Radical Emotics

I am reflecting on the lack of coherence across people who, by and large, are far more aligned with one another than not but whose reflexes are to criticize each other and their ideas rather than giving support. I am intimately familiar with this impulse, both as critic and receiver of criticism. It can become a reason not to share one's ideas, art, dreams, or feelings with others. It creates a culture in which one's public being is chilled.

It is not about the criticism itself, though, and the pursuit of coherence does not eschew feedback and opposing ideas. Criticism as an artifact of logic is a puzzle to be worked on, not an implicit condemnation of a state of being. Yet very often I see the latter possess the passions and find socially acceptable release under the guise of reason, with the end result draining energy from the target of criticism rather than using the criticism to fuel growth. Why is this? Or, put another way, why are we, who might be collaborators towards mutual liberation, in such a habit of shutting each other down?

It's quite an irony to me that those concerned with freedoms of the spirit so often habitually practice caging the spirits of others. Perhaps they go hand in hand, insofar as to get a sensitivity to the pain of unfreedom often requires having experienced the caging maneuvers many times (likely when young) such that once grown the behavior is copied reflexively in spite of it being directly contrary to one's conscious values.

In practice this ends up materializing as otherwise intelligent and kind and even radical people waking up as sleeper agents of conformity to shut down the transgressive ideas of those around them under the auspices of "testing" those ideas. I am left wondering why my gut-check reaction to hearing somesuch transgressive idea is to find why it won't work, or to have questions to more perfectly model its implications. The latter "curiosity" is especially difficult to get inside of while it is happening--after all it's normal for someone to want to understand better the thing you're talking about, right? Yet the questions can come from different places, with different agendas, and hide behind "it's just a question". To counter the idea: why ask questions rather than offer support and invite the speaker to follow their own line of thinking without such direction? Sometimes this is done out of love, to move their attention towards something life-giving, but more often it is done out of unthinking fear and drags the speaker's attention about into disintegration, often without the questioner having any conscious awareness or intent that this is what they are doing.

Lack of trust precedes the underlying emotional posture held by the person adding decoherence by criticism. It is the uncertainty that other people might know things one does not combined with a requirement for proof of the grounding of that knowledge which may actually be impossible due to our separation.

To become radical in a culture of negation requires developing different ways of emoting, and I don't simply mean in the shallow sense of "wow that's so great". It means a changed interior, requiring the therapeutic work of grief and letting go and becoming anew, whereby one's felt experience of the other brings with it the implicit coherence-making faculty of trust in their being.

Finally, this is not to advocating stoking the narcissism in one's friends. It is to prioritize making space for coherence before criticism and finding similarities before disagreements. We all contribute to the crisis of solidarity or its solution one relationship at a time. When the nature of attention in an information abundant world is to scatter, we can support both ourselves and each other by more consciously taking turns and being additive, building the energies between us, and taking personal responsibility for the forces inside ourselves which seek to shut down the people around us.

I hope these ideas can be used as an invitation and not a bludgeon, so sharing and using them is done with the spirit of "I want to practice this with you more" not "You need to do this for me". We're collectively in the process of learning these things together and no matter who is better or worse at it, we all benefit from the experiences of one another. To use these words as a metric would be to defeat their purpose.

Regarding the pains experienced when others fail to receive us, or criticize our ideas even when they would by their own admission be in support of the spiritual aims of those ideas, I can say it is those pains which on reflection have allowed me to practice valuing and trusting more of what is outside of me.

So let's get radical and trust in the basic goodness and wordless knowing of those around us. Cultivating loving solidarity we can change more than we know.