Masculine energy generating systems and how to avoid them

Subsequent upon the murder though domestic violence of Zimbabwean Professor Ottilia Chareka, a friend Betty Makoni has asked me to help those who may be in similar dangers of domestic violence. They need to understand the signs of impending violence before it is too late for them.

To successfully defend against becoming one of the ultimate victims of domestic violence, one must grasp a larger fact. That one may be a very successful academic and still not grasp the real danger one is in is understandable. For a start, one moves in hostile waters by necessity. Females swim in a medium of patriarchy. We do not easily escape it any more than a fish can learn to swim on dry land. To speak of "culture" is, in almost every instance, to speak of patriarchal culture. To grow up in a society of almost any sort is to grow up within patriarchal power structures. Patriarchal values and ideas are thus internalised, much in the same way that the chemicals dumped into the ocean will tend to become part of the constitution of marine life. Patriarchy is, as it were "within our systems".

Well, what is patriarchy? It is a system of values and ideas that proclaims female inferiority in relation to the male. That is how we can understand it on an intellectual level. In saying this, I don't want to give the impression, by any means, that patriarchy is primarily an intellectual construct. In actual fact, while it has many intellectual justifications, it is actually a psychological construct, first and foremost.

To grasp patriarchy only as an intellectual paradigm can lead to false conclusions, since one would assume that a putatively intellectual perspective could be challenged using logic and good argumentation, describing consequences and so on. One takes the claims of patriarchal philosophies at face value, without understanding that the definition of "good" within patriarchal systems is the exclusion of women. (Conversely, the definition of "bad" is that women are included.) So, "good" logic is definitively logic used by men and "bad" logic is logic used by women.

So, although one may pick up many patriarchal ideas through reading books, patriarchy's real power is not related to the intellect, but to a particular kind of psychology. It's the kind of psychology that disarms agency and self-determination in women, through sleight of hand techniques (what Marxists term, "mystification").

How and why does it do this? The simple answer as to why is that this is an issue of power. To neutralise women's self-determination is to gain power over them -- and to gain power over a living human being is to feel enlarged. The question as to how this is done is psychological once again. The patriarchal man moves to establish a relationship with a woman whereby energies are exchanged. Because he wants to feel powerful, he will use his relationship with the woman to facilitate a sense of being divorced from his emotions. He wants to reduce any sensation of feeling responsive to another's needs, as this robs him of his sensation of being powerful and in control.

Many patriarchal men have learned the art of psychological projection to facilitate their powerful feelings. They learn to experience their (often very real) vulnerability in the world as if it were something apart from them. The woman in their life -- a wife or girlfriend -- often becomes a means for these men to create a separate identity for their 'weakness' and fear. As men, they wish to embody and represent only powerful characteristics. Yet, being human in the world, rather than angel or spirit, necessarily entails having experiences where one is not always in control. Patriarchal men thus require women who can take on the responsibility for these negative sensations -- and to embody them, in fact. That way, the patriarchal man can address the aspects of his life that produce vulnerability, without feeling that his status as a powerful being is in question.

Women, of course, are not simply willing captives to this programme by means of which weak men come to feel like gods. They go along with the agenda because this seems to be just how things are, or because they are looking for some sort of complimentary nature in the man, or because they believe in romantic love and therefore have stars in their eyes, blinding them. The patriarchal man, himself, doesn't necessarily understand the destructive nature of his own agenda. He just knows he wants to feel strong and he believes a woman can help him feel that way.

Once both parties have bought into the fundamental lie that men and women have two very different but essential natures, there is very little else in place that could stop the relationship from escalating into violence, should one of either party be predisposed to it. In fact, the stage has been set for psychological violence, if nothing worse.

When the patriarchal man looks at the woman in his life, he sees emotions and perhaps very little besides. Since he has projected his own emotions into the woman in his life, the emotions he has when he looks at the woman are a mirror of himself. This female 'mirror' will either reflect something pleasing or displeasing. If the emotions he experiences when looking at his woman are pleasing, his sense of self worth will be expanded. If he has negative emotions when looking at her (possibly because the emotions he has projected into her are negative), he will feel deflated -- and perhaps very angry.

Living with an angry patriarchal man is like pouring water on a ruptured nuclear power plant. Pleasing and soothing emotions seem to work to keep the system from totally blowing its lid, but one senses that these are but a temporary solution and delaying tactic. Sooner or later, the system is going to blow -- You don't want to be around when that happens!

Facing death

Born into hierarchical societies, our minds naturally take a shape that reinforces those societies and their values. We 'fit in' in order to get along and primarily in order to avoid the extreme kinds of censure that lead to death. A shaman, however, upon "facing death" destroys his or her hierarchically conditioned psyche. The subconscious drive to conformity, engendered during childhood when one necessarily had to submit to much bigger adults, was based on a superstitious (although, at other times, entirely realistic) drive to fend off a threat of destruction.

MORE: http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/2011/02/shamanism-encounter-with-void.html

Why gender activism is still necessary

As you can see from my link, patriarchy involves the dis-habituation of men to actually stop and listen to what is being said to them by women.

I'm for freedom of choice and freedom of expression so long as I am certain that what has been said has been fully digested and understood. Nine times out of ten powerful evidence comes to light, telling me that what I have said has not even been partially digested or even vaguely understood. Some projection or gender stereotype stands in the way of clear and accurate communication.

It is one of my missions in life to clear these clogged and rusty channels for understanding of women's experiences, the meanings of which have been obscured by dismissive statements or concepts.

On "survival of the fittest"

I find the idea that "The weak" could be bred out of humanity, through history, to be quite naive. The problem with "weak" is that we define it socially. To some minds, "weak" is the incapacity to endure assaults day after day. To others, "weak" is the lack of creativity, the incapacity to innovate, the tendency to prefer the tried and tested at the expense of something new.

Humans are so diverse that they embody all sorts of possible conceptualisations of weakness and strength. Arguably, it is this very diversity that is needed for humans as a group to survive.

BY CONTRAST, if we look at what Darwin meant by "the fittest" that are assured survival, his conceptualisation is much more tautological than value-laden. The fittest to survive are precisely those that happen to survive any particular environment or conditions. The fittest to survive a very oppressive workplace, for instance, can often be those who do not really register much, emotionally or intellectually. They just do what they're told.

On traditional masculinity

Let us suppose that it has been established that men are traditionally culturally conditioned to repress their emotions in order to become 'masculine'.

Some social ramifications of male emotional repression need to be considered. The compulsory divorce from emotions, which turns babies into men, tends to lead to a hankering for the past (specifically for the mother), for emotionality and so on. In this way, (although this will be denied, due to repression), emotionality becomes idealized in the male mind as a possible cure-all. This is why traditional men will hanker after traditional women just as much as they yearn to recover their lost emotionality indirectly -- that is, via a relationship with a very emotional woman.

Arguably, there are other ways that traditional males might be able to find, to achieve emotional wholeness.

The right wing agenda of forcing women to become traditional is too costly for women, as this also forces them to divorce themselves from their intellects and from the characteristics that would make them more robust. To require that women fulfill a negative role, as people who exemplify only about one half of the full dimension of being human, simply isn't a healthy solution to the ongoing problem of male emotional repression.

Patriarchal religion and sex

The patriarchal attitude to sex seems to have originated with men feeling a need to gain control over their emotions in order to be able to set goals and stick to them. The strongest emotions are, of course, sexual. Men feel that they must disavow these sexual emotions in order to be free to make their own decisions, apart from the control of women (who would, potentially, control men through sexuality). So men deny their own sexuality and project sex, as such, into women. But then, this seems like they have earned the bum end of the deal. They have deadened themselves and this doesn't feel good. So they reason that it should be women who deaden themselves, so that males can feel good. This is how women came to be both "the sex" and sexless, at the same time, while many men are unable to have a genuinely intimate relationship with a woman, but resort to pornography.

Self-deception and traditional gender roles

The means by which traditional gender relations are maintained is through projective identification.

Projection is itself a virtually mystical form of transaction, since most people are completely unaware that they are doing it. Patriarchal texts encourage men to deny the parts of their humanity that they are taught to consider "weak" or more specifically "feminine". These qualities, which all of humanity shares, which include self-doubt, sensitivity, the emotions associated with victimisation and so on, are all denied by males in the process of gaining masculinity. They "transcend" these qualities by denying that they have them, whilst at the same time anticipating that women are defined by them. This is projective identification. The process of projecting one's negative qualities into women must itself feel like an experience of elevation, of spiritualisation -- even though it is based on self-delusion (to a very large part, if not entirely). It is most threatening to patriarchal men when strong women demonstrate to these men that their tricks of transcendence and projection are not all that amazing.

Each tactic of masculine transcendence comes at a cost to women. Those women who understand the intricacies of women's health know that what damages it most is patriarchal projection. The patriarchal investment of negative energies into women also threatens to betray a patriarchal vulnerability. More than often, those women who realise that they have been projected into are also the ones who implicitly understand how and why patriarchal men have been secretly using projective mechanisms.

These women who know men's "secrets" are a great threat to the whole patriarchal edifice.

Tone is a decoder; a linguistic mode; a language

I understand, now, why I run into trouble so often in Judeo-Christian culture. It's because tone is an ultimate modifier, a mode of relating and, ultimately a language of its own. One can speak the same language as another and use the same words, yet due to a slight elevation of tone, one can be communicating on quite the wrong wavelength, with dire consequences.

My tone is inevitably jubilant and mischievous. I fathom that my outlook on the world may be defined in terms of some kind of paganism. I may write serious words, but often enough I do not mean them in a serious way. That is to say, I believe my political and social criticisms should be taken to heart -- but I would hate myself intensely, all the same, if I were to leave a heavy impression on someone else's psyche, moralistically. Even if taking action against another by means of moral reproof were likely to win my battle for me, I would be unable to do it. I can't take away another's self-determination from him. I would lose my own sense of well-being that way. My sense of pleasure in the world is largely dependent upon another having a sense of pleasure in himself.

My paganism, although irreverent, has an ethical structure. My mockery does not imply disrespect, but rather a sense of marvel at the unknown. (I hold what I do not yet know in particular religious esteem, much more than what I happen to already know about.) I mock because I seek revelation -- not of the reproving moral sort, but in the form of nature's gradual unfolding.

Tone is a decoder -- and I have read my own work in two different ways. In the first way, which is the sense in which I originally wrote, I have a sense of the precipitous awakening of consciousness. Reading the same work in a moralistic tone, I find I no longer make sense, even to myself. From a point of view that uses as its backdrop the severity of moral absolutes,my own work looks frivolous, inclined to miss the point and not to hit home with some stinging moral criticism. It seems as if I lack the power of firmer minds, which would immediately condemn the wrongs of the world, whilst compelling "evil-doers" to accept their category of a negative identity in the world.

Then, finally, I return to myself -- and I realise I'd been reading my own work through an entirely alien prism.

On gendered silliness: the tendency to dismiss women's concerns as "silly" seems to be linked psychologically to the fear of men of appearing silly.

The tendency to dismiss women's concerns as "silly" is linked psychologically to the fear of men of appearing silly. Nobody wants men to appear silly. Therefore we allow men to release their hot air by attributing silliness to women, thus consolidating their positions in their own minds as "non-silly" people.

Unfortunately what seems to be of little consequence -- the tendency of puffed up patriarchal men to let off a bit of steam -- has broad implications as to how women are viewed in society.

* * *

The thing about conservatives is that they cannot see their perspectives from the outside. They take their views as necessary and hegemonic and they aim to make them that way. All the same, there is no God, no stabilising mechanism, that would assure that their views remain fixed and hegemonic. Secular conservatives are more vulnerable to this fact than religious conservatives are. In the corner of their wee, little minds, they must realise that the cartoons that they hold as archetypal representations of human affairs can be easily dismissed.

Take Erick Erickson's depiction of "women backseat drivers" (Obama's advisers)supposedly misdirecting him, according to this ideologue, concerning the last U.S. military intervention. It only takes one woman to come along who is aware that her mode of travelling by car is very different from the one depicted. Her innate ability to compare reality to the gender stereotype of an air-headed "backseat" driver will play havoc with the conservative's goal of stabilising this cartoon within his mind as a depiction of what is serious and necessary about the world.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, superego and modern shamanism

Thus spoke Zarathustra is a very shamanic book in that it aims to expand our grasp of otherwise hidden elements of the psyche.It is also a warrior code, with regards to the means by awareness is to be expanded. (One must face the inevitability of one's destruction courageously.) The book suggests that most people live mediocre lives because they choose to preserve themselves. One could say that this tendency to prefer mediocrity to living fully is due to the nature of the "superego", to harness a Freudian concept.

Superego is the psychological apparatus that cautions us to choose conformity as a way of assuring freedom from death -- i.e. it prevents us from defying powers that be or the nature of the social order. The psychology behind this book is that if we view our own destruction as inevitable, we can then gain the upper hand in directly combating this reflexive tendency within each of us towards self-preservation (and thus towards mediocrity).

 Nietzsche's Zarathustra is actually a persona (a kind of prophet who bases his understanding in philosophy, history and psychology) who advocates that one is to destroy "the law tablets" of the "good and the just". Georges Bataille followed somewhat in Nietzsche's footsteps by suggesting that one can expand consciousness by facing one's destruction and (more specifically) by "sinning".
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2009/08/jungian-view-of-creative-regression.html

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/nietzsche-morality-shamanism.html

Identifying where interactions are ideologically thwarted

What defines an interaction as being thwarted by patriarchal influences? It comes down to realizing that all contents of one's communication over the years have been discarded by the interlocutor. Instead of retaining the meaning of what had been said, he has retained only a very general emotional impression of any set of interactions. Often, these are produced as projections of female stereotypes, from within his head.

By contrast with this psychologically projective mode of relating,we discover the protocol of responding appropriately to others' overtures through a book that teaches foreigners. The pattern demonstrated is as follows:

Person A remarks on something.  

Person B then comments, acknowledging what A has said. Alternatively he might follow with a secondary question (for instance to get more information, ask for clarification, etc.) 

If this is the normal pattern of harmonious social interaction, one can tell when a situation has acquired an artificial ideological dimension simply by the fact that person B will not first acknowledge what A has said before  stating his own point of view.

This breach of protocol at a fundamental level is indicative of the violent nature of patriarchal interactions overall. It expresses an imperative: "I'm only open to affirming my existing point of view!"

Although it is hard to know, initially, if such a person has understood what has been said to him, eventually time itself proves that he hasn't understood much that had been communicated over a length of several years.

Everyday Sadomasochism

Many people grow up with some damage, some injury to their self esteem, which makes them vulnerable to those capable of dominating them.

If you have a basic injury at the level of your emotional being, you are liable making the kinds of mistakes that come from not being a whole emotional being. You can't see others' motivations clearly enough, because there is a part of your perceptual apparatus (related to your emotional wholeness) missing. So you trust the wrong sorts of people -- the people who have themselves been damaged and discovered a partial release from their externally imposed state of masochism by becoming sadists (flipping over). At the same time, because you suffer from a lack of wholeness, you try to make up for it with perfectionism.

The practiced sadist automatically taps into this sense of striving to be complete and turns it to his ends -- towards malicious ends. So, you end up working hard for the sadist, fulfilling his needs to try to make himself whole by dominating another (a project in which he is also destined to fail). Your lack of wholeness is guaranteed so long as you remain in this externally imposed masochistic position.

That is because the sadist needs you to remain incomplete and striving in order for him to gain a temporary sensation of feeling complete.

Axioms

Kudakwashe Rukanda requests to know some of my philosophical axioms, especially as they pertain to gender.

My axioms are not for everyone. They make sense to me because of my distinct experiences, but I do not expect them to make sense to anyone else simply by virtue of my posting them here. One really has to experiment with life to come up with one's own axioms. Some of them may turn out to be similar to mine, but there is no guarantee that this will be so, unless your experiences also happen to be very similar to mine, by virtue of the historical time you live in, by virtue of social structure and by virtue of the attitudes directed towards you because of your particular characteristics (some known and obvious and some unknown, even to yourself).

Having said that, I do not consider my axioms to be remotely arbitrary. They are not narrowly personal even though the situations I have lived through have been personal because they are formulated in the context of an ongoing battle which has been waged since the beginning of time. The battle itself has generals and strategic systems, along with established tactics that are used by forces on each particular side. Although the tactics and strategies have changed over time, each generation that enters the battle learns from the past. Not all lessons are remembered, but some are never forgotten. Boundary lines are maintained. Tactics that have worked in the past are tried again, only with a new justification.

My axioms come from having learned some lessons in this war.

LESSONS

1. The battle is not fought for the reasons it is claimed to be fought for. Truth and justice and rationality are barely more than peripheral reasons. The gender war is fought so that those of each side can recover missing 'soul parts'.

2. In terms of the gender war, men believe they are best positioned to recover their missing soul parts if they can convince women to become masochists.

3. The "soul parts" that women most need to recover -- which men have stolen from them -- are their reason and their knowledge of the deep workings of political machinations.

4. Both men and women are biologically (and therefore in all other senses) MORE THAN their definitions according to gender would make them out to be. Both men AND women are equipped with the capacity to use reason AND experience emotion. Biologically this is true. It is only culture that says otherwise.

5. Patriarchy is a cultural system that says otherwise, in direct contradistinction to biological fact.

6. Patriarchy has advocated, throughout the ages (especially through its holy books) the direct plundering of women by turning them into masochists (and men, correspondingly, into sadists), so that males can obtain their missing soul parts, which they claim women have stolen.

7. Women, who have been plundered throughout the ages, are also often missing soul parts, particularly emotional soul parts such as aggression, along with some intellectual soul parts and knowledge of their own history -- all of which have been stolen by traditional and contemporary holy men writing spiritual precepts.

8. The patriarchal principle of plundering women has robbed both sexes of their vitality and wholeness.

9. One can only find one's missing soul parts by delving into history to see where they went missing. Such understanding of one's historical past will suffice to restore one's missing soul parts -- that, and courage.

10. One learns the truth of these axioms only by engaging in many battles.

Computer brains

The boundaries between individuals' minds and their environments are thinner than might be imagined. This fact is not new. Advertising exploits the thin and permeable skins of our consciousness in order to drive us to do specific things at a motivational level.

What is less well known is that we all carry around in us ideological bugs and viruses. A person may believe himself not to be a misogynist by any means. But, of course he has been programmed by some religious patriarchal ideologues in his childhood, meaning he will play a certain programme in his mind if he is prompted by recognisable triggers.

Likewise, many believe they are 'not racists', but are so under certain circumstances. (Some of the biggest invisible racists are those who have consolidated an already existing demarcating line concerning skin colour in order to defend against their real or imagined oppression.)

On Femininity (Jung and Freud)

Neither Jung or Freud had any idea of the psychology of the feminine. I don't think those who embrace "femininity" as an actually existing ontological entity do, either.

To embrace "femininity" is to come to rest, to be reconciled with patriarchy, to accept that "nothing can be done", which requires a corresponding woodenness and a capacity to mute sensation. A woman who retains her personhood is never "feminine" and to the degree that she is feminine, it means she is that much less of a subjective person.

On the other hand, to admit that one does not know "what women want" despite having studied them for many years and despite having made the study of women one's profession is a tacit admission that the patriarchal category of "the feminine" had (and continues to have) only negative epistemological value.  It tells us nothing.

On Free Will

One needs to see free will from a philosophical materialist's point of view (including economics, political structures, endocrine systems and so on) rather than seeing it from the philosophical moralist's point of view. The moralist is only interested in dispensing blame.

Nothing in the materialist's viewpoint is absolute, but everything is relative and dialectical. That is why there is no point in saying something like "free will either does or does not pertain".

The snake in the garden of Eden -- the perplexing (but not exactly sinful) nature of knowledge

There is much confusion in the world as a result of our friends, the philosophical idealists, and their one-sided views of reality.

For instance, there is the notion that if one observes a pattern of behaviour and remarks on it, one is guilty of "essentialising".

The concept of "essentialising" derives from philosophy. Its meaning is not primarily an ethical one, designed to sound censorious, but has to do with epistemology (the study of knowledge). To "essentialise" any object is to imply that this object has immutable, inherent qualities by virtue of which it acquires its definition.

The three paragraphs I have written above rely upon a certain degree of 'essentialism' for their meaning. In order to convey my knowledge, I must assume that the words I am using retain their meaning, despite the fact that everything around us is constantly changing. If the words lose their essential meaning --that is, if they lose their capacity to "essentialise" -- they will not convey anything at all. As shamanistic persons have pointed out, having the capacity to communicate is predicated upon the necessity of seeing the world as simpler than it is.

A certain amount of 'essentialism' is, therefore, a necessary and inevitable part of any form of verbal or written communication (emotional communication and communication by gesture are other issues). Yet, it is important to consider that language itself, although inclining us towards essentialising, need not be an entirely blunt instrument. If we consider that 'essentialism' makes the world seem simpler than it is, we can also recognise that we have a certain amount of choice as to the degree to which we simplify.

The reason that language generalises is that it is useful to the human mind to recognise general patterns. Pattern recognition is related to what philosophers call "inductive logic" -- and this is necessary for us to be able to plan our lives on the basis of having more or less reliable knowledge. (Inductive knowledge is not as reliable as 'deductive' knowledge, but it is still the most practical form of knowledge there is.) Pattern recognition means that if we see some person behaving in a particular way in the past, we reason that they are likely to behave in a similar way in the future. This form of pattern recognition can relate to groups of people, who may have particular external features, by which they are easily viewed as the same "type".

To make an observation that certain "types" quite often behave in a certain way is a fundamental act of the healthy human brain. The act of putting something into language itself implies an act of 'essentialism'. All the same, the degree of essentialism will be much lesser in the case when one accepts that their statement is based upon phenomenological elements that will change in time. The inevitable essentialism of their statement is thereby reduced and curtailed by the recognition that reality may, at any time, prove to be broader (and more complex) than that which the statement is able to convey.

I hope I have now clarified an important point -- that essentialism is inevitable, because of the nature of language, which must make reality seem more fixed and stable than it is. Also, to observe patterns in the world and to state that one observes them is not 'essentialism' but inductive logic at work. Only at the point that one states one's findings in everyday language does one end up necessarily entwined with the degree of essentialism that is inherent in language itself.

The critique of 'essentialism' that comes from the left wing side of academia is concerned with those who do something more than just reporting their observations (which always amount to generalisations, to the degree that they involve pattern recognition). Pattern recognition is not the source of the ethical dilemma represented by 'essentialism'. Rather, over-simplification of reality is the prime source of the ethical problem.

As it has been said, the very use of language involves an oversimplification of the world, but some people take the oversimplification of reality to much greater degrees than is inevitable on the basis of the use of language. Their oversimplifications are very extreme, indeed. This is the form of 'essentialism' that poses an ethical problem, because ideas start to take precedence over personal experience. In fact ideas about 'how things are' can become so forceful that anyone who suggests that they haven't experienced what their "identity" is supposed to have experienced is deemed to be a liar and a traitor to The Truth.

When this happens, we are in the province of Philosophical Idealism, which is where ideas create reality -- and nobody is allowed to have any particular experience that doesn't already correspond with accepted and sanctified ideas about what is already deemed "True" -- where what is deemed "true" are associations about a certain gender,skin colour and so on.

That is a kind of essentializng that ought to be entirely avoidable.

GASLIGHTING by applying preconceived identity categories

AN "us versus them" mentality is a basic part of our brain structure. The more stressed we are, the more we will tend to employ these categorical distinctions unconsciously.

In Western cultures, knowledge is considered to be very important. It is viewed as an indispensable sign of competence, especially in levels of society above blue collar working class (which probably explains why I find blue collar types much more companionable).

Unfortunately, what happens when people encounter some phenomenon that they don't fully understand, instead of slowing down and giving it their full attention, they speed up, wanting to cover themselves with a sense of competence, by asserting what they think they "know" about it. This is likely done in an state of extreme stress, with the threat of 'failure' (in terms of not knowing) hanging over one's head. The effect is a form of psychological abuse, whereby a person is fit into a particular category of identity and deemed to have certain attitudes and dispositions that they can't remember ever having expressed. If enough people hold that the category of identity has some independent meaning that determines the thinking of the individual, the subject can start to feel as if they're going mad. Their own experiences have little in common with projected notion of who they are. It’s the individual versus mob mentality.

I have detected that pattern that when people are not listening carefully to what I am saying, but are instead drawing sketchy and categorical conclusions about 'identities', this is usually because they are in a state of stress because they fear being shown up for having a lack of knowledge in certain areas.

A state of stress leads to the imposition of a narrow and categorical identity. The one who does this does not intend to do any more or less than deal with a feeling of urgency and uncertainty, to make it depart. These sensations nonetheless guarantee that one will draw one's conclusions in an "us versus them" way, rather than rationally and empirically.

You need to realise what is going on -- that people are 'thinking' about you in a regressive way because your type of existence (or your words) makes them feel their knowledge is inadequate. They don't like that feeling. They are trying to expel it by means of a primitive form of jiu jitsu. They're trying to make things seem simpler than they are.

 The experience of intellectual shamanism is remedial because it acclimatizes one to endure 'nonknowledge', neutral consciousness, or formlessness. One can learn to be at ease with not understanding everything -- and that way, more information about the world can be obtained, with a minimisation of the use of narrow-minded defence mechanisms.

How to set forth on a losing streak

There's a whole invisible dimension of social relations. Ignore them at your peril. Primitivism is not reserved for those few tribal societies living on the fringes of 'civilization'. If anything, those who have developed techniques and strategies for becoming more aware of these invisible forces may have more that is civilized about them than many who live in 'advanced' societies.

Mass consciousness (a state free from individualism) and mob mentality are modes of thinking that a more self-consciously 'civilized' person may think himself to be beyond. Rarely is he beyond these modes of relating to the world. Rather, the more he is assured that these aspects of consciousness have nothing in common with his own, the higher the probability that he has succumbed to them.

The most fundamental mode of 'primitive' consciousness is based on thinking of the world in terms of gender. To divide the world up along these lines seems so natural to us that we are easily hoodwinked into thinking that such a schema is not regressive at all. Hold the certainty of your 'civilized' nature to your heart. You are about to embark on a descent into mass consciousness and mob mentality. You will not know what came over you.

If seeing the world in terms of gendered dichotomies represents the most profound level of human psychological regression, one need not be resigned that this is all there is to consciousness. A higher level of thinking is phenomenological awareness. When one becomes aware of one's thoughts, one's reactions and others' reactions, one has entered this higher state of phenomenological awareness. From such a vantage point, one can observe, with much greater neutrality (as compared to what is possible when embracing a gendered schema), how people react to others on the basis of primitive markers such as gender.

This capacity to step aside from crude mentalisations so as to observe reality more "as it is" is doubted by some people. Those who express the most virulent doubts are those whose whole consciousnesses are very often immersed in the murky waters of gender essentialism.

How does one emerge from these murky thoughts? By means of phenomenology!

The rigorous practice of phenomenological observation enables one to understand the 'invisible' forces at work, whenever gender categories are employed as the most basic categories to define human experience. From a phenomenological perspective, one sees that without mob mentality and mass consciousness are the means by which these categories become concrete. Men rarely perform a gender-based psychological transaction on their own, but are encouraged to do so by other men. This co-operation takes place at an unconscious level, often as a result of some catcall implying that some woman has somehow threatened "masculinity" as such.

How to be on a losing streak

To succumb to primitive patterns of response is to be on a losing streak. Phenomenological experience, acknowledged and not reduced trumps the ways of thinking that are defined by fundamental categorizations. Perception guided by a refined phenomenological awareness is always going to provide more information (and be relatively sharper)compared to perception of reality only in terms of two fundamental categories.

To be on a losing streak in life is to revert to the more primitive form of perception at the expense of the richer, phenomenological level of perception.

Of course, most people are often "stuck" at either one or the other level of perception.

Only a person who has developed 'shamanistic' propensities can see the world in a way that incorporates knowledge of both these levels of perception. Such a 'shaman' will have taught themselves to see the practical expressions of these different levels of awareness and how they intersect.

Raise the draw-bridge!

The fear of self knowledge in Western males does seem rooted in self-hatred, which in turn, is probably rooted in Judeo-Christian notions concerning sexuality as the original sin. The solution that most men try for is to make you culpable for their feelings of "sin"so that they can distance these feelings from themselves. Something that I have learned is that you should never create an affective "bridge" between you and someone who is trying to do this. They are effectively trying to transfer their "demons" from themselves to you. Rather, you should raise the draw-bridge and force them to deal with their own demons in isolation.

Nietzscheans! Regression to a lizard brain level, without any attendant self-awareness, is not shamanistic.

Nietzscheans! Regression to a lizard brain level, without any attendant self-awareness, is not shamanistic.

It's the opposite, in fact.

See my post below.

Survival is possible

The way I have learned to handle my status as a female when I have no choice but to try to earn a living under vulgar patriarchal law is that I accept that most people in the world spend a great deal of their time when they are not functioning as people but as primitive lizard brains.

This perspective leads to certain amount of transcendence and is thus personally redemptive for me.

How does one handle a group of people who are not people, but lizards?

A certain degree of Buddhism is helpful, as one can understand that most people embrace nihilism, unwittingly.

Understanding this, one does not expect more from them than that. Unfortunately, one must also come to terms with the fact that one cannot reform the primitive lizard brain. It understands punishment, but one wastes one's time trying to reform this aspect of "human" nature. One cannot appeal to a "higher" nature when such a thing is simply absent, as it is, for instance, when people psychologically dissociate enough to commit gang rape.

Also beware of any metaphysical constructs of reality as these belong to the lower part of the mind, rather than to the higher part. According to this lower part of the mind, anything feminine is coded as "evil", in a way that disregards the attitudes or behaviour of any actual female person. Also, any behaviour that is deemed "masculine" is coded as marvellous, even if its effects are evil. (Women are blamed for its effects, where as lizard brained males revel in the glory of the act itself.)

As I said -- none of this can be reasoned with.

What is projective identification and how is it related to gender?

Projective identification is a primitive psychological mechanism. It involves projecting the unwanted part of one's psyche into another. Why would any parts of one's psyche be unwanted? Well, at the most fundamental level, there is the association with dirt and excrement. So, psychoanalyst Melanie Klein suggested that infants project their own excrement onto their mothers, as a way of dissociating from their dirt and becoming clean again, in their own minds.

In the case where men are taught that being "feminine" or being "a girl" is something to be despised, they will tend to project their own sensitive feelings or sense of vulnerability away from themselves in order to disown these feelings.

Women are "projected into" when men dissociate from the feminine aspects of their identities. Think about how this works. If someone only ever treats you as if you had nothing much to say, but were a cesspool of undifferentiated emotions, you might start to believe it. If that's the only way that people treat you, you imagine that they are treating you as you actually "are", but really the people who are treating you in that very particular way are forming your character by projecting a lot of their own psychological garbage into you. That is "projective identification" as it takes place within a system of patriarchal gender relations.

Gender and psychological splitting

Jennifer Armstrong

It's very strange that none of the male theoreticians (Freud or Jung) were able to realise to what degree male identity is predicated upon projective identification: the male asserts to himself, "I am not my emotions -- YOU (female) are!"

14 minutes ago · ·

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    Mutambara J Mutambara Raised egos! Maybe

    3 minutes ago ·
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    Jennifer Armstrong In the case of Jung, he had the idea that men needed a female spirit guide to reveal them to themselves. This is a mystification of the fact of projection of one's "female" psychological aspects outside of oneself, implying psychological splitting.
    
    In the case of Freud, he thought that women were always reactive and never active, implying that femininity is a reactive force in relation to male psychological splitting.

    A few seconds ago ·

The other problems with patriarchy

First, there is the essential patriarchal assumption that what women have to say is emotional -- that what they say has no effective content. It is a particularly bizarre one from my point of view. Consider that if someone wants to have any sort of relationship with me and yet they believe that my words have no effective content, they're going to have a hardest time ever trying to do it.

There are many other 'paradoxes" of patriarchy. I believe the fundamental reason behind all patriarchal formulations of the world relate to the male's sense that his psyche has become split due to the forces of sexual attraction, which he considers to be a force actively exerted on his mind by women.

His solution to this sense of primeval splitting is to try to erase women's independent status whilst trying to make them a part of himself (through such tropes as "women as property" etc.). That way he feels he can regain the lost primal unity. The problem is that it doesn't work that way because the problem with the patriarch is inside his own biological constitution (i.e. he is troubled by having sexual desire, since he feels this compromises his sense of independence). Therefore no amount of blaming women and no degree of controlling women will 'restore' this sense of unity with himself, that never really existed in the first place.

Currently, in conservative circles, the Bettina Arndts of the world are saying that the solution to male problems is for women to become more sexual or to talk about their lack of sexuality in marriage. Meanwhile Kay Hymowitz is saying that the problem with men is that women are too sexual.

Neither of these "solutions", which are diametrically opposed, can solve the fundamental problem that males have -- which stems from the fact that women, being independent beings in their own right, cannot ever, in practical terms, be absolutely controlled by men.

The key point here is 'absolute control', since anything less than this cannot make men sufficiently happy as it will not 'restore' the primeval unity of the psyche that men seek -- and lacking for which, they blame women.


ADDENDUM


I don't think reproduction is the central issue. Rather, It has to do with men feeling incomplete because of the issue of sexuality which is a core part of their identities that nonetheless seems to be "outside" of them -- that is seeming to be controlled by women and their whims (simply because women now represent "emotion" in split mind of the patriarchal male). He gets very angry as a core part of his identity seems to be under the control of another, hence his misogyny.

Gia Harris: How does that relate to to being 'outside them'? I'm thinking why dont women have this issue? Our sexuality could be considered outside of us if we want a man but he says no. Why the huge issue for them? or is it just like a child throwing a tantrum screaming 'but its MINE I want it!' lol



I don't know, Gia, but it may have something to do with the way sedentary agrarian (quintessentially patriarchal) society developed. It seems like the concept of rationality also developed at the same time when adjusting one's environment in the face of hardship was no longer possible. Instead of adjusting one's environment in the face of difficulties (moving away), it became more practical to stay in one place and tend to the land. So, repressing one's awareness of the changing states of the environment enabled one to take a longer term perspective, which required putting aside one's immediate impulses or "feelings". I think that males took on this role in particular, adopting asceticism as a sign of higher status over women.

I think that as men became the guardians and leaders of this sort of society, where wealth was accrued more greatly than previously and where hierarchies developed, they began to identify themselves with "rationality". I think it was this that caused the primeval splitting, because they could no longer experience their emotions and feelings, including sexual impulses, as coming from within them. It must have seemed as if these sensations were coming from the outside, instead -- from "women". Males defined themselves by asceticism, presumably, at this stage of historical development. Only later did they engage in another stage of trying to reclaim their sexuality. By this stage, asceticism and psychological splitting had already become normalised as fundamental to the masculine sense of identity.

Systematic ideological control

Most patriarchal theories that have any efficacy also effectively close the gaps around women to prevent their escape from the systematic ideology of patriarchy. Intensive ideological domination over women is achieved only when patriarchy also tweaks all opposing perspectives to make them look patriarchal, too. So it was that Freud effectively "closed the gap" around women by maintaining that they had really weak and flaky superegos at the same time as overly harsh and punitive superegos. The first condition unfits them for effective participation in society because they are allegedly not "strong" enough to co-operate with its mores. The second condition means that they are oversensitive to issues of morality and tend to blame themselves for no reason. So, once again, women are unfit for society. The means by which they might have escaped the circle of condemnation is closed by applying two opposing principles in the same way.

Communication sabotage: mind the gaps!

Conventionally, bigots have two or more barriers against effective communication, especially from women. The first is “You don’t really mean what you say. You are just being emotional.” The second involves setting out to incite rage, so as to dismiss the opponent's arguments. It’s a form of emotional blackmail. Firstly, trivialise what the other is saying and secondly, wait for them to react with appropriate anger. Then you can go on to mislabel their reaction as “hysterical”.

Since sabotaging communication appears to “work” for those that like to play this game, they keep on doing it. Indeed, they will continue to do so, so long as they get any benefits -- and they will continue to get these so long as ideological mystification about women abounds. It is therefore vital to understand how widespread these tendencies of communication sabotage are; how conventional they have become.

Obviously, there should be costs for sabotaging communication. The most logical way to make somebody pay for communication sabotage is to refuse to close the communication gap between you that they had blasted open. This works for those who sabotage on a personal level. Obviously it is not the answer to larger political issues, which do need to be continually addressed in the most clear and logical ways.

In the case of someone who sabotages communication on a personal level I put them on the slow learner’s track. Let them work with the premises they have (which have already been proven not to work at all)and don’t reward the misbehavior. Either they will come around, or they won’t, but good communication has to become their responsibility.

It’s not another person's task to keep trying to communicate by rebuilding the bridge again, despite the enemy's victorious measures of communication sabotage.

On varying the style and not being herd (which can sometimes lead to being heard)

I used to argue a great deal about all sorts of things. Eventually I became very tired and enervated, without having persuaded anybody of anything. It finally dawned on me that most people do not want to be persuaded and are not open to being persuaded about another point of view. Actually, it is a very effective rhetorical (and political) tactic to deny that what the other person is saying is in any way intelligible.That way, they can work even harder to convince the person who is unwilling to be convinced -- and waste all their energy.

When I eventually realised how this game was being played, I changed my tactics. Watch a boxing match and you will see that the person who has to work hard for points is going to lose in the long run. You must conserve your energy and make the opponent work hard for points. Skepticism is very useful here, but so are other features of intellectual rigour, like good arguments, reference points and a sincere attitude. You can award points for these, but if the other person doesn't have these qualities, you need to apply pressure on him to work harder to get his point across ... to YOU.