nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

We could have more descriptions of possible interactions, to open up questions,not just point out ready-made responses. We would need to learn howto be a ‘creative listener’, the one that helps someone to perceive more things,to make more articulations, to escape from definitions and normalisationsregulating everyday life.A good listener is someone who makes the other feel fluent, bright and inspiredwhen he/she talks to them. And there are listeners that make the otherfeel dull, boring and repetitive. Among the Zapatistas, what makes someonea leader is not that they are good speakers, but that they are good listeners. Inthe Soma process, this is one of the main skills necessary to develop a groupdynamic based on horizontal relationships. Therapy has spread as a commodityin capitalist society, being listened to has become institutionalised, andrare, with the private of life outdoing the function of friends and communities.As lots of people spend a lot of money to have someone to listen to themtalking about their life, psychotherapies come to resemble new religions, withall metaphors well applied. The same language of blaming is used, where oneprays against sin, the other analysis over guilt. People go to therapy the waythey used to go to the confessionary, looking for scientific explanations insteadof sacred liturgies: health is the new salvation.Neurosis, paranoia, anxiety, depression, syndromes. In the psychologisingworld of today, everything becomes a symptom for the prescriptions ofpills, and recipes in self-help books. The speed at which ‘scientific’ truths areproduced confuses anyone that relies only on the cartographies of psychology,neurophysiology, cognition, hormones, genetics, etc. What we believe as100