Merv’s father may seem like a god to him. He may worship his father, idealize his father, turn himself inside out to please his father and make his father love him and be proud of him. He may bend over backwards to help his father accomplish his goals, to endeavor to succeed in any of the areas where his father suffered failures, and to make his family name a proud one. From the place of the child he once was – still alive within him today – he would do this rather than displease his father for a moment. Rather than lose his father’s love or pleasure in him. He would do anything at all . . . rather than feel the loss of his father in any way at all.
Bill’s father may seem like a god to him, too. A god missing in action. A god who was absent but for a brief time many years too late. He may make up a myth about his father’s greatness. He may bend over backwards to incorporate little things he experienced of or with his father into his life. He may turn himself inside out to do great things in spite of his father’s absence, and he too may work extra hard to compensate for his own father’s failures, humiliations, and shortcomings. From the place of the child he was long ago – still alive inside him today – he would do this rather than feel the loss he already experienced. He would do anything at all . . . rather than feel the abandonment by his father in any way at all.
When examining politics, people look for the politician’s agenda. What is the candidate’s agenda as he or she campaigns for office? Or . . . when in office? We might think the agenda is one thing on one level of being. Like, for example, raising taxes, cutting taxes, or leaving taxes where they are. Or another example, helping the poor, helping the rich, helping everybody, helping nobody at all except yourself. We can point to parties that advocate these agendas. We can cite philosophies that support these agendas.
But what if these are not the agendas at all? And what if the real agendas aren’t what we think they are? What if the thing we keep missing – if we refuse to truly understand the psyches of human beings to their root – is the unconscious agenda of the psyche? What if the thing we keep refusing to know is that people will do anything to hold their early pain at bay? To keep it away? To keep it buried? To never ever feel it? And that unfortunately our society supports and normalizes this, causing great harm to our society? (But that for another time.)
What if the descriptions of men above are characterizations – however accurate or inaccurate, however complete or incomplete – of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. And what if their real agendas – perhaps unknown even to themselves – is to keep at bay feelings and fears of the threat of loss of father’s love and or father himself . . . or the actual loss of father’s love and of father himself?
What if these men’s political agendas are reflections of these primal root agendas? Now how do we – as citizens, as voting citizens — think and feel about their agendas? Now how do we, as voting citizens, think and feel about their candidacy? Now . . . how do we discern how our own primal agendas affect our choice of a candidate with his primal agenda? And how do we do this exploration now . . . in the time left between today and the election on November 6th?
Can you see this crucial picture? How we decide who we’re going to vote for depends not only on the primal agenda of the candidates . . . but also upon our own primal agendas. Or more importantly, if we are to be able to truly know and understand someone else’s primal agenda, we’re going to have to truly know and understand our own.
How are you going to explore this before Election Day? What you choose to do – or not do – will have an effect on you, your family, your community, our country, and our world for generations to come.
Imagine what our world would be like . . . if we were to even begin to cultivate and co-create a society in which we reach for and work for deep self-awareness instead of denial . . . healing to the root instead of normalizing and the status quo . . . transformation toward and into our truly greatest potential instead of dumbing down and numbing ourselves and each other.
© Judith Barr, 2012
