The Road to Empowerment

Join me on the journey to creating a better life for all 

A key component of empowerment is having a knowledge base that forms positive beliefs and values.

This article explores how our Consumer Culture indoctrinates and manipulates us with distorted information that leads to false beliefs and harmful practices.

However we can challenge false beliefs, social norms and abuse and replace this with accurate knowledge, life-enhancing beliefs, powerful values and healthy living for all.

Let me share my model that underpins and guides my mission.

My goal is to prevent suffering and promote empowerment.

How do I do this? By challenging social norms that perpetuate false beliefs and harmful practices.

I challenge social norms with accurate information and knowledge.

This disruption leads to a mass movement for social change – a revolution that transforms society on a large scale, improving the quality of life for many thousands and millions.

This model is the method passionately embraced by campaigners, activists and change agents for centuries. This challenge to social norms has led to the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movements, the vote for women, the peace movement, the end to apartheid, the animal rights movement, the environmental movement. Challenging the status quo and powerful vested interests is at the heart of every kind of lobbying that protests harmful practices of all kinds.

Saving Girls 

Molly Melching, the founder of Tostan, a dynamic charity in West Africa has been a driving force of challenging the social norms of Female Genital Cutting. For more than 20 years Tostan has taken knowledge of health and human rights to remote villages. Thousands of communities have abandoned the harmful practice and now girls and women can live healthy, pain-free empowered lives. Ending this horrendous abuse of girls and women is a movement for social change.

Molly Melching, Inspiring Leader of the movement for social change in West Africa

 Saving Animals

The movement to stop the suffering and mass killing of animals for food has persisted for decades, championed by dedicated vegetarians and vegans who promote a plant-based diet. The Vegan Movement is now reaching a critical mass and threatening mainstream food companies. In 2018 many thousands – millions - of young, well-informed Millennials globally are embracing a cruelty-free lifestyle.

Juliet Gellatley, the founding director of Viva! based in Bristol, UK has led one of the most successful campaigning organisations of all time, by relentlessly giving the public disturbing knowledge about the abject cruelty inflicted on animals in the meat, fishing, egg, dairy and fur, leather and other animal- exploitive industries and the health benefits, the humanitarian and  environmental benefits of a plant-based diet.

Juliet has devoted her life to this cause of championing animals and she is an inspiring mentor as a empowered campaigner.

Champion campaigner, Juliet Gellatley has devoted her life to saving animals 

Vegan Revolution

After 25 years of campaigning Viva! and other animal rights organisations achieved a tipping point in 2018 with veganism becoming mainstream. Food producers, supermarkets, restaurants and fast food outlets around the world now offer vegan options. We are in the grip of a Vegan Revolution.

Heroic Organisations

Countless heroic environmental and wildlife protection organisations such as Green Peace, Friends of the Earth, World Wide Fund for Animals, the Born Free Foundation, the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust and many more have chipped away at harmful practices and destructive industries, exposing atrocities to the public and appealing for human intelligence and compassion to stop the horrendous suffering of animals and threat of extinction of precious species. 

These organisations work to stop the killing of elephants for the disgusting ivory trade, to stop hunting lions, giraffes and other wildlife for sadistic fun, to stop the barbaric slaughter of whales and countless other crimes committed on innocent creatures.

Dedicated keeper with elephant orphans at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust
Elepahnt Orphanage in Nairobi 

Confronting films like Earthlings expose human mistreatment and abuse of animals for food, clothing, science and entertainment on a shocking scale. The internet allows free access to this information and people can no longer plead ignorance.

The Global Goals established by the UN in 2015 have given all of us who are about the planet a framework for addressing urgent problems before 2030.

It is time to take a stand and embrace one or more of the 17 goals as your personal mission. 

 Controlling the Masses

If campaigners follow a formula to overthrow social norms, equally Governments and Corporates with vested interests follow a formula to peddle social norms, false beliefs and harmful practices.

Indoctrination is the first tactic used to influence citizens and consumers to accept invented social norms. Companies’ advertising agencies use the principle of repetition promoting a new product or activity (that you didn’t even know you needed!) Constant repeat ads over time through the media embed ideas in a person’s mind.

I remember a few years back seeing TV ads for online bingo and thinking, “Wow, who would seriously think that’s a good thing to do? Pay money to play games!” 

I could see how the bright, fun-filled ads targeted lonely, bored people with the promise of belonging to a community and being stimulated by the colourful graphics, with the added enticement of the possibility of winning!

Online gambling appeals to the human need for stimulation and
to lonely isolated people needing friends

When destructive habits become normal

Normalisation is the next tactic. With enough exposure to an idea, people start to believe this is ‘normal’ and everyone is doing it or buying it.

Addiction to habits or harmful products is the next stage that ensures a committed market. In our consumer society, companies aim to get us all addicted to excessive shopping for goods and services we don’t even need – and worse still, that are harmful, physically and psychologically to consumers and exploiting workers and causing environmental damage in the supply chain.    

This process applies to harmful products and practices such as alcohol and drugs, smoking, prescription drugs, junk food, fast fashion, pornography and the lucrative business of war.

  

Exploiting Human Needs

Insidious manipulators exploit genuine human needs; the need for survival, security and health, the need for love and belonging, the need for achievement and recognition, the need for creativity and stimulation and the need for freedom. These are the five fundamental human needs identified by acclaimed American psychiatrist, William Glasser, (1925 – 2013) who influenced the field of psychology in the 20th century culture.

American psychiatrist identified five basic human needs

Advanced Tactics 

To normalise extremely harmful practices such as mass cruelty and killing of animals and manufacturing weapons of mass destruction and perpetuating wars, those with vested interests must use advanced tactics to convince the public.

In every war, government propaganda indoctrinates citizens with the fear of the ENEMY, who threatens the basic need for survival and security and freedom.

The enemy is dehumanised. He is no longer a fellow human being, but a threatening animal or an object to be destroyed. Violent movies and video games play on this concept so the ‘enemy’ can be destroyed with impunity.

The enemy is demonised – turned into something evil, an instrument of the devil. We have this concept courtesy of the church through the ages that justified the slaughter of heathens and burning of women alive. Satan has come in very useful in indoctrinating and controlling the masses.

If dehumanising is not enough, it’s possible to objectify another living being.

This concept is useful when justifying torturing and killing animals. They can be considered food objects without feelings, needs, intelligence, social bonds or lives of their own.

The arrogant idea that God made animals for humans to eat, use and exploit is also another dangerous belief peddled by some religions.

Generating Fear of the Enemy

When America invaded Vietnam in the 60s and 70s, the public were led to believe the Communists, the Red Devils, had to be eradicated like vermin, because propaganda told us communism would spread throughout the world like a plague.

in his radical book, The New Rulers of the World, acclaimed Journalist, John Pilger explains how in the Second World War, American weapon manufacturers discovered their could make massive amounts of money out of war. Since 1945 the US Government has created wars around the globe to ensure the lucrative business continues, as well as amassing nuclear weapons that could destroy the world.

My hero! The courageous and brilliant journalist John Pilger 

Who are we fighting?

In the 21st century, “Terrorism” is the nebulous villain that justifies governments dropping bombs on innocent children, families and communities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen and other countries causing catastrophic killing and injuries, destruction of homes and buildings, despair and misery.

When individuals or groups question social norms, they are brought back into conformity through tactics such as ridicule, shaming, denial, punishment and ostracism. This process of control happens across all cultures.

With many harmful practices, we might not be involved directly with carrying them out. Bystanders are indoctrinated to become enablers, and stand by passively and helplessly, which allows perpetrators to continue harming victims. Psychologists call this as the Victim Triangle.

Destructive Motivation

Why do some authorities and companies operate with such destructive, manipulative intention? What is the motive?

Clearly profit, not concern for humanity, other living beings and the planet is the driving force behind this process of indoctrination, normalisation, addiction and enforced conformity.

If not greed for excessive wealth, the driving motivation behind anti-social practices can be the drive for power and control, a desire for pleasure and hedonism, the desire for fame and adulation.

All of these drivers are insatiable, extreme expressions of human needs. Such people are self-obsessed egomaniacs and lack empathy, compassion and concern for others. They are not acting for the good of our global community and the future but from short-term self-interest. 

We should remove from positions of power and lock up all megalomaniacs, warmongers and sociopaths in therapy clinics until they work out their issues. This way we can protect our fragile planet from destruction.

The Saviour Model

There is another model at play in our troubled world that aims to do good for others and solve problems.

The Saviour Model or Hero Model is where someone with superior powers recognises an individual or group with a problem or unmet needs and decides to swoop in from a lofty height and solve the problem, meet the needs and rescue and save victims.

Coming to the rescue is a life-saving intervention, rather than prevention of problems at the systemic source.

Generations of kids since the invention of television have grown up on super hero fantasies. For me it was Superman, then Batman, Spiderman, Wonder Woman and Super Girl and a glittering array of awe-inspiring comic book heroes.

What child didn’t drift off to sleep with fantasies of being a hero at school or saving their family from hardships. Or was it just me! 

The next generations were served a plethora of enemy-annihilating animated action heroes on enthralling TV shows and thrilling video games, addictive to impressionable young brains.

And the Church played a role in perpetuating the Saviour myth.

Anyone raised in the church in their formative years was susceptible to taking on the Saviour Model for problem-solving throughout life.

Now clearly there is a legitimate and vital role for rescue and intervention in life-threatening crises and emergencies – in accidents, emergencies, natural disasters, famines, the aftermath of war and to save victims of crime.

The model is essential in the medical field, the criminal field and sometimes in the charity sector.

Every day in hospitals highly skilled, quick-thinking medics respond to accidents and emergencies, saving lives with their rapid interventions.

 

Doctors work on an injured soldier

 Police intervene to save people from crime and the legal system enforce laws. I would love to see highly trained Defence Forces used for good in responding to emergencies and natural disasters, rather than fighting wars.

Some courageous charities rescue girls and women held captive in the abhorrent criminal sex trade in Asia. Another maverick charity is devoted to rescuing children forced into being soldiers and sex slaves for the LRA in Uganda.

Many charities believe they must swoop in like heroes to save people living with poverty, deprivation and social problems. Heroic do-gooders take charge and tell poor communities what to think and what to do.

This is a lingering legacy of the British colonial era and the Church Saviour model.

In Transactional Analysis (TA) psychology theory, the rescuer assumes the Parent ego mode, and puts other adults in the Child ego mode, in a patronising, condescending way, as if people were incapable of solving their own problems, with information, guidance and resources. All people must be treated with equality and respect.

Becoming a saviour or hero when rescue is not asked for is a misguided use of the legitimate intervention model.

The unwanted intervention is usually performed for the self-appointed hero’s own unmet needs and childhood fantasies, without awareness of their motivation. 

Saving the Victim is Not Enough

It is not enough to ‘save’ someone. Transformation and empowerment occurs through post-trauma recovery and rehabilitation.   

There are three stages in dealing with trauma – 

Prevention – Intervention – Recovery.

I have a personal preference for working to prevent bad things happening by seeking the cause and trying to change the social norms that lead to harm.

I admire people who are calm and skilled in emergencies – the heroic first responders. And I love those people with the caring, nurturing, healing skills to support vulnerable people in recovering from abuse and trauma.

Take up your role as we fight to save our planet: humans, animals and the environment. We can all be Super Heroes.

Beyond stopping suffering, there is something more to strive for … empowerment for everyone.  

So what is empowerment? The capacity to think, dream and aspire; the capacity to feel empathy, compassion and love and the capacity to be strong, take action and achieve…for the good of all.

Together, all ages, across all cultures, we can save the planet and create a better world