Transformation…..but…..

We want transformation…….. only if it’s done for us.   we don’t want to do any work.

We want transformation to be beautiful.  We leave out the ugly.  So often, then, we are blind to the ugliness of our transformations.

We want to do the work………but only if it’s comfortable and ‘safe’ for us.  Otherwise, no, we’re not going to transform.

We make choices in a maze of our own making.  Our choices keep us locked in our identity/identities.  ‘That’s who I am’ I say.

We don’t know anything.  But we have a lot of words and phrases and ideologies and pleasantries that we attach ourselves and our actions to, and call it ‘me’ and we are self-satisfied on our path.  Usually it’s done in a huge realm of privilege and isolation.  It CONFIRMS and affirms what we already know.  So there is change, but not transformation.

In the European and American mind-set, changes are done through working on ‘self’ in a psychological manner (which is colonizing, self-affirming, adjustment-oriented, and normalizing in its labels and processes and goals and assumptions of ‘human.’)  Certainly there are human systems outside of psychology.  Through colonization and globalization, psychology has made itself the single ‘THE’ of human minds and self, de-prioritizing other ways of knowing human self and society.

In transforming capitalism, socialism has made the most sense, or perhaps a Marxism.  We must understand that it is a dialectic.  Socialism and especially Marxism, grew out of the context of an ever-expanding and invasive globalizing of capitalist self-making and exploitation.  So what I am saying here is that Marxism and Capitalism are domination and resistance, together co-habitating.

Both Capitalism and Marxism have created certain realities in the world that are continuations of life.  There are some great things and also some horrific things.  What will it take to develop new systems?   The problem is that we try to make universal systems.  Why can’t we become more local, helping each other develop different local communities, ecologies, cultures?   I know that part of the fear is the continuity of the will to invade and proclaim dominance.  We must also create effective ethics and communities where the will to invade and dominate other communities does not make sense anymore.  Until then, I’m afraid we must make DEFENSE a factor of community-building.  However, I must say that much of the will to invade and dominate comes from a diminishing, an emasculation, a disempowerment that has been built into people and persons so that aggression and invasion may become a cultural factor.  In other words, it is a social factor, not psychologically born in people.  Invasions and exploitations and destruction, create counter-movements that begin to do the same things.

Transformation is personal and social.  There is a lot we must deconstruct.  To deconstruct takes knowledge and openness to histories, cultures, different languages, knowledge of the factors and effects of power relations, how difference works in power and life, and in accountability and sustainability.