This blog began as a sort of home for me while I read the words of people who have more to say. I want to get back to that.
Why do I want my home to be in this particular neighborhood? For completely selfish reasons. I’ve fled from the corporate world and from most of the internet. This blog-neighborhood is a refuge for me, protection from a culture that I can’t tolerate very well. I’m very grateful that I’ve been able to participate in the healthy culture around here. I know it’s not perfect. But I honestly didn’t think there was such a thing as a healthy culture at all.
I seem to be trying to heal, and to dig out from under a lot of ugly training. Blindly, with no plan and no idea where it’s leading. I’m not on any kind of Mission that I can define. Just trying to dig my way further out. Even if the depth of shit is the same, maybe one day I will be head-up rather than head-down!
Anyway, this blog is more a record of my attempts at personal healing than anything else.
Acknowledgement, June 28
I started out writing a reflection on Thinking Girl’s post Feminism Friday - Woman, What Are You? I really liked that post. My “reflection” eventually turned into this. I’m not sure how that happened, or what the connection is.
June 25, 2007 at 9:12 pm
It’s interesting that you are able to perceive that there is something wrong with the prevailing culture/s. Quite unusual, I think. This can be very hard to see because of the idea of normality which seems to radiate from blocs which have great power. It might be hard to believe, but before I came to the west, I didn’t really have any idea of the practice and utility of eg-psychology. I had to make a personal effort to teach myself, after I realised that I was significantly out of step with how other people were thinking and feeling about things. One can never learn completely that which was not a part of one’s childhood upbringing. One of the most important aspects of assimilating to ego-psychology is to always speak with a sense of anticipation concerning how others will judge you. Your sense of self should reflect the position you have been allocated by others within the society. This “space” you have been allocated is your identity, but it is also territory that you need to defend! These dynamics were completely foreign to me for the longest time, when I came here. To some extent, these ideas are still hard to adjust to. I have always tended to blurt out my perspectives and wanted to share my experiences, without too much attention as to the meta-textual implications about what this supposedly says about my claims to dominance or my acceptance of submission within any particular context. As I said, all of this sense of things I’ve had to learn. [And I have learned it rather badly. When I speak in a spontaneous way, only to find that I've been considered negligent in letting others run all over my "territory" or, conversely, I've appeared to claim too much power, by not attending to how others' egos may be affected by my ideas. I always feel like I've been ambushed when my innocent modes of communication are turned into some kind of meta-text for a reading of ego psychology!]
June 26, 2007 at 7:45 am
I’m very sorry if I did that to you. I think I must have commented badly on your blog, but I don’t think I can understand just what I did wrong on my own.
June 26, 2007 at 8:45 am
NO! You didn’t do that to me. It’s ok. I was just reflecting.
June 26, 2007 at 8:48 am
Sorry, I should make myself clear, somehow. This is not an issue of ego, for me. I’m very thick-skinned. My point was that I don’t recognise ego issues immediately. I mean, the tendency to personalise things, rather than see the abstract and perspectical issue of communication as primary.
June 26, 2007 at 8:49 am
So, I’m sort of saying exactly the opposite to what you thought I was saying — actually, just talking.
June 26, 2007 at 9:10 am
Oh. What a relief! I thought a comment of mine got dropped at your place, and I started worrying.
I love reading the ideas that you “blurt out.” You never seem to be staking out territory to me at all. Which, I guess it seems that way because you aren’t! (The fact that our cultures are different, and that mine at least is kind of scary, does make me think that there’s a possibility of confusion. And then I’ve got plenty of “issues.”)
I don’t know where I fall on the cultural scale of seeing everything hierarchically. I was born in a family that seemed to have that even more than most. I can deal with hierarchy fine in routine things. But I have a lot of trouble fitting into hierarchies when they start to actively suppress information. Which, frankly, is a big part of what they do! But I can’t play my part. I start to fall back on ideas about “logical fallacies” etc., when the point is really that the dissenter doesn’t have enough rank to disagree. I left a “good” job over this kind of thing, and I’m a lot happier now.
I tried commenting on a mainstream U.S. blog lately, and ran into it again. I couldn’t believe the number of different tactics that the self-elected “high status” people used to undercut some simple, clear observations by an outsider. I tried to argue a little myself, which I’m not good at, but for some reason I wasn’t attacked. But, whoever gets attacked, that kind of situation makes me feel ill.
June 26, 2007 at 9:20 am
LOL, good. That’s what I usually assume, that you’re just talking. I really couldn’t find a “personal” reading of what you’ve been saying lately that made any sense. I even asked my wife to look at some stuff and she said, no, everything is fine!
My folks used to lecture me with these long ridiculously exaggerated litanies of my supposed faults. I think sometimes when I’m feeling a little down, people can be saying anything, talking about the weather almost, and somehow enough words will match up with something from thirty years ago that I start to react to something that happened to back then. Not what’s actually going on.
June 26, 2007 at 7:28 pm
Haha! Be of good cheer. I suppose I should have posted something personal and congratulatory on this section of the blog. That would have been quite appropriate. Only, I was busy inbetween work sessions, so I just posted whatever came to mind.
Yes– it is funny about the supposedly “high status” people. Very funny, how they slice into each other and ultimately into themselves. They become much less than whole people through their collusions.
June 26, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Well, please don’t worry about “appropriate” on my account. I’d much rather have comments to read than judicious, respectable silence! And, as you’ve seen, I like to just make up my own story about what the words mean anyway!!!11!1
Re “High-status” folks: I’m reminded of the lions in your video, sitting there right up to the point (pun intended) when the horns enter their bodies. What’s the payoff for that behavior??
June 26, 2007 at 7:57 pm
I don’t think there is any payoff, as such, unless you mean, “what has been the payoff until now?” I think that those who would be high status people in this society (the society I’m familiar with, and perhaps the one you are familiar with as well), are very much divorced from material reality. I mean, they have a system in place — maybe metaphysical, but also social. If that doesn’t work out for them, then they are not used to acting on the basis of a new kind of a game.
But lionesses? I think they are just lazy cats.
June 26, 2007 at 8:06 pm
Yeah, high status makes them blind and crazy as individuals. What really freaks me out, though, is that “high status” types typically don’t care at all about the survival of their own community. (This is more of me cluing in very late to something very well known. But it was one thing to read about it and another to watch it!)
I used to read a horrible, horrible message board. It was like a pit of cannibal rats. And they had this whole mythology about how wonderful and brilliant their “community” was. They were god damned idiots too, it seemed like almost a majority of what they said was nonsense. Just childishly wrong, stuff you could look up and use a little common sense. The one thing I posted there that I remember got a lot of respectful attention was: “well everyone has a right to be regarded as having expertise in this field.” I was trying to be mean, but they loved it. They thought I had finally wised up.
But of course, almost immediately, I said things that got me mobbed. For some reason I kept going back … it lasted for maybe another two years before the rats finished eating each other. Last I looked it was mostly just spammers spamming each other. But a few gurus were still handing down tablets of Authoritative Wisdom to the spambots.
June 26, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Hrm, right. They know how to navigate the status stuff. The one who steers the ship is the one who knows how to get promoted to Captain, not how to avoid the icebergs.
June 26, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Haha! Were they “libertarians” by any chance? They sure sound like it. Actually, I think a lot of these types really don’t even know how to navigate the status stuff, very well. Many of them are just useful idiots for somebody higher up the line. Or to put it differently: They are one-trick ponies. They have learned how to submit.
June 27, 2007 at 3:21 am
Yes! They supported the government taking our rights away*, which apparently made them “Libertarians.” They absolutely supported Bush, but were very coy about identifying themselves as belonging to Bush’s party.
That’s an interesting point about the status stuff. They could navigate their little online club, but these guys were not yuppies. They wanted lower taxes for the rich … I guess in case they win the lottery someday.
They loved movies! They liked to pose very weird ethical dilemmas, usually involving excuses for initiating violence, and I would say, well, do you know anybody that actually happened to? And they would say, sure, Clint Eastwood in I don’t know what movie. And I would say, well, that’s fiction, ok? Not real life. And they would give a different movie.
*Except for their guns. They want their guns. I don’t think they know which end to point away from themselves, but they like the idea.
June 27, 2007 at 4:19 am
hahahaha! Yeah, they like their fictions.
June 28, 2007 at 7:05 am
Hey Tom,
thanks for this - I think it’s jsut perfect.
June 28, 2007 at 9:20 am
June 29, 2007 at 8:46 am
Tom,
I really feel where you are coming from on this. Blogging has been a healing process for me too.
June 29, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Dave, thanks for stopping by. It’s good (but strange!) to hear that this post meant something to anybody. I was sure everybody would just go Hmm.