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 ‘behavior’ 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?
Some of those who cast off religion (as being insufficiently hip) but continue to experience spiritual hunger wind up plunging into such ethereal realms of soul-questing as astrology, Scientology, fortune-telling, white witchery and New Age blatherbloat. Before long they’re channeling Rock Hudson and Bella Abzug and joyously waggling their hands like Yes-God-ing gospel singers; and their throbbing souls (which they had said they didn’t “believe in” anymore) are ripe for plucking by manipulating apostles. Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates wrote novels about this rhapsodic idiocy that will scare the hell out of you.
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.
A young girl coarsened through preoccupation with adolescent sex lowers the value to the species of Natural Selection.
We may confidently assume that those who lack curiosity are also “non-judgmental”. People who fear being wrongly definite repress all their instincts.
I don’t like looking overlong at an acquaintance when he’s not aware I’m watching. I start imagining outlandish things about him. I think this is because he’s affectless at such times, so my sensibility isn’t influenced by the familiar prods and kneading we carry on with when we deliberately interact.
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.
Wreck children at your peril. The acuteness of their pain inspires an unappeasable hunger for payback.
What we need to remember about criminals is that they spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about whether their mothers ever loved them.
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.”
Anthropologists say the human race became the dominant species on the planet because it’s the most adaptive species; if this is true, it carries the corollary that we learn by our mistakes. But I have seen so many cases indicating the contrary that I can’t help doubting the proposition—until I think about money, specifically about how the glee of having a surplus of it or the fear of not having enough short-circuits man’s psyche. What else might explain why a heretofore successful businessman would purchase an acclaimed restaurant, then proceed to amortize his investment by reducing the cost—-and thereby the quality—of precisely those amenities that made the restaurant popular to begin with?
Political correctness is not about acceptance of the other, tolerance, affirmative action, doing the right thing or any other cultural or social issue. It’s a moral salve for the consciences of people who refuse to endure the strictures on behavior of a personal moral code. Imagine a woman who breaks her arm and goes to work as a municipal plasterer instead of seeing a doctor, on the grounds that “confining my limb to a plaster cast infringes on my individual freedom.” The more unbearable her pain becomes, the more civic wall-space she slathers with her featureless goo, crippled but convinced that she is beautifying the city.
Some people think that our intelligence is the master of our lives. Other people believe it is the servant. The vast majority of people couldn’t care less, and the patterns of their behavior, while they may be coherent, are never comprehensive.
People’s insistence on being respected appears to be proportional to their inability to earn respect.
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!”
The people I hold in greatest contempt are those who hurt others because, and only because, they have the power and opportunity to do so.
If you want to have some good, uncomplicated slack time, cultivate an amoral scoundrel as your companion. He’ll be very entertaining, introduce you to some fascinating people, and catch most of the checks out of vanity. Warning him you don’t trust him with your woman or your wallet will take the pressure off both of you, erasing ambiguity from the relationship.