Abuse Writ Large — an Exit Strategy

Lately, as I watch the global news, I have been considering abuse as a collective phenomenon. The understanding of abuse in individuals and families has been advanced a great deal by modern psychology. We understand battered women and elder abuse. Most have some understanding of the different types of abuse, such as physical, emotional, financial, psychological, etc.

But I contend that there is also large scale institutional abuse that functions in very similar ways. The racial violence against BIPOC peoples is both physical abuse and psychological abuse.

The institutional misogyny that appears whenever a women in politics goes for a higher office, or that creates a toxic work culture, or that allows rape victims to be trashed, are all form of abuse.
But I would go further. We know that when a child or spouse has to deal with a malignant narcissist or sociopath for a partner, parent, or sibling, that private abuse is taking place.I contend that when such a person is put in high office, from county sheriff to POTUS, everyone in that sick person’s domain becomes a victim of institutional abuse. That is why we all feel so battered right now. We have been the collective battered spouse to a malignant sociopath for the last four years. And we are collectively showing the signs of that abuse every day.

There is another, deeper level of collective abuse — predatory capitalism. It is the dominant system on the planet today, and it abuses almost all of us on several levels. Financially of course as it beggars all but the top 1%.

But also psychologically as it blames the failure to thrive on the victims. Even many liberals feel that if they and others can’t “make it” there must be something wrong with the individual, not the system. The ethos of predatory capitalism has colonized our internal space so thoroughly that we can’t place the locus of control where it belongs, on the capitalists and the system they both control and benefit from.

Predatory capitalism also dispenses physical abuse as the middle class and below go without medical care, without proper food, and increasingly without shelter. This is killing us.

And finally there is the greatest institutional abuser of all — the patriarchy. It has infected at least 300 generations. It seeps into our subconscious and seems as natural as breathing. And it feeds all of these lesser forms of institutional abuse.

Some of us speak of smashing the patriarchy, but find it not so easy. It is not always a wall. Sometimes it is more like an ocean or a blanket. It can have multiple arms like an octopus. Or pop up in multiple places if you cut it, like the brooms in the Magician’s Apprentice.

But most of all, it has deep roots WITHIN us. And that is the place to begin. Identify and dispense with every inner thought or attitude planted by being born into and growing up in the patriarchy. Work on the inner abuse. Then, as we heal, we can systematically deal with all the other forms as a collective.

Our mother the Earth is depending on our ability to do that.