As far as prosecuting crime judicially, it is a necessary, albeit an evil, ugly, measure. As far as making people say, like, do, feel, deny, disassociate from or associate with what we would like them to, we seldom use reason. When we perceive we could no longer reason with (i.e. convince) an individual or a group, we use GUILT-TRIP. Reasoning ends the moment quantitative-qualitative competition begins and sound-argument driven discussion becomes mute. Convincing the other side of one's superiority by making it feel inferior is not a reasonable, logic-driven argumentation. Silencing an opposition based on economic superiority, age seniority, national, ethnic, racial, or gender superiority, as well as aesthetic superiority, is only possible through either oppression, violent or non-violent, censorship, and the subtle art of guilt-trip. And no, women are not the only queens of guilt trip. Many years of patriarchy attest to the opposite. Freud, enough with the mothers!
We succumb because we are conditioned and gendered to be liked. We oblige. We follow, we strive, we achieve mainly because we want approval. Some of us manage to turn that aim onto themselves. To get precisely our own approval. For many of us, inevitably, at some point some residual voices whisper in the brain's cobwebbed niches that exact same chant which others have so perpetually chanted to us. Be more accomplished, be more aesthetically pleasing, be more agreeable to us, be more like us, be more of our taste and predilection. Be more patriotic. Raise your kids more like we raised you. be more like your brother. Yes. And no.
Very few individuals can truly remain independent outside of the grip of societal guilt-trip. One example I can give is Albert Einstein. He seems to have not cared much for the opinion of any country, religious or ethnic group. He managed to remain himself. Saying so, doesn't postulate that he lacked regret for some of his actions/allegiances. Being a human being, i am sure Albert did.
But hey, it takes courage to fight a sweet old grandmother who is wagging her finger at us for the things she perceives we are doing wrong or not doing at all. Even harder, when she is our old sweet Grammy. If her views need fighting we hold back not to insult her. Even if she borders on the fanatic, dogmatic we hold back because of guilt-trip. It takes a case of egregious discrimination or criminal behavior, of course, to make us jump out of our seats! but the rest we are conditioned to let go by the mechanisms of guilt-trip and meddling.
Why can't we always jump out of our seats when our personal lives and spaces, our individualities are being attacked or at stake? Why is that fear of disappointment so strongly gripping us? Because we don't want to disappoint the people we love, albeit many times, they have disappointed us greatly. We forgive and move on. We don't want to hurt the people we love, albeit they have hurt us plenty. Hurt is always stronger with people of our own families, of our friendly circles, with the people we do business. And yet these are the people that guilt-trip us the most. It is a vicious cycle in which our misbehavior or the perceived DIFFERENT behavior fires back at us in the form of guilt-trip, and then we are bound to rebel and misbehave again to show that we felt oppressed and hurt by the guilt and accusations that were thrown at us. Beautifully ironic - the guilt-trip perpetrators are pre-conditioned by the same vicious cycle of guilt that has once been used upon them.
Dare break the circular tradition of Guilt-Trip? Say NO!.... ?
How sweet and simple it sounds and, at the same time, how harsh and hard to do it really is. It is hard to say NO to things which are twisted in a way that subtly manipulates without confronting. It is very hard to say NO to things which might (or might not) result in hurt based upon the perception and reception of guilt, on one hand, and on the other - the agenda and the misrepresented and misplaced sensibilities of the perpetrator. Time and time again we end up guilt-tripping ourselves as products of the cultures of guilt we grew up in and still live in (no nationality or society is immune to the methodic guilt-tripping of kids and adults). "If I don't do that, I will disappoint so and so." "If I say this I will offend such and such." "If I stand up for myself I will be excluded from this and that...". Since when did it become alright to stop ourselves from thinking for ourselves, from taking charge of our own destinies? Since when or why is it alright to be asked to hold back or change in order to please the expectations of others?
IT IS possible to find equilibrium. But it is one of the longest, most tedious and uneven processes and endeavors we could take. As far as convincing others of our beliefs and views, we never truly could. Nor we should. But as far as showing them that we could believe, behave and be different (not divisive) and still care about each other - this truly is a tricky, sticky, sobering and maturing moment. One of the loneliest but most rewarding moments in life!
