The rise of the Kwan Yin Kardashian

In which the Goddess and the Badass have a love child

I called this blog Fierce Love because I’m quite fascinated by the idea of what happens when opposites come together. Fierce is associated with aggression or wild abandon. Love is associated with peace or devotion. When they come together something different happens. Love gives the ferocity direction. Ferocity gives the love purpose. A new way of being is created.

It’s a kind of alchemy. The best of both worlds.

Steve Jobs once said that new ideas are combinations of existing ideas, therefore the more combinations we make, the more dots we can join, the more good ideas we generate.

Perhaps Steve underestimated the combination of bad ideas plus the internet, which seems to produce the worst of both worlds.

Aggression + the internet equals ranting. Rants discharge the energy rather than directing it into something creative.

Love + the internet creates crazy memes featuring self-love or self-empowerment (you can’t love anyone unless you love yourself!).

There is now so much traffic on the internet that people end up shouting or hiding. Megaphones or earplugs? Marketing aims to help by condensing products into brands, and people into avatars.

Fierce…

For millennia, men have been defined by the archetypes of Hero or Coward. Fear of being labeled a coward plus the adrenaline high of living in a near-death scenario, kept men fighting endless wars.

Now that wars are fought with drones or sophisticated weapons, where does this energy go? Perhaps that’s why suicides and homicides account for 40% of deaths among young men.  

Love…

For millennia, women have been defined by the archetypes of Madonna or Whore. Fear of being labeled a whore kept many women pregnant or devoted to God.

Feminism broke women out of these boxes. But now the creative energy has been set free where did it go? We seem to have created two new avatars… the Goddess and the Badass.

The Goddess has a fabulous headdress, a made-up name like Isis Athena (High Priestesses tend not to be called Carol or Jane) and a scarf that billows fetchingly behind her (preferably on a beach, but a wind machine will suffice for Insta, and photoshop can remove those annoying people in the background).

The Badass is a dominatrix with stilettos, a black leather jacket emblazoned “I’m a bad bitch and I love myself” and a take-no-prisoners attitude. She says Fuck a lot to demonstrate the fact that she’s definitely Showing The Fuck Up, earns 7 figures (it’s always figures), and for a fee will show you how to do the same because (despite the fact that we’re drowning in information) everyone has a million-dollar message inside them just waiting to be released.

On the surface, these two avatars look different, but underneath the surface, they’re both driven by the same energy – winning. Winning at being the most spiritual or winning at being the most edgy.

It doesn’t matter that one glides into the ring humming Om Namah Shivaya and the other strides in to the soundtrack of Born To Be Wild, they’re both inauthentic caricatures, and as such are on the same side.

When they come together, they don’t create a new way of being, they just create a hybrid avatar… the Kwan Yin Kardashian.

We need opposing energies to come together rather than opposing identities if we’re going to do what Steve Jobs suggests and join the dots in an entirely new way.

On the road to becoming “civilised” most of us were taught to deny or sublimate our innate fierceness in order to become peaceful and loving. But energy doesn’t go anywhere, it just turns aggression into passive aggression, hence the phrase “Don’t get mad, get even”.

Diluting our authentic fierce nature dilutes our loving nature, turning it into a superficial act… a crowd-pleaser. We can keep up the act while we’re on stage but once the rubber hits the road, things aren’t so pretty. The way we love is flawed… we have needy love, manipulative love, sentimental love and self-indulgent love.

According to Steve, the broader our understanding of the human experience, the more connections we make, and the more creative our ideas will be. Human experience, not human identity. This requires us to leave our echo chambers, listen to people we don’t agree with, and do stuff we don’t like.

Scare ourselves a little. Love others a lot.

After all, those dots won’t join themselves.