People who react to experience not spontaneously, but rather by first considering how the reaction might “play” for them—or in the case of our crusading intellectuals, how they might use it in the prosecution of their pet sociocultural narratives—and what its corresponding value will be, worry the hell out of me because interposing anything that is arbitrary between reality and our awareness of reality, which is to say, preconditioning our consciousness, is an ego defense that makes me wonder what’s wrong with them that they don’t want revealed through inadequate, inappropriate or inept behavior. I put them in the psychodynamic category that contains socio- and psychopaths, junkies maddened by desperation and rabid ideologues of all denominations.
Archive for the ‘defenses’ Category.
People who consider it in their interest that no rules inhibit or limit their behavior find the pleasures of their excesses short-lived and incomplete. Why else would they keep repeating them so neurotically?
We may confidently assume that those who lack curiosity are also “non-judgmental”. People who fear being wrongly definite repress all their instincts.
The lack of a sense of responsibility leads to self-deception, and this is one of a slew of contemporary American “behaviors” (i.e., behavioral syndromes) against which the sweet-reason approach is powerless to effect change and therefore pointless to employ; others are depression (resulting from the long-term repression of impulses), addiction (escapism masquerading as courageous self-discovery or outrageous self-expression), the chronic inability to keep a promise (“I lied,” “things change,” “I’m moving on”), blaming someone or something other than oneself, saying that one has a disease in order to show that “I couldn’t help it.” The problem is that these sad and threadbare devices are defensive mechanisms applied when people actually need to assert themselves to overcome the fear arising from the insecurity that typifies society so conspicuously. The rising popularity of “extreme sports,” in which people fling themselves off thousand-foot cliffs, for example, with no great assurance that they’re going to land on the ground as anything but a splat, signals the severity of our anxiety. Those of us who don’t leap experience the right impulse (close your eyes and jump) but are afraid to act on it lest we wimp out or look stupid, which we really are for not responding; but we’re not in a condition to appreciate that. And because of our own insecurity we want to cut the clearly maladjusted plenty of slack—we “empower” them, to use another current catch phrase. Unfortunately, the dysfunctional syndrome we adopt metastasizes along with our unabated insecurity until we’re offering even greater slack to those guilty of committing actual crimes; fully crediting them for any of those blame-deflecting excuses cited above they care to indicate, because we believe (however absurdly) that we could well stand in their shoes some day and be in need of all the slack that we can get. The moral of this unhappy exposition is that society is crippled for everybody when a large enough number of its members refuse to accept the discomfort and inconvenience of self-investigation and behavior change as the price of putting an end to the pathology. America’s prosperity, which makes it easy to dissociate cause and effect, insures that this is going to be the way things are for a long time to come.
A distrustful person only imagines that he distrusts others. What he knows—but won’t confront, and thus doesn’t know that he knows—is that he doesn’t trust himself to manage the complications that develop during relationships. The imaginary faux-distrust of which he is aware, therefore, is a protective device allowing him to slip-slide around on the surface of things.
“Oh I didn’t have time” is bullshit.
Carrying a grudge is tantamount to feeding your soul into a cheese shredder, not to mention that you’re aggravating and perpetuating the injury inflicted by your victimizer. I am sure that if he knew how you’ve unmanned yourself, he’d laugh his ass off. Is that what you wanted to happen when you swore your vengeance?
Conversation and Interpretation:
Jack: “Morning, William. How’s it going?” (By saying “William” instead of “Bill” I’m magnifying your ego, hoping you’ll relax whatever reservations you have about me.)
Bill: “Been better, Jack. I still haven’t lost that cold.” (I know you flattered me but I still need some coddling.)
Jack: “Sorry to hear it.” (I don’t give a fuck how you feel, I’ve got my own troubles. What are you, a baby?)
Bill: “Been hunting yet this season?” (You’re right. I need to get my masculinity on the table.)
Jack: “Got me a doe down at Willow Branch is all” (In case you ever wondered if I got enough balls to break the law.)
Bill: “Skinned her on the spot, did you? (That’s what a real man would do.)
Jack: “Well Moloson was there and you know how he is. He likes to do all that for you.” (Moloson is the best hunter in three damn counties and he let me tag along with him last week if I cleaned the truck up when we got back. How you like them apples, assblossom?)
Bill: “They got anything good on the menu this morning?” (I’ve had enough of this crap. You’ve already taken up more of my time than you deserve, you little gas-pumping, best-friend’s-wife-humping moron)
Nobody beats Americans for coming up with self-serving bromides for their psycho-emotional cowardice. “She’s not what I thought she was, but I’m not going to leave her because I don’t want to hurt her feelings.” Yes, it’s much better for her when you chronically get drunk rather than spend time with her, stay out playing with the boys five nights a week, never take her anywhere, screw every other female who will lie still for you, and beat the living shit out of her when you come home and realize you’re “stuck” with this woman. That way you don’t have to test whether you’re capable of inveigling a more desirable and self-respecting female to take up residence with you and tolerate your violently disintegrating personality.
Responsible Discussion:
Government Bureaucrat: “Sir, what are we going to do about the aircraft carrier that appeared in the lobby this morning?”
Department Head: “Nothing, Forbush. We elect not to draw attention to it.”
“Busy” does not mean never resolving anything so that you are always out of time and breath, under the gun, harried and hot, in order to turn people off from asking you to do something else while at the same time enhancing your image of being heroically overtaxed. “Busy” means having more legitimate chores to take care of than you have the time to do them in, as distinct from acting as though you’re doing them.
People who are chronically late are usually not on time. Why do you keep giving them such grief? What‘s wrong with you?
Things and people are seldom what they seem (perception is not reality), so when somebody says, “I am not judgmental,” you should interpret the words as follows: “You are manifestly an obtuse and arrogant schmuck, but I’m not going to say that because you could then reply that I’m a repulsive, inconsequential jerk. So I prefer to maintain this fiction that I don’t think you’re anything at all, and to go on sweating rivulets in my concern that I am forever on the verge of being unmasked as a panic-driven mealy-mouthed coward.”
People employ euphemisms when they wonder if they might be capable of succumbing to a vice. Were it not for self-doubt, we would realize conceivably that it makes as much sense to say “casual cancer” as to say “recreational drugs.”
Abraham Lincoln’s private message to George Custer regarding the latter’s incessant bellyaching about the treachery of his enemies in the upper echelon of the Army: “You don’t know what shit is, Goldilocks.”
An odd little mental disease called exalitheia (=“truth-outing”) afflicts professional people whose callings mandate perpetually duplicitous behavior that takes the form of pretending (especially to themselves) they are doing one thing when really they are doing something else. The disease is regarded as benign and even lifesaving as it operates by short-circuiting the tension resulting from the maintaining of deliberate falsehoods as a way of life. Morphologically the disease is expressed as the compulsive carrying out of deceptive practices in nonprofessional ways without the patient being aware that he or she is doing so, thereby justifying the oft-repeated observation that exalitheia is cathartic, although unlike other cathartic ills truth-outing does not appear to be specifically therapeutic. From the clinical studies and theoretical literature we may glimpse the malady’s pathology in the case for example of John _______ of Peoria, IL, a former news reporter who is likely to startle his luncheon mates by abruptly holding up the salt and pepper shakers and attempting to convince his auditors that they are “identical in every respect including color, a fact that eludes you because you are not trained in the detection of moral equivalency in minerals and condiments.” Another illuminating case is that of ex-lawyer Fred (“Bud”) _________ of Portland, Me, whose exalitheia takes the form of stealing his host’s toilet paper so that he can heroically return it when the host expresses mystification as to its sudden disappearance. “It’s a good thing I was here to find it for you,” he concludes these episodes by remarking. Finally there is Congressman Monk _____ of Boulder, CO, who insists upon his fellow diners paying for their meals with cash instead of credit cards, saying the public benefit requires a conscientious reduction of personal debt, and then pockets the money for both the bill and the tip remarking to the waiter. “If I allowed you to retain the proceeds of your labor, then where would be your incentive to continue being a productive member of the community?” The current emphasis in exalitheia-study is focused on finding ways in which the patient’s acting out of his pathology may eventually be converted into a long-term curative sequence as distinct from the affliction’s present natural purgative value in relaxing tensions which otherwise might eventuate in psychosis.
There are mornings when it seems that I have winked into an alternate universe in which the President of the United States regards it as more important not to be observed changing an abortive policy than to incur the consequences of a policy’s failure. That could never happen here, could it?
I don’t know about a “death wish,” but I do think human beings are cursed with a hey-look-at-what-an-idiot-I am wish, and I deduce this from the fact that when circumstances won’t permit us to escape appearing to be something that we’re not, instead of just trying inconspicuously to get by with a minimum of to-do we are seized with an insane compulsion to attract scrutiny to ourselves by acting as though we are the epitome of the modality we are seeking to evince. It’s as though we desire to fail at being something we are not in order to punish ourselves for our presumption, involuntary though it may have been. Looked at in this light, the syndrome appears to be salutary. It reminds us that we embarrass ourselves less when we say, “I don’t know how to do that. Would you show me?” than when we undertake one of our absurd foredoomed Goofy impersonations.
In 1958, at Duke University, a co-ed told me that her roommate stripped to the buff when she was in her room so she could “get back to nature.” Of course she put her clothes on again to go to class and to the Student Union. I said to the co-ed, “Steal her clothes. Then she’ll have to sneak outside at night to eat roots and berries. And of course she’ll be arrested for indecent exposure if she tries to go to class. So they’ll kick her out of school if she doesn’t flunk out and maybe she’ll be forced to go all the way back to nature.” A couple of years later, at Emory University, a girl in my creative-writing class (she dyed her hair black and actually wore black dresses with black stockings, along with black eye-shadow and black lipstick, so she could be overtly identified as a Beatnik) confided in me, “I’m going to write a story about a prostitute. But first I’ll have to turn a few tricks myself so I can write from experience.” I replied, “I hope to God you never want to write a story about a murderer.” Human beings possess a faculty called imaginative projection that is not formally cultivated in our society. When fatuous schoolteachers coddle, humor and flatter their charges with comments like, “You can have a green sky if you want to!” they are insuring that the children do not develop expressive imaginations, but rather that they proceed to act on idle whim. The teachers ought to say, “You can have a green sky if you can give me a good reason for making it green.” Artists, as distinct from daubers, need to be specific in their intentions; a work of art cannot be executed if the artist is unable to objectify the subjective—that is the primary definition of art. In any case, it is the absence of imaginative projection that empowers fools to imagine they can experience something other than the reality that environs them. Imagination is not compensatory. It is transformational.
Mentally and attitudinally, Americans prepare to enter the world each day like a toreador assembling his elaborate costume and putting it on with utmost deliberation. But this bullfighter waits until the picadors have already killed the bull before he enters the arena, because the object of his opulent self-display is to astonish the multitude without actually incurring the angry charge of a 2,000-pound meat-train trying its level best to cancel the performance.
