Ruthlessness or Weakness - Which is Which?

True power never crucifies others. True strength would rather take a burden on itself than put one on another in moral weakness. But it is a hard road. Do not seek power if your contentment and flattering self-image is the most important thing in your life!

It is a cliche to say that bullies are cowards. It's not really true, though it may make a traumatised child feel better briefly, while mummy says it (along with other implausible slogans about 'words can never hurt me'), before they go back to school for another day's torment. But it is almost true from one perspective. Let's see:

There is no doubt that we live in a post-Christian era. For two thousand years, Christians were exhorted to 'turn the other cheek', love those that hate them, and generally allow themselves to be crucified and beaten up. True, the majority of people throughout history never followed this code, except for a few genuine saints or pious simpletons and a very small number of people so spiritually strong and superior that they had no need to retaliate. However, we were at least expected to feel guilty for our 'sins', our failure to keep the code. We had something to confess, not just to avoid legal reprisal, but through our conscience.

This was a huge potential advance - let's be honest - on the prior 'pagan' codes of Europe which enshrined concepts like vengeance and blood money and where the individual was entirely under tribal ethics. (It is amusing watching contemporary pagans trying to meld revivalist old-time religions with Christian Sunday School morals, but that is another story). But unfortunately the way Jesus' virtue was taught frequently made it a guilt-inducing mind game a true curse on the human spirit

From the 19th Century onwards, thinkers like Nietzche have both responded to and promoted a post-Christian ethos, glorifying strength, individuality and usually materialism. Despite Left-wing vanity, this is no preserve of capitalism or Thatcherism: indeed, the Left distinguished themselves by their ruthlessness perhaps even more than the Right in the 20th Century.

The playground victim finally realises that the fairy tales of meekness and niceness are lies - unless he gets 'teacher' or the 'system' on the bullies. Much of society is a matter of creating the biggest bully of all - the armed State. And after all, the peace loving monks of the Middle Ages could never have survived unless there were others who valued them and were willing to defend their lives with sword and spear. Gandhi's non-violent resistance could only have worked in a Christian imperialist context - imagine Gandhi in Tianaman Square or Soviet Russia!

For we live in the age of the torn out heart; we are all brains with robot bodies, fighting each other viciously yet meaninglessly and sometimes smiling and claiming that we love society! Or is that a bit cynical? No, because those who talk about love and freedom virtually always end up enforcing it either with social pressure or (internationally) with missiles.

As my readers will know, I take social temperatures from ordinary, banal events. For example, in politics, in commerce and personally, nobody apologises anymore. And why should they - nowadays apology is an admission of guilt. You may get sued; or in a relationship, you may get boxed in a corner as 'the offender', your sins endlessly paraded and used against you. So keep that ego good and hard. Call it an 'error of judgement' and don't apologise to the other creep!

BUT - I just can't live that way. I am the idiot who in past personal relationships, spoke better of my partners than they deserved, preserved their honour, while they did the opposite. The fool who gave endless chances; who will never cut someone dead or shut them out.

I can be ruthless with myself and unfliching in destroying parts of my life that are dead, leaving the burning remains of part of my past with nary a backwards glance. But never with people. Never say never is an ethic worth fighting for. To miss that final opportunity to put things straight, to finish on a note of harmony, to think how the other person feels. In short to forgive. To honour the days spent together - days that can never be taken back, the very fabric of your life and soul.

Is it just a musician thing, the need to move through discord to harmony? Or an inner knowledge that what is not resolved in this life must be paid for double in the next?

To return to the bully or sociopath. He can move quickly, seldom slowed down by qualms of conscience; when he is finished with you having either got what he wanted or having failed, he is finished. You no longer exist in his world. Like an impatient tourist asking for directions and then cutting off the person who stopped to help them, the sociopath only treats people as objects. Only his feelings matter and they are not so much feelings as willed intentions. He rises to the top of his profession amassing wealth and power...for a while...and to the detriment of everyone else.

We live in the age of the sociopath. Now that the sentimental falsehood of 'gentle Jesus meek and mild' is believed only by the deeply naive and only taught by the simple or the cynical, we must learn to see patience, obedience, kindness, forgiveness and so on as what the Latin word virtue actually means - i.e. strength. Be gentle through great power, not weakness.

So I challenge you spiritual athletes: dare every day to risk losing face; be gratuitously vulnerable, but not in an attention seeking or egotistical way. Never avoid reconciliation out of cold hearted pride or cowardice. Think of those who have left your life, with kindness. Pick up the phone. Try again, for the hundredth time, to make peace a reality.

And you will realise that your soul is being built by this practice, memory and emotion unfrozen feeling by feeling. And you will realise that your self-image is a ropy pack of lies at best! This gives humour which in turn gives indomitable spiritual power and initiative.

Neither a masochistic saint nor a Nietzchean ubermensch, you will form the first fruits of the true Aquarian humanity, kind out of strength and character, not weakness and fear. 

Go on Go on Go on!

Killed by Attitude - Who Are You To Tell Me What To Do? said the angry fool

You see it in people's hostile, frozen faces. You see it in the way they walk and the way they shout into mobile phones as if they were arguing with their 'voices' in a lunatic asylum. Above all, you see it in a thousand Facebook memes. The endless psychotic aggression masking the paper-thin ego, that will not be told anything by anyone. "Who are YOU to tell ME what to do"? "What's it to YOU"? "You've got not right to judge me". It's a great trick that allows rage-filled people to vent and make others the problem. "What are you, some kind of Nazi"?

Next time you see an inspirational quote saying "just be who you are and f*** anyone who tells you differently" recycled in a thousand different forms, consider: what kind of society would we live in if everyone gave this attitude to everyone else all the time? Actually, it's not hard, because since the invention of the walkman in the 1980s and then the mobile phone, large numbers of people act as if they were disconnected from their fellow humans. The stance is "there is no such thing as a public place; you are in my music room, my office, my boudoir; if your meal in this restaurant is being spoiled by my kids running around, tough: I owe nothing to anyone, and if you've got a problem with that...f*** you"!!!

I travel on the London Underground every day. Frequently people sneeze and splutter. They can't be bothered to cover their mouths, because they are fiddling with an electronic device or reading a paper. London tubes are so crowded that if someone with Ebola ever boards a train, many thousands would probably be wiped out in short order, because...no one has the right to expect others to act in accordance with the germ theory of disease.

I'm writing with humour and a touch of anger, but I have to remember that all communication is 'viral'. If I rant into the void and I am doing exactly the same thing: venting, arguing with myself, displaying sociopathic lack of contact with my world. Electronic communication easily dehumanises people - the talk to voices in their head, which is why disgusting rudeness breaks out so quickly online. So greetings, sojourner, and welcome!

There was a recent news story about a shop assistant who refused to serve a customer who was talking away into their mobile phone. I always cringe when I see this common situation - the dehumanisation, the rude humiliation caused to a person serving a customer who obviously feels they are too important, in too much of a hurry to even look the assistant in the eye let alone share courteous exchange. "Just serve me and let me get on with my busy conversation and my busy life, like any other robot in my virtual life". In a cafe the other week I saw a couple on a date - the unprepossessing man was ignoring the pretty  girl while he fiddled with his phone for a good 15 minutes. I have seen a person with two mobile phones cut off a conversation with a person in front of them to start a long conversation on their phone, and then cut that person off when the second mobile rang. If someone can't see the insanity of this, I am not sure how I could explain it.

I have been in houses where the television is always on so that nobody can look at or speak with anyone else - the god of television rules all. Of course, fundamentally, we have all been programmed like lab rats to respond to stimuli. Flashing lights, bleeping phones, buzzing devices. You see people's muscles constantly twitching like malfunctioning robots, their hands hovering around their phones like some kind of addict. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.

I blame religious education for this! What, my dwindling readership cries - surely that is a mad leap too far! Well, it all comes down to how Jesus was portrayed in 19th and 20th Century cheap 'Sunday school' theology. That Jesus is the ultimate petulant adolescent - criticising the Pharisees, calling everyone a hypocrite, telling people not to 'judge' and getting away with it! This image is inordinately attractive to angry preadolescents, especially boys - as youngsters we all know that all the adults are hypocrites and "who are they to judge me"! It goes down well with those who feel they have no power but would dearly love to wield power over others. The typical rebel or angry young man who one day will become the Pharisee to be hated by the next generation.

When Nonconformist Christiantity mutated into insipid liberalism and nanny Socialism so typical of the Guardian reading classes, this idea that you mustn't 'judge' anyone remained - though what it actually means is quite another matter and most people have never thought about it. What it usually means to those who snarl it is, 'I am going to do what I want and nobody is allowed to say anything against it, in fact the kind of people that might dare say something are thus proved automatically bad'. Because everyone being self-centred is virtuous, and the only real sin is asking others to limit their selfishness and show some consideration.

This developed apace in the 1960s with the Hippy emphasis on 'doing your own thing'. The unworkable but common idea that we should all think mainly of ourselves and let everyone else do the same, in the fantasy a compassionate society will come about by magic, can only lead to one kind of 'society' - a society that doesn't really exist.

But Jesus was no petulant Middle Class egotist playing at selling Socialist Worker (and I have met a few of that type over the years). His teachings about Justice and God's Law are tough medicine and one can't even begin to understand the power of his challenge to worldly authority unless one has tried a thousand times harder to live a moral and socially aware life than most of our angry toddlers ever have. We can't become as a little child until we have grown up; until then we are just - childish. And without enough adults around, the human race doesn't stand much of a chance.

So if you don't like what I've just said...f*** you!!
Only joking, my very best wishes. Learn from all things and know for yourselves. But above all, don't be too proud to hold out for courtesy.