[P2P-F] [NetworkedLabour] our p2p/commons contribution to Journey to Earthland (GTN Discussion) (Michel Bauwens)

Sun Nov 6 10:38:23 CET 2016

On Sun, Nov 6, 2016 at 4:01 PM, Anna Harris <anna at shsh.co.uk> wrote:

> There is much evidence to show that competitiveness and anxiety traits,
> built in to our modern birth and child rearing practices, support the trend
> towards violence in later life. The lack of care at this crucial point in
> life, sets the tone for later states of dissociation which allow military
> personnel to destroy other human beings without compunction, as well as the
> general lack of connection with the natural environment on which we all
> depend.

so first a general remark of your critique. I guess I'm an
integrative-structuralist, which means that what you suggest is part of my
approach, and is well documented on our wiki, but, in this contribution, I
focus on the structural necessity of the commons/caring shift, which is
inevitably linked to the underlying psycho-bodily-relational structures.

But this being said, I can't agree with the idealization of the paragraph.
We actually now know that tribal cultures were <more> violent than
state-based systems, not less, and that the attachment parenting (which is
good, and I have practiced largely with my children, but especially the
last two), was inextricably linked to the desensitization produced by the
male initiation rituals.

Reading the the Institute of Psycho-History, and especially their very
well-document 'History of Child Abuse", is very instructive. In fact, we
have now a unprecedented number of children who have been education through
democratic and respectful parenting, and they are the ones driving the peer
to peer/ commons / collaborative culture we draw on. Military training is
now for volunteer professionals, and the kind of de-sensitizing practices
are not nearly as generalized as they once were.

There are of course huge pockets of the population (say the Trump voters,
and the books of George Makoff), where authoritarian education continues to
be the norm, and produces authoritarian personalities. And the migration of
countries where such repressive practices are still the norm, create
additional problems (it's the rural migration from Anatolia which
overwhelmed the secular state in Turkey).

So we should continue to build on the huge cultural shifts set in motion by
the 1968 revolts, which were politically defeated, but did put in motion
changes we can built on.

But of course, I am in agreement that there are still important amounts of
dis-sociation going on in our child-bearing and child-rearing practices ...
and that these need to be changed, (taking babies away from their mothers
as soon as they are born, sleeping in different rooms with anxiety
provoking baby phones, childcare in anonymous and bureaucratic institutions
too early in life)

I also agree we should be re-creating the positive effects of more
collective child-rearing in renewed community setings ..

I have been blessed by living the last 12 years in Thailand, where unlike
my experience in Belgium, both caring for my kids , and caring for my
Alzheimer-afflicted mother, was 'easy', because of the support of the
extended family.

But let's not forget, thai society is also hyper-authoritarian and violent,
much more than ours, and this is because , 'from 1 to 7, treat your
children as kings, from 7 to 14, treat them as slaves, from 14 to 21, treat
them as friends'

In other words, as I said in the beginning, the attachment parenting is
replaced with very authoritarian education in the school system.,

It leads to a society where you dearly love your (extended) family, but
deeply mistrust anyone outside ... This is what civic societies have
changed, by extending 'love' to a more broader scope, though still limited
to the imaginary community of the nation; part of the next phase, is to
create successful trans-national neo-tribes, firmly rooted in networks of
physical places, that ca form the basis of an extension of that 'love' to
humanity as a whole,

Michel

-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

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