Liberation from the Paradigm of Violence, Entry into the Possibility of Life
Aydin Areta

25 November is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

We live in a society in which, alongside so many concepts that have been inverted and emptied of meaning, open and widespread violence against women is treated as a kind of moral virtue, while women’s struggle to recover their human dignity is described as a movement of promiscuity and nakedness.

Women’s suffering and their historical struggle to recover their human rights are not limited to this geographical space. Across the world women have fought for the simplest human rights, including the right to education, the right to employment and equal income, the right to civil participation, and the right to choose their clothing.

Yet it is not only the female body that suffers from masculine violence in this world. Children, Mother Earth and nature, animals, and before all of these humanity as a whole and men themselves are victims of this broad and historical violence.

Anima is a term in Jungian analytical psychology for the feminine dimension within men. Creativity and generativity, perception, connectedness and balance in a man depend, in this account, upon the freedom and development of this dimension within him. Men whose personalities are more balanced and whose individuation is more developed are those who have established a deeper and healthier relationship with the anima, or feminine dimension of their personality, and have been able to release their anima from repression.

Violence against women in the world, beyond violence against female body and spirit, is a sign of a deeper illness in the human spirit. The anima can be called the soul of being. To live with a repressed anima is to live like a corpse emptied of life, and many men complete their lives like bodies without soul, creativity or the possibility of perception and generativity.
Such men not only represent the dominant culture of civilisation but are themselves victims of a masculine civilisation that has severed its connection with the feminine soul of life. Thus not only women but men themselves become the first victims of “violence”, this painful illness of humanity’s childhood.

The feminine soul of the world remains in chains, and a large part of modern gender-equality movements in the world, in practice, lead to little more than making the world more masculine, because what needs to change profoundly in our world is the unbalanced masculine paradigm governing human civilisation.

In such a world, children’s passion for learning is destroyed within educational systems through which the language of violence and repression runs at every level, eliminating children’s creativity as they are turned into the cogs of tomorrow’s work and production. Nature and Mother Earth suffer from a violence that desires nothing but power and domination. Men, within these same systems of global repression, become workers emptied of spirit and passion for life, disconnected from their childlike spirit and without the possibility of reconnecting with nature and life. They become the first victims of the repression they themselves represent.

Changing this world becomes possible not through changing a single behaviour but through a fundamental transformation in the paradigm of human consciousness. Woman, life and freedom are three repressed dimensions of the feminine soul of the world that have become a cry for change in our society. This is why many thinkers over the past year regarded the Iranian women’s movement as a possibility for a transformation much larger than the geographical borders of Iran. The liberation of women from violence and repression, the flourishing of life and the fruition of human liberation and freedom will, above all, reveal the development of men who have been able to embrace woman, life and freedom within themselves. The final victory of this movement in Iran would be a rebirth in which childhood, femininity, life, nature and freedom all become capable of being redefined in a renewed civilisation.

May we be able to free ourselves from the violence that has contaminated our lives and our very vitality.