Tag Archive for hate

Love is Wise

December 29, 2010 Consciousness, Economics, Emotional Energy, Politics, Values No comments

From a friend’s Facebook post, I saw a video of Bertrand Russell giving advice to people who might see the tape in 1000 years. His quote was “Love is wise, hatred is foolish.” What a great thing to live by—something that should be taught as the basis of all moral teaching. The Golden Rule is a corollary to this statement.

One might also conclude: “love is positive, hatred is negative,” or “love is positive emotional energy, hatred is negative emotional energy.” This is in line with a metaphor I’ve been thinking about lately that I think is very powerful as a guide to human activity: humans are emotional energy batteries. We store the emotional energy we receive and generate that emotional energy back to the world.

So if kids receive a lot of negative emotional energy in their formative years they transmit this negativity back as dysfunctional adults. If kids receive a lot of positive emotional energy they also tend to reflect that back as successful adults. Of course, there may be a genetic component that helps determine whether people are generators of positive or negative emotional energy. But regardless of a person’s innate orientation, negativity begets negativity and positivity begets positivity.

That’s why wars seldom solve things, particularly when the negative energy of violence does not have a clear target. WWII presented a clear evil with a mad dictator directing a well-defined, military entity. In the kind of wars we’re fighting now, the negative energy of violence is much more likely to create stored negative energy in a population than to curb future violence.

At some level our civilian and military leaders understand this, which is why there is an emphasis on building schools and stabile, secure areas in Afghanistan where people can live their lives without the negative energy of fear and violence. But our bombs often create more negative energy than can be overcome by other positive acts. And our fundamentalist enemies are big time negative energy generators.

The Network of Spiritual Progressives has a better solution.

“The NSP wants advanced industrial countries of the world to use their resources to eliminate once and for all global and domestic, poverty, homelessness, and hunger; provide quality education and health care for all; and repair the global environment. As an initial commitment, we want the U.S. to donate at least 1-2% of its Gross Domestic Product each year for the next twenty years, in the form of a Global Marshall Plan (GMP).”

The link is here: http://www.spiritualprogressives.org/article.php/gmp_one. This would certainly be following a wise policy as defined by Bertrand Russell.

Driven by Fear

August 18, 2010 Consciousness, Energy, Politics, Uncategorized, Values No comments

In a previous blog, I talked about positive and negative freedom—how progressives are more apt to promote the freedom to and conservatives seem more oriented toward freedom from. For example, the freedom to get married for gays and the freedom from government intrusion for business owners.

But perhaps a stronger way to show the difference between conservative and progressive ideology is to think about positive and negative emotional energy. Negative emotional energy is fear, hate, insecurity, greed, exclusion and a rigid set of beliefs. Positive emotional energy is hope, love, sharing, community, inclusion, and open-minded critical thinking. As one who is solidly in the latter camp, it seems pretty obvious which ideology is positive and which is negative.

Conservatives, Republicans and Tea Partiers all seem to be driven by fear: fear of immigrants, fear of government, fear of terrorists, fear of gays, fear of their tax money being given to the poor who didn’t work for it. They have a totally erroneous belief that the world consists of isolated individuals, some who are deserving—themselves and the wealthy—and some who are not—anyone not like them or poor. They don’t realize no human being is an island and that we’re all connected.

As pointed out in an excellent Alternet.org article (link below), de Tocqueville observed about the distinctive American mentality more than 150 years ago, “Such folk owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody. They form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus, not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.” [from http://tinyurl.com/29r2x3r]

Human progress is marked by successive expansions of the community of man, such as the abolition of slavery, the expansion of civil and womens’ rights, and an understanding that we all share one planet. Conservatives are desperately resisting this expansion of consciousness. They seem determined to hang on to views that are not consistent with progress, views motivated by the negative emotional energy of fear.

This site is about promoting an understanding that beneath each individual’s beliefs is a human who needs as much positive, supportive, and respectful emotional energy as possible. May hope, critical thinking and community, triumph over fear, rigidity, and greed. One can be optimistic because that is the general trend of historical progress. But we are entering a time of hardship, and fear is an unfortunate, negative, but natural human response. It will take more than hope for continued human progress and a more global species consciousness to evolve.

Positive Freedom and Negative Freedom

June 10, 2010 Politics, Values One comment

The Tea Party people keep talking about getting their country back. They don’t make much sense to me so I won’t pretend I understand the nuances of their complaints, if there are any. But I do understand that they somehow think Obama is out to take their freedoms away. They are angry and they think that the president represents a scary sort of big government that is going to take their guns, their hard earned money, and their constitutional rights.

From what I can get, they have a very negative view of freedom—freedom from as opposed to freedom to. They seem to believe that more government equals less freedom. The overwhelming impression I get is that they don’t want government to tell them what to do. The idea seems to be that the government is bad. It’s bad when it does stuff—like collect taxes, keep the economy from collapsing or regulate business. And it’s bad when it fails to do stuff—like protect the Gulf Shore from oil.

There doesn’t seem to be any consideration given to the positive freedoms that government can provide, such as programs to help lift people from poverty so they have the freedom to pursue their dreams. The role of government as I see it is to give citizens the freedom to pursue happiness. How is one free if there are no job opportunities and no affordable healthcare? How is one free if a big company can pollute one’s neighborhood with impunity?

Now I’m not saying that government can’t impinge on individual freedoms. But by focusing entirely on the notion that freedom means freedom from government the Tea Party people are only looking at negative freedom. Their whole movement is negative. It throws off nothing but the negative emotions of fear, hate and anger.

Fear and hate are not ever going to move the country in a positive direction, but anger might. For I too am angry at what has happened to this country. But this anger must be directed at getting government to do more, not less. Positive action is needed to put the brakes on our corporatocracy. But it doesn’t look like that’s in the cards. Most progressives aren’t angry enough and the Tea Party people are frightened of the wrong things and angry at the wrong people.

Under it all however, we all want the same thing—freedom to live a life of our own choosing, without fear.