{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

Quote: "Do you know many people who think and talk the way you do?"

Hahahahahaha, NOPE! I never cross paths with anyone who doesn't regard me as a complete weirdo. Oh well, I'm quite used to it now, but it will never cease to be depressing to know that most people have nothing going on inside their heads.

Well,I don't know any contemporaries who are like me but I think if I consider the past then van Gogh could be said to be in my strange orbit,mind, I'm not saying I'm as talented as he was,only that I suffer as much as he did.Like him, I keep trying to come up with the art which will break the mould,but all I get is disappointment.And what hurts the most is that I'm ridiculed & mocked all the time.

I get mocked more than Jesus,when they were taking him to the cross.Mockery all the damn time.
Maybe I'd die like van Gogh too.

PS-Hey Mr H.this is Justin.Thanks for the link.

Strange oribit..anyone heard of the Amityville Horroer story-a house haunted by demons?The kind of life I have makes me want to believe in the devil & the demons.

Crazy Squirrel: 

I never cross paths with anyone who doesn't regard me as a complete weirdo.

I, for one, appreciate your attitude.  You have a great disdain for gorts.  You always knew exactly the kind of people I was referring to when I used the term gort.  They sit in audiences on television and worship celebrities.  They go berserk over new cars ... and some of the more deluded ones want to colonize outer space - those totally deluded gorts I call space monkeys.

 

Weird is a good thing here, Crazy Squirrel.  We are metaphysical mutants ... The way I see it, in being born we were involved in a horrible accident of cosmic proportions.  Now, since gort society depends upon sugar-coating this existential fact, there really are not many "places" where we can discuss the situation honestly without being bombarded with thought-destroying demands to "cheer up" or "stop whining". 

I am not suicidal, but I am not going to believe anyone's life is anything but unpleasant.  It's built into our design ...  Going through life feeling weird ... I propose that this is universal.  I think that maybe everyone is weird, that life itself is weird. 

The problem with gort society is that the gorts behave as if all is as it should be ... they are acclimated to living in Hell ... and may not even think too much about it, preferring to be deluded by the lies they chant daily.  I really think it is a sign of merit to be out of sync with the mainstream.  They are driving full speed over the cliff, and instead of applying the brakes, they're speeding up. 

It's probably worse than we even imagine ... Schools exist to produce consumers who want to conform to mass society.  When we see this world for what it is, it can be very creepy.  Much like the science-fiction horror story Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it can't hurt us to talk about these feelings of not being down with what is transpiring. 

The whole point of that book was that the way human beings live is not much different than the way the space pods would live.  What is the difference? 

The gorts don't point at us and scream, but on some level they seem to be aware of one who is "not participating" ...

Thank you for acknowledging the fact that we have been recognized as not conforming to the status quo and most likely have been targeted.  It's not really a conspiracy.  It's done systematically and all out in the open.

[I just type "Adorno" in the local search engine at xhentric.wordpress.com and find exactly what I am looking for.]

Horkheimer and Adorno articulate the situation I experience in everyday life in the following:

“Anyone who does not conform is condemned to an economic impotence which is prolonged in the intellectual powerlessness of the eccentric loner. Disconnected from the mainstream, he is easily convicted of inadequacy.”


From Enlightenment and Deception:

“The most intimate reactions of human beings become so entirely reified, even to themselves, that the idea of anything peculiar to them survives only in extreme abstraction: personality means hardly more than dazzling white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions. That is the triumph of advertizing in the culture industry: the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false.”

What keeps the runners racing around the track?  Mass Mentality.  Herd Morality. Mass mentality is addicted to stupidity ... systematic stupidity.  Mass mentality is not interested in serious philosophical analyses of the world.   A philosopher, with serious intellectual activities, would not become a popular icon as much as a rock star with a bunch of simply stated slogans.  Even when a serious thinker is able to reach large numbers of other serious thinkers, the mass mentality will reduce his or her thought into simple slogans or simple one-dimensional labels: nihilist, antinatalist, pessimist, prophet of doom and gloom, Nazi sympathizer, misogynistic misanthrope, seriously disturbed individual with mental disorders ...

Mass culture cannot live without the image of an enemy.  The enemy of the model citizen is the odd loner who has certain quirks and weird ideas.  While the crowd is cheering on their favorite team, the creepy weirdo (enemy of mass [gort] society) is morbidly contemplating on the nature of infinity and why there is a world rather than not.  While the masses are worshiping their shiny new gort-mobiles, the creepy weirdo (enemy of mass [gort] society) is arranging his or her life in such a way as to use a car as little as possible.  The masses are using tablets and touch screens.  The weirdo makes due with (and actually prefers) the old school dinosaur model ... which is why Bill Gates and his Merry Code-Monkeys no longer support XP and push operating systems that require high-end hardware ... to force the weirdo geeks into eternal consumption of "the new" ...

You see how its all connected, that it is not some mysterious conspiracy, but is all done systematically in the light of day, in church basements, in schools and factories and workplaces and hospitals: conform or be cast out ... subdivisions.  Nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone.

This image of the other, the different, as the enemy is what sustains mass [gort] culture.  Drink cola and watch tv.  Order a pizza.  Mass [gort] culture depicts the minorities as sleeping threats who have suspicious loyalties.  What - you don't have a supervisor?  No significant other to keep an eye on where your head is at?  You need help!  You need a therapist.  You need religion or something.  Have you tried A.A. or a support group for people who think too much?

It is easy now for mass media (including public education and popular religion) to point at the Nazi Devil and speak of the injustice that was done to the Jews, but at the same time mass [gort] culture reproduces other imaginary enemies out of defenseless minorities whose members are seen more like time bombs waiting to explode rather than individual human beings. (Ahmed 2008).

I am starting to think that the new imaginary enemy in postmodern mass industrial society will be the "mentally ill" or the "emotionally disturbed" since this category has no class or race or nationality.  Anyone can be tagged mentally ill to discredit them politically, and hence, place them outside the gort mass and at the mercy of the gort officials and gort professionals.

Welcome to the Machine ...

(From Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund)

“Are you scared?  Do you notice something?  Yes, the world is full of death, full of death.  Death sits on every fence, stands behind every tree.  Building walls and dormitories and churches won’t keep death out; death looks in through the window, laughing, knowing every one of you.”

   “Go ahead, say your evening prayers, say your morning prayers, sing your psalms, gather    herbs in your laboratory, collect books in your libraries.  Are you fasting, my friend?     He’ll lend you a hand, our old friend, the Reaper.  He’ll strip you to the bones.  Run, run    to the fields and see that your bones stay together.  They’re trying to escape, they don’t    want to be with us.  Our poor bones want to be free, it all wants to go to the devil.  The    crows are sitting in the trees.”

even without  the corporations & capitalism, human life by its very nature is evil,if we had socialism of the most benevolent kind,I am sure some of the human misery will get reduced, but even then I’d choose death over life.

You understand the dilemma.  I suspect that it has never been and never will be a good time to be born into the world, into any world.

This is, of course, impossible to prove, although David Benatar does go through a general explanation of why this is so.  I know it is difficult for those of us who recognize the wretchedness of capitalism and consumerism to consider the possibility that there is no solution to the problem of suffering and "evil" ...

Hell, long before Benatar, Schopenhauer asks us to consider two animals, one who is engaged in eating the other.  The pleasure the eater experiences must be miniscule to the pain of the one being eaten.  There are degrees to suffering.  Have you seen Derrick Jensen's book about animals in zoos?  They look extremely angry and even demoralized.  Which is worse, the terrors of the jungle or the horror of being a prisoner in a zoo?

I think socialism would at least acknowledge the inherent suffering and try to provide for the basics for as many people as possible, but no government can protect its citizens against the existential horror of existence itself.  You are right.  Hence, our defeatism.