Victimhood

I worked, by contract, in the criminal justice system for a few years and now I work, by contract, for a corporation which commits terrible crimes daily but they are crimes that are not detailed in the criminal justice system of this nation because they are crimes which injure everyone and everything – BUT – those of the injuries which are inflicted on you and me and the rest of Western society are delayed enough that in our collective insanity we can easily ignore them – or – for most people I suspect, remain consciously unaware of them.

I still do volunteer work in the criminal justice community and I don’t think of myself as being any better than the murderers and child rapists I have worked with, And I don’t mean that in the bullshit phony way that many others might delight in saying. I am in fact no better. I’ve never directly killed a human being nor had sexual contact with a child and I’m pretty damn confident that I will never do either of those things. These are not my areas of weakness. There is no appeal.

However I regularly inflict death and violence upon the Earth and its mammals and even upon human beings who don’t live around here. I do it all the time. Daily. I do it when I eat many of the things I eat. I do it when I buy a new laptop. I do it when I fill the tank with gas. I am an extremely harmful person. I know this with perfect clarity on my best days and on those best days I also reflect upon my total insanity of the previous days wherein my instincts had been duping my consciousness or when I’d been rationalizing my way to a benign self image which is bullshit.

I am no saint. I was not made “in His own image” and neither was anyone else. Humans are beasts the same as wolves and trees and mosquitoes and precisely like wolves and trees and mosquitoes, just about everything we do satisfies our instinctive survival instincts which, besides food and sex and protection, has evolved very largely to manifest as survival within the society which equals REPUTATION, which often includes MONEY (for money is simply a ledger of reputation). Just like the wolf, tree or mosquito, nearly everything we do is bent on our own needs at the expense of any other species. Wolves, trees and mosquitoes – and bunny rabbits and petunias are all, if you open your eyes and pay attention – entirely evil. They kill in order to live. Just like us. And just like the peacock’s tail and many other phenomena of evolution, we have our own unlikely elaborate errant evolutionary feature. It is in the human mind and it encompasses our cleverness, our perversely social infatuation and our illusion of consciousness.

When I keep that in mind I look around at all the nice things we are doing on the surface and it’s very easy to realize that these nice things do not make us angels; do not make us benevolent; do not make us innocent and certainly don’t make us better than murderers and rapists except within a childish viewpoint. Because all the nice things we do reward our vicious survival instincts. They improve our reputation. Nice deeds that we do, feed our own greed.

Now – does every single nice thing we do necessarily come solely from selfish desire or from the master instinctive mind’s need to fool our own consciousness (for we have to fool ourselves in order to effectively fool others)? I won’t suggest that. I like to imagine otherwise but the fact is, it is very simple to map all our good deeds to greedy beastly motives and pretty much impossible to prove otherwise…

BUT…!

So what?

I’m not trying to say that we are all terrible. Oh, I felt that way for a while, years ago. I thought we were all devils. All Satan. Satans in drag as gods. And for the record I suspect that the God mythology stems from that idea; that originally this personification of the source of the universe was set up like that: that Satan is the creator and God is his disguise. But that doesn’t matter. And I’m not here to slag religion today, even though it has perpetrated two of the primary nails in the coffin of humanity – the twin omnipresent fatal ideas – and I mean fatal to our species, literally: one, that we were made in his own image and two, that Earth is not heaven, that some improved heaven resides somewhere else. This is why humans do not understand that we are killers – we are killing machines above all else and why we don’t understand that Earth is the paradise and that we are mercilessly killing it and there is very little time remaining. By Earth I really mean the biosphere, not the crust, mantle, core and all the other bits and pieces. I mean the forests, wetlands and top soil and water systems and air and underground filtration – all of which we have massively crippled or destroyed in a tiny infinitesimal blip of time by any real (universal) perspective or context outside the illusion of our puny lifespans.

Look – all of this is natural. This is the natural state of humanity. It’s nothing to cry or rage about.

And it is okay to wake up from our insanity. It is okay to face up to the beasts that we are. We have every opportunity to evolve. We can close the gap between instinct and consciousness; between the devil and angel if you prefer. I have reliably witnessed this functionality. We humans did not ask for this circumstance. We were born into it without choice. We did not ask for this illusion of consciousness which is – in a sense – an evolutionary precursor to genuine consciousness. We learned to kill to survive because we had to. We are beautiful for this opportunity to become the first species of harmony. We are beautiful for this terrible struggle that we must endure. We are beautiful for our potential and for the suffering we inflict upon our selves.

I am human and I am okay with that. I am not a single entity. I know that. There is a beast in me and there is a weak pitiful beautiful consciousness as well. And when I look around I don’t see single human creatures. When I look at you I see two of you. It has become my normal everyday perception. Unfortunately when I talk to you I must talk to both of you at the same time and that makes things tricky and I confess, I don’t often treat that challenge with utmost diligence. Generally I am not keeping track of what I want each of you to hear; you and your evil twin! Creeped out? Still want to do lunch?

So this piece (if anyone is still reading it) was not planned in any way. It’s strictly a stream-of-consciousness ramble which was intended for one reason only:

I have many associates who open up to me and there is one who is trying to get together with me, largely to express something which they find terrible to contemplate; a suffering. A couple hints have been dropped and I am going out on a limb and I am suspecting that some kind of molestation has been brought to light. I am going to guess a child molestation which has severed – or potentially severed – close relationships. And while it can be very difficult for me to express certain ideas to someone who is looking to me for comfort, because they may not want to accept them and may be looking for other comforts which I regard as artificial comforts, and I may not play the blame game to their liking, I am safe in ruminating here in this anonymous space.

And to anyone who is watching their family break apart because someone they loved has been revealed a victim and another revealed a monster and just can’t wrap their head around it and just doesn’t know what to do or who to support in what way…

The answer, by my accounting, is not difficult to conceive:

You forgive because forgiveness is the only sane option. To forgive is to confess that what has happened was inevitable. All of causality is connected. All happenings are inevitable. There is no logic with which to escape this certainty.

You forgive the conscious entity in the perpetrator. It was the beast which was compelled to act, not the conscious person whom you loved and whom you can still love if you are strong enough; if you understand enough; if you are on board with these understandings enough.

You forgive but that forgiveness is not with impunity. You forgive but you do not forget. You accept that there must be consequences for the instinctive presence whose survival mechanisms dictated the act (probably multiple acts) while fooling the consciousness or rationalizing. For the sake of community safety and the victim’s well-being, there must be consequences. Those consequences could ideally take many forms but for most of us we don’t have the opportunity to manufacture ideal justice and we must trust the police and courts and prison system – as horrifically flawed as they are – to do the best they can.

You love and support the conscious perpetrator if you are strong enough – perhaps after a required hiatus from them – or else you tell them honestly, “I wish I could support you but I am not strong enough. I am only strong enough to try to support the victim if I can. If I grow in strength in the future, then I will return to you. For now I must abandon you for my own well being.”

You also have to support yourself by understanding the above ideas and remembering that we are all molesters; we are all killers; we all leave victims in our wake: the Earth (our only conduit to the survival of our children and descendants), the animals, the people of poor countries whom our masters have brutally exploited through the Western imperialism which gives us our impossible cars and furnaces and iPhones which we gladly accept; blindly or deviously or otherwise.

You support yourself by suppressing the urge to see yourself as a collateral victim.

You support yourself by looking at the victim and remembering that we are all victims and we all create victims and that what has happened to your beloved is not outside the normal mode of life. We all live by creating victims and for all of us our time comes when we are victimized; eventually to the extent of our death.

You support yourself by looking beyond the instinctive desire to see the victim as a tragic aberration though your instincts push you to see it that way. What has happened is essentially normal. (Do not think that this means that I suggest throwing in the towel. It can be our purpose in life to improve; to seek harmony, to reduce victimization of all sorts. We must endeavor to improve; of course.)

Unfortunately it is hard for me to suggest how to support the victim. The victim will have heightened instinctive survival forces working on her – or him. The ideal support is to absorb the above understandings but every victim will be in a different place psychologically and not ready for most of the above material. But ideally I would want to work toward those concepts as gently and patiently and slowly as required. Unfortunately it might be often best in the short term to trust the psychology community for help though that is far from ideal in terms of getting at the one true comfort in life; the comfort of truth; of genuine reality. Psychology will not rescue anyone from the Matrix but often they can do a decent job of navigating the Matrix.

The most valuable thing probably, for a victim to understand is that the victimization happened in the past and the past does not exist. The acts happened to a person who existed in the past who is no longer “you.” The only reason we seem eternally harmed by victimization is because we internally choose to. Our instinctive ego chooses not to let go of it because the pain of victimization becomes our identity and we cannot conceive of letting go of our identity – because we are all in the business of manufacturing identity instead of being real; a bi-product of the survival-by-reputation-and-denial game which the instinct forces upon the consciousness.

I suppose it is probably in actions that we can most-accessibly help victims: simply doing the things that demonstrate they are loved and without condition. But other than the pursuit of true consciousness and the resulting enlightenment which dispels the spectres of lasting pain and victimhood, which is evidently rare to achieve, the area of victim recovery is not my area of privilege; of strongest insight.