The empathic breakdown through manipulation

Laurie Penny was interviewed this week by the Artist Taxi Driver for his documentary in progress, 'This is not a recession, this is a robbery' and she made two great and fascinating points; the first was about the erosion of empathy being part of the capitalist project and how psychological damage that is being created by society is never factored into mental illness.

A fascinating statement and one I believe rings true. To lack empathy is to be a psychopath and may explain the decisions made by the people running this planet.

Empathy is hardwired into us and the RSA, Empathic Civilisation, explains this brilliantly. We witness it during everyday occurrences without noticing we are doing it, any time you have watched a spider crawl across someones arm and got that shivery feeling, that is empathy or when you see someone take a particularly hard tackle during a sporting event and you can "feel the pain", it is our empathic capabilities coming through.

What the war criminals and scoundrels seem to be doing is re-wiring our empathic civilisation to desensitise us to the horrors they conduct on our behalf the world over.

These claims may sound like psycho babble to some but there is a weight of evidence out there to prove the brains ability be re-wried according to its environment.  One such study has been conducted and reported by the Daily Mail of all agencies into the increasingly aggressive appearance of Lego characters today and that they may be harming a child's development. A documentary called Secret History of the Brain: Emotion, also covered this aspect of violence and programming of children. This showed scenes of children playing nicely together who then witness an adult attack a doll. They then replicate this behaviour with the most violent reactions occurring if the adult is of the same sex. It is called the bobo doll test and perhaps unsurprisingly the results were repeated by children who witnessed the same violence on television as opposed to witnessing it in the flesh. These reactions can be tempered by empathy as it develops within us as we reflect upon what we witness, the problem is the constant bombardment and violent environment we live in is hampering this. The problem is 360º immersive advertising and is investigated at length by the documentary Consuming Kids.

Make him angry, he'll make you angry

The re-wiring of the brain has also been discussed recently on BBC R4 which has been running a series called The Science of Music. The latest episode asked the question on how our brains are re-wired through music and explained that musicians are the perfect example of how the brain can be re-programmed according to what it called environment. We are all products of our environment whatever you may think.

By flooding our environment with violence, demonising the poor and highlighting our cultural differences, the establishment is able to manipulate and control us and our feelings, so that we are less likely to share empathy with people put into poverty by our governments, killed by our governments and arbitrarily locked away by our governments. We have to start seeing that we are more alike than we are different and that there are no problems but human problems, we are empathic by nature but it is being destroyed through nurture. An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.


You can follow Laurie Penny and The Artist Taxi driver on Twitter; @PennyRed and @chunkymark

Right To Fight

December, it has been a rare month for Human Rights with first the news that Chantelle Taylor had become the first woman to officially kill on the front line and then the news that women can now serve on submarines too. This all goes some way to addressing the issues raised on International Womens day, back in March this year, where it was claimed that the inability of a woman to serve on the front line, as her male counterparts do, was having an adverse affect on their ability to progress through the ranks. In the book 'A Guide to Saving the World, From Tibet with Love' by Isabel Losada she comments on this weird aspect of the women's rights movement here, that in the West women are shouting for their 'right' to kill the enemy, whilst in Tibet the women simply want the right to practice a faith and way of life they believe in without being imprisoned.

These recent developments, along with Theresa May's comments in March, have gone some way to dealing with those issues. However this all comes against the backdrop of the furor from the sports personality of the year nominations (where not one woman was nominated) the push for and highlighting of the lack of women's rights in both Kurdistan and iRan and the issues on UK soil where so called honour killings are on the increase.

The irony is not lost on me as on International Womens day Theresa May was busy selling a woman's human rights away under the proviso that domestic violence was 'only a violation of their their human rights during a period of peace time, not war time'. Considering we have been at war in one form or another every decade since World War 2, I am not too optimistic for a woman's future.

Our Governments appear to be conspiring as we speak to find cause or reason enough to attack Iran. The discovery of natural gas just the last couple of days will I am sure have done nothing except strengthen their resolve to invade and 'liberate' the women of Iran.

This is all well and good but our Governments cannot even agree to look after and respect women in our own countries let alone profess to care about the women in another land. At the recent Euro zone summit a French official described David Cameron as "a man who had shown up at a wife swapping party, only without his wife". A disgraceful comment to make.

Are women now to be traded the same as commodities like our laws and currencies with keys in a bowl?

Where are the 'sluts' now?

Someone asked me today, "where are the feminists now?" We had a series of global 'slut walks' throughout the early part of the year in reaction to a comment made by a police chief over the Atlantic and as yet nothing said about the comments made about Cameron. Before this however, I read an article by the enigmatic writer, Laurie Penny, in the Independent who receives some of the most vile hate mail, from men I am ashamed to say. These messages included encouraging rape and a variety of other hideous assaults to take place on her just because she dares to air an opinion. An opinion that may well differ vastly from the mainstream party line but so what? As an avid follower of her Twitter page I have seen some of the tripe thrown at her and find it unbelievable we call ourselves civilised.

Now we live in a 'civil'isation where a woman can serve and kill on the front line, serve on a submarine, but not have an opinion? We then get ourselves worked up over a ridiculous sporting award, voted for by a bunch of old men that never won an argument let alone a medal, and accuse them of sexism but forgoe the French faux parx? We have our values all mixed up and it is time we started to really evaluate what matters in our lives.

We risk becoming a society that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.


http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/laurie-penny-a-womans-opinion-is-the-miniskirt-of-the-internet-6256946.html

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/03/human-rights-women-violence
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/08/royal-navy-women-submarines?newsfeed=true
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/09/angela-merkel-david-cameron-table