I remember as a
child jokes circulating about priests molesting little boys. Nobody bothered to
investigate the sources of these jokes and why they even existed. Nobody cared.
Now we know after
thirty some years the cat is out of the bag because the media has changed and
it's easier to get a message out and when it gets out, it gets out! The issue
with the priests was like Pandora's box because it was left alone so long, all
these now adults are able to speak for themselves and tell the truth. Funny how
that works. Nobody listens unless you are an adult. Please take note of that.
We have an oxymoron
psychology about children. We love to make them, we love to kill them, we love
to abuse them, we love to regret them, we love to kick them physically and
emotionally, and we love to use them as pawns in divorce. And at the same time,
they have no rights to speak for themselves. This is the naked truth about our
rules. Narcissistic taxpayers and laws don’t give rights to those who don’t pay
taxes. This comes from citizens as well as the government who is obviously only
interested in your money which is why the elderly are always picked on and
stripped of rights, and are neglected by their children.
Now, after all of
that let's talk about the real issue; we cannot be a civilized society until we
face the fact that we are still abusing animals in ways that are preventable by
law, serious law to ensure we evolve into a society that respects all living
things. (Remember, all living things don't pay taxes). Why is this important?
Because when you solve a problem, you have to go to the root of the problem,
not the middle of it. Root cause, they call it. Well why are animals at the
root cause of our ills for being civilized? Because animals and nature itself
are the first things we as children grew to have a relationship with whether we
like it or not. Why is that important? Because our first established
relationships determine how we think, how we feel, and ultimately, how we
behave.
The underlying
problem in the United States isn't our political ideologies; those are
byproducts of the bigger problem, not the root cause. The biggest problem in
our country is personality disorder. Now, when I say personality disorder, I'm
not speaking in terms of clinical, I'm speaking in terms of laymen
understanding. Let me explain.
Personality
disorder in a clinical sense is; a personality disorder is a type of mental disorder in which you have a rigid and unhealthy pattern
of thinking, functioning and behaving. A person with a personality
disorder has trouble perceiving and
relating to situations and people. ... In: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders DSM-5.
This holds partially to my suggestion, but closer to the more micro problem of
the disorder known as narcissism. Narcissistic personality disorder is a
personality disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own
importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others. But
behind this mask of ultra confidence lies a fragile self-esteem that's
vulnerable to the slightest criticism. Okay, so why is this so important?
The central issue
behind the root cause of these two components in our society is not just that
they exist, but they exist in such a high level of our beings in a modern
world, that it only reminds me of stories in the Bible of a wandering and
misguided people who turned to idolatry and paid the price. The point of this
root cause isn't materialism, as blaming a material thing for your misgivings
is more in line with the root cause, than the material object itself.
The main issue is
how individuals see themselves in the world. This is the root cause of all
problems in society and specifically to how we treat one another and other
living things. You can't escape this no matter if you are a monk or POTUS.
Everyone is responsible for their own behavior, especially towards others. We
fight for the right to our own bodies, but we don't want to fight for
responsibility for our own behavior. Post WWII created boomers, but what it
also created was a self-entitlement personality in a culture that says,
"gimmie, gimmie, gimmie," and keep up with your neighbors, be a
consumer, but most important be socially competitive because that will bring
you a better mate, and better real estate to show off to your friends and
family. This brings us back to those people wandering in the wilderness and
choosing idolatry over self discovery. Playing into the ego, the ID of our
personalities, and then actually buying into it is the core of our ills. I even
found this in someone I knew, still do, but do not communicate, who after years
of understanding her movements, realized her ego was so embedded, not in
materialism, but in outsmarting the system by making someone else slave
themselves against the world while she sat home and contemplated her next visit
to the beach, facebooking it on how wonderful the experience was. That is not simply a laid back personality,
that is a narcissist who escapes the rules of life by refusing to participate
in the middle class slave trade. I had never met a personality so laid back,
yet so narcissistic and willing to turn someone else into their slave so they
can live their dream. Once I understood the dynamics, I understood the person.
Narcissists believe
they are above it all. We base movies, TV shows, novels and other social
rhetoric on this premise. The Kardashians represent that after the Hiltons did
years back. Remember our little Narcissistic princess Paris running to her
mother after being held by authorities, wearing clothes that would get
attention afterwards and make money off it? She set that tone and the
Kardashians took off with it and people actually buy into it. They dream of
being a bigger narcissist than they already are by watching another narcissist
at work. Can we get back on track? Yes.
The problem isn't
being a narcissist, the problem is the behavior. People aren't interested in
the well-being of others, even those who claim they do. We are a resource
driven society and we throw parties for social causes and make a ton of money
doing it. We pretend we are good people, but we rationalize our self-centered
resource gathering behavior, "because everyone else is doing
it." This cognitive dissonance
demonstrates a poor self-image, narcissistic tendencies, all for the sake of
trying to escape the rules of society. Yes, if you are middle class, you are a
slave. The finance industry has enslaved all middle class people with cost of
living and manipulated labor force salary ranking. So the thought process is to
survive and in the process of surviving you ultimately realize that the only
way to get ahead is to bend the rules, make someone else your slave, or steal.
Look at Bernie Madoff. These are not deviations in our society, these are the
norms, but the media raises them up as someone who only represents themselves
as a bad person and not society as a whole.
Wall street brokers
admitted in a conference room, if the rules allow them to cheat, they will.
Honesty is such a breath of fresh air, isn't it? People behave on the basis of
what they can get away with in a society with so many rules that send a message
to an individual, "the rules are stacked against you, good luck."
When people find an opening to cheat, they usually do, because they can
rationalize the immoral or illegal reason with something like, "If I
didn't do it, someone else would."
Narcissists are by
nature lazy. They are lazy because they hate the rules and they hate the rules
because they think the rules don't apply them, only to the little people. Watch
the film Rope, by Alfred Hitchcock. You can convince yourself that you are better
than the rest of society enough to kill someone because you deem it right
because you don't live in the little
people's moral code. Yes, that is Hitler by definition. When you raise
yourself up above the rules, you are a cheater, lazy, rationalizer, instead of
someone who wants to work to change the rules. It's just easier to cheat.
I was raised around
a lot of white lower middle class brats. They had no intent on improving
themselves because they thought of themselves as good enough while they would
swim in their shame. They thought life would unfold for them. I thought it
would take ten years. It did not. What I did is try to understand why it didn't
and most of the answer fell on myself and still does. But ultimately that
thought is solely based on what you do today, not how fast you got there from
the past. Narcissists don't want to wait. They want it now and in a generation
of boomers who think they are entitled to more, the urgency becomes an
underlying variable in their behavior. They want to be relevant and if it takes
too long, people show contempt for you and that would crush the narcissist.
Again, let's back to
the root cause and how this effects other things than the self. The ability to
care for something or someone other than yourself is an art form in how we live
our lives. The engineers of our society don't want that; they want us on the
treadmill serving their needs. They want robots who want to consume, not a
people who are more concerned about society as a whole. We call these people
liberals, but that is a lie. Liberals aren't better people in regards to the
ills of society. They really only help people to make themselves feel better.
Walking for cancer with a bunch of people or what not, and that is not a bad
thing and the task has all the good leanings of being a good person, but these
are also people who still feel entitled and that the government should pay for
their entitlement.
So now the
intersection. When the narcissist does not meet his expectations and his
superior perception is threatened what is the first thing they want to do?
Blame. It's someone else's fault, right? So what do we do? We take it out on
the first thing that's around us; or animals or animals that are available.
Cruelty to animals isn't a narcissistic tendency by definition, its more
sociopathic, but our context isn't about those people. This is not to say that
every narcissist will take their failures out on animals because they don't.
The point is those that do suffer from not only sociopathic behaviors but also
fall into narcissism by its very definition. It's a personality disorder not a
mental disorder and its essence is founded on shame. Most Americans, especially
white Americans are subject to this disorder, I would assume because it was
passed down by the entitlement attitude of the northern European who came to
the United States.
Understanding the
underpinnings of cruelty to animals is extremely important in not evading our
own responsibility and having the awareness to see that in others. Animals are
abused every day, puppy mills exist in the tens of thousands in this country, with
the capitol being Missouri. The conditions they put these animals in is not
just cruel, but you have to wonder about the person's personality, because
again, "Narcissistic personality disorder is a personality disorder in
which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for
admiration and a lack of empathy for others."
Now I hope the
intersection has been created between the idea of our society and our
relationship to animals and why it matters. The essence of our existence lies
in our relationship with nature not people. The American Indian was more
mentally and spiritually connected with nature because he wasn't distracted (he
didn't have Facebook) and had more time
to realize the respect that they were faced with it. The Self is important, as
nobody can take care of you and your mind better than yourself. When you are
left to yourself though, you are still in a relationship with nature, even
though people might not be around. This is the central idea of why it's our
core existence to understand our relationship with nature and in our case
animals.
If you are
destroying the very thing that you have a relationship with, aren't you in
essence destroying yourself? This is not a philosophy lesson. It's nothing more
than viewing it from another angle that until we respect nature, we will never
be civilized. Our disrespect is our symptom, our diagnosis is narcissism, and
the cure, is rule of law. Animal cruelty needs to be invaded by law enforcement
like D-Day to fix the ills of our society. The sad part is there is no
pushback, we just choose to do nothing.
Let me put it
another way, we will never get along with people who are different than us
until we first learn to respect nature and animals. It does not work the other
way around. Again, this is why our relationship to animals and nature is so
important. You can't escape it, you can't rationalize it. It's nature at its
core. You become an ill when you don't respect nature.
