Vlog CCCXIV - YouTube

Vlog CCCXIV - YouTube

Narcissist Free 3 minutes ago

or rather... "emotion means you're crazy". Or rather, "not reacting the way I SAY you're SUPPOSED TO REACT is crazy". That's my take on it anyway.

 · 

Jennifer Armstrong 1 second ago

+Narcissist Free Sure, they say something is "emotion" because they are viewing it as something they cannot understand and want to do away with. It's a reduction on two levels (one at the unconscious level of their cognitive deficiency, and the other level is where they are morally dismissive). But a narrative is never just "emotion", and this is where they betray themselves, in equating the two, erroneously.

 · 1 

Warsuits & wearing historical garments for protection

Castrated life & the the violence of Modernity denied

Daylight out of Darkness - YouTube

Daylight out of Darkness - YouTube

Jennifer Armstrong 1 second ago

+Daylight out of Darkness Thank you. I believe you are right -- although I don't view politics and its impact on morality in as black-and-white a way as perhaps would be implied by the statement that I was "gaslighted". Of course we are all "gaslighted" in the sense that our historically-conditioned perspective is extremely limited and we can be wrong-footed by subsequent historical events that cast a different light on our actions.
In any case, the real gas-lighting I experienced was after migration, when I was told a totally new story about my circumstances, namely that my life had been extremely easy, that I had commanded great authority and had extreme material wealth, and that sort of thing. I was supposed to have had a totally different character, too, based on these impossible things. That was the real source of confusion for me, not the prior state of wandering around Africa bare-foot or on horses.

therapy and narratives

And the need of the victim to maintain their own cognitive links in relation to their experiences in the past is the biggest battle that has to be waged against a narcissist and narcissistic types. This is why I found therapy so inimical and devastating, because the therapist who does not see life as a narrative, but rather as a series of emotional states, is breaking down the structure of resistance to the narcissist just as surely as if the narcissist were doing it himself. Life is only meaningful if it is in the form of a narrative. By contrast, there is no meaning in breaking down somebody's narrative. That is to wage war against them and enforce an absence of meaning and destruction of defensive shell.

Sickliness = divine reproval and blaming

Sickliness = divine reproval and blaming

Vlog CCCXIII

Oh I had years and years of that low level infection and colds and flus. I used to panic when I came down with a virus, because I knew that I would be stuck with flu symptoms for about a year, and it would be the most difficult thing to fight off for me. The worst thing was the African primeval mentality, which my father reinforced in me and whenever he saw me, which was that sickness was a sign of being cursed by God for being less than morally perfect. I had to keep striving to be morally perfect so that the divine force would release me from the virus I had caught, but the guilt and shame were overwhelming. Also I wouldn't allow myself to rest, because I had to engage in moral striving to vindicate myself in my own eyes and in the eyes of others. My father had the same rage that a narcisstic does when he sees that you have become broken down and weak. His anger was astonishing, and rubbed my face in my own terrible failure. And this went on for years and years. And then came the workplace bullying. By this time I thought I would rather die than continue living in the same vein, so whereas before I had tried to do everything right by conforming to norms, no matter how I felt, I began doing the opposite by saying "no". If things were going to fall into disarray by my saying no, I was willing to accept that, even unto death. I kept saying it. And I began trying to understand the horrible ways in which Christianity had caught me up in its web of psychological violence, by reading Nietzsche. I took this "Antichrist" into the bath with me and soaked for hours in the tub, turning the pages back and forth. I couldn't understand the writing. It made me feel seasick, but every now and then there was a glimmer of hope. For instance I learned that "everything absolute belongs to pathology", which meant that my absolute conformity to duty and social obligation belonged to the realm of pathology. I also learned that compliance with truth-telling at any cost was pathological. "Too timid to tell a lie."
As I began revaluing my values, I got healthier. But I had been knocked back so hard by the workplace mobbing as well as by years of abusing my own interests by my reflexive Christian conformity. My body was like an overheated photocopier that had simply stopped working.
It's been a very long road of recovery for me, and I still recoil at the horror of it all and how I was allowed to almost be destroyed by those around me including my family of origin.
---
And the way that affected my mind, too, made it hard for me to retrain for another job. I couldn't focus on the smaller details of anything because I was too busy keeping a vigil of hypervigilance. Also the yeast in my gut performed its own chemical effect of clouding my memory.
It really had been the longest road to recovery, because everybody blamed me for lacking persistence in things, whereas in reality I had been persisting in all sorts of things way beyond my physiological limits.

Performativity, shamanism & the loss of reality within Modernity

Performativity, shamanism & the loss of reality within Modernity

Performativity, shamanism & the loss of reality within Modernity

bullying as warfare

The tactic they use against me (and I have experienced this a few times) is to hire me for a job and not give me enough knowledge or resources to do it.  Then the real or manufactured "complaints" start coming in, usually from anonymous sources, and they are reported back to me.  "Look!" screams the boss, hysterically, "There is a fire over there!  Put it out!"  So I rush to attend to the matter.  Meanwhile he or she has nurtured another crisis somewhere else.  "Look!" he screams again.  "Another crisis!  Put it out!"  And this goes on until I am exhausted.  

Slavish & masterful principles of moral reasoning in "The Constant Gardener

Widening the existing gap - YouTube

Widening the existing gap - YouTube



+Antistar211 It's true that people are very, very devitalized now. But what is even more astonishing is that if you are someone who has developed some mastery over things and self-control, you will be viewed as a threat, and people will try to undermine you for simply that reason. I am now fully aware as to the tactics used to undermine my sense of mastery. The people doing it (for it is usually group harrassment, but it also comes with managerial permission and sadism) is to say, "Look there is a fire over there! Put it out!" At the same time, the culprits are lighting other fires (other out of control situations) elsewhere, which they then command you to put out, or else risk losing your executive integrity. And they go on and on like this until you are worn out. The result? You end up being as out of control and devitalized as everybody else.

Vlog CCCXI

The idea that people are secretly abusing the narcissist from "below" -- from a position of lesser power (e.g. lower social station or weaker physical strength) -- is somehow convincing to people nowadays. It makes you wonder.

The jungle-gym of life and narcissistic ploys

The corrupted mental software of geniuses

Vlog CCCX

A narc once tried to mould me but if you listen really, really carefully (because you have become aware of narcs through bitter trial and error) you can hear a lot of things from them, like I did. I heard this one say indirectly "I am going to try to paint you as extremely emotional." I heard that because suddenly for no reason he began protesting against emotionality. I immediately took that as my cue not to pay attention to anything I may be feeling but to only look at the actions and see what kind of affect they were aiming to achieve. After that, despite my feelings of ambivalence toward this narc., I switched off my positive sensations such as empathy toward the original image of the narc. I'd had and responded to the situation only on the basis of an objective reckoning.

Widening the existing gap

From a Nietzschean perspective, what is metaphysics?

Reply to Naked Ape - Men's Rights

Appeal to Nature Fallacies

Vlog CCCVII

Religion has had quite a different impact for me. As I've said, I was sinking and not swimming as a new migrant and I really needed others' help to orient me and explain how to live in a new society, but my requests kept being encoded not as actual meaningful requests but as so much "emotion". I found this really perplexing. People brought up with a religious ideology are trained to view aspects of experience or content they cannot understand as irrational. I found that people also had some strange notions about hidden essences behind reality that I had never really come across before. MY attempts to get people to take my predicament seriously were viewed as "feminine" and "manipulation" -- kind of as if I were manipulating everyone from a point of powerlessness and from below. (This cultural view seems to come from the notion that "Eve" was devious as well as open to deception.)
Eventually I just couldn't speak anymore. I developed this tight band of psychosomatic stress around my neck, and I felt like my voice was choking every time it came out.
Without any help or orientation I muddled through, but things kept going wrong. I just didn't know enough to master my environment. And once again, people kept blaming me as if I were doing it on purpose -- trying to manipulate them from below, from my point of ignorance.
This whole situation was complicated -- again along gender lines -- because my father resented the higher level of value nominally attributed to women in the new cultural setting. He saw any achievement I made as a mark against his name, whereas others saw my lack of knowledge as contrived and inauthentic.
I think I had CPTSD on a mild level for a long time, but mostly I just succumbed to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
After a whle I did find it terrifying that whatever I said was disbelieved or viewed as a form of manipulation. I'm still traumatized by that -- the anticipation that I will say something to an authority figure and it will be viewed as the opposite, for this is what has generally occurred.
If we listen to the words someone is saying and we make the assumption that they are referring to something in reality, we can often help others in their time of need, but ongoing neglect and denial makes things much, much worse over time.

Two views of meaning: Nietzscheanism, Bataille Vs. Sartre

Continental philosophy, morality and the dialectic

Celebrating the tragi-comic result of God's death.

Note:  Actually Bataille probably does reify "death" in a French formalistic way, which I think is misleading in terms of conveying Nietzsche's own spirit.  However, in the same breath, Bataille does also insist that living is a process, as is thinking.   The tendency of metaphysicians to look for END POINTS and to make these define the whole of reality (or rather, to give a particular meaning to reality as if  they discovered a hidden "essence") has to be taken on and confronted as wrongheaded.

Bataille's Hegelianism and concept of non-knowledge

Lacerated existence, rite of passage & worse misfortunes

Lacerated existence, rite of passage & worse misfortunes

Vlog CCCV

The Freudian view does not make much sense where it presumes that an infant is like a computer that needs to have its hardware programmed by parental attention, or else there will be missing and corrupted data in the programme. If evolution had developed humans to be so exquisitely vulnerable to minor misprogrammings and corruption, it did a much worse job with humans than it did with absolutely any of the other species on Earth, which all seem to require only a very general infantile nurturing to make them grow up and function effectively. In fact even actual computer programmes, which are developed by humans, seem more stable than this notion of the infantile mental state.
My view is that by placing all the blame for malformed humans on the earliest stages of development, society (and Freudians) sidestep the problem of having to evaluate adults as adults, who make adult decisions, or fail to make them in a way that would be appropriate.
Sure, narcissists are sneaky, but it is possible for actual adults to eventually realize what is going on, and when they speak out, they should be believed.Then the damage they do would be minimized.
No more placing the blame on something that may or may not have happened long ago.
Narcissists only thrive because in some way their mental attitudes are adaptive. If we penalize that sort of behavior, their attitudes become maladaptive. But if we blame everything on something that happened prior to when consciousness formed, we are still left in the dark. It's the equivalent of dealing with "inherited sin" or something intangible.

Secrets of eternal pain (plan to avoid your doom)

On Georges Bataille' s reply to Jean-Paul Sartre

(Unfavourable) comparison of modernity to colonial society

Tony Hoeflinger 4 minutes ago · LINKED COMMENT

I have seen every point spoken about here play itself out. What can all of this change in society be attributed to?
Is this down to an open undisciplined society with no unifying rallying sense of core concepts?
Did the digital age help user in a culture with no capacity to focus on thought for an extended time span, no self restraint , no grounding in ethics?

 · 1 

Jennifer Armstrong 1 second ago

+Tony Hoeflinger You'll have to excuse me as I rarely listen to my videos again so I do not know what points I spoke of and can only guess. If it is about making excuses for very poor behaviour under the justification of "human nature", I think I can partly explain it. The attack on colonialism was an attack on what was most noble and powerful in Western culture. Of course nobility and power can also be abused, and colonial societies were in part predicated on that abuse. However, modern people do not separate the abuse of power under colonialism from the noble aspects of colonialism, which involved representing a standard for behavior to others, holding one's own against the winds of misfortune with great stoicism and so on. Nowadays to have noble mannerisms, which is to say to exhibit stoicism and fortitude, is to be viewed as having too much power and potential to abuse it. So those with noble mannerisms are pulled down and we are all supposed to wrestle in the mud.

Vlog CCCIII - YouTube

Vlog CCCIII - YouTube

Jennifer Armstrong 12 hours ago

That's all I require of those visiting my YouTube channel as well. If they don't like something, they need to make a good argument or at least express in words what makes them feel uncomfortable about anything I've said. it takes a long time to make videos and upload them, and it has taken an even longer time -- sometimes decades, to meditate on the concepts and come up with the ideas. It seems that when some MGTOW or an adult-child comes by and wants a Chicken McNugget, and they do not find one on my site, they downvote that which they can't understand. The more diligent might wait until they hear a buzz term like "feminism", which they think they understand, but only in the Western context. Others (like those coming by recently) are pure vandals. I already know they do not understand the terms of debate of my latest videos, since they are extemely subtle and hard to grasp.

Read more

 · 2 

Hide replies 

Narcissist Free 28 minutes ago

+Jennifer Armstrong You're absolutely right Jen. My narc would do that to me in conversations all the time and I would tell him, "just because you don't understand what I am saying, doesn't mean I am wrong". If he didn't understand what I was talking about, he would automatically say I was "wrong". Of course that made him feel superior, because he HAD to be smarter than me. He treated me like an absolute imbecile eventually.

 · 1 

Jennifer Armstrong 47 seconds ago

+Narcissist Free That is the basic narcissistic modus operandi.  They have this bluster and overconfidence -- and, inside, an inner emptiness.  Whenever they are uncertain, they flip into the mode of bluster.   They can't be considered not to know everything.  They want to seem omniscient.  I'm getting your inverted narcissist on my YouTube site now, downvoting things using multiple accounts.  She's very welcome to do so.  Philosophy is outside of public opinion, so the greater the rancour, the more it thrives.   You need a still spirit to understand philosophy, rather than bluster and roads leading toward ignorance.

 · 1 

All 'events' of Modernity happen beneath the surface

Nietzsche, Bataille, active and passive nihilism

Modernity: herein the characteristics of its human subjects

(Mis)takes on matters of truth and ethics in Bataille

(Mis)takes on matters of truth and ethics in Bataille

Way to Bataille's individual sovereignty via pessimism

Vlog CCC

+EcceSignumRex I am too superior to bother with them. If you look at the level of intellectual and emotional development of the majority, most of them haven't got out of middle school yet. What sort of pleasure would there be in making such people feel pain? They wouldn't even understand what it was supposed to mean, under any circumstances. My pleasure is to watch them create situations where they boil in their own juices. For instance, let them sink to the depths of their own notions about how life works, in evolutionary psychology terms. That is much funnier to watch than anything I could concoct for them myself.

Pessimism, non-knowledge & esotericism of modern gnosticism

Addendum to the previous video.
"For the Greeks, Gnosticism was ''a nauseating, inadmissable pessimism."
http://tinyurl.com/phyw5k5

Pessimism, non-knowledge & esotericism of modern gnosticism

Bataille's 'BASE MATERIALISM' (as a modern gnosticism)

Classic Narcissist Vs. Inverted Narcissist. - YouTube

Classic Narcissist Vs. Inverted Narcissist. - YouTube: "
Jennifer Armstrong 1 second ago
+Daylight out of Darkness I didn't even mean that people are damaged, just that we are climbing our way out of the swamp, and there are different degrees of this. In the past and in pre-history everyone had a group mind. It was normal and healthy to have "leaky boundaries". Nowadays, a different standard for perfection is set up, but we still do not know if that is really healthy yet, or whether it might not be false in some way. To stand entirely alone and not to have symbiotic relationships with others may seem desirable on the surface of it, but could lead to an extreme level of alienation after a while. Human evolution is an uncertain prospect, in other words, and there can be missteps."



'via Blog this'

Vlog CCXCIX

Heidegger's metaphysics and ontology, critiqued via Adorno

Gang stalking and the reinforcement of gender norms

Narcissistic abuse with benevolent intent (the Don Quixote effect)

Bataille, Hegel and Being

Plf. MOO

On the Mount of Olives I walked around in bare feet, not afraid of the cold of ice, pressing in around me.   I had come to prosecute a war and I would not leave until I'd drawn my spear and made my impact, as great or minimal as that may be.

I roamed high and low listening for answers regarding my community for as yet I had no community.  I was alone and yet this fact did not phaze me.  I hadn't come here for company.  Indeed, coming here had not even been my choice.  I'd been assigned here, by agents higher than me.   "Either come back a hero or come back with your head on a shield," they had stated.  And I'd willingly obeyed.

The Spartan life form does not ask much questions of itself.  It rests or roosts indifferent to its fate, which has been pre-decided.  I, myself, just being me, am not more than one.  I came here, and being alone, I am solitary, but I lose or gain nothing this way, I lose or gain nothing.

I'm alone; but God decreed it that way or Satan from the pits of hell itself.  Black bats fly around me, having being disturbed from their cage, but against the sunlight they are white, almost translucent.  I am the friend of black bats and anything dark and sinister, just as much as I'm on my own and must preserve my life at every cost.

My father died in primary school but rose again to run the factory.  That is how I think about things nowadays.  "Do not allow the pug dog to enter the microwave oven, as it will only roast itself!" asserted my mother.  She knew right from wrong and I acquiesced to her views.  I'd be the ongoing guarding of the pug, by maintaining full security surveillance, 24-7, for fear it entered that experience, which could only serve to roast itself.  It counted upward, "one-two-three", and downward again, "three-two-one".   The other dog had warned me of its views, but now it had the reputation, either of being born-again or of being permanently dead (and yet somehow alive).  My mother had sided with the permanently dead point of view, but I had always fallen on the side of optimism, thus my view was "dead and then alive".

The surface irrationality of Continental Philosophy

MadebyReuben 1 day ago

I can relate greatly to your story, the basic structure is the same except my family have a colonial mentality of the old British West Indies, and I was brought up in England. but the rigid metaphysics, authority, gaslighting, emotional cut off was all there. even the sense of wilderness in the Caribbean as a child.

 · 1 

Hide replies 

Jennifer Armstrong 1 day ago

+MadebyReuben Wow. I am really glad to meet you!

 · 2 

MadebyReuben 4 hours ago

+Jennifer Armstrong it does take some time to put all the pieces together, i finally have most of the events of my upbringing and reasons behind some of the behaviors exhibited by my family understood, but im sure more will reveal itself, over time.

 · 1 

Jennifer Armstrong 31 minutes ago

+MadebyReuben It's really, really hard to put the pieces together when you are from Rhodesia, especially leaving at the age I did, because people do get very angry or exasperated due to the stigmatic status of that nation. They also don't like to talk about differences in psychology due to upbringing, since in intellectual and liberal circles that has become quite out of style to do so.

 · 1