Connecting Dots From the Personal to the Political

Patriarchy, Narcissism, Ecocide and Art

“Connecting Dots,” Photograph by Aviva Rahmani 1997, the moment when fresh water met salt water as part of the Ghost Nets Project (1990—2000) for the first time in 100 years, after excavating made land to daylight an estuary.

In this article I will explore some questions that seem to be emerging in our times, that concern me as an artist. The world seems poised at an historic inflection: what do we deem worthy of protection? Art and artists are as much at the center of that inflection as education, wealth gaps or the destruction of the ecosystems humans depend upon.

Art can't directly change human behavior, but it can precipitate seminal situations. Art can force people to confront serious conflicts between justice and self-centeredness. When creating "The Blued Trees Symphony," I was asked if we could copyright the trees?" I replied "That is what Monsanto does but we could copyright the relationship between trees, human creation of art and resistance to eminent domain takings." Copyright evolved from the Napoleonic code, established in 1804 in France. That code deemed that art had an inviolable spirit, so essential to human civilization, that no one could violate the work of art or the reputation of the artist by hurting it or stealing the essence of its intentions.

In the United States, that broad definition was narrowed down to placing a financial value on the art. The Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), did establish the "moral rights" of art. The moral rights of visual art are defined in part of definitions of genre, for example painting or sculpture. In the contemporary artworld, material and moral value is also determined in part, by how salient the issues provoked might be to current discourse. When I began "The Blued Trees Symphony," one of the lawyeers I consulted with advised me to "win the case in the court of public opinion long before we set foot in a courtroom to win an injunction against natural gas pipeline companies. Therefore, we made sure there was plenty of press and documentation of the project. By the time we came to a mock trial in the Cardoza School of Law, in 2018, we could hand arts writer, Ben Davis, a stack of reprints for his testimony. Bronx Supreme Court Justice April Neuberger then adjudicated for the injunction on the basis of his testimony. Davis asserted that indeed, "The Blued Trees Symphony," was an important voice in our then current cultural conversation. These are important value judgements about what morality people are willing to protect and why. The onus is on the artist to present work that touches the moral nerve of history.

In 2025, an important cultural conversation is emerging over totalitarian trends in our government. I have been researching parallels between patterns of narcissism, patriarchal (inc. totalitarian political) systems, and emotional abuse. I am interested in how these patterns manifest in familial and intimate relationships but then are mirrored in political systems and culminate as ecocide. A number of nations, including the United States have fallen back into those patterns, despite resistance from women. A hallmark of these patterns in manipulation, expressed in insults, gaslighting, demeaning humor, sarcasm and the absence of empathy for the suffering of others. The most striking research paper I came across recently revealed that about 35% of people, of all genders, experience domestic emotional violence in the form of intimate assault. That means to me that the normalization of these patterns is deeply ingrained in our culture with profound moral implications. Emotional abuse is now recognized as just as destructive as physical violence and perhaps even harder to recover from. That recognition has not reliably trickled down to the courtroom. It is still being adjudicated in the court of public opinion.

It is unclear from the research on emotional abuse how much emotional abuse is primary and how much is secondary-reactive. What is clear, is that these patterns are pervasive, persistent and unhealthy, at least in American society and likely, from what I've seen and read most of the world. It is therefore, if my logic is correct, that ecocide is inevitable without profound systemic changes at every level of human experience.

There are broadly two types of emotional abuse. One is primary, intended to control and dominate another person or persons and the other is reactive. The former generally takes place in private. It can occur between partners, between parents and children or in the workplace. The nature of that abuse often induces such shame, hurt, confusion and self-doubt that the target cannot voice their plight easily to others to gain support. The latter, generally an expression of desperation, often takes place publicly. The sad irony then, is that the victim is blamed for the toxic dynamic. On the international stage, the same pattern can be seen when vulnerable but marginalized groups are scapegoated and targeted for persecution, as in the case of racism, or currently, in the United States, the terrorization of immigrant populations. Although the judiciary has fought back against illegal tactics by ICE, the abuses continue. Numerous sources have compared ICE tactics to the Nazi brownshirts.

I believe this pattern of emotional abuse is mirrored in international policies and, as research indicates, is recapitulated intergenerationally. Experientially, individuals become trapped in feelings of anger, fear, disappointment and confusion that can obscure the original dynamics and veil the consequences. For example, a childhood victim of this abuse can not only grow up to repeat the familiar but toxic patterns, but project those feelings inappropriately, including the feelings of deprivation and entitlement that protect the abuser. Many researchers believe that situation becomes a petri dish for narcissist disorders. In a narcissistic system, just being a normal person with reasonable empathy and self-doubt makes one vulnerable to their predation. My conclusion is that we have normalized incredibly toxic patterns of routine interaction at every level of society.

Many aspects of modern culture support and even promote these patterns, for example the reification of the white, male warrior-hero in Action films who kills without remorse. Arguably, those same patterns of alienation are often reinforced by other patterns, such as a reliance on social media and AI. When we see profound alienation between people trust and openness that might allow healthy communication goes out the window.

I think these patterns are also directly linked to a number of other patterns currently being tracked by researchers, such as an epidemic of loneliness. The findings that half the general population experiences chronic loneliness provokes the question, what might be the correlation between patterns of emotional abuse, whether by a primary or a reactive individual and the often lethal consequences of loneliness? One reason I am assembling this data is to understand why there is such easy normalization of t.'s world and capitulation to totalitarianism across demographics.

I have written in previous articles in this series about seeing the globe engaged in an environmental WW III, about misogyny and femicide as war crimes in that context, about ecocide as the extractive result of these patterns. We know from history that art and artists will be an inevitable target. Tyrants correctly understand that art questions their control. Tyranny cannot tolerate good questions.

Explicitly or implicitly, most powerful art speaks for fundamental human needs and questions justice when it seems absent. One of those needs seems to be a moral drive for fairness. In pursuit of morality, art speaks truth to power. Art can be the messenger of all the repressed, denied, tortured and projected feelings that humanity experiences. Art can resist advancing or present horror, whether in Edvard Munch's depiction of a scream, Sebastiao Salgado's photographs of barren landscapes and destroyed peoples or Sue Coe's depictions of slaughter houses.

In the making, art can be entirely driven by intuition. But intuition is informed by perception and perception is driven by what we witness as well as what we experience. When an artist is an intellect or a witness, where our intuition and intellect settles is determined by understanding the greater world we inhabit as a global community, a matrix of personal and public relationships. That is where the important questions will come from. That is where we might find art that could change the world.