Towards a New Culture by Dieter Duhm
The compelling political, economic, ecological, social,
technological, psychological, medical, scientific, and mental-spiritual
questions of our time need different answers than those available within the
framework of our established ways of living and thinking. The analysis of all
of these questions leads to the same realisation: they can only be solved truly
and with lasting effect if the human finds a fundamentally new relationship to
himself, to his fellow humans, to all other living beings, and the entire
planet. A "new relationship" means a new behaviour, a new way of
life. In the heart of a new approach towards an ecological culture stands a
liberated, unsentimental, and active love relationship with all that lives.
Earlier [...] a few basic characteristics of the new culture
were described, without which a new order of humane society, oriented upon the
laws of life, can hardly be possible. These characteristics are: solidarity
with all living beings, life research, free sexuality, non-violence without
repression of aggression, grass roots democracy through transparency
(especially in the emotional and sexual areas), and constant social feedback through
direct human contact. These characteristics cannot be realised at the depth of
their true meaning on the basis of present-day emotional, character, and
ideological structures; in part, they cannot even be understood. They seem to
go against empirically determined laws of human behaviour. But in reality they
only go against the empirical laws of the existing cultural era which is based
on bioenergetic self-suppression. The realisation of the above-mentioned
characteristics requires an inner process of change for the individual we could
term "emotional cleansing."
What does "emotional cleansing" mean? It means
that love and hatred are freed from their mutual embrace; that one feels no
fear when one needs to fight, and no inhibitions when devotion is called for.
It means that one does not force a smile when one would rather cry or scream,
that one learns to differentiate between love and the need for someone to lean
on, between a "yes" that stems from the heart and a "yes"
that stems from the fear of being rejected. It means that one no longer
confuses one's lover with one's mother or father; that one does not confuse
emotional hypersensitivity with love of one's neighbour, or the rage of being
personally hurt with the rage against the destroyers of life, and one's own
cowardice with consideration and tolerance. Emotional cleansing means that the
emotions and energies can flow again because they are free from hypocrisy, that
the feelings of inferiority and guilt disappear because the inferiority and
guilt have disappeared. It means getting rid of false feelings of shame with
which we have denied our best and most vital urges, and that true shame
emerges, the shame over our constant repression of the truth of the living
world within ourselves and others, for no other reason than for our fear of the
eyes and judgement of others.
Fundamentally, emotional cleansing means to
overcome the entire psychological and cultural system that Wilhelm Reich called
"the character armour."
The character armour is both a system that keeps down the
biological energies and a psychological-ideological protection against all
invasions of life that have been forced out, and against all signals from
buried truths, longings, and love. The cultural era of the character armour has
declared all grapes that hang too high to be sour and hated everything sweet
that was unreachable. It despised and rejected the lust for which it had always
longed, made impotence into the virtue of abstinence and turned cowardice into
morals. This mendacity has become a solid structure and a permanent part of all
that has been handed down as "education", "humaneness", and
"human dignity". People instructed others about freedom and did not
see the trap in which they themselves were caught. They developed theories as
an excuse for their own fears, attacked the state and society but resisted
every attack on their own character armour.
For the regulation of their social lives people of the old
culture needed external ideologies and authorities. By being armoured beings,
they could not rely on the honesty and reason in the human feedback they got
through contact with their peers. Since they also were pent-up and full of
latent cruelty they had to protect themselves against asocial excess through a
system of laws and punishment. Fear has therefore been a central element in
regulating society. If there can be said to exist one single central change of
paradigm for our total culture, then it will be anchored in the change-over
from a social order regulated by fear to a social self-organisation rooted in
free and direct human contact.
Of course this change cannot occur overnight, not even in
small model communities. But centres and support groups need to be established
which, through their social and psychological structures, will be able to
facilitate this central process of transforming human society. Using all
available human and sociological intelligence, we need to replace fear as a
regulating principle by something we could call ... love. The "home",
of which the philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote, actually does lie in love, in a
free, unsentimental love containing no remnants of fear, lies, or hatred; and
the great nondum, the unredeemed part of history, lies for now in this, the
greatest of unredeemed human longings. When it is fulfilled, when the human is
loving in full sensuality, stands awake and fully present in the world, then
finally a mode of existence will have been realised that we have always at
heart known exists.
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