Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
What we are doing is trying to remove our past instead of evolving from it. The problem there is we forget the lesson, which allows for the evolution. We have sex and violence inside of us, no matter how you slice it. Men need to be men fully, then they can learn from women. And vice versa. What we’re doing is trying to shame masculinity and femininity for their shortcomings – the 50’s housewife and businessman paradigm.
And there are shortcomings and limitations to that paradigm, thats the tricky part. But, first we have to reach the maturity of those archetypes in order to genuinely see whats missing in them. You can’t skip steps. Now we’ve got people missing the first part and trying to jump to the second part. Men who haven’t become men trying to force the compassion and passivity of women. Women who haven’t expressed their true woman trying to force the resolve and activity of men.
It’s an enticing shortcut, because then we can avoid the fear of fully being ourselves. We don’t have to take the challenge of being a man or woman which has its unique lessons. We’re not being allowed to make the prerequisite “mistake” that shows us where the full balance – or middle way – lies.
The same goes for tearing down old statues and renaming sports teams. We are trying to expunge the violence and conquest of our past because we are ashamed of it. But you cant force the world to move past it, you can only transcend it. You allow it, and learn from it.
Our challenge as humans is to live out the animal programming that is unavoidably inside of us and then evolve beyond it. And you can’t make the jump if you’ve been shamed from expressing your nature in the first place. We are trying to suppress our animal out of existence, and that is impossible – it just creates more violence ultimately.
What is needed is a society where the animal is understood for what it is and allowed to express itself entirely in a “safe” way. There are ways to embrace our inherent sex and violence that aren’t harmful to other people, that can be done in a therapeutic and cathartic way.
But right now we are essentially making the same mistake as the church, which is more than a little ironic considering our collective abandonment of organized religion. We have some ideal of what people are “supposed to be like”, and we are trying to force it on them. That has never worked, and it never will. We are trying to remove the possibility for the “sin”, when that experience itself is what allows for the transcending of it. I discuss this in more detail in my book.
In short, we can’t find our inner balance until we’ve fully expressed our imbalance. We need Don Draper and Marilyn Monroe first, with their limitations, before we can move past them. And that was really the whole point of the show Mad Men anyway. It is the uniqueness of western culture and the golden age of Hollywood that allowed for the crystallization of man and woman – it is why Gurdjieff’s last words were “Bravo, America”.
So, instead of trying to cancel the lesson of our history, we need to learn from it and embrace it fully. But, apparently we can’t cancel ‘cancel culture’ either, we have to let that run its course as well. It is an intelligent response in some ways, just misguided. All these lessons learned and applied, evolution gradually makes its way forward. It all happens by itself anyway, why do I need to bother bringing it up? This eternal magician needs no recommendations from armchair philosophers.
Yet, here I am. Here’s to a new year, let’s hope the train of evolution starts picking up speed.
Jeff Nirenberg 