Liberation Psychology 2.0

What is liberation psychology?

In simple terms, I define liberation psychology as the practice of putting psychological theories into service for human liberation.

Liberation psychology, initiated by social psychologist and Jesuit priest Ignacio Martín-Baró, brings a critique to the mainstream psychology, while at the same time offers a viable alternative. In Writings for a Liberation Psychology, Martín-Baró (1994) criticized the way psychology holds to the methodology of natural science to legitimatize its field of study. This has developed a fictionalized and abstracted image of what it means to be human based on ahistoricism and the idea of isolated individuals.

Martín-Baró elucidated that such use of psychology enforces the dominant and oppressive social structures, showing how it often fails to see individual suffering and illness in the context of history and society and instead places responsibility solely on the individual.

He insisted that psychology must truly become a force for liberation, yet to do this it first must liberate itself. This led him to recognize the need for a liberation psychology; one created not from top down, but from the bottom up, on a ground of the everyday reality of ordinary people.

Martín-Baró aimed to reveal our true nature, so as to help us realize our full potential. He worked to free people from the dominant psychology’s construct of an isolated notion of self, and American middle-class insulated reality. By engaging what he calls “the de-ideologization of everyday experience”, he tried to recover the authentic experience of those whose dignity and humanity have been denied and bring it back to them as objective data.

WikiLeaks, liberatory praxis of publishing

With his fierce commitment to justice, Martín-Baró became a target of political retaliation. He was assassinated by a U.S. trained Salvadoran death squad in 1989 at the University of Central America in San Salvador during a massacre of Jesuit priests. For him, the psychology of liberation is a living process that cannot be completed and it continuously evolves through our participation.

Now, decades after his death, the struggle for liberation remains, or perhaps grows even stronger. With the advancement of technology and rapid globalization, the environment that we live in now is different than his times.

I am a new generation of liberation psychologist, whose outlook of the world has been profoundly influenced by the Internet. I saw sparks of liberation being rekindled in cyberspace.

Image by Somerset Bean

In the Spring of 2010, a little known whistleblowing site blazed onto the global stage with the release of the Collateral Murder video. By the means of leaks bringing information to the public, WikiLeaks engaged in liberatory praxis of “de-ideologizing process”.

Their scientific journalism enabled a mechanism that can reveal an uncensored view of history, returning it to the historical record as objective data. The disclosure of government secrecy provided evidence of the way states and transnational corporations steal the original experience of people and exert control over their lives. Freed from propaganda and false narratives of their history, people are beginning to transform themselves from victims to active agents to take the reins of their own destiny.

Conscience of Chelsea Manning

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange made it clear that his organization is driven by the inspiration of its sources. Catharsis for liberation of subjugated history came from the ordinary people—their courage to take enormous risks in order to bring truth.

Though her act of conscience, former US military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning engaged in the act of liberation. In uncensored images of modern war that depicted a US Army helicopter gunship killing innocent civilians in New Baghdad, Manning gained an access to the forbidden landscape to see the real face of those she was trained to see as ‘others’ and methodically demonized by the Bush Era doctrine of War on Terror.

The ideas that conceived WikiLeaks originated from the philosophy of the “cypherpunks”, activists who communicated through an electronic mailing list to advocate privacy by the use of strong cryptography. They are a loosely tied group that emerged in the late 1980s, who recognized the potential of cryptography in shifting the power relationship between the individual and the state.

The term cypherpunk is derived from (cryptographic) cipher and punk. The word cipher is to put a message into secret writing. In cryptography, cipher is described as an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption. Through creative use of cryptography, Assange built a platform of journalism that could enforce transparency on the powerful, revealing the state secrecy, while protecting the identity of the sources.

The rise of cypherpunks  

WikiLeaks’ infrastructure, which is resilient to government censorship, made it possible for the whistleblowing site to effectively carry the conscience of ordinary people and upload it online, letting its light shine on the darkest corners of the world. Contagious courage ignited through waves of whistleblowers unleashed the forces of liberation.

In ‘The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work‘, eminent computer scientist Phillip Rogaway talks about how the cypherpunks wanted more than anything “crypto with values” (p. 46) and their value was freedom. They aim to deliver this value through their action described as “cypherpunks write code”.

Adam Back, a cryptographer and one of the notable cypherpunks, explained a spirit behind this motto:

The idea is that lobbying politicians and promoting issues through the press would be a slow uphill battle. So, instead of engaging in legal and political systems, Back noted that they could simply “deploy technology and help people do what they consider to be their legal right” and society would later adjust itself to reflect these values.

Cypherpunks deploy civil liberty enhancing technology to create a new avenue for free expression. We are now seeing the fruits of their work in the invention of Bitcoin. This new programmable money can be used to liberate individuals from a central authority that tries to outlaw, restrict and regulate human activities.

New economic incentive structures encoded in a piece of mathematics gives people a choice to leave the institutional hierarchy behind and move toward creating a network of decentralization.

Psypherpunks

Almost a century ago, during the Nazis’ rise to power, medical doctors were recruited to carry out the genocide of Jews through the Nazis’ medical killing. In our time, psychologists are facilitating torture in Guantánamo Bay and developing unethical detention and interrogation practices.

Knowledge of psychology is used to manipulate public opinion through propaganda, control human behaviors by advertisement and by the CIA to influence tech firm CEO’s decisions concerning the development of science and technology. More than ever, it is imperative that psychologists critically examine their profession’s role in society and become a force that eliminates the suffering of individuals and oppression.

The task of psychology to become a liberatory force in the world continues and in order to do so, psychology now needs to free itself from theories and practices that constrain it, and reinvent itself. I believe that those who take liberation psychology seriously can find inspiration in waves of contagious courage that has emerged on the net. They can follow pathways spontaneously arising from the heart of freedom-loving people around the world creating a decentralized network.

Liberation psychologists can too become “psy(cy)pherpunks”! Just as cypherpunks who wanted to apply cryptography with morals, psypherpunks can create psychology with values. They can use the knowledge of psychology towards the liberation of all beings, creativity, and love.

Liberation psychologists “psypher”, to reveal hidden sets of commands that dictate our behavior; social expectations and cultural conditionings. We decode images and dominant narratives that are imposed by the mainstream media and dismantle unconscious scripts that control our actions. We can make the invisible become visible, aspects of ourselves that have been marginalized, rejected, projected outside and that which have become our shadow. We can now invite them to be integrated into ourselves.

Towards liberation of self

Martín-Baro (1994) advocated a creation of self that is “open to becoming different, on a plane of equality, with neither privileges nor oppressive mechanisms” (p. 182). Psypherpunks can work on building an alternative to the system of control that tries to censor and restrict thoughts that spring from our heart. Through the practice of dialogue, we can seek to secure a development of this self, and cultivate a fertile soil that embraces our differences.

So, I here invite you to join the efforts to put liberation psychology in action! Tending to the language of soul, let’s write a code that allows individuals to defy the instructions from above and help them self-determine their course of actions, led by each’s own heart’s imagining.

We can now become the psypherpunks who deploy knowledge of psychology as a tool to hack consciousness and inspire change in human action. We are here to facilitate the evolution of consciousness, helping one another break the old ego-programming and re-write new scripts that serve for our highest good.

Each individual’s awakening disrupts the old system of hierarchy, and then our collective shift into a higher consciousness creates a ripple effect that can open a free society.

Reference:

Martin-Baro, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology (A. Aron & S. Crone, Eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Writer’s statement

I call myself a ‘historian in the digital age’. Historians are here to witness and account stories that are unfolding. The Internet opened a new way of performing this task. In the analog era, information depended on printed materials and distribution was slow and historians dealt with the past. Now, the free flow of information that became available online makes it possible for us to document history as it is unfolding and enter into the future.

Late historian Howard Zinn once said;

“To BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”1

I saw history happening on the Internet in the free software movement and crusade to open governments with the motto of “privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful”. Impulse to set history in motion emerged from cypherpunks– an online mailing group that advocates privacy and shift of balance of power between individuals and the state with the use of strong cryptography.

In their grand experiment of preserving power of ordinary people, I saw struggles to claim their own history. I witnessed courage, creativity and conscience in facing obstacles and oppression by governments and powerful corporations.

In this story of ordinary people, where conflicts and corruption prevail, I saw moments where peace claimed its victory and justice saw the light of day. Where there is betrayal, I also recognized loyalty and friendship being made. Where there was hatred, I saw love demonstrated in each person’s kindness and their striving to remember our inherent obligation to one another.

Disruption in this history instigated by cypherpunks started to form a resilient network of humanity in this digital age. I saw it with the rise of WikiLeaks, the world first global fourth estate and Bitcoin, the borderless and frictionless “Internet of money”.

I now found how this sense of ‘history is happening’ is shared among those who are engaged in these new innovations of journalism and currency. I saw a growing community of collaboration and the excitement of being on the front lines of history.

Through my writing and teaching, I am dedicated to capture sparks where ordinary people overcome fear and choose a path of self-determination out of their own free will. I hope my words make this light that emanates from each individual brighter and help us all claim our own creative power to shape the course of civilization.

Notes:

1. Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002), 208.

The Meaning of Free Speech

My writing has always been involved with freedom of speech. I have written many articles, trying to elucidate its importance and necessity in civil society. In fact, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was the very thing that I admired and inspired me to be a part of the unfolding destiny of this country. In my years of living in the US, I have seen assaults on and the enclosure of this fundamental right and my efforts to defend it led me into activism and moved my writing into a more a political dimension.

I remember what Mario Savio, the spokesperson of the Free Speech Movement once said about free speech. He reminded us how it is “something that represents the very dignity of what a human being is” and that this is “what marks us off from the stones and the stars … really the thing that marks us as just below the angels.”

Years later he is gone. Berkeley, the birth of the Free Speech Movement is once again becoming a center of free speech. Now, I am again thinking about what free speech really is. Aside from its political meaning, I realized how the root of speech is in listening and that the Western construct of ‘free speech’ lacks the understanding of this vital relationship between speech and listening. I now contemplate how maybe recovering this lost unison of speaking and listening was the essence of the FSM.

I ask, what have we lost in our speech that is divorced from listening? We must have forgotten our first word – our shared mother tongue. It is the taciturn heart – that silent knowing that gently holds multiple perspectives, without favoring any one view more than the other. Then, free speech comes to mean to ‘think with the heart’.

Mario (1994) said on the struggle for justice;

We have to be prepared on the basis of our moral insight to struggle even if we do not know that we are going to win. [It’s a weakness] to underestimate the importance of spiritual values. By spiritual values, I mean we as a community can feel something deeper than we are: not that we as a community feel God is on our side but some sense of looking down into the heart of things and being able to perceive which way is just, which way is not just. And that’s what we have to convey to people. Not everyone for himself, but all of us for the community.

Our struggle for free speech cannot win through political means alone. Perhaps, it calls for spiritual engagement. Our efforts require us to first liberate speech from the sphere of the head and inspire communities together to create a movement that speaks with the heart.

Creating a Culture of Humanity

Whenever we get repelled by someone’s comments and shut down or judge their perspectives, we disconnect ourselves from others. Dr. Gabor Mate describes this ‘disconnect’ as a sign of trauma. He defines trauma as an impact inside the body and the mind and is a disconnect from oneself.

He also talks about trauma being related to two fundamental needs that infants have for their crucial development. One is a need for attachment. It is absolutely essential for a child to attach to caregivers in order for them to survive. But they also have another need, which is for the child to become authentic. Problems emerge when the need to be authentic comes into conflict with an attachment need.

This happens when a child’s need to be authentic threatens attachment. If a child expresses their emotions freely and caretaker can’t properly accept them, the child gets a message that he or she expressing who they are will jeopardize their connection to their caregivers. Then a child is put into a difficult position; they now have to choose between his or her attachment need and the need to be authentic. In this situation, Dr. Mate describes how a child has absolutely no choice because without attachment they can’t survive and as a result, they learn to suppress their authenticity. This creates trauma.

We often see this disconnect happen in our everyday interaction. I see where this trauma shows up the most is in the realm of politics. Disconnect happens in our debate about wars, refugee crisis, racism and economic injustice. We see people triggered and get emotionally charged. We tend to subscribe to a single narrative and close off opportunities to have dialogue, and as a result we shut ourselves off from truth that contains multiple perspectives and contradictions. Many people develop hostility toward one another because of disagreements and failure to acknowledge different views on issues.

I have now begun to see how national politics frames a discourse upon an identity based on nationality and race. This disconnect emerging in this space points us to the fact that perhaps there is trauma at the very core of our identity. What is this disconnect? National identity, such as Japanese, Chinese or Canadian or racial identity as white or black can create conflict of two needs that Dr. Mate described earlier, namely our need to attach and need to be authentic. These identities might put us in conflict with our authenticity –a primal mode of being human.

This happens when a child is born into a particular culture defined by nation-state confinement and goes through enculturalization processes that define them narrowly in their identification with nation and race. A child’s survival depends on them adopting values of their mother culture related to people around them, including family, teachers and caregivers whose identity is tied to that culture. When national identity develops in a way that is disconnected with its larger identity of us being human, it can create a symptom of extreme patriotism and racial and national superiority. Is it possible to think when we adjust ourselves to national identity, we are directly put into conflict with our authentic self that exists as resident of the earth?

I was born and grew up in Japan. Through entering into Japanese culture, my need to attach to people around me who identified themselves as Japanese occasionally came into conflict with my primary identity as human. Whenever people of Japan defend their national identity, it is possible to lose a larger perspective of the earth. In social adaptation of developing my own identity, I experienced conflict within myself. This was a schism between my need to be accepted in Japanese society and my need to be an authentic human being in the world.

The materialistic culture that we live in is based on denial of our connection to nature. I feel the identity promoted through it, our sole identification with body, skin color and language we speak conceals essential parts of our own humanity. As long as society exists with its culture uprooted from the earth, our culturalization process brings tension. We are then placed in a quandary of false choice; either we betray our truth and adjust ourselves to society’s values to be accepted by people or face alienation.

Can we create a culture that grows organically from its own foundation? Civilization has declared war against nature. Growing up in a materialistic culture of global capitalism, we are all perhaps given an ultimatum; either ‘adapt or die’. We adapt to this culture of denial and die to our spiritual identity. Growing up into a culture does not require us to give up our truth. By each starting to live with truth and have courage to be authentic, we can create a new culture of humanity. We can adapt and can live. Culture then can become what it should be, a vehicle to cultivate and nurture our true human nature.

Commitment to Stay in the Present

Trauma and unmet needs grapple with all of us and bring us back to memories of the past, where we felt vulnerable and hurt. Our brain stores difficult memories as a part of a survival mechanism, and even years later since the initial incident the unconscious sends signals that we are not safe.

We often use the expression ‘emotionally arrested’ to describe a condition of someone who lacks a certain level of emotional maturity. This word ‘arrested’ is right. Emotions that are not processed fully, which are not placed in a conscious relationship with ourselves arrest us.

They lock us in an interpretation and perspective of events that were made when we didn’t have a choice or could not have had access to the potential to see them differently. Trauma keeps each person in the past and deprives everyone of our ability to enter fully into the present moment. Dr. Gabor Mate describes this trauma as a form of injury that disconnects us from our essence.

Our authentic self is connected to the potential that lies in the present. Healing trauma is not about analyzing what has happened or trying to fix the past that we can’t ever go back to. Possibility for healing exists in the present moment. Thus, I now realize how focus needs to be given to stay in the present. For this, we need to be mindful, becoming aware of patterns emerging in a relationship and pay attention to the language of our body to be in touch with our own feeling.

When emotions come up, instead of immediately identifying ourselves with them, we can learn to observe and depersonalize the situation. In this, we have to bring a fine balance between being overly detached or emotionally attached to something or someone too deeply. Our knowledge about what happened in the past and how it is affecting us now helps us to not react and gain a certain distance.

In this space freed from impulses and emotions, a new horizon opens up. When we step into this uncharted field, true choice becomes possible. Possibilities that were thought of as never existing all of sudden become available.

We can start talking to parts of us who are still frightened and feel abandoned. We can now learn to teach ourselves how to process upset, anger and sadness – all emotions that have been suppressed, that are not integrated into our consciousness. By allowing these emotions to move freely, we can connect with parts of us that remain stagnated. We can assure the small child inside us that she or he is now safe and that what happened was something that occurred in the past and is no longer happening now.

I am now learning how our foremost responsibility in life is to learn to love this little child inside, to accompany him or her in both happy and challenging times. They are a way to our essence, helping us see multiple potentials that always exist and see events from our spirit’s eyes.

To do this requires our commitment to stay in the present. It is a real work, darn hard work! But, if each of us commits to it and keeps working on it, together we might have a greater chance to end the tyranny of the past and step into a new future imagined in our hearts.

New paradigm to understand pathology of our culture

Dr. Gabor Mate’s compassionate approach to understanding trauma and issue of addiction and disease provided me a new framework to see illness, including so-called personality disorder.

Whether it is diabetes, cancer, ADHD, or arthritis, all disturbances that have come to be treated as illness in our society are not necessarily illnesses. Whether it is psychopathy, or narcissistic personality disorder, pathology is not disease that needs to be eradicated.

I am starting to understand that these are symptoms of loss of our spiritual identity. Perhaps, an illness manifested in our body and disorders in our personality is a voice from our authentic self, trying to get our attention. They are disembodied parts of ourselves that want to be re-membered by us.

From this point of view, I ask. What is psychopathy? The hallmark is absence of empathy and a deceptive nature. Individuals who exhibit psychopathic traits engage in social hiding, by creating elaborate masks, mirroring deepest desires of those they have their eyes on and fooling others to get what they want.

This toxic behavior can be seen as a kind of coping mechanism. They are trying to compensate for something they lack, because they learned early on in their life that this is the way that they get validation and love. By repeatedly doing it, they become addicted and lost in a personality that is cut off from its source and this gives them illusions about who they are.

This abstraction that psychopaths are trapped in only reflect light from outside. This light is merely a spectacle through which they try to see themselves, but cannot.

In a sense, they are rootless orphans looking for their mother – a darkness looking for the light that created them. Maybe, psychopaths are just extreme cases and manifestations or symptoms of this loss of self. In one way or another, we all have parts of ourselves that are fragmented.

Invalidation, shame and neglect –original injuries in early stages of our lives cut us off from our soul. This schism creates a divide between the mind and body and blocks us from accepting love that has been there from the beginning of our lives.

These parts of us that are split from ourselves hide and escape from us. They want to be seen, but not to be identified with ourselves. They want to be witnessed with the presence of compassion. It is the heart that can re-member these disjoined parts of ourselves.

Perhaps the pathology of our society – wars, violence, environmental destruction and predatory capitalism, all are symptoms of our loss of self. They need our compassionate understanding, rather than just shunning away, fighting or trying to fix them. These are not political issues alone, but deeply psychological and spiritual. This opens a whole new approach to activism and social justice.

Healing of the World

I am now learning how there is a deep trauma within our culture and this unaddressed trauma is passed on generation to generation. Our society has plenty of trauma caused by a long history of colonization, slavery and genocide.

Perhaps the root cause of trauma is the loss of our spiritual disposition; who we think we are. Coming to this planet, we are all wounded, in that initial split from our origin, when our umbilical chord was cut from our mother and when we began the journey of becoming an individual.

We forgot our significance and how beautiful each of us are. Instead trying to prove our own self worth, we seek for prestige, power to control and accumulate wealth. In our suppressed memory of our original wound, I feel we are retraumatizing ourselves repeatedly, through giving our significance and power over to authorities outside, electing leaders that wage wars that are killing innocents and inflict violence through merciless capitalism.

In this sense, perhaps we are all here to heal ourselves, to tend to our pain and through it, heal this world. Each person finds a different calling and this is manifested in many diverse expressions. Some write poetry. Some create songs, while others paint. Some film documentaries and capture images through photography. Some become therapists and doctors helping others recover what they have lost. Others teach and accompany students in a quest of finding their unique gifts and the reason why they are born.

Maybe, whatever we do all relates to remembering this original wound that we have long buried within ourselves. Maybe our task is to heal this wound that our ancestors tried but could not do.

We can end this pain here, so that we don’t have to pass it on to the next generation. Maybe through recognizing love that has always been there, each of us can simply learn to love ourselves. Then, we can heal and can end much of this suffering of the world.