Thursday 30 April 2009

Bereft of a theory of human nature

Reflecting upon the first world war, second world war, Hiroshima and the Holocaust, war of savagery and butchery waged by man against man, oppressed versus oppressed Laing concluded, we human beings have slaughtered by our own hands coming on for one hundred million of our own species. We all live under the threat of our total annihilation. We seem to seek death and destruction as much as life and happiness…only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilisation apparently driven to its own destruction. I dont know how this fits with 28-year-old Parameswaran who was ready to starve himself to death for freedom of tamil people. He continued to hunger-strike for 24 days and stopped it today as he felt the British government responded to his requests. It seems like Parameswaran's parents were killed by SLA and he himself has been closer to death many times. When he was asked by a BBC reporter whether he was afraid of dying.....
He said: "No, no, no, I'm not worried - because I saw many thousands of deaths of friends of mine. That means livers, kidneys and stomachs coming out, people dying, right in front of my eyes".
Is man‘alienated’ from his true human nature?
"Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth"

Wednesday 29 April 2009

Insanity is a sane response to an insane society


From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents before them, these forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities says Laing. According to him this enterprise is on the whole successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves. A half crazed creature, more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age.
he says further that family life is to induce a false consciousness of security: to deny death by avoiding life, to cut off transcendence, to believe in "GOD", not to experience the void, to create in short, one-dimensional man, to promote respect, obedience, to con children out of play, to induce a fear of failure, to promote a respect for work, to promote a respect for respectability’. Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality!
(Laing, 1967).
I am not sure whether he wrote this in anger, or in the moment of perfect clarity. Socialists will have no problems agreeing with him. He might sound bit naive for Scientists. At present, I feel like a blank slate upon which society writes its narrative. Helplessness?