What Is Power? (3g) Tao Te Ching (7)

Bundle:  What the abusers are like.

Here there be monsters.

With abusers we move into the pure fantasyland of the delusional personality, in my opinion.  These be the sublimated-cannibal, Warlord ego, adopted by the rank and file warriors. The righteous. The pure. The mockers.

But it’s a sickness. Abuse is either-or oppositional thinking in a blame-and-shame culture of righteousness in which the wrong must be subjugated to the right, the impure to the pure.  In a Warlord religion of righteousness, in which everyone is taught to fear damnation because of an inner flaw, so that worth and safety are guaranteed only by purity, and the Warlord judges who is pure or impure according to their obedience to him, in service to his glory, God is the ideal, psychological image-projection of the aspiration to triumphant purity and subjugation. Abuse is fundamentally an abuse of our natural inclination to go on living, our intention to promote and sustain life, and our intuition and experience of the commonality of good and its real power.

LT has a lot to say about abusers.  For instance:  Of course the bottom line is that your typical abuser just does not get it.  He is blind to reality, Being, and its real power.  Why?  Because his “ever-wanting soul / sees only what it wants” (1); and I’ll add, only what it wants to see, his fantasy of himself as godlike.  In our tangible world of ever-changing, cycling dualities, he will not let go of what he wants (2).  He thinks that by doing whatever he wants to do, he can have whatever he wants (3).

Because he misapprehends the nature of Being, in its beings, including inability to know himself realistically, to him the facts of real power appear to be signs of weakness.  Indeed, to him, the large attributes of Being, as perceivable and expressible by humans, appear to be their opposites, and his abuse takes the form of creating their opposites, as means for acquiring what he wants to have:  against beauty he substitutes ugliness; against truth, pervasive falsification; against good, nihilistic evil; against love, annihilating pain and exploitation; against spirit, reductionism; against soul, alienation and isolation; against imagination, fixation; against birth, death.  Against others, himself; against empathy, fear; against wisdom, self-deception.  Against the mothering source, patriarchal denial.  Frankly, he is goofy as hell. (40-41)

Against peaceful generosity and cooperation, violence:  Frustrated by the refusal of reality to be what he wants it to be, he tries to force it to conform to his ever-wanting ego.  At his worst, he inflicts war. The worst abuse by the viciously deluded is his failure to recognize that being, in Being, naturally following the Way, is sacred.  The natural result is that “the normal changes into the monstrous, / the fortunate into the unfortunate, / and our bewilderment / goes on and on.”

We are always up against the deluded, who are blind to reality, and therefore think that things are the opposite of what they actually are (41).  They think all is nothing, and thus, in extremis, they think that their exercise of power is all-or-nothing.” 

But because “the world is a sacred object,” those who seek to seize it, those who damage it, “I see them come to grief.” (29)  War backfires.  “Where the army marched / grow thorns and thistles.” (30)  “Even the best weapon / is an unhappy tool, / hateful to living things.” (31). “What others teach, I teach too:  violence and aggression  / destroy themselves. / My teaching rests on that.” (42)

Real power is sacred, and it best not be abused. (32) The abusers do a lot of huffing and puffing of themselves, but they never grow up by doing good. “Such stuff is to the Tao / as garbage is to food / or a tumor to the body, / Hateful.” (24)

Citizen Donald J. Trump, former President of the United States, presumptive Republican candidate for the presidency, has been found guilty on all 34 counts, unanimously by a jury of his peers.

A former “leader of the free world,” and most powerful person on earth, is now a convicted felon.  Fkkk’im.

Hooray for democracy!  Good for us!

[Episode, “What Is Power?” Intro page (1), basic position (2), consulting Lao Tzu (3a), (3b), (3c), (3d), (3e), (3f), current (3g), and further reflections (4).  Contents page to chapter, “WhatIs?”]