Charles Eisenstein

In my experience as a man, most of the men I’ve had around me tend to avoid talking about what is going on inside of them, not sharing and describing what they feel and how this relates to their unmet human needs.

"The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, 'Please do not tell us what you feel.' ... If we cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed."

— bell hooks

This quote resonates with me. I want to share a few more gifts and ideas that have come my way in the past few years.

Last year I learned about the work of Pia Mellody, who believes that that there is not just one type of abuse, ‘disempowering abuse’ - shaming someone and making that person see themselves as ‘less than’ others, but two types of abuse. The second type of abuse, which I think American culture suffers, is what Pia calls: ‘false empowerment’, making a person feel like they are somehow 'better than' others. This leads to people having what she calls other-esteem, in contrast to reality-based self-esteem - which someone on the internet described as: "other-esteem happens when we base our self-worth on external things".

Psychologist Terrence Real has a great summary which I copied from his book ‘How Can I Get Through to You? Reconnecting Men…

> I've always been a little confused about whether or not these authors asserting that propaganda "destroys truth" believe they personally know what is true and what is false

Not all propaganda. I mean, the White Rose called their own leaflets propaganda.

Also, are you saying they can't possibly know? I know whether I am sitting on a chair or not right now. Is this being arrogant and closed-minded, or just me knowing what I know? Even though know the word "chair" is a simplification, and ultimately we "know" nothing that isn't based on axioms we came up with -- but to go down that rabbit hole every time for everything would indeed destroy the capacity to form convictions and to organize in groups.

> Another useful tip about propaganda is "propaganda doesn't care how you feel, only how you act"

That's true for the "oldschool" variants. To put a point on it, I'd say the modern variant very much cares about seeking out and destroying all kernels of people owning themselves rather than being leaves in the wind. The point is to break people down to be able to instill and enforce anything on a whim, not to instill a particular conviction that they then make their own, and which would become a problem once the agenda changes. The capacity to make anything their own, as well as anything that springs from within them, is "the enemy".

> The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

> There are no dangerous…

> it is worth commenting that there are trivial ways to remove DRM from Audible files.

say i share with a loved one or close friend the de-DRM'd audiobook. now their computer becomes infected with a RAT, and 'my' file/audiobook fingerprinted with the proprietary fingerprint algorithm (to identify me as the unique purchaser, the same techniques are probably applied industry wide) is leaked online as a consequence (or their backup system is compromised or any kind of infosec violation out of the hands of my friend). next, Amazon corp identifies me. their immediate next step: lawsuit on me as an individual because 'my' file is now leaked on p2p filesharing sites and forums without me knowing about it.

capitalist-enforced DRM is cancer because it's artificial scarcity imposed on a non-scarce resource (computer data/audio file). it's the result of trying to work with the limited and violent toolsets of a capitalist economy.

the internet is still young and there are likely so many better options for publishing things.

for example, an author i've followed for a while by the name of Charles Eisenstein has a deal with his publisher, North Atlantic Books, to initially launch his book as paperback only, and then after a six month period, his whole book is available free to read on his website (also of course there's the wonderful Library Genesis).

The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein:…

Often I have had a similar struggle to the one you described because I have not found my own personal reason for being grateful. I know now that it's because I was often living inside the narrative of people who were close to me, that was not my own. Being captive in this 'not-self' narrative has been quite deceiving. Taking back my own narrative has been super powerful for me.

In other words, I no longer think I am weird for not feeling joyful or being grateful for things for which I have not yet been given the chance to ask myself if I actually am grateful for them, or if I actually personally value them at all. Being stuck in someone else's narrative, or a cultural narrative, is to me like being in a jail, because the narrative will not correspond to my feelings, because it's not mine.

I now use the Nonviolent Communication set of strategies to listen to my own feelings, and use them to learn which of my human needs are unmet.

I also had Compassion Focused Therapy, which brought me back from the dead.

The writing of Francis Weller has inspired me beyond belief. If you're interested, this is a taster: https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/478/the-geography-of-sorrow

Or if you prefer listening, I love this podcast with him: http://charleseisenstein.org/podcasts/new-and-ancient-story-podcast/episode-04-grief-and-reverence/

A lot of philosophers have had similar (but different) takes on this phenomenon over time.

Plato:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-metaphysics/

Jiddu Krishnamurti:

https://charleseisenstein.org/video/it-is-no-measure-of-health-to-be-well-adjusted-to-a-profoundly-sick-society/

https://www.wildmind.org/blogs/quote-of-the-month/krishnamurti-measure-of-health

Terence McKenna:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7391624-we-have-gone-sick-by-following-a-path-of-untrammelled

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5998836-the-reason-we-feel-alienated-is-because-the-society-is

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/9243.Terence_McKenna

Interestingly, this sort of phenomenon is rarely if ever discussed in the mainstream - rather, when any such ideas are discussed, they are typically mocked, trivialized, discredited, misrepresented, framed, "debunked", etc. It makes one wonder why things are this way - is this consensus perspective accidental, or might something else be going on? Can we point to any other historic examples of people being deliberately (mis)led, by coordinated and powerful actors, to believe certain things to be true, that are not actually true?

I'm actively reading ads since puberty or so, that is, I look at what they're saying, what they're trying to imply, compare with the reality, and what they generally are doing to language and communication. I used to consider it just being a smartass prick, a hairsplitting, literally-taking party pooper... but without knowing it, since I can think I tried all I could to innoculate myself against this:

> Because we are lied to all the time, in ways so routine they are beneath conscious notice, even the most direct lies are losing their power to shock us.

-- Charles Eisenstein, https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-ubiquitous-matrix-of-lies/

I take many things into account, but the judgement of those who aren't that active and hostile in their interaction, who just soak in it, is not one of those things. That many people do see a problem makes me think better of them, but it doesn't influence my opinion of the ad landscape, that's something between me and the ads.