Circle Values: Personal-Power: the exercise of power-over one’s private self as understood by one with \"The Native Mind\&q

Community self-governance, self-control, self-rule, self-determination, self-empowerment is a reflection of the personal-power exercised by its individual membership. The integrity of our humanity is inherent to us as a human-being. Personal-power is our humanity’s, unique amongst mammalians, capacity to apply mindfulness or feeling-thought to any given situation, to exercise ingenuity as a product of free-will, to not be enslaved. Because personal-power is the essence of being human – we can’t lose it or have it taken from us.

Identity is not one’s personal power! Identity is a social construct! We can become alienated from our sense of self or our loss of a socially constructed self-identity that stems from our exercise of personal-power, or the lack of same. It means the public-power innate to and wielded in interpersonal social interactions that is based on culturally accepted, honoured, respected, dishonoured, disrespected, and validated or invalidated value systems – like getting or giving a star in kindergarten, or not. Identity is hierarchical within the social sphere. Therefore, when we lose our identity we lose our place in the social strata that has become familiar to us and dictated our behavior. We are cast adrift as if someone lost in the jungle without a guide. The more oppressive (violent) our new environment, the more troubling will be our adaptation to it, thereby reducing our survival rate.

Adaptation is a survivalist strategy of ingenuity and an exercise of inherent personal-power. So what do we lose when we become alienated from our personal-power, our humanity? We lose the force of our humanity to alter our environment to increase our survival rate, while remaining safely cocooned by it. A person who only sought validation for their existence from outside of their personhood would therefore be a person alienated from their personal-power, with their capacity for survival utterly dependent upon the good graces of others, due to their incapacitation in the exercise of free-will or their personal-power. Adaptation to culture (acculturation or socialization) is wholesome, but only when it is mutually and equitably agreed upon. A survivalist social strategy is an ecological contract of personal responsibility.
Social-control is the exercise of ownership, regardless of harm, for the purpose of self-aggrandisement.

Oppression exists when we are coerced into accepting a constriction over our exercise of personal-power (self-identity), such that we become enslaved by it (in varying degrees and in some one or all aspects of our existence). Generally-speaking oppression is a progressive loss in which we begin to lose our connection with our personal-power, hence our capacity to exercise free-will to do right by our selves (as individual members of community). We begin to lose our capacity for adaptation requiring ingenuity and creativity, i.e. our capacity to think with the holism of reason in promotion of our humane right to life. A force outside of ourselves overwhelms us, such that we perpetrate self-harm for the purpose of promoting superficial gain for someone/something outside of our individual existence within community. The oppressor is successful as designating our humanity as gift of serviceable value (or not). Where there is no mutuality communal survival rate is reduced when not extinguished outright.

Social-control is societal oppression as artificially-created conflicts within and between individuals. Oppression divides us from our intra-personal selves and inter-personal community of selves in a divide and conquers way. Oppression’s purpose is to steal our humane right to exercise individual personal-power in promotion of one’s private right to an independent life. In the dominant culture this is perpetrated largely through our indoctrinated, programmed (acculturated) lack of knowledge as to the very existence of our personal-power (humanity) as intrinsic to each of us. We find ourselves trapped by a force greater than our social selves creating barriers to the exercise of our self-determination or personal-power. Aberrant parenting, educational system, employers, governmental legislation, etcetera with ulterior motivation or self-gain train us out of the exercise of a format for social-control, in which each person’s personal-power becomes synonymous with their self-identity as it gets expressed through consensual, social interactions within community.

“Always remember, a cat looks down on man (us), a dog looks up to man (us), but a pig will look man (us) right in the eye and see his (its) equal”. Winston Churchill (parentheses mine) In other words, our dominant culture is hog-rule!

Where there is no mutuality in gifting or giving and receiving, we assimilate under the aberrant rule-over knowledge by professionals not to use our personal power on behalf of ourselves, but to submit dictation of our intellect to the control-over by other, for example, Psychiatry. We don’t think to self-protect our precious humanity. We allow our personal-power to be degraded by social forces from outside our selves each time we allow other to define us and by our acceptance of their definition for us. Where there is no mutuality, the exercise of our personal-power becomes our self-identity that is the right of social participation recognized in the community, but - without influence. Authority-over other, and conversely our subjection to it, is delegated to us in the exercise of another’s agenda impacting against community. As with all oppressions there is a reward for submission and a punishment for no submission or the giving things of desire and the taking of that which is needful and wanted. This speaks to the First Nations ethic of Assimilation and Traditionalism. (See: http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/HistoryCulture/Cree/Feit1/index.html Hunting and the Quest for Power: The James Bay Cree and Whitemen in the 20th Century By Harvey A. Feit )

To the degree that we assimilate through submission to the dominant culture of power-over, we invariably do harm, self and other, thereby degrading community. The oppression exercised by power-over leading to assimilation or denial of one’s humanity, creates a human-being whose self-identity becomes the exercise of their humanity (personal-power) as the physical extension of another, in the promotion of other’s private self-gain. The assimilate provides their personal selves, regardless of community harm, with the reward of “creature comforts” or luxury items or items without intrinsic value, while escaping the punishment for non-compliance to one’s individual person. Assimilation is not adaptation! Assimilates’ personal-power has not changed, but we are changed in relation to it. Assimilation is the acceptance of coercion as a way of life. It is the exercise of fear seeking short-term protection from personal harm (from the punishment) and the reward (private gain) that is a pleasure without intrinsic value and therefore cannot satisfy our need for self-fulfilment. We become the never-satisfied!

Adaptation is the exercise of ingenuity and creativity as a product of and self-defining example of - one’s life force expressed in community. Assimilation is the process of losing one’s ability to exercise ingenuity and creativity or to process feeling-thought (empathetic learning seeking wisdom). Adaptation is acceptance of authority that is respected as possessing something of intrinsic value that one does not have and therefore one is willingly influenced by it. Assimilation is the submission of one’s personal, social and private, authority/identity in all things - to become enslaved to the criminally enfeebled. Adaptation leads to a mutually equitable benefit by both parties in the action of giving and receiving something of intrinsic value. We become the easily satisfied!

Humanity that is our moral and spiritual self-worth is our personal-power establishing a sympathetic mutuality, wherein respect equates to influence, such that the successful seeker of experiential wisdom is being influenced by principled judgement. The seeker both respects and is respected by the one whose moral values model the reasoning of choice. The power in choice is “the gift of delight” (John Breeding, which he likens to heaven) in appreciation for individual progress of self-realization within community, a process of self-direction seeking wisdom’s self-reliance. Choice directly equates to self-governance, self-control, self-rule, and self-determination i.e. the desirability for power-over one’s private self, of individual responsibility and accountability for oneself. We deceive our selves into thinking that the terms mean hedonism or mayhem or inherently amoral, of being without conscience, mindfulness, or empathy. We have been/are being instrumentally coerced into a code of conduct by dependant authoritarianism masking love, where suffering in fear and enforced, functional self-interest, guilt and anxiety is misconstrued as respect.

June 06 – Kate Hill

\"Remember their times of resistance, make note of the time and their actions of defiance. Give voice to their histories of resistance: Note their continuation of their history of defiance. Know that a scream, be it silent or loud, is an act of refusal to collude with house arrest.\" Interface of gender and culture, NZ; Kiwi Tamasese http://psychology.waikato.ac.nz