those who lack as individuals

It really is as if people presume that they are they are the manifest agents of the invisible hand of the market. That’s what gets me about the weirdness of the current cultural fashion. Whilst they are acting as if they are the invisible hand — generally in the sense of acting sadistically, although sometimes masochistically — those that do so clearly do not perceive themselves as individuals at all, but as abstract forces acting and being acted upon. That is why they do not expect you to take it “personally”.

But of course, if you are not bound to see the world in these same terms, what you see are individuals who have temporarily decided that they are “forces” and not exactly individuals (who will have to answer for their actions later in a personal sense). You see the evasion of responsibiilty for having a self, and then the return to a certain posturing as an individual with unique qualities, and it all seems very funny.

A true individual, of course, would remain one from this moment to the next, and not posture as an abstract force, beyond his or her own control, whenever that was convenient.

--


So I think I’m starting to nail it though — how someone can SEEM okay on the outside, but when it comes down to it, their personality turns out to have been eaten through with holes. It’s like they see themselves as an individual, too, but actually they’re the Borg, and should not be trusted.

These days, my feelings are very finely tuned to detect this all too familiar aberration from human centred being. I ask myself, “did I come away from the interaction feeling like I’d just spoken to a human, in the deep sense of it?” Very often there is something human there, but also something resigned and empty. You feel like you are touching an “almost human”, someone who will sway in the wind. That isn’t so much the problem, but that they may betray you by yeilding to the path of least resistance. (And they will feel “strong” if they get to express their sadism in the process.)

But people who do martial arts, people who do adventure sports, most of the black people I speak to from Africa (and somewhat fewer of the whites) seem to return a feeling of reliability and substance. Those are the ones whose company I choose.