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?