It is self-hate. Self-hate once started is unconscious mostly. It has a life of it's own. It is a self defeat mechanism, a destructive urge that comes from not being in the center of yourself and treating all aspects of who you are really in this world with humane compassion.

As people, we each share endless combinations of unique characteristics that make us highly susceptible to the generational continuation of self-hate. It's not our fault we are vulnerable, sensitive, adaptable beings. It is just what we are.

We are so vulnerable because as a species we can observe ourselves and be critical of ourselves. This doesn't have to be made into a bad or exalted thing. Unlike some other species of animals we have long memories that go back to our earliest of days. We are incredibly sensitive to receiving and registering information and influences from outside ourselves especially when we are young and developing. (Marketers know this about humans, so it is about time EACH of us respected this fact in ourselves and took steps to filter out what is harmful to us on a PERSONAL and INDIVIDUALIZED basis).

Compassion for yourself includes caring for your mental-environmental space, too. Maybe this trait of extreme sensitivity to influences and whatnot in our world remains in us from the jungle days. Considering we have no fur, claws, or sharp teeth, and our young grow up so very slowly, we had to be incredibly perceptive, creative, sensitive and aware of our surroundings as well as acutely aware of ourselves and our internal environment to survive. It would be very hard to survive as a neurotic, psychotic or self destructive person in the jungle. And being this way amongst a band of primitive people would constitute a serious survival issue for the whole group.

So it was important that each member be as stable, emotionally accepting of themselves, trusting of their own senses, and in touch with themselves as possible. In our current civilization we are far removed from the jungle, so we can afford to hate ourselves and each other.

And what a tragic waste of life potential this is.

Every one of us is capable of a huge range of feelings, behaviors, and thoughts. We have a huge range of adaptability too. A baby learns how to cope with the world and gets lessons about what the world is about from its parents, who in turn learned how the world is from their parents. Self-hate is an inner tyrant part of yourself, and this part, if unchecked by compassion, dominates a person's sense of self and perception of the world. Their behaviors, actions, and thoughts are colored by this self-hating process just under the conscious awareness. Psychologists say abuse is a generational problem, and the same goes for activation of the often quite unconscious, autonomous self-hate mechanisms and beliefs found and ignored in people's psyches everywhere.

How does self-hate begin? Lets do a hypothetical situation.

Tommy is three, and he is playing with his own beloved toy truck. Tommy has had it for a while and will keep playing with it until he loses interest or he's stopped by someone else. Tommy is unaware that his brother wants what he's got. Tommy truthfully says, when Mom comes over to the scenario, it's my truck and I'm playing with it. Mom goes to Tommy and tells him to give his brother the truck and to share. Tommy resists sharing because he has no clue why he must give up his own toy. Mom takes the truck away, slaps his hands for grabbing, and calls Tommy bad. She scolds him for being selfish and greedy. Tommy goes into a pout, and then goes and plays with a ball.

But a lot has gone on here. What Tommy's mother has said and done is absorbed, registered, and recorded. For Tommy it was more than just words, it was his mother's tone, body language, implied messages, and actions. It was the atmosphere of the home and world. Remember, Tommy is TOTALLY DEPENDANT on his mom.

What did Tommy hear? He heard that the feeling of selfishness in himself is evil. He heard that his mom will reject him if he is selfish. He heard that sharing is unpleasant, but must be done to avoid rejection. It means he's in a double bind of realizing that sharing is depriving him of joy in his toys, but rejection by Mom and punishment is unpleasant, too. It means deprivation, because Mom is who gets him his toys. He's dammed if he shares and dammed if he doesn't share. Nobody asked him what he wanted to do with his own toy truck. (The German words for 'gift' and 'poison' are interchangeable).

He learned in this exchange between himself and his mom that to be safe, in this world that he is learning the ropes of coping in, it's important to reject part of himself — the selfish, self-absorbed part — and that this part of himself to the world, is INTOLERABLE.

Tommy learns to view that part of himself with wary suspicion. It must be put down, hidden, denied . . . or he will be in danger and won't survive, because without Mom who would feed him?

This was a simplified message. But considering the child abuse rates in America and the extreme bullying and P. C. mindgames going on with adults and kids in societies and schools in our country, it could've been harsher, more frequent, and applied to many more things about Tommy's authentic psyche and persona.

What if Tommy's mom took selfish urges in Tommy in a compassionate way, and accepted selfishness as part of the human condition that we all live with, without tones or implied rejection and contempt? It might have gone like this:

"I know, Tommy, that it's your truck. I know you really like playing with your truck now, but your brother admires it too, and he wants to see it too. Would it be ok to let him see it too? Why not let him see it too? Can I see it?"

Little kids, when they understand and trust the parent, will listen to parents' suggestions more often than not. Then, after persuading Tommy to hand over his truck, encourage them both to pass the truck around (by parental example). And then leave the scene to let Tommy decide what he will do with his truck. More likely than not they will be playing with it together.

This type of exchange takes COMPASSION on the part of the parent and compassion towards the selfishness in the child. It takes compassion for the parent towards themselves to feel and accept, in awareness that they felt selfish as a three year old themselves.

This kind of thought out, engaging response is very hard for parents to do when they are stressed out, overworked, resenting the time the kids take from their own pursuits, tired and unhappy with their own lives and relationships. It's even harder on parents that suffer the above burdens AND are suffering with self-hate and a lack of compassion FOR THEMSELVES. How can a self-hating unaware parent create a compassionate home and teach their kids compassion for themselves or each other when they have no compassion for themselves? I have learned in my life, in every abusive situation there is a pivot point somewhere, a realization. And that pivot point is a choice inside you and I. The choice is either to let the patterns of self-hatred can continue to be manifested through you and be transmitted through your own words, choices, actions, relationships . . . or to refuse to obey the castigating voices of an unreasonable godlike conscience and stop it. Stop doing the compassionless actions to yourself. Stop perpetrating abuses of the human condition that keep this civilization deteriorating and keep it destroying this world and every shred of happiness at a dizzying pace. All of this can END with you and me, by letting go of the illusions within ourselves first. . .

Say, in your heart, I will be good to myself, I must respect myself as the unique person I am, and I will be LOYAL to myself above anyone or anything else. I will put myself as the center of my world. And I will not destroy my own happiness with arrogance, pretentiousness, illusions of power, or self-mastery.

A very young child's persona — the feelings about himself and the world, his character structure, how he relates to himself and other people — are formed when he is growing up. So he learns what these might be like from parents who demonstrate how to feel about himself. He has no other model other than the world he's in to learn from. The child automatically, without conscious awareness, applies how his parents feel about him, applies their view of the world, of themselves, to how he feels about himself. If his parents are too grossly permissive and don't care, he feels he's a person not worth caring for. If the parents are overbearing, controlling, and restrictive, he sees himself as a fragile fragment rather than a whole separate autonomous person. If they are excessively punitive or, worse, sadistic, he sees himself as a monster who must not trust ordinary human characteristics, senses, impulses or feelings, let alone the variances of his own judgement processes. Zealous, stringent, punishing, demanding, perfectionist parents will create overwhelming, guilty, cruel, castigating consciences in their kids. Criminals, I think, suffer from these kinds of consciences, and so they crack under the pressure from the tyrant within themselves, and rebel in a big way from these tyrannical consciences. The death penalty, in some ways for a criminal, is a triumph of their inner fascists and an escape for their true selves, from enormous pressure and pain brought on by their castigating, Hitlerian consciences.

If a child's parents have little regard for who he REALLY IS, which is his natural proclivities, desires, goals, talents, and instead push on a child what THEY think he must become according to THEIR perceptions of who they want him to be, then he will wish to be someone else. The kid obliges the parents and give up on his own selfhood, and steps out of the center of his own world. And he will work against his natural, authentic being, and it will rob him of self-esteem and happiness. He will become unbalanced, insecure, and unstable inside. Our hypothetical child, Tommy, if he never confronts the meaning of the slapped hands and pouting, if he never understands the lesson of sharing and selfishness with compassion, he might secretly wish to be a rich man who will never have to share with anyone else again. Money won't reject him. Or he might become guilt-ridden for possessing anything, and have nothing of his own.

These kinds of parents might minimize or devalue the child's assets while they extol these virtues of mythic supermen. Examples? 'The forever good people', 'most loved people', 'strongest bravest people', 'popular successful people', 'pretty/handsome people', 'wise expert people', 'rich entitled people' with no indebtedness, 'poor scum', 'stupid sheep people', 'underachiever lazy losers', etc., etc., ad nauseum.

Add onto this sad, inherited situation the additional pressure of being raised in a sensorum, surrounded by this sick, competitive market saturated stratified culture, made from the sad, inherited situation and all its varieties inside each of us. Our civilization is full of self-hating people with impossible standards, exaggerated notions, confusion, hypocrisy, denials, and grand illusions, great escapes, and these godlike dreams of being supermen regarding aspects of the human condition as well.

This emotionally unrealistic malignant socio-psychological cocktail will push any kid into a self-idealization process. He will aim for society's unattainable goals, like extreme virtue, incredible personal power, the appearance of total wisdom, perfect beauty, movie star popularity — all impossible ideas. This crazy illusion, this game we play with ourselves about human beings, is guaranteed to bring the child and adult a lifetime of frustration, failure, and hopelessness. The failure to 'measure up' or succeed in the impossible brings on still more self-hate attacks that are used as punishment, as a whip, to drive this person farther away from himself into a fantasy self he thinks IS his real self.

Many people are chronically depressed but are unaware of it. When the fog lifts and they feel good for a fleeting moment. It is then that they notice how gray their life has been. Sometimes this glimpse of themselves is enough to send someone into therapy.

As little kids, before we could discern reality from illusions, we were taught by our ignorant well-meaning parents and this sick culture to dehumanize and repress certain aspects of ourselves, as they were deemed 'bad' or shameful. We learned other behaviors were "good, " and in this reward and punishment game we play to survive, we forget compassion. Eventually we learned to separate ourselves from ourselves. We practice excessive inappropriate repression of emotions, and put out of consciousness our own feelings, ideas and thoughts.

We deaden ourselves to ourselves and the pain we feel, we resign by pulling out of life and its various involvements, and settle for less than we deserve. We sell out our potential for what we are told we want. We forget who we are. . .

Soon we are no longer the center of our own world. We become so concerned about "what do other people think of us?", "what will they do to us?", etc. , that we become afraid of them. We isolate, put on airs and false fronts. When we are not treating ourselves with true compassion we cannot treat others with true compassion.

We make decisions for effects outside of ourselves, to be directed to ourselves in the form of admiration or something. Any act of charity in this mindset is done to prop up an illusion about yourself as someone else. It's seeking a "good guy" badge. Reclaiming compassion for yourself in the human condition takes courage, it takes facing some pain and giving up some cherished beliefs you think are yours. It takes facing many fears head on. It takes dealing with other people's reactions and rejections of the authentic "you" in all your aspects, when they have been accustomed to whatever illusion you were living. Undoing the mechanisms of self-hate humanizes you, frees you, gives you the simple bread and butter of feeling good (not the euphoria or high happy) and puts you in the center of your world again. Being in the center and compassionate towards yourself does not mean you control everything around you and inside you, however.

Culture is a frame of reference, a value system, and in a lot of ways culture defines the human condition in both the individual and the world. Through language we share ideas. Through propaganda, marketing, and media we are manipulated insidiously, pressured into believing many errors about human emotions and being a person and what that is.

Many of the standards we call "values" are taught to us by our parents and our culture and many are antithetical to being human. We have become unaware of how rigid, Godlike, impossible, choiceless, self-destructive, extreme, and conflicting our "standards" have become. We are oblivious that these beliefs, standards, and illusions buried deep within us obscure reality, denigrate the human condition, keep us confused, scared, inhibited, and insecure. So in this pain, we forget what it is to be a person.

This culture provides a vast amount of materials used by people in the service of self-hate. This mainly takes form in disastrous illusions and horrific demands on ourselves and on the world at large leading to bitter disappointments, hopelessness, futility, frustration and despair. We have systematically become unaware of how inhuman, Godlike and impossible our terms for living and self-acceptance have become. No wonder we are in a Civilization that is on a collision course with annihilation! We have no idea that our aspirations are often totally inappropriate and incompatible with being humans in a world that is shared with other life. Our culture is full of double bind situations that cause much pain in us.

Here I will list a few.

Cowardice VS Bravery What is cowardice? I dunno. I do know that fear is a healthy self-preservation mechanism. To fear dangerous situations where one might face harm, like war or hazardous confrontations, dangerous relationships or bad entanglements, including business, emotional, or social, is normal and necessary to survive. Our culture says fearlessness is a virtue, that it is a sign of being a real man. Fear is a natural and valuable attribute for ANY living organism to have. To destroy one's capability to fear is a quick ticket to a grave. To fear in ways not realistic, to have severe emotional insecurity, and to feel vulnerable surely asks for compassion and understanding from us. Having feelings like this are not rare, they occur at times in all people. They are not evil.

To fear being in a war is normal. To run away from harm is self-preservation. Fear is a life-saving reaction and our leaders are themselves fearful of going into the fray of bullets, gases, and bombs. So you, Joe Blow Citizen, have every RIGHT to resist getting blown apart, because war is a psychotic enterprise. The decision to refuse to kill and refuse to be killed has genuine merit in a survival sense. Willingness to sacrifice one's life for someone else or some cause is a result of severe self-hate and dreams of being a hero in this Valhalla fantasy. This game is a sign of a serious disconnect in judgement, despite how devoted one is or is not to their country or a cause.

There are always exceptions, of course, and these exceptions are rare. Being loyal to oneself first is not a BAD thing. Being loyal to oneself first, one can look at the options, demand the facts, and make a meaningful choice regarding self-sacrifice in a personal context. A draft — ANY draft — is a society-wide self-hate, self-destruction mechanism in action.

Even the Aztec expected their kings to lead their armies in battle. In America we ship off the most vital and alive people we have with lives to live, and hope for their futures to die. The Aztec would have called us barbaric, and yet they had self-hate in their culture, and people had enough compassion for themselves to abandon their kings and their civilization when it got too impossible to live in.

Fighting for the right to Fail

We must have the right to fail. Because when we do not have the right to make mistakes, to lose, we begin to fear failure so acutely that we curtail realistic and attainable desires. This fear ruins the possibility of risk, innovation, and experimentation becomes a threat, it makes for inhibition, even paralysis. If we take any chances in life, we don't have to always win.

In reality we win some and we lose some. And if we lose it ain't always OUR fault.

Each time we risk to invest ourselves in love, a relationship, a belief system, or a way of life, we must anticipate possible loss because that is part of the human condition, too. People we love will die. We'll lose our faith. We don't pass the test. Business ventures will fail. We lose the job. We give up. We tire. We change our minds. We grow out of habits or develop new habits.

Life, death, and renewal is a cycle. Life has all aspects of this cycle because it is FULL. Despite the glaringly obvious reality of this cycle in life itself. Our culture stands so rigidly against failure and loss, while it gives lip service to the contrary. As a culture we look at aging, death, surrender, dependence, illness as an INSULT to the human condition, as a weakness and flaw in our personhood. As individuals, we are taught to despise it as if it were an insult too. Our society tries to remove that loser part from its own existence, and so do we. Ever striving forward, we worship youth, newness and glorify struggle and worship winners. This is only expressing one side of the human experience. A full perspective on life includes loss, surrender, and decline.

And so we have the right to lose in life, without castigating ourselves. We have the right to surrender without shame, the right to grow old with self-love, and the right to die with dignity, just as much as we have the right to be young and succeed, strive and grow.

The Myth of Independence

In reality, we all are PARTIALLY helpless, dependant, rejected, and being taken advantage of all the time. Yet some of us go through life feeling chronically abused, guarding ourselves against any taint of helplessness, dependency, rejection, or being taken advantage of.

Our culture contributes actively to maintaining inhuman, impossible standards. We are taught, propagandized, persuaded, and goaded into believing that total independence is not only possible but must be attained at all costs. Any hint of dependency is seen as a terrible thing, a horrific aberration, a character flaw. In men it is seen as unmasculine. The attitude towards dependence is derogatory and, paradoxically, promoted alongside the opposite idea that we live in a complete society in which cooperation and exchange is necessary for survival. But the latter part about cooperation is true: total independence is a DANGEROUS illusion.

This illusion of never needing help is an exalted fantasy of our times. A rich man depends on many workers for his affluence. A politician depends on the acquiesce of power from many self-sovereign people. A CEO, to get his huge salary, depends on the complicity to self-hate in those people beneath him in the work hierarchy, to accept their lower wages for their just-as-valuable work. It is self-hating society and a totally irrational belief that says a trashman's work is less valuable than a CEO's. If the trash wasn't collected we would all be in deep trouble. If the CEO stopped shuffling numbers, well, life would go on, wouldn't it?

Lets look at dependence realistically.

When I hear the likes of Pat Buchanan on TV yammering about who can and cannot "hack" it in society, I cannot help but see how DEPENDANT he is on other people. Is the work he does as a commentator or writer worth more than the work of people who repair the presses that print his books? No. But the way Buchanan talks about dependency and postures about his own independence and successes in his life, you'd think he crafted his books himself with homemade paper written with a pencil he made from tree branches and charcoal.

In fact, Buchanan's entire career is dependant upon the coordination of THOUSANDS of nameless, faceless people working for HIS benefit. There are people who gave him their time, money and support. Everyone supporting him, from the person who assembled the PC that he types on, to the guys who built the car he uses to drive to work, to the papermakers, bookbinders, marketing teams, TV crews, makeup people, editors, the maid who cleans his office, the plumber who unstops his toilet, the doctor who treats his illness, the researcher who made the chemical compounds in his prescriptions, the Mexican immigrants who pick the fruit he gets from the store, or the waiter who brings it to him in restaurant, the Chinese/South American slaves who made his polo shirt ... All of the efforts of these people, combined, has made him what he is today. NO-ONE is a self-made success story . . .

We all marvel at the masterwork of King Tutankhamun's golden mask and the Kings of Egypt as if they were glorious. Fact is, it was very much like society is today. But this mythic mask is only a grand illusion designed to conceal a vulnerability of a so-called God, a dried-up dead body of a crippled boy King/God. He was supposed to live forever. By all evidence, though, the boy didn't make it.

King Tut was murdered in the ruthless pursuit of power and position by insecure adults in their need to be on top of the kingdom. When we as children are urged to don the mask of godlike perfection, we cut off the actual person inside, in pursuit of the impossible. The actual person starves. They dry out and thirst for compassion and self-expression in this land of austerity we are taught to accept, by the ruthless tyrant God/kings inside our parents/ and later ourselves.

Slowly we suffocate the human being we are to become, with the golden mask of what we are not.

We have no clue who created this most incredible artifact of the goldsmith's art, but allegedly it was stolen from his father's grave goods, a stolen inheritance so to speak. There is no signature of the artists that made the mask, on the mask. Because it was a symbolic thing made to protect the illusion of omnipotent power of an "independent" God-king as representative of the souls of Egyptian citizens. What a sad representation What a LIE. . . No-one knows how many people worked to make the golden treasures of King Tut, just like we have no clue how many people helped Bill Gates build Microsoft or Pat Buchanan walk into the spotlight and tell us we can't 'hack' it.

But I can guarantee you, in ancient Egypt it was not the royal court prima donnas and entitled elites who faced the smelting furnaces and the toxic fumes to make the ornaments they wore. Just like the big company boss doesn't clean the toilets in the executive men's room, even though he uses them too.

It wasn't the high priests who dug deep underground and mined the gold it was the people who acquiesced to a life deprivation that was dictated by inhuman economic relationships and domination. . It wasn't the queen who strung the beads, or carved the wood or beat the gold into thin sheets. It was the average people who saw themselves as expendable and lessers to the kings that faced the brutalities of production and service. It was the people with self-hating mechanisms that functioned as inner tyrants who terrorized themselves into believing they must pay and toil to exist because they were worthless. It was countless people sacrificing their own happiness and negating their true authentic selves in a billion different self-destroying mindfucks. This was because the Egyptian society was hierarchical, and the people were chained into their position by belief, an inherited lesson of self-hate and impossible cultural standards taught by their parents going back into the mists of time.

In modern days we obliviously wonder at the sheer brutality it must have taken to get the workers and slaves to build the pyramids. But one need not speculate on past brutality. Just ask Bill Gates how he gets people to do the tedious, repetitive, boring work that builds his empire.

People can endure a lot of suffering, but it is better when we do not have to. We need to get past cut-throat competition and contrivances to prove worth, and give up on the childish dreams of glory and primitive top and bottom, reward or punishment simplicities.

It's time to say no to tyrants inside us and everywhere else, and treat ourselves to our own compassion. When we allow ourselves to be human beings, we will see that we can allow others to be who they are, as well. I truly believe human beings have a bent towards compassion. It is when compassion is perverted into self-hate and we are no longer at the center of our own selves that we run into the culture-wide destructive inhuman Godlike tendencies born of too precious illusions. There are many grande illusions that torment us deep within, we can never be beyond the few I listed here. There are illusions about anger, goodness, normalcy, security, purity, perfection, indebtedness, endurance, toughness, beauty, charm, self-control, uncertainty. . The list goes on and on.

But we can face the truth instead of the illusions.

If you are interested in overcoming this problem of self-hate and breaking the generational ignorance that makes our culture so self destructive, I wish you to find joy. Any changes that happen in this world always begin with one person willing to change. I would recommend these books to get anyone started:

Compassion and Self-Hate
by Theodore I. Rubin
http:// www.amazon.com/ exec/ obidos/ search-handle-form/ ref=s_sf_b_as/ 104-7791976-5248701

A Language Older than Words
by Derrick Jensen
http:// www.derrickjensen.org/ index.html