I do hold that the middle class, the middle of society, the middle of the middle is not all it is cracked up to be. It’s actually quite fetid. And neurotic and small. The people who can survive the middle are those who society permits to have good roots. Constant uprooting experiences (such as I have had) will make you unable to survive the middle. But this is also a blessing in a bigger way than it is problematic. If one is cast onto one’s own resources fully and necessarily, one can often make the best possible life for oneself.
But I should be clear. I have no aspirations toward belongingness and none toward improving my sociability of becoming more popular. To my mind these are American dreams, and I just don’t partake in them.
This leads to a discussion about the differences we have in aspirations and also even in terms of the fundamental structures of our beings. There may be similarities, but also huge differences. For instance, for the first 20 years of my life, I was cut out of appetitive being. I lived a very abstracted existence. This is something psychoanalysis cannot even begin to grasp. And I think it is easy to lose sight of that, when it comes to understanding how my paradigm is really constructed, which is fundamentally top-down and not bottom-up. If people do not keep that in mind AT ALL TIMES, they will think I am saying precisely the opposite to what I am really saying. That’s because their own paradigm is turned in the opposite direction.
All of my language – including my reverence for the wilderness comes from the sense that it was my only friend in this extreme state of detachment that I had for the first two decades of my life. So I absolutely do not relate to the notion psychoanalysis has, that the wilderness is basically ourselves, in our raw, untamed natures. For me, the wilderness is basically what is NOT ME, but yet enables me to become whole. For psychoanalysis, the wilderness is ALREADY me, and is the obstruction to becoming social and therefore fully whole. You see how the whole thing reads back to front from the other perspective? This is really important to keep in mind – because one easily loses sight of it.
All of my language – including my reverence for the wilderness comes from the sense that it was my only friend in this extreme state of detachment that I had for the first two decades of my life. So I absolutely do not relate to the notion psychoanalysis has, that the wilderness is basically ourselves, in our raw, untamed natures. For me, the wilderness is basically what is NOT ME, but yet enables me to become whole. For psychoanalysis, the wilderness is ALREADY me, and is the obstruction to becoming social and therefore fully whole. You see how the whole thing reads back to front from the other perspective? This is really important to keep in mind – because one easily loses sight of it.
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