Heartsong Voyeur
   
   
   
   
   
   In an ideal world, a discussion of tribal psychology would probably be
presented by someone with ample participatory experience in a tribal
society, holding some degree of ethical accountability; both in their manner
of presentation and in the forms of human sharing that they recommend.
Unfortunately analytical exploration appears to be as foreign to tribal
society as genetic engineering or pipeline construction.
   The sources of insight I've found so far, about tribal psychology, are
from what I call heartsong voyeurs; from people whose inspiration to study
and to write has no apparent origin in some kind of tribal sharing that they
are theoretically advocating. This to me is a little like studying economics
solely from the discussions of shoplifters.
   The terms voyeur, lecher and pervert all refer to sexual interest
without accountability to the feelings and dreams of the people of interest.
For a nonsexual interest that is equally cruel there appears to be no
direct recognition in our culture and no term in our language, hense my
invention of the term "heartsong voyeur". Significantly, my body cannot get
sexually aroused heartlessly, so I have serious doubt that anyone's body
can; and thus I presume that a heartsong voyeur must likewise only appear
heartless due to a form of ignorance that is unfamiliar to the object
people, though the cruel effect is real and must be defended against.
   A heartsong, to me, is any deeply inspired product of solitary human
endeavor, especially one requiring several years to complete. Some people
seem to use the term only for the single most significant focus in
someone's life. I have found thousands of examples of the use of the word
in print but I have not been able to find a dictionary that lists it, even
on the internet. So, in my use of the term I am referring to any astounding
product of someone acting alone, such as a subroutine in a popular computer
program or the design of a building or the presentation of an entertainer.
   Except for a few mentally retarded people, everyone I've ever got to
know has a life saturated with minor heartsongs about which they are quite
touchy, particularly if the matter hasn't jelled into something clearly
definable yet. Almost everyone seems similiarly touchy about their body
presentation, especially nude, and any sounds or smells they create. Thus I
think of anyone's posture and verbal style as heartsongs.
   This essay will undoubtedly be read by some people who will be rating it
as a commodity, comparing it to other similiar commodities, as if they were
contemplating the purchase of it. Many will even prefer that it be an actual
commodity so that they can obtain easy license from their associates to
relate to it more wantonly. They will perhaps even determine a commercial
motive on my part, in spite of the lack of advertising or way to donate. I'm
paid by the CIA or something.
   But this essay is a bid to encourage constructive thought and internet
writing about the topic, with or without reference to my article. If it
facilitates only my own evolving clarity, then it is a success in it's
purpose. It is no more a commercial offering than deer poop in the woods,
and, striving beyond the bounds of my verbal skill level for my own
peculiar sense of rightness or elegance, I am touchy about references to it.
   Our culture encourages the use of privacy and deliberately created
confusion (white lying, ass-kissing) as the main forms of defense against
hurt feelings from heartsong voyeurs. Both methods are beyond the skill of
young children, leaving them defenseless, and both create serious handicaps
on the maturation of all of us, due to lack of interpersonal data and
reliable feedback about each other, ironically fueling the drive to be
personally invasive, to be a voyeur. I believe that our culture cannot name
and question the ethical legitimacy of heartsong voyeurism because of the
widespread use of offers of physical and artistic heartsongs for sale or
temporary use, with the consumer being unconditionally right, regardless of
their influence on the producer's feelings. Even offers of sexual voyeurism
are tolerated as a sales method for many things; and many items and training
seminars are sold explicitly to assist in more successful voyeuristic
invasiveness, both sexual and not, both paid and "earned" or "won".
   Heartless invasiveness and emotional brutality are ethically supported
in my culture. Probably half of the people I've lived with have proudly
related stories of their shoplifting or burglary expeditions, always
presuming my admiration. Likewise, discussion of political turmoil on any
scale always slides into a lively and shameless declaration of some form of
cruel abuse that one or more of the participants warrants. And almost
everyone relating the story of any showing of someone else's personal
expression seems to want license to represent the subject person without
regard for their feelings and dreams.
   In my own youth, my culture was not like this at all. Any discussion
then, among my associates, about theft, revenge, or predation, always
presumed a temporary psychotic expression. I established an unquestioned
assumption that any destructive act or expression was innately self-abusive
in the long run and thus illogical. I've often pondered a specific rationale
someone offerred, thinking maybe my former culture may have been too
narrow-minded, but so far the logic for heartlessness never holds in a
manner convincing to me.
   Nevertheless, I've heard and read many stories of parents having this
quandary about heartsong protection with their kids (a love/hate
oscillation), and occasionally kids with their parents, but generally the
culture presented by the entertainment media (the ultimate moral arbitrar
for my associates) has expressed the view that treating an offense as if
it were a temporary and regrettable abberation inspires further offense
on the part of not only the antagonist but also everyone witnessing; that
any offense, no matter how big or small, must be answered with a vicious
counter-offense, or trouble will escalate, due to some kind of widespread
motive to be offensive.
   In my life, offenses committed by several people acting together do
often operate this way. I consider the interest in industrial enterprise to
be an example of this. But the people I've known who were really alone in
an inspiration or a feeling, whether kind or not, nearly always burn out,
and quickly, unless they can get some kind feeling of shared involvement, at
least through a verbal spiritual illusion, such as the Earth First hit
list that the Unabomber used.
   In general, the adults I've seen unified by agreement of any kind, even
illusory agreement, are more inclined towards offense than those unified by
sentimentality of some sort; and solitary adults often have obnoxious
neurotic habits and interests; but any adult whose dreamworld I can
successfully be nice to becomes at least temporarily harmless, at least to
me; even if their initial intent with me was an attack.
   Jean Liedloff, The author of the Continuum Concept, represents to me a
spokesperson for the moral confusion created by this clash of capitalist
hurrah and interpersonal reverence. She writes inspired by tribal associates
she met in foreign countries, does not strike me as a safe person to be
personal with. She describes her angle on this inclination to commit offense
in modern culture as inspiring her to commence a clinic for paid therapy for
adults, with herself as the therapist. I editted out the glee she expressed
in making a circus out of the lives of the people in Bali. I found no
mention, in any of her articles, about the granting of one's adult
associates the same minimal recognition and care as she advocates for
children. She notes in her article about adult orphans that the brazillian
indians who adopted her were quite concerned about this, but she limits her
discussion to a brief description of the indian society. She has apparently
made no attempt to incorporate their adult to adult ethics into her own life
or evolve any suggestions about that for anyone else. Her adoption was not
mutual.
   In my view, any kind of interpersonal sanity must originate in the
ethical relations between adults. I believe that the children will
ultimately copy the ethics of their environment, adapting to isolation and
heartsong voyeurism, unless their parents have overtly adapted to close
nonsexual adult intimacy with several adults simultaneously.
   These are Jean Liedloff's ethics of the continuum concept, the emotional
neccesities of a sane individual, rewritten to embrace adults as well as
children:
   
  * constant access to nonsexual physical contact with trustable adults as
    needed.
  * access to a shared bed, with constant physical contact; and a solitary
    bed, with no censure either way.
  * access to instant desirable food in reponse to their own body's signals,
    without risk of mockery or condemnation.
  * being constantly in emotional contact with at least one other person,
    and allowed to observe (or eat, or sleep) while the other people
    involved go about their lives; unless voluntarily separate for awhile.
  * having associates immediately respond to his or her signals (noises,
    gestures of stress, etc.), without judgment, displeasure, or
    invalidation of the apparent issues, yet showing no undue concern nor
    making anyone the constant center of attention;
  * sensing (and fulfilling) their elders' presumption that he or she is
    innately social and cooperative, has strong self-preservation
    instincts, and is welcome and worthy as an associate.
 
   The last item implies the presense of an elder who presumably has no
elder to back their psyche. So that eldest person requires a special
regard, an artificial minimizing of interpersonal challenges of any kind, as
with a newborn. Also, these needs cannot be converted into laws or rules
without having them become a force splintering the people involved. The list
is a warning and a suggestion of what kind of culture needs to be allowed
(as opposed to required) in order for anyone to be able to avoid becoming
neurotic.
   That I have seen, most people will easily support these ethics if they
aren't overtly prohibited; so all I advocate is a lifting of the formalized
hatefullness that normally gets directed at people who show evidence of
these needs. My experience suggests that a household or similiar unifying
social unit of eight adults is a bare minimum for any hope of me avoiding
neurosis, and that twenty adults appears to be ideal, with kids outnumbered
at least two to one; but I've also noticed that one person in the group
being true to these ethics appears to be enough to substantially support
minimizing neurosis in even as many as twenty loosely fidelitous people.
   These ethics have not been hard for me to support, even as a lonely
underdog, and the resulting sanity of my associates has been easily motive
enough, even if they don't notice any of this.
   Sexuality gets no mention in Jean Liedloff's emotional neccesities; I
presume because her sexual feelings were not condemned as sick, in her
youth. Mine were and still are, so I add this:
   
  * overt and friendly incorporation of his or her sexual expressions and
inhibitions into the emotional moshe, both in public and in private,
with everyone's wish to be emotionally accountable and passionately loved
taken as reasonable to assume.
   
   Only a very few women I have known have shown evidence of any sexual
feelings at all towards anybody. I have read several viciously written
accounts of women claiming that men condemn their active sexual feelings,
but in private discussions with men I have only heard an intense yearning to
meet a lustful friendly woman. Since there has been so much posturing among
my associates about sexuality, I have no idea what the real situation is,
other than that the men I've known are generally far less emotionally
conscious than the women I've known, though, in their stumbling about, the
fellows have been apparently more accountable. The definitions of loaded
words seems to offer a clue to a collective consciousness about this:
   
   Slut (1954 definition): Woman with untidy habits and appearance, a slob.
   Slut (1980 definition): Woman con artist who temporarily feigns sexual
devotion to a man in order to inspire his physical and economic generosity;
actual sexual interest not assumed or even important.
   Slut (2004 definition): Woman who expresses real sexual interest in more
than one man, with no emotional accountability.
   Whore: a slut who overtly expects money for sexual sharing.
   Sacred Prostitute: Wise and skilled woman who instructs both sexes in
sexuality, through engaging in it with them; without feigning exclusive
devotion but with mutual fascination about sexuality presumed.
   Gigalo: Man who feigns general devotion, to inspire general generosity
from a woman; no presumption that the woman is fooled, similiar to a
beautition.
   Fox, Hottie: Sexually attractive woman; no presumption of initiative or
of evil.
   Stud: Sexually attractive man; also no presumption of initiative or of
evil.
   Nymphomaniac, Lustful babe: Woman who pursues sexuality.
   Lecher, Pervert, Voyeur: Man who pursues sexuality.
 
   The Boy Scout handbook explicity requests that a boy suppress his sexual
interest, even the showing of it or giving himself an orgasm. It makes no
reference to study or emotional self development related to sex or
relations with girls. The book uses the word sex.
   The Girl Scout handbook makes no reference to a girl suppressing sexual
initiative but does offer coaching in how to say no to an unattractive man
without hurting his feelings and enraging him, or failing that, escaping.
It goes into considerable detail discussing a girl studying her own sexual
feelings, with a special journal and with questions to specific trusted
older women, with a goal of sexual and emotional development; though the
word sex never appears in the book at all.
   So I need the terms lecher, pervert and voyeur to refer to either sex
expressing or acting sexually in an emotionally unaccountable way; and the
term lustful to imply accountability even when refering to a man.
   Most of what I've read about adult emotional necessities suggests that
any adult unable to relate with mutual complete indifference to all their
associates is in need of something called therapy. What little I've read
and seen of therapy has me totally spooked about it, but I have
successfully adapted to surviving in a social context of sustained mutual
indifference, through what I call a purely conceptual, totally dreamless
self identity. But I think of this as if I had learned how to firewalk or
live entirely on termites and green grass; interesting but hardly essential
to sanity.
   Ted Kazinski's essay "Industrial Society and It's Future" (Unabomber
Manifesto) has been a valuable springboard for useful perspective about
this. Though I consider him criminally insane, I view the Founding Fathers
of America likewise, and equally inspiring to reread. They all write in
behalf of the people who idealize living as an autonomous conceptual
identity, a rugged individual, an apparent american ideal.
   The challenge of the economic arena engaging technological and licencious
seduction of my personal associates away from general emotional
accountabilty has left me somewhat defeated in my hope for a sane
good-hearted tribe, and thus somewhat empathetic with Mr. K. but unlike
him, I refuse to succumb to nhilism and I don't see our freedom of
ambition and cultural expression being eroded by technology and
organizational offerrings; rather I see creative freedom eroded by
communities of agreement, and passifying recreational distraction, both of
which are older than history. So far only my addicted associates press me to
sacrifice the sort of freedom that I value, by encouraging me to use drugs
and junk food and welfare and borrowed resources and to embrace the
entertainment media. The larger society and it's hired representitives seem
only too easy to see my exit from those kinds of emotional dodges.
   Thus the immaturity of my personal associates looks to me like the only
real trouble in my life. I view the greater world as being in good order, as
much as can be reasonably expected of real human beings, a passable day
care center. I believe Mr. K and I are socially and emotionally feeble due
to lack of true friends, and thus are grouchy.
   Mr. K expresses the belief that my hope for real friendship is vain
unless I can remove the temptation to high-tech debauchery through
revolution; and perhaps the story of Atlantis originated from this dillemma.
But I have seen real benefit in handling strife between intimates by having
those with an explosive temper or other catastrophic immaturity have the
easy option of getting entranced by drugs, entertainment or surrogate
activities. Particularly this affects child care in a setting where highly
important, but emotionally random, adults insist on taking autonomy to the
point of licence; the "freedom" to come and go without regard to psychic
impact; as Mr. K is undoubtedly inclined to do. A child reeling in
self-pity seems to recover with less of a nightmare for everyone if some
pain-killing device can be offerred to them during their recovery period.
Since all the methods are addictive in routine use I still see a critical
need to minimize the stress that evokes their use, particularly what I call
"bullying" or making fun that involves humiliating coercion of some of the
players.
   The choreography of bullying leaves me cold from the beginning. Mr. K
participated in the college moshe for many many years before he took a
final revenge by unconditional rejection of all formal associates
regardless of choreographic style or intent. To me he is a a defeated bully,
still in the spirit of the game; and will still potentially seek a last hit
by mailing bombs to symbolic people.
   The teenager in my house gets into trouble with authorities because he
socially competes so effectively that he inevitably evokes jealosy in
another kid he has upstaged, and gets into a psychic brawl that abandons
the choreographic rules of the authorities. The authorities insist that
everyone play fair regardless of the pain of defeat, inspiring clever and
sinister revenge on the part of the losers towards my housemate, and on his
part towards them. When completely thwarted in getting in the last hit he
finds someone who can't hit back to exact a surrogate revenge on, drawing
the ire of some of those in authority. He is never apparently a complete
loser like Mr. K, but he comes from a family tradition of testing any
authority structure for individuals who are vulnerable to entertaining abuse
or who can be counted on to be lax on enforcement. When my roommates discuss
their childhoods all of this is routine and, for nearly all of them, a
burnout.
   From my perspective, almost everyone appears to be in a bitter retreat
in the same mood as Mr. K, adapting to the hallucinatory psychosis of
isolation, plotting strategy for their next foray into the moshe. I relate
to the competitive moshe as an aberation. Mr. K could not see a way back in
for himself so he declared war on the moshe in a bid for creating a
choreographic environment that he could find a place in. I have the same
quandry with reentry into the moshe but I consider any declaration of war to
be a guarrantee of disaster for all parties involved, an escalation of the
bully style, but with more of the rules of fair play set aside.
   Thus the tribal wish idea; I have found that I can easily handle the
moshe without fielding any bullying if I am in a clique that doesn't
initiate any collective sparring with outsiders and has no internal
sparring involving me. If there is no internal sparring at all in the group
then it does not even require a home territory or individual private
"recovery" time; the group is a home without walls.
   What appears to me to force deliberate bullying in an intimate group is
the need to negotiate what I call practical need and practical effort.
Unlike Mr. K, I don't perceive that organization dependent technology
muddies the distinction between practical policing and playful bullying any
worse than a group picnic on the beach. In fact I see playful bullying to be
significantly reduced by the personal formality made possible by the current
technological culture; a wimp or loser has the trump of being able to
totally run away and restart with all new players, instead of courting
insanity from oppression or isolation.
   I withdraw from all playful bullying and offer no compromise in
practical bullying (I don't negotiate or bargain); hense I get accused, by
some of my associates, of both wimpiness and immovable fascism. I minimize
sparring encounters but when cornered I recognize no invented rules of play
or "fairness". I am no fun, a poor sport in the worst way, and I cannot be
formally trusted, even take offense at being formally trusted. I must either
be studied sincerely or kept at a formal distance.
   In my youth I embraced the autonomous rugged individual ideal, and still
do in relation to brute issues. I believe that Jean Liedloff's emotional
neccesities can only be answered for adults if those of them who take on the
practical responsibilities have also arranged in their lives to be able to
take no for an answer in their bids for intimacy; studying instead how to
draw warm passion from intimates, as the girl scouts do.
   I make a plea for everyone to give overt recognition to the need for
general emotional accountability in their own personal intimacies, whether
or not they are able to comprehend how they influence feelings and
sentimentality.
   
   
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