Schopenhauer's Cosmic Miserablists
General Category => What Now? => Topic started by: Doctor Huckleberry Diesel on October 28, 2014, 11:57:47 am
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I enjoy browsing the shelves of the library after dark. It is open late three nights per week, and I have found that this is when I allow myself to search for a text written by an author that is actually in my orbit. I found a book that looks promising by Barbara Tepa Lupack. Insanity As Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction: Inmates Running the Asylum, circa 1995. The text looks as if it hasn't been read. There are so many older books there that are tempting to borrow, dating back to the late 1800's and early 1900's, but their pages are brittle and/or loose, and I am concerned that, were I to be reading outdoors near the ocean or leaning against a tree, the wind would destroy them. Hence, I usually limit myself to the sturdier texts.
I tried to strike up a conversation about this book with one of the attractive librarians, but she shied away, not understanding anything I said. It may be a combination of language barriers as well as a total lack of interest in subversive literature on her part. As Schopenhauer said, not every Hansel finds his Gretel. I told her that the book looks promising as it insinuates that those who do not “fit into our society” glued together by illusions and hallucinations may be the most authentic. She simply told me that she does not understand as she backed away … Schopenhauer had said that a married philosopher belongs in comedy. I might add to this proposition that a flirting philosopher is rather comical as well.
What initially attracted me to this text is that the author examines five major works, three of which have left deep impressions on me, namely Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Ken Kessey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five – the latter two I was actually required reading in the private high school I attended in my youth. The head of the English department was evidently trying to tell us something. When I would try to discuss these and other works, like Ira Levin's This Perfect Day or John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, with fellow adolescents back in my hometown, they informed me that these were not in their curriculum. They would insist that “that school is messing up your head.”
My track coach sat me down one day and accused the head of the English department of being a subversive Communist … a rather novelesque adolescence, no? Dead Poets' Society? Myths, Dreams, and Cultures: The Real Man's Club.
In the fiction Barbara Tepa Lupack examines, each protagonist is mad or is considered to be mad – but who reveals a special insight into the dangers of social, political, and cultural conformity. All seek confirmation of their authenticity, and all offer social and ethical remedies that challenge bureaucratic institutions – solutions that amount to inmates running the asylum. This is what “Holden” and I are attempting to do with a humble little old-fashioned anti-Facebook message board launched in 2014: seeking confirmation of our authenticity. This is, in fact and in deed, what the Gort Busters website was doing, what the Why Work website was offering. Is it not rather eerie that these projects were either aborted, died from lack of participation, or were destroyed by some kind of Operation Cyberstorm? And yet, as with Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, dialogue only requires a truthful mind. Only the truthful can even see the truth (see poem, Hyperborean Winter (http://xhentric.wordpress.com/incantations/a-death-song/training-schools-for-slaves/the-hyperborian-winter/)).
I may be taking extensive notes from this text as it is related to one of my favorite books of Critical Theory, Shoshana Felman's Writing & Madness, the book which inspired the poem/principle, Madness Theory, which most definitely resonates with The Inversion Principle which I had been exposed to in “The Real Man's Club” in the mid-1980's. Here I sit, thirty years later, a full-fledged Steppenwolf typing away in his domicile at 3AM in the morning.
See "Madness Theory (http://xhentric.wordpress.com/incantations/madness-theory/)" at xhentric.wordpress.com/incantations/madness-theory/
Much like my nephew in the gortbusting years and “Nat” in the whywork years, I have to credit “Holden” for personally motivating and inspiring me to continue to document my scholarly activities in such an anti-intellectual environment as we live in this twenty-first century Bizarroland culture called the Space Age or the Machine Age – mass industrial consumerist culture, which is a spiritually bankrupt perfumed corpse. Now I will continue to develop Madness Theory, a spiritual/intellectual descendant of The Inversion Principle. It is all interconnected.
I want to implement Madness Theory by commenting on the hypocrisy the status quo, thereby challenging the social order. This is my living protest and actual historical rebellion against oppressive social institutions (religion, government, big business, the military), i.e., what John Trudell refers to as “the corporate state” - the Enemy. Know your enemy.
Early in the text (Insanity As Redemption) I come across a reference to R.D. Laing, and I am instantly validated as anti-Freudian.
Noted British anti-Freudian psychoanalyst R.D. Laing offered an even more radical view of social repression and societal transformation, one that was especially appealing to writers and social thinkers of the 1960's and 1970's. Influential in shaping the deep current of dissatisfaction with external authority, his works proposed that the distinction between conformity and nonconformity, sanity and insanity, was not always very clear. Laing conceived of madness as a struggle for liberation from false attitudes and values, an encounter with primary feelings and impulses that constitutes the possibility of the emergence of the “true self” hidden from the false outer being, whose chief function is adjustment to the demands of the society and the family (as its offshoot).
“True sanity,” he wrote in The Politics of Experience, “entails in one way or another the dissolution of … that false self completely adjusted to our alienated social reality.” Insanity, Laing concluded, might very well be a state of health in a mad world.
Laing's ideas found their parallels in many novels. Even the notion that society itself resembles a madhouse has had a durable career in modern fiction.
mad world (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gFl2OXySs8)
I call it, besides Science Fiction Bizarroland and The Perfumed Corpse, The Funny Farm Plantation.
Barbara Tepa Lupack continues:
J.D. Salinger's rebel-hero Holden Caulfield's quest in The Catcher in the Rye ended in an insane asylum and “signaled the end of American quests for the pure Utopia.”
She even mentions John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, offering insight into the absurdity of Ignatius Reilly's predicament:
And the journey – a retreat from his mother's lunacy – that Ignatius J. Reilly takes in A Confederacy of Dunces propels him into the arms of the equally loony girlfriend he had earlier tried to avoid. He merely trades one brand of absurdity for another.
[…] in a world as devoid of meaning […] madness is both a legitimate response and an effective challenge to the superficial sanity of the social order and historical process. Only a person out of step with society has an appropriate vantage point from which to view its failings; only a person who fails to obey the institutions that mandate certain behaviors can appreciate their rigitity and the consequences of nonconformity.
screaming like a baby (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzheO7UbJM0)
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I guess it is a good idea to place the original so-called poem here, minus the comments.
MADNESS THEORY
“Life doesn’t make any sense.
It is irrational and defies human logic.
We can’t know why there is something rather than nothing.”
The Trickster is always hungry!
The center of the universe is in the pit of my belly.
We are born, not into Sin, but into Madness.
Tyranny is justified by ‘therapy.”
The History of Madness resembles the History of Philosophy.
In excluding madness, philosophy betrays itself.
Madness can be philosophically repressed,
But it makes itself heard through literary texts
In literature, the role of madness is philosophical.
The literary madman is a disguised philosopher.
Madness is an uncivilized preference for solitude.
Madness is impossible desire for a woman.
Madness is reduced to the diminished status of “mental illness.”
Madness is the most subversive of all cultural questions.
Madness implies exclusion – to be outside a culture
Am I inside or outside the madness I discuss?
The question of madness is nothing less than
The question of thought itself:
The question of madness is that which turns the
Essence of thought into a question
Hegel places madness inside thought;
Nietzsche places thought inside madness.
The entire history of Western culture
Is a story of Reason’s conquest and repression
of that which it calls madness.
I can no longer accept ignorance on the part of the masses
As the explanation of fascism – I demand an explanation
That takes into account the desires of the masses
Masses of desiring-machines asking for repression
Not only for others – but also for themselves.
We speak of the masses, the deluded masses -
No! This may not be the case at all
The gorts are not the innocent dupes
We may have thought them to be
Under a certain set of conditions
They want fascism, they desire chains
Chains for me, chains for you,
and worst of all, chains for themselves
But I sense the masses are not innocent dupes
It is the perversion of the desire
Of the masses that needs to be accounted for
If we are to at least be conscious
Of the bars of our cages as we address
The rulers and wardens and guards and bosses
Here in the Prison Colony of ****ting Machines
As you wake up to your true nature,
You will be like a mute who has had a dream,
but is unable to talk about it.
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Nat responding to the excerpt from Heller's Catch-22: "Bipolar 'disorder' explained."
The Right To Be Unhappy
Is it time for another overhaul in the psych-ward?
There is not only a sense of shame in "checking in" to a hospital, but there is also the fear of being incarcerated "for our own protection" should we be diagnosed as suicidal. I wonder how many people suffer psychological agony in silence, afraid to reach out to others, isolated in a dimension called loneliness?
There is a stigma that goes along with having "nervous breakdowns" or "losing it" or "blacking out" or just being "too emotional" for polite (phony) society. People may consider emotionally disturbed people as "weak-minded," and this may prevent disturbed individuals from reaching out for help when they feel themselves "losing it."
Besides, I suppose emotionally disturbed people look around and see other people somehow "coping with existence," enduring the anxiety and stress of living in the Industrial World. Many may just suffer silently through their mental anguish from a "sense of duty" ("If others are coping with life without falling to pieces, why can't I?")
I have my own ways of coping, I guess. I have allowed this world to get into my head, so it is up to me to take my mind back from it. We each have to take our minds back. I do this by walking into the woods away from the cars and concrete, but today I think I was able to reach that state of awe and wonder just by holding a little stone in my hand and feeling it, looking at it with wonder at just BEING.
If I can find that state of mind ... where one looks at one's own hand for the first time.
Anyway, it is better to "go crazy" and become more fully alive than to be a well-adjusted drone trapped to schedules and socially-approved opinions and views.
How does one know when one has had enough? On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse. Two policemen approached him after he caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin. What happened remains unknown, but an often-repeated tale states that Nietzsche witnessed the flogging of a horse at the other end of the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms up around its neck to protect it, and then collapsed to the ground.
In the following few days, Nietzsche sent short writings—known as the Wahnbriefe ("Madness Letters")—to a number of friends. I try to be strong, but maybe enough is enough. How much are we expected to endure? Don't we all have different thresholds as far as how much we can endure before we "crack"?
Although most commentators regard Nietzsche's breakdown as unrelated to his philosophy, Georges Bataille drops dark hints ("'man incarnate' must also go mad") ... manic-depressive illness with periodic psychosis ...
Let's see ... A mental collapse, more commonly referred to as a nervous breakdown, occurs when stress levels are so high that your body is unable to cope with them. You become emotionally and physically unable to function on a daily basis.
You may feel highly fatigued and experience panic attacks and breathing difficulty. Victims of a mental collapse may cry uncontrollably and not even know the reason why they are crying. Frequent flashback to traumatic events can make emotions worse. Victims may suffer from schizophrenia and ultimately the breakdown can overwhelm the victim and suicidal thoughts may emerge.
Suicide isn’t wanting to die. It’s not being able to bear living. You are experiencing what are called post-traumatic stress symptoms. Your traumatic experience can make you a stronger and wiser person. The potential is there for you to learn and grow in ways you may not have considered had the trauma never occurred.
Here are some notes I've gathered from the Internet from various sources that may help us value our psychotic "expressions of distress" as cathartic and transformative experiences.
From Wiki:
Laing's view of madness
Laing argued that the strange behaviour and seemingly confused speech of people undergoing a psychotic episode were ultimately understandable as an attempt to communicate worries and concerns, often in situations where this was not possible or not permitted. Laing stressed the role of society, and particularly the family, in the development of madness. He argued that individuals can often be put in impossible situations, where they are unable to conform to the conflicting expectations of their peers, leading to a 'lose-lose situation' and immense mental distress for the individuals concerned. (In 1956, Gregory Bateson articulated a related theory of schizophrenia as stemming from Double Bind situations.) Madness was therefore an expression of this distress, and should be valued as a cathartic and transformative experience.
This was in stark contrast to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the time and is still contrary to the majority opinion of mainstream psychiatry. Psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers had previously pronounced, in his seminal work General Psychopathology, that the content of madness (and particularly of delusions) were 'un-understandable', and therefore were worthy of little consideration except as a sign of some other underlying primary disorder. Laing was revolutionary in valuing the content of psychotic behaviour and speech as a valid expression of distress, albeit wrapped in an unusual personal symbolism. According to Laing, if a therapist can better understand the person they can begin to make sense of the symbolism of their madness, and therefore start addressing the concerns which are the root cause of their distress.
It is notable that Laing never denied the existence of mental illness, but simply viewed it in a radically different light from his contemporaries. For Laing, madness could be a transformative episode whereby the process of undergoing mental distress was compared to a shamanic journey. The traveller could return from the journey with important insights, and may even have become a wiser and more grounded person as a result.
Laing was involved in research linking development of psychosis to family background. Despite supporting evidence, this has been controversial ever since, and the influence of parents who feel 'blamed' for a child's diagnosis of schizophrenia accounts for most of Laing's unpopularity in many circles. It was an inappropriate attribution by commentators who had not grasped the breadth of Laing's view of the nature of pathogenesis in families, as he had maintained throughout his career that parents are equally mystified, and unaware of the disturbed nature of the patterns of communication. Laing's most enduring and practically beneficial contribution to mental health, however, is probably his co-founding and chairmanship in 1964 of the Philadelphia Association and the wider movement of therapeutic communities, adopted in more effective and less confrontational psychiatric settings.
Laing is often regarded as an important figure in the anti-psychiatry movement, along with David Cooper and Michel Foucault. However, like many of his contemporaries, labelling him as 'anti-psychiatry' is a caricature of his stated views. Laing never denied the value of treating mental distress, but simply wanted to challenge the core values of contemporary psychiatry which considered (and some would say still considers) mental illness as primarily a biological phenomenon of no intrinsic value.
Laing, was, however, a critic of psychiatric diagnosis and argued that diagnosis of a mental disorder contradicted accepted medical procedure: diagnosis was made on the basis of behavior or conduct, and examination and ancillary tests that traditionally precede diagnosis of viable pathologies like broken bones or pneumonia occurred after (if at all) the diagnosis of mental disorder. The notion that biological psychiatry is a real science or a genuine branch of medicine has been challenged by other critics.
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My Dear Theo,
You give me great pleasure by writing-every post of yours means a great deal to me.All I can say is that I look forward to your writing the way van Gogh would have waited for the paints from Theo-with barely suppressed impatience.Your writing to me is the bread of life.You are the most gifted,honest individual I have ever known.
When I wrote"There's an inherent problem with Mr H's philosophy" my implication was this:
Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.
or as McLean wrote" But I could have told you Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you."
Have you ever felt like some kind of rebellious creature on a high-tech plantation who may be useless to the zoo-keepers specifically because of particular strengths which the engineers and managers find to be "defects of character"?
:D All the time Mr H,all the time :D
Much like my nephew in the gortbusting years and “Nat” in the whywork years, I have to credit “Holden” for personally motivating and inspiring me to continue to document my scholarly activities in such an anti-intellectual environment as we live in this twenty-first century Bizarroland culture called the Space Age or the Machine Age
Thank*you* for writing to me.Unlike you, I don't have a way with words so I cannot fully express how grateful I am that you write to me.So,let me just say thank you- a zillion times.
About the Madness theory-does the madman dream? I had a very vivid dream last night,about an ex of mine.In the dream,we met at some sort of business conference,we started talking & I began to feel warm & fuzzy.And then she asked,"How we can improved the performance of the organization"? The question made me angry.I said" I don't give a damn about what happens to the organization.Its not just about this corporation-they are all the same-octopi.
" I am a socialist S.-"."Have you ever read Trotsky & Guevara"?She got annoyed & I woke up with severe pain in my chest.
Thank you once more, and a good handshake in thought.
Ever yours,Holden.
PS-What's wrong with your teeth exactly?Could you not get it remedied?
PPS-I'll see on the dark of the moon..
http://youtu.be/hnzHtm1jhL4
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Insanity As Redemption may very well be the most relevant text I've encountered since Felman's Writing & Madness – relevant to Madness Theory, that is. Both texts are written by women. Not surprisingly, most of my literary influences have been male. Is it significant that both these intellectuals are female? I'm not sure, but I know I will try to remain open to such voices from now on. Both text are Literary Theory or Critical Theory. While, when I had the opportunity to attend university, I was focused on Mathematics and Computer Science, I was thoroughly stimulated by electives in Literary Theory and Sociology, as well as Anthropology. In fact, I found the professors in these fields to have far more of what I would call “personality” than the professors of more technical subjects, although the Multivariable Calculus professor at Rutgers called these other subjects “touchy-feely”. I will take the opportunity here to state that I took Calculus III as an “elective” and wrecked the curve. In my first semester there, most of the courses I needed for a Computer Science major were full, and I was amped for mathematics, so I took a chance with three rough math courses. I held my own.
I only mention this as evidence of my peculiarity. I wonder if anyone else in Rutgers' history has taken Multivariable Calculus as an elective and received a 4.0 (A) in it. I was a maintenance worker in a park, and Matt Damon is a vast conspiracy!
Back to the subject. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, McMurphy's “revolution” starts the moment he appears on the ward.
His rebellion demonstrates to the inmates that anti-Order is [true] sanity, that true madness is not their alleged irrationality but the deadly order, system, and rationality of the institution. When the rationality is perverted, as on [nurse] Ratched's ward, reason becomes madness, and the only solution lies in the disease. The society that tries to cure its misfits by standardizing and straightjacketing them only causes the disease it quarentines.
… A vagrant and a self-styled psychopath, McMurphy is not above feigning insanity to avoid hard labor, though he later learns from the symbolic lifeguard at the hospital that his commitment can far exceed the remaining months of his sentence.
… [McMurphy] drives himself to existential heroism in the face of absurdity. His genuine compassion for the residents grows until it becomes his sole purpose for being.
… When Big Nurse reads McMurphy's record (including his arrest for having relations with a fifteen year old girl) on the day he is admitted, she subconsciously skips a section that McMurphy immediately calls to the staff's attention: “The nurse left this part out while she was summarizing my record. Where it says, 'McMurphy has evidenced repeated' – I just want to make sure I'm understood completely, Doc – 'repeated outbursts of passion ...'”
Such passion is exactly what Ratched has eliminated from her life and her ward, and its reemergence in the figure of her new admission is highly threatening.
Markedly unfeminine, she looks and moves like a robot …
Her only recourse is to have McMurphy lobotomized, a last attempt at castration … Yet her victory is Pyrric: McMurphy has already passed his strength and manhood on to the other inmates so that not one phoenix but several rise out of the wasteland's ashes in his stead. As the inmates begin to check themselves out or request transfers to other wards, she is voiceless – and powerless – to prevent them. The silenced Madame Sosostris cannot rule the wasteland any longer. Her icy facade melted by the heat of McMurphy's passionate defiance, Big Mom is no more.
I appreciate that this examination of Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is written by a woman, because, if it had been written by a man, it might be more harshly criticized. The novel's central theme is the restoration of the inmates' individual and collective potency, and yet, the novel has been criticized as laboring under a most reactionary myth involving the mystique of male sexuality.
While it is true that Big Nurse is a towering machine who dwarfs the men and erodes their confidence, her threat lies not in her sex but in her consuming quest for power, which connects her to the all-powerful Combine. The fact that she resorts to traditionally unfeminine ways to increase her authority suggests, that women's – and men's – roles in the novel are anything but stereotypic and that the deliberate reversal is part of a larger comic pattern.
… And just as the traditional female and male roles are reversed, so are the traditional black-white roles. [Even McMurphy and Chief's relationship] is no Lone Ranger-Tonto affair: It is McMurphy, after all, who has to introduce Bromden to the wonders of the natural world and who lays down his life for his friend, not the more stereotypic reverse.
Taken together, all these comic role reversals emphasize the underlying principle of ironic contrast and the reason for the novel's universal appeal: that in the contemporary world, madness is sanity and sanity is madness. It is the inmates who are sane …
madness (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek0SgwWmF9w)
Big Nurse is not a repugnant person because she is a woman; rather, she is a repugnant person because she denies her femininity and her very humanity for the sake of a smoothly running routine. The Japanese nurse – another woman – is, on the other hand, among the most likeable characters in the book because she does not subscribe to the system's wholly mindless regimentation.
… Even the argument of latent racism that several critics have raised has a strong counterargument.
Juxtaposed to the three malicious authority-worshiping orderlies, Mr. Turkle, the Black night orderly, is (like the Japanese nurse) among the most sympathetic characters in the book. He is kind to the Chief. He also helps smuggle the whores and the liquor onto the ward and even offers McMurphy the key to escape in the morning.
Turkle's humanity balances the other aides' inhumanity and demonstrates that the behavior of Ratched's threesome, who rely on violence and perversion to maintain control, is unusual indeed. Therefore, to fault Kesey for his treatment of women and Blacks is, as Ronald Wallace correctly concludes, “to miss the comedy of a device that has informed comic art from Aristophenes to Erica Jong.
As symbols of resistance to a repressive system, the mad heroes McMurphy and Bromden show that “it is through their almost divine madness that the real insanity of the asylum – and of contemporary society – is exposed.
Kesey, like Vonnegut, is implementing the principle of ironic contrast. Fellow American soldier, Roland Weary beats Billy Pilgrim severely. Billy is, ironically, saved by his German captors, rescuing him from his compatriot's violence. Even taken as a prisoner of war, an act which places him in the underground barracks, ends up saving him once again when Dresden is firebombed by the goddamned Allied Forces, the British and American Forces. I know the truth isn't America's cup of tea, and, as per usual, they will most likely shoot the messenger.
… Billy is no simple schizophrenic or delusional individual, though intermittingly institutionalized, he is, like McMurphy and Yossarian before him, quite possibly the sanest man around. His sanity is evidenced, among other things, by his sheer endurance.
So the weak may in fact be strong, the insane may posses the greatest insight, and those bound for the slaughterhouse may be the only ones to survive.
When I got to the chapter on Kosinski's Being There in Insanity As Redemption, since I had never even heard of the book and the library happened to have a readable copy, I decided to first read the novel itself. I found it a little confusing, but Barbara Tepa Lupack's examination shed some light on it for me.
Kosinski wrote of, “the inability to escape from others who [attempt] to prove and prove again to you that you are as they see you.” Contemporary Americans were, for him, the best example of such lack of selfhood. Possessed by little self-knowledge or self-worth, they readily adopt the view of the world that the fairy-tale magic of television creates for them. Raised “to the ultimate power of electronic derangement,” says John Aldridge, they perceive life wholly in terms of television situations and “create the personages they see on the screen in the image of their hopes for themselves, their wishful projections of transcendent glamor, wisdom and financial success.
As a result, they are vulnerable to seduction by whatever powers happen at any moment to be in control of mass media. Their experience of a public figure is shaped by the manner in which that person is video packaged, and they accept the image as a reliable index of his true identity.
Mr Murdoch (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKFSC8BF5Q8&spfreload=10)
Kosinski's novel, Being There, is a sharp and growing portrait of a growing constituency, the new generation of watchers and followers who suffer a Big Brother dependency on television and whose minds are picture pasteboards – video without audio, all reception, no perception.
At the Rand estate, his new home, Ben cautions him just before the president arrives to hide his mind because the president's security officers often confiscate “sharp objects.” Contemporary society's newest god is TV, whose filmic images are modern miracles revered by those who worship celebrity.
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Much like my nephew in the gortbusting years and “Nat” in the whywork years, I have to credit “Holden” for personally motivating and inspiring me to continue to document my scholarly activities in such an anti-intellectual environment as we live in this twenty-first century Bizarroland culture called the Space Age or the Machine Age – mass industrial consumerist culture, which is a spiritually bankrupt perfumed corpse.
Perfumed corpse... I like that.
Do you still speak with Nat?
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You remember the catastrophic confrontation between Dimasok and Mr. Naturyl? It was worse than the YouGetAJob/HermitScribe explosion. I had contacted him via phone shortly after that to keep some kind of peace, and last year sometime he had thanked me for sending him John Trudell's 1980 Speech ...
... I think we both must go in and out of serious funks. No, we do not communicate ... but I feel no animosity. I don't hold too many grudges. Nat was concerned that too much "defeatist" philosophy might be detrimental to my mental health.
Anyway ... I am out of time again. I better log off quick.
Peace.
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You remember the catastrophic confrontation between Dimasok and Mr. Naturyl? It was worse than the YouGetAJob/HermitScribe explosion. I had contacted him via phone shortly after that to keep some kind of peace, and last year sometime he had thanked me for sending him John Trudell's 1980 Speech ...
... I think we both must go in and out of serious funks. No, we do not communicate ... but I feel no animosity. I don't hold too many grudges. Nat was concerned that too much "defeatist" philosophy might be detrimental to my mental health.
Anyway ... I am out of time again. I better log off quick.
Peace.
Ha! I do remember that! I was involved in that as well. Whatever happened to that "dim" guy? It would be nice to see Nat speaking around here too. I think this place could use some more nay to your yay (or should it be the other way around?) for the sake of balance.
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I think this place could use some more nay to your yay (or should it be the other way around?) for the sake of balance.
Probably more "yes" to my "no" ... >:( :D
And yet, harmony is not such a bad thing either ... :P
It's cool to receive confirmation. I think Nat actually validated me as well. I don't remember us knocking heads on too much at all ... except when I gave D administrative permissions which he may have abused ...
If I remember correctly, Nat was repeatedly validating me.
What is the big deal with debates, anyway? Maybe it is best to just let this message board serve its humble function. There were many debates at whywork.org with trolls which actually drained us of a great deal of energy and served mostly as a distraction preventing us from the "work" at hand.
Look at all the traffic at derrickjensen.org forums. There are places for debates and arguments. Why bother arguing here when our object is primarily to preserve our observations for posterity - as well keeping it as a resource for ourselves should we succumb to being filled with doubt by the tyranny of public opinion?
Optimistic falsehoods convene the crowds; discouraging truths disperse it.
As far as BALANCE goes, are diametrically opposed worldviews necessary to attain "balance" ?
If you take a look at the dialogue unfolding in the Nihilism (http://whybother.freeboards.org/what-now/the-japanese-way/msg668/?topicseen#msg668) thread, you will notice that we are proposing that nihilism can be accompanied by a more well-balanced attitude that includes a sense of humor. The most crucial, authentic, and honest "arguments" taking place occur within the privacy of our own minds. No opposition is required when we think against ourselves.
A clear example of this can be found in my own great and simultaneous attraction to the thinking of personalities as diverse as John Trudell and E.M. Cioran, the former urging me to protect my spirit against forces out to destroy my Will to Live, the latter suggesting I embrace extinction as both inevitable and preferable to continued existence.
These contradictions leave me no alternative but to embrace paradox, preferably with a sense of humor, albeit, a dark one.
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I'd rather stay away from debates, especially those online. I feel you may have put more thought into my "balance" comment than necessary :P But yeah, it would be neat if he gave a few thoughts around here. Maybe invite him over?
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I think Nat and I both require or demand a great degree of creative freedom, and he is most focused on promoting the idea of a general income, which is great. Myself, I am kind of "hovering in anxiety" - and I want to be OK with this. I want to be free to consider unpleasant truths.
Also, inviting Nat might be like recruiting him, and I don't want anyone to feel obligated to post here. It can become like a job, and that's not what I want. I don't want this board to become a burden or a psychological/emotional drain on anyone who participates.
Holden and I happened to be staring into the abyss, and, well, you know what they say about "deep sea diving." It's not a bad idea to have someone with you ... when you are in deep waters ... there might be sea monsters ... mind parasites (http://whybother.freeboards.org/what-now/reference-mind-parasites/) ... who knows?
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whatevs
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How much math will make you go insane?
I remember when I had returned to college full time in 1998, a Physics professor from China told us that we could expect to only get about 4 hours sleep each night. As a student I could justify the obsession with studying ... and yet now, all these years later, "slipping" back into this obsession, witnessing myself in this mode without "credits" and "degrees" as motivation sometimes has me questioning my sanity.
I would never discuss these doubts with a professional since I do not want to live a "normal life" anyway.
I mean ... I don't want to sit back and vegetate in front of a television or consider seeking some humble employment to "occupy my time". Too much time is not the problem. The problem is this unacknowledged fear of some kind of intrinsic limitation of how much I can retain, and trying to remain interested in what I am learning without thinking about where it is leading. In other words, this entails a great deal of patience with myself ... and dealing with frustrations.
Maybe there can never be any long lasting peace, and I will just have to be content to retain whatever I can thankful for hours of undisturbed leisure. The only world I have left to defend is the one inside my head!
Also, in the end, even as I do enjoy making the minor breakthroughs in understanding, it does not change the nightmarish quality of existence itself.
I have this crazy idea that if I can just understand what a differential equation means (not just solve it), I might better understand the underlying workings of nature. This pursuit will not lead to happiness.
I am sure that this is a healthier obsession than seeking alcoholic oblivion. I have witnessed the agonizing misery taking place in the hearts of those chasing euphoria on a daily basis.
Do I have to set aside time to read a novel ???
With My Dog-Eyes is only 59 pages.
With My Dog-Eyes is an account of an unraveling—of sanity, of language . . . After experiencing a vision of what he calls “a clear-cut unhoped-for,” college professor Amós Keres struggles to reconcile himself with his life as a father, a husband, and a member of the university with its “meetings, asskissers, pointless rivalries, gratuitous resentments, jealous talk, megalomanias.”
I did some research on the author:
Hilst's father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, her mother with dementia. Hilst herself, who had been a great beauty and socialite in her youth, began to write seriously by her 30s, eventually confining herself to isolation in her home built in coffee fields inherited from her parents. She devoted herself to literature, her dogs ("sometimes numbering more than one hundred," we're told in the introduction by the translator, Adam Morris), and, for "many years towards the end of her life, [spending] every evening getting drunk on cheap whiskey, drunk to the point of not remembering the things she said or the fights she provoked. 'I drink because it's the only way I can tolerate reality.'" Insanity, or a radically fractured view of her intolerable reality, is what her work both is, and is about.
I am personally intimate with that route. Maybe becoming obsessed with mathematics again is the only way I can tolerate a life without alcohol. I have to justify all this excess consciousness and give it something challenging to investigate. It's not a quick fix, but I am sure that, on some level, I am reaching for some kind of defiant breakthrough.
This may all sound rather forbidding, and I wouldn't want to pretend that it's more reader-friendly than it is. There are few concessions to conventional understanding: we get flashes, but they are not comforting. This is a mind unravelling, and through the gaps we see a horrified fascination with the body, a kind of carnal awareness of existential futility.
So here you go: this is the heavy stuff, literature as an assault course, not for the impatient or faint-hearted, or those who suspect they're having their legs pulled. Look on it as not so much a novel as an extended prose poem, written from the edge.
I guess all I can do is let it play itself out. It's as though I have made a pact that there is no backing out of. Returning to mathematics and developing an authentic understanding of fundamental concepts may be something I am documenting the process of in order to convince myself not to slip back into the downward spiral that leads into far more agonizing forms of insanity.
http://youtu.be/hnzHtm1jhL4
I am glad I don't play video games. That's a whole different kind of geek-monster than the mathematics & programming geek-creature. Some folks are obsessed with their cars or their offspring or their careers or their "significant others" ... As far as obsessions goe, this obsession, once the used books have been tracked down, as well as remaining settled in some domicile where the books, notes, computers are stored, is not expensive to maintain.
Even if it were some kind of demonic possession, it appears to be a far more peaceful radicalization than the more "religious," "nationalistic," or "ethnic and tribal" radicalizations.
I don't feel like I belong to any tribe and I am not concerned about projecting my "self" biologically into the future. Is it possible to have a "spiritual connection" to, or as, the Thing-in-Itself, simply by having thought deeply in terms of philosophy and mathematics?
One does not have to be hired or given a position on some faculty to participate in the realms of mathematics or literature. These passions do not depend on monetization to be validated and authenticated. One could be in a dungeon or an insane asylum and continue to "access this realm" --- although it would be far more difficult to study more advanced areas, and one would have to settle into and explore what has left the greatest impression.
ahhhh! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L47GQG12WHg&feature=iv&src_vid=hnzHtm1jhL4&annotation_id=annotation_2053483537)
This is another motivation, and I may have mentioned it subconsciously as a kind of "joke," that I was desperately filling my head with as much mathematics as I could retain and understand so that, in case I were subdued by knuckle-dragging corporate police thugs for the thought-crimes I may have unintentionally committed simply by not bowing down to "the Master," I would still have this realm of mathematics and philosophy within me which could not be taken.
Perhaps this is also the motivation for my concentration on a limited area of mathematics, spontaneously venturing into Number Theory and Abstract Algebra but mainly trying to discipline the "demon" by focusing on areas I have been exposed to but feel I lack enough understanding to "preach it" without access to books.
I want to be able to live as a "mathematics preacher" even were I to be swooped up by corporate psychiatric police thugs and thrown into a "therapy prison" or dogg pound.
(Nice goals, Mr. H. Now that is a practical game plan. You just can't lose with that plan.)
Yeah, so, basically, learning mathematics is never a waste of time. :D
To reiterate: How much math will make you go insane?
Well, I felt I was swooped along through both Linear Algebra and Multivariable Calculus (as an elective!) :o, and moved along to other mathematics and mathematically charged "computer science" courses, always learning to program on the side. Programming is not taught as a discipline in itself. Then, after the diploma proved not to be the key to the "kingdom," I fell into depression ...
Finally, upon realizing that "the kingdom is within me," so to speak, and that, unlike our great mentor, Arthur Schopenhauer, my mother actually needs me to be very present in her life, once I shook off the alcoholic stupor and understood that I was most myself when sitting alone in a room or outside on the stoop in a rocking chair thinking with pen or pencil in hand, there were some concepts and ideas that I was kind of interested in ...
I think that building a stronger foundation in linear algebra and multivariable calculus will prepare me for being a student of differential equations ... to get a glimpse of where the formulas in physics come from, and what they really mean ... So, regardless of my age, and mostly out of curiosity and lack of interest in mindless entertainment and distraction, the mind is focusing on areas of knowledge it perceives as some kind of holy or unholy grail.
"By filling one's head instead of one's pocket, one cannot be robbed."
Once again, I do wonder, How much math will make you go insane?
The way I am approaching it is on a very personal level. I am living a kind of unwriteable novel that perhaps can only be encountered on the most subjective level and can not easily be "told as a story," for it is mostly chaos. I, like so many other millions of our strange species, jot things down so as to reflect upon later, or to document my traversal through specific terrain ...
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Her only recourse is to have McMurphy lobotomized, a last attempt at castration … Yet her victory is Pyrric: McMurphy has already passed his strength and manhood on to the other inmates so that not one phoenix but several rise out of the wasteland's ashes in his stead. As the inmates begin to check themselves out or request transfers to other wards, she is voiceless – and powerless – to prevent them. The silenced Madame Sosostris cannot rule the wasteland any longer. Her icy facade melted by the heat of McMurphy's passionate defiance, Big Mom is no more.
Is "Big Mom" == "Mother Culture (https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi979.htm)"? (Daniel Quinn)
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Click on the ape, man ...
(https://www.uh.edu/engines/ishmael.jpg) (https://www.ishmael.org/books/foreign-editions/)
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Is "Big Mom" == "Mother Culture (https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi979.htm)"? (Daniel Quinn)
As long as you extend your hand to hers, she will surely lead you down the right path, no questions asked. ::)
An aside: I think I should read Ishmael some day, given my environmental and overpopulation concerns. Not to mention, that is a really provocative idea as to how the oral story of the semites came to be.
Hasn't it really all just been about food and water, even as Mother Culture tries to force our hand along the road of myth? Aren't these stories just niceties we tell ourselves as we are gathering/hoarding/locking away resources?
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Yes, Silenus, Ishmeal is a provocative read. I enjoyed The Story of B even more - and Beyond Civilization, while not a story, did enchant me during a year in a welfare motel between Freehold and Asbury Park, Not the Dirtiest Jersey. I mean, back then, there were still some woods to walk around in (2003).
I went through a SpeciesTraitor stage, and, even just this morning, I seemed to be involved in some kind of telepathic communications with a crazy squirrel who propped him-or-herself down a few feet from my outdoor rocking chair to show off its "eating skills." I felt somewhat inadequate and demasculated seeing as I only have this one chomper on the front-top-left side of my mouth. I wouldn't be able to process such a nut into my guts without a sharp utensil. Then my mind wandered to the collapse of civilization (cell towers down and no fuel in), and thought how I would be forced to sharpen a stick, or better still, throw a rock from a short distance on the down low just to fill my gut with a squirrle meat loaf, or squirrle stew/soup. Would some be feeding off the seaweed and seagulls and fish? Most definitely. I imagine the food industry would be taken over by competeing gangs of pirates ... :o
Since entering what I would call a Cosmic Pessimism phase, or Depressive Realism phase, I have been seriously leaning in the direction of suspecting that even life beyond civilization would still be absurd, horrific, and basically and fundamentally "disturbing and unpleasant."
One only need to reflect upon the possibility of a poisonous spider biting your nut sack while shiiting in the woods to know the horrendous potential for skull-crushing pain we are all vulnerable to experience at any given moment. Awareness of our true predicament is anxiety-inducing, so, you see ... well, regardless, a shift in the direction Quinn is talking about would help the likes of you and me, those of us more than willing to "take what we need and leave the rest." Maybe our communities could be redesigned; but I think all this would have to take place after some kind of major collapse involving massive die-off.
The brute facts of our nightmare world, which Raul brings attention to every time he says, "Drive safely," are a testament to the fact that this Way of Life is unsustainable.
Bjourne Stroustrup says the world is getting better, pointing out that employees of Microsoft are working hand in hand with employees with Red Hat or CentOS ... Microsoft and Ubuntu working together with a "Microsoft Loves Linux" campaign, a total shift in attitude, where Microsoft is investing energy into enhancing the quality of experience for those working from the command line, interfacing between the various systems, and building cross-platform software. This is all really great stuff, I agree.
But this does not imply that "the world is getting better" in general.
The command line will be preserved as the masses are breast-fed on mobile -gui-driven interfaces, voice-to-text communications, etc.
Without access to electricity and a plcae to store dry tobacco (not to mention computers and books), I would go from feeling like a "farily intelligent homo-sapien" to a "retarded chimpanzee" who will die of thirst while wandering around aimlessly in search of coffee fix and a cigarette.
It is humilating to see ourselves as we are, but, I think, a healthy mental exercise.
I hate when my own biological mother says, "we sure do like to eat."
It just sounds so stupid. I sometimes respond irritably with, "And just who or what doesn't like/need to eat?"
::)
food and water
tobacco and coffee
prunes
eggs
tomatoes, bacon ... WATER!
BREAD
garlic, salt, etc .... Wow, yes, all about the food.
In Asbury Park, on First Ave, there is a block where there is a church on every corner, more churches than liquor stores, and these churches look as though they were at one time the temples of the Gods, the wealthy aristocrats living in their own Walt Disney Land of the Jersey Shore by the Theatre. That was before the riots and "race wars" of the 1960's and 1970's.
Well, now, these days, there are very few "services," but mostly "Third World" style attempts to hand out food and clothing to the People - the disparity between the Haves and Have Nots is glaring, even though, all the while, just a couple blocks away, the "Hipster" lifestyle is presented for the "young urban professionals" ... the music scene and local color.
I think it's Hell, but, well, I was among the losers, the growing army of "mental health" consumers subjected to daily psychological abuse in the guise of court-mandated "psychiatric treatment".
Fuuckin' Hell.
screaming (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0nj5UBEM-E)
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You're absolutely right in that it is a healthy mental exercise. I think we've noth mentioned fantasizing about living hunter-gatherer lifestyles but have come to the conclusion that we'd be no better off. With less necessities in life, but with greater uncertainty as to the resources. And could you imagine fending off any one of the 7.5 billion apes just as distraught and hungry as you??? Yikes...
A reshaping of civilization after the massive die-off (end result of (farmed) lives essentially produced by techno-chemical agriculture)? Well, let's just start with less ffucking pavement. :)
Have you or anyone else on the forum ever had the thought of the fact that one is simply alive is a detriment to Gaia? The feeding, the dissipation of energy? Nature is such a cannibal!
I try to eat very little now, enough for sustenance. I'm a twig now at around 140 pounds and 6'3"; if I turn to the side I may just disappear from perception altogether. :)
May I ask what tobacco you purchase? I've recently bought a 6 oz. bag of "Largo" brand, as it's the only bagged tobacco sold by the convenience store. Cheap and tastes fine.
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What I enjoyed most about The Story of B (http://www.inspireseattle.org/StoryOfB.html) is the assertion that B is the Antichrist, and that this Antichrist will NOT live the "lifestyle" of an evil-clown emperor, but a lifestyle more reminiscent of a certain Jesus of Nazareth or, more radically and fundamentally like some psychadelic-mushroom-eating John the Baptist.
Very, very interesting.
From the above link:
The Antichrist: a central figure in our culture since ancient times. Historically, since Christ came to lead all humanity to God, Antichrist will come to lead all humanity to Satan. And historically, the Antichrist will not fail, any more than Christ failed. The Antichrist will be loved and followed as fervently as Christ - but only for a time, of course. Ultimately, after a cataclysmic battle, the forces of God will triumph, bringing history to its conclusion. Historically, if Jesus came for the salvation of our souls, then the Antichrist would come for the damnation of souls. Today, it’s changed to the Antichrist will come to lead people away from personal salvation and towards saving the world.
When Jesus departed, he left no one behind who was the message. In fact, it was St. Paul - a man who had never even seen Jesus - who ended up saying “This is what’s what” with more authority than anyone else could muster. More than John or Peter or James, Paul was the message. It still took 300 years of Christian thought to reconstitute Christ’s message. When St. Paul brought Christianity into the Roman world, very fundamental ideas were already in place there. The idea of gods as “higher beings”, the idea of personal salvation, of an afterlife. The idea that the gods are involved in our lives and that their help can be invoked. Notions of sacrifice and redemption. People had been believing this in our culture already. That’s why they jumped on the Christianity message. It was easy.
------------------------------------------- <snip>-----------------------------------------------------------
The origin and cause of human suffering - and the means of ending it - became the first great intellectual and spiritual preoccupation of our culture, beginning about 4,000 years ago. The next three mellennia would see the development of all those religions that were destined to become the major religions of our culture - Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - and each had its own theory about the cause of human suffering and its own approach to ending it, transcending it, or putting up with it. But all were united in a single, central vision: salvation is the highest goal of human life.
All our salvationist religions have feared the appearance of one who would lead the righteous from the paths of salvation. The Antichrist isn’t just the antithesis of Jesus, he’s equally the antithesis of Buddha, of Elijah, of Moses, of Mohammed, of Nanak, of Joseph Smith - of all saviors and purveyors of salvation in the world. He is in fact the Antisavior.
Who is B? After reading The Story of B, you’ll understand why salvationists say “B is the Antichrist”. And when they do, we respond “yes, B is the Antichrist. B means to steal the hearts of the people away from you so that the world may live. We are only one species among billions. The gods don’t love us more that they love spiders or bears or whales. The age of the Great Forgetting has ended, and all its lies and delusions have been dispelled. We no longer imagine that man was ill-made and needs to be saved. We can no longer live as though nothing matters but us. We can no longer believe that suffering is the lot the gods had in mind for us. We no longer believe that death is sweet release to our true destiny.”
We are straying from the path of salvation not for the love of vice and wickedness, but for the love of the world, as previously our culture never once dreamed in a thousand years of dreaming. The evangelist John wrote, “You must not love the world or the things of the world, for those who love the world are strangers to the love of the Father...Children, the final hour is at hand! He’s not one but many, and when the many of him are among us, you’ll know the final hour has come”. John knew what he was talking about. He was right to warn his followers against those who love the world. We are the ones he was talking about, and this is the final hour - but it’s their final hour, not ours. They’ve had their day, and this is indeed the final hour of that day. Now our day begins.
Vision is the river, and we who have been changed are the flood. The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds - with no programs.
If our culture is undone, it will be undone by a whole new generation of authors and teachers. Those who cannot be put back to what they were. Are you one of them? If so, you are B.
If you discovered that we could sustain our animal bodies on seaweed and shell-fish, and that we might be able to design floating tent-shelters that could be set on blocks with solar power, I would still wonder where we would poop, and all that. But the ape chewing on the leaf while communicating telepathically (in Ishmael) was also telling the story B is telling. That's my theory, anyway - and I don't know much. I aint no expert on Quinn. It blows my might that it is being incorporated into some schools.
It's that bad. I mean, the urgency. Suicide rates among the youth is climbing. There is not much actual stimulation, and so many human animals can't muster up enough will to live. Some wish to take some people with them. Don't they see they allowing your enemies to live is a far worse punishment? :)
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I was thinking about the two penetrations. First, that of the pen-is into the vag-ina.This represents maximal Will to Life. And that of the nail into the palm.This represents the maximal Denial of Life.One must triumph over the other. They just cannot live side by side. I am sleepy again.
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As for Christs and Antichrists, in the bottom of my heart I find it all kind of "silly."
I do respect that the idea of the Antichrist is far older than story of the Christian Messiah. That is, the Antichrist would also be the antithesis of the Buddha as well.
Unfortunately, I'm afraid I may not love the world very much at all ... the insects, snakes, slugs, etc ...
This is why I placed a reference to Daniel Quinn's ideas in our Madness Theory thread: My feelings have changed since reading his works in 2003. That is, I am not sure where I stand. While it is clear to me that the Industrial World Mother Culture is a nightmare scenario, I am not so sure the alternatives are all that great either.
I am leaning in the direction Silenus mentioned, where I can't really pin myself down on any opinions or tastes. Just last night I found myself considering the possibility that I may, deep down inside, not really like computers and computing all that much. Maybe I don't like mathematics too much either. I just happen to tinker ...
More often than not, I'm just disgusted. At least I am more interested in understanding things than in being "productive." Our world is obsessed with productivity and efficiency. There is not much to motivate people to seek understanding. People want to get the money flowing into their bank accounts. Who has time to understand anything?
The power-brokers don't need to understand computer science, mathematics, nor how their automobile functions in order to purchase Mercedes or own a company that manufactures computers.
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I try to eat very little now, enough for sustenance. I'm a twig now at around 140 pounds and 6'3"; if I turn to the side I may just disappear from perception altogether. :)
May I ask what tobacco you purchase? I've recently bought a 6 oz. bag of "Largo" brand, as it's the only bagged tobacco sold by the convenience store. Cheap and tastes fine.
I'm sorry I missed this post. I've been somewhat rattled, irritated, and braindead from troubleshooting wireless network in new installation of Funtoo (1.3) Linux with OpenRC init system (NON-SYSTEMD). The installation took a week as each piece of software, right down to the kernel is compiled on the machine itself. I really wonder why I even bother sometimes. I guess I'm just one curious string-bean of an ape-man.
I certainly do consider our species a sort of disease to the earth, and yet we came out of the primal soup like everything else. It's hard to feel too responsible.
As for the tobacco, the brand of pipe tobacco I purchase is only good when fluffy. "The GOOD STUFF Pipe Tobacco" RED. One pound bag for $21 from a kind store-owner from India. It sells elswhere (just down the road) for $30, and I used to get it in the Asbury Park area (Belmar, to be exact) for $35 per pound. I get 2 pounds per month. When it gets stale, I don't mind spilling some on the ground. :-[
It's good when fresh (fluffy). It helps to mix all the tobacco together and then store in sealed containers.
I don't skimp so much on the rolling papers, as I prefer using RAW classics. So I order a few 500-packs of those every few months or so. I used to get 2 pounds of tobacco every other month, but lately I have been smoking more (or smoking less of whole rollies) and having to get 2 bags per month. Maybe I ought to discover a way to conserve or recycle half smoked rollies; or one day invest in a pipe. I daydream of some Native American style longish pipe ... Maybe I'm a "stupid white man" who was never taught how to smoke properly, never exposed to any Sacred Pipes, the likes known by Black Elk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Elk_Speaks)'s ilk.
When the tobacco gets a little stale, no matter how I roll, it's just not that enjoyable. When fresh, and I roll calmly, not too tight, not too loose, then I smoke as happily as a jailbird who just got a bag of Bugler from the commissary. I would prefer Buglar or, better still, Natural American Spirit, but those are close to $50 per can (far less than a pound). It's not even close to funny. I buy one pack of Natural American Spirit [black pack = Perique] per month, the same day I pick up my 2 pounds of "GOOD STUFF Pipe Tobacco".
I don't mind smoking cheap tobacco. The money people spend on class A cigarettes is scary. After paying a few of my mom's bills and stocking up on some groceries, I get coffee beans, tobacco, pencils or notebooks, etc .... I wish I could grow some herbs. There has to be a way to medicate ourselves without having to live in a tent.
I don't blame the guy who lives in a yurt in the mountains smoking his homegrown, letting his teeth fall out.
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one deciding that I can get by without breakfast. I've grown to like prunes from the time I wake up until after noon when I break "fast". I'm down to about 122 pounds when I've been closer to 135 most of my life (5'7"). I don't care anymore. I've never been into lifting weights or doing push-ups. It is good not to care about such things. If I make homemade pizza and eat it daily for one week, I can get close to 130 pounds, but, goddamn, I can't eat like that all the time as my mom has to eat to, and she can't eat the pizza ... Plus, there's no way I'm putting the oven up beyond 400 F in the summer. Steel Cut Oats of any variety are a Life Saver. They revive the Will to Live, especially when the colder weather returns.
I agree with you and Holden that we probably do not have to eat as much as we think, especially if we are not doing a great deal of labor.
I'll keep this post short as I am feeling distracted by technical annoyances. I'm tracking down a technical problem, and feeling "obsessed." Nothing is fun anymore. I'm not having "fun" with funtoo, but it my choice to explore this. I won't go into details as it is quite boring stuff.
I think of Marvin the depressed robot from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy/Universe, whatever it is.
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UPDATE: It turns out, that while the official Funtoo documentation strongly suggests using NetworkManager, and while this has worked smoothly for Artix [Arch Linux - OpenRC initialization system] and Slackware 14.2 current [Linux - using BSD style files rc init system] and even Funtoo 1.2, for this present Funtoo 1.3 (with experimental concepts of "kits" with "flavors" and "mix-ins"), I used a combination of command line tools: wpa_supplicant, iw, ip, and good ole' ping.
The thing is, Funtoo has made it possible for me to install 2 desktop managers, both Gnome and KDE Plasma ... so it was suggested to let them use their GUI-applets via NetworkManager. There's a wpa_gui applet that runs in Plasma, where I just choose wlan0 and the router (connection to access point): Schopenhauer. That's the name of the router access point which is reached by the wireless network interface card on the actual machine. They call it a freakin' SSID. Am I man'splainin'? It is most likely all quite boring to most people, but, well, working around it and finding I can do it in a slightly more direct way removing NetworkManager from the "default run-level", and adding wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd). It's kind of fun too, I suppose for, at least a second or two.
Thank goodness, after several days and nights searching frantically through important systems directories for configuration files I may have tweaked or even created, I came across a very clear and well-explained method, which is quite a rare find. The internet access is like a connection to a Great Oracle, but finding the guidance you seek requires very generic questions not too specific. I was searching for a specific Funtoo solution, but found a far more generic solution (from way back in 2013) with the query, "How to connect to a WPA/WPA2 WiFi network using Linux command line (https://linuxcommando.blogspot.com/2013/10/how-to-connect-to-wpawpa2-wifi-network.html)?" (not exactly ... but close enough for government work) ;)
- Stay Dry, but not too dry.
Yet another UPDATE: While the above method worked, for a more permanent solution, I do not use wpa_passphrase to generate the file /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf but create it manually where I replace my "secret key" with "******":
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=wheel
update_config=1
country=us
network={
ssid="Schopenhauer"
scan_ssid=1
psk="*******"
proto=RSN
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}
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I just have to be sure my "user" - mwh - is in group "wheel"
usermod -aG wheel mwh
Be sure that you did as root:
rc-update add wpa_supplicant default
rc-update add dhcpcd default
rc-update delete NetworkManager
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Of course, neither network-manager-applets in Gnome nor in Plasma (KDE) will show up in task bar, but as root you can ping external 8.8.8.8, and as regular user you can connect to the internet, using web-browsers, wget, etc. upon boot/login.
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I don't skimp so much on the rolling papers, as I prefer using RAW classics. So I order a few 500-packs of those every few months or so.
Actually, I've switched to 300-packs of RAW organic. The 300-per-pack boxes make for handy dispenseries when I have a few 500-pack boxes. You can spontaneously rig up a ghetto-set of pre-rolled rollies which fit perfectly snug in the smushed 300-pack box. It fits about 5 or 6 depending on the girth of your roll.
Such are the vulgar details of the delicate yet wise caffeine addicted smoking ape.
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If I should croak, I have to give full credit for the poem, Madness Theory (http://whybother.freeboards.org/what-now/madness-theory/msg600/#msg600), to the work of Shoshana Felman, Writing & Madness (https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=3600)
also, a recap [understatement]:
One only need to reflect upon the possibility of a poisonous spider biting your nut sack while shiiting in the woods to know the horrendous potential for skull-crushing pain we are all vulnerable to experience at any given moment. Awareness of our true predicament is anxiety-inducing
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Should any slaves out there find themselves involuntary isolated, fed, and healthy, you might find this paper written by an English/Literature student (PhD thesis) relevant to Madness Theory. This has an "economic twist" ---- quite timely ...
Financial obligations cannot bind the madman any more than social convention. Worse yet, as the play continues it demonstrates that madness can have a ripple effect throughout the entire socioeconomic community.
from: Madmen and Mad Money: Psychological Disability and Economics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/handle/11427/28391/Leverton_Madmenmad_money_2018.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y)
(by Tara Juliette Corinna Leverton)
Here's a woman who might be an interesting conversationalist, huh? :)
Despite the progress made in expanding our understanding of the role of madness in culture, and culture in madness, there are still some gaps in the scholarship. Literary critics have not yet offered an in-depth examination of the way the specific economic concerns of the medieval and early modern period affect how mad people are represented in literature and art. Historical accounts of what Thomas Szasz refers to as the ‘manufacture of madness’ in the West have not focused on the relationship between mad characters and the medieval and early modern economy, despite the importance of this period to the development of contemporary capitalism.
From Chapter 2:
There is a consistent connection between madness and economic instability in medieval and early modern literature. However, the nature and the intensity of the specific economic anxieties mad characters evoke are less consistent. Medieval depictions of mad people display subtextual concerns over price volatility and food availability – both contemporaneously pressing economic issues. Early modern literature uses mad people to explore early modern economic concerns such as rising poverty, new systems of charity and their effectiveness, and the social alienation that comes from being unable to participate in the evermore important urban marketplace.
Beth Allison Barr outlines the expansive nature of medieval ‘madness’ and describes the lack of consensus among scholars today as to how mad people are treated in medieval society and culture: Madness is an inclusive term used to describe a variety of conditions in medieval Europe, from mental disorders (such as melancholy and mania, often referred as ‘woodness’) to hysteria, demonic possession, extreme religious zeal (manifested in visions and erratic behavior) and even conditions of the heart and soul – such as lovesickness, severe depression and despair caused by excessive grief...as well as insanity triggered by anger and fear.
Spoken: We're Lost (https://archive.org/details/werelost)
LOST:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbaRBs0-shE
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https://youtu.be/8mRuMgEZo_Y (https://youtu.be/8mRuMgEZo_Y)
"Wouter Kusters is a Dutch philosopher and linguist, he is best known for his books in which he describes his own experiences with psychoses. He is the author of *Pure Madness, A Quest for the Psychotic Experience*. In this episode we discuss his latest book *The Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking*, alongside discussions on mysticism, transcendental philosophy and the line between reality and insanity."
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(in my Dr. Spock voice): Fascinating, Captain.
I am genuinely interested in this! Time does not fit in with reality.
At about 25 minutes, it gets very interesting ... removing the veil of Maya!
Transcendental authoritarian oppression!
Are psychiatrists constraining truth? Psychosis as Truth?
I rather enjoy lurking here ... ;)
Around 36 minutes into the podcast, the interviewer asks if the entire medical profession is constraining truth because it does not fit into their idea of normalcy.
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I was honestly shocked when the idea of psychology/psychiatry being a mass conspiracy (simply by controlling narrative, controlling the language, and hence establishing itself and justifying itself through itself) was tossed around.
I'm glad you enjoyed. Not much else to say at the moment; a lot to process and I will have to have another listen or two.
Hope you & yours are rested.
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Yes, as a matter of fact, I was able to take a very long POWER NAP this afternoon which lasted well into the evening. I woke at 9PM wondering why it was still dark at 9AM. :P I picked up copies of x-rays from Emergency Care today (yesterday, actually), and in the afternoon I will be transporting "The Mother" to a "professional doctor" to see what the next step in the healing process will be. All in all, the poor old girl is holding tough ... even becoming wiser and more sympathetic to the sacrifices I make on her behalf. So, there is a growing sense of peace, kindness, and good old fashioned tenderness, which is not easy to pull off in the hate-filled atmosphere that plagues this world of covert psychological operations involving god-knows-who, where one never really knows who is who or what is what. :-\
I am so rested that I am enjoying strong black coffee throughout this Light Night of the Soul. No tobacco but for a little pipe tobacco, but I feel an inner strength. Thanks for breathing new life into the Madness Theory thread.
I will hit send and let the "server not found" message appear. I sent Holden an email about my suspicions of being fucked with by the "Spies in the Sky" ...
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From Trees With Knots Do Not Make Good Lumber (https://xhentric.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/trees-with-knots-do-not-make-good-lumber/):
Those admitted into psychiatric hospitals are admitted not so much because they are sick, as because they are protesting in a more or less adequate way against the social order.
The so-called “mentally ill” are recruited in our contemporary society. The massive manpower mobilization in the Mental Health Movement is best understood as an attempt to increase the number of mental patients “found” in society. Those who do not submit to wage-slavery will be forced to accept a psychiatric diagnosis if they want to receive social services.
Like mine owners hiring more and more laborers to tear more copper out of the bowels of the earth, the state and federal governments, their subdivisions, and private and philanthropic organizations are hiring more and more psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers to tear more madmen out of the bowels of society.
I was honestly shocked when the idea of psychology/psychiatry being a mass conspiracy (simply by controlling narrative, controlling the language, and hence establishing itself and justifying itself through itself) was tossed around.
Do you find it creepy if not fascinating to find solace in coming around full circle over and over again? (Psychoanalysis may be an instrument of control that doctors and professionals use to make people conform to the repressive rules of modern society.)
It's as though one becomes the receiver of one's own transmissions.
The goal of sexual repression is that of producing individuals who are adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all the misery and degradation.
The masses are enslaved. The structures of civilization that nurture us with the food we need from the grocery stores simultaneously threaten us by keeping such items under lock and key to be exchanged for money.
We live in an age of anxiety in an insane world where we witness the vulgar, wealth-warped values of the mall-rats. Have we been trained to repress our desire to see the malls and their rats (consumers) destroyed because we have been brainwashed into identifying ourselves as consumers, even if we suck a very minimal amount of milk from Mother Culture’s teat? Do we repress our hatred of the gorts because we have been guilted (or shamed) into believing we are also gorts?
Are we so easily bought and sold? Those who do not buy into the consumerist materialism may be shunned, mocked, and eventually totally marginalized by way of criminal prosecution or psychiatric diagnosis. Freud’s enthusiastic endorsement and use of psychiatric vocabulary for denigrating people place him in the mainstream of psychiatric thought: invalidating human beings by psychiatric methods.
Whereas man’s inhumanity to man was once legitimized by appeals to God, now it is legitimized by appeals to Health. The psychoanalytic description of hypomania and hysteria is but a semantic revision of a demonological one.
“The states of possession correspond to our neuroses … In our eyes, the demons are the bad and reprehensible wishes, derivatives of instinctual impulses that have been repudiated and repressed.”
~ Freud
I am seeking a broader cultural-historical-economic perspective of the psychiatric industry. What is called “mental illness” (or “psychopathology”) emerges as the name of the PRODUCT of a particular kind of relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. (Szasz 1970)
There can be no doubt that the business-as-usual work ethic of most jobs and careers have detrimental effects on our mental health. The only way to minimize the damaging consequences of living by the wealth-warped values of the mainstream corporate mind-fuck is to rebel. The art of rebelling in a consumerist culture is to consume as little as possible, from fashionable clothes to automobiles to alcohol to psychiatric medication to organized religion.
From early childhood on, we are bombarded with meta-narratives which try to explain just about everything that happens in the world. Being incredulous toward meta-narratives means you doubt them, you disbelieve them.
What are the meta-narratives of our age? Marxism is a meta-narrative that attempts to explain and describe reality in terms of economics and class struggle. Psychoanalysis is a meta-narrative which tries to explain and describe reality in terms of internal psychological conflicts. Rational Science in general is a meta-narrative which believes all phenomena can be understood objectively.
All meta-narratives are rational. They are reductive in that they try to explain everything. Are we to resent the masses for being so manipulable?
In Fydor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Prince Myshkin is considered an “idiot” only because he does not hold any grudges. Made ridiculous, insulted, jeered at, even threatened with death by Rogozhin, “the prince” forgives. As if he had an inkling of the suffering that underlies aggressions, he ignores them, withdraws, and even gives solace to those who have abused him.
I want to be done, once and for all, with any perspective (like Marxism, Psychoanalysis, or Rational Science) claiming that history is moving in some preordained direction, or that all events can be understood as part of some causal chain of events. Psychoanalysis may be an instrument of control that doctors and professionals use to make people conform to the repressive rules of modern society.
My insights put me at odds with the masses who are driven by semi-conscious fears and mass hypnosis (television, standard education, church).
Could you imagine the contributors on this old school message board landing in the same wing in a psychiatric hospital?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcztDZ13TLI
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private message sent to Holden and copies to raul, Ibra, and Silenus
i gots to go ;)
note: please excuse all the typos (following [follwing], dire [dired], board , liberated, etc ...)
I was typing fast and did not read before hitting send due to time constraints. :-[
All is as well as can be expected, and there was no dramatic turn of events. We [the toned down Ignatius/Agnes mother-son duo] are holding down the fort, and will be breaking bread to soak up stew juices this evening under the same roof. The Mother's fears have subsided quite a bit, and we will just have to acclimate ourselves to coping with her growing neurological "challenges" ...
May Jupiter grant me patience and grace. :-\
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Why I consider Madness Theory to be a spiritual/intellectual descendant of The Inversion Principle:
From 2014 October
I may be taking extensive notes from this text as it is related to one of my favorite books of Critical Theory, Shoshana Felman's Writing & Madness, the book which inspired the poem/principle, Madness Theory, which most definitely resonates with The Inversion Principle which I had been exposed to in “The Real Man's Club” in the mid-1980's (age 17 or so). Here I sit, thirty years later, a full-fledged Steppenwolf typing away in his domicile at 3AM in the morning.
See "Madness Theory" at https://xhentric.wordpress.com/incantations/madness-theory/
Much like my nephew in the gortbusting years and “Nat” in the whywork years, I have to credit “Holden” for personally motivating and inspiring me to continue to document my scholarly activities in such an anti-intellectual environment as we live in this twenty-first century Bizarroland culture called the Space Age or the Machine Age – mass industrial consumerist culture, which is a spiritually bankrupt perfumed corpse. Now I will continue to develop Madness Theory, a spiritual/intellectual descendant of The Inversion Principle. It is all interconnected.
I want to implement Madness Theory by commenting on the hypocrisy of the status quo, thereby challenging the social order. This is my living protest and actual historical rebellion against oppressive social institutions (religion, government, big business, the military), i.e., what John Trudell refers to as “the corporate state” - the Predator-Enemy. Know your enemy.
Early in the text (Insanity As Redemption) I come across a reference to R.D. Laing, and I am instantly validated as anti-Freudian.
Insanity, Laing concluded, might very well be a state of health in a mad world.
Now, in 1984/1985 I was introduced to the idea that up is down and down is up (THE INVERSION PRINCIPLE from Myths, Dreams, and Cultures [an obscure Philosophy class for inspired high school seniors]).
The core truth of madness theory might be stated as follows:
"Insanity may very well be a state of health in a mad world."
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inspired high school seniors-Herr Hauser
Was it a class for gifted students?
I had to wait till I met you in 2014, for a tête-à-tête with real philosophy. But I think it was worth the wait.
It shattered the game plan and the booby traps that the gorts had for me into a million little pieces.
The U.S. is said to be great in identifying real talent, but in you case, I can bet my bottom dollar, they have failed, and how!
Maybe its because what you possess, Mein Philosoph, goes far beyond mere talent.
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inspired high school seniors - Herr Hauser
Was it a class for gifted students?
Not particularly gifted. Well, just to get into the "academy" as it was called, one had to show some kind of promise. By the time we made it to senior year, we had witnessed many either get the boot (for behavioral problems or poor performance) or quit the school (for lack of access to females).
And no, the academy in question mostly prized its mathematics whizkid prodigy eggheads, someone like Ed Chu (a member of the "AP Calculus" class that had me depressed as fuck) who had great discipline and very strict parents. My own parents were divorced the year before I entered the school, so by the time I was 17, I was engaging in some (alcoholic) drinking on weekends, pot smoking during the week, and was already starting to feel the advancing nervous tensions building up in me - the anxiety, the paranoia, the growing anti-authoritarianism. I had begun slipping a little in mathematics, and I even got to the point where I refused to attend a BASIC Computer Programming class - the beginnings of some kind of nervous breakdown? As a teenager, I was actually mostly repelled by the idea of digital electronic computers, although I had always enjoyed "computing" - as an organic computer made of meat.
The go-getter businessmen dads of other classmates had their offices in their houses with their giant computers and printers. I did not come from such a household. In fact, to this day, my father has no use for a computer. I even tried to give him one back in 2008. He didn't want one.
So, no and again no, as our Art would say. The Philosophy course, Myths, Dreams, and Cultures was not at all reserved for the eggheads. In fact, the instructor was the head of the English department, the man responsible for getting many of the great books on the summer reading requirements, such as Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenacne, Levin's This Perfect Day, Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, and even Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
It was a great opportunity. The course was focused on Joseph Campbel's Myths to Live By. Unfortunately, Ed Chu did not show much interest in what "my Philosophy instructor" was offering. What is a "real man" anyway? Is a real man a man who philosophizes?
There was never any mention of Schopenhauer, but more about Wilderness Survival - the whole Tom Brown Jr. (https://www.trackerschool.com/) thing.
That was the momentum behind GORT BUSTERS: It was the current generation of "The Real Man's Club" conversing on a message board like this one with old worn out Steppenwolves like myself from the old school RMC ---- I feel very fortunate to have been exposed to such a charismatic Teacher with a capital T.
My interests in mathematics and computing have returned again and again, but I am not sure how long such interest can be sustained. I wish someone like me had left me some notes like the ones I am leaving. Leaving notes to some youth in the future who will treasure my attempts to preserve something they might find extremely valuable (for their inner wealth).
I get bored with words. I sometimes even get bored with music.
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Yes,something similar happened to me around the same age.My parents fought a great deal and came close to getting a divorce but ultimately did not.
I imagine that Mr.Ed Chu,your classmate, is working with a Corporation now, probably making a great deal of money( do you happen to know what he is doing?).Sure,he might have done better than you at a particular point of time.i
But you see there are some initial successes which lead to the ultimate failure and some initial failures which lead to the ultimate success.
I am sure you know that India produces more engineers than any other country in the world and it is just a sheer anomaly that my father forced me into a program that I hated. I could have easily been sent to an engineering school and might have ended up as “one of the techies”. I might have gotten married.Sired a kid or two.
Instead I was thrown into a furnace of pain and anguish, I began to question everything, every single thing, no school of philosophy could have been better than that.To paraphrase Schopenhauer sometimes what it takes is extreme suffering, to see the truth and no amount of knowledge could substitute it.
If one forced to run a long race, then is better, as Sea Biscuit, shows us,to pace one self and not to expend all the energy at once in the first lap.
Also, what you have done is , you have broken the mold and as Thomas Kahn says, those who do that are in for a rough ride but eventually they emerge from the ashes, like Phoenix.
It has only been a couple of centuries that a mathematician or philosopher is supposed to be with an institution. We belong to the lineage of Diogenes, not Plato. That is our fate. Not everything is bad about such a fate. The freedom Diogenes possessed Plato never had.
We may not have the support of an Academy, but we do have freedom of thought, which matters a great deal more.
We might just have a dog and a broken bowl but we bow to no king, to no emperor.A few years back, there was a boss of mine, who wrote really cheap poetry and as he did not know how to even start the computer, so he asked me to set up a blog for him,which I did in my personal time.
I even did all the work to get his book published on Amazon( he back-stabbed me after all that,but that's another story). He ,one day said, that he was about to retire and hopes that his blogs gets really popular before that so that he could start minting money from it after retirement.
Quite innocently and without any malice I blurted out that,generally speaking, the work of any author gets recognised well after he is dead and buried, if then. The bastard went ballistic and I immediately back-tracked and said that it might happen within 10 years too.
Even that was not good enough for him, so I said ,some might make it in 2 or 3 years only.Then was he pacified.
What I am saying is ,we here , are not bothered about making it. Ever.
Get well soon.
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cialis tablets https :// cialiswithdapoxetine DOT com : cialis pills
Blocked by Gorticide (http://whybother.freeboards.org/gortbusters/umm-kulthum-i-wore-the-dress-of-the-living-i-was-not-consulted/msg11432/?topicseen#msg11432) ! >:(
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We belong to the lineage of Diogenes, not Plato. That is our fate. Not everything is bad about such a fate. The freedom Diogenes possessed Plato never had.
Holden, some of your statements hit me like a magic incantation. To understand our Fate might reduce much of our anxieties. Thank you for your extreme thoughtfulness. May the bastards in your own society never wear down your determination to be an honest man.
... we here, are not bothered about making it. Ever.
What could "making it" even mean in such societies as ours ?
Our failures may have been our greatest merit.
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Psychiatric diagnosis has followed the same trajectory as alcoholism. Each diagnosis in turn has been constructed by somatic psychiatrists as a disease, in each case building a similar house of cards. It doesn’t seem to matter that the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry and its influence-peddling in academic psychiatry has been exposed as financially and scientifically corrupted and manipulated. The drug companies have engaged in study suppression, falsification, strategic marketing, and financial incentives.
Take, for example, the antidepressants: the chemical imbalance theory has been discredited, but this didn’t alter the fact that the theory is still believed. Never mind that antidepressants don’t actually do anything constructive, apart from the fact that people believe they do (which has also been proved). And in their wake a lot of harm has been done.
source (https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/04/psychiatric-diagnosis-is-a-fraud-the-destructive-and-damaging-fiction-of-biological-diseases/) (Mad in America)
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I am glad you liked it.Life is just very tiring.One thing after another.Makes no sense.
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https://youtu.be/JvkMd4uENX8
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I found a PDF file of A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking by Wouter Kusters (translation).
I have not had access to keyboard except with library for 60 minutes per day, in which I have technical, practical things I also must take care of within the 60 minutes, hence the down and dirty link to the text I am exploring at the moment.