This is a post I've been meaning to do for awhile. Given that I'm starting it at about midnight (by the way--my new power cord works! my compy is back! huzzah!), it counts as both Monday and Tuesday.
At work, there is a computer upstairs which has a large playlist of songs on permanent shuffle. Most of these songs are pleasant enough. There are just a few, however, which stick in my craw. The one I have mentioned most often is a song by the band Simple Plan called "Welcome to My Life." For those of you not curious enough, or too wise, to follow the link to the full lyrics, here's the first verse and chorus:
---
Do you ever feel like breaking down?
Do you ever feel out of place?
Like somehow you just don't belong
And no one understands you
Do you ever wanna runaway?
Do you lock yourself in your room?
With the radio on turned up so loud
That no one hears you screaming
No you don't know what it's like
When nothing feels all right
You don't know what it's like
To be like me
To be hurt
To feel lost
To be left out in the dark
To be kicked when you're down
To feel like you've been pushed around
To be on the edge of breaking down
And no one's there to save you
No you don't know what it's like
Welcome to my life
---
Awhile ago Amber explained to me the true definition of "scandal". In Catholic parlance, a scandal is something which encourages others to sin.
This particular set of lyrics is scandalous, to me, in the extreme. It encourages people to feel self-pity and resentment, and to cut themselves off from others. It promotes a bitter state of mind in which a person makes the whole world their enemy because they are feeling lonely and depressed.
It asserts that when you're feeling lonely and depressed, the solution is to isolate yourself from others and sulk among your many possessions. Also, the best way to make others like and respect you more is to angrily inform them they cannot possibly relate to the emotional pain you are experiencing. Oh, without leaving any room for the possibility that others might also experience emotional pain.
For goodness' sake, the speaker in this song has a room of his own with a door that locks. He has a radio which he can turn up to scream-drowning-out volume, presumably without adverse consequences. How many of the listeners who hear--and we may assume, empathize with--these selfish assertions lack those same comforts?
That's really the irony, though. That this song whose main message is, "wah, wah, you don't understand me and I'm all alone and will wallow in my misery" is popular because people empathize with it. In other words, many, many people can understand precisely "what it's like" because they share the same feelings of isolation and loneliness. Thus the fact that the song is popular enough to make it onto my store's iTunes refutes its main premise.
Here is another song, also on the playlist at work, which approaches almost the same set of feelings but does so in a way which is much more positive. It is "Story of my Life" by Smashmouth.
---
I get to the party, but I'm too late
And I got stood up on my very first date
I listen to country and everybody goes rock
I get to the dance floor, that's when the music stops
It doesn't matter what I do, I just can't seem to win
But here I go again
And I say
Hey that's the story of my life
I had a good plan but it didn't go right
Oh no I'm overdrawn
I check my account and the money's all gone
Why me I don't know what to think
I finally get aboard and the whole boat sinks
Seems to be the story of my life
---
Here the speaker takes an almost amused attitude towards his misfortunes. He doesn't accuse others of not being able to understand his misfortunes; rather, he describes them and implicitly invites others to share in his frustration. This is reinforced by the fact that multiple voices chime in to sing the chorus, mimicking the internal voices of listeners who see their own stories reflected in the words to the song.
There's really not much in the way of instruction or even encouragement in this song--not in so many words. Instead it comforts those who are experiencing frustration and loneliness with the message that they are not alone, that their frustration is universal. Also, I like to think there's a certain amount of self-aware irony here. "Sure, I've got troubles just like these," the listener is meant to think. "Yet the guy who wrote this is a famous musician who probably has lots of money and a hot girlfriend, so maybe things won't stay this bad!"
Which is what pop music is supposed to be all about. It doesn't make you think very hard, doesn't shake up your mind or wring out your deepest emotions. It just makes you feel a little better and a little more able to face the frustrations of the day.
Showing posts with label tuesdays with abhorrent fiends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tuesdays with abhorrent fiends. Show all posts
this is what passes for poetry these days
Okay. This is truly one of those "more in sorrow than in anger" moments. I haven't been back to Quizilla for several years and freely admit it was silly to spend so much time there. User-generated quizzes which ask you things like "Is your favorite color red, blue, yellow or green?" and then say "You are aligned with the element of earth!" if you answer green are...yeah. They're an incredible waste of time and mostly only tell you about the assumptions of the quizmaker.
Apparently, though, this site on which I wasted far too much time while in college has now expanded into another area: user-generated poetry.
These are the most popular poems on Quizilla. Here, for um...my edification, and your, ah...amusement? is the number one top rated poem on that website right now. It is entitled "The Dark Rain of My Miasmic Sou--" oh, wait, no. That's from the Kingdom of Loathing.
Inspiration: The Words Of The Broken Heart
by alexknight629
"Nothing is more powerful than the words of a broken heart.
The best inspiration is found when you truly fall apart. "
The heart of a shattered girl written out on paper.
Written at three in the morning under the light of a single taper.
The tears she sheds as thick as ink.
As her sanity is brought to the brink.
She may not cause herself physical harm.
But for anyone who cares there is still reason for alarm.
Inside, this girl, she's so sick of trying.
Wishing that only she could be dying.
Just read her words, they're written everywhere.
Can't you see she just wants someone to show they care?
But you'll never see the pain she locks inside
All the nights she stayed up and did nothing but cried.
She'll be with you all day,
Pretending everything is okay.
But if you look deep within,
You'd see what lies underneath her grin.
The heart of cold she does not show.
No one really has to know.
Her writings back again, better than ever.
For a while there is had begun to wither.
Happiness had taken hold.
But now her heart is black and cold.
Full of inspiration, Where to start?
Her words as strong as the broken heart.
---
I've run into poetry elsewhere around the blogosphere from time to time--poetry written by adults which was nonetheless not very good. Since leaving Gaia Online, though, I've never had an example of an unpolished work by a 14-year-old with which to explain why poetry is really important. Or rather, teaching people how to write good poetry is important.
People need poetry. We freaking need it. If a human being has sufficient grasp of any language by the time that human being reaches puberty, and has spare time between work, sleep and perhaps dodging bullets to compose it, there is about (guesstimating based on my own unscientific observations) a one in three chance that said human being will generate poetry. Even if they never show it to anyone else.
Poetry is used for taking mental states--the organized structures of emotion, memory, and expectation which provide the foundation for the formulation of thoughts--and altering them. Good poetry enables the writer and reader to do this efficiently, effectively and (I aver) to some worthwhile purpose. Yes, even if that purpose is taking a horrible thought and getting it outside one's mind so as to feel less helpless in the face of it.
This poem is, as I said, not very good. It is far from excellent. It is not, however entirely bad--it uses images somewhat, attempts to make rhymes, and displays a mental state with enough clarity that one can see it to poke at it.
There are times, though, when I wonder if American people who get into poetry writing really think this is all there is. As though the really good stuff written by poets of the times of old is gone forever--or as though there isn't any difference. Dangit, I know I could be better, I know I need to keep working at it. Even though it's a tool I drag out and apply to my mind whenever I face an especially tangly emotional problem, I pay attention to keeping its edges sharp. A scalpel which leaves a jagged edge is not the best thing for delicate surgery; it's likely to promote infection and leave scars.
Is Megan going to get older, though, and just keep writing the same sorts of thing over and over, believing it's good because no one ever says "you know, that pair of rhyme words is kinda boring, maybe also think about scansion a bit"? Will she try to get better, or get bored with poetry and just stop, robbing us of a potentially rather good poet? Would we notice?
I'm pretty sure that not noticing the fact that we don't cultivate our potential good poets or notice when there aren't many says something bad about America. This could, however, just be my personal bias. Also my desire to be paid enough to live off of in exchange for teaching people how to write good poetry. I would love to live in an America, in a Chicago, where this could be the case.
Who knows. XP It's past my bedtime anyway.
Apparently, though, this site on which I wasted far too much time while in college has now expanded into another area: user-generated poetry.
These are the most popular poems on Quizilla. Here, for um...my edification, and your, ah...amusement? is the number one top rated poem on that website right now. It is entitled "The Dark Rain of My Miasmic Sou--" oh, wait, no. That's from the Kingdom of Loathing.
Inspiration: The Words Of The Broken Heart
by alexknight629
"Nothing is more powerful than the words of a broken heart.
The best inspiration is found when you truly fall apart. "
The heart of a shattered girl written out on paper.
Written at three in the morning under the light of a single taper.
The tears she sheds as thick as ink.
As her sanity is brought to the brink.
She may not cause herself physical harm.
But for anyone who cares there is still reason for alarm.
Inside, this girl, she's so sick of trying.
Wishing that only she could be dying.
Just read her words, they're written everywhere.
Can't you see she just wants someone to show they care?
But you'll never see the pain she locks inside
All the nights she stayed up and did nothing but cried.
She'll be with you all day,
Pretending everything is okay.
But if you look deep within,
You'd see what lies underneath her grin.
The heart of cold she does not show.
No one really has to know.
Her writings back again, better than ever.
For a while there is had begun to wither.
Happiness had taken hold.
But now her heart is black and cold.
Full of inspiration, Where to start?
Her words as strong as the broken heart.
---
I've run into poetry elsewhere around the blogosphere from time to time--poetry written by adults which was nonetheless not very good. Since leaving Gaia Online, though, I've never had an example of an unpolished work by a 14-year-old with which to explain why poetry is really important. Or rather, teaching people how to write good poetry is important.
People need poetry. We freaking need it. If a human being has sufficient grasp of any language by the time that human being reaches puberty, and has spare time between work, sleep and perhaps dodging bullets to compose it, there is about (guesstimating based on my own unscientific observations) a one in three chance that said human being will generate poetry. Even if they never show it to anyone else.
Poetry is used for taking mental states--the organized structures of emotion, memory, and expectation which provide the foundation for the formulation of thoughts--and altering them. Good poetry enables the writer and reader to do this efficiently, effectively and (I aver) to some worthwhile purpose. Yes, even if that purpose is taking a horrible thought and getting it outside one's mind so as to feel less helpless in the face of it.
This poem is, as I said, not very good. It is far from excellent. It is not, however entirely bad--it uses images somewhat, attempts to make rhymes, and displays a mental state with enough clarity that one can see it to poke at it.
There are times, though, when I wonder if American people who get into poetry writing really think this is all there is. As though the really good stuff written by poets of the times of old is gone forever--or as though there isn't any difference. Dangit, I know I could be better, I know I need to keep working at it. Even though it's a tool I drag out and apply to my mind whenever I face an especially tangly emotional problem, I pay attention to keeping its edges sharp. A scalpel which leaves a jagged edge is not the best thing for delicate surgery; it's likely to promote infection and leave scars.
Is Megan going to get older, though, and just keep writing the same sorts of thing over and over, believing it's good because no one ever says "you know, that pair of rhyme words is kinda boring, maybe also think about scansion a bit"? Will she try to get better, or get bored with poetry and just stop, robbing us of a potentially rather good poet? Would we notice?
I'm pretty sure that not noticing the fact that we don't cultivate our potential good poets or notice when there aren't many says something bad about America. This could, however, just be my personal bias. Also my desire to be paid enough to live off of in exchange for teaching people how to write good poetry. I would love to live in an America, in a Chicago, where this could be the case.
Who knows. XP It's past my bedtime anyway.
Things on which everyone can agree
Thanks to Amber I have gotten some good sidebar links of conservatives who (unlike Bill Cooper, who Geds is deconstructing in a more systematic way) are not weird and extreme, I have noticed some things. Namely, that conservatives and liberals tend to pay attention to different news items. This is not surprising, since I imagine our respective providers of news--Fox News for the reds and, somewhat ironically, The Daily Show for the blues--tend to focus primarily on those items which support their chosen ethos.
However, there are some things on which we all seem to agree.
I wish here to make mention of one of those things. Other things will follow in later posts. (Stay on the lookout for post #2: Brainwashing children is bad.)
Thing#1: Rape is bad.
Here is a conservative blogger decrying a recent Playboy article which lists a top 10 conservative female pundits one might wish to "hate f***." Granted, under the right controlled circumstances, given a partner with whom one already has established limits, angry sex can in theory be fun. It offers a way to let aggressive emotions percolate out of the psyche in a constructive and enjoyable fashion. And for those of us who maintain an extremely rigid boundary between fantasy and reality (said rigidity being necessary because the line between fantasy and reality is frequently tested) the concept of "hate f***" is not entirely repulsive. Because it is understood to exist only on the fantasy side of that line. In which realm, as in the world of cartoons, all participants are willing, and elements of illusory non-consensuality are said imaginary participants' way of working through their emotional issues.
In short, while such a list might well adorn the personal blog of an individual who presumes a certain level of fantasy-making sophistication in his or her audience, it should MOST CERTAINLY NOT be an article in Playboy magazine. Which is read by impressionable young men, middle-aged men who may not be accustomed to using their critical thinking skills, and curious teenage girls who pilfer pornographic magazines from their neighbors in hopes of seeing someone else's awesome boobies. (Guess which category I have had occasion to fall into.) None of whom should be given the idea that rape is cool. Rape is reprehensible. We can all agree on that.
Here on the other hand is a story about a lesbian who was gang raped shortly after the passage of California's Prop 8. Granted, this act of violence is atypical, the act of extremists who take an ideological position to a weird place way beyond its logical conclusion. However, despite the fact that rape as a "punishment" for homosexuality is both extreme and not sanctioned by any defense-of-hetero-marriage type group, anti-gay hate crime is still pretty friggin common. Your average person who thinks homosexuality is a sin would probably say, "look, if you can't be attracted to the opposite sex, the best thing to do is join a church, pray to God for healing, and be celibate and we will give you lots of love and support!" Yet it is very easy for a person to drift from the idea that homosexual acts are sinful to the idea that people with homosexual desires are inherently wicked and somehow less than human. If a person has in themselves large amounts of bitterness and unchecked aggression, even if they don't otherwise have an animus against gays, gays can become a target of convenience because they represent something "everyone" "knows" is "evil."
So how does a religious group police itself so as to weed out those who take indictment of a sexual orientation as a license to commit violent acts against those who are so oriented? How does an ideological group weed out those of its members who are perfectly willing to dehumanize their conservative opponents to the point where encouragement of rape seems hilarious rather than appalling? Is it as easy (and difficult) as holding ourselves and our siblings-in-metaphorical-arms to a higher standard of discourse?
However, there are some things on which we all seem to agree.
I wish here to make mention of one of those things. Other things will follow in later posts. (Stay on the lookout for post #2: Brainwashing children is bad.)
Thing#1: Rape is bad.
Here is a conservative blogger decrying a recent Playboy article which lists a top 10 conservative female pundits one might wish to "hate f***." Granted, under the right controlled circumstances, given a partner with whom one already has established limits, angry sex can in theory be fun. It offers a way to let aggressive emotions percolate out of the psyche in a constructive and enjoyable fashion. And for those of us who maintain an extremely rigid boundary between fantasy and reality (said rigidity being necessary because the line between fantasy and reality is frequently tested) the concept of "hate f***" is not entirely repulsive. Because it is understood to exist only on the fantasy side of that line. In which realm, as in the world of cartoons, all participants are willing, and elements of illusory non-consensuality are said imaginary participants' way of working through their emotional issues.
In short, while such a list might well adorn the personal blog of an individual who presumes a certain level of fantasy-making sophistication in his or her audience, it should MOST CERTAINLY NOT be an article in Playboy magazine. Which is read by impressionable young men, middle-aged men who may not be accustomed to using their critical thinking skills, and curious teenage girls who pilfer pornographic magazines from their neighbors in hopes of seeing someone else's awesome boobies. (Guess which category I have had occasion to fall into.) None of whom should be given the idea that rape is cool. Rape is reprehensible. We can all agree on that.
Here on the other hand is a story about a lesbian who was gang raped shortly after the passage of California's Prop 8. Granted, this act of violence is atypical, the act of extremists who take an ideological position to a weird place way beyond its logical conclusion. However, despite the fact that rape as a "punishment" for homosexuality is both extreme and not sanctioned by any defense-of-hetero-marriage type group, anti-gay hate crime is still pretty friggin common. Your average person who thinks homosexuality is a sin would probably say, "look, if you can't be attracted to the opposite sex, the best thing to do is join a church, pray to God for healing, and be celibate and we will give you lots of love and support!" Yet it is very easy for a person to drift from the idea that homosexual acts are sinful to the idea that people with homosexual desires are inherently wicked and somehow less than human. If a person has in themselves large amounts of bitterness and unchecked aggression, even if they don't otherwise have an animus against gays, gays can become a target of convenience because they represent something "everyone" "knows" is "evil."
So how does a religious group police itself so as to weed out those who take indictment of a sexual orientation as a license to commit violent acts against those who are so oriented? How does an ideological group weed out those of its members who are perfectly willing to dehumanize their conservative opponents to the point where encouragement of rape seems hilarious rather than appalling? Is it as easy (and difficult) as holding ourselves and our siblings-in-metaphorical-arms to a higher standard of discourse?
Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol. 51: acting lessons
Greetings y'all.
Despite beautiful local fireworks and a trip to Wisconsin to see my newest cousin, Independence Day passed without a post from me. (Although I was able to enjoy KoL's Dependence Day.) But that is okay, because Geds has posted a wonderful and captivating series about the American Civil war called Four Days in July. If you don't feel like scrolling to the bottom, you can start at the first post in the series, here.
I am working on American Idol posts, but have been lethargic and playing tons of Heroes of Might and Magic IV instead of writing stuff. I will post those eventually, in case they will be interesting.
Our local mental health place has experienced massive budget cutbacks--cutbacks with consequences. To wit, they are no longer able to give psychiatric care for free to people without insurance. Namely us. So after meeting some nice intake counselors, generating pages and pages of notes for our files, meeting psychiatrists, and getting on some meds that actually help us, we are now right back where we started.
My last appointment with the psychiatrist happened to fall on the same day the staff got the news of their budget cuts. I had wondered why she handed me enough meds to last me the next six weeks when my next appointment was only in three weeks, but it makes sense now. Nice of her. And since me and Dave are on the same meds, when we start to run low we can pool our resources for maximum duration.
I took the news pretty calmly; meds and counseling are very helpful but not life-threatening if I have to go without. Some of the clinic's other patients are not in the same boat, though. The counselor who brought me up to speed on the budget cutbacks said there'd been one very angry man who stood around in the lobby shouting after he got the news. I imagined a situation he might have been in; homeless, jobless, with a serious set of crossed brain wires. Suddenly told there would be no more help for him. Hell, I'd've been shouting too.
The previous week Dave and I had gone to the nearest Department of Human Services office to apply for welfare. Right off the bat, hearing that I am getting money from unemployment and am not disabled, the lady there told me I would only qualify for food stamps, not cash assistance or medical assistance. Dave might qualify for all three, since he has no income.
But to even apply for food stamps I need written proof of all my expenses, including rent. Which is kind of a problem, since the lease was between Dad and the landlord, and I just kind of kept on paying the rent after Dad died. So I have no written proof of anything from him; I had to call and ask him. Difficult, because even medicated, talking to hearing from, or otherwise dealing with our landlord throws me into a fearful state of mind. He seems like a nice and reasonable guy and has only once mentioned the possibility of us having to move out, despite the fact that I'm now a month and half behind on the rent and have been for some time. However, he'd be within his rights to kick us to the curb whenever he gets fed up, and I know it. I am acutely and fearfully conscious of this fact whenever I see his name on our caller ID. So far, though, I've either been lucky, have subconsciously guessed his schedule, or have developed some minor super power which allows me to only call him at times when I can get his voicemail. Hopefully he will send us a document we can use without getting too irritated.
There are some more hoops we can jump through to try to get state aid, though. The counselor who explained it to me gave me a letter which basically states "This person is in need of psychiatric care", and helped me find a local DHS office nearby which might be more sympathetic. She kind of walked me through some strategies for how to present myself and my case which might help.
First of all, me and Dave shouldn't come as a couple next time--that gives an impression of stability, which while it may be true in an emotional sense, does not translate for us into financial stability. Second, I need to talk about my problems and why I need mental health care in a way that makes me sound like a patient. I tried out some phrasings on her, and she said my natural way of speaking sounds way too much like therapist lingo and would sound coached. So she tried re-stating my issues in more normal-sounding words: "you know, I've been really depressed ever since my father committed suicide, and it's been so hard to find a job." And despite the seriousness of the subject I burst out laughing. She started laughing too. How funny it is, she said, that I'm coaching you on how not to sound coached. I said it was all about image, just like with homeless guys begging for change. I could be a genuine vet with two legs missing, but unless I have a loud voice and a jingling cup with change in it, people aren't gonna give me their money.
So much of everything is about image, is about acting the part so that people will put you into the role you wish to play. Write a resume, write a cover letter, so that you appear to be a consummate professional, eager to work your tail off and capable enough to tackle any task. Apply for public aid, and present yourself as a poor helpless person whose only hope for survival lies in a government program.
Every person has many facets, and though I am a capable (and after months of inactivity, most eager!) employee, I also hover on the brink of eviction, wondering which utility will be cut off first. So yes, all of these things are true. But what matters in any given endeavor is how true they appear to be.
Despite beautiful local fireworks and a trip to Wisconsin to see my newest cousin, Independence Day passed without a post from me. (Although I was able to enjoy KoL's Dependence Day.) But that is okay, because Geds has posted a wonderful and captivating series about the American Civil war called Four Days in July. If you don't feel like scrolling to the bottom, you can start at the first post in the series, here.
I am working on American Idol posts, but have been lethargic and playing tons of Heroes of Might and Magic IV instead of writing stuff. I will post those eventually, in case they will be interesting.
Our local mental health place has experienced massive budget cutbacks--cutbacks with consequences. To wit, they are no longer able to give psychiatric care for free to people without insurance. Namely us. So after meeting some nice intake counselors, generating pages and pages of notes for our files, meeting psychiatrists, and getting on some meds that actually help us, we are now right back where we started.
My last appointment with the psychiatrist happened to fall on the same day the staff got the news of their budget cuts. I had wondered why she handed me enough meds to last me the next six weeks when my next appointment was only in three weeks, but it makes sense now. Nice of her. And since me and Dave are on the same meds, when we start to run low we can pool our resources for maximum duration.
I took the news pretty calmly; meds and counseling are very helpful but not life-threatening if I have to go without. Some of the clinic's other patients are not in the same boat, though. The counselor who brought me up to speed on the budget cutbacks said there'd been one very angry man who stood around in the lobby shouting after he got the news. I imagined a situation he might have been in; homeless, jobless, with a serious set of crossed brain wires. Suddenly told there would be no more help for him. Hell, I'd've been shouting too.
The previous week Dave and I had gone to the nearest Department of Human Services office to apply for welfare. Right off the bat, hearing that I am getting money from unemployment and am not disabled, the lady there told me I would only qualify for food stamps, not cash assistance or medical assistance. Dave might qualify for all three, since he has no income.
But to even apply for food stamps I need written proof of all my expenses, including rent. Which is kind of a problem, since the lease was between Dad and the landlord, and I just kind of kept on paying the rent after Dad died. So I have no written proof of anything from him; I had to call and ask him. Difficult, because even medicated, talking to hearing from, or otherwise dealing with our landlord throws me into a fearful state of mind. He seems like a nice and reasonable guy and has only once mentioned the possibility of us having to move out, despite the fact that I'm now a month and half behind on the rent and have been for some time. However, he'd be within his rights to kick us to the curb whenever he gets fed up, and I know it. I am acutely and fearfully conscious of this fact whenever I see his name on our caller ID. So far, though, I've either been lucky, have subconsciously guessed his schedule, or have developed some minor super power which allows me to only call him at times when I can get his voicemail. Hopefully he will send us a document we can use without getting too irritated.
There are some more hoops we can jump through to try to get state aid, though. The counselor who explained it to me gave me a letter which basically states "This person is in need of psychiatric care", and helped me find a local DHS office nearby which might be more sympathetic. She kind of walked me through some strategies for how to present myself and my case which might help.
First of all, me and Dave shouldn't come as a couple next time--that gives an impression of stability, which while it may be true in an emotional sense, does not translate for us into financial stability. Second, I need to talk about my problems and why I need mental health care in a way that makes me sound like a patient. I tried out some phrasings on her, and she said my natural way of speaking sounds way too much like therapist lingo and would sound coached. So she tried re-stating my issues in more normal-sounding words: "you know, I've been really depressed ever since my father committed suicide, and it's been so hard to find a job." And despite the seriousness of the subject I burst out laughing. She started laughing too. How funny it is, she said, that I'm coaching you on how not to sound coached. I said it was all about image, just like with homeless guys begging for change. I could be a genuine vet with two legs missing, but unless I have a loud voice and a jingling cup with change in it, people aren't gonna give me their money.
So much of everything is about image, is about acting the part so that people will put you into the role you wish to play. Write a resume, write a cover letter, so that you appear to be a consummate professional, eager to work your tail off and capable enough to tackle any task. Apply for public aid, and present yourself as a poor helpless person whose only hope for survival lies in a government program.
Every person has many facets, and though I am a capable (and after months of inactivity, most eager!) employee, I also hover on the brink of eviction, wondering which utility will be cut off first. So yes, all of these things are true. But what matters in any given endeavor is how true they appear to be.
Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol. 50: adventures in medicine, with dream log
"I hide behind curtains 'cause I have a fear of being stabbed."
~ Chief Wiggum as Polonius, when the Simpsons did Hamlet
So today is a big day in my personal timeline: I have lost my med virginity. Meaning that today, for the first time ever, I took psychoactive meds prescribed to me by a psychiatrist.
And yes, there is a big difference between taking meds prescribed for you by a doctor and taking recreational mind-altering substances you procured yourself, even considering the very limited extent to which I have done the latter. Leaving aside things like side affects and potentials for addiction, the difference is largely one of intent and expectation. With recreational substances, the intent is to escape from consciousness of self and everyday reality. With a prescribed substance, the intent is to more fully experience those realities. People I know have experienced both sides of that coin with one and the same substance, for example in the case of aderol. And the really cool documentary Hoffman's Potion (link to video) asserts the same is true of LSD: used correctly with a doctor's supervision, it can be beneficial. Used irresponsibly in the wrong situation, it can do a lot of damage. It's one I haven't tried, but the documentary kind of made me wish doctors were allowed to use it.
As for my new pills (these ones), it'll be at least a week before I know what effects they will have. My mind completes the chain of thought without needing to be asked:
Pill delivers chemical to bloodstream.
Bloodstream transports chemical to brain.
Brain alters balance of various hormones used in the signaling of emotional states.
Emotional states of the preferred type become chemically easier to enter into, improving the personality's overall ability to confront external reality.
It is a good thing, to do this. Lots of people I know, love, and/or respect are now or have been psychiatrically medicated at various times. Family members. Friends and friends on hiatus. I don't attach a negative stigma to seeking out psychiatric care, and I like to think I don't attach a negative stigma to taking doctor-approved pills.
The fact that it feels like such a big deal to me, though, makes me feel in turn like I'm some kind of wuss. Because most of the people I know have had far more exciting adventures in psychiatric medicine. (Although some of those adventures had unpleasant results, which is part of what makes me so suspicious.) Because I'm getting growly about trying out a very small dose of one of the least harsh SSRIs on the market at the late, late age of 27. Because I can refer back, in my mind, to the Rolodex of disordered postcards I call a memory, and wonder if there may have been other periods of time in my life when a stint on the smiley pills might have done me some good.
But I don't like it and it is galling!
When dealing with my own psychology has principally to do with cognitive stuff, that is comfortable territory for me. Or comfortable discomfort, at worst. I know there's bad scary things in my personality, parts of me that don't like the rest of me or anybody else. For the most part I know where they are, to a certain extent how they got there, and increasingly, as the work progresses, how they work and what I can do to make them function properly. Oh, I complain a lot, but my intent is for it to be the useful sort. The kind where you break off in mid-sentence to say, "...hey, wait, that could actually work." If I have a disturbing dream, like I did the sleeptime before last, it usually only takes me a few days to figure out which issues my brain was trying to tell me about.
As for the dream, this paragraph should suffice. If you know Pearl and she's ever told you about her Grape Escape dream from way back in the day, or if you watch this video and use your imagination (commercial for Grape Escape), it started out a little like that. Only with Lego people and different torture devices. *shudders* Dangit, in real life you can't feel Lego people's pain or hear them screaming when they get horribly killed. That dream eventually did have a good ending, although the landscape had to be reformatted like three times to get there. At first I just watched, helpless, while bad stuff happened. There was a brief interlude where pushy, sales-skills-having people who conformed to the ideals of corporate successfulness were faxed to heaven on a giant fax machine. Then there kept being dream-people in awful situations, and when I saw them I would want something to happen to them. As soon as I did, my perspective would switch to inside that dream-person, and I'd experience the results of my decision. After this, the landscape would change to a different situation. If I'd made different choices the dream could have been a lot worse. Instead, the Amish c-section was successful and the mother survived (barely) as well as the baby. The technicians escaped from the evil building of death and deactivated the monstergate on the way out. The boss of the spikey spheres level was defeated and the key to the door at the end was recovered before the boss respawned. Me and Dave rescued the fluffy little dog from the woods and gave its fur a spiffy new hairstyle instead of shooting it because we'd been sent to kill coyotes. And when we returned to base camp, the fashion instructor complimented my spiffy new hairstyle. Oh, foolish brain. It hasn't been enough days yet to put it all together, but soon I will figure out exactly why it is I'm so afraid to admit that I'm a freaking adult.
Changing that mutable mental landscape with chemicals, though, feels like taking the problem out of my hands. Meds are a tool I don't myself know how to properly wield. I am deeply distrustful of letting anybody else wield a tool which directly impacts my mental state and which I don't myself know how to use. I think that's the principal reason why it feels like such a big deal. That, and resorting to the use of this tool to bludgeon at the big stupid rock of my own brain means that the tools I already possess have proved insufficient to the task. So my pride is ouched, not merely my sense of excessive caution.
But I have made my decision. Hopefully, like the ones I made while fast asleep, it will prove to have been the right one.
Here's to happier days and better living through chemistry.
~ Chief Wiggum as Polonius, when the Simpsons did Hamlet
So today is a big day in my personal timeline: I have lost my med virginity. Meaning that today, for the first time ever, I took psychoactive meds prescribed to me by a psychiatrist.
And yes, there is a big difference between taking meds prescribed for you by a doctor and taking recreational mind-altering substances you procured yourself, even considering the very limited extent to which I have done the latter. Leaving aside things like side affects and potentials for addiction, the difference is largely one of intent and expectation. With recreational substances, the intent is to escape from consciousness of self and everyday reality. With a prescribed substance, the intent is to more fully experience those realities. People I know have experienced both sides of that coin with one and the same substance, for example in the case of aderol. And the really cool documentary Hoffman's Potion (link to video) asserts the same is true of LSD: used correctly with a doctor's supervision, it can be beneficial. Used irresponsibly in the wrong situation, it can do a lot of damage. It's one I haven't tried, but the documentary kind of made me wish doctors were allowed to use it.
As for my new pills (these ones), it'll be at least a week before I know what effects they will have. My mind completes the chain of thought without needing to be asked:
Pill delivers chemical to bloodstream.
Bloodstream transports chemical to brain.
Brain alters balance of various hormones used in the signaling of emotional states.
Emotional states of the preferred type become chemically easier to enter into, improving the personality's overall ability to confront external reality.
It is a good thing, to do this. Lots of people I know, love, and/or respect are now or have been psychiatrically medicated at various times. Family members. Friends and friends on hiatus. I don't attach a negative stigma to seeking out psychiatric care, and I like to think I don't attach a negative stigma to taking doctor-approved pills.
The fact that it feels like such a big deal to me, though, makes me feel in turn like I'm some kind of wuss. Because most of the people I know have had far more exciting adventures in psychiatric medicine. (Although some of those adventures had unpleasant results, which is part of what makes me so suspicious.) Because I'm getting growly about trying out a very small dose of one of the least harsh SSRIs on the market at the late, late age of 27. Because I can refer back, in my mind, to the Rolodex of disordered postcards I call a memory, and wonder if there may have been other periods of time in my life when a stint on the smiley pills might have done me some good.
But I don't like it and it is galling!
When dealing with my own psychology has principally to do with cognitive stuff, that is comfortable territory for me. Or comfortable discomfort, at worst. I know there's bad scary things in my personality, parts of me that don't like the rest of me or anybody else. For the most part I know where they are, to a certain extent how they got there, and increasingly, as the work progresses, how they work and what I can do to make them function properly. Oh, I complain a lot, but my intent is for it to be the useful sort. The kind where you break off in mid-sentence to say, "...hey, wait, that could actually work." If I have a disturbing dream, like I did the sleeptime before last, it usually only takes me a few days to figure out which issues my brain was trying to tell me about.
As for the dream, this paragraph should suffice. If you know Pearl and she's ever told you about her Grape Escape dream from way back in the day, or if you watch this video and use your imagination (commercial for Grape Escape), it started out a little like that. Only with Lego people and different torture devices. *shudders* Dangit, in real life you can't feel Lego people's pain or hear them screaming when they get horribly killed. That dream eventually did have a good ending, although the landscape had to be reformatted like three times to get there. At first I just watched, helpless, while bad stuff happened. There was a brief interlude where pushy, sales-skills-having people who conformed to the ideals of corporate successfulness were faxed to heaven on a giant fax machine. Then there kept being dream-people in awful situations, and when I saw them I would want something to happen to them. As soon as I did, my perspective would switch to inside that dream-person, and I'd experience the results of my decision. After this, the landscape would change to a different situation. If I'd made different choices the dream could have been a lot worse. Instead, the Amish c-section was successful and the mother survived (barely) as well as the baby. The technicians escaped from the evil building of death and deactivated the monstergate on the way out. The boss of the spikey spheres level was defeated and the key to the door at the end was recovered before the boss respawned. Me and Dave rescued the fluffy little dog from the woods and gave its fur a spiffy new hairstyle instead of shooting it because we'd been sent to kill coyotes. And when we returned to base camp, the fashion instructor complimented my spiffy new hairstyle. Oh, foolish brain. It hasn't been enough days yet to put it all together, but soon I will figure out exactly why it is I'm so afraid to admit that I'm a freaking adult.
Changing that mutable mental landscape with chemicals, though, feels like taking the problem out of my hands. Meds are a tool I don't myself know how to properly wield. I am deeply distrustful of letting anybody else wield a tool which directly impacts my mental state and which I don't myself know how to use. I think that's the principal reason why it feels like such a big deal. That, and resorting to the use of this tool to bludgeon at the big stupid rock of my own brain means that the tools I already possess have proved insufficient to the task. So my pride is ouched, not merely my sense of excessive caution.
But I have made my decision. Hopefully, like the ones I made while fast asleep, it will prove to have been the right one.
Here's to happier days and better living through chemistry.
A response to Pleiotropy re: homeschooling
This post started out as a comment on Pleiotropy's recent blogpost, The homeschooling trap. However, Blogger apparently doesn't like comments that run longer than 4,096 characters (I think that was the number), so I'm posting it here. Head over to Pleiotropy and read his post if you want some background!
His post is primarily about homeschooling, but one of the main underlying issues is teaching kids creation vs. evolution. I don't feel, myself, that that really ought to be the main issue (information content and quality are two different matters, as I'll get into later in the post) but it's the one where debaters on all sides have the strongest opinions.
I invite comments and discussion! But because this is an issue where people have very strong feelings, and because I (hope I still) have readers who practice what they preach on both of them, there might actually be a discussion. We are all here on the blogosphere because we are intelligent people who a) know how to read and write, and b) like doing both of those things for the fun of them. It is my hope that any discussion that happens here will be fun for everyone involved! If I have unfairly characterized or insulted anybody, please let me know, as this was not my intent.
***
For me the biggest struggle moving from homeschool to school away from home wasn't even the socialization factor. It was the routine. Since my mom was teaching just me, my older sister and my younger sister, that meant that whatever I was learning, I was the only one learning it. And I would study it as long as I needed to do so. Which meant in my case whipping through the reading, vocabulary and history parts and dragging painfully through the math and science parts.
The thing is, my mom did a damn good job of teaching me. Leaving aside for the moment the God-shaped orientation of the curriculum itself, she is a smart lady who taught me how to read and write and spell and do math. And my dad was a smart man who, though he wasn't our primary, everyday educator, encouraged all his daughters to think critically and ask questions and to love the encyclopedia (in the pre-Google era) and the dictionary. My parents read to us. They talked about stuff with us and liked it when we asked questions. Us getting a good education was really important to them.
So for me, for the most part, homeschooling meant I got lots of one-on-one, personal tutoring from my mom. And got used to being able to learn as quickly as I wanted if a subject came easily to me, or stay on a unit or do extra work if I had trouble "getting it". The structured pace of school away from home, having to sit still in a desk instead of doing my homework in my room or on the back porch, not being able to provide 50% of the conversation for every lesson, was even more excruciating than trying to socialize with my peers.
I went to Sunday School. I played with kids on my block. Our homeschooling families group went on field trips together. It isn't like I was totally isolated in a nuclear family bubble with zero outside contact. The transition wasn't from non-socialization to full socialization. It was from one kind of daily routine to another kind of daily routine.
So what if I had to re-learn all that history and science without the pro-Christian bias when I went to high school (or, if you prefer, re-learn it all with the anti-Christian bias)? The material itself was never the problem for me, only the social consequences. I said evolution wasn't true once in freshman biology, because it was what everyone my whole life had always told me. (Except Dad, who secretly believed in evolution, but had stayed pretty vague on the subject when I was younger.) And the result was comparable than the time I said "Who's Kurt Cobain?" Except this time the teacher was exasperated with me, and not just my fellow students.
Cultural indoctrination occurs on many simultaneous levels. Expected common knowledge is only the most superficial of these. Behaviors, values, emotional display levels, taboos, and subtle group-hierarchy signaling methods are much more difficult to learn. All cultures indoctrinate: this is how culture functions. Members of a group learn to share common habits, norms, and social signals so that they may interact with one another with a maximum of understanding and a minimum of stress. This is why transitioning between two different cultures causes "culture shock"--a myrad of things one learned to take for granted must be re-learned and placed in a new context.
Going from a private, Christian school to a public, secular high school is a massive dose of culture shock. Going from being homeschooled to attending a school away from home is a massive disruption of habit and procedure. I do think that having to deal with both of these stressors at once would be terrifying for any young person. If I have a problem with homeschooling, that's it. However, going to high school is inherently terrifying, and I think that many young people probably could deal with the extra changes, given the right emotional support etc. I think it would be very possible for a parent or parents to help cushion the shock for their kids, provided they are in a position to do so.
But I think it is oversimplifying the matter to urge parents not to homeschool because it indoctrinates their children into a culture and belief set in which the parents themselves are heavily invested. THAT IS WHY THEY DO IT. They believe that indoctrination as such is not wrong, so long as it is done in service of what they earnestly believe to be the truth. And as I mentioned earlier, when one is a member of a culture, so a certain extent indoctrination must occur! You believe (and, having deconverted and given the evidence another look, I also believe) that evolution is the way things happened. They don't. They believe evolution is a dangerous lie that makes people more likely to be amoral and unhappy. They don't want their kids to be amoral and unhappy. They are willing to do whatever it takes to protect them from this fate.
And it is not, primarily, access to the information itself that poses a problem, as they see it. It is the attitude towards that information, learned in a cultural context. When a person has an attitude, an opinion, a belief, about an important subject, the attitude they possess is a primary signifier of the group to which they belong.
Saying that homeschoolers are likely to be more ignorant presumes that the parents doing the homeschooling are generally unfit to teach. Some aren't fit to teach--but many are, especially the types of basic information that gradeschoolers need to learn. "Ignorant" in the sense of not having been given access to science texts with evolution in them, I will grant you. In the very narrow sense of not having been provided with otherwise generally available information on a particular subject.
But this ignorance is easy enough to overcome later in life so long as the person is able to read, learn, hear, and speak. Triply so if they have any love of learning. Human beings, however they are raised, have an insatiable curiosity, especially when it comes to forbidden things. And those of us raised inside the evangelical bubble all know perfectly well that vast troves of information were being kept from us "for our own good." To a young person this is fascinating, frustrating and in short, a dare.
(This post is getting the Tuesdays tag because, like other Tuesdays posts, it deals with issues of social structure. The irony of the fact that today is Friday is not lost on me!)
His post is primarily about homeschooling, but one of the main underlying issues is teaching kids creation vs. evolution. I don't feel, myself, that that really ought to be the main issue (information content and quality are two different matters, as I'll get into later in the post) but it's the one where debaters on all sides have the strongest opinions.
I invite comments and discussion! But because this is an issue where people have very strong feelings, and because I (hope I still) have readers who practice what they preach on both of them, there might actually be a discussion. We are all here on the blogosphere because we are intelligent people who a) know how to read and write, and b) like doing both of those things for the fun of them. It is my hope that any discussion that happens here will be fun for everyone involved! If I have unfairly characterized or insulted anybody, please let me know, as this was not my intent.
***
For me the biggest struggle moving from homeschool to school away from home wasn't even the socialization factor. It was the routine. Since my mom was teaching just me, my older sister and my younger sister, that meant that whatever I was learning, I was the only one learning it. And I would study it as long as I needed to do so. Which meant in my case whipping through the reading, vocabulary and history parts and dragging painfully through the math and science parts.
The thing is, my mom did a damn good job of teaching me. Leaving aside for the moment the God-shaped orientation of the curriculum itself, she is a smart lady who taught me how to read and write and spell and do math. And my dad was a smart man who, though he wasn't our primary, everyday educator, encouraged all his daughters to think critically and ask questions and to love the encyclopedia (in the pre-Google era) and the dictionary. My parents read to us. They talked about stuff with us and liked it when we asked questions. Us getting a good education was really important to them.
So for me, for the most part, homeschooling meant I got lots of one-on-one, personal tutoring from my mom. And got used to being able to learn as quickly as I wanted if a subject came easily to me, or stay on a unit or do extra work if I had trouble "getting it". The structured pace of school away from home, having to sit still in a desk instead of doing my homework in my room or on the back porch, not being able to provide 50% of the conversation for every lesson, was even more excruciating than trying to socialize with my peers.
I went to Sunday School. I played with kids on my block. Our homeschooling families group went on field trips together. It isn't like I was totally isolated in a nuclear family bubble with zero outside contact. The transition wasn't from non-socialization to full socialization. It was from one kind of daily routine to another kind of daily routine.
So what if I had to re-learn all that history and science without the pro-Christian bias when I went to high school (or, if you prefer, re-learn it all with the anti-Christian bias)? The material itself was never the problem for me, only the social consequences. I said evolution wasn't true once in freshman biology, because it was what everyone my whole life had always told me. (Except Dad, who secretly believed in evolution, but had stayed pretty vague on the subject when I was younger.) And the result was comparable than the time I said "Who's Kurt Cobain?" Except this time the teacher was exasperated with me, and not just my fellow students.
Cultural indoctrination occurs on many simultaneous levels. Expected common knowledge is only the most superficial of these. Behaviors, values, emotional display levels, taboos, and subtle group-hierarchy signaling methods are much more difficult to learn. All cultures indoctrinate: this is how culture functions. Members of a group learn to share common habits, norms, and social signals so that they may interact with one another with a maximum of understanding and a minimum of stress. This is why transitioning between two different cultures causes "culture shock"--a myrad of things one learned to take for granted must be re-learned and placed in a new context.
Going from a private, Christian school to a public, secular high school is a massive dose of culture shock. Going from being homeschooled to attending a school away from home is a massive disruption of habit and procedure. I do think that having to deal with both of these stressors at once would be terrifying for any young person. If I have a problem with homeschooling, that's it. However, going to high school is inherently terrifying, and I think that many young people probably could deal with the extra changes, given the right emotional support etc. I think it would be very possible for a parent or parents to help cushion the shock for their kids, provided they are in a position to do so.
But I think it is oversimplifying the matter to urge parents not to homeschool because it indoctrinates their children into a culture and belief set in which the parents themselves are heavily invested. THAT IS WHY THEY DO IT. They believe that indoctrination as such is not wrong, so long as it is done in service of what they earnestly believe to be the truth. And as I mentioned earlier, when one is a member of a culture, so a certain extent indoctrination must occur! You believe (and, having deconverted and given the evidence another look, I also believe) that evolution is the way things happened. They don't. They believe evolution is a dangerous lie that makes people more likely to be amoral and unhappy. They don't want their kids to be amoral and unhappy. They are willing to do whatever it takes to protect them from this fate.
And it is not, primarily, access to the information itself that poses a problem, as they see it. It is the attitude towards that information, learned in a cultural context. When a person has an attitude, an opinion, a belief, about an important subject, the attitude they possess is a primary signifier of the group to which they belong.
Saying that homeschoolers are likely to be more ignorant presumes that the parents doing the homeschooling are generally unfit to teach. Some aren't fit to teach--but many are, especially the types of basic information that gradeschoolers need to learn. "Ignorant" in the sense of not having been given access to science texts with evolution in them, I will grant you. In the very narrow sense of not having been provided with otherwise generally available information on a particular subject.
But this ignorance is easy enough to overcome later in life so long as the person is able to read, learn, hear, and speak. Triply so if they have any love of learning. Human beings, however they are raised, have an insatiable curiosity, especially when it comes to forbidden things. And those of us raised inside the evangelical bubble all know perfectly well that vast troves of information were being kept from us "for our own good." To a young person this is fascinating, frustrating and in short, a dare.
(This post is getting the Tuesdays tag because, like other Tuesdays posts, it deals with issues of social structure. The irony of the fact that today is Friday is not lost on me!)
Tuesdays with Abhorrent Fiends vol. 49: My kingdom for a chair!
And evolving from the sea
Would not be too much time for me
To walk beside you in the sun
~the Pixies
Please, I ask indulgence of all my readers, you in particular--who will in due course be identified. Kind of.
I was going to post a long, involved, reasonable-sounding follow-up to my last post, but fuck it. Those sorts of things never, ever, ever have their intended effect, and besides, about two-thirds of the way through I realized I didn't even know what my intended effect was.
From time to time lately I have been depressed. Mostly, this is because I have been unable to find gainful employment that gets me out of the apartment and makes me feel useful. There are also other reasons, some involving my being unable to magically fix Dave's depression or magically bring my father back from the dead. One of the reasons I have lately been depressed, however, I intend to address right now. And see what happens.
People (or, at least, this particular person whom I allegedly am at the moment) write complicated, long-winded analyses of religious viewpoints for at least one of three reasons:
1. To convince themselves of the correctness of their current viewpoint, of which they are then unsure,
2. To convince people of the opposing viewpoint of the correctness of theirs, or
3. To inform third parties, not otherwise involved in the discussion, of their (the author's) understanding of the terms of the dispute between the two viewpoints.
#2 does not happen. It never works. Ever, ever, ever. People change their beliefs only when they, themselves, confront a situation in their lives for which their current belief set is incapable of providing them with the appropriate transformations to effectively confront. If an argument presented in such a way ever did sway somebody, it was because they already experienced a crisis for which their current belief set was insufficient and was looking to add in new parts anyway. So I am not going to become a Christian because of logical debates, nor is a certain particular loved one of mine going to become a non-Christian of any stripe because of logical debates. We'd just sit there, either at our respective keyboards or on our respective couches, flapping our fingers and/or gums until we became blue in the hands and/or face, without accomplishing anything other than carpal tunnel and/or anoxia. As long as our respective belief sets are getting the job done for us, we are not going to commit any of our precious, precious mana to any others, and all the appendage-flapping in the world isn't going to change that one jot or tittle. I am totally fine with that, and differences of opinion even on matters of such great importance should not be an impediment to loving relationships between people who have gone through hell and high water together.
And Christianity itself isn't especially the problem. Belief sets, in and of themselves, never are. One of the things I believe is that virtually any belief set can be employed to produce virtually any mental/emotional state, depending on the goals, opinions, and available personality energies employed by the individual believer. So it is neither my goal to deconvert, nor to be deconverted.
"What, then," I ask myself, "o mighty analyzer of many motives, is your motivation? What exactly is it that you are trying to accomplish?"
I want to understand. I want to understand what happened that caused you (yes, you!) to believe as you believe, hoping somehow that offering a step-by-step account of how I came to believe as I believe might make it a fair trade. I want a step-by-step breakdown of the process that led, either from inactive disbelief through inactive belief to active belief, or from some other point A to some other point B. Because I Do Not Get It. I was blind or stupid or not paying attention or all wrapped up in selfish concerns and somehow, somewhere along the line I missed something very important that was happening inside you.
Was there anything I could have done, at any point, to make your search for a more effective belief set easier or more pleasant? Did you attempt to consult me and have me blow you off because I was selfish and stupid? Or did you consciously decide not to consult me, either because it was a matter too private to get a sororial second opinion on, or for some other reason that seemed sensible to you at the time? Did it sneak up on you overnight, as un-analyzed emotions boiled up out of the back of your brain and made a de facto decision for you? Or did it happen slowly, under the light of day, as you took out certain key experiences and emotional states one by one and riffled through possible belief sets to see which one provided the transformations which would make all of them bearable?
I realize this is not, possibly, the best place for this sort of discussion. Especially considering the fact that whatever your thoughts and feelings on the subject have been, you have not shared them with me yet for one reason or another. Maybe it's all too raw and bloody in there and you still don't want to think about it consciously. Or maybe my judgment is compromised, I'm an unreliable confidant, and so you didn't think it was worth explaining to me because of how I would react. Perhaps there is some completely different reason. Such as the fact that I have not, until now, come out and asked in a plain and simple manner. If you would rather respond by email than by comment, which hangs out here on the internet where as many as a half-dozen people might possibly take the time to read it, that's cool.
But I am going nuts over here trying to figure out what the blazes is going on with you. And I am tired of taking the oblique approach. Well, yes, this still counts as an oblique approach. Cowardly, even. Of all my vices, I've lived with the awareness of that one the longest. I'm not cowardly as often or to the extent I used to be, or even in quite the same ways all the time. But the basic broad yellow streak is still etched across my soul. And rather than have you throw a small piece of furniture in my general direction (well do I remember the discussion in which you explained that you were not actually throwing it at me, just trying to startle some kind of non-zombie-like reaction out of me!), I would rather experience any of the just rewards of my cowardice out here on the internet, where I feel more at home.
Dammit, woman, I have been a fear zombie and a guilt zombie and a shame zombie, sometimes concurrently, other times consecutively. I flatter myself I can recognize the signs. You have turned yourself into some kind of a zombie. And I do not like it. I miss you, miss watching you live life as your most excellent, feisty, sarcastic, uppity self. The you who is always in charge of her own thoughts and feelings and has an opinion on everything. An opinion which is absolutely right at all times, even if it has recently changed in response to newly available data. I do not recognize this mousy, retiring head-in-the-intoxicating-sands-of-fictional-realities person, except in the memory of my own shameful past. And I do not like it. I did not like being it and I do not like seeing it!
Even in your response to my last post, I did not get a single one of YOUR opinions, nor any idea of what led you to them. Merely the opinions of Christian orthodoxy, which of late you apparently espouse, for reasons which utterly mystify me. I myself am undoubtedly to blame for having framed the discussion in terms of generalities and hypotheticals and other such cowardly evasions. So I was not, previously, asking for your opinions. Just kind of hoping that you would be so good as to volunteer some, given a non-threatening context.
Which is why I am now throwing a piece of rhetorical furniture in your general direction! I am not obliquely referring to matters on which you may or may not possess an individudal opinion; I am asking for your freaking opinion! Because I desperately want to know it!
Would not be too much time for me
To walk beside you in the sun
~the Pixies
Please, I ask indulgence of all my readers, you in particular--who will in due course be identified. Kind of.
I was going to post a long, involved, reasonable-sounding follow-up to my last post, but fuck it. Those sorts of things never, ever, ever have their intended effect, and besides, about two-thirds of the way through I realized I didn't even know what my intended effect was.
From time to time lately I have been depressed. Mostly, this is because I have been unable to find gainful employment that gets me out of the apartment and makes me feel useful. There are also other reasons, some involving my being unable to magically fix Dave's depression or magically bring my father back from the dead. One of the reasons I have lately been depressed, however, I intend to address right now. And see what happens.
People (or, at least, this particular person whom I allegedly am at the moment) write complicated, long-winded analyses of religious viewpoints for at least one of three reasons:
1. To convince themselves of the correctness of their current viewpoint, of which they are then unsure,
2. To convince people of the opposing viewpoint of the correctness of theirs, or
3. To inform third parties, not otherwise involved in the discussion, of their (the author's) understanding of the terms of the dispute between the two viewpoints.
#2 does not happen. It never works. Ever, ever, ever. People change their beliefs only when they, themselves, confront a situation in their lives for which their current belief set is incapable of providing them with the appropriate transformations to effectively confront. If an argument presented in such a way ever did sway somebody, it was because they already experienced a crisis for which their current belief set was insufficient and was looking to add in new parts anyway. So I am not going to become a Christian because of logical debates, nor is a certain particular loved one of mine going to become a non-Christian of any stripe because of logical debates. We'd just sit there, either at our respective keyboards or on our respective couches, flapping our fingers and/or gums until we became blue in the hands and/or face, without accomplishing anything other than carpal tunnel and/or anoxia. As long as our respective belief sets are getting the job done for us, we are not going to commit any of our precious, precious mana to any others, and all the appendage-flapping in the world isn't going to change that one jot or tittle. I am totally fine with that, and differences of opinion even on matters of such great importance should not be an impediment to loving relationships between people who have gone through hell and high water together.
And Christianity itself isn't especially the problem. Belief sets, in and of themselves, never are. One of the things I believe is that virtually any belief set can be employed to produce virtually any mental/emotional state, depending on the goals, opinions, and available personality energies employed by the individual believer. So it is neither my goal to deconvert, nor to be deconverted.
"What, then," I ask myself, "o mighty analyzer of many motives, is your motivation? What exactly is it that you are trying to accomplish?"
I want to understand. I want to understand what happened that caused you (yes, you!) to believe as you believe, hoping somehow that offering a step-by-step account of how I came to believe as I believe might make it a fair trade. I want a step-by-step breakdown of the process that led, either from inactive disbelief through inactive belief to active belief, or from some other point A to some other point B. Because I Do Not Get It. I was blind or stupid or not paying attention or all wrapped up in selfish concerns and somehow, somewhere along the line I missed something very important that was happening inside you.
Was there anything I could have done, at any point, to make your search for a more effective belief set easier or more pleasant? Did you attempt to consult me and have me blow you off because I was selfish and stupid? Or did you consciously decide not to consult me, either because it was a matter too private to get a sororial second opinion on, or for some other reason that seemed sensible to you at the time? Did it sneak up on you overnight, as un-analyzed emotions boiled up out of the back of your brain and made a de facto decision for you? Or did it happen slowly, under the light of day, as you took out certain key experiences and emotional states one by one and riffled through possible belief sets to see which one provided the transformations which would make all of them bearable?
I realize this is not, possibly, the best place for this sort of discussion. Especially considering the fact that whatever your thoughts and feelings on the subject have been, you have not shared them with me yet for one reason or another. Maybe it's all too raw and bloody in there and you still don't want to think about it consciously. Or maybe my judgment is compromised, I'm an unreliable confidant, and so you didn't think it was worth explaining to me because of how I would react. Perhaps there is some completely different reason. Such as the fact that I have not, until now, come out and asked in a plain and simple manner. If you would rather respond by email than by comment, which hangs out here on the internet where as many as a half-dozen people might possibly take the time to read it, that's cool.
But I am going nuts over here trying to figure out what the blazes is going on with you. And I am tired of taking the oblique approach. Well, yes, this still counts as an oblique approach. Cowardly, even. Of all my vices, I've lived with the awareness of that one the longest. I'm not cowardly as often or to the extent I used to be, or even in quite the same ways all the time. But the basic broad yellow streak is still etched across my soul. And rather than have you throw a small piece of furniture in my general direction (well do I remember the discussion in which you explained that you were not actually throwing it at me, just trying to startle some kind of non-zombie-like reaction out of me!), I would rather experience any of the just rewards of my cowardice out here on the internet, where I feel more at home.
Dammit, woman, I have been a fear zombie and a guilt zombie and a shame zombie, sometimes concurrently, other times consecutively. I flatter myself I can recognize the signs. You have turned yourself into some kind of a zombie. And I do not like it. I miss you, miss watching you live life as your most excellent, feisty, sarcastic, uppity self. The you who is always in charge of her own thoughts and feelings and has an opinion on everything. An opinion which is absolutely right at all times, even if it has recently changed in response to newly available data. I do not recognize this mousy, retiring head-in-the-intoxicating-sands-of-fictional-realities person, except in the memory of my own shameful past. And I do not like it. I did not like being it and I do not like seeing it!
Even in your response to my last post, I did not get a single one of YOUR opinions, nor any idea of what led you to them. Merely the opinions of Christian orthodoxy, which of late you apparently espouse, for reasons which utterly mystify me. I myself am undoubtedly to blame for having framed the discussion in terms of generalities and hypotheticals and other such cowardly evasions. So I was not, previously, asking for your opinions. Just kind of hoping that you would be so good as to volunteer some, given a non-threatening context.
Which is why I am now throwing a piece of rhetorical furniture in your general direction! I am not obliquely referring to matters on which you may or may not possess an individudal opinion; I am asking for your freaking opinion! Because I desperately want to know it!
Abhorrent? On a weekend?! (aka Tuesdays 48: Sin and forgiveness)
I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about the whole paradigm of sin and forgiveness, and I'm starting to think that it's broken. It is an idea with a lot going for it, but the effects on a personality rarely produce a long-term positive result when it is completely followed through.
Christians are supposed to forgive others, and thereby follow in the footsteps of God's forgiveness of all humankind. By so doing, they also support the correctness of their religion by demonstrating that adherence to divinely mandated standards of behavior produces the type of individuals that everybody wants to be around.
John Weaver recently posted something about forgiveness and abuse by clergymen that gave me some new insight on the topic. Here's a quote:
As I read it, the attitude that frustrates John is one in which the victim's lack of forgiveness is more troubling to those in authority than the perpetrator's crime, not to mention the perpetrator's repentance or lack thereof. In such a situation, the mandate to forgive is being selectively enforced as a means of social control, rather than universally enforced as a means of spiritual transformation. The weak are always required to forgive, but the strong are not always required to refrain from doing harm. Which is exactly the sort of attitude that having a close, personal relationship with God is supposed to help people eradicate from themselves and fight against in their social groups.
Dave and I recently watched an episode of Scientific American Frontiers that was all about chimps. (It's an awesome PBS show, hosted by Alan Alda--reruns air on Saturday mornings at some freakishly early hour, but thanks to our DVR we can watch at our leisure.) In between interviews with Jane Goodall and disturbing images of the bush meat trade, we got to see a center where they study the apes' social behavior. As it turns out, chimpanzee groups function using some of the basic building blocks of morality. Generous sharing is repaid by favors, fighting and selfish behavior are punished, senior members of the group mentor younger members of the group in appropriate action, etc. (Here's an article with some further info on the topic.) Moral behavior in chimps can help a group band together and cooperate in ways necessary to succeed in inter-group warfare, or survive hostile conditions in their environment.
The main distinction I can see between the human capacity for morality and that of the chimpanzee is that we have the ability to expand our moral compass--to apply the rules of good behavior to everyone, not just those who are already our allies. I say merely that we have the ability because we don't always use it. Whether it's a racial-supremacist group claiming that everyone outside their little genetic pool deserves to die, a high school clique whose members feel they don't have to be polite to other kids who aren't part of the "in" crowd, or a church whose members have collectively forgotten that heretics are people too, we can all succumb to our ancient instincts. But we each have the ability to move beyond that kind of insular attitude. We can teach ourselves to believe that all strangers are potential allies, that no person deserves to be branded an enemy in our minds unless they, as an individual, have wronged us, and that forgiveness and reconciliation, when such are possible, are always preferable to hostility and estrangement.
To me, the doctrine of original sin is meant to be a symbolic formula for inducing this transformation in the minds of people who believe in it. It goes something like this: "An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God is the head of a tribe which includes all humanity. He is the model for all behavior towards all people. I have wronged him, but he has forgiven me, even though he knows I will inevitably wrong him again. Therefore I must conform my behavior to the model he has provided for me, and forgive others even when my instincts tell me not to do so." If a person takes this bit of emotional algebra in and invests belief in it, then it will allow them to transform their personality in a way that overrides the instinctive human desire to use a double standard of morality. They will be able to adhere to a single moral code and apply it equally to all people, out of deference to the ultimate authority of God.
But like any other piece of perfectly nice emotional algebra, like any other symbolically encoded belief, forgiveness for original sin is subject to the same types of shortcuts I discussed back in Tuesdays 46. Much like the doctrine of predestination, you really only need to change one part of one element in original sin to completely negate its transformative power. Let's say that, instead of "God has forgiven me, even though he knows I will inevitably wrong him again", a person processed the belief as "God has forgiven me, because I have promised to try to obey him in the future."
An easy enough mistake to make, to be sure! In emotional terms the new version is less counterintuitive and easier to swallow. But it has changed the terms of the contract between God and supplicant. Instead of forgiveness offered freely, what you have is forgiveness offered in exchange for submission.
The eventual effect of this will be the double standard reborn, in a slightly different form. Submission to God's authority is required in order to obtain God's forgiveness. And since the interaction between the believer and God is the model for all other relationships, those who are under the authority of other human beings must submit to that authority. If they do not, they lose their status as bona fide members of the human authority figure's group, just as they would lose God's forgiveness if they ceased submitting to his authority.
But wait! you may be thinking. All I've really done so far is to support the traditional beliefs of Christianity--that it is good to believe humans are saved from their inherent sinfulness by grace alone. So why shouldn't we just go ahead and believe in Christianity, but be very very careful to believe exactly as the Bible instructs, without changing "one jot or tittle"? And what does any of it have to do with chimpanzees?
A belief is a hardworking thing. It doesn't just sit there in the back of your personality, to be taken out and dusted off when you're having a philosophical discussion. Belief shapes action the same way a spaghetti machine shapes dough. (I almost used a much less pleasant metaphor!) It forces out all the nebulous potential for effort, attention, and affection inside the personality through a rigidly defined set of possible means of expression, which imposes limitations but also provides direction and form.
In order for a belief to perform this important function, it needs to have the following essential qualities:
1. a positive value judgment (X is valuable and to be sought)
2. a negative value judgment (Y is not valuable and to be avoided)
3. a motive for accepting the belief (which binds the person's mana to it and allows it to be integrated into the structure of the personality)
(Keeping in mind my definition of "mana", which, similar to Freud's "libido", is the combined potential of the personality to produce effort, attention and affection. Dog, I really need to post a glossary one of these days. Or maybe an NAQ--Never Asked Questions. Yeah. I like the sound of that.)
The Christian concept of sin and forgiveness contains the first two elements, but the third is a cipher. The doctrine makes logical sense, but on an emotional level the would-be believer is faced with a nasty fill-in-the-blank. God offers forgiveness of sin. God also commands obedience to his moral standards--but not, we are told in no uncertain terms, in exchange for forgiveness of sin. The two interactions are part of the same relationship, but we are to consider them as being completely separate from one another in terms of causation. Forgiveness of sin is exchanged for repentance. Obedience, again according to doctrine, may be correlated with repentance, but we are not to presume to know the extent to which they are linked. What, then, is the motive which will allow the would-be believer to integrate God's moral commands into the day-to-day functions of their personality? I've already discussed "submission to God's authority" as a possible answer, so let's look at some others:
--Nothing. After all, God offers forgiveness freely. So long as one is prepared to apologize to God for all sins, one is perfectly free to keep committing them. For reasons of social pressure and/or cognitive dissonance, however, many people who try this one in practice usually either ease their way out of the religion entirely or switch to a different motive.
--Peer pressure. This one swaps out adherence to God's commands for adherence to those of God's commands that are actively enforced by the members of one's social group. It's not doctrinally sound and hence doesn't produce the personality transformation, but it is extremely practical and satisfies all the instinctive cravings humans have for peer reinforcement of beliefs and hierarchical social structure based on adherence to a group-specific worldview. And hey, free other-determined identity!
--Gratitude. Now, gratitude for divine favor is is a beloved talking point with the more superstition-minded elements in Christianity ("God got me this great new car!"), but this is a distortion that radically changes what the religion is all about. These types of believers aren't in it for an immaculate Christ who died to make it possible to obtain God's forgiveness; they're after a fairy godfather who will bring prosperity and good luck to those who play nice and wish really hard for the things they want.
But the kind of gratitude I'm talking about here is a whole different animal. Original sin means that all humans were born lacking the ability to make a spiritual connection with God--or that we have it as children, but lose it as soon as we develop the capacity to think for ourselves. The reason God created us was so that he could enjoy being connected to us, so when this is not possible, we have zero value. Christ's sacrifice allows us to fulfill our purpose again, which raises our value from zero to infinity. (Anything God wants is of infinite positive value. That's the nice thing about divinity.) Therefore we should have infinite gratitude. Looked at logically, this is a tautology, a circular argument: obey God because obey God. Looked at emotionally, it's actually a subtler version of the submission to authority motive: God is the only one who has the authority to determine value. If you obey God, you are valuable. If you do not obey God, you are worthless.
Now, it is possible for this to degrade into the same situation we ran into with submission to authority. If a believer acknowledges any other human being as more capable than themselves of interpreting God's judgments, then that person becomes a proxy for God, and as such can dispense judgments of ultimate value or worthlessness. But since, with gratitude, the thing for which the believer is grateful comes directly from God, it is possible to avoid this problem.
So, as far as I'm concerned, gratitude is the only remotely usable motive on this list. Using this motive, a person can bind the Christian moral code into the functional framework of their personality, apply its constraints to guide their actions, and expand their moral compass so that these morals affect their interactions with all humans, not just those within their group of allies. Here's where it gets interesting.
Any unrepented sin severs the connection between a person and God, changing their status from "saved and infinitely valuable" to "damned and completely worthless." Remember, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in life are not punishments for sin--they are the inevitable results of living in a world where sin exists. The only punishment for sin is in the afterlife. But since each sin is equally able to cause damnation, each requires a new act of repentance. And in between the commission of a new sin and its corresponding repentance, the believer's understanding of themselves must change to mirror their status in the eyes of God. Repentance is always possible, because God never stops forgiving, but is also constantly necessary, because human beings are innately flawed and can never stop sinning.
This sets up a non-stop rollercoaster, filled with constant heart-pounding peril and narrow escapes. Every situation is a life-or-death situation, and every misstep ushers in the specter of ultimate doom. "Oh no! I'm damned! Please help me, God, I regret this as much as I've ever regretted anything! Phew, now I'm saved. I better not do anything like that agai--oh, no, I'm damned!" The believer's mind and heart stand to attention at all times, teetering on a razor's edge between the terror of absolute guilt and the bliss of divine absolution.
No personality can sustain this. Flipping back and forth between maximum self-worth and total self-loathing requires a level of energy that would, if mana were heat, strain the resources of a small sun. It is horribly inefficient and totally impracticable. (The character of Joan of Arc in The Messenger seems to have managed it, but in real life that level of intensity tends to result in total gibbering mental breakdown rather than heroic feats of wonder.) Instead, in practice a person will gradually work their way into an equilibrium at some random point on the spectrum between the two.
If they land somewhere in the middle, the drama and magic of their faith will fade with time, as the emotional energy required to hope for salvation and fear damnation gets siphoned off into other personality functions.
If they land somewhere near the bottom, the constant self-loathing and desperate need to constantly obtain reassurance of God's forgiveness can have one of three effects. They can become whimpering automatons and retreat from reality. They can become so convinced of their own inability to reach God that they look to others to provide reassurance--thus switching to the peer pressure motive and losing their expanded moral compass. Or, like me, they can leave the religion entirely.
If they land somewhere near the top, they will usually take the euphoria of the assurance of salvation as a license to arrogate the value-determining powers of God. As one of God's favored, saved individuals, they come to believe they possess a special insight into what he wants from others. They will often then use this assumed moral authority to attempt to gain social power over others. A rare individual here and there is able to refrain from doing this, and these are the humble, happy Christians who see the bright side of everything and are kind and compassionate to everyone no matter how bad things get. I don't know that I've ever seen one outside of fiction; those I've met in person who vaguely resemble this ideal were some of the loopiest, shallowest, most gullible saps I've ever wanted to run away from screaming. Once or twice I've run across a humble-before-God-but-not-you Christian who had high self-esteem and felt they had a special insight into God's judgments, but also used that insight on themselves and as many of their own flaws and failings as they were willing to consciously acknowledge. I have more respect for them than any other type of Christian. But on the other hand, I've met non-Christians with the exact same qualities, who felt they had developed the ability to make sound moral judgments on their own, and were equally willing to apply those judgments to themselves as to other people.
The point of all this brings me back to the chimpanzees. We all have to learn to live with each other, just like the chimps do. We have to learn to behave in ways that make us functional members of a social unit, people other people want to be around, just like apes need to act like the kind of apes other apes want to be around. And as a human being, I want to be able to expand my moral compass to the point where I consider every individual my ally who has not specifically earned my enmity. It is an incredibly delicate and exacting task all by itself.
Original sin and divine forgiveness does offer a pre-defined set of moral values and an emotional algebra which makes it possible to expand my moral compass to include every other person in existence. But it is also a belief set which, at the very best, drops me into an infinite emotional loop from which I must somehow escape before I can even take up the work of constructing my personality to meet the challenges of everyday life. And once I have done so, I've got a set of moral values whose real-life applications I must work out for myself and an identity forged in the tension between my attitude towards the actions I take and the opinions my allies have of me. Plus one extra ally, God--whose opinion of me is either absolutely supportive or absolutely condemnatory or both at the same time, depending on what I've been up to lately and how deeply I'm willing to think it through. And gives me the opportunity to either completely support or completely condemn the people around me, depending on what I know about what they've been up to lately and how deeply I'm willing to think it through.
In other words, it costs a lot, leaves me exactly where I started, and imposes behavioral constraints not of my choosing in the process.
This is why I vastly perefer to invest my belief in a more biological-style model of the afterlife. If we can continue to participate in life in some altered form after our current bodies stop working, then I don't have any problem with the idea that life on that side is kind of like life on this side. Uncertain, difficult, sometimes fun, sometimes unbearable, and constantly changing. I could live with that.
Christians are supposed to forgive others, and thereby follow in the footsteps of God's forgiveness of all humankind. By so doing, they also support the correctness of their religion by demonstrating that adherence to divinely mandated standards of behavior produces the type of individuals that everybody wants to be around.
John Weaver recently posted something about forgiveness and abuse by clergymen that gave me some new insight on the topic. Here's a quote:
I find the politics of how abuse is handled in the church deeply frustrating. I have heard abuse victims being told to forgive their abusers, and then condemned if they did not choose to do so.
As I read it, the attitude that frustrates John is one in which the victim's lack of forgiveness is more troubling to those in authority than the perpetrator's crime, not to mention the perpetrator's repentance or lack thereof. In such a situation, the mandate to forgive is being selectively enforced as a means of social control, rather than universally enforced as a means of spiritual transformation. The weak are always required to forgive, but the strong are not always required to refrain from doing harm. Which is exactly the sort of attitude that having a close, personal relationship with God is supposed to help people eradicate from themselves and fight against in their social groups.
Dave and I recently watched an episode of Scientific American Frontiers that was all about chimps. (It's an awesome PBS show, hosted by Alan Alda--reruns air on Saturday mornings at some freakishly early hour, but thanks to our DVR we can watch at our leisure.) In between interviews with Jane Goodall and disturbing images of the bush meat trade, we got to see a center where they study the apes' social behavior. As it turns out, chimpanzee groups function using some of the basic building blocks of morality. Generous sharing is repaid by favors, fighting and selfish behavior are punished, senior members of the group mentor younger members of the group in appropriate action, etc. (Here's an article with some further info on the topic.) Moral behavior in chimps can help a group band together and cooperate in ways necessary to succeed in inter-group warfare, or survive hostile conditions in their environment.
The main distinction I can see between the human capacity for morality and that of the chimpanzee is that we have the ability to expand our moral compass--to apply the rules of good behavior to everyone, not just those who are already our allies. I say merely that we have the ability because we don't always use it. Whether it's a racial-supremacist group claiming that everyone outside their little genetic pool deserves to die, a high school clique whose members feel they don't have to be polite to other kids who aren't part of the "in" crowd, or a church whose members have collectively forgotten that heretics are people too, we can all succumb to our ancient instincts. But we each have the ability to move beyond that kind of insular attitude. We can teach ourselves to believe that all strangers are potential allies, that no person deserves to be branded an enemy in our minds unless they, as an individual, have wronged us, and that forgiveness and reconciliation, when such are possible, are always preferable to hostility and estrangement.
To me, the doctrine of original sin is meant to be a symbolic formula for inducing this transformation in the minds of people who believe in it. It goes something like this: "An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God is the head of a tribe which includes all humanity. He is the model for all behavior towards all people. I have wronged him, but he has forgiven me, even though he knows I will inevitably wrong him again. Therefore I must conform my behavior to the model he has provided for me, and forgive others even when my instincts tell me not to do so." If a person takes this bit of emotional algebra in and invests belief in it, then it will allow them to transform their personality in a way that overrides the instinctive human desire to use a double standard of morality. They will be able to adhere to a single moral code and apply it equally to all people, out of deference to the ultimate authority of God.
But like any other piece of perfectly nice emotional algebra, like any other symbolically encoded belief, forgiveness for original sin is subject to the same types of shortcuts I discussed back in Tuesdays 46. Much like the doctrine of predestination, you really only need to change one part of one element in original sin to completely negate its transformative power. Let's say that, instead of "God has forgiven me, even though he knows I will inevitably wrong him again", a person processed the belief as "God has forgiven me, because I have promised to try to obey him in the future."
An easy enough mistake to make, to be sure! In emotional terms the new version is less counterintuitive and easier to swallow. But it has changed the terms of the contract between God and supplicant. Instead of forgiveness offered freely, what you have is forgiveness offered in exchange for submission.
The eventual effect of this will be the double standard reborn, in a slightly different form. Submission to God's authority is required in order to obtain God's forgiveness. And since the interaction between the believer and God is the model for all other relationships, those who are under the authority of other human beings must submit to that authority. If they do not, they lose their status as bona fide members of the human authority figure's group, just as they would lose God's forgiveness if they ceased submitting to his authority.
But wait! you may be thinking. All I've really done so far is to support the traditional beliefs of Christianity--that it is good to believe humans are saved from their inherent sinfulness by grace alone. So why shouldn't we just go ahead and believe in Christianity, but be very very careful to believe exactly as the Bible instructs, without changing "one jot or tittle"? And what does any of it have to do with chimpanzees?
A belief is a hardworking thing. It doesn't just sit there in the back of your personality, to be taken out and dusted off when you're having a philosophical discussion. Belief shapes action the same way a spaghetti machine shapes dough. (I almost used a much less pleasant metaphor!) It forces out all the nebulous potential for effort, attention, and affection inside the personality through a rigidly defined set of possible means of expression, which imposes limitations but also provides direction and form.
In order for a belief to perform this important function, it needs to have the following essential qualities:
1. a positive value judgment (X is valuable and to be sought)
2. a negative value judgment (Y is not valuable and to be avoided)
3. a motive for accepting the belief (which binds the person's mana to it and allows it to be integrated into the structure of the personality)
(Keeping in mind my definition of "mana", which, similar to Freud's "libido", is the combined potential of the personality to produce effort, attention and affection. Dog, I really need to post a glossary one of these days. Or maybe an NAQ--Never Asked Questions. Yeah. I like the sound of that.)
The Christian concept of sin and forgiveness contains the first two elements, but the third is a cipher. The doctrine makes logical sense, but on an emotional level the would-be believer is faced with a nasty fill-in-the-blank. God offers forgiveness of sin. God also commands obedience to his moral standards--but not, we are told in no uncertain terms, in exchange for forgiveness of sin. The two interactions are part of the same relationship, but we are to consider them as being completely separate from one another in terms of causation. Forgiveness of sin is exchanged for repentance. Obedience, again according to doctrine, may be correlated with repentance, but we are not to presume to know the extent to which they are linked. What, then, is the motive which will allow the would-be believer to integrate God's moral commands into the day-to-day functions of their personality? I've already discussed "submission to God's authority" as a possible answer, so let's look at some others:
--Nothing. After all, God offers forgiveness freely. So long as one is prepared to apologize to God for all sins, one is perfectly free to keep committing them. For reasons of social pressure and/or cognitive dissonance, however, many people who try this one in practice usually either ease their way out of the religion entirely or switch to a different motive.
--Peer pressure. This one swaps out adherence to God's commands for adherence to those of God's commands that are actively enforced by the members of one's social group. It's not doctrinally sound and hence doesn't produce the personality transformation, but it is extremely practical and satisfies all the instinctive cravings humans have for peer reinforcement of beliefs and hierarchical social structure based on adherence to a group-specific worldview. And hey, free other-determined identity!
--Gratitude. Now, gratitude for divine favor is is a beloved talking point with the more superstition-minded elements in Christianity ("God got me this great new car!"), but this is a distortion that radically changes what the religion is all about. These types of believers aren't in it for an immaculate Christ who died to make it possible to obtain God's forgiveness; they're after a fairy godfather who will bring prosperity and good luck to those who play nice and wish really hard for the things they want.
But the kind of gratitude I'm talking about here is a whole different animal. Original sin means that all humans were born lacking the ability to make a spiritual connection with God--or that we have it as children, but lose it as soon as we develop the capacity to think for ourselves. The reason God created us was so that he could enjoy being connected to us, so when this is not possible, we have zero value. Christ's sacrifice allows us to fulfill our purpose again, which raises our value from zero to infinity. (Anything God wants is of infinite positive value. That's the nice thing about divinity.) Therefore we should have infinite gratitude. Looked at logically, this is a tautology, a circular argument: obey God because obey God. Looked at emotionally, it's actually a subtler version of the submission to authority motive: God is the only one who has the authority to determine value. If you obey God, you are valuable. If you do not obey God, you are worthless.
Now, it is possible for this to degrade into the same situation we ran into with submission to authority. If a believer acknowledges any other human being as more capable than themselves of interpreting God's judgments, then that person becomes a proxy for God, and as such can dispense judgments of ultimate value or worthlessness. But since, with gratitude, the thing for which the believer is grateful comes directly from God, it is possible to avoid this problem.
So, as far as I'm concerned, gratitude is the only remotely usable motive on this list. Using this motive, a person can bind the Christian moral code into the functional framework of their personality, apply its constraints to guide their actions, and expand their moral compass so that these morals affect their interactions with all humans, not just those within their group of allies. Here's where it gets interesting.
Any unrepented sin severs the connection between a person and God, changing their status from "saved and infinitely valuable" to "damned and completely worthless." Remember, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in life are not punishments for sin--they are the inevitable results of living in a world where sin exists. The only punishment for sin is in the afterlife. But since each sin is equally able to cause damnation, each requires a new act of repentance. And in between the commission of a new sin and its corresponding repentance, the believer's understanding of themselves must change to mirror their status in the eyes of God. Repentance is always possible, because God never stops forgiving, but is also constantly necessary, because human beings are innately flawed and can never stop sinning.
This sets up a non-stop rollercoaster, filled with constant heart-pounding peril and narrow escapes. Every situation is a life-or-death situation, and every misstep ushers in the specter of ultimate doom. "Oh no! I'm damned! Please help me, God, I regret this as much as I've ever regretted anything! Phew, now I'm saved. I better not do anything like that agai--oh, no, I'm damned!" The believer's mind and heart stand to attention at all times, teetering on a razor's edge between the terror of absolute guilt and the bliss of divine absolution.
No personality can sustain this. Flipping back and forth between maximum self-worth and total self-loathing requires a level of energy that would, if mana were heat, strain the resources of a small sun. It is horribly inefficient and totally impracticable. (The character of Joan of Arc in The Messenger seems to have managed it, but in real life that level of intensity tends to result in total gibbering mental breakdown rather than heroic feats of wonder.) Instead, in practice a person will gradually work their way into an equilibrium at some random point on the spectrum between the two.
If they land somewhere in the middle, the drama and magic of their faith will fade with time, as the emotional energy required to hope for salvation and fear damnation gets siphoned off into other personality functions.
If they land somewhere near the bottom, the constant self-loathing and desperate need to constantly obtain reassurance of God's forgiveness can have one of three effects. They can become whimpering automatons and retreat from reality. They can become so convinced of their own inability to reach God that they look to others to provide reassurance--thus switching to the peer pressure motive and losing their expanded moral compass. Or, like me, they can leave the religion entirely.
If they land somewhere near the top, they will usually take the euphoria of the assurance of salvation as a license to arrogate the value-determining powers of God. As one of God's favored, saved individuals, they come to believe they possess a special insight into what he wants from others. They will often then use this assumed moral authority to attempt to gain social power over others. A rare individual here and there is able to refrain from doing this, and these are the humble, happy Christians who see the bright side of everything and are kind and compassionate to everyone no matter how bad things get. I don't know that I've ever seen one outside of fiction; those I've met in person who vaguely resemble this ideal were some of the loopiest, shallowest, most gullible saps I've ever wanted to run away from screaming. Once or twice I've run across a humble-before-God-but-not-you Christian who had high self-esteem and felt they had a special insight into God's judgments, but also used that insight on themselves and as many of their own flaws and failings as they were willing to consciously acknowledge. I have more respect for them than any other type of Christian. But on the other hand, I've met non-Christians with the exact same qualities, who felt they had developed the ability to make sound moral judgments on their own, and were equally willing to apply those judgments to themselves as to other people.
The point of all this brings me back to the chimpanzees. We all have to learn to live with each other, just like the chimps do. We have to learn to behave in ways that make us functional members of a social unit, people other people want to be around, just like apes need to act like the kind of apes other apes want to be around. And as a human being, I want to be able to expand my moral compass to the point where I consider every individual my ally who has not specifically earned my enmity. It is an incredibly delicate and exacting task all by itself.
Original sin and divine forgiveness does offer a pre-defined set of moral values and an emotional algebra which makes it possible to expand my moral compass to include every other person in existence. But it is also a belief set which, at the very best, drops me into an infinite emotional loop from which I must somehow escape before I can even take up the work of constructing my personality to meet the challenges of everyday life. And once I have done so, I've got a set of moral values whose real-life applications I must work out for myself and an identity forged in the tension between my attitude towards the actions I take and the opinions my allies have of me. Plus one extra ally, God--whose opinion of me is either absolutely supportive or absolutely condemnatory or both at the same time, depending on what I've been up to lately and how deeply I'm willing to think it through. And gives me the opportunity to either completely support or completely condemn the people around me, depending on what I know about what they've been up to lately and how deeply I'm willing to think it through.
In other words, it costs a lot, leaves me exactly where I started, and imposes behavioral constraints not of my choosing in the process.
This is why I vastly perefer to invest my belief in a more biological-style model of the afterlife. If we can continue to participate in life in some altered form after our current bodies stop working, then I don't have any problem with the idea that life on that side is kind of like life on this side. Uncertain, difficult, sometimes fun, sometimes unbearable, and constantly changing. I could live with that.
Tuesdays with Abhorrent Fiends vol. 47: It's all in good fun 'til somebody loses an eye
So I've been out of work for a month and a half, and it has affected my self-esteem. This is not too surprising, since I have the kind of personality that is, shall we say, hypersensitive to the winds of time and circumstance. Like a whippy little reed, bent by the slightest breeze, but broken only by a sub-zero frost followed by a blizzard. Or something equally poetic.
Due to my lack of forward momentum in real life, I've turned more and more to games for that little hit of empowerment and validation they can provide. It's kind of like watering a plant with club soda. It gets the hydration in there and aerates the soil, but ultimately weakens the root system and makes the plant pale and stringy. Man, I've got to get away from these plant metaphors.
I'm aware that it's not entirely healthy to obsess over roleplaying games, be they online or console or PC-based. But the idea of taking on the role of an alter ego is only a small part of the appeal for me. The big draw is that in any game, you know that you will only be presented with problems you can solve. You will never confront a puzzle unless all the pieces necessary to solve it exist in the game, never be presented with a monster that is actually impossble to defeat. If you, the player, are patient and plan ahead, load your character up with all the items and skills and spells appropriate to the task, you will be able to overcome any challenge the game sets you.
So here's a list of all my beloved PBBGs.
The Kingdom of Loathing. I don't play as often as I used to--got my big sister into it, and she is a way more disciplined and accomplished player than me. The nice thing about KoL is that once you've beaten the game, you get to "reincarnate" back at the beginning as a new character class, retaining a few useful things you've obtained or accomplished in your previous run. It's turn-based, so you can only spend a finite amount of time on it every 24 hours. Also it is freaking hilarious.
I'd also signed up for a game with a similar gameplay layout to KoL but which is not funny. However, I've forgotten the name of the game, hence can't go back and play my characters. Yes, characters. It is a rare game that'll have me playing less than two characters. Many games frown on multis because people might use multiple characters to beef up one character with the items and buffs meant for a single one. But me, I crave perfect information. I want to run the first one through as a test character, with all the skills I might like to have, testing out the various action options and sequences of events. Then for the second character, I know which skills are actually more powerful, which courses of action most likely to bear fruit, and I can concentrate on those. Or, in the case of KoL, just have two characters in different phases of the game at all times so in case I get bored bashing hippes for the war effort, I can go fight possessed cans of tomatoes to help out the Captain of the Gourd.
BARP. Very, very similar to the NES game Ultima, if y'all have ever played that. A 2D, low-rez, graphics based environment that runs fairly speedily in a browser. I haven't played all that much for awhile, ever since I managed to get my character trapped in some underground caves filled with extremely powerful enemies, and haven't been able to find my way out. One nice thing about it is that you can load your own custom character icon. (Mine is The Cheat.)
Sryth. A text-based RPG with a very D&D style combat system, truly well-written quests and interesting dungeons. The major drawback? More than two thirds of game content is only available to subscribers. Arrgh.
And, most recently, Perenthia. The gameplay itself hearkens back to Zork, the grandaddy of all text-based dungeon games. But the game runs on the Microsoft Silverlight plugin, for which I had to use IE because it runs like a sullen, arthritic slug on Firefox. But the very best thing about it from my perspective is that it is still in the Alpha testing phase.
Every social group of living creatures has a hierarchy. From ants to chickens to chimps to people, there are those whose opinions hold weight and those whose views are brushed aside. And as anyone who has dipped a toe into an online community knows, alpha testers are the slightly less miniscule fish in the incredibly tiny pond, second only to mods and programmers. All others, however impressive their accomplishments, are mere Johnny-5-come-latelies. They get to reminisce about the old days before all the bugs were fixed and lord it over the newbies in the forums. They
When I realized how happy I was about this, I began immediately to question my motives. Am I so desperate for social power? Am I so frustrated with the trials and tribulations of real life that I turn to a crappy, bugs-not-fixed-yet text-based online universe?
Yes. Yes I am.
Due to my lack of forward momentum in real life, I've turned more and more to games for that little hit of empowerment and validation they can provide. It's kind of like watering a plant with club soda. It gets the hydration in there and aerates the soil, but ultimately weakens the root system and makes the plant pale and stringy. Man, I've got to get away from these plant metaphors.
I'm aware that it's not entirely healthy to obsess over roleplaying games, be they online or console or PC-based. But the idea of taking on the role of an alter ego is only a small part of the appeal for me. The big draw is that in any game, you know that you will only be presented with problems you can solve. You will never confront a puzzle unless all the pieces necessary to solve it exist in the game, never be presented with a monster that is actually impossble to defeat. If you, the player, are patient and plan ahead, load your character up with all the items and skills and spells appropriate to the task, you will be able to overcome any challenge the game sets you.
So here's a list of all my beloved PBBGs.
The Kingdom of Loathing. I don't play as often as I used to--got my big sister into it, and she is a way more disciplined and accomplished player than me. The nice thing about KoL is that once you've beaten the game, you get to "reincarnate" back at the beginning as a new character class, retaining a few useful things you've obtained or accomplished in your previous run. It's turn-based, so you can only spend a finite amount of time on it every 24 hours. Also it is freaking hilarious.
I'd also signed up for a game with a similar gameplay layout to KoL but which is not funny. However, I've forgotten the name of the game, hence can't go back and play my characters. Yes, characters. It is a rare game that'll have me playing less than two characters. Many games frown on multis because people might use multiple characters to beef up one character with the items and buffs meant for a single one. But me, I crave perfect information. I want to run the first one through as a test character, with all the skills I might like to have, testing out the various action options and sequences of events. Then for the second character, I know which skills are actually more powerful, which courses of action most likely to bear fruit, and I can concentrate on those. Or, in the case of KoL, just have two characters in different phases of the game at all times so in case I get bored bashing hippes for the war effort, I can go fight possessed cans of tomatoes to help out the Captain of the Gourd.
BARP. Very, very similar to the NES game Ultima, if y'all have ever played that. A 2D, low-rez, graphics based environment that runs fairly speedily in a browser. I haven't played all that much for awhile, ever since I managed to get my character trapped in some underground caves filled with extremely powerful enemies, and haven't been able to find my way out. One nice thing about it is that you can load your own custom character icon. (Mine is The Cheat.)
Sryth. A text-based RPG with a very D&D style combat system, truly well-written quests and interesting dungeons. The major drawback? More than two thirds of game content is only available to subscribers. Arrgh.
And, most recently, Perenthia. The gameplay itself hearkens back to Zork, the grandaddy of all text-based dungeon games. But the game runs on the Microsoft Silverlight plugin, for which I had to use IE because it runs like a sullen, arthritic slug on Firefox. But the very best thing about it from my perspective is that it is still in the Alpha testing phase.
Every social group of living creatures has a hierarchy. From ants to chickens to chimps to people, there are those whose opinions hold weight and those whose views are brushed aside. And as anyone who has dipped a toe into an online community knows, alpha testers are the slightly less miniscule fish in the incredibly tiny pond, second only to mods and programmers. All others, however impressive their accomplishments, are mere Johnny-5-come-latelies. They get to reminisce about the old days before all the bugs were fixed and lord it over the newbies in the forums. They
When I realized how happy I was about this, I began immediately to question my motives. Am I so desperate for social power? Am I so frustrated with the trials and tribulations of real life that I turn to a crappy, bugs-not-fixed-yet text-based online universe?
Yes. Yes I am.
Tuesdays with Abhorrent Fiends vol. 46: Calvinism!
So. Calvinism.
I ran across this quote over at Rhoblogy. Taken completely out of context, I agree with it:
Put that way, I can see how belief in predestination can be used to set up a very stable emotional homeostasis on the subject of the worth of persons. "I do notice," says predestination-believing Fiat, "that according to X standards of measurement, you are a much, much more valuable and important person than me. I don't need to be afraid of you, however. Because these are human standards of measurement, and you and I are both, by divine standards, totally screwed." Or, in a different situation; "I am aware that according to X standards of measurement, I am a much more important and powerful person than you are. However, I have no reason to make that role a part of my identity, nor any right to snub you because of it. By God's standards, you and I together are both totally worthless." In either case, I could merrily conclude, "But since there's a tiny chance that God may have taken pity on us and allowed us to be redeemed even though we don't deserve it, let's be friends!"
I think existentialists must have riffed off of Calvinism there, perhaps without realizing it. Both play a neat trick of turning our natural animal us-against-them instincts inside out. A person who constructs the belief dynamic properly in their minds is left with a permanent feeling of "us, together, against unbelievable odds, with a hope whose chances of fulfillment we cannot know." Which state of mind often brings out the best in a human being. It is either the attitude that helped us defeat the dinosaurs to fulfill God's mandate to fill the earth and prosper, or the attitude that helped us fight our way out of the trees and to the top of the food chain.
Either way, it IS a neat solution to one of the knottiest personality construction problems out there: identity versus ego.
In order to understand the power dynamics of your social environments, you need to be able to constantly compare yourself to everyone else around you. This information allows you to understand your identity as a member of each group. However, if you take what you observe and plug it immediately into your ego, your sense of self-worth becomes extremely volatile. The weight and substance and passion you allow yourself to experience becomes dependent upon the social status given to you by others. Wearing more "goodguy badges" on your brain than the next guy? Feel ten feet tall and ready to take on the whole Empire yourself. Not entirely comfortable with the values and beliefs of those who are superior to you in the hierarchy? Feel small and squishy and always in everybody's way. (And woe betide you if the people above you in the hierarchy are, themselves, insecure. They WILL take your discomfort and lack of adherence to their value set as a personal attack.)
What a belief in predestination allows you to do is the emotional equivalent of finding a common factor to two terms on either side of a mathematical equation that cancels out both of them. The emotional value loads drops out, leaving behind only information. You can then take a step back, look at what you know of yourself in a social context, and compare that with the internal structure of values which are the core of your identity. The thing that makes your personality tick. Your place in the social hierarchy of a group you've chosen to join becomes a piece of information that you can weigh and judge. It only needs to be used to alter the core beliefs of your personality if you find it matches up well with the values you've chosen to take to heart.
However, this is extremely hard work. As one of my favorite poems has it:
[Currency]
Diamond
evaporates;
bright metal melts away.
Attention is the hardest thing
to pay.
Not many people feel there is sufficient reason to keep paying attention to this process, this separation of social information from internal beliefs, to continue working it out on a day-to-day basis. The values of one's chosen social groups stay the same, right? One's internal values don't need to be questioned and re-evaluated for every single crisis of conscience or conflict of honor, right?
So in practice, we build ourselves little shortcuts. Little DIY beliefs which substitute for the laborious process of comparing belief against action, idea against practice. For use in those tough real-world situations where making a snap judgment of someone's character will show you how to behave toward them without bothering to learn what they are really like as an individual. We want to be able to tell at a glance if someone is depraved or commendable, and so we take a working summary of our beliefs where they intersect with the values of our communities, and make them into laws in our minds. Arbitrary laws.
Let's take the example from last Tuesday of a football team whose players have a fad going for Valentino suits. Guys who wear "our brand" are good guys, have good judgment and fashion sense and are generally cool. Guys who don't are less cool and may be taken less seriously, unless they prove themselves to be "goodguys" by adhering to other values shared by the team, ones with a heavier emotional weight attached to them.
How might a Calvinist assemble such an arbitrary law in his mind, if he felt a shortcut was necessary for the economical use of his attention and emotions?
Let's go back to Rhoblogy:
The thoughtful Calvinist would say to himself, "Others mock and deride me for my beliefs; according to God's law, we are all sinners and equally worthless. But if I am among the elect, these attacks will not deter me from accomplishing God's will. And if those who mock me are among the elect, they will eventually see the truth when God moves in their hearts. So I must neither stop, nor despise my adversaries."
The shortcut-taking Calvinist would say to himself, "Others mock and deride me for my beliefs; I can take this as evidence of where we each stand spiritually. I am being persecuted for doing God's work; therefore I am saved. They are persecuting me for doing God's work; therefore they are damned."
So anyone I meet, no matter his professed belief set, might have some arbitrary shortcuts such as this assembled in his mind. He might have several of them, dozens, a horde of emotionally-satisfying but logically absurd assumptions. These may seem to him to match up with the doctrines of his supposed religion. But in fact, he may have so constructed his shortcuts that they unmake and nullify all the beneficial personality transformations which his religious system is meant to wreak.
This is why I try, to the best of my ability, not to build shortcuts. Or if I must build them, I try to take them apart, check what other beliefs they're based on, make sure the emotional re-routing going on is not blinding me to important information about myself and the people around me. Personality construction is an art (not, alas, a science!) we all must practice. It's part of being a person. Yet the least little mistake is bloody freaking dangerous! Someone can sell you a diamond, and as soon as you buy it, you without any outside prompting can turn it into a turd. And then go waving your turdly behavior around at everyone you meet, causing them to conclude, "Well, I guess whoever that person was dealing with doesn't have any diamonds."
My chief worry about the new Calvinism has to do with the nature of shortcuts people are mostly likely to put together if they choose to stop wrestling with the real thing. "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling" is good advice for anyone of any belief set. Because any belief system, however well-put-together, turns into an emotional minefield as soon as you start making substitutions. As soon as an individual loses the sense of uncertainty regarding their own salvation, their "Calvinism" becomes Nazism. In the broadest, non-racial sense, that is, "People of my group are inherently better and people of your group are inherently inferior, therefore we can do anything we want to you and you have no right to do anything." If a person sets up his shortcuts as a series of proofs for his own elect, saved status, he can quite easily come to believe that he knows the will of God, he knows who is naughty and who nice, and will begin to treat other people according to the beliefs he himself has constructed.
And there is a huge temptation to set up those shortcuts. Uncertainty regarding one's own relative worth as a person is an extremely uncomfortable way to live. Which is one of the reasons it can be so beneficial: those who are able to work through the discomfort can gain wisdom, patience and compassion as they see others enmeshed in the same struggle. The belief in one's own innate superiority is an extremely comfortable one--emotionally efficient, satisfying in a junk-food kind of way. But it is just about the worst thing you can possibly do when it comes to obtaining accurate information, whether about yourself, your social environment, or other people. It's a greasy fingerprint over the lens of the mind that turns your vision of everything outside yourself into a nasty, disgusting blur.
In conclusion, Calvinism done right is something I approve of, and I certainly wouldn't despair at being stranded on a desert island populated only by true and proper Calvinists. I could adapt. But in part because it is such an effective transformation when done right, it is more susceptible than many belief systems to being twisted just that little bit, from a source of great wisdom into a source of great pettiness and stupidity.
I ran across this quote over at Rhoblogy. Taken completely out of context, I agree with it:
If there's no law, there's no depravity. Or commendability. There just IS.But Rhoblogy's making a point about predestination. The idea that some people are saved and others damned without having a say in the matter, as I read him, isn't supposed to make us feel surly or resentful. Rather, we should be astonished that any are saved at all. That way no one has any call to puff themselves up with pride at their accomplishments. All human effort is worthless anyway, and it is only because of the astonishing and uncalled-for mercy of God that He has chosen to spare some from the fate which all unquestionably deserve.
Put that way, I can see how belief in predestination can be used to set up a very stable emotional homeostasis on the subject of the worth of persons. "I do notice," says predestination-believing Fiat, "that according to X standards of measurement, you are a much, much more valuable and important person than me. I don't need to be afraid of you, however. Because these are human standards of measurement, and you and I are both, by divine standards, totally screwed." Or, in a different situation; "I am aware that according to X standards of measurement, I am a much more important and powerful person than you are. However, I have no reason to make that role a part of my identity, nor any right to snub you because of it. By God's standards, you and I together are both totally worthless." In either case, I could merrily conclude, "But since there's a tiny chance that God may have taken pity on us and allowed us to be redeemed even though we don't deserve it, let's be friends!"
I think existentialists must have riffed off of Calvinism there, perhaps without realizing it. Both play a neat trick of turning our natural animal us-against-them instincts inside out. A person who constructs the belief dynamic properly in their minds is left with a permanent feeling of "us, together, against unbelievable odds, with a hope whose chances of fulfillment we cannot know." Which state of mind often brings out the best in a human being. It is either the attitude that helped us defeat the dinosaurs to fulfill God's mandate to fill the earth and prosper, or the attitude that helped us fight our way out of the trees and to the top of the food chain.
Either way, it IS a neat solution to one of the knottiest personality construction problems out there: identity versus ego.
In order to understand the power dynamics of your social environments, you need to be able to constantly compare yourself to everyone else around you. This information allows you to understand your identity as a member of each group. However, if you take what you observe and plug it immediately into your ego, your sense of self-worth becomes extremely volatile. The weight and substance and passion you allow yourself to experience becomes dependent upon the social status given to you by others. Wearing more "goodguy badges" on your brain than the next guy? Feel ten feet tall and ready to take on the whole Empire yourself. Not entirely comfortable with the values and beliefs of those who are superior to you in the hierarchy? Feel small and squishy and always in everybody's way. (And woe betide you if the people above you in the hierarchy are, themselves, insecure. They WILL take your discomfort and lack of adherence to their value set as a personal attack.)
What a belief in predestination allows you to do is the emotional equivalent of finding a common factor to two terms on either side of a mathematical equation that cancels out both of them. The emotional value loads drops out, leaving behind only information. You can then take a step back, look at what you know of yourself in a social context, and compare that with the internal structure of values which are the core of your identity. The thing that makes your personality tick. Your place in the social hierarchy of a group you've chosen to join becomes a piece of information that you can weigh and judge. It only needs to be used to alter the core beliefs of your personality if you find it matches up well with the values you've chosen to take to heart.
However, this is extremely hard work. As one of my favorite poems has it:
[Currency]
Diamond
evaporates;
bright metal melts away.
Attention is the hardest thing
to pay.
Not many people feel there is sufficient reason to keep paying attention to this process, this separation of social information from internal beliefs, to continue working it out on a day-to-day basis. The values of one's chosen social groups stay the same, right? One's internal values don't need to be questioned and re-evaluated for every single crisis of conscience or conflict of honor, right?
So in practice, we build ourselves little shortcuts. Little DIY beliefs which substitute for the laborious process of comparing belief against action, idea against practice. For use in those tough real-world situations where making a snap judgment of someone's character will show you how to behave toward them without bothering to learn what they are really like as an individual. We want to be able to tell at a glance if someone is depraved or commendable, and so we take a working summary of our beliefs where they intersect with the values of our communities, and make them into laws in our minds. Arbitrary laws.
Let's take the example from last Tuesday of a football team whose players have a fad going for Valentino suits. Guys who wear "our brand" are good guys, have good judgment and fashion sense and are generally cool. Guys who don't are less cool and may be taken less seriously, unless they prove themselves to be "goodguys" by adhering to other values shared by the team, ones with a heavier emotional weight attached to them.
How might a Calvinist assemble such an arbitrary law in his mind, if he felt a shortcut was necessary for the economical use of his attention and emotions?
Let's go back to Rhoblogy:
"Regular" 5-point Calvinism teaches that God uses means to accomplish His will, like missions, leading a godly life as a witness to others, sharing and explaining the Gospel, etc.Then, later, refuting a point in the NY Times article that sparked this discussion:
"being a persecuted minority proves you are among the elect."A perfectly fair critique. Rho is talking about a hypothetical Calvinist who is thoughtful and thorough in living out his beliefs; Worthen was talking about a hypothetical Calvinist who has built himself a shortcut based on the sentiments of his social set.
No, it doesn't. It proves you're among a persecuted minority.
Adherence to God's Word and repentance and faith in Jesus are among the proofs that one is among the elect.
The thoughtful Calvinist would say to himself, "Others mock and deride me for my beliefs; according to God's law, we are all sinners and equally worthless. But if I am among the elect, these attacks will not deter me from accomplishing God's will. And if those who mock me are among the elect, they will eventually see the truth when God moves in their hearts. So I must neither stop, nor despise my adversaries."
The shortcut-taking Calvinist would say to himself, "Others mock and deride me for my beliefs; I can take this as evidence of where we each stand spiritually. I am being persecuted for doing God's work; therefore I am saved. They are persecuting me for doing God's work; therefore they are damned."
So anyone I meet, no matter his professed belief set, might have some arbitrary shortcuts such as this assembled in his mind. He might have several of them, dozens, a horde of emotionally-satisfying but logically absurd assumptions. These may seem to him to match up with the doctrines of his supposed religion. But in fact, he may have so constructed his shortcuts that they unmake and nullify all the beneficial personality transformations which his religious system is meant to wreak.
This is why I try, to the best of my ability, not to build shortcuts. Or if I must build them, I try to take them apart, check what other beliefs they're based on, make sure the emotional re-routing going on is not blinding me to important information about myself and the people around me. Personality construction is an art (not, alas, a science!) we all must practice. It's part of being a person. Yet the least little mistake is bloody freaking dangerous! Someone can sell you a diamond, and as soon as you buy it, you without any outside prompting can turn it into a turd. And then go waving your turdly behavior around at everyone you meet, causing them to conclude, "Well, I guess whoever that person was dealing with doesn't have any diamonds."
My chief worry about the new Calvinism has to do with the nature of shortcuts people are mostly likely to put together if they choose to stop wrestling with the real thing. "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling" is good advice for anyone of any belief set. Because any belief system, however well-put-together, turns into an emotional minefield as soon as you start making substitutions. As soon as an individual loses the sense of uncertainty regarding their own salvation, their "Calvinism" becomes Nazism. In the broadest, non-racial sense, that is, "People of my group are inherently better and people of your group are inherently inferior, therefore we can do anything we want to you and you have no right to do anything." If a person sets up his shortcuts as a series of proofs for his own elect, saved status, he can quite easily come to believe that he knows the will of God, he knows who is naughty and who nice, and will begin to treat other people according to the beliefs he himself has constructed.
And there is a huge temptation to set up those shortcuts. Uncertainty regarding one's own relative worth as a person is an extremely uncomfortable way to live. Which is one of the reasons it can be so beneficial: those who are able to work through the discomfort can gain wisdom, patience and compassion as they see others enmeshed in the same struggle. The belief in one's own innate superiority is an extremely comfortable one--emotionally efficient, satisfying in a junk-food kind of way. But it is just about the worst thing you can possibly do when it comes to obtaining accurate information, whether about yourself, your social environment, or other people. It's a greasy fingerprint over the lens of the mind that turns your vision of everything outside yourself into a nasty, disgusting blur.
In conclusion, Calvinism done right is something I approve of, and I certainly wouldn't despair at being stranded on a desert island populated only by true and proper Calvinists. I could adapt. But in part because it is such an effective transformation when done right, it is more susceptible than many belief systems to being twisted just that little bit, from a source of great wisdom into a source of great pettiness and stupidity.
Tuesdays with Abhorrent Fiends vol. 45
I originally had a ton of different links up here. A buffet sampling of the world's ills, from a sad story about a young man kidnapped and forced into suicide bombing to a smarmy pastor who preaches what sells, not what (according to his religion) saves. But I'm going to pare it down a little. I'm not making a big, fancy point about the source of all the evil in the world. That's too big a topic for me, and even if I came up with an answer that made for satisfying reading, it wouldn't be the answer.
So here's the story that irritated me enough that I decided to make a blog post about one of the ways people like you and me can talk ourselves into doing stupid, hurtful things. Found the link to it here. It's about a bus full of idiots in Boston.
I have a tendency, sometimes, to think up my point first and then only afterward look to see how the evidence suggests it. Sometimes there's some idea that has been pressing on my thoughts, some emotional or mental state I struggle to describe, and I come to see another person's story as a metaphor for my own inner experience. In this, I am not alone. But giving in to that temptation is dangerous.
Sunday afternoon Dave and I were sitting in the TV room with an NFL game paused. (I'm not a football or sports person myself, but Dave has a way of explaining things that helps me see the math and psychology behind them. And math and psychology are cool!) The jist of the conversation went something like:
See, when I started drafting this post back on Sunday, I had it all figured out. Here, I thought, was a simple, cogent argument. I could explain how it happens some people get carried away by the hype of whatever it is they've chosen to do. Could explain how others are able to retain a wider perspective, to focus their love and attention on the thing they are doing rather than the way they feel about themselves because they do it.
The crux of the matter, the place where the action really happens, is inside the personality. A person enters into a social group with a certain level of commitment, of trust in the group and its aims and goals and methods. Inside the minds of other members of the group there is a whole spaghetti monster of memes, a mess of value judgments with the dedicated emotional energy of the whole group behind them.
Of course not all the value judgments, not all the beliefs and assumptions, actually have anything to do with the aims of the group or the thing they have come together to do. Like if, off the field, all the players on a particular sports team had a fad going for Valentino suits. They would all agree that Valentino was awesome, and slap their mental and emotional energy down on the table to back up the belief. But that belief, because of the way they came to have it, would be part of their identity as a member of the team, rather than their personal preference of tailoring styles.
Now, a person who was thoughtful about the things he believed and why would be able to separate the suit fad from his identity as a team member in his own mind. He would have a sense of perspective about the belief he'd absorbed from the group, would know it wasn't necessary to the game plan or his own integrity as an athlete. But a less thoughtful person would not be able (to borrow a phrase) to achieve that separation. So, for example, if a casual acquaintance said something critical to him about the suit, he might react as though the honor of his team was in question. In that case he'd be defending the meme about suits--this particular belief of no special importance--with all the same vigor and intensity as he would have defended the source from which the belief came to him--the group identity of his team.
Reminds me of DNA sequences. Every strand of DNA contains many "instructions", that is, sequences of proteins which, when assembled, become the shapes of specialized cells and tissues that permit an organism to grow and function. But in between instructions and the stops between them, there is a lot of static. Broken bits of code, sequences that don't assemble any proteins at all but just sit there, filling space and helping the DNA molecule cohere. Every group's memetic spaghetti monster has a ton of those, whether the group is a legally chartered academy of scientists or an informal group of friends who happen to sit at the same end of a local bar. The "suit memes" could deal with anything from which jargon you use to talk about a subject, to which suits are best, to the moral advisability of smoking, to the immediate likelihood of global thermonuclear war. And it doesn't make a bit of difference. Their sole function is to identify group members to one another, to help hold their sense of identity as a group together. LaVey called such things "goodguy badges", and I think it's a good term for it. It is a belief whose sole function is identification, but which a person who has not thought the matter through will treat as though it were an integral part of his or her identity.
What does this have to do with me, sitting here thinking I have the answers? Or a bus full of idiots who laugh at a drunkard's talk of rape and murder, without ever pausing to wonder if the drunk might not be joking?
I believe we assemble our identities, our working knowledge of who we are as people, from the raw memetic material we get through social interactions. The more intense the relationship, the higher the level of trust, the more beliefs go flying back and forth from one person's mind into another's. Or from one person's habits, instinctive reactions, unconscious prejudices, into the mind of another.
For good or ill, we absorb a lot more information from our environment than we are aware of on a conscious level. Regarding physical reality that's a grim necessity. If you had to read every word on every sign you drove past, notice the shape and texture of the bumps on the steering wheel every time your fingers touched them, you'd go nuts. (You might get more spiritually in tune at first, but in the long term, information overload is a terrible way to go unhinged.) But when it comes to social reality, metaphorically speaking, we all end up swallowing a lot of ideas that can back out of a driveway and sideswipe us when we least expect it.
So here's how I figure it. (Yes, it's scary to realize I'm geniunely and sincerely reduced to guessing about my own motives. I hope, most sincerely, that this is just because I'm analyzing my motives beyond the point which is usually reasonable.) When I started out writing this blog post, I'd been reading around to any blog that struck my eye for a couple of hours. I gravitate to the style of blog where the author picks a subject on which he or she has particular experience or skill as well as strong feelings, and writes about ignoble bastards who try to use something in the blogger's area of interest to defraud and harm other human beings. Maybe I'd chosen, with the arcane emotional calculus we all use to assemble our working identities in the day-to-day, to absorb something the bloggers had never intended to give me. I hadn't absorbed their earnest desire to prevent suffering or their hatred of quackery and swindling, but instead a vague, nebulous feeling: These jerks are wrong. I know what the answer is, why can't they see it?
The moral of the story is: we absorb what we feel we most need. Not what we think we need--this type of decision usually takes place below the level of conscious thought. But if I am feeling small and powerless, I will seek beliefs within the social belief structures available to me that make me feel empowered. If I want to feel wise and superior, I will seek beliefs that support that feeling. If I want to get angry and start arguments with people, I will seek out beliefs that urge me to conclude the world is against me.
This is not to say that you can find anything anywhere if you look for it. You can find anything anywhere, but it won't be of equal quality. If you or I were to travel through time and go back and join the Heaven's Gate cult, and our most earnest emotional need was to feel intelligent and insightful, they could fix us up with some beliefs that did the trick. But if those feelings, and not the reality behind them, were all we were after, then we'd be just as dead as the rest of them.
Which is why those guys on the bus in Boston were idiots. Not because they were disrespectful and insensitive to the women (or men, perhaps, who'd had female friends or relatives raped or beaten or murdered)--that just makes them jerks. They were idiots because they responded to the drunkard on the most superficial possible level, without questioning in their own minds what his motives might be, what he was getting out of it, before deciding whether or not they wanted to encourage him. And any time I spout off about something because I'm reacting emotionally, because I'm looking for a quick hit of self-esteem or self-loathing or whatever emotion it is I need that day, I'm just as much of an idiot as they are.
This post is mostly a note to myself to remember it! Because I very nearly posted something much less useful!
So here's the story that irritated me enough that I decided to make a blog post about one of the ways people like you and me can talk ourselves into doing stupid, hurtful things. Found the link to it here. It's about a bus full of idiots in Boston.
I have a tendency, sometimes, to think up my point first and then only afterward look to see how the evidence suggests it. Sometimes there's some idea that has been pressing on my thoughts, some emotional or mental state I struggle to describe, and I come to see another person's story as a metaphor for my own inner experience. In this, I am not alone. But giving in to that temptation is dangerous.
Sunday afternoon Dave and I were sitting in the TV room with an NFL game paused. (I'm not a football or sports person myself, but Dave has a way of explaining things that helps me see the math and psychology behind them. And math and psychology are cool!) The jist of the conversation went something like:
Me: Football is like, Olympic-level athleticism combined with intense, action-packed groupthink. Either one of those things is extremely hard to do and can consume a person's entire life all by themselves. I mean, you have to be ultra good at two things. No wonder football players never seem to do anything else!
Him: You know, I have a lot of respect for guys who can leave the game behind, still keep a sense of themselves, and learn to do other things. The biggest thing is, if they can learn not to take the game home with them. Not to respond to every situation in life as though you were defending the same ten yards or so of grass as you do on the field. Cause it's just a job.
Me: Exactly. You can't commit your entire identity to the franchise.
Him: Yeah, I've actually read some interviews recently where guys had a really realistic perspective on it. The team could cut you any time, for any reason, or trade you. Or maybe your contract runs out and they don't want to re-sign you.
Me: So you can't totally emotionally commit to an organization because they're not going to do the same for you.
Him: Well, they might. If you're, like, a transcendently talented player who doesn't have a massive attitude problem, they'd feel like they were lucky to have you.
Me: That makes sense. But the thing I think that happens, when guys can't adapt, is that they've taken part of the team's groupthink--the "we're the best! we're better than they are! we're always gonna win!" part--and applied it to their own identities. Because that's a really seductive mindset.
Him: Right. You've got to separate part of yourself from the team. And most of the players you read about who go out and commit crimes are the ones who weren't able to achieve that separation.
See, when I started drafting this post back on Sunday, I had it all figured out. Here, I thought, was a simple, cogent argument. I could explain how it happens some people get carried away by the hype of whatever it is they've chosen to do. Could explain how others are able to retain a wider perspective, to focus their love and attention on the thing they are doing rather than the way they feel about themselves because they do it.
The crux of the matter, the place where the action really happens, is inside the personality. A person enters into a social group with a certain level of commitment, of trust in the group and its aims and goals and methods. Inside the minds of other members of the group there is a whole spaghetti monster of memes, a mess of value judgments with the dedicated emotional energy of the whole group behind them.
Of course not all the value judgments, not all the beliefs and assumptions, actually have anything to do with the aims of the group or the thing they have come together to do. Like if, off the field, all the players on a particular sports team had a fad going for Valentino suits. They would all agree that Valentino was awesome, and slap their mental and emotional energy down on the table to back up the belief. But that belief, because of the way they came to have it, would be part of their identity as a member of the team, rather than their personal preference of tailoring styles.
Now, a person who was thoughtful about the things he believed and why would be able to separate the suit fad from his identity as a team member in his own mind. He would have a sense of perspective about the belief he'd absorbed from the group, would know it wasn't necessary to the game plan or his own integrity as an athlete. But a less thoughtful person would not be able (to borrow a phrase) to achieve that separation. So, for example, if a casual acquaintance said something critical to him about the suit, he might react as though the honor of his team was in question. In that case he'd be defending the meme about suits--this particular belief of no special importance--with all the same vigor and intensity as he would have defended the source from which the belief came to him--the group identity of his team.
Reminds me of DNA sequences. Every strand of DNA contains many "instructions", that is, sequences of proteins which, when assembled, become the shapes of specialized cells and tissues that permit an organism to grow and function. But in between instructions and the stops between them, there is a lot of static. Broken bits of code, sequences that don't assemble any proteins at all but just sit there, filling space and helping the DNA molecule cohere. Every group's memetic spaghetti monster has a ton of those, whether the group is a legally chartered academy of scientists or an informal group of friends who happen to sit at the same end of a local bar. The "suit memes" could deal with anything from which jargon you use to talk about a subject, to which suits are best, to the moral advisability of smoking, to the immediate likelihood of global thermonuclear war. And it doesn't make a bit of difference. Their sole function is to identify group members to one another, to help hold their sense of identity as a group together. LaVey called such things "goodguy badges", and I think it's a good term for it. It is a belief whose sole function is identification, but which a person who has not thought the matter through will treat as though it were an integral part of his or her identity.
What does this have to do with me, sitting here thinking I have the answers? Or a bus full of idiots who laugh at a drunkard's talk of rape and murder, without ever pausing to wonder if the drunk might not be joking?
I believe we assemble our identities, our working knowledge of who we are as people, from the raw memetic material we get through social interactions. The more intense the relationship, the higher the level of trust, the more beliefs go flying back and forth from one person's mind into another's. Or from one person's habits, instinctive reactions, unconscious prejudices, into the mind of another.
For good or ill, we absorb a lot more information from our environment than we are aware of on a conscious level. Regarding physical reality that's a grim necessity. If you had to read every word on every sign you drove past, notice the shape and texture of the bumps on the steering wheel every time your fingers touched them, you'd go nuts. (You might get more spiritually in tune at first, but in the long term, information overload is a terrible way to go unhinged.) But when it comes to social reality, metaphorically speaking, we all end up swallowing a lot of ideas that can back out of a driveway and sideswipe us when we least expect it.
So here's how I figure it. (Yes, it's scary to realize I'm geniunely and sincerely reduced to guessing about my own motives. I hope, most sincerely, that this is just because I'm analyzing my motives beyond the point which is usually reasonable.) When I started out writing this blog post, I'd been reading around to any blog that struck my eye for a couple of hours. I gravitate to the style of blog where the author picks a subject on which he or she has particular experience or skill as well as strong feelings, and writes about ignoble bastards who try to use something in the blogger's area of interest to defraud and harm other human beings. Maybe I'd chosen, with the arcane emotional calculus we all use to assemble our working identities in the day-to-day, to absorb something the bloggers had never intended to give me. I hadn't absorbed their earnest desire to prevent suffering or their hatred of quackery and swindling, but instead a vague, nebulous feeling: These jerks are wrong. I know what the answer is, why can't they see it?
The moral of the story is: we absorb what we feel we most need. Not what we think we need--this type of decision usually takes place below the level of conscious thought. But if I am feeling small and powerless, I will seek beliefs within the social belief structures available to me that make me feel empowered. If I want to feel wise and superior, I will seek beliefs that support that feeling. If I want to get angry and start arguments with people, I will seek out beliefs that urge me to conclude the world is against me.
This is not to say that you can find anything anywhere if you look for it. You can find anything anywhere, but it won't be of equal quality. If you or I were to travel through time and go back and join the Heaven's Gate cult, and our most earnest emotional need was to feel intelligent and insightful, they could fix us up with some beliefs that did the trick. But if those feelings, and not the reality behind them, were all we were after, then we'd be just as dead as the rest of them.
Which is why those guys on the bus in Boston were idiots. Not because they were disrespectful and insensitive to the women (or men, perhaps, who'd had female friends or relatives raped or beaten or murdered)--that just makes them jerks. They were idiots because they responded to the drunkard on the most superficial possible level, without questioning in their own minds what his motives might be, what he was getting out of it, before deciding whether or not they wanted to encourage him. And any time I spout off about something because I'm reacting emotionally, because I'm looking for a quick hit of self-esteem or self-loathing or whatever emotion it is I need that day, I'm just as much of an idiot as they are.
This post is mostly a note to myself to remember it! Because I very nearly posted something much less useful!
Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol 44.
Okay, so I'm not much good at real-life investigative reporting. But I have done more socializing on the internet than in real-life over the past few years. My instincts, by nature and/or nurture, are both suspicious and duplicitous.
So I noticed something today. Have a look at the linked blog's list of followers.
Imagining for the sake of argument that we have no other information, what can we learn from this list?
So I noticed something today. Have a look at the linked blog's list of followers.
Imagining for the sake of argument that we have no other information, what can we learn from this list?
35 of the 76 followers have blogs. (Including me.) I don't know how to interpret this proportion. To do so I'd have to look at the blogs of other organizations to establish a baseline. If anybody already has knowledge of such matters, I am interested.
Some of the blogs, however, were created within the past three months by self-identified recent graduates of the program. There are multiple examples: see here, here, and here. The first two read, to me, like something the bloggers wrote according to someone else's instructions. The third one seems patently fake, the sort of thing that is created by a ringer in order to grab search engines. There seem to be four categories of people in the followers list:
1. the ones who don't have blogs
2. the ones with very few (less than 4) total posts, whose blogs seem forced, like the three linked above
3. the ones whose blogs are only a title with no posts
4. the ones who are clearly real people updating about their real lives and thoughts
Category #4 has a little over a dozen people. I ought to go back and do a count, but real bloggers are not my main concern.
Category #3 I don't know enough to interpret. Is it common for people to start blogs, but never get around to posting in them? Is it common for people to have blogs where they make all their posts non-viewable except to themselves? Either seems plausible. So I'm mentally tagging them all as real bloggers for the time being.
Category #1 could be ringers. They could be shy people who don't feel like having a blog. There could be some of each. Not enough information to make a meaningful judgment.
Category #2, on the other hand, is the least numerous and most disturbing. Why does it disturb me so? Let me tell you a little story. A true story, about a time when I learned some of the negative assumptions I am now struggling to replace.
Once, when I was a kid, I got into a terrible fight with a neighbor girl. We didn't speak for several days. Mom suggested I write a letter of apology. The first letter I wrote was very angry and sulky. (Think of Homer saying, "I'm sorry...sorry you're such jerks!") Mom said that one was too angry to send. So I wrote a second draft, toned-down and very smarmy. Mom said that one sounded really insincere.
So she offered to help me write one that was right down the middle. She pretty much dictated it to me, word for word. It used some of the language from my previous drafts, but some of it was totally new. Like one part, I remember distinctly, where Mom told me to write that I didn't blame my friend for her mean behavior because she hadn't been raised to have good manners.
Trusting my mom's superior knowledge, I went over and delivered the letter, blissfully believing my friend would accept my apology, she would see that it had all been a silly misunderstanding, and we could go back to the way things were before. To my surprise, instead my parents and her parents were suddenly having an even bigger fight. Forget not wanting to play with each other--we were suddenly not allowed to play with one another.
I was confused, and felt terribly guilty. Despite all Mom's reassurances to the contrary, I was dead certain (for years) that I was to blame for the whole mess. How the matter was eventually resolved has slipped from my memory. I know me and my neighbor later become playmates again, but not the circumstances that led to it.
Here's my point. I have some experience, both then and during later, darker times, with writing and saying things under at least partial duress. I know what it freaking sounds like. I am pretty sure that these Mercy graduates who make these forced-sounding blog posts either don't realize they're being manipulated, or believe it's being done for their own benefit. I can imagine how it might be phrased, even: "Keeping a blog with positive things in it is an important part of your journey towards health! Hey, why don't you start by talking about your positive experience at Mercy?" Heck, the people doing the manipulating probably have themselves talked into a nice-sounding rationale. "Well, there've been so many lies told by minions of Satan in the press and blogosphere, we have to counteract it with the true voices of real people and their positive perspectives."
Hear that, emotionally vulnerable young woman? Jesus is your buddy, we are the best thing that ever happened to you, and anyone who says differently is enslaved by demons of slander and lies.
Once, when I was a kid, I got into a terrible fight with a neighbor girl. We didn't speak for several days. Mom suggested I write a letter of apology. The first letter I wrote was very angry and sulky. (Think of Homer saying, "I'm sorry...sorry you're such jerks!") Mom said that one was too angry to send. So I wrote a second draft, toned-down and very smarmy. Mom said that one sounded really insincere.
So she offered to help me write one that was right down the middle. She pretty much dictated it to me, word for word. It used some of the language from my previous drafts, but some of it was totally new. Like one part, I remember distinctly, where Mom told me to write that I didn't blame my friend for her mean behavior because she hadn't been raised to have good manners.
Trusting my mom's superior knowledge, I went over and delivered the letter, blissfully believing my friend would accept my apology, she would see that it had all been a silly misunderstanding, and we could go back to the way things were before. To my surprise, instead my parents and her parents were suddenly having an even bigger fight. Forget not wanting to play with each other--we were suddenly not allowed to play with one another.
I was confused, and felt terribly guilty. Despite all Mom's reassurances to the contrary, I was dead certain (for years) that I was to blame for the whole mess. How the matter was eventually resolved has slipped from my memory. I know me and my neighbor later become playmates again, but not the circumstances that led to it.
Here's my point. I have some experience, both then and during later, darker times, with writing and saying things under at least partial duress. I know what it freaking sounds like. I am pretty sure that these Mercy graduates who make these forced-sounding blog posts either don't realize they're being manipulated, or believe it's being done for their own benefit. I can imagine how it might be phrased, even: "Keeping a blog with positive things in it is an important part of your journey towards health! Hey, why don't you start by talking about your positive experience at Mercy?" Heck, the people doing the manipulating probably have themselves talked into a nice-sounding rationale. "Well, there've been so many lies told by minions of Satan in the press and blogosphere, we have to counteract it with the true voices of real people and their positive perspectives."
Hear that, emotionally vulnerable young woman? Jesus is your buddy, we are the best thing that ever happened to you, and anyone who says differently is enslaved by demons of slander and lies.
(then, via telepathy:)
(SO WRITE WHAT I TELL YOU TO, BITCH, OR YOU'RE GOING TO BURN!)
Ok, sweetie? OK! Wonderful, praise the Lord! Let's get started!
Eheheh. Hehe.
Okay, not funny.
Scary as hell.
Eheheh. Hehe.
Okay, not funny.
Scary as hell.
Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol 43.
I highly recommend the following story:
The Things That Make Me Weak And Strange Get Engineered Away by Cory Doctorow.
It's scifi. It's set in a classic "totalitarian dystopia" future. But! It's also a lighthearted romp with an endearingly bumbling main character who actually manages to use his enormous brain properly from time to time. He is a monk in something called the Order of Reflective Analytics.
Which Order, were it not fictional, and all other things being equal, I would have been standing in line to join since a week before the doors opened. In fact, I would willingly be a participant in three consecutive episodes of Fear Factor if such was necessary to be allowed to join.* They spend all their time analyzing things and making sure they maintain good mental and physical health, plus a set percentage of time they spend noodling around with whatever hobby strikes their fancy.
I really, really like analysis. Especially self-analysis. The continued existence of this blog is more proof of that than anyone deserves to have inflicted upon them. My brain, she is like one of those scammer aliens from Bender's Big Score. The ones who have a sprunger in their neck which becomes engorged in the presence of (mmmm) information.
(The scammer aliens, for those who haven't seen the movie, are the ones on the right. The not even vaguely hot ones. The at least vaguely hot ones are Amy and Leela.)
Self-analysis, simply put, is a convenient dump for all that attention and mental energy I have to be paying to something. Me is always where I can get at me to think about me, so whenever I get bored, I end up self-analyzing more than usual. Which from time to time has led to some really bad feedback loops between boredom and sadness. But not today! So we'll not discuss that further just now.
Today, something highly reflective occurred to me. Lo, in the midst of my light clerical labors, whose chiefest occupational hazards are papercuts about the fingers and knuckles, soreness of the neck, back and shoulders, and extreme boredom of the kind which does not preclude rational thought if one is moved to engage in it.
Consider all those superstitions I listed in Tuesday 42. Consider that I hold each and every one of them in my brain at any appropriate time, and use them as an analytical sounding board off which to bounce my initial and subsequent observations of the events I experience. In the case of "ironic commentary" superstitions, any appropriate time is all the dogmanned time. Because irony, as we know, never goes out of style.
Now, why, on the face of it--why on Earth would I do such a thing?
The practical reason (in Aristotelian, the efficient cause) is that this system of superstitions replaced something else which was worse for my mental well-being. Namely, a system of similar but more negative superstitions I'd picked up haphazardly from my years in Christianity. All of which had to do with the relative morality or immorality of every little event I happened to notice, and the varying degrees of unsufferable disgustitude with which I was meant to react to a truly astounding number of things. Now, I know that no single human being, or even a group of separated individuals, would ever have wanted or consciously intended to put such a thing into my brain. However, it was my misfortune and lack of wisdom to absorb and mimic various structures of value judgments as I perceived others to apply them. So me becoming superstitious, in the sense of my previous post, was actually an improvement in terms of my mental health. This is because I was replacing something built blindly, by instinct and reaction, with something built fumblingly, through half-understood methods for reasons which were still nebulous.
However, the structural reason (aka: formal cause) why I must have something which serves that purpose in my brain is because I crave information. Sure, we all do! A constant stream of information about what things mean and what they all have to do with one another is essential to our survival. Furthermore, without that information, consciousness has nothing to work on, and eventually goes all wacky and shuts itself down.
And what occurred to me today is that without a structure of value judgments to put things in context, all the random little minutia of my day are just data. Not information. Like if the wind blew the letters on a sign off into the street. Your conscious mind can't do anything with data unless you have a context in which to process it. Value judgments and the beliefs which give them an overall shape and structure provide that context. And I want to process lots and lots of it all the time, certain types of it especially. If I can't get information of the kinds I want in the amounts I crave, I will eventually get edgy and twitchy and eventually freak out in the exact same way that I freak out under sensory deprivation. It is like depriving a non-vampire bat of both the smell and sound of tasty fruit nectars, or a bear-shark of its inalienable right to eat fish. Making stuff up to think about is way preferable to suffering the effects of boredom.
Point is this. Self-analysis, superstition, whatever direction you know how to point it in, every personality has a certain amount of attention which must be spent on something. And in order to do that, the person whom the personality expresses must believe in a set of value judgments. Because the essence of a value judgment is that it determines which things are most (and least) worth paying attention to!
Therefore. The value judgments in which you choose to believe determine (final cause!) which aspects of reality will provide you with the most data. Belief shapes the avenues of perception; perception provides data which can be turned into information once filtered through the lens of belief. I ended up with a cobbled-together group of wacky, vaguely new-agey superstitions for value judgments because they happen to be a decent fit, symbolically speaking, for the types of events I enjoy noticing.
This seems to confront me with a conundrum of fictionally difficult proportions. How am I to determine which value judgments are best for me, when the value judgments one possesses and the aspects of reality one notices exist in a causally dependent relationship to one another?
Or maybe it's more like Dave was telling me last night, while we were both getting drunk. If you are worried about many things, pick something you feel good enough about to make a decision about, and decide. Then all the other things will seem easier.
*By the fourth, I would start rationalizing myself out of it. Deep inside my brain I would weigh all the shiny biofeedback charts and times of quiet reflection against the necessity of having to eat another bug, and the bug would probably win. In terms of me wanting to not eat it, I mean.
The Things That Make Me Weak And Strange Get Engineered Away by Cory Doctorow.
It's scifi. It's set in a classic "totalitarian dystopia" future. But! It's also a lighthearted romp with an endearingly bumbling main character who actually manages to use his enormous brain properly from time to time. He is a monk in something called the Order of Reflective Analytics.
Which Order, were it not fictional, and all other things being equal, I would have been standing in line to join since a week before the doors opened. In fact, I would willingly be a participant in three consecutive episodes of Fear Factor if such was necessary to be allowed to join.* They spend all their time analyzing things and making sure they maintain good mental and physical health, plus a set percentage of time they spend noodling around with whatever hobby strikes their fancy.
I really, really like analysis. Especially self-analysis. The continued existence of this blog is more proof of that than anyone deserves to have inflicted upon them. My brain, she is like one of those scammer aliens from Bender's Big Score. The ones who have a sprunger in their neck which becomes engorged in the presence of (mmmm) information.
(The scammer aliens, for those who haven't seen the movie, are the ones on the right. The not even vaguely hot ones. The at least vaguely hot ones are Amy and Leela.)
Self-analysis, simply put, is a convenient dump for all that attention and mental energy I have to be paying to something. Me is always where I can get at me to think about me, so whenever I get bored, I end up self-analyzing more than usual. Which from time to time has led to some really bad feedback loops between boredom and sadness. But not today! So we'll not discuss that further just now.
Today, something highly reflective occurred to me. Lo, in the midst of my light clerical labors, whose chiefest occupational hazards are papercuts about the fingers and knuckles, soreness of the neck, back and shoulders, and extreme boredom of the kind which does not preclude rational thought if one is moved to engage in it.
Consider all those superstitions I listed in Tuesday 42. Consider that I hold each and every one of them in my brain at any appropriate time, and use them as an analytical sounding board off which to bounce my initial and subsequent observations of the events I experience. In the case of "ironic commentary" superstitions, any appropriate time is all the dogmanned time. Because irony, as we know, never goes out of style.
Now, why, on the face of it--why on Earth would I do such a thing?
The practical reason (in Aristotelian, the efficient cause) is that this system of superstitions replaced something else which was worse for my mental well-being. Namely, a system of similar but more negative superstitions I'd picked up haphazardly from my years in Christianity. All of which had to do with the relative morality or immorality of every little event I happened to notice, and the varying degrees of unsufferable disgustitude with which I was meant to react to a truly astounding number of things. Now, I know that no single human being, or even a group of separated individuals, would ever have wanted or consciously intended to put such a thing into my brain. However, it was my misfortune and lack of wisdom to absorb and mimic various structures of value judgments as I perceived others to apply them. So me becoming superstitious, in the sense of my previous post, was actually an improvement in terms of my mental health. This is because I was replacing something built blindly, by instinct and reaction, with something built fumblingly, through half-understood methods for reasons which were still nebulous.
However, the structural reason (aka: formal cause) why I must have something which serves that purpose in my brain is because I crave information. Sure, we all do! A constant stream of information about what things mean and what they all have to do with one another is essential to our survival. Furthermore, without that information, consciousness has nothing to work on, and eventually goes all wacky and shuts itself down.
And what occurred to me today is that without a structure of value judgments to put things in context, all the random little minutia of my day are just data. Not information. Like if the wind blew the letters on a sign off into the street. Your conscious mind can't do anything with data unless you have a context in which to process it. Value judgments and the beliefs which give them an overall shape and structure provide that context. And I want to process lots and lots of it all the time, certain types of it especially. If I can't get information of the kinds I want in the amounts I crave, I will eventually get edgy and twitchy and eventually freak out in the exact same way that I freak out under sensory deprivation. It is like depriving a non-vampire bat of both the smell and sound of tasty fruit nectars, or a bear-shark of its inalienable right to eat fish. Making stuff up to think about is way preferable to suffering the effects of boredom.
Point is this. Self-analysis, superstition, whatever direction you know how to point it in, every personality has a certain amount of attention which must be spent on something. And in order to do that, the person whom the personality expresses must believe in a set of value judgments. Because the essence of a value judgment is that it determines which things are most (and least) worth paying attention to!
Therefore. The value judgments in which you choose to believe determine (final cause!) which aspects of reality will provide you with the most data. Belief shapes the avenues of perception; perception provides data which can be turned into information once filtered through the lens of belief. I ended up with a cobbled-together group of wacky, vaguely new-agey superstitions for value judgments because they happen to be a decent fit, symbolically speaking, for the types of events I enjoy noticing.
This seems to confront me with a conundrum of fictionally difficult proportions. How am I to determine which value judgments are best for me, when the value judgments one possesses and the aspects of reality one notices exist in a causally dependent relationship to one another?
Or maybe it's more like Dave was telling me last night, while we were both getting drunk. If you are worried about many things, pick something you feel good enough about to make a decision about, and decide. Then all the other things will seem easier.
*By the fourth, I would start rationalizing myself out of it. Deep inside my brain I would weigh all the shiny biofeedback charts and times of quiet reflection against the necessity of having to eat another bug, and the bug would probably win. In terms of me wanting to not eat it, I mean.
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