Sunday 30 August 2015

How history changes our consciousness (Theodor Adorno)

Understand esoteric critiques of political realities

Vlog CCLXXVIII





There's nothing more painful than when people do their glib, know-it-all trick on others. I've had that so many times, on my way out of the forest of confusion. Whereas you turned to books that could point you in the right direction, I resorted to experimentalism. I'd had extremely nasty things done to me, and my whole digestive system had collapsed so that I couldn't eat very much or anything solid without my stomach swelling like a balloon. From this evidence alone, I knew something terrible had happened to me. People would glibly pass by whilst saying that I was overreacting or that I ought to snap out of it. I was so confused that I thought maybe they were right, so I began my own experiments. I began addressing some of these others with a bit of the condescension and hostility that had been directed at me. It didn't take much to make them react. It's amazing how sensitive some people can be -- way, way more reactive than I. I'd been extremely stoical, throughout the abuse and long recovery period.
But the severity of my circumstances had not been caused by me or even by my capacity for stoically bearing up. In reality, I had come from a very severe culture and high intensity situation, and my level of emotional attunement to the culture I had entered was not refined or exacting enough. I did not have any sense of what was normal behavior in the new culture and wasn't able to observe the different sorts of people that populated it, or to read between the lines enough.
Also my capacity to respond with adequate emotional attunement had been damaged by my father's personality and his extreme rages, which had caused me to expect that I would only be in danger if someone were directly raging at me. In fact the opposite was true, and I was being subtly but consistently undermined.
The people who kept saying that what I needed was more stoicism were in fact out of their minds, because it was my very capacity for stoical persistence that had led me to be able to endure a hostile situation to the point that my organic system was breaking down. Additional idiots were those who said I was too socially sensitive. The opposite was again true, since I'd had no exposure to contemporary Western culture before the age of 15, so I really wasn't able to ascertain clearly whether somebody insulting me subtly or was being genuine and straight-up. Therefore I could hardly have taken offence at something I was unable to ascertain in the first instance.
It has taken me decades to put the pieces of the puzzle together, and nobody helped me. Even those I thought would logically be allies backstabbed me and ran away.
Your videos, though, have been of great value.

The Christian mechanism of torture, its heights and depths

Death causes terror, so creates our limits (Bataille)

Friday 28 August 2015

Capoeira Angola

Vlog CCLXXVI - YouTube


Thank you, for the shoutout. :) I understand the nature of an extreme experience....I so hear the authenticity. Also you have a high level of logic and reason in facing your situation, whereas I was trying to deal with mine intuitively. One of the growing sensations I had, way back, when I was being attacked, and it was a race between my ability to get more knowledge and the likelihood of being attacked again (because I really was in a vulnerable position, with a questionable state of health, a lack of cultural knowledge and no means to earn an income), was that even if others did not understand the seriousness of my situation, I would certainly reflect to them that it was so, through the seriousness of my counter-attacks. I had such small margins of well-being and survival to play with, that I had to make the seriousness register on another level. I did make it through, but only through studying power, almost obsessing about it, and moving to the extreme left. It should be noted (since you gave me the shout out) that a lot of left-wing philosophy, since it is so concerned about power, veils itself on a number of levels, since it doesn't want to be easily ascertained and understood. Only those who need it very desperately indeed will perhaps come to understand it. But there are many levels of reasoning and devices of protection, some of which make it nearly impossible to enter. I consider myself to be one of the privileged, as I entered, although under great duress. We survive how we can. If a guy as smart as Freud was so afraid of power that he wasn't able, or was unwillling, to tell the truth, we need to clothe ourselves in .....something-or-other. Sometimes it is at a level of clownliness. Did you know that there is a whole martial arts school, Capoiera Angola, that is based on SEEMING to clown, but which is actually deadly serious? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF9lfOAWTxo

Vlog CCLXXVI

Tuesday 25 August 2015

Nietzsche and Narcissism

Shopenhauer, Heidegger, and all those guys

Psychology of 'co-dependency' & the 'just world hypothesis' - YouTube

Psychology of 'co-dependency' & the 'just world hypothesis' - YouTube:



'via Blog this'



+Jennifer Armstrong "Just world hypothesis"? Me thinks Voltaire had a clearer perspective of the truth. We must tend to our gardens. Co-dependency is inevitable in some fashion to some degree. Would you equate vanity with narcissism? There are some useful and interesting post-Nietzsche philosophers, to be sure - Heidegger, perhaps, being the most valuable in my opinion. But Schopenhauer is someone whose thought I rank along side Friedrich's (a very small list, to be sure), and, the way I see it, the latter owed as much to the former as he improved and refined the former.
 
+Mark David O'Connor No, no, vanity and narcissism are not the same. Nietzsche explicitly critized Shopenhauer as hostile to reality in many of its forms. I'm not sure how you can make a comparison with S and his other-wordliness and Nietzsche. The most extreme Nietzsche was in these terms was to insist on Idealism rather than materialism. Yet, by incorporating a philosophy of evil, he came very close to materialism, or as close as can be to grappling with physical reality.
Heidegger, too, is other-worldly, and Bataille attempted to rise up against him since he did not embrace enough risk or realism for Bataille's taste.

Saturday 22 August 2015

Erich Fromm's ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM & "co-dependency"

Vlog CCLXVIII - Rant - YouTube

Vlog CCLXVIII - Rant - YouTubeBreakthrough Moment 6 hours ago

Because it's so nebulous, psychology lends itself to quackery and charlatanism. Anybody with a PhD can hang a shingle, doesn't make them a good shrink. I've come to realize that nobody takes your interest to heart the way you do. And no one knows you better than you do. Psychologists have their own agendas and are looking after their own interests; anyone that knows how to read can do their own research.

We have to learn to deal with the poor little narc, aw poor things, and because we're not as adept at being a$$holes as them and we're "too" nice, something's wrong with us?? I don't think so. Being nice has become a taboo that, like you, I'm not buying into so I can pay some shrink to tell me I need to adjust MY disposition for some psychotic a$$hole. Our society caters to the narc. Therein lies the problem.
+Breakthrough Moment Brilliant comment! : ) Thank you BM!
+Breakthrough Moment There is every possibility that a metaphysics of gender is at play here as well. Remember that Abrahamic religions define men as adults and women as wayward children, whilst also placing men in the sadistic role and women in the masochistic one. If one has absorbed these ideas as implicit assumptions, of course one is going to try to teach women (children/masochists) how to adapt to the world of "men".

Psychology of 'co-dependency' & the 'just world hypothesis' - YouTube


thijsjong
Do you know the work of Eric Berne. I think this subject fits very close with his work. Ganes people play. To be submerged and drenched into the games. A terrible fate

 ▼ 
Psychology of 'co-dependency' & the 'just world hypothesis'

Jennifer Armstrong
+thijsjong I only know French and German intellectuals.  Sorry.
Something I have found is that one can play games with others too.  I can create a very specific filter for cowardliness and gulibility. For instance I may say:  "I consider myself to be a very determined person and quite a fighter for what believe is right, whereas others have considered me to be a frail little thing and a flower."
I then sit back to see who takes the bait.

Psychology of 'co-dependency' & the 'just world hypothesis'

Friday 21 August 2015

Vlog CCLXVIII





I think it possible, if humans have any capacity to reason at all (which is doubtful, in many cases), that I may have been dismissed as a "co-dependent" by those who had probably read too much Ayn Rand and who have had a simplistic life with simplistic intellectual leanings.  That is why I decided to give them a taste of their own medicine.  Because.  Communication itself it an act of "co-dependency".  We sit still and we listen and we wait for the other person to say their bit, and during that time we are in all important respects "co-dependents".   (By contrast, the narcissist, as we know, never listens, but just twitters some jibberish and makes it strong through magical thinking.)
So I waited for those who are used to having their way, in seeming persuasive in their language, to begin to speak.   At that point, I relinquished my role as a "co-dependent" by telling them that I had no idea what they meant.  Perhaps they meant something to themselves, but I was not holding out any hope of interpreting their meaning, for I was nothing like their co-dependent, either in this situation or in any other.  
The destruction of the dynamic of co-dependency is also, to be logical about it, the destruction of communication and therefore of meaning. (So long as I don't care what you "mean", I stand above you.)
As the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, said, "To understand someone is to 'stand under' them."
From now on, I have no idea what the narcissist means, or what he might ever intend to mean.  His language is a mystery to me.  I renounce all involvement.

On why I had to turn hard to the left & how it saved me

Thursday 20 August 2015

Nietzsche's 'mountain climber' and Bataille's B.A.S.E. jumper

slaves


Mike Ballard
"slaves to the meaning we created"...good one. Exactly. We're dominated by our own creations. Oh poor things we make ourselves. But, if we can laugh at the absurdity, we can accept our advancing maturity.

Excellently done.  Makes Nietzsche and Bataille relevant to our ever present continuum.

 ▼
Georges Bataille's perspective on tragedy and divine laughter

Jennifer Armstrong
 I'm glad I was able to make it make sense.   One can really understand  what is being got at by the writers by means of a formal stucture that one could probably depict as a graphic.   Too much truth-certainty leads us to dominate ourselves by means of our unshakeable faith in what we think we know.   This overestimation of what we think we know produces such unhappy features as weakness of character and (at times) gradiosity.   If we can move outside of ourselves, to see the contingencies of life, we can become more whole, more resilient and more self-aware, especially as regards the real value of knowledge, which is understood as relative (not as the absolute thing we had thought it to be).

Georges Bataille's perspective on tragedy and divine laughter

Wednesday 19 August 2015

Importance of understanding the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos





It is vital to understand how we create meaningfulness in situations (eg. life as a whole) that are not intrinsically meaningful. This making of meaning is a general human tendency (an expression of Eros), an outpouring of our attachment to living, which may often become even an addiction to meaningfulness. Those who love life too much (embracing Eros too much) don't see the opposite side of our human reality: the facet of disintegration, and of meaninglessness (the effects of "death"; or Thanatos). Those who see both sides, however, realize that it is wise to strategically impose one's own sense of gradations on life by attributing to events different levels of meaningfulness, rather than assuming meaning to intrinsically exist already in the order of things.

Bataille's "Will to chance" and his "left-hand path"

Monday 17 August 2015

Coming to terms with the politics of projective identification

Vlog CCLXIII





In my case I had been a victim if not extremely vulnerable ever since I became a migrant, because I was not protected by a common understanding, socially, politically and psychologically, and because my father had suffered such a high level of catastrophe in his life that he had turned into a psychological vampire, trying to reclaim some of his life by taking mine.  I suffered huge psychological injuries, but gradually recovered from most of them.   As I went through the very slow recovery process of putting myself, my mind and my health back together, I took up writing.  I wrote a book about my circumstances, thinking that at least intellectuals would be able to understand and sympathize with me, if nobody else could.   I kept correcting it over the years, since people said it still was not communicating my intentions effectively.  In fact, I was afraid of shocking and hurting others, so I did not speak directly of my father's extreme violence, for instance when he overturned the mattress with me in it, and I had been sleeping naked.   I'd kept the writing at a fairly abstract level, implying the violence but not necessarily stating the contents outright.
Intellectuals.....Did they understand my work?   They turned on me more viciously than anybody had ever done, making out that nothing really occurs in reality.  From their point of view, the only events that occur are inside one's head.
I felt this to be an extreme betrayal on all levels, not just on the personal level.  These intellectuals were actually denying that one should communicate something that they didn't want to hear.  Not only that, there was an element of viciousness and personal attack to their responses, which were not measured and intellectual at all.  Indeed, there had been no attempt to make them seem so.
By this time, though, I was getting used to the high levels of unexplained personal hostilities, so I was at least half-ready for the disappointment and sense of being rebuffed.  In martial arts we learned that if someone is really coming after you, you have no choice but to fight them back as hard as you can, so that they will not be able to do that again.  
This was really the turning point for me in waking up to the intentional nature of the hostilities that would bury my reality and making the direct attackers regret taking me on.
As for the bystanders, they get to suffer their own delusions through their embrace of reality distortion.

Tuesday 11 August 2015

Half-cocked: Anglo-Americans' reactions to Continental Philosophy

Vlog CCLVI





Psychoanalysis traces a certain path of what it deems to be normative development.  My sense of it, however, is that there is written into the framework certain presuppositions which are ideological.  Freud, for instance, assumes normative development to follow a line that is patriarchal, in the Olde Jewish sense of the term.  That is to say, in effect, it would be considered normative if women took heed of their fathers or 'father figures' and deferred to their guidance.   In Lacanian theory, I detect the normalizing of the ideology of bourgeois competitiveness, for instance in the "mirror stage", where it is said the child sees himself whole for the first time, but also sees the reflection of himself in the mirror as a competitor and antagonist.  
The difference between psychoanalytic and shamanic theory is that shamanic theory is not at all afraid of the "death drive" or return to the womb, since all that happens when one faces death or "the womb" openly and honestly is that one experiences rebirth and a further stage of maturity.  Psychoanalysis is afraid of this cyclical version of life and insists only on a linear narrative about time.  In effect it has the angel of death barring a return to human paradise (the womb state and its associated sensations of ecstasy).   It puts in place of this cyciical version of events the stark reality of death and insists on a constant moral striving to overcome i
nternal flaws.

Conceptually linking "shamanism" with philosophy

Friday 7 August 2015

How to Take Revenge On A Narcissist





In fact I've never felt my claws more sharpened than when dealing with the "non-dualistic" poseurs.  I took the hit they dished out, but then I invented some "random effects of the universe" of my own to fix them.  Of course it can be said that nothing negative came from me.  I was merely channelling some negative affects toward those who would perpetuate the abuse by making out I had brought it on myself.

The liberal moral relativism is a-historical and wishes to cover a multitude of sins.  In fact it is an expression of extreme intellectual laziness.  Historical context needs to be taken into account within therapy, rather that being dismissed as if it were just the basis for rationalizing the current pathio-dynamics.  IT'S NOT ABOUT LENIENCY, IT'S ABOUT LAZINESS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7opoSqCux0

Dialectics (part 2) & the Americanization of gender

Thursday 6 August 2015

Vlog CCLI





I do think a programme for male independence might be exactly what is in order to sever the apron strings and the all-pervasive attachment to Mamma.
If there are those who join an organization and feel it justifies them to attack persons like me, in another country, however, I don't seem how they have made any break from a symbolic Mummy.   I've been targeted by many, many an American man who presumes to be able to read my mind, when all they can read are the darkened entrails of their own sad and disgusting culture.   My views and sense of hygiene are of the British upper class.   I don't crawl in the dirt and rotten debris of humanity, where the weird notions of gender are derived, in the soils of American culture.

An introduction to the philosophical concept of dialectics

Wednesday 5 August 2015

Vlog CCXLIX





I used to have the worst sensations.  Whenever I felt a virus coming on,  I would feel my father's utter rage running through me.   That was punishment for me being about to let him down by succumbing to yet another virus or round of sickness.   The sensation of his rage and disappointment at me -- but mostly his hatred of my physical being -- used to virtually assure that I would not put up enough immune system resistance to whatever was launching its attack.    I used to be stuck in this double-bind from the internalization of his rage and my inability to go anywhere (to literally leap out of my own skin) to get away from it.   I had to train myself for years and years and years to get the narc. abuse out of my body.

Defending independent thought

I'd like to make it very clear to Americans that my ideas are not about YOU. Even if I use the familiar word, "feminism", the range of my own thought has nothing to do with you and your tiny little world view.

Regeneration of the self; restoration of one's wholeness

Tuesday 4 August 2015

THE VILENESS OF THE AMERICAN NORM

The tacit cultural approval given in the US to a society of narcissists is the full explanation of what is wrong over there. Once again let us not forget what the TYPICAL American is -- an absolutely vile person who actually ENJOYS being called out on his or her ignorance as this gives them more chance to revel in it.

TYPICAL AMERICANS

And once again about TYPICAL Americans (not the escapees or aberrants of the culture), the stupid-but-not-caring posture is exactly the feature of themselves they take the most pride in. Let us not forget that.

Cultural barriers to objectivity