Barry Goldman
2001
sow_thistle@yahoo.com
Monsters For Josh
These are some sketches of a conversation I had with my little
brother after we saw this movie called the MONSTER SQUAD.
Like enemies. People always like to invent enemies. Or pin
the blame on someone. When you feel angry, what's your first
response? To be angry at Danny, right? Like if you walk into the
kitchen and see a pot of spaghetti lying on the floor all over the
place, what's your first reaction? To yell "Blackie! [our dog] Why
did you knock over the spaghetti?" When in fact what probably
happened was:
Danny accidently steps on Blackie's tail and Blackie barks at
Danny so Danny hits Blackie and Blackie runs away and barks into
Shanna so Shanna runs around the living room divider away from
Blackie into the kitchen and Danny is running into the kitchen to
go cuddle with mom and Blackie knocks Shanna 'cause he thinks
Shanna is playing and Shanna falls on Danny and Danny hits the pot
and pot falls all over the floor and so Shanna and Blackie and
Danny all run down stairs 'cause they think mom is going to blame
one of them which she does.
Many things that happen in life are due to these complicated
dances and we are not often willing to take the effort to
appreciate the complex ecology of dances, so we are very quick to
pin the blame for somthing on someone. And especially if there is
no one to obviously put the blame on we invent a monster or an
enemy or a god.
Like the Frankenstien monster... He was neither good nor bad.
He was just like a new born baby curious to find out about his
world. The village in which he was born was ill, that is, the
whole complicated ecosystem of the people and loving and being
brother and sister and employer and employee and the police and the
economy and the customs and such was somehow ill. And the poor
people who were inside that ecosystem (so they couldn't quite find
its skin, even if it had one) were too frightened and fustrated to
study the ecology of their dance and so blamed the illness on this
newborn child of Dr. Frankenstien. THEY created the monster.
Notice how they incite him to violence, teach him that he is
ugly... covince him that he is a monster, becease they need someone
to be the monster.
Now when that man who had been in the Nazi concentration camps
said he had known some monsters, perhaps he meant that he thought
the Nazis were monsters. Was each person caught up in the Nazi
"illness" a monster or was Hitler the monster or was the word
"Nazi" the monster or just what?
Germany was ill. Germany was a complex ecosystem. For that
matter, it wasn't just Germany that was ill... or, where was
Germany's skin? Germans traded with other countries, fought wars
with other countries, learned other languages in shcool, shared
stories back and forth with other countries... So maybe all of
Europe was ill, or... Any way she had acute poins in Germany.
The German people were confused and frightened. They had been
through the terrible World War I (and got the shit end of the stick
for it, too) and through a terrible depression and not enough of
them were strong enough to make the effort to study the ecology of
their dance and find out why it was ill.
For that matter neither did the other people of Europe make the
effort to study the ecology of their dance. Well... now, it's
tricky. 'Cause people seem to be afraid of such big ecosystems and
like to hide in easily definable skins. If they see that something
about Europe is sick, they don't want to admit that it might have
something to do with THEIR country, that maybe it has something to
do with the way THEY interact with the people of the rest of
Europe. Or if their country is ill, they don't want to admit that
their country is a kind of myth. That it is so intimately linked
to other countries for its very existence as its unique self that
perhaps it isn't only exactly inside its own boundary. And they
will have to understand someone else's country also in order to
understand why the dance that their country is part of is ill.
So they took the easy way out and invented some monsters. They
decided to blame the illness of their country, which was realy the
illness of all of Europe, on "the races which were making their
Aryan people impure". The Jews became the focus as just such a
race. But I realy shouldn't say, "THEY decided", because it was
all of Europe that was ill, not the individual people in Germany
that were ill. Who made the decision? The illness? The German
ecosystem? Even with our beginnings in the studies of
bifurcations in cooperative systems, we are still not very capable
of understanding such questions. But, as the Jews were not the
CAUSE of the illness in Europe, perhaps the Nazis were not entirely
the cause for the attempt to eliminate that mythical disease.
But wait a minute Barry! Aren't you always fond of saying
that corporations don't kill, that large systems don't kill? That
individual people, you and I, make the decision to kill that person
or not? To comply with such a corporation or not? Yes, very
complicated. Where is free will, where is evil, where is sin? Who
(what kind of ecosystem, what level of nested dances) is
responsible? TOUGH QUESTION!
So the Jews weren't the monsters as some people would have
liked to beleive, and neither were the Nazis the monsters. Or, ok,
call the Nazis monsters, and you then have to call the Jews
monsters also, because monsters are just the fantasies of small
groups of frightened men. Even by calling the Nazis the monsters
instead of the Jews, we still come no closer to understanding the
subtle illness of the complex ecosystem of Europe. Calling the
Nazis the monster, and then wiping THEM out, and naming what is
realy horrible about western civilization's illness as an easily
compartmentizeable agent is the real danger.
So the point is that we get angry, we hurt, we get confused,
depressed, and we aren't very good at diagnosing these illnesses
and healing them. Or for that matter, on the other side, we get
proud, or we develop skills, or we "become" powerful, or
[expand...] and we don't quite know WHO HAS the power, or WHO is
responsible for these fortunes either. Our misunderstanding of how
these dancing ecosystems work especially mess up our relationship
with power.
So, how to heal? Three steps.
1) Understand how these dancing ecosystems work. How we create
these myths of selves inside skins, of causative agents.
2) Appreciate how difficult is the mystery of WHO, or WHAT
LEVEL of the dance is responsible. We need to learn to appreciate
the mystery of these situations. That they cannot always be
'solved' so quckly by finding simple causes.
3) We need to find sources of strength, calm, and softness in
order to be able to live with anger, fustration, and hurt, while we
thread our way through the complicated dances of which we are part.
Sources of strength which will allow us to hold back from reacting
immediately, even while it 'seems' as though we are being attacked.
Ok, let me tell you about monsters and Nazis and Jews and
enemies.
This universe is full of living creatures, right? Now the
thing about living creatures is that they are very complex dances
of webs and cycles of dances, like rainforests and ecosystems and
families and languages and cities and countries and people. Like
even you, Josh, you are not exactly just you. You wouldn't be
quite the same if you hadn't grown up with Shanna and Danny, or if
you dindn't live in a family where Shanna and Danny are always
fighting. There is a little bit of dad, and mom and Danny and
Blackie and Shanna and me and your teachers and you friends in you.
Well not exactly IN you... Look at river. A river isn't just the
water flowing IN it 'cause if you took a bucket of water from the
river it would not act like a bit of river. A river is a respnse
to water being born somewhere high up in the mountains and some
place low in the valleys for it to flow into and some just weak
enough spots of ground along the way through which the valley can
call the water from the mountain towards it to cut out a river bed.
But the mountain and the valley and the gravity and the soil are
not IN the river. Like the people in the twenty third century
calling you to get up and learn your Torah to pass on towards them,
which the people thirty centuries ago put together. They all
aren't exactly IN you, but if that pair like the valley and the
mountain weren't IN RELATION to each other, then you would never
need or want to learn Torah and you would be a different person
than you are today.
Ecology is the study of such complicated dances that don't
exactly stay inside their skins...
People dont't like to take the effort to study the ecology of
dances...
When such dances get sick, it's very hard to tell what exactly
is wrong with them and how to readjust the steps to make them well
again...
Especially when you are part of the dance. When people are
part of such a dance/ecosystem and it gets sick, they invent a
monster, who is SMALLER than the dance (or a MEMBER of the dance),
to blame for the sickness and think they can cure the sickness by
killing the monster.
The ancient Greeks invent Demeter to explain the fertility of
fields, Athena to explain the way emotions work in the complicated
ecosystems of their minds, families and societies.
Is HaShem a monster? Right that's the monster we invent to get
out of understanding the biggest ecosystem of all. Or all of them
at once as they interact around our lives.
Just as the Nazis might have seen the Jews as the causative
agent of an illness they didn't understand, (they didn't even
understand exactly what "body" was ill) Just what is it that
doctors do? And recall that many seminal leaders of the medical
and chemical industries in our country came from the Nazi dance.
Don't forget to tell of Stephen King and his stupid story of
"children Of the Corn". How in creating a phony monster, he
totally misses the illness that is really there, the one in the
American Agricultural Ecology.