Emotional scars

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

I placed this here for reasons that will become obvious…

One of the issues of our times is that we are damaged…
but not physically but emotionally, psychologically…
when we get physically hurt, it leaves a scar, I have plenty
of scars from plenty of stitches… my body remembers those
times when I was hurt… and from several areas, my body still
hurts… and will hurt until the day I die… but, what is less
remembered is the emotional, psychological scars that we have…

One of my psychological scars is from when I was 19 and my
mother told me she wished she never had me and I was more
work than all 4 of her other kids put together… psychological
trauma can last a lifetime too…

We all have both physical and psychological wounds…and here
is the thing, the body, the consciousness remembers every single
wound even if we don’t remember it…these wounds play
hand in everything we do, even if we don’t know why…

But psychological wounds are not just individual wounds,
we can and do hold to collective psychological wounds…
talk that the generation of Perl Harbor… what few still survive,
my mom was one until she got dementia… and the psychological
wound of Perl Harbor was part of the American consciousness…
the body and consciousness remembers, it always will remember…

and today, what drives the body collective of America?
it is fear… the entire platform of the GOP/MAGA party is
about fear… fear of the government, fear of illegal immigrants,
fears about people of color, fear of education, fears about
democracy… but where do we trace this fear to?
Why is the primary emotion of America fear?

Here comes the impact of our emotional scars…
We hold scars from our past that still haunts us,
drives us… and the way to overcome these fears,
these emotional scars is to name them, to bring them
out into the open…

The most scaring emotional events in my life, I was born in 1959,
were two events, The Vietnam War and Watergate…the events
of today flow from those two events… The collective psychological
damage from those two events cannot be underestimated…
and they still impact us today…

the first event, The Vietnam War…I still remember sitting
at the kitchen table watching the news at dinner time, usually
Walter Cronkite, and watching the war unfold over my TV tray
dinner…‘‘the number of causalities today were 52 and that brings
up the number of causalities for the week to be 180 deaths’’

and unlike today, we watch the fighting on TV, we saw the wounded
and dead, we saw the horror being brought to our living room,
day after day, week after death…all the while eating dinner…
and the disconnect between the rhetoric from Washington
and the actual fighting, became too much for many people…
there was only 20 years between the Vietnam war and the
Second World War, but you wouldn’t know it from watching the news…
it seemed like a million years…

and here, began the disconnect between the people and
those who governed… Washington was saying one thing,
and we could see something else… it was clear that we weren’t
winning the war, but listening to the news, to Washington, you
wouldn’t know it… it was all temporary setbacks and
communist lies that we were losing… this is the first of
psychological scars that we still bear today…
The disconnect between the war and what the official story
was…

the second scar that we bear witness to today, is Watergate…
America had lost some faith in the political process because
of the Vietnam war… and with Watergate, we lost a whole
lot more faith and belief in Washington… I was in High School
the day Richard Nixon resigned… the entire Watergate episoide
has left a permanent psychological scar on the psyche of America,
that is still present…

and into that breach, stepped Ronald Raygun…and he
played on those psychological scars by his attacks on
the U.S government… of his attacks on the institutions
and policies of the U.S. government…his famous words:

""The nine most terrifying words in the English language are,
I’m from the government and I’m here to help’'…

that statement has context, and that context is the Vietnam war
and Watergate… without each, Raygun words are not possible…
until the Vietnam War and Watergate, people trusted the
government to do the right thing…

It is an easy thing to trace this dislike of the government from Raygun
to today… the emotional scars from Watergate and Vietnam
reside in the soul of America… and the next step is the fear…
what is the basis of fear? it is from a loss of control…
We don’t fear when we have control over things, events,
or people…and this loss of control can be traced to the
Vietnam War and Watergate… the disillusionment of
the people today in the government can be directly tied back
to the Vietnan war/Watergate and Raygun’s capitalizing
on that disillusionment to drive a fear and hatred of the government…
that same fear and hatred of the government that drives
the GOP/MAGA party today… the emotional scars from
the Vietnam War and Watergate still drive America politics
today…

the question becomes, how do we overcome our emotional scars
that are over 60 years old? The answer is to admit them,
to overcome requires an acknowledgment of the emotional scars
that have plagued America for all these years…

To finally face what is driving our fears…the loss of control
over our lives… we seem to have very little control over our
lives these days… from our work which has taken control over
our private lives to the control that big government and big business
and big pharma and all those others, that seem to have far
greater control over our lives than we do…
the media for example… WE mistrust and despise the media
because we have no control over it… we cannot approve of
something if we don’t have any control over it…

and therein lies part of the solution… we regain control over
our lives… politically, economically, socially, philosophically…
we regain control by forcing those big concerns that now
run our lives into becoming our servants, not us being
their servants, but them become servants to the people…
a radical idea to be sure… to take control over our lives
requires us to break the links that hold our chains to the
big concerns that run our lives… and that link is money…
we are held hostage because of money… we don’t have
any and the big concerns hold all the money, thus hold
all the cards…

you want to regain control over your life… that link is money
and end the domination of money in your life and you end their
control over you…this is true privately and this is true collectively…
the chains on our bodies is there because of money…
change that part and you change the world…reclaim your life
as your own… and in doing so, you also end the trauma, the
emotional scars of the last 60 years, by regaining control over
your life… you end the tyranny of big business and the economics
of our modern life… where we have no control over what we can
buy, where we can work, what we can think and do…

Kropotkin

1 Like
2

I think the American soul is hurt in many ways, not least because of its fear but also because of its callousness. On the surface, Americans seem friendly, and I have several penfriends who show that a good many are genuinely friendly, but the callousness of the system rubs off on people who are less aware of it. It isn’t always upfront, but it wounds people anyway. It also causes alienation, a key concept in Marx’s critique of capitalism, and people have little control over their work conditions or lack an association with their lives in general. Work, like school, is something you have to do, and we already know that many pupils’ learning curve flattens out in school. The natural abilities of human beings that thrive are often neglected, and people are disempowered by hierarchies that do not always have to do with meritocracy.

Instead, it resembles a “pecking order,” with entitlement and privilege having more to say than ability. As in the hierarchy within a chicken shack, the wounded often rely upon the owner to give them food to gain strength so that they can compete. This works in Europe to varying degrees, but apparently, it is much better than in America. Of course, there are those who escape the chicken shack and those who gang up on others inside the shack.

However, this is becoming more what those in power seem to want, not only in America but also elsewhere. Merit is measured in how much you benefit those at the top rather than the whole. Many Oligarchs are experts at manipulating people’s opinions on this and creating fierce competition among employees while sitting back and watching them fight. Politicians, in their service, supply the legislation that encourages that.

I dropped out of my managerial position when I realised how, by micro-management, I was being forced to pressure my staff, but fortunately, I could retire. My brother had a stress-related illness in management with four years to go. These pressures do leave scars, and if you are not careful, they cause resentment. I lost my natural ability to communicate for a year or two, which had been my strength, and my brother is worse off with a physical impairment.

3

That’s an over-generalization and only as true as one accepts it to be true for oneself over time. You can certainly change that. The main issue is lack of information or rather lack of education about finances. American school systems and for the most part too at the levels of the family and culture more broadly, do not teach anything about financial knowledge. Like to not be poor you should probably have an understanding of how compounding interest works so you can make it work for you while avoiding situations where it works against you.

At the end of the day we need to pay for our own existences. Someone has to pay for it because it’s not free. Every day we consume a heck of a lot, it has to come from somewhere. Someone had to make it, deliver it to us, and all those people involved needed to be paid to do those things. Just so we can live another day.

The idea that the economic system is primarily one of disenfranchisement or alienation is absurd to me. Look around, we have crazy amounts of abundance and conveniences in our lives. Even poor people usually have smart phones and the internet. You have to be basically destitute on the street to not have a basic level of comfort and convenience that would be enviable by kings and queens throughout most of human history. And the fact we need to work a job in order to gain and maintain this wonderful life? So what, or did you expect that we can have all this amazing stuff AND it would just magically pop into existence for free?

Marx misunderstood certain key concepts in his theory, like the concept of value and especially of what profit is and from where it comes. That being said, his analysis of late-stage capitalism as it’s sometimes called is pretty good. But the idea of alienation from the product of our own labor, naw, that’s completely wrong. We aren’t alienated from the product of our labor, in fact just the opposite: I put in X amount of labor and I get 100X back, that is how it works for anyone who has a job. You can stand or sit around borrowing access to someone else’s capital and machinery and intellectual processes because they chose to allow you to borrow that access from them, you do that for a certain number of hours in the day, and then you are given money. What you can buy with that money is generally speaking WAY more than what you could have accumulated or produced for yourself in value-terms if instead of working you had stayed home and done anything else.

4

Of course, it is a generalisation. But the general condition the world over where capitalism is run, is that it makes society lop-sided. The problem isn’t alleviated through information, but the playing field has to be levelled to some degree. Just as a team playing on a downward slope has and advantage, so do people who start with a financial advantage. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be overcome with more effort, but the amount of effort required is often exhausting because jobs pay too little. If you need two or three jobs or are working long hours to get through, the added effort, especially if other problems intervene, becomes draining.

I started low and still made it to regional manager of an elderly care company in a foreign country, speaking a different language. But I had help all the way. Due to being the child in the family who changed schools seven times in ten years, moving to different locations outside of and in the UK, I flunked school in the end, because I had no help to align with the curriculum at each school.

I joined the army, became a Recovery Mechanic, stayed in Germany and became a long-distance driver. I had to change my job to attend evening school, which my new boss wasn’t happy about, but because of my skills, he accepted it. First, I had to learn to write a new language, and then I had to attend a two-year course to get my grades. After achieving my grades, I still couldn’t go into nursing because the pay during training was too low, and I waited thirteen years until I could get a retraining program. During that time, I became an office manager in a workshop. At 38, I finally started nursing and rose through the institutions until I reached regional manager and retired.

The point is that it wasn’t just hard work—that was necessary. I was also helped by various people and benefited from Government programs that financed my nursing training. If I hadn’t had this support, it would never have happened. That is why many people don’t get off the ground! One guy I knew had an accident at work, which meant that he could no longer do the job he had been working for. Another guy’s family was killed in a car crash, which devasted him. There are reasons.

That is okay to say if you can, but how many people are born into a situation that dogs them at the very beginning? My father, a soldier, gave me some ideals. Many people have no fathers. I usually helped people I saw making an effort up the ladder as an employer, but there were some that I couldn’t help despite recognising their investment. Just before retiring, when I visited a care home I used to manage, one of the employees hugged me with tears in her eyes, saying thank you. I had to think of all those I couldn’t help.

5

Everyone has difficulties and starting unfairnesses in life. Some people have more, others have less. None of that matters unless you’re a quadriplegic or a mental vegetable.

Successful people don’t care about their starting conditions and don’t whine about how unfair things are. They just work and succeed. That’s what separates winners from losers – attitude, more or less.

Or you can teach people that they’re victims before they even started playing the game. Yeah, nice strategy to fuck them up for life before they even get going. Well done.

6

“But I was born without a father.”
So what, work harder.

“But I was born poor.”
So what, work harder.

“But other people are born with trust funds! They don’t even need to work!”
So what, work harder.

“But I had to miss the final exam because my family member got sick and I needed to take care of them and now I failed the class and they won’t let me retake the test and I got kicked out of the degree program and I lost my scholarship and I have so much student loan debt and no degree now.”
So what, work harder.

“But I got injured and I’m on disability now.”
So what, work harder.

“But my friend got the promotion because he’s white and I’m not.”
So what, work harder.

“But the capitalist system enslaves us to wage-slavery and robs us of our productive value while feeding the rich with even more unearned wealth!”
So what, work harder.

“But but but but but but but but!”
So what, work harder.

I think you are starting to get the point by now.

7

Callous attitude, and if you had read what I wrote, you will have seen the work I put in. And yet, without help it wouldn’t have happened.

I keep reading this stuff, and to be honest, you haven’t got a clue about what people go through and still face failure.

But then again, it sounds like you don’t want to know. But one day you will realise that we are all one, and realise what you’ve done.

8

Nothing callous about my position at all, in fact yours is the evil (harmful, destructive) position to hold. You put people down before they even get going, you psychologically insert victimhood and defeatism into their emotions and attitudes. How do you think that plays out in terms of self-fulfilling feedback loops in the mind, e.g. how one thinks about oneself and one’s own life?

You think it’s “callous” to not blame others for your own failure? Ok man, good luck with that I guess. You sound like a female with all that heavy emotionalism over there. Why not just face the truth? An attitude of victimization and defeatism isn’t going to help you in life, no matter how much you want to indulge in some feel-good self pity or project your own egoic virtue signaling by being soooooo concerned with the unfairnesses of life.

9

No emo ever made it to CEO. Think about that.

10

Callousness, or showing or having an insensitive and cruel disregard for others, seems to be spreading – perhaps it was always there, but I hadn’t noticed. In our conversation about people in need, the fact that the callous mind is absolutely ignorant of the fact that it is ignorant seems very prominent.

This seems to be an extreme case of left-hemispheric dominance and also a schizoid condition, which tries to radically rationalise everything at the cost of a holistic view of the world around you. For such a condition, compassion is an unnecessary complication – even “evil” – and everything is black and white. There is no room for doubt, different perspectives, or different experiences. Everything must be seen from their perspective.

This is, of course, a breeding ground for conflict and oppression, in which asocial behaviour is deemed “necessary.” It is essentially sociopathic and has all the ingredients for destabilising society and, in fact, causing what they say is self-inflicted by others. If people lack empathy and view the world rigidly uncompromisingly, they are more likely to justify asocial behaviours as necessary or even virtuous.

It is likely that social media is exacerbating this issue. The absence of the normalising presence of other human beings, their gestures and body language, tone, and immediate feedback, which force us to consider different aspects of a situation, is a significant factor. We only see words on a screen and not the human being behind those words, which can lead to a lack of empathy and understanding.

To say compassion is “evil” in that Orwellian way only confirms the pathological nature of such a mindset. This is worrying because we all become needful at some point in our lives, and if it becomes the norm, even more grisly things will happen. This inversion of moral values is especially concerning because it undermines the social fabric that depends on mutual care and support. Empathy and compassion are fundamental to human society. They enable us to connect with others, support one another in need, and build communities based on mutual respect and understanding. Without these qualities, society risks becoming more divided, more hostile, and less capable of dealing with collective challenges.

11

Falsely equating compassion with a mindset of constant victimhood and using “life is unfair! Waa!” as a perpetual excuse? Yikes.

I never once said I don’t have compassion for people in tough situations or because their lives are unfair compared to others. Of course I do have compassion, a lot of compassion in fact. But I am not so insane as to allow an emotion like that to override the truth. The value of compassion is well understood and it has its place in the hierarchy of our thoughts, actions and intentions. Nothing wrong with that at all, except when it gets blown out of proportion and becomes the most important value-determining factor. This happens a lot with women and that makes sense, they are evolutionarily wired to be more risk-averse and more sensitive to harm than men are, simply because of their historical role of caring for children. But men are supposed to see the world how it is, not through any colored glasses.

Fact is clear and unchanged regardless of your emotions: teaching a mentality of fundamental unfairness and victimization is not going to help you succeed, quite the opposite in fact. That’s my only point. Take it or leave it.

12

It’s a very serious issue raised by @Peter_Kropotkin , almost everyone has a story to narrate and ‘ scarry ‘ experience to share ! The scars on personal front go so deep, nearly to a subconscious level . There is a lurching fear of loosing mental balance , capacity to work with a sharp fall in competence and creativity . Reasons for personal Emotional Scars vary widely, many a times they are of non- cognizable offence type , the Justice can’t be sought from Court of law . The scars are further darkened by obnoxious and arrogant behaviour of perpetrators. Well I stop here about personal scars, as continuation may take the form of thesis .
The societal scars are also equally graver . India is very unlucky in this regard . The scars engraved by partition never appear to be fading, in fact periodically these scars are darkened and rejuvenated :sob: the trail of death continues uninterrupted because of wars, terrorism, border clashes, skirmishes, mortar shelling or espionage. In India there is hardly any district or block which hasn’t received a martyr in coffin. These societal scars really retard the normal well being .
What’s needed is a debate on scar removing measures , methodology and syllabus . To me the solution lies in giving healing touch through tendering apologies . The parties in dispute should have a continuous dialogue . The process of Truth and Reconcillation must go on .

13

Strawman, completely invented.

The facts are seldom clear, and you invent an approach that is in no way what I said. You are callous in your thoughtlessness, and you make statements about people that you do not know, about things that you know nothing about. And now you are putting up another strawman.

Pathetic!

14

HumAnIze:
“But I was born without a father.”
So what, work harder.

“But I was born poor.”
So what, work harder.

“But other people are born with trust funds! They don’t even need to work!”
So what, work harder.

“But I had to miss the final exam because my family member got sick and I needed to take care of them and now I failed the class and they won’t let me retake the test and I got kicked out of the degree program and I lost my scholarship and I have so much student loan debt and no degree now.”
So what, work harder.

“But I got injured and I’m on disability now.”
So what, work harder.

“But my friend got the promotion because he’s white and I’m not.”
So what, work harder.

“But the capitalist system enslaves us to wage-slavery and robs us of our productive value while feeding the rich with even more unearned wealth!”
So what, work harder.

“But but but but but but but but!”
So what, work harder.

I think you are starting to get the point by now.

K: in fact, Humanize has it completely wrong…
I taught swimming for a while, and in the case of
swimming, as for life, the harder one works, the more
difficult it becomes… in swimming, the harder one works
the harder swimming becomes… the less one does,
the easier it is to swim… in working really hard in swimming,
one is fighting the water, not working with the water…
the less one does, the more the water does the work…
and it is vastly easier to swim doing as little as possible,
then trying to put great effort into swimming…

and the same holds true in life… when I am at work, the harder
I work, the more problems it creates… but at home,
writing like this, or studying, the less I do, I let the work,
the writing or studying do the work, it isn’t actually work
for me to write or to study… it is fairly effortless… and I
enjoy it and the time flies in this writing/studying…

At work, time goes slowly and it takes a great effort to
get anything done… not so, when I am working with
the writing/studying… the eastern religions hold to his
idea of working with, instead of working against, nature
or the flow of things… my days pass effortlessly and quickly
on days like today, when all that is planned is to write or study…
for it doesn’t seem like work, but it comes naturally to me… without
any effort or work… I flow with the writing or studying… not fight
with it… so, you stated belief that the answer is ‘‘hard work’’
is wrong… flow with the effort instead of fighting with the work…
don’t work with effort or harder, work with the flow…

Kropotkin

15

Thanks for so clearly confirming your utter lack of concern for the truth.

I doubt we’ll much converse again.

16

The difference to your theoretical “truth” is that I worked professionally with people in need and practically functioned as a crisis manager in a district while at the same time managing a retirement home. This extends to the fact that the company I worked for also took employee crises seriously, and my job as a manager and, ultimately, as regional manager included caring for my employees.

These were real people with real problems who worked for older real people who also had their problems. We are not talking about minor issues here but rather about existential problems that were not caused by those affected. Some of them were relationship problems where those affected had invested a lot and were suddenly cheated on and were faced with the end of their social existence.

So don’t come at me with some self-important “truth” definition that has nothing to do with real life. Accept that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

17

None of that has anything to do with anything we are talking about. We are talking about what sort of attitude to take with people and what to teach them with regard to being successful in life. The fact you worked in social services or whatever to help people, sure keep patting yourself on the back about what a great person you are. I can tell it’s a big part of your identity what a ‘good person’ you are, but again that has nothing to do with what we are talking about.

You keep making this personal, all about you, when this has nothing to do with you or me. Do you even know what I do for work and what I’ve done for work in the past? You have no idea, but you seem to throw your own life history of “helping work and compassion” at me as if you assume my own doesn’t include as much or more of the same. Silly assumptions on your part I’m not going to correct because my own life and the work I do, helping people or whatever it might be, is none of your business and has no bearing upon this discussion.

When it comes to the perspective you want young people and working age people to have, which is better for them?

A) Life is unfair, you are a victim, you were born with disadvantages that aren’t your fault and it’s ok that they hinder you, it’s not your fault you aren’t successful, or

B) Work hard no matter your situation, don’t blame others and don’t fall into making excuses, just do your best to work hard anyway and you will succeed

Because I know which one of those two attitudes is going to help someone and which is going to hurt them. You seem not to understand this but keep making it all about you. No one cares about you or me, we are talking about an objective thing here. Not only which specific claims and statements but in general what types of attitudes and perspectives will actually HELP people in their lives, vs. depowering and hurting them in the long term? Try to stay on topic this time, thanks.

18

Neither position is ideal because of the word “success,” which is often associated with the attainment of fame, wealth, or social status.

The accomplishment of an aim or purpose that is adapted to the ability at hand, which can progress, but is measured on one’s own progress and not other people, and is aimed at helping someone help themselves, is empowering.

The garbage you spew out about “Life is unfair etc.” has absolutely nothing to do with it. What does have to do with such an enterprise is not assuming that people can start at the same level.

In sports, boy, girls, women, men, and the disabled all have their own category, which may also take age, amateur and professionals into account. If you have someone who has a disadvantage, you don’t just ignore it, but encourage them to do the best they can.

Success ist then the accomplishment of an aim or purpose which may not be the one they want to achieve, but there is another day and perhaps a new perspective. In geriatric care, each achievement, however meagre it may appear to people outside, is celebrated.

The same goes for young people and working age people when they enter professional life. Each starts at the level they’re at and not suggested that they only have to work hard and they can start with everybody else.

19

That’s not my experience. I find they whine about a lot of things, and often lack the perspective that their problems are luxury problems. The look exactly the same as the poor people, in the intensity of their anger and whining as poor people complaining about things that are cutting close to survival issue and minimal quality of life for their kids. I’d vastly prefer being a waiter to non-rich than to the rich, though for the potential tips I might bite my tongue, depending on my life situation.

Further rich people don’t have to complain about some things. They can pay for others to complain for them: public relations firms, lawyers on retainer, politicians they contributed to and so on. And then much of the system and individuals and businesses run to kiss their asses. The rich get more complimentary gifts and discounts than the poor. And still they whine.

Of course there are many individual exceptions in all classes.

20

Oh so you pretend not to know what success means.

Bro, we’re done here. GG and no re, for real.

Peace to you tho, I hope you become… not insane. So you can actually help people and stop hurting them.