Stuck in the Victim Archetype

The elephant in the room of Uganda—even as we talk about nine-percent GDP growth rate, or embellish the supposed twenty two national hospitals built by a past regime, or how such and such a political party is going to be the savior—is the story of blame, victims and perpetrators.

Who is blaming who? Who is the victim? Who is the perpetrator? It all depends on the ethnic or tribal group, or the ethnic within ethnic group. In this toxic stew, no self-serving nonsectarian law will change the trajectory of the dysfunctional state.

So, then, how can we get out of this mess? A bi-ethnic presidential candidate wants us to know that he is the Obama and the window to paradise. He is probably not aware that the Obama ship is sinking—courtesy of trying to please everyone in its maiden hundred-day journey. If the inter-marriage prescription can give us polyglots, so that we can, at least, understand the backbiting across the table, may be we can literally begin to understand one another. When in doubt, try anything.

The religiously inclined have a different take: We must turn to God and away from the pervasive immorality. There are several problems with this tact. First, most of the people in power profess to the Christian God. They may have gone to historical missionary schools. Why then the rampant split personalities? When we see people proclaiming the name of Jesus or Allah, we should wonder whether Jesus or Allah is responding with a hearty laugh when at the same time these characters are vicious towards other beings.

The bottom line is that most of us are damaged somehow in our very core. Considering that ninety five percent of who we are operates below consciousness—a result of downloads of conditions, events, and states that began in the womb and solidified by age six, this is the place to begin individually to understand and find the mechanisms for correcting and passing on something better for the next generations. In the meantime we can only have compassion when, in a survival mode, a president does not practice what he preaches. He is probably acting out some subconscious behavioral traits, and he is not even aware of the contradictions. Hence, the Biblical injunction, “Forgive them; they know not what they do” may make sense, literally.

For some this forgiveness thing may sound like some prosaic religious mumbo jumbo. For those of us who are turned off by obeying and/or pleasing some stern God in the netherworld, and who trust only in the experiential and proven hypotheses, there is plenty of scientific evidence in the benefits of forgiveness. If the God thing helps, go right ahead as long as you can affect the mind to sincerely do the forgiving. Eventually, we may be able to break the cycle of blame, victims and perpetrators. In Forgive for Good, Dr. Fred Luskin says, “Forgiveness allows us not to get stuck in the past.” In Radical Forgiveness, Colin Tipping adds that forgiveness “transforms the victim archetype” once and for all.

What Are the Next Big Things?

Anybody remember researching data on microfiche? That was better than the logbooks. Just when you got adept with the microfiche machine, there was the dump desk-top machine. The manager had to force you to use the new machine by removing the microfiche machine from your vicinity. When the dump desk-top became more intelligent with the plug-and-play operating systems like Microsoft,—thanks to the mighty Bill Gates—the world arrived at the information gathering, storage and retrieval nirvana.

At about the same time in the early nineties the buzz about the Internet was coming out of the top academia, the military and government into the public arena. Now, from a small remote village, an old lady can send an e-mail to a son across the seas and, in an instant, receive a reply. One doesn’t need to understand the underlying technologies of digitization and fiber optics to do Internet.

As in that Talking Heads lyric, we might ask ourselves: How did we get here? That’s not my beautiful I-Phone; that is not my beautiful hand-thingy; and that’s not my beautiful all-in-one communication gizmo! It warms the heart that, despite the ills we hear around us, the extent of knowledge and progress seems limitless.

And now, what are the buzzes coming from academia and other research centers? There are, of course, hundreds if not thousands, but what are happening in neuroscience and molecular biology, using more powerful machines and research methods, are revolutionizing the understanding of the human condition, with the potential for our taking control of individual and community well-being.


Increasingly the researches are showing us that the brain is where all our glory and misery emanates from. Brain plasticity is a proven reality. A brain can adopt and build new connections—even until one croaks in the nineties—as long as you keep it vibrant and active.

Superiority based merely on genes using Darwinian natural selections has been debunked by the study of Epigenetics. A gene interacts in a substantial way with the environment in order to express or suppress itself. It is not Genes + Environment (G+E), but Genes ^ Environment (G^E). This single finding has enormous implications.

One can do a number of things to affect one’s happiness, physical or emotional states by activating or suppressing some of the thirty thousand genes (without changing the configuration of a gene’s DNA codes) in our genome. Moreover, the new states can then be passed on to the offspring. Imagine! The flipside, of course, is that we can pass on negative traits that we mire ourselves in. By this new biology we have the ability to change ourselves and society. It is change we can trust—and we don’t even have to be a hotshot President Obama!

So, in the spirit of The Graduate movie, where the future was in plastics, the now future is in Neuroscience and New Biology.