Common Ground

FB comment on a friend's post asking if there is common ground between the far right and far left on the political spectrum. 

The common ground is buried so deep that few find it. A lot more are going to need to find it if we are going to survive as a human race without a nanny state or catastrophe that makes us mostly start over. I’ll again start with observations from recent discussions. We humans are social/connected creatures. Whether we can see it and admit it or not we are connected to each other and to our surroundings, which are connected to everything else. When we are born we cannot even distinguish that we are separate from our surroundings and caregivers. Soon we learn that things we do seem to make those around us happy, mad, sad, etc, and that our felt needs/desires are sometimes at odds with our caregiver’s. This is how we first learn that we are also in ways separate from everything else. In order to try to fit in and prosper we develop what I’ll call unconsciously constructed frameworks (UCF) for the way the world works and how we fit into it. This primarily forms with what I call visceral beliefs guiding our emotions very early in life, well before we develop any reliable thinking or reasoning, as we figure out what leads to feeling secure or scared and otherwise good or bad in our family/preschool/etc environment. Later we are taught how to reason and view things from our family’s/groups’s/culture’s perspective. Most of the time we are taught and naturally want to use our reasoning to justify and fortify our UCF, rather than to challenge it. This mostly static UCF of emotions and thinking/reasoning to support it are blocks to experiencing life as it actually is at any given moment. I should step back to try to explain why that is. The fact that we are hopelessly inseparable and dependant upon things beyond ourselves is obvious when we are very little, but no less true when we get older. We cannot tolerate the vulnerability that is an escapable part of being a part of things beyond us though, and adopting some variety of our group’s UCF with our own nuances is how we attempt to get around that. As long as we choose an acceptable role within the group’s UCF and do an adequate job of fulfilling that role, our group lets us fairly successfully avoid feeling the vulnerability of actual reality. Anthony De Mello does a great job of discussing this at length and how this is the illusion we live within. And how these emotions and thinking/reasoning/concepts are the attachments (blocks) we will have to let go of or give up if we are to awaken to Life. Alan Watts also discuses it as the illusion we must break free of, but he more often refers to it as seeing through the game of life. Humans have always operated primarily on this basis of substituting a shared religion/story/philosophy/collective UCF for actual reality. However, that has gotten much harder to do recently. Until recently different groups with different religions did not have much contact with each other in their daily lives, and it was thus easier to have everyone in the group operating from a fairly consistent perspective and get those who did not in line or do away with them. With the melting pot of the US and globalization though this has now become impossible without an authoritarian and overly invasive regime demanding and enforcing a collective UCF. Unfortunately, instead of recognizing this and moving towards reality by recognizing, admitting and letting go of our blocks/attachments/illusions, many are pushing harder and harder for their version of masking it. The common ground is that everyone is trying to avoid the vulnerability inherent in being a part of everything else. The far left’s approach is to get rid of vulnerability by making the world safer and easier than reality allows. The far rights approach is to act like they are not vulnerable and sufficiently rebuke anyone who displays vulnerability. This vulnerability inherent in Life is hard to come to grips with by itself and that becomes almost impossible when almost everyone is trying to avoid it and are inclined to try to suppress anything that makes them feel it. After a friend's comment If we were to briefly entertain my obnoxious psychobabble about us forming unconsciously constructed frameworks (UCFs) to try to best get our felt needs (including safety) met in the situations we find ourselves, and this takes the form of adopting ourgroup’s/culture’s paradigm(s) in order to avoid the felt vulnerability of realizing we are all part of the same thing and dependent upon one another, and this is guided by our emotions and adopted group’s reasonings, which are blocks/barriers to experiencing reality as it actually is, it might make sense for people to choose the neatly dressed confident clones to represent them. The fact that these people have made themselves into these neatly dressed clones is the proof they are the most committed to the paradigm and thus the least likely to push people past the felt safety of their barriers/blocks and experience the vulnerability of being a part of everything else.