This is going to be a highly metaphorical essay (what other kind do I write?) comparing human morality to the human body’s immunity system. I would justify this by observing that social systems often mimic physical systems. After all, a human body is a colony of eurkaryotes that have developed in highly specialized ways.
When intruders get into the body, white blood cells are assigned the duty of getting rid of them -- by eating them! First engulfing them, then digesting them. They learn to recognize intruders by little signs on their skins, differently shaped molecules sticking out from the skins of all cells. The white blood cell makes a key that fits the cell’s lock. The white blood cells keep those keys in case of needing them again.
Sometimes cells of the person’s own body go rogue and begin to over-replicate (cancer) or malfunction. White blood cells clean them out, too, Assuming all goes well. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Maybe the white blood cells are disabled somehow or they can’t seem to make a key that will fit the lock. HIV appears to infect the white blood cells themselves so that the guardians die. On the other hand, the white blood cells may go crazy and become terrorists, attacking the cells of the body that are perfectly healthy. We call that an autoimmune disorder.
Society at large has similar sorts of specialized groups that repel intruders and keep order by suppressing the damaging criminals -- sometimes by killing them and sometimes by confining them. (Rarely by eating them in a direct way, though they might be entities that suck their sustenance.) And those polities that are hypervigilant may be deranged if the culture changes too quickly so that they can’t tell an intruder from a creator. They begin to erode and destroy what they were meant to protect. Though I do see the reality of terrorists and I worry a LOT about the private corporate armies around the planet, I don’t think we’ve put enough thought into the right-wing Taliban-like forces in our society that erode our energy, health and growth by constantly trying to damage or even kill anyone who doesn’t fit their idea of proper order. Part of the problem is that they only see the skin of the cell rather than its contents and never register that they need to try a key.
But there is another way I want to look at the metaphor and that’s through the eyes of the Internal Family Systems counseling assumptions. The idea is that all of us have inside the voices and personalities of our families and friends, esp. the ones we knew earliest. This isn’t fancy stuff like ids and egos that Freud suggested, but it is parallel. In there is the over-strict grandmother, the indulgent aunt, the crazy old uncle, the bully brother, the needy sister. The worst are the voices of abusers, because with them comes the muscle-memory of beating and violation, as painful as ever.
Not all the voices are conscious. They sometimes need an accepting listener to get them up to where they can be recognized for what they are and gradually erased or countered. According to the IFS people www.selfleadership.org , the inner voices fall into three categories: those that protect you, those that try to “straighten you up,” and those that are yourself at various stages and situations. Each of the three categories can be multiple.
It’s easy to understand that the voices that are supposed to be guiding a person (“uh, oh, don’t do THAT”) and the ones that are “autoimmune” (“you little bastard, I’m gonna kill you!”), will cause the huddled group of inner survivors to close down, hide, and become wounded. This will be part of one’s deepest inner assumptions about life, even deeper than the rules of the culture that say uncountable (and unaccountable) things about how people must act.
The result of autoimmune inner-voice systems is deadly. This form of thinking came out of working with women who were starving themselves to death. They were so convinced that they were worthless that they tried to purify themselves down to being bones. The culture supports this with skeletal Paris models. The therapist finally asked one woman if he could speak to the inner person who was so frightened -- and he could!
Thinking about one’s inner voices this way can account for how a person can be punishing and critical in one situation, and then turn around to be generous and protective in another. Or how people can turn against themselves. It depends on which voice has their ear. The situation can be the trigger and this election has touched off every maladjusted autoimmune opinionator in the country (“Never trust a black man-- they’re not like us.” “And his poor dog up there on the roof of the car, so scared that he shat down the rear window!”)
The question is who is listening to this cacophony in our whole nation and why aren’t we listening to each other? Indeed, why aren’t we listening to ourselves -- not us but the voices we carry around in us? “You’re taking up too much room. Why are you so selfish? Why can’t you ever finish what you start? No one will ever marry you.” That’s my mother. What’s interesting is that these voices are repetitions of the voices she heard from HER mother. Her mother got them from a hypercritical step-mother. They’re memes. Sometimes as powerful as genes.
Many of them are based on times that don’t exist anymore, assumptions that have been discredited, desires that were unworthy in the first place. So why do I still hear my mother’s voice every time I sit down to sew or when I neglect my kitchen. (She did those things, too.) One of the pleasant things about academic work is that she can’t follow -- the only voices are from seminary and since I was forty by that time, they didn’t exactly go to my heart. (Seminary is meant for “nice” young men.) The main one was “if you REALLY want to be a minister, you’ll do what I say.” But what they said was “don’t make trouble.” This is an Human Immunological Deficiency Voice that renders people powerless to defend themselves.
One from my student teaching is still with me: my supervisor said, “You’re a lot smarter than you look.” He meant it to throw me off base. He had a deep, rich, resonant voice -- he sometimes answered the phone by saying, “This is GOD speaking,” and one tended to believe him. Over the years I’ve turned to his voice and argued with it. “Ah, but that can be an advantage, Brer Fox! It’s an excellent disguise for a guerrilla thinker.” God is SUCH a fox. But rabbits have their defenses.
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