I have spend too much time in trying to make myself understood within a contemporary social context. The terms of reference of contemporary society do not -- and have not -- helped me to explain myself. My situation ressembles that of one who was brought up within a cult. (I do not mean a "cult" exactly. That isn't it. But when I watch a show like "Big Love" on TV, I think that this precisely is the situation that I have escaped.) I want to tell you that my points of reference growing up are nothing like those of conventional society. I have different reference points, for instance, in terms of what I consider to be an emotionally important situation. I find loss of a home to be important, but cooperation with those who do not think as I do to be far less important. I do not believe in an equivalency between similar situations, unless we also share similar historical circumstances. My experiences have taught me that I cannot make inner sense of presuming equality between such externalities. A similarity between experiences, only, puts us on more equal ground. I have a more tactile and visceral -- less idealistic -- orientation to the world, compared to some. I find that bourgeois terminology about greater or lesser degress of 'emotionality' do not seem to square with this perspective.
I realised today the source of my anxiety, as I experience it in the past (but hardly now, or less so). There is the primeval act in which blood is shed, and then one is forever bound to the set of values for which this blood was lost. I am referring to Rhodesia, and to those who value its ideals because they shed familial blood for it.
Blood produces a sense of loyalty -- or "guilt" -- concerning the values over which it was shed; and as Nietzsche said, it is the worst possible mode of argument. There is no rationality in it, and little dignity or human solidarity. Instead, one adopts, or maintains values, simply because blood was shed -- shed for these particular values.
And therein lies the rub -- I am the victim of some consolidated manipulation on the basis of blood guilt. I am not permitted to have values apart from those for which familiar blood was shed. To do so is to leave the cult ....
And I have never been permitted to leave the cult.
Rather, I must be held towards observing Rhodesian values. They are fundamentalist Christian values -- belief in life after death. They involve gender conformity and an ethnic orientation of WASPish ethics. To hold values other than these is to risk being seen to leave the cult.
This was the source of my anxiety, my night terrors -- that I had not known that I was in a cult, or that I would have difficulty leaving it. Everything that I do that is of my own way of thinking is denied its value as authenticity. Only that which happens to coincide with a Rhodesian way of thinking is conceded any value. To the degree that I forge my own steps, I am considered naive, childlike. I am still not permitted to leave the cult.
And so it goes: the constant undermining; the direct, and the more subtle modulations of behaviour ... all in the service of manipulation!!
1 comment:
Yes. I have the same problems which seem to be (or feel like) guilt about not having entered and not wanting to enter, fear that one has no choice but to enter, and anxiety because to enter is to die.
At the same time not to enter is to be killed by the cult, so one cannot win, etc.
ACTUALLY though this gives me an idea for my predicament of recent years: can one engage in certain kinds of professional activity without joining the cult? I've often thought not, but perhaps there is a way.
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