How to parent in the managed violence of our age?

and where is this all heading?

I woke up this week to Sub-stacks around the use of hormone therapy in children and cancel culture in institutions. And I couldn’t help but flashback to witnessing a mother of nonviolent communication whispering softly to her child, with such menace and under-spoken anger that they flinched and looked terrified. She was trying to be a good parent and had been told that yelling was bad. That she should cancel it out. No anger around children. It’s disturbing. I also flashed to another memory of a young child being asked which absolutely enormous muffin he would like to have, the kind of muffins that were the size of his head. He had no idea and no desire, especially since when he did choose the mother would then start to question the choice, which I guess could be seen as a teaching moment, this is how you make up your mind, dear, if the child didn't look so miserable and uncomfortable. If she didn't look so desperate to have her child's approval.

Have you experienced this and wondered where it will lead to, the parent asking the irritable child if they want to go to sleep and they scream no and the parent then reframing the question? My instinctual parenting response is very British nanny. Like just give your child direction. Tell them what to do. And listen, I’m not saying that it’s the right response. My curious self is like what if this is important skill building for the kid, this endless choice, and where will it lead in the generations to come? 

The child is often confused - and I'm talking under 5 years old here. The questions are frequently emotionally loaded despite the often socially correct “nonviolent” delivery - Such questions as what do you want to eat? Do you want to stay with daddy tonight? Can you not bite mummy, please? Personally, I’m quietly aghast at the reversal of boundaries, the child dictating the parameters for the parents. The 3-year-old running the show and the parents the ones who are seeking to be liked, accepted. No one feels very safe.

So I question my reaction. I want to recognise who I am, part of the present social mindset, an offspring of the dominant taker culture which I dislike intensely. Which every core principle in my body rejects, which I struggle with around where I belong and who I belong to. And, curious about my judgement, wondering where it comes from for I cannot deny I am part of a construct that does not sit well with me.  I wonder how much of that influences my understanding of what is the right way to do things and how much of it all matters.

 I think individual parenting skills matter very little. You do the best you can. After all we have been rising up and down the roller coaster of civilised society for thousands of years now as we slowly annihilate indigenous knowledge. This is a trauma-based society, offshoots of the catastrophic agricultural practices that are in their nature inherently violent - farming that replicates floods and other widespread catastrophic events that wipe out every other form of competition  - turned into the opportunity of mono-cropping that can safeguard us against the future - controlled disaster zones so to speak. And this unseen violence, unthinkable and perfectly normal now, this managed catastrophe so pleasing to the eye in soft golden fields of bounty has slowly trickled and affected every way we live. Violence permeates us, culturally and socially and anyone who is not identifiable as part of the dominant mindset feels that on a cellular level. Knows it in their heart.

And yes within this framework, loving beauty shines and arises. People find themselves through the conflicts and the ashes give birth. Across the board people manage to be the best of themselves shaped from all different kinds of crucibles - loving parents, boring parents, drunken drug addled parents, absent parents and overly focused parents, mean nasty parents, trauma based parents, abuse victim parents. 

But it's not the shining examples of “I made it despite everything” that I'm curious about. This continuous heroic journey that is the very flagship of our dominant violence, the perpetuating call to arms “ you to can find yourself despite everything”  herald that motivates this social disaster to keep moving forward. It's all of us who are swept along, it's the helpless and alone and lost that I want to see change how we view civilised “man”. After all, I am heavily invested in the breaking down of what stands up presently. I am, along with millions of you, a rabid watcher of the dystopian future scape awaiting apocalypse, scrabbling for another alternative.

In the generations bookmarking me, this general discomfort was mostly expressed by eating dysmorphia. In the generations following it is becoming gender dysmorphia or the downright physical attack of cutting. All underlying expressions of being incredibly uncomfortable in the body. Of not belonging to your body, Of not feeling right in your body and wanting that feeling to stop. wanting to belong. Millions of teenagers, entering into the burden of carrying our culture, feeling the utter existential dread of being present in their bodies, the claiming of their home. Unsurprising as we become more and more witness to the diseased mother that we stand on, the ongoing nightmare of mother earth slowly infected with toxins that we share within our blood.  Unsurprising as we are so far away from the acceptance that the natural law is above us, greater than us, as conscious as us. Unsurprising given our complete lack of integration with wildness and all the mysteries and dangers within that we have decided that we are not part of it anymore, that we can science our way around and out of it. Unsurprising as we are now the ones “managing”  mother earth with our carbon sequestration and wilderness breeding programs and borders and zones and weather seeding. Handing over the wildness of our souls to specialists to arrange, outraged when they somehow don't do it right.

We live lives where everything is controlled, danger is viewed as entertainment and the unknown is rapidly outsourced to experts. Not experienced or felt. Just how quickly we managed “to control” covid is a shining example of how on top of things we are and how receptive the whole population is to the inherent lie of social management - don’t trust your immune system, trust this product! Which simply shames both approaches, strips them both of their inherent value. For myself the constant refrain of “well what do you want to do” with the small child is a battle cry of that achievement. An underlying agreement that we have it so managed that a 3-year-old can make a decision that will lead to no harm. There is no pond out back for them to drown in. No axes to chop off toes, no hills to get covered in poison ivy.  Exploration is done behind glass within pixels. With only one of our senses. A mono-sense. Total non-sense. But that’s what got us here. That inherent drive to find safety born from the inherent violence of our culture. And not recent. Ancient, along with the dawning of agriculture and the organised religions that managed it all the way to our internet collective mind think.

How will we break through this inherently violent organisation that we all belong to? 99% of us depend on agriculture. Most of us feel we have the ability to do anything we want, as our small children hear over and over again, our chorus of progression, and most of us know that this is somehow not true, while still being able to buy anything, eat anything, play at anything, entertain ourselves with anything, have any choice of jobs and we work at making sure the underserved and overlooked have the same, this endless choice. Still, most of us feel the underlying lack of freedom and most of us are dealing with how this doesn't feel safe or good or healthy or fulfilling. And as I see the children, make their decisions, work with their parents, it seems exhausting. They try and fulfill each other’s needs and it feels surreal. And I also know that my way of set boundaries, clear authority isn't the way forward because that’s what got us here. Got us at this place. That control is a direct response to my violent culture. That our relationship to an authority other than us has gone. And the authorities that we construct are becoming more and more empty. Greedy. Evil.

Will we manage integration as we witness the death of heroic response? Will we manage to transform the inherent violence that we all stand up for right now? Or will we just continue to cancel out dissenters of the managed status quo of our“safety”?  What will we do? What do you want to do?