Today we ask you to know that there is no circumstance in which abusive behavior is “okay.”

In many places in your society, there are patterns of “acceptable” abuse.

Hazing rituals, for example, are considered acceptable abuse.

In many professions, it is commonplace for superiors to behave abusively toward their subordinates.

The more “successful” a person is, in terms of egoic standards — wealth, fame, etc. — the more “acceptable” it is for him to be abusive.  Wall Street tycoons, Hollywood directors and actors, politicians — such people are often publicly and famously abusive, but there is no recourse against their behavior.  So long as they are rich and powerful, their behavior is tolerated and even encouraged.  It may be dismissed as a personality quirk, a hazard of dealing with the rich and powerful.

Abusive behavior of course occurs everywhere, wherever someone finds himself in a position of authority over weak, dependent people.  So parents are tyrants with their children, teachers abuse students, children abuse weaker children, and so on.  

Then there are the large scale abuses: powerful corporations against third world workers and the environment, corrupt governments and dictators, and all the innumerable forms of vicious cruelty that humans perpetrate against other humans.

This is why you must understand that there is no such thing as “acceptable abuse.”

Please understand this.

The difference between a boss abusing his employees, and a dictator abusing and killing his people is only a matter of degree.

The difference between a parent behaving abusively toward a child, and a corporation exploiting third world factory workers is only a matter of degree.

Abuse is abuse.  Cruelty is cruelty.  Tyranny is tyranny.  Enslavement is enslavement.

Parents who abuse their children, even with the good intention of “toughening them up,” are preparing them for a lifetime of receiving abuse and perpetuating abuse.  It normalizes cruelty.

It is a terrible thing.

Abuse is not “okay.”

It is true that animals and primates behave abusively toward each other, perpetrating violence in order to maintain a hierarchical pecking order.  Human abuse is an outgrowth of these animal forms of abuse.

But humans are not apes and chimpanzees.  Truly, they are not — even if many of them behave like apes and chimpanzees, in terms of their aggressive impulses.

Human can transcend these primal patterns.  Many humans have successfully done so.  Many heroes have stood up and said “No more” to endemic systems of abuse and enslavement.  The great progress of the modern era has been in rejecting and repudiating such abuses.

Abuse is not “okay,” in any form.  It is never normal, or cute, or just the way things are.

When a healthy parent holds a newborn baby in his arms, does he think: “My job is to prepare this infant for a lifetime of cruelty and abuse.  First, I will abuse this child at home so that he gets accustomed to it.  Next, I will send him out into the world, where teachers, other children, and bosses will abuse and torture him all his days.  Finally, when he is an old man, he will be abused in a nursing home.”

Almost no one thinks such thoughts, holding a newborn.  But many parents, acting unconsciously out of the abuse they received as children, in practice do just that.

This is why the single best thing you can do as a human is to heal your own consciousness, and get calm and stable within your mind.

A person who is calm and stable in his mind does not behave abusively toward other humans, and cannot perceive any scenario in which abusive behavior is “acceptable.”

Within your universe there are a great many worlds in which such behavior would truly be perceived as “alien.”