TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore four different areas of life in which violation is considered socially acceptable. The first area is war, where in war certain cultures, countries, nations consider it socially acceptable, even legally acceptable, to attack other cultures, other people, other countries. Attack them, take away their homes, kill them, violate them, imprison them, kidnap them, harm them, whether or not those people have necessarily done anything wrong or not, or even if they have done something that might be considered socially wrong. Does that mean that they, or perhaps their whole nation, deserve to be killed? And it’s interesting, it’s almost like war is some sort of social safety valve to allow people to have the liberty to just boom, vomit out all their buried feelings, to give them the right, to give a whole culture the right to displace its rage on a different world. So war is one.
A second area might seem totally disconnected from war, or maybe not. That is how humans throughout history, even in this modern world, are often allowed, legally and socially sanctioned, to violate nature. To violate woodlands, trees, jungles, forests, the ocean, animals, wild animals for sure, to hunt them, to kill them. I think about myself as a kid. I was given a BB gun when I was 12. I saw kids when I was younger than that had BB guns and killing animals all over the place, and later with rifles and shotguns, and shooting and killing. And there were certain rules supposedly that people were supposed to follow. You’re supposed to have a hunting license to kill certain animals, a fishing license to kill certain fish. You’re supposed to do it in a humane way, and yet all over the place I saw people violate this and violate it with a lot of buried repressed feelings that just came out, well, doing all sorts of cruel things to animals, doing cruel things to nature.
And then I think of even the most probably horrible thing of all that’s the most legally sanctioned, is the right that people have to develop land. To take a forest and cut down all the trees, and not necessarily to directly kill any of the animals that live there, or sometimes live in this land, but to just deprive them of their homes. So they die by proxy. They have nowhere else to live, they can’t migrate through there, they can’t raise their babies there. I remember as a child watching a farmer who had a beautiful natural pond on his land, and he sold the land to be turned into a grocery store. I talked about this in a different video, and it turned out where this beautiful pond was, that was full of a whole natural ecosystem of turtles and fish and frogs and salamanders and all sorts of migrating birds that came through, and muskrats and woodchucks and foxes that lived around it, and skunks and opossums, raccoons, deer that came and drank in the water, all these different things. And me, little Daniel, who would go there and play there and try to catch pollywogs and learn about life.
Well, this pond happened to fall into the area which was going to become a parking lot. And one day I came to play at the pond, and boom, there were these huge backhoes, and they were filling it in and covering it over. And the next thing you know, everything in there was dead. And this happened in early spring, so the turtles hadn’t even come out yet. They were all buried because they were hibernating. They were buried in the mud, and they got buried under all this dirt. They were gone. They just took all the water out, drained it, and killed everything. And it was all gone. And this was a shock to me. It was like, how could you do this? How is this allowed to kill a thousand or five thousand or ten thousand creatures like that, totally legally, to sell it to a supermarket, to make into a parking lot so people could put their cars there? It was like, if this wasn’t a violation, then I don’t know what is.
I remember being eight, nine years old and watching this and crying and crying and not knowing what to do because there was nothing that I could do. Nobody cared about what I felt. Nobody cared about the rights of these animals, these animals, these creatures, these plants, this pond itself. None of this was considered to have rights. I remember talking about it with my parents, and well, that’s life. They didn’t really even care that much, and they knew it all, so there was nothing you could do about it. And that, in many ways, is the history of humanity in its relation with nature. And we’ve been given a mandate long ago, and the Bible, once upon a time, go and tame the lands. I think this is in the book of Genesis. God said to do this: tame the lands, tame the wilderness, and all this. And yet I see this as a violation.
And a place where people also, I see this, I saw this with hunters, especially when I was little. People who felt impotent in their lives, felt powerless in their lives, felt less than. I saw it myself when I got my first BB gun. The little sad, lonely pre-teen or early teen Daniel, who was so bullied and put down and violated in my family, I was given this weapon, this thing. Even though it just was just an air gun and it shot a little copper pellet out there, it was like I had the power to kill. I had the power to harm. I had the power to destroy. It was like suddenly my weak little arm was a lot longer and could do a lot more damage, and it gave me a sense of feeling good inside. And how sad was that? That to violate others in the ways in which I had been violated made me feel good. It was like I transferred from being the victim to being the victor, but really from being the bullied into being the bully, from being the violated into being the violator. And that was even encouraged. I was told that was a good thing.
And yes, I ate the things that I shot, and I learned a lot about science from it, so there were a lot of secondary positive effects that came out of it. But at the same time, underneath it, this was fueled by me being so hurt inside and being so angry and never being allowed in my family to express my hurt and my anger at the people who were violating me, because then they just violate me more. Then they just reject me more. To feel my feelings was something that made my life worse. And I do connect this with war because I’ve talked to a lot of people who, well, were proud to go to war, who felt empowered by this. I’ve heard this: “Oh, it’ll make you a man if you go and fight, if you go and fight these other people, these bad people who we actually don’t even know anything about.” And now how much of war is just like, especially from the United States, it’s like a video game with drones and people acting out a sense of competition and empowerment. Literally, it’s like a video game plus, where people are really dying, people are being violated. And it’s disempowered people, people who have been violated in their lives, who are getting a chance to express their feelings.
It’s very interesting how this is considered not just legal, but it’s considered advantageous. People are getting paid a lot of money to do this, to harm people, to violate people. They get a lot of perks from it. This brings me to the third area, which is the root of the first two areas. So I’ve addressed it a little bit. The third area where people are allowed to violate others, where they’re socially sanctioned to violate others, even legally allowed to do it, is parents in the family system with their children. Yes, there are laws and rules. You cannot rape your children. You cannot beat your children so bad that they get broken bones. You cannot do this or that. You must feed them. You must make sure they get some sort of an education, at least in this country. But even those rules, a lot of times, aren’t followed. And a lot of times, children are so disempowered in their family system and in society that even if those rules are being broken, I just think, look at the comments on this YouTube channel.
Have directly talked about those very rules being broken. That parents can get away with doing those things, and the parents know it. The more that they disempower their children, so often the less likely their children can even know that they have rights, that they can fight for their rights. So often nobody cares what the child says. The father can violate the children’s rights, and the mother will defend the father, not the children. I mean, that certainly happened in my life again and again and again and again. It was like the family system was a separate world, a separate nation, where there were a separate set of rules. Hmm.
To what degree does the American Constitution protect the right of privacy within the family? It gives parents liberty to do what they want behind closed doors. And then I think of that’s just certain areas where, okay, we won’t look. We don’t want to know. Sexual abuse and other horrible things can be going on, and maybe it’s against the law, but we won’t ask too many questions. But then about emotional neglect, verbal violations, all sorts of emotional incest, all these areas in which children’s spirit, sometimes their bodies, their very inherent right to be loved, to be cared about, to be treated as a respected human being is disrespected. It’s violated. And this is totally legal. This is totally normal. In fact, this is more common than respect. I see this as ubiquitous. I hear stories of this. I watch this. I see it in the street. I see disrespect happening all the time, and this is considered fine.
And then I see parents who have so many children, sometimes so many being even two, three, where they can’t remotely meet the emotional needs of any individual child they have. Or parents who have children out of wedlock in one-night stands, who have children where they don’t even want the child. They give the child away. All of this being legal. Oh well, I made a mistake and all these different things. And children being raised by parents who don’t want them. Parents who give their children to other people during the day. People who don’t like them, people who don’t care about them, people who might even hate them.
I think of myself being given to a nanny who probably had her own children, who had to abandon her own children to come and look after abandoned me because my parents wanted to go to work. They didn’t need to both work to make money; they both wanted to further their careers. My mom was having an affair with her boss at work. She didn’t need the extra money; she needed at work. My father could have made quite enough money to support us. My mother wanted to go to work for the status, also for her affair with her boss. And so she abandoned me, neglected me. I was left in the hands of someone who didn’t like me because she was abandoning her own life to be paid not very much money to take care of me. It was this terrible violation, yet this was normal. This was even socially acceptable. Everybody thought it was great. Oh good for you for going back to work, to my mom. You’re a feminist, you’re fighting for your right to work. And underneath it was a lot of violation of me and considered all okay.
And setting the stage for me to understand that violation is normal. Setting the stage for me someday to, when I got a BB gun and other areas of my life, where I got a false sense of empowerment to violate others to make up for the rage and sadness and neglect that I’d gone through. I remember when I turned 18 years old and I had to register in America for the selective service. If there is a war, if there is a draft, you legally will be taken to war, Daniel. And I remember my mother, quite hypocritically, my mother who had violated me in so many different ways, telling me, “Daniel, I am not supportive of American wars. If there is a draft and they will take you to war, I will take you to Canada and we will escape the draft.” I remember thinking to myself, hell no! I’d rather go to Vietnam and fight in Vietnam than spend another year with my mother in Canada. My mother who actually violated me. I actually rather liked the idea of going and fighting a war and acting out my rage and anger that she had committed on me. And here she was presenting herself as my protector. It was so twisted, these rules of violation and harm. So twisted, and so much of this all legal.
And I’m going to get into the last area, the fourth area where violation is legal. And in a way, this is the most legal area of violation of all, and that is self-violation, self-harm. I know many people, thankfully none of my therapy clients that I was working with at any given time, but I know so many people who have killed themselves, taken their own lives, also literally physically attacked themselves in horrible ways. Sometimes I have physically harmed myself in different ways. Thankfully never tried to kill myself, but I’ve known so many people who have tried to kill themselves and some who have succeeded. And it was like not quite socially sanctioned, but legally sanctioned. I’ve heard in some cultures, some countries, it’s against the law to try to kill yourself. I believe it was in America in the past. But those are just the most over-loud ways of physically violating oneself.
But then about people who emotionally sell themselves out, hate themselves, despise themselves, treat themselves terribly, have repeated patterns of doing horrible things to themselves, undercut themselves, loathe themselves, despise themselves, have terrible addictions that destroy their own individual lives. And it’s legal. It’s legal to hate yourself. It’s legal to treat yourself terribly. It’s legal to have so many different addictions in this world. And all of this being rooted in a history of having been violated. So basically, it’s okay to act out one’s own historical violations on oneself. Often people are lauded for this or pitied for it. When people violate others, when they harm others, a lot of times if it goes out of the bounds of what’s considered socially acceptable, people who are violent and beat other people up, people who commit domestic violence on their partners, that’s not okay. That’s not okay. But when people do those exact same things to themselves, that’s often considered just fine.
So when I think about this, when I think about these hypocritical social rules of society, where there are all these different areas where people are allowed to commit violations, the most important thing that it comes back to, to me, the cure for it. I was going to say as it were, but not as it were. The real cure for this is to heal the violations we went through, to grieve our traumas. Well, first to just identify what happened to us. So many people have no clue what their own history even is. They don’t even want to look at their own history. It’s easier to act it out unconsciously than to study it consciously. But really to study our own histories and then to grieve it, to bring up our feelings, to remember what we went through, to feel those feelings that we were not allowed once upon a time, and to bring those feelings back into consciousness, to bring them back in their proper measure, to really own them and to not act them out on others or the world. To grieve that, to heal that, to become a whole person. And then the more one becomes a whole person, an integrated self, the less one needs to violate others, violate the world, violate nature, violate one’s own self, violate one’s children. Because there’s less need to act out. And instead, a person who is more healed becomes more respectful, more nurturing, more loving, more caring.