Humanity – Are we The Bullies of Life? DAY 44

Someone recently pointed out to me how porn in fact is a form of bullying and he argued that bullying in fact is the core point of why porn even exists in this world. This discussion opened up a lot of dimensions that I hadn’t considered in relation to both porn and bullying because I have recently been investigating both porn and bullying but I hadn’t as such placed the two into an interdependent context. (So thank you C!)

As a teacher I travel to many schools during the week and at least here in Sweden there are constantly campaigns attempting to instill ‘tolerance’ and ‘friendship’ in and between the children. This is even written into the national educational policy and curriculum and is thus something that we as teachers are required to teach by law. But many teachers and parents can probably relate to how difficult it is to teach children these things. Some children naturally gets it and would never hurt a fly, others might look like they’re getting it and then as soon as you turn around you hear them make a nasty remark or see them kick someone on the shins. This is obviously also why educational committees, to try and change how children see and interact with each other, are constantly launching these campaigns. We ask why it is so difficult to stop bullying among children, but I suggest we flip the question around and ask ourselves instead.

Isn’t porn a form of bullying? And isn’t the one who views porn in fact a bystander to bullying who does nothing to help the victim but instead get off at their expense? Isn’t war a form of bullying – the utmost manifestation of bullying in fact? Can’t the way we as human beings treat animals constitute as a form of bullying?

As I’ve described in previous posts, the problem with bullying starts in ourselves, in our own minds and how we relate to the world and other human beings. See bullying doesn’t just emerge out of the blue in the minds and behaviors of children. Bullying doesn’t exist because children and teenager is particularly mean people who simply haven’t learned the rules of society yet. Children wouldn’t bully if bullying weren’t already a part of society – a part of our world that we accept as normal.

I can give you an example: when I was around four years old, I hit another child deliberately because she took something I wanted on the playground. After that I tried covering it up because I feared being caught and yelled at by the teachers. I also around the same time kicked a bee for fun, it was just a kick – and the bee died and I felt horrible because I had done something so stupid for no reason and had actually killed another living being. In neither of these situations were there adults present explaining to me how the world works. In the first instance the school teachers were busy somewhere else. The school was quite big and so it was easy for us children to go and do stuff that the adults didn’t know about. In the second instance, I was with my mother and a group of other adults, but when I started crying because I had killed the bee, they just kind of shrug and laughed it off, perhaps perplexed not knowing what to say. Since I was a child I knew that war was wrong and bad and stupid. I felt that the children who starved in Africa were my peers, my equals and I couldn’t understand why they had to suffer and why I couldn’t help them, by for example sending my food to them. In none of these situation – and I could share many more examples – were there adults present explaining to me how the world works in fact. No one explained any principles of living or assisted me to understand how to live in a way that is best for all.

So as children, we’re at the complete and utter mercy of the system – and we learn from watching adults subtly manipulating other adults or even ourselves. We learn from seeing adults shrugging in apathy that that which we see as common sense, like for instance the absurdity of war, is irrelevant and immature. When we become teenagers we’re told that we’re too idealistic, that we’ll learn when we’re older how the world really works. But when we’re older, we become the parents, we are the adults. And we still haven’t learned. Have we? If we did – we certainly wouldn’t go to war. We certainly wouldn’t sit and watch in the darkness while placing filters on our children’s computers the next morning.

War and Porn and Bullying are all coming from the same origin and starting-point: our human nature as who and how we’ve accepted and allowed ourselves to exist. They’re interconnected. Sexual crimes of humiliation and torture are not unusual in the cases of bullying or war. In fact sexual torture has become common in child bullying, none the least since children became the primary market for porn. The most popular porn these days presents bullying, humiliation and both verbal and physical abuse to the viewers. The viewers, the bystanders that takes sides and believe that they have a prerogative to make judgment calls as to the legality of the abuse they are watching – exactly as we do when we sit in front of the TV and watch images from war. We can be for it or against it, but we’re watching it. And then we go about our business, pretending that its got nothing to do with us, that we’re not a part of it – even though it is our own human nature that is the cause and origin.

There isn’t anyone but us on this planet. There are no aliens, no gods, and no extraterrestrial beings that are coercing us to do what we do or to be who we are. We are our own fucked up creation. And whether we like it or not, we’re all together in this. And I can sit here in my ivory tower and cast moral judgments upon everyone else, but that does not remove me further from responsibility or make me any less part of the problem. Because this is my world and my world has a problem and since the world consists of the same blueprint that I’ve created and accepted myself, as, just as the world is my problem – I am also the problem of this world.

And it starts immediately from the moment we leave our mothers wombs, even before that as our very genetic make-up is contaminated, indoctrinated into separation, competition, paranoia and abuse. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible to change.

We cannot go on pretending that what’s happening in this world are random events completely outside of our control or range or that someone else somehow is responsible for creating the world as it exists. Porn is an outflow consequence of who we are, War is an outflow consequence of who we are, abuse of animals is an outflow consequence of who we are, bullying is an outflow consequence of who we are. Therefore – the solution to all of these problems lies not in simply implementing more rules and regulations, but to get to the bottom of the problem, which is ourselves. And simultaneously with changing the outer structures, like preventing wars from happening, we require changing the nature of ourselves as human beings, our starting-point from which we live and exist in this world. Then adults as parents and teachers can actually become catalysts for implementing such changes at a global level, by standing as an example, one adult, one child, and one word at a time.

At Desteni we’re presenting two solutions – one directed towards changing our world systems and the bullying and abuse taking place at a global level. This is the Guaranteed Living Income System. We are also sharing a process that we as a group and individually have decided to walk, to become dignified, trustworthy and caring human beings, through getting to know and understand how our minds work and how we’ve become who we are today, so that we can stand up and change. This is called the Desteni I Process. 

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