Author Topic: Trees with Knots Do Not Make Good Lumber  (Read 606 times)

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Trees with Knots Do Not Make Good Lumber
« on: January 10, 2018, 12:27:54 pm »
This is an essay I compiled back in 2012.  I had saved it at xhentric.wordpress.com

It exceeds the 20000 word limit so it broken into parts.

We talk about “mental illness” and “mood disorders” and labels such as “unemployable personalities,” so I know it helps those so labeled to point out that the primary source of mood disorders is NOT a failure in cognition.  Our so-called experts and professionals understand the basic causes of the bipolar and unipolar mood disorders no better than they understand schizophrenia. 

How does one overcome ignorance parading around as authority?

A tree with a knot in it does not make good lumber, so “capital” will consider such a tree useless.  An intellectual does not make a good “employee” – the captains of industry (and their lacky managers and engineers) will see “intellectuals” as useless.  Of course we would have it no other way.


Quote from: Paul M. Churchland:
A nation that is watching a large economic underclass slowly disintegrating, as a coherent society, under the influence of family breakdown, educational collapse, false heroes, drug addiction, organized crime, and nightly gang warfare, is a country that must look to its various institutions of socialization and contemplate their sometimes disasterous performance.  Worse still:  an entire generation is currently being socialized within the civil chaos described.  The momentum of our failure is not yet spent.

Back in 1996 I diagnosed myself as bipolar – back then we called it manic-depression.  I diagnosed myself from doing my own research while “earning my daily bread” as a maintenance worker for the State Parks of New Jersey [as a state slave who supposedly “had it dicked” simply because I lived in a huge historic house out in the woods next to the maintenance shop].  I felt oppressed, like I was the property of the state, a piece of equipment to be “gassed up and abused until the wheels fell off,” and those higher in the chain of command seemed to be disturbed by my habit of not “knowing my place.”  Well, the fuuckking wheels fell off!  That’s what happens to abused machinery.  Why would the authorities expect a complex human animal to be abused without some kind of consequences?   There are consequences.

This is my reality, and I have left a trail of notes that verify, at least to myself, the deep philosophical breakthroughs as well as the severe social disintegration, I experienced along the way.  Professionals confirmed my diagnosis back in 1996, and by 1998, after being thrown in a cage over some trouble with “the law,” I was removed from my position as state slave and granted the opportunity to attend the University, an opportunity I did not waste.  Unable to find work after graduating with honors, I bit the bullet, grabbed the bull by the horns, and declared myself not suited for the work-force.  On welfare, this was the only way to protect oneself from being harassed by social workers and forced into mind-numbing dead end jobs where co-workers, managers, and the general public seemed to just accept the Hell we had been shoved into.  They would expect me to just deal with it like they were.


I began to suspect that the professionals in psychiatric institutions and outpatient “treatment centers” knew much less about the politics of mental illness than I did.  In other words, I began to understand that I had been a great “student of life,” and that many people who had me at their mercy had not been very good students of life, that they were “petty,” small-minded, and ambitious.  There is no cognitive failure in mood disorders; even the symptoms of such “disorders” reflect the ambiguity of psychiatric labels.

Have I traversed the regions of madness to arrive where I’m at?   Whoa to you who inspects the mind of Mike Hentrich.  This ape-man has sought for the truth and found the truth to be a nightmare:  The earth has become a madhouse.  How ironic that the madness of capitalism and industrialization is pinned on the psychiatric client!   How very convenient for those who have the control of the masses.  It makes perfect dollars and cents.

One would have to be inside the aggregate organism labeled “psychotic” to truly grasp the irony and absurdity of proceeding as though the Subject needed to be cured.  As far as this Subject is concerned, the only thing I need to be cured of is the cure itself!  What kind of nightmare world is this where adults get shuffled like cattle in and out of rooms like so many pre-schoolers at a daycare center?  It’s a holding tank, and it is widespread.  All these day-programs and “out-patient treatment centers” are just “day jail” for poor people that the State doesn’t want wandering outdoors all day.

Most of the modern endeavors – outpatient centers, inpatient hospitals, and even the various social clubs for the sick – remain threatened by a common danger:  How does one avoid the institution’s reforming an asylum structure?  How will this structure produce anything but a subjugated group?

Quote from: David Cooper
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.


Quote from: Thomas Szasz
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.

Sigmund Freud (Sickmind Fraud) said that mental health is the ability to work and to love.  I guess Freud would see me as untamed and poorly Christianized.  The philosopher abhors marriage – marriage being a hinderance and a calamity on his path.  A married philosopher belongs in comedy!

I still have not given up my search for a disgruntled woman who would be able to handle my dark mind.  And yet, I am careful.  Becoming intimate with me might be disasterous unless the woman was able to handle me.  Most women can only handle me in very small doses.  If a woman is too young, I might get blamed for “driving her out of her mind” or something.  I am not kidding when I say I don’t want to hurt anyone.  I don’t want to be hurt by anyone else either.  I am tired … my heart just wants to stay calm …


Quote from: RD Laing (on Love)
"From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful."

“We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.”

“Insanity – a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”

“Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”

“Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.”

Quote from: Emile Cioran
The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them on the preposterous. Which does not keep our thoughts from being contaminated by the presence of the human, from stinking of the human, and from being unable to cleanse themselves of it.  He who is too weak to declare war on mankind must never forget, in his moments of fervor, to pray for a second Flood, more radical than the first.

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our own secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.  When we have no further illusions about ourselves, we retain none about others;  the unspeakable that we discover by introspection we extend, by legitimate generalization, to other mortals; depraved in their essence, we rightly endow them with all the vices which, oddly enough, most of us turn out to be unfit for or averse to ferreting out, to observing in ourselves or in others.

Think of all the anxiety caused by repressing our desires to spit in the faces of those in society who treat us like dogs or cattle.  Think of all the workers who repress the inclination to murder their bosses, the soldiers who repress the urge to destroy their commanding officers, and all the sexual desires repressed.  Depression occurs when anger is repressed.  We turn inward the wish to murder.

Sexual repression is an integral part of the way we are conditioned.  The anxiety associated with the fulfillment of sexual needs becomes part of the anxiety associated with all rebellious thoughts and actions.  The father is the representative of the State and of authority in the family nucleus.  I notice I am still rebelling against my father’s work ethic, refusing to acknowledge it as something desirable.

When a father bullies a sensitive son, and the son becomes depressed, this is because the son has not stood up to the father.  Organized religion usually supports the cruel patriarch.  One knows better than to fight from a position of weakness.  The son can rise out of depression by making a silent vow to himself to escape his father’s dominion at the first opportunity.   Even though politicians make parents and family sacred social institutions, the nuclear family is often part of the “public opinion machinery” that forms The Thought Police which colonizes the inner Primal Self, the wild self.   If one does not allow the wild animal self to fight that which thwarts its desires and impulses, the anger eventually gets directed inward, leading to certain suicide.

Suicide is simply the confession that life is too confusing and that one does not understand it at all.  One of the ways I have personally resisted the suicidal impulse is by cultivating my ability to get by on less.  This has turned out to be the most effective strategy to face and face down my own father’s work ethic.  In effect,  I simply had to respect my stubborn refusal to kiss the asses of the money-holders, and thereby turn my father’s work-ethic upside down.  In other words, where he believes such work will prove someone is hard, tough, and macho, I proclaim such hardness and machismo is pure cowardice.

[continued in next post]
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

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Nation of One

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Re: Trees with Knots Do Not Make Good Lumber (Part 2)
« Reply #1 on: January 10, 2018, 12:28:14 pm »

The television, the police, prisons, schools, hospitals, and factories serve to reinforce the power of the few and to coerce the many into acceptance of a brutal and degrading “rational” system.  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 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-**** 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?  Sorry Microsoft, manipulable is a word.  Microsoft is wrong as usual.

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).  Viewing virtually no television whatsoever, I have somehow managed to tune out of the frequency of the masses.  I have reached a much deeper frequency, one that is connected to older cycles, older rhythms.  There are others tuning into frequencies at this depth as well.  Our energy-fields make contact …  Our energies commune on a level hidden in plain view.  We don’t have to hide.  We are invisible.

The “beyonder” is constantly cross-examined, constantly subjected to interrogation.  At times the Beyonder loses patience with all this, and demands to be left alone, passing from one code to the other, deliberately scrambling the codes by quickly shifting from one to the other according to the questions asked, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next.
I heard a “mental health professional” ask a client, “And how do you feel when you start drooling from being over-medicated?”

What kind of assanine question is this?  Why not stop taking the **** medication when the side-effects are worse than the symptoms the medication is suppressing?  I have long ceased believing in the ego.  They are trying to **** me over again.  They are trying to **** us over.  We must not delude ourselves.  Freud never liked schizophrenics or manics or psychotics, and those employed in hospitals and treatment centers don’t like their clients there either.  Freud didn’t like resistance to being oedipalized, and tended to treat his clients/patients like lab animals.  I have seen this in the way some “mental health technicians,” “care takers,” “drivers,” and clerics treat clients in our current pharmacracy – how superior some “employees” think they are to us poor, wretched, confused creatures.  They think we are lazy and pathetic?  Some utterly mock us with ****-eating grins on their faces.

Slavery in all its forms is an essential economic pillar of the Industrial World, and has been from the beginning. The eradication of economic slavery would mean the collapse of the profit pyramid structure, the scarcity economics process on which sits the very socio-economic management of industrial civilization itself.

What is this scarcity economics?  In scarcity economics, lack is produced.  Lack – the sense of needing something one doesn’t possess – is produced, created, planned, and organized in and through social production.  The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the ART of a DOMINANT CLASS.  Media advertizes and creates this sense of lack.  Lack is a product of the imagination created by the power brokers and their servile media whores.

Mood disorders such as “bipolar disorder” are just patterns of behavior expressed by particular individuals in response to the conditions of the world.  Behavior patterns are not illnesses.   When doctors act as though they are “curing the sick” by suggesting compliance with taking medications, they are being dishonest.  Most likely they are even and especially dishonest with themselves and their peers.  They are terminating behavior patterns on the pretense that they are healing the sick.

It is more accurate to say that psychiatrists, therapists, case workers are punishing trouble-makers and coercing deviant individuals to behave in conventional ways.  Drug treatment of “mental disorders” does not benefit the patient;  it only benefits the established order of society, reinforcing the false hierarchy in a game that is rigged against the disenfranchized.
I am often beset with a sense of failure and frustration, but someone who never experiences contradictions and paradoxes is no serious thinker.  I suffer long periods of philosophical despair, depression, nervousness, and anxiety; but these periods are interspersed with periods of furious writing and research.  It’s not always scholarly research either.  I am a long time fan of black humor (also known as dark comedy).  Black humor is a form of humor that regards human suffering as absurd rather than pitiable,, or that considers human existence as ironic and pointless but also somehow comical.  Am I an absurdist?

Can we embrace the futility while also embracing survival?  It is important that we make some kind of effort to understand what is about to happen to us because it will have earth-shaking reprecussions on the way we live.  Is it possible to laugh out loud in the face of the crises we face?  People who have invested the bulk of their lives into paying for high-priced suburban houses will be in serious trouble.  The loss of their collective hallucinated wealth will be stupendous.  If large numbers of gorts cannot unload their suburban McMansions to some greater fools, then eventually these structures will be abandoned, becoming the slums of the future.
As a non-religious person, I am not very comfortable with the image of religious governance where the churches, mosques, and synogogues are the only large institutions left standing.  The automobile age will be over soon.  It’s in its death throes.  The entire modern industrial world is a gigantic perfumed corpse.  The primitive future will be about staying put for long periods of time between migrations.

[the rest ... self-censored out]
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

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Re: Trees with Knots Do Not Make Good Lumber
« Reply #2 on: February 13, 2021, 08:37:57 pm »
I was wondering if Holden has ever heard of the autobiographical story by HG Wells called Revenge of the Wage-Slave.

The article reminded me of you, Holden, and how your parents may have discouraged any interest you might have had in mathematics.  I imagine that they might discourage you from your readings as well.

Quote
In fact young Herbert largely educated himself, making good use of a long period of convalescence at the age of seven to develop a precocious enthusiasm for reading, which his parents did their best to discourage.
« Last Edit: February 13, 2021, 08:42:56 pm by Sticks and Stones »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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Dissolving Mist
« Reply #3 on: February 15, 2021, 11:30:30 am »
It is true. My parents do not like that I am continually reading. They just want to make sure that I am earn money. Wittgenstein, when he was in England, once visited a lady friend of his who was in a hospital because of some toothache related complication.When he asked her how she was feeling, she said that she felt like a dog that has been run over. Wittgenstein did not like her response and told her that she cannot possibly know how a dog feels when it is run over.

Now, in this particular instance, I think Wittgenstein is onto something. When you wrote about your toothache a few weeks back, I tried to imagine how you might be feeling. I tried to remember how I felt, in 2019, when I was suffering from toothache, but all I could muster was something quite vague. The one who is experiencing pain, at that particular moment of time, for him, the pain is the most certain thing in the whole wide world.

Sometimes I like to toy with the idea of reincarnation,like a kid might imagine that he is a knight,but, I know quite well that Kant is irrefutable. I mention this because I guess, this life time would probably turn out to be insufficient to study all the things,especially, mathematics, that I wish  to comprehend better. I would ,it goes without saying, do my best.

This might all just be  a bad dream and when I would open my eyes, I might find there is nothing around me.Not even a permanent self. Just mist. Mist which would disappear with the emergence of the Sun.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.