I am thinking especially of collective trauma for one simple reason. The individual is often unfairly singled out and blamed for becoming mentally ill. The fact that we are living in a highly individualistic and individualized society has made it very difficult for many of us to think in terms of the collective, how we interconnect and interact, and how much we really influence one another. The nasty lying words of that regrettable woman, the late Dame Margaret Thatcher, former British prime minister, "there is no such thing as society"-have become prophecy. We think of ourselves and each other as scattered individuals whose lives do not touch or impact each other. Or so we would wish.
This of course takes its most toxic manifestation in the way people behave in public, each doing their utmost to blank out those around them with their dear little tech toys. Simply wear your iPod on the bus and crank up the volume and no one will bother you unless to tap you on the shoulder and ask that you turn down the volume. Most of us would simply suffer in silence or get up and move, rather than run the risk of actually connecting with a stranger. Those of us, that is, who aren't already plugged into our own personal listening device. And of course, there are the many others texting or searching or reading or talking to someone on their iPhones, often while plugged into their personal listening devices. Anything to maintain the illusion that we are each all alone in the world.
We are the bitter fruit of capitalism, of a corporate individualism, a culture of branding and conformity that keeps us all isolated from one another, entrenching in us the poisonous nonsense that our sole defining value is that we are consumers. And that we live in competition with everyone else. There is very little social glue that will bind us together as a community. If we are going to be good, compliant little consumers then we are certainly not going to be much swayed nor influenced by the most fundamental human values of mutual cooperation and fraternal love and friendship. In order to survive and continue to thrive as good little consumers of course we are all going to compete with one another for hard to land jobs that aren't necessarily going to pay very well, but will still keep us alive with just enough cash left over to spend and keep alive the Great Economy Cow.
I think we have lived always with this toxic dynamic, though it has existed before in proto form and now, thanks to global capitalism have been able to refine it to a horrifyingly destructive science. Year after year governments are elected on the strength of their promises to build a strong economy. The only time in recent history that I have seen a political party actually win based on promising they would run a deficit was when Justin Trudeau swept his renewed federal Liberal party into power as he promised that money would be spent on renewing and developing social infrastructure: daycare, affordable housing, health care and education, to name a few.
This isn't to say that capitalism has won the day, but that enough people are waking up to the nightmare their own greed and apathy have brought upon them and actually want to return to being and treating one another like human beings, especially the most vulnerable among us. Now, here in my own province of British Columbia a similar dynamic is in place as the minority provincial Liberal government has been defeated today in a vote of none-confidence. The forces of greed and economic self-interest appear to be finally being put to flight. Or are they?
Historically these are relatively recent developments in our unfolding human story. What the late great Doris Lessing used to call our lovely liberalism is but a very recent and very tiny blip on the radar of our historic development as the human species. Democracy, as we know, enjoy and take for granted, was simply not known anywhere in the world nor any of our five hundred thousand year history. There could be, of course, minor and obscure exceptions in various hunter-gatherer societies, but for the most part, before the eighteenth century, Ancient Greece alone, under Pericles, boasted of a government that was only by courtesy a democracy, given that only free Athenian men were allowed to vote, leaving out women, slaves and foreign workers.
Our history is drenched and deeply red with the shed blood of millions, if not billions slaughtered in wars, on the scaffold, burnt at the stake, beheaded, shot, dismembered, usually after the most gruesome forms of torture imaginable. The ruling king's word was law and all his subjects lived literally at his mercy and command. Rule was always by force, whether military or religious/ecclesiastical or police. Everyone but the aristocracy and the more successful burghers was equally poor and equally oppressed. Literacy was limited to the elite, usually the clergy.
Such is the medieval legacy of Spain. The country that sent its thugs into unknown lands in the Americas and the Philippines to subjugate and slaughter the natives, shove their degraded form of Catholic Christianity down their throats, and plunder their gold and the wealth of their land. This is the same Spain that ruled ruthlessly and viciously from afar these conquered lands, with virtually none of the modifying influence of the Enlightenment nor the Protestant Reformation. They remained their own entity, their own private Iberian universe, sheltered by the Pyrenees and the insular ignorance of their own roots of Ancient Roman brutality and Dark Ages ignorance from the progress and reforms that were already transforming the face of Europe.
This is the dark and bloody legacy of violence that has played such a pivotal role in the historical and cultural development of Latin American nations. And this is what has systematically traumatized entire societies and communities of individuals, from the Inca of Peru and the Aztec of Mexico to the impoverished campesinos today running the gamut in Central American countries between gangs and drug wars and the need to flee for their very lives to countries of refuge.
On an endnote, it is quite interesting that the late Dame Thatcher, and the late and deplorable Agosto Pinochet, former military dictator of Chile, were very dear and very close friends.
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