During a grief ritual I was teaching, I got a question about hatred on one of my YouTube videos, and it helped me see how soothing and orderly hatred can be.

In a time when we're losing so much, and things feel out of control, the simple act of hating and adoring people can give us structure in an otherwise overwhelming time of chaos and loss.

Idealizing and adoring our leaders -- or hating and dehumanizing them -- these polarized acts can soothe us, even though they're not healing, and will lead to mountains of loss in the long run.

Grief, on the other hand, is massive, and ever-changing, and it leads us into depth and complexity -- and a profound understanding that we cannot control the world by polarizing ourselves. But if we have no practice for grief, it can be simpler to avoid it and pretend that we can control the flows of the world by sitting in hatred, idealization, polarization, hierarchies of human worth, and certainty.

The practice for hatred and adoration is Shadow Work, and the practice for grief is a grief ritual in a community that can help you create some healing structure in a time of great and oceanic loss.

Mentioned in this episode:

Shadow Work books at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/lists/shadow-work-4ea99124-7347-4af8-9faf-915c6a0448aa

The Language of Emotions: https://bookshop.org/lists/karla-mclaren-s-books

Braver Angels: https://braverangels.org/what-we-do/take-an-ecourse/

Fun with your shadow: https://karlamclaren.com/the-twisted-love-inside-hatred-revisited/

One of the ways you can tell that a social structure is unhealthy (and even cultic) is by the presence of what I call "hierarchies of human worth."

The suffix "archy" means "to rule" or "to be first." Hierarchies are rigid structures that grade and order things from first to last, and if we apply order to things, hierarchies can be very useful.

Think of the PEMDAS hierarchy that helps you make sense of mathematical equations, or the flowchart hierarchy of a good computer program. Equations and programs simply wouldn't work without hierarchical processes.

But if humans and other living things are thrown into hierarchies, you will see damage to empathy, emotional functioning, and social functioning throughout the hierarchical system. You will also see violence -- physical, emotional, social, spiritual, sexual, relational, etc. -- throughout these rigid structures. Hierarchies are for things and processes; they're not for not living beings. Patriarchy is a hierarchy of human worth, and the damage we see is absolutely to be expected -- especially when there are only two class members: Men and boys ruling, and women and girls being ruled. It's a dangerously simple-minded structure that brings damage to everyone trapped inside it. The solution is not to move to yet another archy; it's to reimagine ways of being human, of working together in social groups, and of reimagining power structures that are not inherently violent.

The problem is not in men as a category or in patri as a prefix. The problem is the archy.

Mentioned in this episode:

Frans de Waal on the truth about alphas: https://youtu.be/BPsSKKL8N0s?si=fz1LFAr987kfti10

A good critique of the CNN story by Joshua Goldberg at Substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-194481801

My books The Power of Emotions at Work and (with Janja Lalich) Escaping Utopia: https://bookshop.org/lists/karla-mclaren-s-books

There will be situations where you can't be an off-ramp, and it's important to face them and know where your edges are.

It's also impotent to have temporal empathy for yourself -- which is the capacity to hold a vision of yourself figuring things out one day. It's okay to fail, and as the Tao de Ching says, "The glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time you fall."

I mention Braver Angels in this episode, and they are here: https://braverangels.org/our-mission/

And the marvelous book by David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, is here at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/lists/the-off-ramp-project