WHAT IS RIGHT ABOUT FEELING WEAK.
The one thing that human beings cannot
stand is to feel weak. In our culture today, weakness is hated and despised.
The question is, is that view healthy?
In my life I have met many ex soldiers.
My own son was in the army. Of the ex soldiers I have met I have never met
an ex soldier who had seen action and was still healthy. They may have had
the exterior signs of good health, but on the inside they were deeply
damaged people struggling to deny they were deeply damaged people. Why?
Because to admit the damage was to admit weakness and weakness is despised.
What is weakness?
Weakness is a feeling of vulnerability.
It is an internal signal that someone or something has just hurt us. It is
what we feel when someone says something cutting and it gets through our
defences. The very instant that this happens to us, something else occurs
that is very interesting. We get angry. Anger is like the roar a lion will
give if you get too close to its cubs or its food. As humans we can
internalise our anger by trying to hide it and acting as if the words or
actions done to us had no effect or, we can roar like the lion in the hope
that whoever made us angry will become afraid and go away. Anger is the
bandage we place on the wound of weakness to hide it. The bandage does not
heal the wound, it simply hides it from view. We hide it, because to admit a
weakness in a world where weakness is hated feels like social suicide. It
feels this way because all around us are images and texts telling us that
weakness is wrong. But is it?
Why is weakness hated?
Weakness is hated because we think that
strong is best. There are good reasons for thinking that strong is best. We
have all seen countless examples of the strong beating the weak throughout
our lives. Just consider the Olympic games for example. The accolades are
heaped upon the gold winners. The others are just also- rans.
If the strong always beat the weak then
weak must be bad. Right? It all sounds so logical. Until we look at little
closer at our attitudes to weakness, then we see that humans are selective
about the weakness they will tolerate. When it comes to our own personal
vanities and desires, weakness suddenly becomes attractive to us. To the
"swinger" for example, the strength needed to maintain a
monogamous relationship with one partner gets in the way of the weakness
that wishes to sleep around. At that point, justification comes into play.
Excuses for the behaviour are carefully honed, socially acceptable phrases
are used to counter any accusation of weakness. Thus the concept of
"swinging," which was formally taboo, becomes tolerated because it
is portrayed as an, "Individual choice" made between,
"consenting adults" in a spirit of, "mutual acceptance"
and anyone who objects is portrayed as, "Interfering with the human
right of personal expression inherent in the individuals concerned." By
carefully moulding the way society views an event it used to view as a
taboo, the weakness is elevated to the position of an apparent strength and
thus it becomes acceptable to society. However, the question remains, is
swinging OK? The answer has to take into account the way in which it has
been portrayed as OK. Were we all manipulated by the swinging community? If
the answer is, "Yes, we were," then we all know, that it must be
bad if the only way it could become socially acceptable is by manipulation.
We know this because we also know that manipulation of others can only
occur when the others have been lied too. It was the fear of weakness that
led to the manipulation of society by the "swingers" and the
challenging of the healthy values that society holds dear. Once we realise
this process, all the other ways in which we can be manipulated by the weak
become clear. Weakness then, is something that society in general regards as
dangerous to its cohesion. This is why it is seen as bad. However, in the
realm of the individual, personal weakness can be an enormous strength.
Weakness as strength.
One day a young man goes into college. He
is met, as usual by his enemies. They taunt him, as usual and as usual he
gets angry. There are too many to fight on his own so he reports them to the
school authorities. As usual, the school authorities do little to help him
and his anger grows ever more intense. He knows that so much anger is
dangerous so he tries to bury the feelings deep within. The insults and
assaults on his self esteem are very painful. They make him feel weak. They
make him feel like half a man. He feels disempowered. The most dangerous man
on the planet is a disempowered man. (Feminists take note)
One evening he goes home and sits alone
in his room. He gets out his "Rocky" video and sits and watches as
a man -- a real man -- fights against all of the insults and assaults made
against him by pounding his opponents in bloody blobs of pulp in the boxing
ring. Our young man is getting a clear message from this video. "Real
men fight back!" Next he watches his favourite tape: Rambo. He sees
Sylvester Stallone take the insults and assaults. He sees the mounting
anger. He sees the violence explode, accompanied by a lions roar of
incredible anger. The suppressed rage within the young man begins to
generate violent fantasies. His mind shows him pictures of himself taking
revenge on his persecutors.
The next morning our young man goes into
his fathers gun locker and takes a long thin package to school. His
tormentors, both teachers and pupils, die in a hail of bullets. Message
received! It is only then that the young man discovers that society takes a
dim view of such carnage outside of officially sanctioned areas for
destruction and he is sent off to eventually be fried in an electric chair.
What happened?
The young man indulged a weakness called
revenge. He justified it too himself by using props (The videos) and he went
out and indulged that weakness in a terrible and public act. (He acted out
his violent fantasies) In reality he was screaming, "I have had enough
and you are not helping me!" The reason, at least in part, why he was
not helped before his mind exploded, was because his complaints were
probably viewed as "whining" by those who could have changed the
tragic course of his life by acting on his behalf. His requests for help
were viewed as weakness and his revenge was viewed as weakness. In fact, his
weakness lays in the fact that he himself could not tolerate feeling weak.
Had he been able too, there is a real chance that he would never have
visited his fathers guns cabinet. Had he understood that his weakness was in
fact his strength, he would never have killed anyone.
The answer to the riddle of why this
young man exploded lies in the way in which he perceived his own
vulnerability. Had he indulged his weakness, instead of his violent
fantasies about revenge, he would have come to a deeper understanding of who
he really was, instead of trying to live up to a false perception of who he
felt he should be. The readiness to indulge the weakness of revenge (which
to him, felt like a strength) led him away from compassion and love and into
hate and destruction. I have little doubt that he felt good as he pressed
the trigger and unleashed death on his "enemies." He felt powerful
again. Something his tormentors and the unenlightened attitudes of his
school teachers had removed from him. With that gun in his hands and the
terrified looks on the faces of the bullies, he felt in control. That is why
I say and maintain that the most dangerous animal on the planet is a
disempowered man. It is a far wiser society that teaches men to be empowered
in a positive way than one which seeks to denigrate its male population with
constant put downs.
But what if the young man in my story had
explored his vulnerabilities instead of his hatred and revenge. How would
that have made him stronger?
Using weakness as a strength.
Everyone is made to retreat from
compassion and love by the need to hide weakness. Nations do it and
individuals do it. The man or women that abuses their partner does it. The
government that abuses its citizens does it. The ex soldier does it. I do it
and you do it. It is a basic human flaw that drives us all into external or
internal conflicts and wars. When we are hurt by others we become hugely
selfish and we experience a strong desire to fight back and hurt the one who
hurt us. We are driven by revenge and revenge leads to destruction. We see
it everywhere. A whole movie industry has been built upon it. Computer games
ooze with it. The spiteful spouse using kids to wound her other half is
indulging it. Feminists love and worship it. Journalists and politicians
preach it. Even some psychiatrists teach it. The harsh judge in the family
court is driven by it. Yet all of us know that revenge is really a weakness.
It is a "giving in" to a destructive human passion. We all know
that if taken to its logical extremes, revenge can only lead to anarchy.
That is why we have a justice system. It takes our revenge for us (Though a
true justice system does so after carefully examining the facts. Today, the
facts are often second place to the need for revenge). However, we all have
a choice. We can seek revenge or we can refuse to seek revenge. Our choices
are complicated by the messages we get from the media and from society.
The media love nothing better that to
urge society to give in to its most destructive passions. By doing so,
society will produce an endless stream of scandals that will keep the press
in jobs and money as long as society is willing to let them get away with
it. Consequently, immature journalists constantly urge revenge on the
population. They also sell lust, violence, greed, manipulation and over
indulgence in just about anything. It generates news, which is good for
them, but bad for the rest of us. The modern media are societies cancer. An
operation to remove it is long overdue. Society, which allows the press to
print and broadcast their rubbish and sell it to us all, gives a tacit nod
and wink to the concept of revenge and the other destructive passions,
despite knowing they are inherently bad for its own survival. Therefore,
most people do the same in their day to day lives. Turning these ideas on
their heads are the only way forwards for the human race if it is to survive
as a species.
The opposite of revenge is forgiveness.
Unlike revenge, forgiveness takes effort and so it is less popular than the
automatic instinct for revenge. Worse still, forgiveness is perceived by
many as a weakness not to be indulged in. However, had our angry young man
indulged in forgiveness instead of revenge, a whole group of people would
still be alive today and the grieving of parents and colleagues would never
have begun. Society would have become a safer place and all of us could have
relaxed a little more. It may not sell papers but it does save lives.
How does forgiveness work?
To examine how forgiveness works it is
first important to see what it is not. Forgiveness does not let the guilty
party off the hook. It does not make the guilt of what they have done
magically disappear. Only the application of justice can do that. A person
is assumed to be innocent until their guilt is proven. After the guilt is
proven and the sentence served, the persons innocence should return. I say,
"should" return, because in a society driven by revenge, the
concept of "forgetting the sin when the sinner has paid the price"
is virtually unknown. We make criminals pay long after they have been
released from their sentence and wonder why they keep on offending! It is
right to make them pay. It is wrong to make them go on paying. One aspect of
forgiveness is the application of mercy to one who has been made to pay. The
application of mercy takes love. Love is killed by the need for revenge.
Hence, there is little in the way of mercy around today.
Forgiveness then, is the opposite of
revenge. It is the way we look at things (personal perception) that
determines if we are able to forgive another. If we carry anger for what has
been done to us in the past, then how can we forgive? More importantly, how
can we be mentally healthy? A person carrying a huge weight of rage is not a
healthy person. -- Incidentally, I believe that the rise in female violence
and the teaching of feminist revenge are directly correlated. -- It could
even lead, inexorably, to the gun cabinet or its equivalent. Forgiveness is
the release of personal anger by the application of mercy towards the one
who has angered us. Mercy can only come when anger has been extinguished.
Anger can only be extinguished when a conscious decision is taken to
extinguish it.
The victim of a crime is hurting no one
but him/her self by carrying hatred and rage for the criminal. The criminal
is unaffected by that rage unless it becomes personal violence. (In which
case, the vigilante has become a criminal and is no better than the
offender). To admit the need to forgive, one must first have the
determination to examine and to lay down ones anger. That takes courage and,
as all we readily admit, courage is a healthy emotion. We prize it greatly.
Therefore, if we have the courage to let go of our anger we are not being
weak but strong.
Is all anger bad?
Anger can be the most positive emotion
you will have apart from love, if you use it wisely. Getting angry is not
wrong. Staying angry is wrong.
In the work I do inside the men's
movement I have many reasons to get angry and I often do. What I will not do
is to allow that anger to infect me to the point where I cannot function
under the weight of it. If I did, I would find a gun and some feminists and
introduce them to some hot lead. Instead, I try to turn my anger into
positive action. I rarely allow it to get out of control to the point where
I can no longer think about anything other than my anger. At the same time,
I regularly clean out my internal anger cabinet by forgiving those who have
hurt me. By doing so I can stay on top of all the things I have been getting
angry about. The trick is to get angry but not to indulge the passions that
the anger tries to enflame. Including revenge. Instead of pursuing personal
revenge I tend to pursue corporate justice.
By watching myself carefully I am alerted
to the need to clean out my anger cabinet by the coherence (or otherwise) of
my thinking. If my thinking becomes too cloudy then I am overindulging in
anger and need to do some forgiving. It is remarkable the way these
exercises in self discipline free me and restore my personal energy levels.
It also really pisses off feminists who would love me to stay angry and
incoherent.
Your strength lies where you look last
for it. In your weakness,
George Rolph
No More Silence.
terd