Freud’s model does not allow for nor explain a way out of intrapsychic conflict. Maybe the way out cannot be explained. Current understandings do not allow for nor explain a way out of interpersonal violence. This can be explained, but an adequate understanding cannot exclude competition.
A social model based on conflict models cannot incorporate humor, play, inversion, joy. Competition without playfulness is conflictual. (Is the contradiction between “social” and “conflict” obvious?)
It is necessary to understand creativity, playfulness, and also the social functions of conflict. “A system that is no longer challenged is no longer capable of creative response...no longer capable of renewal” (Lewis Coser, Men of Ideas, p.359). If we consider Godel’s ideas, and we see the individual self as a system, we can understand internal contradictions as proof of MORE–proof of potential. When individuals do not attempt to explore that potential in the larger social system, the bound motivation is experienced as intrapsychic conflict. When motivation is expressed socially as release of internal conflict instead of as exploration of potential, one communicates and finds conflict instead of discovery.
When social difference is viewed as conflict, we look to either bind or discharge the conflict; when social difference is viewed as proof of potential, we look for discovery. When society does not look for greater integrity through discovering the potential of the individuals that make it what it is, the options are binding (repression) or discharge (impulsivity, distraction, or aggression). The answer is to actualize potential. The types of difference that we notice will influence the potential that we actually unfold, although the possibilities may be infinite.
Incorporating meditation affects the process, wedding increasingly accurate observation to increasingly comprehensive organizing principles. The very same process occurs at a social level. This process ushers in an understanding other than that supported by historical conflict models. Integration and discovery cannot be explained or understood through divide-and-conquer models.
The purpose of humanity is full exploration of our individuality, diversity, and potential whether defined in religious, cultural, evolutionary, or any other terms. It is possible to reinterpret what we usually experience personally as internal conflict as undiscovered, unexpressed, unshared potential. It is not metaphysically and eternally TRUE that these emotional states or the experience of these emotional states ARE conflict or potential. If we want these motivations to unfold as potential, we must choose such an interpretation and then explore together what that potential will ACTUALLY be in our shared reality.
We can allow our internal motivations to be felt as conflict, but once we see that there is a choice, it is possible to hold ourselves responsible for our choice, and it is possible to develop integrity and joy based in responsibility and openness.
The ways we believe and communicate belief about the metaphysical nature of conflict work as a blueprint of options for what to do when we experience what we habitually interpret as internal conflict. Consider the number of negative comments you have heard about people in your lifetime and how–especially as a child–you reacted to the tone of those comments and their implications. Those negative comments are like a crowd of ghosts living in your head, encouraging negative interpretations of your own behavior and emotions as well as other people’s behavior and emotions.
We put another ghost in our children’s crowd with every negative comment we speak, and we give the ghosts weight and reality by the tone and meaning we use. This puts our children in nearly constant internal turmoil, with our interpretations either supporting the sharing, altruistic, loving motivations, or alternately supporting distrust, fear of others, aggression, and defensiveness. This is a realist’s method only to the extent that we create a social reality that is based in this cynicism and saturated with this distrust of humanity. This method is either confusion or sadism.
If this crowd of ghosts has been singing its theme song of cynicism and pain in your head since before you could decide for yourself on the reality of human nature, then it may be possible to develop a different experience and understanding of yourself and others. If there has always been some part of you that resisted the voodoo spell of such ghostly or “spiritual” messages, then you have direct evidence based in your self that cynicism is not the nature of your spirit, and that cynicism cannot be home for you.
Even with all the cynicism and manmade conflict in the world, some phenomenal humans have found or created a place to call home. If we are creating our home together, what blueprint are you using? What are you building towards?
When we shape ourselves to fit conflict models, when we grow into those blueprints, then self-fulfillment means the development of cynicism and violence, self-fulfillment means we gain expertise in interpreting almost everything we see and experience to fit into that cynical and violent image. I reject that image because it does not fit me; it is not my home. Reality offers more than only the possibility of opportunistic cynicism.
If you drew the picture of what you wanted as a child, would you be willing to live there as an adult? Whose blueprint are you following? Whose images are you living in? What will it take to find challenge and renewal? What does your home look like? What familial, national, spiritual, or philosophical images are you creating or supporting by what you say or do?
Copyright 2007 Todd Mertz