Archive for the ‘ The Self ’ Category

Acceptance

Finally, at age 74, I can begin to see what an emotional and mental mess I am. And I can also see how screwed up everybody else is too. The two realizations go together, and cannot be separated.

This, I believe, is why psychotherapy doesn’t work. You cannot understand yourself unless you understand the social world you live in. Eric Fromm seems to be an exception, but I won’t know until I have a chance to get better acquainted with his writings. I have ordered two of his books from Amazon, but I may not be getting them until next month.

My isolation from the developed world is an advantage (it got me away from the developed world’s craziness) but also a disadvantage (it takes a long time for me to get anything, and sometimes it never arrives). But I digress, I started to talk about accepting the world and accepting myself – in both cases, accepting them are they are.

I will begin with the world first. The truly amazing thing here is that its people are no longer human. This is something almost impossible to comprehend by thinking about it, but easy to feel – if you are in touch with your feelings. Immediately after saying this, I have to ask myself “What about my meditation teacher? His spiritual accomplishments are awesome, but as he says himself, being enlightened is no guarantee that you are a good person. There are plenty of examples to the contrary.” The answer forces itself on me: These people, at their core, are mass people – and are not really human at all.

Saying this is dangerous, and everyone is afraid of saying it – for very good reasons. Mass man is totalitarian and and will attack anyone or anything that apposes it. The natural reaction of those attacked is to attack right back – with all their strength. This has been my reaction too. But it is beginning to dawn on me that this is not a good strategy – it is being just like them. What I have to do is recognize them for just what they are – and accept them anyway. Fortunately, I am in an economic situation (living on my Social Security) where I can do this.

2011
11/08
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
The Self
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Society Must be In Complete Control

It must be in complete control of everything and everyone – especially every one.

This is what a mass society demands – and we live in a mass society (as called to our attention by Ortega y Gasset) – and what Sheldon Wolin calls an inverted totalitarianism, where enforcement is by everyone, not just from the top. This is much more effective than anything George Orwell could have dreamed up – mainly because this kind of control is invisible (since it is everywhere) and can be easily denied by anyone and everyone.

I should say more about the kind of control this is. It is control of what really matters: control of what people believe. They must believe, above all, in the way things are - in the way their society is organized and controlled.

Let me illustrate this with an example from my own life. Back in the Sixties (which really occurred from the late Sixties to the early Seventies) I was living in Denver, Colorado – and the Human Potential Movement was active:

The Human Potential Movement (HPM) arose out of the social and intellectual milieu of the 1960s and formed around the concept of cultivating extraordinary potential that its advocates believed to lie largely untapped in all people. The movement took as its premise the belief that through the development of “human potential”, humans can experience an exceptional quality of life filled with happiness,creativity, and fulfillment. As a corollary, those who begin to unleash this assumed potential often find themselves directing their actions within society towards assisting others to release their potential. Adherents believe that the net effect of individuals cultivating their potential will bring about positive social change at large.

It was an exciting time to be alive. I met the man who was going to be my guru, who was into Gestalt Psychology at the time. I knew the couple who established the Gestalt Institute of Denver, and used to go skinny-dipping with them in the Jacuzzi behind their home. I also knew the young woman who established People House, where people could attend workshops on weekends and get in tune with the latest stuff. Of course I also went to Esalen in California – the real hot-spot of what was happening.

On family level my brother, who had been a music teacher, decided to become a lawyer and help the disadvantaged Navajoes – where he had been teaching for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

All of this came to a crashing end. Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Psychology died, and my guru switched to NLP instead – without having the slightest idea of what he was doing; he just went with the flow unconsciously – as everyone else was doing.

Everyone was letting everyone else run their lives – without being aware of it, or thinking about it in the least.

I freaked out, dropped out of engineering, and went traveling and backpacking for the next six years. Unfortunately, I did not develop any understanding of what was going on – I just noticed, to my surprise, that I could not build a life of my own.

But I had something more important on my mind: I was running out of money. Eventually I became a technical writer, and continued to suffer for another twenty years. Like many others, I was desperate to find myself, and looked in some strange places – including plenty of psychotherapists.

No one told me the obvious: that society did not want me to be myself. As I said in the beginning: society must be in complete control of everybody, and cannot tolerate anyone who is different – who cannot be easily controlled. And especially those who are critical of it.

So here I am, blogging away, criticizing the world I came from – and making absolutely no difference. But this is not quite true: I am building a life for myself, in my own modest way.

Almost no one is interested in it – but what difference does that make?

2011
10/27
CATEGORY
Psychology
Sociology
The Self
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Ortega on Resistance

By Ortega I mean Ortega y Gasset and to by Resistance I refer to the quote below, taken from page 93 of Ortega’s “The Revolt of the Masses” and the Triumph of the New Man, by Pedro Blas Gonzalez. This text has not been proof- read very well, and I have made some minor changes to it – and I have broken the text into shorter paragraphs. Roll up you pants, because we are going to wade right in:

An even greater problem that Ortega points out in the cyclical nature of human history is our our lack of understanding or failure to recognize human existence as always offering resistance to our individual lives. He tells us, “all life is the struggle, the effort to be itself. “

Human life, then, is best understood as resistance. This resistance is present in every one of our endeavors, trivial as they may seem at times. But resistance in itself, Ortega argues, is the manifestation of life in its human form.

This forces us to discover the self and our place in the scheme of things: my destiny or vocation. The struggle to become how my intuition informs me that I am part of the struggle to be. To live, then, is to confront and develop ourselves.

This is very much in keeping with the existential notion of life as project. Hence in Ortega’s view, to posit life as resistance, as other thinkers like Dilthey and Heidegger have also argued, brings about two central realizations: humility and a sense of awe.

These two conditions, when maintained throughout the course of one’s life become the fundamental ingredients in not following the somnambulist sub-existence of the mass man.

I only need add that Ortega, like most original thinkers, has been ignored in our time – a time which has been characterized as the Great Regression.

2011
10/19
CATEGORY
Philosophy
The Self
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Permission to Be

To be or not to be is no longer a question, it is an existential quandary. Are we allowed to be at all? The answer is “No.”

However it goes beyond that – we are not just forbidden to be, we are forbidden to know that we cannot be.

2011
10/17
CATEGORY
Aphorism
The Self
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The System and its Functionaries

The System I don’t have to explain, although it might be hard to explain to creatures from another planet. If we said “The System has taken the place of God,” this wouldn’t help much either – although that would certainly be true. But the System is more technical than God was – and in our minds, better.

The System is different in another way too: God had people, but the system has functionaries. There is a difference. Functionaries are objects or things. They are trained, or programmed, to perform certain functions that the System needs done. The System makes everything work together – at least in theory. In practice, as we are finding out, it doesn’t work very well.

We are strictly forbidden to notice this. Why? Because if we lose confidence in the System it will quickly collapse and the world, as we know it, will be over.

Am I exaggerating the importance of belief in the System? Consider what happens when any bubble collapses. Panic sets in. Nothing changes but people’s attitude toward some part of the system – but all hell breaks loose, and the results can be very serious.

Why is this? Because the System, although it claims to be God, is really operated by, and only benefits a few – the rich and the powerful. Our political conservatives, as well as the sycophants in every organization, are aligned with them and their interests.

This is obviously not a desirable state of affairs. How did it happen? Because people had been converted to functionaries who cannot think for themselves – simply because they were no longer people.

Right here is where I lose everybody, because they do not understand the difference between being a human and being a functionary (a thing). They cannot imagine how such a conversion could happen.

I have a hard time imagining it myself. But it did happen, and I can imagine some of the reasons why – mainly involving our relationships to technology. I watched two college students, a young woman and a young man, talk on the bus – meanwhile checking their cellphones constantly. I realized, with a jolt, how their cell phones were part of them! Just as when I was young, a car was part of many young Americans. And, for that matter, is now part of nearly everybody.

Our things have become body-snatchers, and now own us – when we think just the opposite. This is easy to say, and intuitively people can believe it – but the implications, which are vast, are beyond them.

As I have said elsewhere, we seem headed for another Middle Ages. Hopefully, this will force us to reconsider our relationship to technology, and we can start over – this time with us firmly in charge.

2011
10/06
CATEGORY
Economy
Technology
The Self
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Fighting Against the World

To me, this comes naturally – but to most this is what they avoid the most. They know, more or less correctly, if they fight the world they will lose the fight and end up dead – not something that appeals to them. The trick is to cleverly work around this.

What parents have to do is show their children how to fight the world. And if they cannot do that, they should not have children.

Being yourself is easier said then done. I almost died up North (I wasn’t very bright up there) but ended up instead in Costa Rica where I have been able to build my own life. The people I meet down here (in a low-stress rural area) know I am real, and they support that. The young women in particular see me as a grand opportunity, even though I own nothing more than a bicycle. They know I know, and they think if they get me, they will get my knowledge too. They would be getting a decrepit old body too, but being young they have no appreciation of what this entails.

All this is a prelude to what Nietzsche and Ortega call mass man and noble man. Today we have an instinctive revulsion for any talk of higher types – and an instinctive approval for anything associated with the lower types – since they are us.

I am reading Ortega’s “The Revolt of the Masses” by Pedro Blas Gonzalez. On page 25 he says Ortega’s book could be entitled The Metaphysics of Strife and Resistance. Except any mention of metaphysics would immediately turn everyone off. As would the statement that Ortega’s analysis is an exploration of universal essences. Existentialists insist that existence is more important than essence.

Am I losing you? Let me quickly jump ahead to page 29:

Ortega views human reality as demanding, as a great chain of resistance that makes life as we know it bearable. Resistance, then does not give away its secrets. Human reality as resistance plays itself out to fruition as a kind of rite of passage that can ideally ennoble us. To understand these conditions and have a will to embrace this challenge is an accurate definition of nobility.

Does this make the idea of nobility more appealing to you?

It follows that someone as unappealing as Socrates (physically he was an ugly person) could have a vital impact, even if he died as a result of his fight.

2011
10/03
CATEGORY
Life in Central America
Morality
Philosophy
The Self
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Afraid to be, Afraid to See

If there is one phrase that describes the state Americans are now in it is this: they are scared. And they ought to be, if they stick their necks out, they get their heads chopped off. So they take great care not to be.

And here I am in the midst of all this wreckage, surveying the scene – a nobody in the middle of nowhere, feeling guilty about being one of the survivors. Ten years after 9/11, I am just now coming out of shell-shock. I keep wondering how long it will be before the bomb drops here.

I can remember when America was expecting nuclear war at any minute. Kids were taught how to shelter themselves under their school-desks, and bomb shelters were being built in back-yards. We didn’t realize that another bomb had already laid us low, and there was very little of us left.

Indeed, as I sit here writing this, it is hard for me to realize this myself – and I wonder if it hasn’t all been a bad dream.

However, the responses from yesterday’s posting about The Heart of Darkness are now in, and I can see Americans (and no doubt Brits too) can still relate to this – it is supposed to be about Africa, but is really about the dark side of ourselves.

However, and this is really shocking, the young have no comprehension of this tragedy – none at all. And I have to say, reluctantly, that many adults are in denial themselves.

I am reluctant to say this, since America is the land of by birth, but the facts keep hitting me over the head – saying “Pay attention, dummy!” They are telling me to pay attention to myself, and what I know. I am not very good at this, but it is the one thing that works.

Allow me with a short retrospective of my life. After the high-tech crash in Silicon Valley, I crashed myself. I had seen so much crap in my 20 years as a tech writer, I could no longer go on prettying it up in my writing. I was good at this; they knew it; and they didn’t want anything else. I was tired of being a whore – it wasn’t my body they were interested in, but my mind.

To make a long story short, I was kicked out of the nest and was in free-fall – living on my credit card debt (my credit at the time was still excellent; they could not read my mind, or they would not have loaned me a cent). To make the story even shorter, I ended up here, living a life somewhere between that of a Gringo and a Tico. Neither side can understand me; and I can’t really understand myself.

But I have plenty of time to read, think, and write this blog. Gradually, it has dawned on me that my life is no longer threatened – that I am no longer in a dog-eat-dog world.

This doesn’t feel right, but I have to get used to it.

2011
09/22
CATEGORY
Economy
History
Philosophy
Psychology
Technology
The Self
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Being Means Having Your Own Personal Power

The best example I have of this is the little birds I see every morning, who demonstrate with their own bodies what it is to be alive and alert. People, by contrast, only exist in an extended form which they do not own personally. Their power has been taken from them and now exists outside of them, mixed in with everyone else’s power and under the control of something that has taken over from them.

This something is embedded in what we now call The Enterprise – which is simply the integrated exercise of power in all its forms – most commonly by the business world, which owns all the jobs that now define who we are.

People’s power has been taken from them, they are empty and no longer exist in their own right, but in their possessions.

To them, this does not seem to be a problem. They have lost their selves, it is true, but they have gained much more. In reality, they have lost everything, and have nothing to show for it. And they have no way of going back, because they have forgotten what it was like to be a person.

How do we know what it is like to be a person? We tell stories, the same as we always have. But unfortunately, we have lost this ability, and rely on the media to do it for us.

I recently watched Gone With the Wind, which I got from Netflix. It takes two DVDs of 3.5 hours each! This was Hollywood at its most spectacular - and its most superficial. But this is what Americans wanted to know: how to be more superficial and more identified with their possessions. And at the same time: forget what it was like to be, and to live in a more natural world.

I grew up in a little agricultural town devoted to the growing of fruit – mainly table grapes which it shipped via the railroad to the big cities. Everyone also had their own cow and a large garden, and there was plenty of anything else you wanted to eat – very cheaply. It was a beautiful little place. But this ended abruptly in the Fifties.

I was shocked to see the family farms disappear, because this represented an independent way of life. At the same time, all the small-town businesses, including the weekly newspaper that had been in business for one hundred years, quietly disappeared. I asked myself: What was going on? No one else seemed to notice anything.

Now, much later, I know what was going on: an independent way of life was being destroyed, forcing everyone to be part of The Enterprise – whether they liked it or not; that did not matter.

This ties into something Ortega Y Gasset wrote about so well: the rise of the masses. As he said, whenever this happens civilization is threatened. He thought they were taking control – but he missed one thing: they were being taken control of by the mass media – something the Nazis perfected, and is still the most powerful tool of The Enterprise, which it resembles. People now have no mind of their own – and they want none. Being controlled from the outside is exactly what they want.

They do not want any power of their own – to them this seems trivial. They want the far greater power of everything combined – the ultimate power trip.

2011
09/02
CATEGORY
The Self
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Emerson on Being Yourself

Emerson was part of another world. From Wikipedia:

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.

Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.considered to be America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence”…

While his writing style can be seen as somewhat impenetrable, and was thought so even in his own time, Emerson’s essays remain one of the linchpins of American thinking, and Emerson’s work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that have followed him. When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was “the infinitude of the private man.”

Now he is simply dismissed as an American romantic (and therefore not practical) – but he was listened to intently in his day – which ended in the late 19th Century.

I am reading the book The Site of Our Lives: the Self and the Subject from Emerson to Foucault. The first chapter is on Emerson, which to tell you the truth, annoyed me, because I was interested in Existentialism, and he is clearly not part of that movement. But, as others have noticed – we never really understand something, we just get used to it. And reading about Emerson, I got used to him. Allow me to quote the last paragraph on Emerson, from page 100:

Emerson begins “Fate” be telling us that “We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return and reconcile their opposition.” He also asserts that for him “the question of the times resolves itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live?”

These simple statements explain the nature of Emerson’s greatness even as they show our own tendency toward superficialness keeps us from appreciating the Emersonian view of self.

For contemporary Americans, the answer is simple: be like everyone else – there are no individual selves, and none are wanted.

2011
08/24
CATEGORY
Philosophy
The Self
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An Affluent, Living Death

This was what my life was – a typical American life. And, like all Americans, I had no idea what was going on. We were not supposed to know – and more fundamentally, not supposed to be. We followed orders.

Now that I have time for myself, I am determined to figure out what was going on. And I am finding that I simply have no words to express it. Language is entirely inadequate.

This is hardly a new discovery: the Buddha discovered it quite a while ago. But if he were alive today, even he would be incapable of coping because something new has been added: technology. I use that word with some confidence because we think we know what it means. We do not. For us, it means a new form of magic that will give us everything we want: a flying carpet. But it has not made us happy.

We have have been overwhelmed by the machine: by non-life. And made to look insignificant by comparison. We have traded our selves for a mess of pottage (Gen 25:29-34).

Immediately, people will say “What is this wonderful self you are talking about? We now know it is only an illusion.” They usually stop short of saying “We are completely determined by our world, and have no independent existence.” People do not like to hear this – but unconsciously they have learned to live with it in their working lives – and accept it as inevitable. If their possessions are a little different from their neighbors that satisfies them.

I am now reading Emerson and Kierkegaard. And realizing that they represented a different way of life. One where the individual was still real. But as they knew all too well, this way of life was seriously threatened. The modern world had reached its peak, and would soon begin a decline that ended with WWI. The 20th Century would be a Waste Land – populated by people who had been wasted.

The final collapse, which we are witnessing now, is nothing but the external reflection of this internal collapse. It is not surprising – only surprising in how long it took to finally happen.

2011
08/10
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Technology
The Self
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