Friday 29 March 2013

particular skills

Incompatible Qualities | Clarissa's Blog

People have a lot of bull* formulations. My biggest encounter with one was quite personal. I have a really good mind for pattern recognition, both in social and systemic contexts. That is my fundamental skill. But I am very poor on detail. I just don't find a lot of things interesting enough to capture my attention.

As a result, in the past, I had masses of people accusing me of being possessed by huge intellectual pretensions and to be placing myself way above my league, because quite clearly, in their views, I was a dunce who couldn't even focus on what was in front of me.

The metaphysical demand that some people have, that one must plod up a ladder of accomplishments gradually, but not to flower as an intellectual until one has deposited one's foot on every rung of the aspirational ladder, is crazy-making. "You have to be social and detail-oriented before you become a thinker, otherwise you are a narcissist and a pretender!"

I am, to this day, traumatized by this demand, but more so by the fact that I tried to accommodate it. I developed extreme doubts about my abilities to attend to detail and to socialize effectively that I didn't have before these sorts of people got on my case.

Ultimately, I had to erase all that weird programming and my attempts to integrate it. I wiped the slate clean and went back to how I was thinking before I became a migrant.  Nowadays, so long as I don't try to adjust to other people's demands and weird ideological expectations, things seem to go swimmingly.

It is noteworthy that the majority of the guys who attacked me in this way were leftists of the Stalinist sort, who thought that everybody should be the same, sunken in the mire of an antagonistic “equality”. Later, I was attacked by those who considered themselves “Nietzscheans” but were actually advocates of any extreme form of mob mentality and sought to jump on the bandwagon. I came to realize how very little people are able to use any critical thinking skills.

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Cultural barriers to objectivity