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 ‘psychodynamics’ Category.
Madness as Sanity, Reality as Madness: These were popular terms in the nineteen-seventies, a time when the twinning of opposites seemed profoundly philosophical and concepts such as these were intensely meaningful to someone with an armful of horse.
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?
Depriving a teenager of idealism is like not charging the battery of a car before you turn the ignition key and step on the gas. The car can’t go anywhere, and you flood the engine.
Some people sabotage their own pretensions to individuality through the fear of being perceived as different. Collections of such people agree to be different together in meticulously codified ways.
The surest indication that you need to pause and ponder right now is the feeling that you ought to wait until you’re better able to think.
When you’re done with all the busywork, you won’t feel less alone.
People who lack intelligence but consider themselves to be “players” self-identify by flagrantly accentuating their sexual characteristics, as though a fabulous distinction accrued to them by virtue of possessing the primary appendages of the species.
The problem with self-delusion is not that you are hiding shameful actions and qualities from other people (simple lying and deception take care of that) or even from yourself (a sense of mounting dread prevents this from occurring) but rather that your unwillingness to see yourself for what you are eliminates the only means whereby you might regain your bearings before that sense of mounting dread drives you into outright insanity in order for you to escape conclusively the truth about yourself.
A mentality so lame that it’s disarming: A man who wants to appear a cut above his pals employs the French word “forte” (strongpoint), ignorantly mispronouncing it as fortay. When corrected by a friend, he objects: “Everybody says fortay. If I say it differently, they’ll think I’m showing off.”
We don’t “make” decisions. Decisions make themselves. Sooner or later we catch up to them.
People’s insistence on being respected appears to be proportional to their inability to earn respect.
Lethargy indicates repression.
Despite appearances, most people’s behavior is not irrational; it’s neurotic, i.e., dysfunctional in rational ways. But because we imagine that certain people—most of them, in fact–are irrational, we solicitously counter their bizarreness with our light-wand of rationality, to no avail, because their maladjustment is spawned not in the intellectual faculty but in the awful chaotic swirl of modern life. I think we ought to reverse the terms of the process and purposely act irrationally in order to snap such people out of their neuroses. The next time you run into that smarmy little self-deprecator who works down the hall, ask, “Why did you dye your hair blue?” and instantly leave the room. The baffled neurotic, imploding with uncertainty and doubt, will then take a couple of baby steps along the path to eventual normalcy by hastening to find a mirror so he can verify his hair color, then wondering why you might have spoken so strangely. (Point #1: Your insanity acts like a cattle prod, shocking his malady into the open.) The second time you see the patient, offer this assurance: “I don’t blame you for killing your wife. Your secret is safe with me”; and then go away again. After this encounter, the subject will begin to objectify his thinking as he tries to figure out what in the hell your problem is. (Point #2: Objectification is the sine qua non of emotional salubrity.) Keep this going, and the day will come when you two collide at the water cooler and the former human ant colony says, “You don’t play badminton, do you? I just took it up and it looks like I’ve got a real talent for it!”
When a person doesn’t acknowledge plain reason, the subject of the discussion is not what you have been thinking it is.
Success depends on knowing in your bones how things work in your field of activity. The successful person beholds the field not as an organized schema but as a dynamic process; his knowledge isn’t acquired by simple learning, it is transferred from the field’s array of energy directly into his nervous system as a function of the totality of his involvement. The successful executive manipulates his knowledge to seize control of a sector of the process in order to improve the sector’s efficiency. The successful entrepreneur locates an opportunity that no one else has recognized for a creative transformation of the process itself. The necessary “knowledge”, in other words, is intuitive/intellectual rather than merely intellectual, and if you don’t have it, be content to do your job, and turn to your private life for self-fulfillment.
If you want to know what sort of partisan dirty tricks the Democrats have been playing, just pay attention to the wrongs they accuse the Republicans of committing; the two are infallibly the same, because when their gamesmanship is flushed into the light the Democrats want to say, “They do it, too,” invoking the exculpatory principle of moral equivalency. They get away with this brazen transparency because Americans as a people possess a matched pair of civic defects deriving from their mental lassitude: the compulsion (a) to latch onto the first explanation (as long as it is superficial and simple) for any disturbance of the Sea of Unknowing; in order (b) to avoid doing what Americans hate to do, i.e., decide that “somebody just like me” has acted villainously.
I have devoted fifty years to the effort of formulating language conveying precisely what I think I mean. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that practically everybody else employs language to evade the slightest suspicion of specificity.
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.
Providing yourself with an admirable self-image is only half the deal. You also have to match it in reality. The “true you” is not an icon.