 Hello there, it's Thursday at noon. I know it is Do you remember our Arrangement Thursdays at noon on CFUV Are you ready to get started? What do you have in mind? What I want to do now is called first-person plural You make it sound excessively attractive That's what I have in mind Sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote in his ominously titled 1958 book The Causes of World War 3 Quote The issues of war and peace cannot be melted down into a naive psychology of peace through better understanding among peoples It is not the aggression of people in general, but their mass indifference That is the point of their true political Psychological relevance to the thrust toward war It is neither the psychology of peoples nor raw human nature that is relevant It is the moral insensibility of people who are selected molded and honored in the mass society close quote Violence war and oppression remain rampant in the 21st century 500 years after Europe's Renaissance Western civilization seems further away from the values of peace tolerance freedom and justice than ever Is it human nature to be violent or are people socialized to hate fear and hostility? Is it also in our nature to love to be free to do justice? Where are the peacemakers in this age of escalating violence? Alan Clements is an American-born former Buddhist monk who spent a substantial chunk of the mid 1990s in Myanmar Then called Burma Working on the book The Voice of Hope With Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi the book permits Westerners to hear of her experiences as a nonviolent resistor to the totalitarian regime in that country Alan brought his one-man show spiritually incorrect to Victoria We spoke with him by telephone to find out a little more about the life of this activist who emphasizes the spiritual approach to social change While no longer a strict Buddhist Clements treats his work with an approach rooted in Eastern philosophy and religion the two being considered the same in that tradition He looks at human identity as a process of becoming rather than being and he abhors forces that work against that development He stimulated our thoughts this week about war and peace Let's start off by asking about the show itself the one-man show you're going to be performing. Oh, yeah Do you think a one-man show is a particularly appealing forum for the transmission of your ideas? All I have is myself Yeah, one-person show for me is really just me doing what I've been doing for the last 25 years, which is Speaking up about the nature of life and meaning and the search for quality existence So and yeah, though the one-person format for me. It's not really one person ultimately I mean it's me being alive in the company of those who Come out to participate in this what I like to think of as a co-creative process So it's not really just me performing It's really about what people bring to the space that I really look for Carl I have a quotation here by Jack Healy the former director of amnesty international. It's on your website So I take it you think it's at least pertinent He said that you quote Articulate the essentials of courage and leadership in a way that can stir people from all sectors of society into action And so forth after that close quote What are the essentials of courage and leadership and Buddhism and And In fact do Buddhists think that we'd be better off doing without at least one of those words entirely the issue of courage, you know when I if I can just In brief form, you know, I had been a Buddhist monk in the country of Burma for many years and then 1988 people may remember that There was a revolution very much similar to the one that happened a year later in China in Tiananmen Square But this one happened in the city of Rangoon up to a million people took to the streets as a result of this nonviolent revolution a woman Rows up from the people. She eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 Aung San Suu Kyi when I met her in 1995 after she had been released from six years of house arrest I asked her what is at the very core of this Buddhist based Spiritual revolution and what she told me was that you were just outside on the street with the several thousand people that dared come out In defied the dictatorships authority that gatherings of five or more Would be a punishable crime against the state That takes courage. She said that the root of Buddhism at the root of a love of freedom Is the courage to feel a life that is inclusive of other people's well-being and so when I speak about courage and leadership It's really about a respect for self as equal to a respect for others And how can we work together towards this mutual sense of freedom rather than just my own individual freedom? Which is very American these days Okay, that covers courage. Do you think leadership is a concept that has a place in Buddhism? I'm a believer Carl that leadership, you know for sounding cliche it really starts pretty much in The human heart and to the extent that one You know at least enters the domain of their interior world and begins to suss out Different emotions and psychologies and mind states. I think leadership begins and Becomes successful to the extent the individual knows his self or herself. And so yes, I think leadership is crucial Not just a Buddhism, but anyone in the world who wants to have a Life that's conscientious and that's based upon self-knowledge You've mentioned on Sun Su Chi your co-author on the voice of hope. Yeah, I got the impression that Putting together the book was as a practical matter Mortally dangerous that you had to face unimaginable dangers just in order to speak with this woman and To bring her words back to this part of the world. Is that overstating the case? it probably is for my own sense of integrity in as much as I Find it difficult to compare myself as an outsider a Westerner Living Secretly in the context of a civilization a country of Burma where there are absolutely no human rights where the prisons are filled with political prisoners Where any day or night? You could have your house taken from you and it is frequently done And so in the context of meeting with on Sun Su Chi and her colleagues, although I Was told that I risked Either deportation there have been Westerners who have been imprisoned in that country But Carl I was around people who were risking everything day and night many of the leaders around on Sun Su Chi keep Small suitcases by their front doors both literally and symbolic of their willingness to go to jail for their views They're political prisoners and they're living a revolution. That's nonviolent in full knowledge that any day or night And it happens the prisons are filled with people. There's ethnic genocide going on there based upon that dictatorship There is mass Forced relocations. There are so many violations of of human rights that in context You feel that what you're faced with is nothing in relationship to the day-to-day life of people on the ground level there So yes and no to answer that question You seem to be calling for what amounts to a vigorous reworking of Western culture and You've used the term natural freedom as one of the linchpins of this reworking You've probably heard this question a thousand times by now, but let's go for number 1001 What do you mean by the term quote natural freedom close quote is it synonymous with development with potential? Natural freedom to me. I've if I can say I've just spent the last year of my life in solitude and Writing a book called instinct for freedom where that concept freedom I Speak to in the most personal way to me The reason I use the word natural coral with the word freedom is that I feel that I would like to empower Freedom all types of freedom whether it be Social economic freedom The freedom of mobility just the intimacy and the sacredness of being able to talk with you at this very moment And how for granted it would be to Assume that I could speak tomorrow. Whereas if I lost my voice how sad and what a Grieving would go on Now being in Burma a country where there was no human rights and we also have our violations here in Canada but when you see the basics of Liberate liberty taken from people The ability to convene in groups of larger than five the ability to speak your mind to write what you want all Are prohibited there? I would like to think of freedom as the most natural Condition of human life Therefore natural freedom. I also feel that freedom is Something that need not be developed as much as it need be honored And so the more respect that we have for the value The value to be able to speak our minds the value to co-create the value to travel to explore I feel the more that we honor this freedom as its most natural condition Will respect it in other people and therefore support it the most and thirdly to me Being natural is probably the hardest most complex and the most beautiful thing to do I feel that I can more comfortably be with someone who's Inarticulate but natural and sincere in their Whatever it is. There's their struggles. They're foyable their contradictions then The contrivances that seem to come from those who were more haughty or pretentious which often come With those people who subscribe to a spiritual tradition and become Inflated if you will with their egoism with their enlightenment with their depth of insight So I would like to think of freedom as something as natural and as intimate as Well, no two of us have the same fingerprints and no two of us will kiss our partner or someone in the same way No two of us will make love in the same way So in that sense freedom is the most natural most intimate expression that we have in the sense that no two of us Will do with a like and so I use the word natural and uniqueness as synonymous in my book. I hope that answers your question. I Want to clarify something about the human rights issue You've used the term more than once and if compared Burma to Canada and the United States Saying that what happens in Burma is inconceivable by the standards in those two countries But at the same time those two countries are less than pristine in this area We'd like to expand on that. What do you know about the situation in the United States and how does it compare to Canada? The human rights violation to the America. Yes You know as an American I can speak on behalf of my own culture and country. It's It's a horrifying circumstance to see that the world's soul superpower is Acting in the most hypocritical unjust arrogant preposterous megalomaniac psychotic manner at this point with a regime under and led by George Bush and It's frightening to me as an American and as a universal citizen that I would like to see myself as a global citizen who is concerned with Life as we know it as well as the generations to come it's Social environmental political and environmental denigration like we have never seen before And I think the specifics. I won't indulge them. I think almost every university student every high school student in the world knows That America primarily is consuming at the most grotesque pace the resources on the planet at the expense of most people and the programming the corporate Jingoism and the Annihilation of most cultures for the sake of American lifestyle is a collision course with what feels to be global suicide at the at the expense of The world's population for a couple of hundred million people. I just feel that it's it's a circumstance That's more insidious That Noam Chomsky along with a lot of other brilliant Intellectuals have clearly articulated the the nature of how American corporations and Madison Avenue and Los Angeles have Put forth an agenda in which most of the American population is completely dumbed down into believing their arrogant rightness and we're looking at class in Doctrination and the propaganda to keep people in support of what could very well be The largest most well-fed dictatorship in the world i.e. Washington DC led by George Bush I am not happy with America or my own country at this point in short You're listening to first-person plural on CFUV 101.9 FM Victoria so how do you think it got started you know? I look back at Evolutional sciences and it seems to me Carl that we're ever modern man and woman Migrated you look back at the out of Africa theory 7,000 generations ago where Evolutional scientists tell us that 60,000 or so humanoids migrated north to Europe and across the Asian minor into The Indian subcontinent eventually migrated around the world they'll tell us that wherever Those people went they either outproduced the local populations or they kill them through calculated acts of mass murder and Where is this diabolical? gene found in the human psyche that Seems to be the source of this Pathological aggression that we see manifesting From time immemorial into modern day. I mean where did the first? Violent strike come except that it seems to me that the human species is a predator Species it survives on the killing of life and it becomes indiscriminate whether it be about killing Someone because of their views Because of the way they look I Know when I was in Bosnia in the form of Yugoslavia for the last year of the war it became so so psychotic to see the propaganda and the type of justification for the Ethnic slaughtering of someone simply because of the last couple of syllables on their name And so where did this kind of class violence come from? there's just something that in the human heart that when it feels hopeless and impotent in society or if it feels somehow that it I don't know can't creatively express its own need for love and care Maybe there's something to be said for the lack of nurture in early childhood that promotes men and women to kill each other I haven't a clue ultimately except that it seems to be traceable to the mind state of Anger and greed and ignorance and to me in my book instinct for freedom I try to address how to understand and identify these mind states and how to work with them to help Weaken them and potentially overcome them if we be so lucky But I can't explain why Man needs to kill in the name of freedom truth God whatever it may be But it seems to have happened in mass for a long long time Long before America was settled You seem to think that there might be an adult Your ideas indicate that you think that there might be steps that can be taken that will serve as something of a palliative Something of a remedy how is for example spirituality important in fostering community in your cosmology well looking at the word spirituality going a couple of Layers Deeper into what it may point to at least in my experience. It means basic kindness When the Dalai Lama was asked about What is his religion? He said my religion is kindness. I stand in that When he was asked about how he goes about the business of manifesting Buddhism and spirituality in his life He said I try to see everyone that I meet as my brother or my sister and my mother or my father my family and To me those are the simple messages. I feel in a non-sectarian modern form of spirituality That the world could embrace today that is Trans-religious, I mean, I'm no longer a Buddhist. I really espouse what I call the world Dharma a spirituality that is rooted in love kindness warmth and Perhaps it's old-fashioned Carl to be thinking these ways, but I think the more that we can understand our own basic desires for security for happiness and Somehow allow ourselves to step out of that own our own personal Needs and hear the cry hear the desires of others. I think it's possible that we might relax enough and Our leaders might relax enough to open up before the world simply falls into Something that we cannot repair. You've indicated elsewhere that you think quote passive resistance closed quote as a misnomer for this sort of non-violent action, you've also indicated that the term non-violent is not properly illuminative is Kindness the word we're looking for here if so is kindness and imperative is beneficence Well, these are complex. These are complex questions that you're bringing up and I Don't think there's one side to any of these issues people have asked me often You know, you've written a book called Burma the next killing fields. You've been in Bosnia and Croatia during their genocide Are all genocides the same was what what happened in Rwanda the same as what happened in the ethnic cleansing of Yugoslavia? To me all dictatorships, although they be authoritarian they manifest very differently Ethnic cleansing is different country to country politics are different country to country democracies obviously The democracy in America is very different than the democracy in Canada and the democracy that will come out of Burma I think we'll have a compassionate face unlike the American face of arrogance and consumerism all those things change and my belief is that You know, hopefully we're headed towards something where the evolution of all these principles lead towards a form of life and civilization that I just Well, for lack of better words hope has love and kindness and compassion at the forefront of of these expressions Well, we obviously don't have time to talk about the message. So let's hit the medium one more time What is to use your own title spiritually incorrect about your one-man show and Moreover, what are the drawbacks of being correct? Well, what is spiritually incorrect? You know the Catholic Church killing three million women? Paul pot annihilating his entire population based upon an agrarian belief system to me I I'm really trying to confront the lie the propaganda of dictatorships of Capitalistic societies of corporate giants and trying to shove down our throat the belief in product placement that we need we need we need we need and to me I'm trying to Start a revolution Quiet as it may be Nonviolent at times and if it needs to get in your face, I don't believe in killing people But then again, I saw in Bosnia to answer your last question the value of NATO's Intervention everyone in that country applauded 12 days of bombing to stop the genocide. There's no one easy answer but I would like people to champion the most radical place of individual thinking and Confront the old tired stories of How society is telling us we should live and so fundamentally spiritually incorrect is a celebration of the individual and The willingness to confront the injustice of propaganda and to begin to make peace be creative and have much more fun So I don't know whether ultimately answers your question But that's as close as I can get to it at the moment You've spoken about the spiritual individual and I'd like to Contrast that with the spiritual group. Is there more to your approach than just congregation? Is there an interaction effect? I would like to think that you know, we're only six billion of us out here and with hordes of flies and animals and butterflies and oceans and trees, I mean What I feel that I would like to evoke whether it be in my theater the way that I wrote it in my book and my personal relationships between people is to instill a sense of awe The longer I've lived the more stupid I feel I am I haven't a clue. No one has a clue ultimately of This universe that we're just such a microscopic part of I mean, it's an overwhelming circumstance and so to me what makes relationships so curious and so beautiful is when we have a degree of Wondering and awe and Something sacred that we both honor that isn't just about Different nationalities or different social economic brackets or different cultures or different politics But something that we connect to that we're both humans that we're part of a mysterious universe where the God that is Running through our veins rate this very second is the same God the same energy the same intelligence and That we have a brief moment in the evolution of this huge infinity This huge eternity to contribute something to the preservation and the evolution of What is the greatest miracle of all life itself and so that takes place? I Feel by communion by community by family by relationship after all fundamentally the world has shown us We are one family whether we want to embrace that or not It's a small world. We're hurtling through eternity at 10,000 kilometers an hour We must wake up that we are one family here and begin to behave in a more civilized way and that to me comes through individual contact I'm not someone who has lunch with the Prime Minister. I'm an ordinary citizen doing an ordinary thing and My relationships are one by one. And so spirituality to me How do I relate to you? How do I relate to the person at the checkout counter? How do I relate to? My body when I wash my face. It's all about the simplicity of here and now Anything else you'd like to ask or is there anything other area that you'd like to cover or if you have anything you'd like to add Now would be a good opportunity Well, can I talk about my book? Absolutely You know, I've been asked to write the book that I just spent a year of my life writing and I Am Informed by my publishers that writing the book was only half the story that in fact you have to become your publicist and inform people that this book exists and For lack of better ways more humble ways of doing it. I really ask people, you know to go out there and buy my book Called instinct for freedom finding liberation through living and turn people on to it. It's really an underground book and The reason I chose to write this book was that the publisher asked me to write it. I purposely have refused to write Spiritual books. It's like, you know, I don't want to write a book about how someone should make love It's individual and but they came to me Carl and said listen We want you to write a book that is from your heart in any way that you want and I said you really would put that down on paper Whatever you want and so I wrote a book from my heart if I never lived I said at the end of this and I completed it This was the book that I would want to write and so I really asked people To go out there and get it and read it and not just for my sake but the book is about Many many people that I know friends colleagues and many people that we all know out there who don't have a voice the prisons like I said are filled in Burma with Political prisoners people who risked it all for the freedom To stand in their conscience and so this book is a voice if I can use it for the voiceless And so in that sense, I really hope it has value and I hope people read it and I thank you from my heart for that opportunity I know that there's lots of books out there and lots of pages to turn and this is just one of many many hundreds of other books but instinct for freedom is From my heart and I hope people feel it from that point of view That's all I have to say about it Ellen Clements. Thank you for speaking with me today Thank you very much Carl for having me You I I Asked out a few leading questions I wanted to raise certain methodological concerns talk about the underpinnings of how he went about things and I'd like to discuss that a little bit more now You had some thoughts on the way he viewed humans and human nature. I'd like to hear more about your Methodology before we get into the human nature People look at gentle approaches and they think well, that's the easy way and I think Alan would say on the contrary the easy way is just going along with the crowd and Killing everybody in sight until somebody kills you The gentle way is the more rigorous the more demanding the more civilized I think even use the word civilization at one point And that's a concept that I think goes missing far too often non-violence is a path that requires more discipline violence is easy You have to train to be the best at it If you're gonna survive. Yes, you can't just Go out and start beating people up because well some of those people are armed and they've been Training with firearms for some time and they're going to shoot you but that's not what I'm talking about here I'm talking about The conceptual framework for it the why we do it and how we go about it people do train That may be the central fact of their existence, but I'm talking about The amount of thought that goes into deciding which sort of training to undergo Training for non-violence is training as well. You talk about it. You think about it and invariably under non-violence talking becomes your number one approach Talking riding other forms of communication of symbolic power I also think resistance becomes part of that approach and There's a physicality to the resistance the sitting down and not moving the Going limp when somebody tries to move you, you know the sort of Jell-O body Approach that says okay. If you if you're gonna take me you're gonna take me as dead weight So there is it there's a physicalness to the resistance that I think is an important part of the training So it's not just talking it out. It's also recognizing that if a regime wants to Control you it must control your body It must control your physicality and that is one of the weapons that Resistance has nonviolent resistance has But I don't know that he got into that so much but it but what I do think that he got into was The thing that struck me about your conversation with him and about reading his website is that he has a lot of interesting musings About the nature of people about the nature of government the nature of politics About human nature itself. I don't think that he's put it into anything like a coherent theory Which is perfectly okay with me? I think that there's lots of room for being contemplative about these questions and I think that the Western desire to push it into a Coherent philosophy or a coherent theory may Be a way of stifling new ideas and new thoughts It's his best guess all the way along. There are certain things that he saw firsthand and he presents them to you as eyewitness reports and he's Very Specific about that. I'm sure that we could have talked about my enmar for over an hour Without him having to do anything but describe what went on there. Yes, and I and I think his World travels and his experiences are one of the most impressive things about him because he is coming back with this personal experience to share and with this eyewitness account of What he has seen and he's coming back talking about it in In in-depth terms in contemplative terms. He's not just reporting he's Grappling with what it all means. What does it mean to him as somebody born in the United States? What does it mean to him as? Someone who comes from North America and shows up on the doorstep when he was talking about You asked him if he was in mortal danger and he said well, you know I might have been imprisoned and I might have been kicked out of the country, but the people that I Was talking to were in danger of Being killed of being imprisoned. They had no escape. I love that awareness of his position versus their position He understood where his privileges were in that situation and that's unusual in the Western mind It's unusual in Western culture for people to mark who they are to understand Both the limitations of their lives and the privileges of their lives one of the things that baffles me is that 500 years after The Renaissance I suppose you would call it occurred in Europe We still haven't answered the Pol Pot question. He mentioned Pol Pot by name Speaking of the dictator of Cambodia. You've probably heard stories about the Khmer Rouge. Sure the killing fields. Yes and the Pol Pot question is also the Stalin question the Hitler question you could go down the list and And Empiricism points out that the Enlightenment the Renaissance call these intellectual movements in Europe what you want Whatever the sum total of them was at the end of the day We still have people rising to power and killing everybody in sight and Clements points this out and I'd like to know I don't expect you to answer this here But I would like to know why that is Why is it that the sum total of all this cleverness? has been that at the end of the day What life is about on this planet is a Bunch of people hand a bunch of power to one guy and he quote tells them close quote to go kill everybody Which they knew was coming but did anyway the Renaissance Doesn't have an answer for this. I think that Post-modernism might have some approaches post-modernism is Real for its lack of prescriptive systems that may or may not be true But I think it provides knowledge that one might bring to situations in which a Prescriptive approach is sought which is the next best thing in fact I might argue that one does that anyway even with prescriptive approaches There is the moment when one says okay, do I follow this or not or more generally? How much weight do I give this and that is inevitable that moment is inevitable? Clements likes what I would call spiritual approaches. He might or might not like that terminology and The methodological soundness of it at first struck me as being Well vague But the more I think about it the more I think that I witness accounts and best guesses Maybe all we have Well, let me address you you kind of brought up two things there and I want to address Both of them. So I want to go back to I want to go back to the pull-pot question And that is why why do we have these horrific? Regimes that keep popping up and it's interesting you mentioned pull-pot first But then you proceeded to mention several people who are European Russia's Kind of European. I think they're more European than Asian but we can let that go as well But anyway Clearly Hitler clearly But they've been doing the same thing in Asia as well, right? But my point is that Cambodia being a renaissance didn't happen in Cambodia But you can't argue that it didn't happen in Germany. You can't argue that it didn't happen in Europe certainly a Great deal of both Eastern and Western Europe bought into The ideas of the Renaissance I mean, I don't know of anybody in Europe who still has a government that is under the auspices of the Vatican. Do you Know nobody's paying tribute to the Pope I Would say there are some that in a dotted line manner are still connected Yes, but not in the way that they were before the Renaissance The direction I want to go in is this you might say that yes, it's true that the Renaissance tried to evoke an understanding of government of politics and so forth and led to ideas that we have now about freedom about basic human rights but the Renaissance also did some things that set up the continuation of Violence and I think the biggest thing that the Renaissance did is it Divided the human mind from human nature It said that the mind the life of the mind exists different from and away from our Basin needs for food for sex for Connections with other people our emotional nature our physical nature and in fact it's difficult in 21st century English to even speak of this in Holistic terms Because there is no word that means all of these things together There is no word that we can use in English that means body mind spirit psychology sociology all of these things together we've divided up human beings into itty-bitty fragments that lead us to Not being able to communicate in any way shape or form What it means to be wholly human and we've been sold this taxonomy this methodology as being Uniquely determined and optimal Yes So there's no language to talk about this and there is a Kind of pressure when we do try to talk about this To answer all of these fragmented questions and never get to the point It's so easy to define somebody to define and other in that kind of system as being less than human We're the ones who use our minds. We're the civilized ones. They are The bad ones, you know, we're we're the freedom lovers They're the terrorists we're democracy their tyranny Etc. Etc. And these dichotomies get set up over and over again and at their base is We are Human and you are Something else something other than you certainly if you're bound by humanism you simply redefine certain Organisms is not human and that justifies you're doing all sorts of horrible things to them And I think that an ecological view of the world Which I think that part of what Clements is doing is Based upon an ecological view of the world Comes back to this understanding that all of these actions have reactions in nature That in fact, even if we're doing these things to non-humans It affects our lives. It has consequences to our existence that you can't pull out part of the ecology and Pretend that it doesn't have any effect on the rest of the ecology and Therefore he I heard in your interview with him him evoking a lot of nature language He talks in terms of our instincts. He talks in terms of our Genetics he talks in terms of our Evolutionary history This is very biological language. It's a biological view of who we are as human beings And I don't think he intended this but he I mean, I think this is a limitation of language Rather than a limitation of his thinking but he sets up civilization as something that's sort of keeping that under control In a lot of ways He's suggesting that the reason that we go out and kill each other is that it's part of our nature and that civilization comes in and Puts a check on that But then he also towards the end of your discussion with him starts evoking other parts of our nature like what if Love is part of our nature if we have an instinct for love and what if we have an instinct for freedom What if part of our nature is to be kind to each other? Then then the question of sociology comes in Then it is a question of what our culture teaches us to pay attention to in our instincts and what our culture Teaches us to ignore and I think that's the piece if you were going to make a more theoretical Case than he's making then that's the thing that he's missing. He's missing this interaction of our cultures with this Story that he's telling about our nature What do you mean by interaction? I mean that culture puts some limitations or some emphases on How we interact with each other as human beings We are taught things as well as we just know things instinct implies that we just know it that I think that what we come to regard is instinctual and what we come to regard as Learned is also learned to certain extent In other words, I don't think that you can answer this question I guess is what I'm saying in the end. I don't think that you can answer the question. How much of what we do is Basic biology and how much of what we do is basic socialization or Or in culturation I Think that they they happen together Okay, let me run a model by you a suggestion people talk about human nature being malleable all the time, but I think that if one Treats the altered human as Possessing human nature one is forgetting that the human had to be altered in order to reach that state to the extent that The secret police of the world have to brainwash people in order to change their quote human nature close quote to that extent do they admit It pre-exists That they have to alter it is pointing to it is admitting that it is there so you're suggesting that putting people in fear for their lives and Setting them up I'm violent situations is an alteration of who they are I'm saying that if you have to beat something out of someone by taking them away from their family putting them in solitary confinement for a couple of years and Making them subsist on bread and water doesn't prove that something is very very strong Not irresistible not immovable, but merely very very strong. I don't know what would prove it I don't know how much better an argument would be required That it isn't true in extremists is the only thing that has been proven Ultimately you can make people Believe or do just about anything if you have absolute power over them, but the key word there is ultimately I Suggest that there might be something that varies from person to person. I don't think that people are identical But I think that there is something within each person that struggles to come to fruition like Flowers bursting through the cracks and sidewalks. I Think that that self-organizing creative ability is there within people. It takes a different form in each person But it needs an ecology in order to flourish. Yes, and when the ecology is jute So that it is beaten out of that person instead that is still an admission that it is there And it is powerful. Although I say again not absolutely so I like your example except I would like to suggest that it doesn't have to happen in extremists that is that See culture to me is an incredible invention that can be used for good or evil. I I Mean culture enables us to not have to reinvent the wheel every time we interact with another human being We have some givens in our life G.I.B.E.M.S. And Because we don't have to figure that out all over again every time we talk to each other We can do other things. We're free to be more creative the problem is is that when the given is violent when the given is dangerous when the given is Hostile even if it's not violent, but it's symbolically violent or it It sanctions you it prevents you from being free Then it turns into a bad thing So it's not that culture is bad. It is the The product of culture that can hurt and I think that it can be subtle it doesn't have to be blatant There are lots and lots of ways in which culture can control you and Create problems in your ecology where you are not a creative human being and it can do it subtling I think that that's a pretty cool thing that we just came up with to tell you the truth I like this idea because I like the idea that it has to do with you know What kind of soil you're in as to whether or not you can grow whether or not you're getting plenty of rain? Whether there are other things around you that you know just to sort of take the biological metaphor a little bit here Whether there are nutrients around you that can nurture you that's where creativity grows And I think this is the thing that people have to see that if they that if they allow The powers that be to limit that to destroy that ground to take away that nurturing That what we limit is human potential You have been listening to first-person plural because how people get along with each other still matters First-person plural is a show created for community radio by Carl Wilkerson and Dr. Patty Thomas to examine social and organizational issues Music for first-person plural is performed composed and produced by Carl Wilkerson except where noted for more information about first-person plural Dr. Patty Thomas or Carl Wilkerson visit our website www.culturalconstructioncompany.com or email us at FPP at culturalconstructioncompany.com you