Those Emperors Have No Clothes On
Naked Old Men Run The World - The World Has A Trust Problem
This post was written was written in April 2022 - and is more true today than it was when written.
Amazing to understand that the Emperor truly has no clothes and the world - even given the ongoing genocide by world leaders and all the rest of the dystopia still believe these emperors have clothes on.
Yes society does have an issue with trust.
By the time we recognize we are in an abusive relationship with broken trust we are already in trouble deep.
After years, perhaps decades of trauma we are in a classic trap. Traumatized and weaker we understand we must exit the relationship no matter what it means.
This is no different when the abusers are our government or corporations, institutions or another person.
The dynamics are the same and may include physical or psychological abuse or both.
The abuser cannot carry on if the victim or abused does not consent so it is a two way street.
Allowing ourselves to be abused is the ultimate evidence of lack of self respect.
As long as the relationship continues we simply cannot attain a strong, dynamic, mature, resilient self.
The emperors still have no clothes - appear stark naked and quite obviously the last choices for leaders by any stretch of the imagination and by any stretch of the definition of sanity,
The Myriad Faces of Abuse
The artist Steve Earle once spoke of this saying that Americans are all like the adult children of alcoholics.
He’s spot on. Even when we’re grown up we carry the legacy of childhood abuse with us until we face it head on, tell ourselves the truth about it and learn to heal.
Regardless of the type we have all been victims of some sort of abuse and certainly not just Americans.
This applies even if we did not suffer the consequences of alcoholism or related abuse.
It is possible to become the victim of abuse for a long time without recognizing it for what it is.
It’s always a double edged sword but is especially poignant when we care about the abuser.
By 2022 all of us have suffered through the Covid-19 epidemic and most of us have faced ambivalent feelings about it.
We may have been uncertain of the validity of the PCR tests, information coming from trusted doctors, about the trustworthiness of vaccines or treatments, about information from our governments, institutions, news agencies, or humiliated by being ordered to wear masks or perhaps by the refusal of people to wear them for the sake of others.
Maybe we feel our trust has been betrayed.
Of course we care about our nation, about the integrity of our leaders, about the trustworthiness of our friends & neighbors so the sense of betrayal can be acute.
It hurts. It is a trauma and healing requires work.
The Abuser
Since the abuser can be anyone, any group or institution, it is important to recognize it while it’s happening.
By paying close attention to our feelings we can usually catch these events and extricate ourselves before it gets intense.
Learning to pay attention to what is popularly referred to as our “BS detectors” - our inner sense of what’s wrong or right.
Often if we don’t face abusers and confront the personal consequences we ourselves can come to intentionally or unwittingly perpetuate it.
A vicious circle. Witness the huge increase in violence around us.
Obviously this has enormous consequences for ourselves and our society. Once we lose trust it is difficult to return to it.
Once we heal from abuse we understand it far better and can avoid it in the future.
To do this we must be scrupulously honest with ourselves and others, confronting our own shame & anger.
Lying about it or hiding from it on any level won’t work. Because abuse always involves an agreement between the abuser & abused the emotions are complicated.
Once we break this agreement and face the truth we may leave it behind and become healed.
Abusers are essentially cowardly, weak people who suffer enormous emotional turmoil and can’t or won’t face the truth.
Often they are most dangerous when cornered so we must be practical to safeguard ourselves from harm.
The consequences of failing ourselves
When we fail ourselves we also fail everyone else, especially those we care about.
So it’s far from just our own business to heal from our participation in an abusive relationship. It seems like more of an important personal responsibility.
No matter who the abuser is or how mild or severe the abuse we must react.
When it is a government who does the abusing it is particularly daunting.
It seems nearly everyone felt betrayed by the consequences of the withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan.
There are innumerable ways we can feel abused by a nation and most citizens have felt some disenchantment with government actions.
The old saying that governments behave when they have a healthy degree of fear for what we the people may do if the government fails to behave seems a fair observation.
Today, that many citizens of many different nations around the globe disapprove of their government is putting it mildly.
Many are speaking or acting out and we watch as governments respond by feeling threatened, fearing their power and authority will be lessened.
And yet the citizens, as in the United States, have a contract with the government - represented by the Constitution and by the original intent of why there is a government or nation in the first place.
The main issue with the constitution is it must be fairly interpreted in light of the intentions of the founders - a difficult proposition at best.
A thorough discussion of these issues is way beyond the scope of this post and the skill of this writer.
But I will say that I believe our founding ancestors would be shocked and extremely disappointed if they were to appear in our midst in 2022.
They would clearly see the abuse and the failings we citizens have agreed to.
When all other definitions fail it is we the people - the citizens - who truly are the source of the governments power and riches.
We all are responsible for what we allow the government to do.
As our founding ancestors warned, it is only by paying strict attention to this and by seeing these actions clearly,that we may better coordinate our efforts appropriately to bring any governmental abuse to an end and proceed to heal from it.
This is necessarily a limited discussion of these issues. I hope eventually to write more of the other social contracts we hold with other entities than the government. Corporations and institutions are among these and each likely need their own separate consideration.
“Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic.”
— Albert Moravia
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
— Margaret Mead
Once we could have believed democracy boasts two-way traffic.
Now we understand that tyranny may arise in a democracy as well as in any other form of government or economic system.
It is simply the nature of government to take more and more power.
And it appears that neither small numbers or large numbers of “thoughtful citizens” may change the world.
Since this article was first published I have come to see that our very civilizations are at fault and that we simply are unable to overcome our tendency to want to live to be serially abused by these old decrepit serially abusive toxic narcissists.
And onto today’s essay which posits the idea that we might well change if enough of us decided to.
We shall see!
The problem , KW, is that half the population feels that one set of leaders is abusing them and the other half feels that they are being abused by the other set of leaders, and they will never come to anything close to agreement on who is doing the abusing and what constitutes the abuse.
I would be interested in hearing if you agree and how that can be resolved, in f it can be short of a national no fault divorce or civil war. The clip of JRB at a post debate rally and Al Sharpton on MSNBC are not hopeful signs.
Naked, angry old men will be defeated in the end.