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Everybody Knows

   

Last night I dreamt I was leader of a crew of space travelers that had landed on a distant uncharted planet. The planet not only turned out to be inhabited by people physically and linguistically more or less indistinguishable from human beings, but their civilization, clearly, was far in advance of ours. In a word, their world was peaceful. And the signs and beneficial results of that fact were everywhere.

We were met by a group of high elders, who calmly and happily greeted us and almost immediately offered to give us a tour of their chambers of government. Their demeanor radiated cordiality and respect, while carrying a hint of the avuncular. They seemed proud and excited to show us their world and explain how they had brought it to its current state. In their attitude was more than a suggestion, at first unspoken, that achieving this success had been neither easy nor particularly simple. On the way to the council chambers—their version of a senate, house of representatives, and supreme court–they confined themselves to pointing out the sites where various artistic and scientific enterprises, happily referred to as “adventures,” were taking place.  Apparently, we had landed smack in the middle of their political and cultural capital, for they spoke of other parts of their world, in which what they called “unifiying synergetic industries” played a larger role.

Yours is a timely arrival,” said their leader. His hair was almost entirely silver and cut rather long. He wore a sleek, white robe that stretched down to his ankles and emphasized comfort over style. His companions were decked out in similar fashion, while admitting of a healthy variety of style and color.

“Our day is about to begin, and congress is preparing for session. Please follow me.”

We marched up to an attractive amphitheater, familiar in the sense that its seats fanned out to the left and right. Its focal point was a podium where the speakers on various issues could address the larger body. Right above that, at his desk,  the presiding officer was bringing them all to order. We quietly sat down in the guest balcony to watch the proceedings.

“Good morning, all,” he intoned with a stately calm, speaking a bit more officiously than had our guide. “Everyone please get into grounding position.”

At this the entire room, as well the guides—only my own group still remained seated and uncomprehending—stood up and quickly kneeled down in front of their chairs. I noticed that all along the floor, between each row of seats, ran wide strips of comfortable-looking cushions, presumably so people would not bruise their knees during this exercise.

After that, there ensued a short period of what I might describe as mild, controlled chaos. Some of them simply stayed in a half or full kneeling position. Others subsequently stood up and bent their knees til their legs began to wobble. Still others went from the kneeling position to lying prone between the rows, heads and feet vertical to the front of the room. Some of these lay quite still, while others could be heard to utter various and sundry sighs and sounds. We could make out a few brief utterances from some, but nothing that seemed particularly in context with anything else, except that, once we were able to get over our surprise at their behavior, and focus more on them than on our own shocked response, it was clear that they were all enjoying themselves, in spite of the general seriousness of the exercise. Even our guides temporarily forgot about us, so absorbed they had become in this activity.

From time to time one of the members would suddenly stand up and walk out the end of his or her row, through doors to what we supposed were other rooms adjoining the hall. There were four such rooms, one at each corner, and they would go in and shut the door behind them. It wasn’t entirely clear what purpose this served, but from the heightened if still muffled sounds that came from inside, we surmised that these rooms were for those whose exercises that day required an intensity of movement or decibels that would have proven too distracting to their fellows in the main hall.

All this seemed to us to go on for quite a while, but in real time most of the representatives were back in their seats, sitting quietly as before, in about twenty minutes. Exactly a half-hour later, when the president brought the meeting to order, only two members still hadn’t returned, but they did so shortly thereafter.

Our guides had also serenely returned to their seats beside us, without comment. Clearly what we had just witnessed was a regular, if not daily event, as much a staple of their governmental process as the brief prayer that often precedes the usual business of our own government. Even as I was thinking this, though, their president led the house in prayer as well. Whatever purpose attached to the previous exercise, it didn’t preclude a spiritual dimension.

Then they went to work, much like our house or senate does. If you are familiar with the workings of our government, or even just occasionally watched our representatives on television, you know sort of how it works. Bills are drafted, and then go through a fairly complicated process to eventually be voted for or against.

 

After a while, the elder spokesman leaned over to us and whispered, “Look more familiar now?”

“Yes,” I said, “but what was that first part all about?”

“Ah yes. Well, that was of key importance. That was our bioenergetic preparation for the day.”

Responding to our blank expressions, he continued.

"Bioenergetics is a collection of grounding, expressive, healing and enlightening exercises that helps us each as individuals stay regularly in touch with our truest, finest, most sensible, rational, spiritual, peaceful selves. Although many books have been written explaining how it works, bioenergetics still remains predominantly an experiential science, and it most certainly always will. By experiential I mean the main benefit and understanding you get from it always derives from doing the exercises themselves.

He chuckled. “We figured out quite a while ago that the biggest obstacle to bioenergetics was the embarrassment and uneasiness most people felt getting down on one knee to do them each day, particularly in front of other people.” He gestured broadly toward the folks having lively discussions below us. “The way we got around that impasse, and by now we have mostly eliminated if not reversed that sort of response, is by establishing the exercise period as a respectable and even honored part of our daily regimen. Of course, this sort of change in attitude was greatly enhanced as we began to see how much the inclusion of the exercises improved the way we ran our world.”

Some of our party openly guffawed, which of course was a pretty rude thing to do under the circumstances. I myself had a hard time keeping an entirely straight face. But then, I thought about what I’d seen of this world so far, and how much different it felt—yes, and in a good way—from the one we’d left behind. So I held my impulse to burst out laughing, or otherwise make fun of what he’d just said, in check, long enough to ask, “So these uh, “bioenergetic” exercises have some practical relation to governance?”

“Absolutely,” he went on. “There’s nowhere near enough time for me to explain all the details about that relationship to you right now, and no one, for that matter, even myself, could really claim to understand it entirely. But there are two fundamental premises or, if you will, practical applications bioenergetics has to politics that we all can now agree upon, and which never cease to help us find more peaceful, sensible, comprehensible and beneficial outcomes in our negotiations. Both have to do with the idea of displacement. Displacement is actually a fairly well-known psychological term that’s been around for quite a while. I’m sure you are aware of its meaning even on your planet.”

Some of us, myself included, nodded.

“We, however, simultaneously use “displacement” as an historical term. The explanation goes like this. People have had a regular tendency to displace the bad feelings that accrued earlier in their own lives, or their families’ or ancestors’ lives, on the current people in their lives, usually those they hold nearest and dearest, or familiar figures they deem to hold power over them. That’s what we call personal displacement. Whole societies, on the other hand, tend to displace bad feelings they still harbor for all sorts of previous violences done against them by other races and nations on the current members of those races and inhabitants of those nations. That’s what we call cultural displacement. Historically, we refer to these behaviors, or psychological immaturities, as behaviors that we developed during our long period of technological immaturity, when, arguably, it was the best we could do. When people never knew when the next unavoidable bad thing was going to happen to them, and they felt otherwise powerless to do much about it, displacement behavior was often their least worst choice.

“Once we achieved technological maturity, and could finally resolve in other ways most of the inequities that had historically led to such violent behavior, it wasn’t long before some of us realized we had come to the brink of committing global suicide only because we still lagged so far behind ourselves in terms of psychological maturity.”

 I looked at my crew. None of us was laughing any more. All this was beginning to sound much too familiar.

 "In other words, we were still all displacing bigtime, but now we had all kinds of big new fancy and powerful toys to do it all that much better. We quickly reached the point where we were about one major explosion away from self-annihilation.”

 Suddenly I was extremely curious. “How did you avoid it? I mean, in a democracy . . .”

 The elder’s face grew sad for the first time since we’d met him. “Perhaps we were just lucky, though at first no one knew how it was going to turn out. Global cataclysms kept mounting up, even as technologies, and the polarization of wealth, made it easier and easier to run the world from essentially one power base. In the end, we were down to an utterly panicked world population—what was left of it that could even participate politically—and a few leaders who were still strong enough or obsessed enough, or both, to want to try and run things. They each had a somewhat different approach, but only one of them was really different from all the others.

“His difference lay not in a more democratic vision; in fact he didn’t really believe in democracy at that time—few still did. But he had personally experienced the healing benefits of bioenergetic exercise on self-defeating displacement patterns in his own life, and had somehow managed to extrapolate the idea of them into a broader societal context. But what really made him unusual was that he had been able to incorporate all that knowledge into the persona of a tough, savvy political operative with a squeaky clean reputation. By this time lots of “new-age” people had been running around with somewhat similar recipes for social change, but none of them had ever escaped the label of “fringe thinker” or worse, much less acquire the thick hide and wily tactics this guy had.

“So in many ways he was a total contradiction, including the fact that while deep in his heart he believed fervently in democracy as the ultimate best way for us to live, in the short run he was certain only an enlightened dictatorship fueled primarily by the very real desperation of a populace faced with immediate extinction could save us.

“So, to make a long story short, all the other contenders for world leader sort of knocked each other out of the running, and when the dust settled he was the only one left standing, nobody’s particular favorite, a true dark-horse winner. But at that point everyone was too exhausted, fearful or distracted to care too much; few in fact had any hope left at all.

“Then, seeing that he now had a more or less complete mandate, albeit a negative one,  to reorganize the government any way he wanted, he gathered his few faithful followers around him and made bioenergetic exercise—and what he deemed to be the central insights that went along with it—to be the prerequisite for holding onto political office of any sort, anywhere in the world.

“At first this idea was met with nearly universal opposition. But as I said, there really wasn’t anyone left with any better ideas, and he never pretended he was going to get this accomplished, at the outset at least, by democratic means. People were free to abstain, but then they were out of power. Pure and simple.

“The first couple years, or so I’ve been told—I hadn’t been born yet—were in many respects hell on wheels, at a lot of levels. It took a long time for people to work out all the pitfalls of essentially putting the world into rehab for a centuries-old addiction to violence and its displacement. There were far more patients than caregivers and decent guides. There were lots of explosive events, psychological and physical, fatal and near fatal. Lots of splinter groups, guerrilla movements, and so forth. But somehow his government managed to defend itself and its main institutions from obliteration long enough for the beneficial practical results of the new bioenergetic consciousness on the planet to start being seen. People gradually came to understand that this wasn’t totalitarian socialism posing as idealistic communism, but the political and psychological realization of the recognition of the fact that with technological maturity comes a brand new responsibility for us all to become conscious managers of our own selves ecologically; that we as humans are poised halfway between God and Nature, and if we want our own domain to be run peacefully and rationally, only we can do that, with of course some help from both of the former.

“Bioenergetic grounding, the thing you saw all those reps down there doing before starting to govern today, is a way to get you personally into that balanced, centered middle ground of consciousness, from where you are more likely than not to be able to refrain from any atavistic tendencies toward displacement, and actually relate to your fellow humans entirely as per today’s issues and personalities. Thus, the solutions you come up with are likely to be, if not always without difficulties—life will always present its challenges—much more appropriate relative to current realities, and thus more efficient, effective, creative, etc”

My crew and I were all just sort of sitting there with our mouths hanging open. Were we dreaming? Here were people who had actually figured out how to get to where we all had wanted to get on our home planet, but a goal we had all long since given up on—and a big reason why most of us had opted for the space exploration corps, since we figured the farther away we could get from the mess on Earth the better.

As the political session neared its end, our hosts stood up, and politely gestured for us to follow them out.

Again their leader smiled. “Now please let us introduce you to some of the most wonderful pleasures of our world—pastimes  and entertainments both joyful and educational, full of shared experiences entirely free of displacements based on either fear or inequity—in other words, adventures in happy and peaceful living that the right ideas, some bigtime luck, and many generations of hard work on ourselves have finally allowed us to create.

At which point the alarm went off, and I woke up.

 

@Copyright Lee Strauss 2022

Comments

Interesting story....
Hmmm Exercise as grease for democracy?

They do this in the East...Falun gong in China....various forms of prayer, etc.
Maybe we should try it before city council meetings......There are ritualized exercises before most "official" public religious or civic gatherings, I've noticed. Never liked 'em. Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance got really old and suspiciously like mind control for me by second grade. Simply the act of standing for it is an echo of earlier tribal rituals involving dance or singing.People in groups are just unpredictable, powerful entities. -occasionally easily steered or seemingly controlled by geniuses like Hitler or Martin Luther King, or Michael Jackson-for good or evil or profit. Interesting that the Chinese government saw the Falun Gong movement as such a threat.Music, dance, and recitation are traditional conditioning tools for group coherence and control. Perhaps your "grounding" ritual is a little more subversive.  Will

Thanks for this amazingly knowledgeble, "spot on" response. "Bioenergetic therapy" is one thing, and arguably vital in helping some people attain better self and social awareness. But more generally, a bioenergetic could apply to anything with a pulse. Breathing, heartbeats, etc., are all "bioenergetics."  From that standpoint, almost any effective ritual (military parades, church choirs,  academic schedules by the bell, etc.) could be seen as "a bioenergetic within a bioenergetic." Depending on the material wealth of the society in question, the potential  "layering" and reciprocity of bioenergetic levels, variously mixing natural and social elements, could, theoretically, go on indefinitely. Every academic or corporate specialization (the etymology of "universitas" traces back to about the same root as that of "corpus"), in this sense, has already become a "bioenergetic within a bioenergetic within a bioenergetic," etc. ad nauseum. And people's livelihoods increasingly become dependant, not just on their aptitudes and job skills, but on their ongoing knowledge of the intimate codings for language and behavior that go with their particular specialty. So ya, potentially, technology can change morality--to the extent one thinks that once people become sufficiently aware (perhaps in part by applying some "bioenergetic-type therapy," which is also another of our newest technologies) of the social and psychological mechanisms that drive their behavior, they will do the "right" thing. The big challenge to this, for even the most optimistic thinkers viz our potential for improving ourselves, is that for thousands of years becoming too self-aware with regard to this stuff has actually been discouraged by technological limitations. One doesn't want to change the way one grips the club or racquet in the middle of a big match. More to the point, in a perpetual warfare state, the tribe that shoots first and asks questions later usually wins out, and then gets to write the history of what happened. This "dominator" approach, coupled with a modicum of growth in the pre-frontal lobes, has been so successful that now it threatens to wipe out the very natural base it originally spawned from. So the big challenge is to get enough people to see that the heightened self-awareness that has been generally counterindicated from a survival point of view throughout most of our previous history is now just about the only thing that can and will save us from self-destruction. Like the heroine's line from my play last year: "I love two men, always have and always will. One who lives   in a world that has never been, the other in a world that can no longer be.  Anyway, thanks for the read and useful critique. At some point I plan to look up those references. They could well prove useful for the language book. Check back on the site every once in a while. Eventually there should be video, and podcasts, and hopefully much more clarity and accessibility. (And if you have similarly interesting insights into stuff you read later on, please post them on the forum--the more interactive the site can become in just this way, the better.)  Meanwhile, if you didn't already read it, the essay A Global New Deal specifically discusses some of the stuff I mention above, from a more purely environmental and social scientific vantage point.