Self and Group Determination: Never get the two confused.

[Aaron (Al) Lewis]

 

Which is what many people of color in the USA have been taught to think. One of the mantras of the Afro-Centric attempt at establishing itself as a vanguard movement was and is the theory of Self Determination. Oh it sounds good, but what does it actually mean? Look carefully at how it has been projected. “We, as the black community, need to strive for self determination” or “We need to empower ourselves through self determination.” 

 

There is a striking contradiction in both statements and if not vetted and filtered properly will cause cognitive dissonance in the brain of those receiving the message. It is a set up guaranteed to keep a person static and immobile. You see one of the basic contradictions is applying and overlaying self, a single entity, on top of the group, a plural. How then can a group of people be self determined?  It is a paradoxical oxymoron in and of itself. With that theory as a foundation the people embracing it as a healing modality are doomed to fail and be continually and continuously mislead. It intrinsically opens one up to be stupefied and to participate in group think rather than what it implies, self think. 

 

Self determination, by its very nature, would have to start with the self. That is the only logical way to start the application of determining. The first path would then be to come to learn what the self is and what self is not. One of the first impediments one might encounter, if one is fortunate enough to even distinguish between the idea of the group and the self, is how to journey inside where the self resides. How would you know when you encounter the self? What does it look like? What does it feel like? What does it sound like, what does it need or does it need? I am asking what are some of the actual processes you can use to find and embrace the authentic self? 

 

How would you know if your brain isn’t just playing tricks on you? It, the brain, is famous for playing involved and complicated tricks on its carrier. What about what we call the ego or the unhealthy, needy ego that doesn’t like to admit that it doesn’t know and shows up faking like it does? Kind of like what some of you may be experiencing right now as you read this post. The way people have been inculcated into this society makes it difficult to show up authentically, so people tend to create personas that are acceptable to the group even at their own expense of not being real. To show up authentically in self requires quite a bit of risk. What if you are not well received? What if your family, friends and associates did not approve of what your authentic self looks like, thinks like, acts like and says? It is easy to say, “I’d do it anyway”, but would you really? 

 

Are you really prepared and willing to expose yourself over and over again to the possibility of annihilation, exile and the ridicule that comes to the few that really do this? Are you willing to live your life in virtual solitude, rarely really trusting anyone because you fear, rightfully so, that their design and aim is to change you? 

 

By being authentic I am not referring to the rebel or the revolutionary. Both of those are usually reactionary unconscious choices. The construct, the matrix, the system, mother culture does not fear the rebel or the revolutionary. She is well aware of how they operate. In fact she created them for a purpose and uses them explicitly for her ministrations of maintaining and exacting control of her subjects and if you look real carefully after they, the rebel and revolutionary, are dead and martyred they are accepted into mainstream thought and history. If they were such a threat why then does the construct make heroes out of them after they are dead of course? 

 

On the other hand she, Mother Culture, is deathly terrified of authenticity. It is the one thing she compels all of her subjects to forget about and tries to stamp out all memory of it. It is the one thing that evaporates her power immediately. It shows her for the specter, the vesper, the illusion she really is. No wonder she goes to such great links to miseducate your babies so that they will never even question the existence of a part of themselves in exile. Just some food for thought. 

[Clifford Black]

This thread has the potential to develop into a much needed class.

B.

[Aaron (Al) Lewis]

The phrase "self determination" when applied to a group is an alogism.