Balance Versus Dominance and Transgender issuesWhen entering a modern day prison; one could be forgiven for thinking that they are stepping back in time, before equal opportunity rights and psychological advancements in science ever existed. A world where not much has changed the accepted paradigm.
This has been my struggle for over 2 years.
Anywhere else in the world a person of my polarity could be accepted for their choice of name and lifestyle. For there are laws to say so. However its apparent that the ruling elite, those people payed by the community are more comfortable to run a modern day prison according to their own beliefs.
It's sad that people are sent to prison for punishment with the prospect to reform their attitudes, yet the environment itself is resistant to change. How can prisoners be taught to accept societies laws when their rights are denied?
I suffer the unsettling addressing of a male each and every day because of one particular phrase that remains unchallenged inside the Sentence Management Policy Manual.
It states in a pre-1950's fashion that if a prisoner has a penis they will be seen, treated as male.
The prison system clearly accepts a physiological attribute above a psychological one, when world-renowned sex and gender experts have documented that the human brain itself is the most important sex organ.
There is not enough enlightenment of this in many levels of today's prison system.
What have I done about this and many other issues
I have written many letters to the Department, yet come up against the same stone wall.
My plight was ruthlessly splash over a tabloid newspaper. An unfavourable notoriety was used to justify no assistance from an uninformed public.
Now I'm suffering depression when I need only little in life. I'm being denied the basic right of all humanity which is to express my identity as 'I see fit' and harmonious.
I want to eventually be a citizen of this society that says it's free and democratic.
It starts here, in the house of corrections.
By Ms Paula Denyer and Just Us 22 February 05
Related:
Contrasting Natural and Collectivist Social Orders
Balance Versus Dominance
The diagram above shows the major differences between the collectivist social order that is associated with takerism and the older, natural, social order of peoples such as the Australian aborigines and the tribes of the Amazon, who successfully followed Leaver principles for tens of thousands of years.
On the left, we see that individual species, humans and others, have inalienable rights. These rights are not granted and they cannot be withdrawn. They stem from the divine order that creates matter, structure, and life.
On the right, there is the concept of human-created collectivism, and bigger and bigger governments, all the way to a global, totalitarian state. The distinguishing feature is that, here, the 'order' in society is made by men, it is not natural. Nor is it divine.
Whereas natural rights, on the left, cover all living things, the artificial rights that are given and taken by nation states, on the right, only apply to humans. The dominant idea is, as Daniel Quinn observes, "Humans belong to an order of being that is separate from the rest of the living community (there's us and there's nature)."
Historically, there have been periods when legal distinctions between animals and humans have been blurred. For instance, in medieval Europe, in the 14th and 15th centuries, numerous trials and executions of animals occurred. One source identifies 34 recorded instances of pigs having been tried and cruelly put to death. Besides pigs; rats, chickens, goats, and bees were similarly tried.
Some of the pigs were fully dressed in human clothes at the time they were, inevitably, found guilty. In one case a vicar excommunicated a flock of sparrows that infested his church. All this happened despite the theological stance that animals had no soul, and no morals or conscience. They could not really be guilty of transgressing the Rule of Law.
Clearly, there was a period of confusion in the West when remnants of the beliefs (some would say superstitions) of the old, pre-taker, tribal societies existed alongside the new doctrines and dogma of man-made collectivism and religious interpretation. Today the distinction has all been resolved. Even the UN groups that deal with animal matters are clear that animals do not have natural rights. They are merely 'there' to be exploited.
Thus, the Whale Shark, the largest fish in the world, was recently protected by the UN group that monitors trade in endangered species. The UN did this, not because they recognised that the whale sharks have any natural rights, as part of a divine creation, but because some countries, including the Philippines, India, and Britain, argued that these enormous fish are worth more as eco-tourism attractions than as shark fin soup.
It was a purely economic decision, the rights of the whale shark did not enter into consideration. This is unsurprising, since the United Nations is a Taker institution that was established by nation states to look after their interests - not those of the animals and plants on this planet.
In a Taker society that is run on collectivist lines - and they all are - the power of life or death rests with the state. In a true tribal society, one that exists with nature on Leaver principles, the power of life or death is in the hands of the natural order of things, as determined by the design of the material world. Social groupings of the human animal, into tribes, live by the rule of reason, obligation, and the rectification of wrongs.
Collectivist governments, on the other hand, gravitate to the total dominance of all matters, including the determination of life and death. In the natural world, where human tribes belong, there is balance and reason instead of dominance. Leavers do not 'conquer' the land and annihilate all those who don't happen to agree with them. Takers do exactly that, until they overextend their reach and exhaust the capacity of their economy and their forces.
The Rule of Reason
In his novel, The Story of B, Daniel Quinn outlines the difference between tribal law and what passes for just law-making in collectivist societies. He illustrates his points with an example relating to adultery, a common enough occurrence in every human community. He writes.
* "Tribal laws are never invented laws, they're always received laws. They're never the work of committees of living individuals, they're always the work of social evolution. They're shaped the way a bird's beak is shaped, or a mole's claw - by what works. They never reflect a tribe's concern for what's "right" or "good" or "fair," they simply work - for that particular tribe."
* "Here's how the Alawa of Australia handle adultery...." (The example is quite lengthy. Look it up - on page 314 of the paperback edition, 1997 - if you want to know the details. L )
* "Nothing like invented law, which just spells out crimes and punishments, tribal law is something that works. It works well for all concerned. A man and woman whose love is as great as this must of course have each other. But for the sake of the tribe they must be gone - out of sight, out of mind forever.
The children of the tribe have seen with their own eyes that marriage and love are not the trifling matters they have become among "advanced" peoples like us. The husband's dishonour has been avenged - and there will be no snickering among his comrades about it, for they stood side by side with him to lambaste the adulterer."
* "Every part of this process is the law, and every actor in it is a participant in the law. The law for these people isn't a separate statute written in a book. It's the very fabric of their lives - it's what makes the Alawa the Alawa and what distinguishes them from the Mara and the Malanugga-nugga -who have their own ways of handling adultery, which are best for them. It can't possibly be said too often that there is no one right way for people to live, that's only the delusion of the most murderous and destructive culture that history has ever produced."
Quinn makes the point that the emphasis in tribal law is always on correcting the harm done. The Rule of Law that applies in collectivist societies, even before they become totalitarian states, places its emphasis on punishment.
Even in cases where courts award damages the compensation is always in a monetary form; loss of an arm is worth so much, damage to reputation is worth so much. The philosophy seems to be that every harm can be expressed as a sum of money, and that there is no need to do anything more than fix the price of the damage.
This simplistic and mechanistic view, is characteristic of materialist cultures. But it is totally foreign to the tribal peoples of the Amazon forests or the Australian wilderness. They have laws that aim to repair feelings and lessen animosities.
Their aim is to keep their tribes functional and to maintain respect for the rights of the other creatures and life-forms that share their world. Tribal laws reflect a very different mindset, and a system that is much longer lived and successful than modern approaches to law-making and justice.
Divine Order Versus Secular Structures
The word 'God' in the above diagram refers to the divine order of creation, rather than the concept portrayed in the various interpreted religions of the world. God, in the context of the diagram, is the same as the "Great Spirit" (etc) of pre-taker tribal societies.
This is the God of earlier times, not necessarily the God of the sages who wrote the New Testament of the Christian Bible. The diagram simply contrasts the secular structures and man-made order of modern nation states and interpreted religions with the natural order that tribes, flocks, herds, hives, and all other collections of creatures follow.
Every social group has rules of conduct and ways of achieving order. The key difference between the two sides of the diagram is that on the left the rules evolve within what is practical, while on the right the rules are determined by elites. Whether those elites are in religious institutions or state institutions they determine how others in the society should live.
In 'modern' society the parrot people of the media often tend to reinforce the notion that the way the churches and the various layers of government say we should live is the way we were meant to live. This is an implicit message, for as Daniel Quinn notes, we are seldom aware of the paradigm that he terms 'Mother Culture,' even though we live by it all the time.
On the left of the diagram is the natural world where all creatures are free to determine, for themselves, how they live. They do this within the practical bounds set by the divine structure of nature and the cosmos.
A bird is designed to fly, so it can migrate from one continent to another without regard for any rules other than those imposed by climatic conditions and the availability of food and water along the route.
Migrating birds often fly in vee formations, because this arrangement allows them to all have clear, undisturbed, air. Only the laws of aerodynamics govern how the migrating flock travels. There are no imposed rules about the way birds are allowed to fly.
On the right of the diagram the situation is quite different. There are rules in many denominations of the Christian religion that prevent women from becoming ordained ministers.
There are rules in some countries, such as China, that allow each couple to have only one child. There are rules that prevent people who flee Afghanistan, and travel to Australia in unseaworthy river boats, from living freely in that country.
Instead, men women and children are held in what are effectively prisons, at the pleasure of the Federal government. There are rules that prevent more than limited amounts of money from being taken out of one country and into another.
There are rules about rules about rules. And all these rules and laws are human inventions. None of them are natural and divine. Yet, they must all be obeyed, because that is the way we were meant to live. The nature of their rules is a key difference between the natural order on the left of the diagram and the man-made order of collectivist states, on the right.
(Lothar)
