Edward’s Diary Entry 156: Collective Memory Syndrome

Now another factor in national-populism is the constant dwelling on the past. This is where the limited regional “Identity”, ahankara, gets its fuel. The past is present in the mind thanks to "Memory", manas. In Catalonia, the central government gave away powers for education in their own language, Catalán, along with economic and law-enforcement powers, and the region is one of 3 in Spain with its own police force, the Mossos d’Escuadra (along with the Basque country and Navarre). It also has its own communications media. In fact, there is very little the region hasn’t gained from the central government, so autonomy is pretty complete. After 40 years of repression during the Franco regime, things have come full circle since the Spanish Transition and the constitution of ‘78, and today, the region is in the throes of parties who are seeking total “independence”. With just about everything “devolved” or granted to the regional government, some factions want more. They want to set up their own little state, where regional politicians can run the whole show and don’t have to answer to anyone.

This is based on the function of Memory. The younger generation who grew up in an autonomous region under the Spanish constitution of 1978 have no personal experiences of past conflicts. But families always have members who were on one side or another in the past: dictators or democrats, fascists or communists, centre-rights or leftists, monarchists or republicans, Castilian-speakers or Catalan-speakers. These differences in Identity can always be stirred up and made to seem important, like the half-empty-glass theory. There are personal and family memories that have been transmitted, and there are collective memories and history lessons to be “learned”. Memory has a terrible grasp on the mind if it is given exaggerated importance. “Your grandfather was shot by the nationalists”; “Your uncle had to flee Spain and Catalonia so as not to be killed”; “Your mother, your father, your great-grandfather, was this, that or the other.” Poor children of democracy, your forebears had it tough, but now you can identify with them and continue the tradition of strife, struggle and limited identification with stupid human conflicts!

Trapped by Memory, fuelled by fear, hatred and violence, subjected to indoctrination and brain-washing – aka biased and slanted civic education in the hands of well-meaning perhaps, but ignorant heirs of the past – youth has been corrupted and now the new generation sees the world through their parents’, grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ eyes. Not all of course, but maybe 1 million out of 7 million, and that is potentially dangerous for a society when systems have been set up to support this limited view of the universe.

So the power of the human mind to Identify with something, using all the words, images and beliefs conjured up from Memory, with very little Awareness being brought to play, forces the Discriminatory process of the mind to revolve around its own particular obsession… instead of being put in its right place, subordinated to a higher order of human compassion and solidarity and even solidarity with Nature and the World.

And that is the reason for the uprisings in Catalonia. By all means, people, seek your independence – but seek it inside, in the mindstuff itself, not in the outside world if you act contrary to established law. Laws can be improved, social conditions enhanced, traditions can be protected, but please, not with another rebellion that can lead to social disruption and actual physical violence. Then everyone will suffer unnecessarily.

And if “independence” were achieved, what would happen to the little town on the google map above, where the boundary cuts right through the town, through houses, fields and hillsides? 

Edward’s Diary Entry 155: Banalising Identities

Tidying your home and tending your garden are OK. Doing what you see as necessary for your village, town or city is good. You can even say you love your city if you want. And your province or county, your state, region and your country – even your continent or mode of civilisation.

But when your “sense of self”, or your identity, gets bound up in a kind of overwhelming obsession for a partial concept like city, region or country, language and series of customs, or belief, creed or religion, your mind is in trouble. Then it’s “your” identity against someone else’s. In a mental state like this, too much emphasis is placed on comparisons, and intelligence only revolves around the exclusive identity you have chosen to defend. In the final analysis, this identification will result in apprehension, fear, aggression and eventually violence. It is childish really, because just by chance of birth in a certain part of the world, the human spirit becomes a prisoner of a mental construct, of a kind of restricted “me” and “mine”.

Identifying with limited concepts can never be truly conscious behaviour. It is a trick played by the mind due to outside pressure, called propaganda. The ideal situation is for a human spirit to be as all-embracing as possible; not to be confined to a city, region or nation-state. Everything should be in the right place. Yes, I was born in a certain part of the world; yes, I grew up there or elsewhere; went to a certain school; rooted for a given sports team. Yes, I learned a language, hopefully more than one... It is true I can feel a sense of belonging to a city, region or nation. But if I cannot overcome the lesser influences and rise above metropolitanism, regionalism and nationalism, my mind is doomed to become small and petty, fault-finding and exclusivist. And that will spell rejection of others who have different concepts in their minds, and a kind of spiralling virulence that may turn into verbal abuse, mental violence and actual physical aggression. “I’m right and others are wrong!”.

This is why regionalism or even nationalism should always be kept in its rightful place, in its appropriate place. It is of regional or national importance only. It is not something the mind should be obsessed with. Above the city, region and nation stands the fact of sharing the human condition on Earth – we all eat food from the same Earth, drink the same water, breathe the same air and enjoy the same sunlight. Above and beyond any regionalism and nationalism is the increasingly apparent reality of living alongside 7.5 billion other human beings on a crowded and increasingly interconnected planet. Clan-like, tribal and feudal societies have come and gone. Tyrannies and revolutions have brought a semblance of democracy. There are human-made legal frameworks in place wherever you go, even to remote islands and mountain retreats. For example, there are some 3,000 abandoned villages or towns in Spain, and many of these are up for sale, but the legal constraints of municipality, district, province, autonomous community and nation and applicable EU regulations will still be in place. There is no escape. So there is no such thing as “freedom” from the rule of law in modern times; some kind of picturesque dream-like external “freedom” to do as one pleases. Freedom can only be of the mind and spirit, not of the body. And even mental freedom is incredibly difficult to attain, hence the emphasis on “liberation” or mukti, in Asiatic teachings.

So what is the rightful place of the feeling of being a “Catalán” in a population of some 7.5 million, of whom 1.1 million, by the way, are actually foreign residents? It should be sitting in between the fact of pertaining to a municipality and belonging to a nation-state and the European Community. For the more evolved, it is a convenient folkloric background, to be enjoyed and celebrated, without forgetting the sense of being human and reaching for the stars, being global and looking inward to the spirit. A limited Catalonian identity should not raise its head to become ugly, exclude others and strive to become all-important, crossing legal limitations and disrupting social life in cities striving to be cosmopolitan. If it does fight to become overridingly important, it is because the minds of some have become fossilised under an identity that is banal, limited, pugnaciously constrained to its provincialism, and dangerous for children, adolescents and immature adult minds.

Google Maps (image above) paints a dotted line along an established boundary, but the satellite image shows that Nature doesn’t care about man-made lines of demarcation.

More later…

Edward’s Diary Entry 154: On “Potatoes” and Identification with the “Fatherland”

I have been busy studying and reviewing the situation in Catalonia, where “identification” with the concept of what we can call “an exclusive group of people” is running rampant. Many minds out of a population of 7.5 million in 4 provinces of northern Spain are “convinced” they are a special case in the world, and even compare their case to other groups of people around the world who get together and say they are somehow special, either because of language, race, roots, real or imagined history or whatever, viz. Quebec, Flanders, Slovenia or Scotland. This is usually called “nationalism”, “populism” or “national-populism”, although we are now witnessing a “nationalism” that is actually a kind of disputable “regionalism”. But whatever we call it, it is “identification with an exclusive identity”.

After 40 years of democratic, constitutional Spain (new constitution in 1978), in which the 17 regions were given varying degrees of political autonomy, with Catalonia actually being granted the highest degree of autonomous treatment from the central government, it looks like “differences and dissimilarities” have been stirred up to such an extent, and historical stories about break-ups, republics, separation and anti-monarchism have been fuelled to such a high degree that quite a few people in Catalonia now fervently feel they deserve the “right” to become an independent state, contravening Spain’s national constitution. This has even been fomented and supported by the autonomous region’s own television and radio channels, and its total control of devolved powers to provide education for this population, mainly in Catalan, as only a few minutes of watching or listening has proven – the slant and bias is definitely there, and this is part and parcel of a politicised indoctrination process.

You see, when small-scale identities are allowed to run riot in the mind (I am this, I am that, I am whatever), they take over intelligence and obfuscate the discriminatory process. When “identity” attacks, anything can be used as an argument to protect that identity, and clarity in the mind is ousted. One identity completely overrides all others and minds become constipated, dwelling on their own little Weltanschauung, or picture of the world.

This is how expectant young students, university professors, dyed-in-the-wool republicans, potato farmers and tractor drivers could break into tears over the “loss” of their “fatherland”, when the Catalan president saw himself forced to “suspend” a republic he had declared 10 seconds earlier in his 10th October speech from the rostrum of the Catalan Parliament. The regionalist mindset, flagshipping “freedom” (we’ve heard that one before, right?), had taken over from all strivings to become increasingly internationalised, if not globalised, in this 21st-century.

A few days later in the Congress of Deputies in Madrid, where all regions and political parties are represented, in their job of representing the “people of Spain”, a Basque leader talked about Basque potatoes and Catalan potatoes. A Valencian deputy protested that there were also Valencian and Murcian potatoes. Not without his tongue in cheek, Spanish prime minister Rajoy, in his reply, couldn’t help pointing out that with all this talk about potatoes – some hotter, some colder – everyone had forgotten the “Spanish Potato”, which is the kind he and his government were trying to promote!

More next week….