Wish you were Hair

Are the House Democrats Insane? | Clarissa's Blog


This, from the blog entry, is completely true:

"if we can no longer be the benevolent masters of the Third World, we can at least be the privileged source of evil, patronizingly depriving others of responsibility for their fate (when a Third World country engages in terrible crimes, it is never fully its own responsibility, but always an after effect of colonization)."

I can't comment on USA immigration policies, but the lack of ability on the part of most Westerners to engage in rational discourse, without mincing their words, is very disturbing to behold. For example, from a Facebook discussion on "primary processes" recently, I explained that some cultures are more imbued with them than others. I added that this has both positive and negative consequences for cultures who are less so imbued and more imbued.

The positive consequences (obviously, in per my view) are that people who approach the world in such a way are more able to intuitively accommodate others, if they so wish. A negative aspect would be that the magical thinking of primary processes would lead more often to accusations of witchcraft -- which is also what we see more often in most parts of Africa. So, there are positive and negative aspects to this. I also mentioned that Western culture tends to be devitalized relatively speaking, through not involving this full-bodied approach to life. At the same time, it was good not to be accused of being a witch.

This is of course a touchy topic, full of opinion and representations of subjective experience. Nonetheless, some people cannot touch upon it easily, if at all. They bring up all sorts of qualifying statements like, "We can't make comparisons between cultures..." even though I have explicitly been making them. They also freely affirm that Western culture is lacking in something (which is falsely attributed to a moral lack in the form of Western materialism). African culture is only to be envied and aspired to, not criticized.

 Despite the fact that I have already criticized it, by saying I find refuge in Western culture which does not easily attribute witchcraft to people, the issue is side-stepped with the statement that Europe also experienced a witchcraft craze in the medieval era. That was something I already knew, but it is illogical to make the comparison meaningless, by seeming to associate present day Africa with a more ancient European time.

It seems to me that no matter how hard I work to establish that there may be pluses and minuses within different cultures, most Westerners reflexively work to establish a moral hierarchy, where they (as Westerners) appear on top, due to their ability to split hairs more finely.

Primary process thinking: what is it?

Primary process thinking is the form of adaptive thinking we are all born with. It at the foundation level of human nature. Just as a tadpole turns into a frog, or a worm into a moth, we all engaged in primary processes in our chrysalis stage.

It's related to an original state in the womb (and later in early childhood), where subject and object are one. The child and the mother are one bio-system, rather than being individualized and separate. Rationality has not started to develop. Nor has the awareness that one is separate from others. This way of thinking lends itself to the feeling that anything could happen. The imagination, and not logic, tends to predominate.

Primary process thinking also has an instrumental role when people have to adjust to larger systems, under strain. Humans are equipped to become one with an organisation, by projecting and distributing various facets of their personalities and needs into other members of the institution. Thus the institution functions as a whole organism, or one mind, rather than as separate people going their own way. This is very adaptive, but at the cost of rationality and individuality.

Humans are extremely adaptive in a positive way too.  We use primary process thinking all the time.  For instance, primary processes are the basis for empathy -- the capacity to think oneself into the other's skin in relation to basic human needs and desires (The lowest rungs of Maslow's pyramid of needs).  In all, it's what lies behind our ability to relate most directly with others.

Nietzsche's anti-theology

Allan G Johnson's THE GENDER KNOT

Bataille's THE SUMMIT

Against matriarchy

Who Gets Custody? | Clarissa's Blog

It's very interesting to make the connection between the women's movement and custody of children, since many women these days seem to assume the link as part of their matriarchal version of feminism.

I don't like it myself. I was never the child-bearing type. I even find it confusing to have to deal with issues relating to children, as this gives me a sense of looking at needlework too fine for my eyes to see. I'm supposed to be observing something, but cannot see it.

 As Clarissa says elswhere, children are very sensitive to every shift in the parent's emotions, but I can't relate to others on a level this fine. I do believe it is expected and I've seen people do it, but I can't, and largely because my own upbringing was unlike this, and yet was so good.

 Since goodness came to me by means of being insensitive, I can't relate to the feminist ethics that imply goodness and sensitivity are inevitably linked. I don't feel it. I feel the opposite. I don't understand it or like it.

Born in the womb and not leaving it

Margaret Pereira I think people are mostly busily geared to pursuing material goals, but also I think they find it too difficult to use such imagination or become connected to environmental or other external forces. Perhaps that's part of being a secular society but perhaps also part of being lulled into passivity by materialism.2 minutes ago · LikeJennifer Frances Armstrong I don't know. I was brought up in Africa, and spent the first fifteen years of my life there. Consequently, I found it very hard to adjust to Western materialism or Western individualism or a very narrow kind of rationality that excludes the imagination.A few seconds ago · LikeJennifer Frances Armstrong That's why I write, in my memoir, "I was born into the womb level of consciousness and I never left it."A few seconds ago · Like

Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg by Joseph Chilton Pearce | SearchWithin Book Review

Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg by Joseph Chilton Pearce | SearchWithin Book Review

QUOTE:

According to Pearce, the primary process is the substratum on which our ego-consciousness is based. The full human being can exist alternately in ego-consciousness or in the realm of the ever wondrous primary process. The ego-consciousness is individualized while, to a great degree, we all share in the primary process mode of consciousness. This aspect of our consciousness knows many things of which we are not normally aware, but can learn to be. It is the realm of mystic experience, ESP, and many puzzling abilities. In the primary process we have assurance of our "being," and death becomes meaningless because we participate in something that is more than individual. In ego-consciousness, we are constantly goaded and plagued by the fear of death that always disguises itself under one wrap or another. These disguises may be the need for social acceptance, business success, or even that we "smell bad" or need "brighter teeth."

MORE:

Pearce tries to "strip away the hope that binds us to culture." Culture and ego-consciousness operate on this hope. There is always the hope and ambition that business success, a new car, new home, or better relations with other people will quench forever our vague anxieties. The truth is that nothing is sufficient. Nothing within culture and ego-consciousness can eradicate anxiety and the fear of death. These apprehensions are inherent in the very nature of the ego and of culture. Pearce says that while culture and ego-consciousness are necessary, they form only half of our full being. In our other mode of consciousness—the primary process—is found the solution to the anxiety of existence.

MY COMMENT:

We have the primary process thinking originally as infants, since we do not differentiate between the subject and the object at that stage. I also find that people from Africa tend to use primary process thinking as a large part of their culture, and for making social adjustments that take into account the needs of others.

• 
  
• 

  Margaret Pereira Western material culture must seem quite bland by comparison [to African forms of culture].

  2 minutes ago · Like
• 

  Margaret Pereira Not that I'm suggesting making comparisons because I don't believe a comparison would be possible. But it still has implications for an adjustment from one culture to another.

  about a minute ago · Like
• 

  Jennifer Frances Armstrong Hugely, hugely bland. It's not that Western rationality is bad in and of itself. Living in a society that strictly separates "emotion" from "reason" can have some advantages, as in the lack of witchcraft accusations, etc. But the disadvantages are also palpable, in that people do not intuitively make adjustments to each other, there is less imagination in accommodation, and people don't react to changes in weather patterns as if these spoke personally to them.  The idea that there are evil forces afoot also has to do with primary process thinking (which Margaret and I discussed a bit earlier). We can feel threatened by situations that seem out of our control, and then our imaginations invent unreal causes. Primary process thinking is not all a walk in the park.

  A few seconds ago · Like
• 

Animism and shamanic projection

Shamanism derives from animism, originally. When one enters an altered state of consciousness, everything melts, like a Dali painting, and the subject and the object become one. That means that all objects become imbued with your consciousness. The whole world becomes projected out of your mind.

Temporarily, nothing seems inanimate, and one can communicate with every object as a projection of one's own consciousness, splintered outwardly

The clambering apes

Just see these superfluous ones! They steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the wise. Culture, they call their theft—and everything becometh sickness and trouble unto them!

Just see these superfluous ones! Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another, and cannot even digest themselves.

Just see these superfluous ones! Wealth they acquire and become poorer thereby. Power they seek for, and above all, the lever of power, much money—these impotent ones!

See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus scuffle into the mud and the abyss.

Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness—as if happiness sat on the throne! Ofttimes sitteth filth on the throne.—and ofttimes also the throne on filth.

Madmen they all seem to me, and clambering apes, and too eager. Badly smelleth their idol to me, the cold monster: badly they all smell to me, these idolaters.

My brethren, will ye suffocate in the fumes of their maws and appetites! Better break the windows and jump into the open air!

Do go out of the way of the bad odour! Withdraw from the idolatry of the superfluous!

Do go out of the way of the bad odour! Withdraw from the steam of these human sacrifices!

Open still remaineth the earth for great souls. Empty are still many sites for lone ones and twain ones, around which floateth the odour of tranquil seas.

Open still remaineth a free life for great souls. Verily, he who possesseth little is so much the less possessed: blessed be moderate poverty!

Bataille's excess

To understand Bataille, it pays in any case to have read some Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel and Freud, since he draws a lot from these. Visions of Excess has a simply premise from Nietzsche, that when we are unhappy we lose all moderation and go into excess. Another Nietzschean premise is that those who a psychologically rich can afford to go into excess more than those who are psychologically impoverished. So it is that Bataille tries to appeal to a particular segment of society -- those who have been made to feel unhappy by their lack of power in relation to society's hierarchical structure, but who are nonetheless intrinsically rich enough, within themselves, to express a different kind of spirituality than those who are on top.

VISIONS OF EXCESS contains short meditations, some of them pornographic, but all of them in relation to the structure of psychology I have described. Bataille sees society as a body, with the lower parts being more important than generally assumed. He likes the idea of a body without a head. He also likes the idea of challenging oneself with greater and greater forms of evil. This is a Nietzschean conception, that incorporating more active force, that we tend to conceptualise as "evil", into the consciousness, expands existence.

Shamanism: old and new traditions

The old and new traditions of shamanism are linked by their idea of the psyche as being made of disparate elements that require integration if one is to function as a human being, without an integral loss of being or distortion of it.   Nietzsche depicts Zarathustra as being concerned with the selfsame issues:

When Zarathustra went one day over the great bridge, then did the cripples and beggars surround him, and a hunchback spake thus unto him:
"Behold, Zarathustra! Even the people learn from thee, and acquire faith in thy teaching: but for them to believe fully in thee, one thing is still needful--thou must first of all convince us cripples! Here hast thou now a fine selection, and verily, an opportunity with more than one forelock! The blind canst thou heal, and make the lame run; and from him who hath too much behind, couldst thou well, also, take away a little;--that, I think, would be the right method to make the cripples believe in Zarathustra!"
Zarathustra, however, answered thus unto him who so spake: When one taketh his hump from the hunchback, then doth one take from him his spirit--so do the people teach. And when one giveth the blind man eyes, then doth he see too many bad things on the earth: so that he curseth him who healed him. He, however, who maketh the lame man run, inflicteth upon him the greatest injury; for hardly can he run, when his vices run away with him--so do the people teach concerning cripples. And why should not Zarathustra also learn from the people, when the people learn from Zarathustra?
It is, however, the smallest thing unto me since I have been amongst men, to see one person lacking an eye, another an ear, and a third a leg, and that others have lost the tongue, or the nose, or the head.
I see and have seen worse things, and divers things so hideous, that I should neither like to speak of all matters, nor even keep silent about some of them: namely, men who lack everything, except that they have too much of one thing--men who are nothing more than a big eye, or a big mouth, or a big belly, or something else big,--reversed cripples, I call such men.
And when I came out of my solitude, and for the first time passed over this bridge, then I could not trust mine eyes, but looked again and again, and said at last: "That is an ear! An ear as big as a man!" I looked still more attentively--and actually there did move under the ear something that was pitiably small and poor and slim. And in truth this immense ear was perched on a small thin stalk--the stalk, however, was a man! A person putting a glass to his eyes, could even recognise further a small envious countenance, and also that a bloated soullet dangled at the stalk. The people told me, however, that the big ear was not only a man, but a great man, a genius. But I never believed in the people when they spake of great men--and I hold to my belief that it was a reversed cripple, who had too little of everything, and too much of one thing.
When Zarathustra had spoken thus unto the hunchback, and unto those of whom the hunchback was the mouthpiece and advocate, then did he turn to his disciples in profound dejection, and said:
Verily, my friends, I walk amongst men as amongst the fragments and limbs of human beings!
This is the terrible thing to mine eye, that I find man broken up, and scattered about, as on a battle- and butcher-ground.
And when mine eye fleeth from the present to the bygone, it findeth ever the same: fragments and limbs and fearful chances--but no men!  [emphasis mine]

Attaining wholeness -- this was the project that Bataille read into Nietzsche in his introduction to his book, On Nietzsche.   Bataille thought the majority of his time was prevented from being whole due to the enslaving nature of work.  In other words, history has a structure that creates deformities in its subjects. One need not take up Bataille's Marxist view explicitly to understand that history -- and our responses to it -- lead to the fracturing of identity.

Identity is, after all, not a tangible possession, but is an emotional relationship to one's inwardness.   One is whole so long as one's inwardness is integral, But force of circumstance may cause one to lose that relationship with one's integral self.  In that case, one loses wholeness and becomes deficient as a human being.

The resulting deficiency is not precisely personal, but can be viewed in terms of one's relationship to one's environment, which will differ from individual to individual, whilst often also having some aspects that are held in common (depending on the nature of the historical dynamite that would be capable of separating limb from limb).

It's easiest to give an example on the basis of one's own experiences, since one can claim to know oneself the best.   In my case, I experienced a degree of emotional numbing after emigrated from Africa to Australia in 1984.   In shamanistic terms, this meant my inner sense of identity had become scattered and was less than integral.   Emotional scattering is also cognitive scattering, as Antonio Damasio suggests. It can lead to being unable to make the best decisions.  Due to my having become scattered, I became susceptible to many viruses, as well as to others' misinterpretations of my identity.   I needed to restore the parts of myself that had become historically scattered, in order to restore my sense of wholeness.

My idea is that the fundamental goal of shamanisms, past and present, is to restore the individual's human wholeness, by recovering the parts of the self that has been lost due to historical change.

Since shamanism deals with history and with political forces, it differs from psychoanalysis, which restricts itself to pathologies arising from family structures.

Intellectual shamanism today is concerned with strategies to restore an individual's wholeness, through emotional integration of parts that were at times lost, due to the suddenness or violence of historical shifts.

On becoming free

It's difficult indeed to develop the mental strength necessary to oppose a system of oppressive values that has already been internalized. The oppressive morality -- for morality is a set of principles governing behavior -- has become part of you. That is why your arguments seems to defeat themselves. This is also why Bataille says, you need to change your consciousness and simply start thinking differently about the world, if you want to be free. Don't succumb to the tyranny of forms:  that which cannot be defined is totally free.

Martial arts wedding from ten years ago

Assuming motives and getting it wrong

Presuming nefarious motives is the mark of othering. One is free to ignore annoying people, but one shouldn’t presume to know them, unless one truly does.

In my experience, people have often attributed to me motives which I might reasonably have been thought to have had, had I been brought up in the same environments as they. I hadn’t though, so my drives, meanings and ambitions were misaligned with the expected norm.

In my experience, most people in the contemporary First World can’t imagine what it is like to fight for values when it seems like a matter of life and death. They assume that one who feels this way must necessarily be being silly. I can tell you that I’m not a ridiculous or silly person, and yet I did feel this way.

To make sense of why I felt so, one must go back into history. In fact, my father’s history holds the key. He’d fought a war for particular values, which were based squarely on valuing whiteness, patriarchy and Christianity. When he lost the war in historical, tangible form, he had to win it in other ways. That is, he was driven to win it symbolically, by enforcing these values as the patriarchal breadwinner. I was to have no choice in the matter because, you know, people had died for this ideal. We had lost close family members, killed in action.

In order to be free, I had to do battle with the patriarchy in a most extreme and fundamental way, which had to do with my cultural history and familial relationships.

Whilst the degree of anxiety I experienced in this might have seemed silly or disproportionate to an outsider, the outsider didn’t have to fight my battles. In fact, no outsider could really understand what this battle was about. You would have to read a bit of Freud, to understand how patriarchal values are internalized. You’d have to know a lot about the ideology of the Rhodesian cultural system and the isolationist politics the society adopted. You’d also have to have had similar experiences, or at least be able to imagine what it means when people literally sacrifice their lives for an ideology and then expect it to be upheld, above all by closest family members.

Understanding all of these points would enable an outsider to begin to grasp the degree of my anxiety. Not understanding any of them, an outsider would presume that I was a delicate little flower, overreacting to normal, First World gender relations. But my reaction to everything was influenced by this structure of anxiety.

My initial feminism was therefore very fraught and uncertain. It involved a sense of freedom at the expense of partial self-annihilation. I had to sacrifice the past and its value in order to obtain my freedom.

I wasn’t an overreacting feminist — but that didn't stop people from seeing me that way.

Translation: More Gems From Suzanne Venker | Clarissa's Blog

Translation: More Gems From Suzanne Venker | Clarissa's Blog



I think this is a good and accurate translation of a misanthropist's rants.  Hatred between men and women is born out of traditional gender relations, where both men and women would trap each other in some way, in order to co-opt them into the family system.  Men would be deceived through the promise of sex, to become providers, no matter how they were feeling.  Women would be compelled to play their role as housewives and mothers, through economic default.   There were few ways for women to make a living on their own, in the past.

Now, everything is changing and this is obvious from each new generation.  The up and coming one has very little sexism in it, even compared to my generation.

There is much less reason for anyone to be angry than before.  Only the sexists, who want to hold back progress, are still enraged.

FAT PIZZA full episode "Habibs Wedding" ---PART 5

Ressentiment and gender issues

Is Feminism a Tough Badge to Wear? | Clarissa's Blog


A word of caution — one should never automatically assume that complaining about gender is just a form of subconscious revenge — i.e. ressentiment. I know that my complaints about gender, when I made them some years ago (and repetitively), were completely legitimate.

I was trying to communicate about some important imbalances I had observed in my environment, and everybody at the time seemed to be saying, ‘It’s just emotion. It’s perception. You are overreacting about something that is necessarily totally normal and acceptable, just like everything in life is.”

The gender stereotype, that women are incapable of referring to the objective environment because they are stuck at the level of only being able to relate to personal issues, made my life miserable. I really did need just to be able to communicate, but nobody seemed open to that.

If you thwart communication, you make life very difficult indeed — and you certainly do nothing to combat social ills. You only exacerbate them.

Feminism: the good, the bad and the ugly

Is Feminism a Tough Badge to Wear? | Clarissa's Blog

musteryou:
I think the ressentiment that some people have in the realm of identity politics has to do with not being able to handle their revelations about systemic injustice. 

Danny: I wonder just what revelations could generate such responses (by responses I mean the resentment that you mention).

—-There’s a woman of my age, whom I met on Facebook. An American. Described herself as a working class feminist — i.e. using the sociological terminology that categorizes her as poor. She suddenly flipped out and became rad-fem — but that’s another story. Before that change, she seemed very logical in documenting various sorts of legislative oppression. But suddenly, she expressed herself in only an emotional mode and used some very boring rhetorical tactics against me. I think she’d got to the point where she had become emotionally overloaded. She no longer wanted to relate her observations in terms of the facts. Instead, she wanted to make out that somehow I had more “privilege” than she. I was supposedly looking down on her because of my education. Well, she was also educated to a very high degree. She had a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, and she was clearly self-educated beyond that in a way I found to be particularly impressive. I had previously told her so. But, somehow she had suffered from a sudden lack of confidence. She began to project quite strongly in my direction. Let me say, I know when someone is projecting cultural baggage and concepts that do not belong to me, because they accuse me of having an ego. Supposedly, I am egoistic in the bourgeois, individualistic sense. In this case, I’m to be viewed as uppity because I have an education and caution against falling into the identity politics trap of letting of steam by attacking other “identities”. Thing is, I’ve never really mastered Western individualism, much as I tried, so the assumption that I’m competing individualistically is very bizarre. That’s not how my character is constructed — I only have a superficial understanding of Western egoism as an expression of economic force or intent. So, all I know is she freaked out about something — probably a relationship with a man — and then blamed me for what she was feeling.

my:…but there is a point when you have to get beyond the obsession with primeval issues of belonging and try to attack the system that produces inequality. 

Danny:I think a part of the problem is that people are still getting some sort of benefits based around those group identifications.

—I’m sure you’re right.

my: Yeah, you bring to light another point, which is that people try to develop group identity not only on the basis of a shared ideology, but on the basis of re-instating the ideologies of the oppressors. 

Danny: Perhaps for the sake of protecting their own? And then justified with some thought along the lines of, “It’s oppressive when you do it but it’s not oppressive when we do it.”?

—Yeah, the status of victim can and does offer some protection in many instances, primarily when it is taken on by a group.

IRONY

Culture is also a language, because every individual culture has a different relationship to sub-text.   Also, as Nietzsche has pointed out, the hardest differences to bridge are those where two elements seem most similar -- most probably because we mistake similarity for sameness.   This, of course, relates  to my personal experience as an English-speaker, with a different historical background from other English speakers.

That which suffers the most from differences in sub-text is irony.  I'm sure if we could remove irony from communication, we would have a very mechanical, useful language, but much of the substance of communication would then go missing.

Irony is produced when there is a recognized difference between cultural and social expectations and what is said.  Irony is therefore fundamentally social and is based on shared cultural understandings.   It's never about the individual alone, or just about his or her desires or perceptions of the world.

Agitation by authorities

Children Are People | Clarissa's Blog

I totally agree that constantly supplying an exterior source of motivation is counterproductive, no matter what a person's age. It is particularly inappropriate to try to use exterior forces to motivate an adult.

When I was a kid, I went through school and did everything I had to without constant parental agitation. That was easy. Actually, I'd internalized a lot of authoritarianism, so it was double easy. Then people started getting on my case because, "this is the way we do it." After that, I had all number of problems with concentration, with motivation, with the ability to feel respect....

I think people feel that in the absence of a scary deity, “human nature” is incapable of standing alone and must be constantly cajoled into action.

It just so happens that only yesterday I was relating to Mike how, during the time I was a tutor for school-aged children, the only two students who were inner-motivated came from extremely religious families. One was a Coptic Christian, the other Catholic. In all of the other cases, numbering about 150, the parents expected the tutor to be a God stand-in, and impart knowledge magically to their child’s brain.

The majority are flakes who get it half-right

Is Feminism a Tough Badge to Wear? | Clarissa's Blog

Danny said: “You wouldn’t believe how quickly I was told [rather than listened to]”

Well that’s the thing with identity politics. Although it’s foundations of often epistemologically sure, the majority of people who embrace it cannot overcome their ressentiment. This means that instead of thinking carefully about what they hear, and then only resorting to attacking their actual enemies, they tend to attack their closest allies. I think this has to do with not being able to handle their revelations about systemic injustice. Their emotions build up to a point where they set out destroy those whose positions are most similar to theirs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment

That is why we need to see that intellectual maturity and emotional maturity require each other, otherwise one of these gets beyond the other and people can’t contain themselves effectively.

The establishment of borders and boundaries does serve some primeval safety need, but there is a point when you have to get beyond the obsession with primeval issues of belonging and try to attack the system that produces inequality.

 Unfortunately, the greater stress people experience, the more they will think in terms of these strange boundaries, rather than being able to focus outwardly.

Another point: people try to develop group identity not only on the basis of a shared ideology, but on the basis of re-instating the ideologies of the oppressors. This is the degree to which identity politics is pathological -- and I would say it is 70 to 80 % mad.

Self-defence seminars in Zimbabwe

Apes in capes: God/s and sexuality

My Take: Searching for God, settling for sex – CNN Belief Blog - CNN.com Blogs


Regarding the above post:

I don't usually read the rants of fundamentalists, but I can draw out some interesting connections with regard to Georges Bataille's notions of eros and death.  He was very interested in using sexuality as a means to combat, as it seems, philosophical idealism.  I find this an interesting project, although it has its limits.  Western dualisms divide the mind from the body in order to make the mind alone the means to ascend to  heaven.

Actually, there's a logical problem right there, because there is no extension of life beyond death.   So, to subdue the body in order to try to extend one's mind, known as "soul", indefinitely into the future, is a silly project from an atheistic perspective.

Nonetheless we are all creatures historically imbued with silliness.  Metaphysics forms a key part of our mental processes, because we have been brought up to relate to the world in a way that separates "mind/spirit/God" from "body/emotion/sexuality".   In Bataille's paradigm, sexuality becomes a means to engage within a dualistic antagonism of mental states engendered through the processes of civilization.

Bataille, therefore, advocated "sinning", in order to bring heaven to Earth and make what is sacred appear in the realm of immanence.    We face the death of the idea of our eternal soul whenever we "sin".   But at the same time, we put to death something that was never real to begin with.    Perhaps instead of preserving the historically fabricated ideals within our beings, we would destroy these metaphysical constructs in our own minds, and could make room for our own natures to flourish.


**NB. Bataille wasn't entirely opposed to philosophical idealism, just to being unconscious of what one is doing with it. He referred to both animalism AND unconscious ethically idealist climbing (toward two opposite ends of the psyche's ladder of being) as nonknowledge.

Draft Chapter 18: my father's memoir

When I moved into town,  a lot of friends told me my army commitments would have to increase.  Town was First Battalion and they used to go once a month.  I immediately volunteered to go into O P A,  which was only called out when needed.  That was the out-of-town battalion.  There were only demonstrations going on in the city at that time.  I got my transfer to Fourth Battalion.

Nothing happened for ages.  Then one night, I was sitting in bed and I heard the radio say,  "All members of first battalion to report to the drill hall immediately!"  I heard vehicles starting up all around me.  The next morning,  I read on the bill boards that Fourth Battalion was now called up.  The African Nationalists had decided to march on the center of town.  They stopped them in the nick of time.  The boys at the drill halls were given rifles and told to jump on a truck.  They they were then taken into trouble zone.  The soldiers surrounded the nationalists and then started to pump tear gas into the center of  the demonstration.  They just avoided having to fire on them.  I heard later how some of the guys had gone down in land rovers and, finding themselves in a rioting crowd of some three or four thousand, and being pressed on both sides,  their vehicles were attacked by wheel spanners, in trying to take the wheels off the vehicles.

If you have a gun pointed in your face,  you might think twice about taking off a vehicle's wheels, so that didn't happen.  The officials turned off the water and power supplies to Highfield,  where the demonstrations were taking place.  The next morning, there were helicopters flying back and forth over the township, dropping teargas.   It was to make them realize they were vulnerable,  so that they wouldn't march on the capital, Salisbury.

Th army had a standard technique for dealing with riots.  They would march into the middle of the rioters with a platoon of soldiers,  who then formed a circle, and the officer would stand up in the middle of the circle and read the riot act.  I heard my dad reading it once on the radio.

In most riots there's a core leader,  so getting rid of the leader was the first  priority.

After a few days it was defused and everyone went home.  The biggest problems were the piccannins because they thought they were invisible and would come and pelt you with rocks.

The next thing that happened after that time,  I got appendicitis.   I just started feeling a bit ill.  I went to the doctor who diagnosed me.  He booked me in.  Another guy being booked in had the same name as me., so I was just glad he was also going in for an appendix operation.

This was about 1962 and  I'd started work in '59.

While in the army,  I met up with someone who suggested into Fyfe house,  which was a very good place to live.  I just applied and they told me to move into flat four.   When I was staying there, I used to write notes on the mirror to remind myself what to do.  When I got back there was a note from the cleaner,  "What I do now,  sir?" The notes were just to remind myself to do things, like to go fencing on a particular night.

When I took up fencing, I had an outfit made with padding around the chest area and steel gauze. When people push that foil forward fast,  it can hurt.   I wasn't very good at fencing and there were a few new people who weren't that good either.  All the same, I persuaded a new girl there to go for it and she got me.  I said,  "Very good, now do it again!"  and she did.

I had to make sure I won the last bout,  but she stabbed me again, and after that I could never beat her.  It annoyed the hell out of me that I could train someone up to have more confidence than me.

Over the weekends,  in 1966,  I would go sailing.    I met up with other people who were sailing and would offer to crew for them. Lake Mcilwaine was nine miles across.  I had petrol coupons to get there,  to buy four liters of fuel a month.

Meanwhile, the militants started to hold up people on the road north and then setting fire to them with the occupants in them.  This led to the Rhodesian Front getting a clean sweep when an election occurred in '63 or '64.  In the mean time,  the Federation had already broken up and Britain had given the other members of the federation independence, but she refused to give independence to Rhodesia.  That's because the African nationalists had spoken very closely to the British   The leader RF,  Winston Field,  had been replaced by Ian Smith, a war-time hero.   Smith had been a prisoner of war Italy.  He had escaped and walked over the Alps in winter, barefoot.

Smith decided he'd had enough dealing with Britain   so we weren't taking direct orders from them.  He'd declared UDI and after this all the world put trading sanctions against Rhodesia,  which led to a lot of strange developments.  The Nationalists became more aggressive and started invading Rhodesia from Zambia in the north,  in armed columns.   We started hunting them with jet bombers.   The aircraft were left over from the World War 2.  The principal one was the Canberra Jet Bomber.  We also had one or two Hawker Hunters.

Reflections from seven years ago

“The individual subject was an empty entity, an intersection of discourses”. --
--Foucault abbreviated.

I don’t think anyone afflicted with the ideology which allows one to spirit oneself out of the material world – decentering, this process calls itself – can understand the fearful, almost tragic (at times superlatively tragic) dimensions of an embedded material existence. If choice gives you the capacity to disappear, still that is you who self-erases, and it is your affluent situation which actually bequests to thee its power. Not all of us have that power. Not all of use would wish to.

I am now able to pin down the meaning of a phenomenon, which caused me great distress for thousands of days (actually about 15 years all up). I still get tripped up now and then by this which I take to be a cultural difference. In my more relaxed moments, which is to say, when I am feeling most culturally normal, I am inclined to relate to others on the basis of the phenomena I see, which I take to be neutral, at least in the first instance. It is far from me to rush to judge any phenomena without a great deal of first exploration. I then will slowly draw my conclusions.

 When I first came to the West from Zimbabwe, I found that all of my language – can you believe it? Language itself! – was morally loaded, and I could not speak without being reprimanded and beginning to splutter. I could not point something out without some meaning entirely different from what I had intended being understood. I could not, as I had intended, point to something on the horizon, and say, “Hey look at that!” implying that I cannot make sense of it and I wonder what it means, without it being said that I was pointing something out to relate myself to it in superior or inferior mode.

 It appeared to me the Western way of relating to me always has a loaded moral sense to it – even when my methods of relating were mainly intellectually detached and interested in phenomena without rushing to interpret it. I would take this difference as being a fundamental one between what I have continually found to be the Western way of seeing things, and the way I was brought up to approach the world. It’s not that my cultural conditioning had no moral emphasis. It certainly had a very strong moral emphasis.

Now, it seems to me that perhaps the Western way of doing life is to make moral judgments primary, based upon words alone. The phenomena which actually entailed in speaking the words – which is to say, the contexts, level of awareness, and other emotionally mitigating factors leading words expressed – are rarely considered relevant in a fast paced Western society. It really is as if the words have meanings completely independent of their contexts.

Once I was censured for my cultural lack not having a moral map of language. Nowadays I’m sure I can still be dismissed for watching without judging, not drawing conclusions in an immediate way, and failing to find moral meanings in the verbal utterances alone, of others. I seem to lack the sense of what these mean. They carry evidence, but words alone are not primarily significant to me, and assuredly never have been.  A person’s actions can hold a higher level of meaning, in my estimation,than their words can.

And this, of course, is what makes it hard to write with any sense of narrative continuity. One loses oneself within the mechanisms. Stuff happens but the stuff that happens means little. This is a way of becoming spirit, ephemeral, smoke. As if detached, one’s spirit floats “above it all”. One is released, superficially, from superego demands by one’s ontological skepticism. “Perhaps I do not exist at all?”

It was just that I was more embroiled in the phenomenological world than my western peers, having been taught to see it, indeed even to be able to make moral judgments. I could not (and still find I cannot) make moral judgments about people and their situations on the basis of the meanings of their words alone, and what they are reckoned to objectively signify, vis-à-vis other words and indeed a world of nothing but words.

Perhaps this makes me out of step or seem to be without self-certainty in those situations where I’m supposed to judge the other’s words and not the actions. I rarely think that words are worth judging a person by. Their actions are always far more telling.

Those who think they can tell what I mean by a preliminary glance are simply narrow-minded, simply presumptuous. There is no possible way that I can convey what I mean simply by words.

Instead,  I’d have to show you.

Apes Suffer Midlife Crises: unbiased reporting

Apes Suffer Midlife Crises | The Onion - America's Finest News Source | American Voices

Projection, nations and the Jews

Why Do You Care About Israel and Palestine? | Clarissa's Blog


Projection isn’t so much rational as it is adaptive. Unfortunately, there is way too little written on this common mechanism. Also, people presume that adaptation is always good. It resonates well with those who have a superficial understanding of Darwinism, and believe that superior humans manifest greater adaptive characteristics than do inferior ones.

Let me explain a little more about adaptation though projection. One has to believe that wherever one finds oneself in the social order, this is where one ought to be. To entertain the feeling that one has characteristics that would fit one to be higher than one is, is to exacerbate a state of internal suffering. To avoid this feeling, one believes that everything has worked out as it should have. If one does have superior characteristics, one projects them up in the hierarchy. “It’s Professor X who has these qualities I admire.” If one has inferior qualities, like laziness or carelessness, one projects these downwards. “It’s student Y who needs to pull her socks up.” Having distributed oneself throughout the institution in this way, one feels adapted.

In the case of projecting things onto Jews, one feels that one has sunken pretty low within the society, and one desires that there would be something morally lower that would distract from having to think about one’s situation. The Jews are easy to blame because they haven’t had roots in most places for very long. They’re outsiders, who like to belong, but one could argue they don’t belong. Outsiders are lightning rods for any bad feelings in the community. Those who want to adapt especially attract the community’s hostility when it is undergoing stress. “You SEEM to be one of us, but you are in fact OTHER.” The person who wishes to adapt, or who adapts well, is open to the charge of deception as to their true identity. “They seem to be the same as us, but actually they act/feel/think differently.”

To adapt to trying times, the community must release its pent up tension into an enemy. Sometimes this enemy is external, sometimes it is internal. The pressure to adapt to trying circumstances is always profoundly felt — and thus, enemies are created. It is more convenient, and more cowardly, to project one’s anxieties, self-doubt and depression into those who are close by, rather than risk going to war with an external enemy. The wars that take place in most organisations, families and communities are means by which the members of the group attempt to achieve a sense of adaptation to stress. The desired outcome is a feeling of equilibrium and peace with oneself — and it doesn’t seem to matter who has to suffer for the members to achieve this state.

Ways to enjoy a hot day

It's on it's side. I'm going to try to right it, but it may make me seem chubbier. We shall see.

The black hole of despair and how to avoid it

Third-wave Feminism Defends the Idea of Women as a Servicing Class | Clarissa's Blog

Z says:  "They also keep saying it is impossible to change what you are. Musteryou says that idea is at the core of contemporary culture and I would like to hear more on this."

I think the attitude that is going out of style is the one defined by military mores.   That view of 'human nature' is that it is raw material, out of which something can be shaped, drawn and/or crystallized.    The contemporary view is the opposite one.  According to this, we are all born with wonderfully perfect, crystallized identities, that can get damaged along the way through exposure to the elements of the world.  According to this outlook, which rarely states its suppositions directly, the ideal person is the unborn child.   Everything following that is tainted -- and gets worse and worse as it gets older.

The military view is the opposite:  everything gets shaped and formed and improved as it gets older.  Experience builds character.

People who go running to a doctor to get pills to combat every little emotion they have are definitely operating in the world on the basis of the first world view.

Old age is going to be a horrific burden for them, as they have missed to opportunity to mold themselves creatively in their youth, rather than seeking palliative care to handle their bumps along the road of life.  So, then they are faced with an aging body and a childish outlook. It must be a horrifying experience.

Identity politics is also part of the same, first paradigm.  The supposition is we can't work things out amicably, because we have different and irreconcilable identities, which demarcate our essence.   Our hurt defines our true self. We will draw everything into the black hole of our despair.

The inability to create comes from the passive learning model, and the idea that learning for oneself poses a nebulous danger.  If you go outside, your leg might break.   If you risk yourself, someone else will take your rightful place in the conformist order.   If you ask too many questions, you will become a target for random snipers.

The military school says:  certainly this is so.   That is the nature of life, to be random and perplexing.  But, after all you only have one life.   You may as well form something out of it.   Risking nothing means you save nothing, anyway.  Death, fragility and destruction are all unavoidable, and no amount of playing it safe or trying to protect the fragile, unborn self, will make any difference to the fact that life leads to our ultimate demise.

Active learning

Third-wave Feminism Defends the Idea of Women as a Servicing Class | Clarissa's Blog

lamestllama: “I often wonder if it would help for self reflexiveness to be taught in school. Some many people don’t have a realistic view of themselves.”

I’m skeptical that it can be taught in schools, because no matter how anyone might twist and turn to reformulate the meaning of being in school, students are there for passive learning, and you cannot learn passively what you are.

You need to learn it experimentally.

If kids were able to run around, have adventures, get lost in the forest, break their arms and come back fighting, they would then gain a realistic view of themselves. 

A kiss to the head could be detrimental, especially if it's from my fist.

ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES: Sarah Palin for the Republican Presidential Candidate? More From Charlotte Allen.

My comment:

In all ways, her agenda doesn't serve humanity. If there's one thing this world doesn't need it's an increase in population. Along with this, typical gender roles, where one party in the relationship gets dismissed as an emotionally volatile idiot does damage also to the emotional states of men. You can't disown and project your emotions without becoming lesser than you might have been. Best for both men and women to strive to be whole persons, rather than to put each other down.

When we were very, very young

Third-wave Feminism Defends the Idea of Women as a Servicing Class | Clarissa's Blog

1.
The majority of people are simply passive these days, and it could be that choice feminism reflects this. It’s epitomized by the notion that the modern housewife of today has more than two detergents to choose from, and so should count herself lucky.

A couple of days ago, I spent some time studying the Youtube videos of Dr Beter Breggin, concerning the ADHD debacle. I concluded from watching these that people don’t understand that a human is a work in progress, not something that springs from its father’s head fully formed. The assumption that we are what we are what we are, and nothing can change that, is at the core of contemporary culture. That’s a bizarre mo-fo to be at the heart of the culture. That’s kind of like saying everyone’s a six-year old. Or that, if they try to do anything other than be “what they are”, they are destroying the fundamental reality of having to be six year’s old.

2.


It was very good for me to see Breggin’s stuff, because this is old-fashioned humanism he espouses. It’s distinctly out of vogue and most people don’t deserve it because they can’t get their motors running long enough to be the slightest bit self-reflective.

I’ve also noticed that for the most part people don’t even believe their own strange ideas that identity is fixed. They hold that it is fixed for them, the observers and the judges, but not for other people. So they will scream that women have to stay the same and therefore society must necessarily change, to protect the women better. But this is believing in change, on the basis that women cannot change.

I’m very bothered by this logical inconsistency.

Humans demean themselves when they defy even basic logic.

ON my way to a black belt

Why others don't assist you to be free

Recovering from in internalization of patriarchal values
While you are still wounded and looking to heal, people will sense that and apply the solution of pushing you back into what they think is the solution for you: the ideal feminine mode.

Part of this reaction to you is lizard brain. People do it because they sense vulnerability and they react to that instinctively by pushing you around.

Another cause for this is false cognition. The symptoms of the problem are viewed as the cause of the problem and vice versa. So problems arising from patriarchy receive a patriarchal solution. Are you suffering from being pressed into a gender role? Perhaps you would suffer less if you stopped resisting?

Having come across too many people who presented me with such confused thinking, I conclude that most people really don’t understand what it as stake — and don’t want to know.

It’s interesting that no matter how you actually present (which is to use the terminology of symptoms), there are those who will find a way to twist it into seeming to be a pathology. What they’re interested in is the norm — but perhaps not really even that. They want a confirmation of their own decisions, reflected through you.

Contemporary gender relations are a form of terrorism that require a psychological black belt to defend against.

Peter Breggin, MD, Debunks Drugging Children (1998)

He has all number of good points, but one that he deliberately avoids making, whilst getting close, is that if you teach boys and men that women are inherently worthy of disrespect (as American culture more than often does seem to) and add to this the cultural lesson that it is demeaning to listen to a female teacher, you will get fidgeting, incapable boys in the classroom.

Stop the misogyny, which is at the roots of many of our social problems, and you will get a society that is less ridden with neuroses.

He says, "In our culture, for women to raise a strong energetic boy as a single mum is almost impossible."

This is very telling about the culture of the USA.  How absurd.  In my culture of origin that was really not so, and if you read my father's description of his mother, you will see she was, for any of her faults, formidable.

Also, let the little beggars run around.

Further thoughts:

Breggin is wrong in some ways -- leans a little toward the right just a bit, with regard to how gender is constructed.  In this regard, he could do with a thorough humanities education. I do mostly agree with him, though, even in his extreme stance because I think adaptation should not be chemically assisted. Ever.

Better to be an instigator for change in society than accept chemically assisted adaptation.

1. Peter Breggin, MD - Psychiatry and the Holocaust--The Violence Initia...

Femnist, Mary Daly, does actually make reference to the Nazi origins of contemporary psychiatry.

The summit

Sunday Link Encyclopedia and Self-Promotion | Clarissa's Blog


From the Alice Miller article quoted in the section linked to above:

As far as I know, not a single ideology has "appropriated" the truth of the overriding importance of our early conditioning to be obedient and dependent and to suppress our feelings, along with the consequences of this conditioning. 

The issue being addressed is authoritarianism and how this is instilled in a child from an early age.

Actually though, one is an authoritarian by virtue of one's human nature, and one's parents can either exacerbate this, or channel it through beneficial paths.  The issue of human authoritarianism can also be tackled via intellectual shamanizing.   We are all naturally driven to climb a summit in order to prove ourselves to both ourselves and others.  Bataille says, the summit is not the only path for experience.  In fact, there is nothing on top of the summit.   Nothing.   God is an illusion.  So we may choose to go elsewhere, apart from ascending to the summit.

Third-wave Feminism or Taking it in the jaw like a lady?

Third-wave Feminism Defends the Idea of Women as a Servicing Class | Clarissa's Blog


1.  A lot of women seem quite happy servicing others’ emotional needs. There seems to be a return to traditionalism, with the idea of the fancy wedding, babies, a docile existence. There is strong resistance to experimenting with qualities that are not traditionally feminine.

As for myself, I have tried these non-traditional experiments, with mixed results in the public sphere. Privately, I have gained great self-esteem by not being normal.

Much of society has not let up on giving women an emotional role to play. Generally this is a kind of projective identification, in Western Australian society. People get distressed or alienated from anything meaningful, and then they take out their anguish on what they deem to be lower class members of society — women. Many women here seem to accept that punishment as just the way things are. You’ve actually got to be pretty tough to take it — tougher than I, no doubt — or just less perceptive.

2.  I’ve always been shut out from Western feminism. That’s truly weird for me, but I don’t view myself in a primarily moral way, as a gatekeeper for society’s mores. This means that contemporary feminists don’t understand what I’m getting at. I don’t need to be a moral exemplar in order to have something to say about the state of play in gender. It’s not about pointing fingers to morally condemn ‘the patriarchy”, nor is it about immersion in a martyr complex. I can have fun, and not be perfectly extraordinary in all sorts of ways, and yet still say that when men project their unwanted emotional sensations onto women, they are doing themselves and the women a grave disservice. People need to be whole. Patriarchy therefore needs to be banished.


3. I have had to take huge evasive measures to save my mind from the continuous onslaught of patriarchal projections. You know, it’s weird that Western patriarchy relies so heavily on the psychological division of men and women into halves, whereas other societies don’t necessarily require this. There are still, regrettably, different designated roles for men and women, but the heavy heavy emotional onslaught is less prevalent or does not exist at all.

Western women do get targeted in this way, to be emotional receivers of society’s ills. If you do not realize what is going on when this starts to happen, you will probably either withdraw without deep reflection, due to the astonishing irrationality of it, or you will allow your being to be penetrating in such a way that you start to take on the weird roles allotted to you. That is mental rape — and for some women, it is ongoing.

But back to your point, and that is, I suppose, that most people can’t see what is going on. They don’t seem to be able to conceptualize the notion of war that happens at an ontological level — that is, a war for one’s being. Most people entertain a fantasy that they simply emerge into reality like the flowers of the fields, exactly defined as they already are. It’s an absurd idea — to assume we are not subjected to change, sometimes by malicious forces.