Long time coming

[Alloyd]

I am a baby boomer physician. I grew up on Ayn Rand and Woodstock, and always had a rather iconoclastic view of our culture. Partly I was playing the rebel as a way to cope with my own feelings of isolation and family and peer rejection.  But I also  knew something was very wrong in the world and was looking for an explanation.  Even though my world views have turned out wrong many times (and I cringe when I think about the political ideas I have supported) I am grateful for whatever it was inside that allowed me to keep questioning and to prefer being wrong to not thinking.

 

The peace movement died,  Ayn Rand's perceptions were amazing but her prescriptions unlivable and I found no other support for my libertarian ideals,  I focused on my practice and family, and numbed myself to the outside world, eventually regressing to conservatism as the "lesser of two evils." 

 

My more radical questioning resurfaced as I had the opportunity to use psychodrama to treat opiate dependence with group therapy. The psychodrama community is aware that the word psychodrama has developed connotations- (Emo, hystrionics etc.) that are not exactly liberating. The basic idea is that if you stop talking about things and play act them, you are forced to get out of your own head and you learn to trust your own perceptions and spontaneity to create solutions. As you reverse roles with other people in your life and get in their skin, you develop empathy and become more effective. This project:

 

1. Gave me the opportunity to create communities that would be a reflection of my own world view, tand a laboratory to test some of my own ideas about how communities should work. They work great. I am overwhelmed by the courage and love of the people I work with. The nice thing about working with people rejected by the political structure is that when you are invisible you have much more freedom to express yourself.  Also,the people you work with don't have an investment in the status quo. so they are open to new ideas. I do not generally directly express my politics or religion, just have people question the moral authority of the "betters in their every day lives." 

2. Experience the implementation of psychodramatic theory- a theory that emphasizes spontaneity, creativity and individual choice and is as liberating as good philosophy. 

3. Brought me face to face with the drug war, which made me confront the moral bankruptcy of our culture, and of my own of my need to reconstruct my world view and my adolescent questioning.

 

 

About two years ago one of the group members talked about his involvement in the freedom movement, and I asked him to forward me some links. He sent me the Bomb in the Brain series. It gave me the courage to introduce the issue of child abuse more and more into my groups and practice (not to mention reworking my own past, but seeing my history making more sense as part of something much larger). I began listening to Stefan's podcasts, and felt like I had come home to my youthful idealism, only this time with an empathic intelligent community, which I have been belated in joining.

 

My family wants nothing to do with my views. Though they argue vehemently that anarchism is unrealistic, I don't think they are statists. They have no illusions, They just view the world as a basically unchanging, unchangable dangerous place.  They worry If I think about it too much I'll  get depressed and if I speak about it too much I'll  get destroyed.  Hopefully I am wise enough to pay attention to their concerns.

 

I was a close friend of Hector Sabelli, a philosopher physician who measured mathematically the creativity of sequences of events such as heart beat intervals, the distance between galaxies, and sequences of notes in musical pieces.1 , He taught me that every aspect of the universe is creative, that the universe is constantly becoming richer and more complex. Jacob Moreno, who created psychodrama taught that we are fallen Gods, humbled by a world that teaches us our small place in the universe. We become Gods when we stop trying to control others and work together to co-create each others dreams. We can see glimpses of that in effective communities of all sorts. If you are involved in good 12- steps groups,  you don't just see people recovering, you see people help each other create new lives.  I see that spirit  in the forum and throughout the freedom movement.  I don't understand see how this spirit flows from the basic premises of the movement..

 

I look forward to giving back some of what I have gained from my time on this site.