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 ‘dysfunction’ 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?
I wonder how many realize that the way we view reality is governed by the technical and logistical demands of television coverage, with even greater distortion effected by a truncated presentation format and by story-juggling editors keeping an eye on the ratings. Any event that can’t be shoehorned into this Procrustean mould—such as, oh let me see, the 7 year-long, 200- billion-dollar Savings and Loan scandals (“We could never figure out how to do the graphics”)—simply stays beneath the water gathering force and fury until one day it blasts to the surface like the Great White Whale, swamping the little Pequot and sending its crazed and visionary captain to the bottom.
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!”
I once told the production foreman and the transportation manager of a company I worked for: “If you two spent half the time doing your jobs that you waste pretending to do them, you wouldn’t have to put on an act.”
Can it be surprising that a people who allow appearances to govern their opinions and existence should always be addressing the symptom rather than the disease?
The fact that many people today communicate in disjunctive squeaks and croaks accompanied by an array of primitive gestures, supplies the ultimate response to a proposition first voiced c. 1967: “Don’t let the rules of grammar get in the way of your self-expression, man. Let it all hang out.” Dropping the rules of grammar resulted irresistibly in the self’s no longer being linguistically expressible by a large percentage of the population to any degree at all.
The Idea of Phart: An amalgam of “phony” plus “art”, this term designates the exhibitions of the little nothing self-promoting charlatans who lack even the minimal artistry necessary to make it in the art-is-a-major-investment sweepstakes. Their “work” may also be described as “tabloid art” because the little preening suck-ass nothings vie for the public’s attention on the basis of sensationalism. Artistically, on the other hand, they operate on the basis of anti-imagination: 42-miles of fuchsia-tinted Saran Wrap unspooling across the highlands of Bulgaria; Jesus in a bottle of piss together with the Virgin Mary sculpted out of dogshit; 36 amputated titties in eleven rows of three plus another three on the ceiling; the actual corpse of an obese grandmother asphyxiated by the action of her support-hose cutting off her circulation; six little boys dressed as nuns throwing darts at The Artist Himself while the latter creates profane tattoos out of his flesh wounds; a python in a maze wriggling its way towards a day-old puppy at the terminus. Speaking qualitatively, what is the difference between this bathetic junk and a freak show at the local fairground or, for that matter, Ripley’s Believe It or Not? In our great land it’s not what you do that counts, it’s what you call what you do.
Overheard at the Intersection of Hollywood and Vine: A woman is using the payphone. I don’t have his pants. Why would I be walking around Hollywood holding Peter’s pants in my hands? Jesus…. So I’m the bad guy?…. The last time I saw the goldfish it was in the refrigerator door-rack.…. Hey this grungy-looking weirdo is staring at me. He’s checking out my tits. Wait a minute…. Okay, he’s gone. Are you saying I didn’t pick her up from school yesterday? Fuck that. Who’s got her?…. Oh shit. Look, can you go down and get her out for me? You can act like you’re me…. I would act like I was you, if you…. What’s the big deal, Breanne? Don’t you give a shit about my daughter?….
Reductio ad Ignorantiam. Where you find violent crime, bigotry, aggressive confrontation, manipulative advertising, religious frenzy, rage, random violence, a high rate of addictive behavior—always where you find those you also find ignorance. What may we deduce from the correlation?
Let’s continue to say that sex within the context of an emotionally rich relationship is desirable. But let’s stop saying that sex outside of such a context is evil and reprehensible, and instead characterize it by a functional term like “hygienic.” (If freedom means anything, it means the freedom to choose which form of sex one prefers.) Let’s stop moralizing sex. This will be difficult for many because Puritanism considers all sex as being nasty, within or without wedlock, with the result that millions of Americans grow up fearfully ashamed of their sexual feelings and therefore of themselves (because they can’t prevent the feelings from occurring), so much so that they repress the feelings and then become neurotically afraid to face them squarely. Again, the implementation of a new public rhetoric will alleviate the situation by objectifying sex so that we can deal with it rationally. Not to mention that the people who have moralized and over-personalized sex and the people who have never had those problems need to be able to speak the same language together so that we can re-integrate society, which is never going to happen as long as one segment is calling the other segment “bad and degenerate” while the latter is calling the former “hypocritical and controlling.”
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.”
The murderous mass rage, the vicious and uncontrollable insanity, of the Middle East presents us with a picture of our own population two or three generations in the future. A pair of vectors are going to intersect then, and American society will obliterate itself. When the inability of the vast majority to think objectively and critically regarding its own interests (and nearly 60% of Americans are functionally illiterate right now) intersects with the perfection of the capacity of the communications industry to by-pass our brains with behavior-triggering sights and sounds, then the same perfect storm of human cyclonic frenzy will prevail here that has erased the sanity of the Arabs. Those who own the media will control America through the manipulation of people’s behavior. The Arabs have never had the means to withstand emotional exploitation, whereas we possessed them but have just about finished throwing them away. Why are we letting it happen?
History through the Classroom Window: The American teenager today may acquire all the condoms he desires from his high-school nurse’s station, but he’s forbidden by that very institution to have a burger for lunch or crack a cold Diet Coke to slake his thirst. To understand what has become of our educational system and its “clients”—our kids—we must go back in time to the fall of 1945. The generation that persevered through the rigors of the Great Depression, then slogged and battled their way to victory in World War II, had spent an average of three to nine years in school before necessity compelled them to take up the duties and responsibilities of adulthood. They liked to say their real education occurred in the school of hard knocks, and they were not wrong in thinking that. On the other hand, the ultimate vindication and success these provincial young men and women wrung from global conflict after a decade and a half of poverty and grim travail unlocked America’s long-restrained human energy the way the Manhattan Project had recently unlocked the power of the atom. The G I Bill of Rights and the post-war continuation of the government’s awarding of research grants to universities gigantically expanded the country’s educational apparatus just as the rise of the big corporation and evolving science and technology as well as the understandable desire to experience something better than a subsistence-level existence impelled the returning soldiers to enter the halls of ivy for a “college education.” In another decade and a half, America’s revitalized educational system in conjunction with our spectacular prosperity (for the energies of our industrial base had also been liberated) had converted our population from credulous hard-scrabble pluggers into skeptical-to-cynical sophisticates perusing their navels in the lap of luxury and security even as The Readers’ Digest tapered off in popularity while Playboy and Esquire became the periodicals du jour. It amazingly occurred that a generation of men and women who had become adults by the age of thirteen raised a generation of young people who remained adolescent deep into their twenties, as often as not displaying their superior cultivation by cruelly mocking the tastes and attitudes of the parents who had made possible their lives of idle frivolity. Meanwhile, the expansive and dynamic post-war culture also transformed the population, from practitioners of frugal and prudent self-restraint, sacrifice and head-down hard work into easy-credit no-sweat narcissistic hedonists. These big metamorphoses were facilitated by a class of teachers who evinced more interest in their professional status and political influence than they did in educating the young (a boring, crude, obsolete and trivial notion to be sure); very soon there emerged a phalanx of radical academics to provide the teachers with rigorous focus and direction. These were the militant disciples of Antonio Gramsci who proceeded to disaffect the younger students from their traditional values and heritage in order to inculcate into them as they matured an ideology of personally amoral secularism and collectivism—under their tender care the fundamental value of American life ceased to be the freedom of the individual and became uniform equality, the better to manipulate you with, my dears. And as if that were not sufficient to burn away the heritage bequeathed us by the Greatest Generation, commercial advertising as transmitted first and foremost by television converted the population into robotic consumers of merchandise, excitement and sensation—the Me-Pepsi-Now Generation. The 60’s academic radicals, who might never have remained in the universities to work their evil had the Anti-War Movement not encouraged them to hole up on campus during the Vietnam War, are the specific treacherous agents of our disastrous values revolution—disastrous to good order, that is, and as regards the replacement of ideals motivating constructive activity by appetitive self-indulgence—, but they never could have succeeded in their mischief if those admirable and heroic veterans had known the critical importance of and taught their progeny the value of knowledge for its own sake instead of perpetuating their forefathers’ conviction that education is the strictly utilitarian agency that endows the young with the rudimentary skills and knowledge they need to earn a living. This crucial concept of knowledge (and of art, too, as long as we’re on the subject) as a human birthright to be appreciated and desired intrinsically—this missing complement of liberty itself and free enterprise—is as alien to American life and popular thought as eating horsemeat and snails, and our forfeiture of it has done as much as or more than any other factor to cause us to “lose” the country to a belief system founded on tossing dollars out and shoveling stuff back in and not giving a damn for the ultimate costs or consequences, because that is now the government’s responsibility. And yet the guys who forged our victory in the Battle of the Bulge and on the island fortress of Okinawa with their blood and sweat and valor are telling us now (I can hear them even if you can’t) that it is time to quit our bellyaching and our scape-goating of others for the troubles we have made for ourselves; it is time to suck it up and to shoulder our responsibilities. They are right. That is what I’m going to do from here on out, and as far as I’m concerned the journey towards truth and a wholesome productive life for everybody begins with the right naming of names.
untitled, Zeus Bascon, 2010, International Hotel Manilatown Center
When I go to put on a pair of pants and discover that I can no longer wear them due to an increase of girth, I irrationally vent my maddened rage in abusing the garment instead of scolding myself for lacking self-control—until I’m brought up short and sobered by the idea that this very behavioral dysfunction is the reason why my weight ballooned to start with. I am furiously suppressing some awareness about myself or some event-memory that must be pretty damned harrowing for me to evade acknowledging it so maniacally.
Just because we’ve moved on from the simplistic values of our forefathers doesn’t mean, as the Old Morality die-hards say it does, that Americans are no longer held together by a shared code of ethics. National cohesion is a psychic phenomenon, and not just a catalogue of arbitrary obligations and restraints. Upon investigation we see that many principles unify American conduct; in fact we practice them “religiously.” The most prominent of our Action Rules are: “If you like it, do it till you’re numb,” “If anybody objects, get them fired,” “If no one is looking, take it and hide it until you’re in the car,” “If somebody has the power to hurt you, kiss their ass,” “Screw the other person before the other person screws you,” “If somebody gets hurt, don’t feel guilty—they will profit by the experience,” “If the truth is complicated, lie. If it’s incriminating, deny. The important thing is not to change your story,“ and, “Since perfection is impossible to achieve, don’t waste time trying.” These precepts amply satisfy the requirements of a moral code to guide the individual plainly and clearly while providing everybody with an even playing field. The same thing is true in regard to our intellectual life, which like our morality is a process much more than an extended data bank. If you need to know something, go to the computer. Meanwhile, your daughter perhaps may not recall the name of the woman who sewed together the first American flag, but she knows she can’t get pregnant from having oral sex. At least she knows something. Why bother about the small stuff? The conclusion following from the argument: Aspire to nothing and you’ll never fail.
The Second American Civil War is going to be waged between the two populations currently squaring off against each other in proliferating hatred and approximately equal numbers—those embracing the principle that the Self is perfectly freewheeling, and those for whom cherishing the Good entails imperative obligations. For historians of the future, the most significant aspect of this conflict will be a staggering irony: That the institutions erected by the Early Americans to guarantee the preservation of the nation became the very agents that, growing ineffably corrupt, precipitated its demise.
Summary Conclusion: Modern Liberalism is a mass dysfunction prevalent in large segments of the upper middle class, a population category that is noted for practicing the sheltered prolongation of adolescence through the college years. Originating in the 1960s when both advertisers and educators began regarding teenagers as consumers to be coaxed and humored, as they had been regarded when children by the makers of toys, clothes and breakfast cereal, Walt Disney and a host of other merchandisers, this Indian summer of adolescence experienced by youth in the universities results in an elephantine inflation of the ego plus the implantation of a sense of entitlement, both to rectitude (product of the displacement of education by quasi-sophistication) and to effective control over society through the exercise of professional expertise. Many Conservatives have wasted years of their lives and an incalculable amount of energy (that might otherwise have been spent productively) in trying to “reason with” Liberals, an erroneous approach founded in the Liberals’ habit of clothing their narcissism in the rhetoric of intellectuality and socialistic altruism. The ego of a liberal is an ego that is perpetually shrieking: “I want to be a good person without having to be a good person!” Clearly, reasoning with the emotionally constipated and mentally disjointed is foolish because the afflicted are inhibited by their embattled egos from examining their assumptions. The most effective way to communicate with Liberals, as Ann Coulter has correctly diagnosed, is to strike them over the head with a baseball bat. A proposition deriving from the argument: Not every young person who enters college is a member of the upper middle class, but everyone who passes through college is, psychologically, aspirationally, stylistically.
The most emblematic statement I can make regarding the essential characteristic of our age is that having discovered drugs that control the symptoms of various mental illnesses, we happily and with great relief behave as though we think that we have cured those diseases. The feature that makes this statement redolent with meaning is the disclosure that our greatest psychological need is not to address and solve our problems, but to latch onto to any pretext we can to continue discounting if not completely ignoring them.
Because of the stated beliefs of some adherents today, and the infamous behavior of others in the past, I find the widespread scorn of religion understandable if not completely justified on merit. However, I am bewildered by the heat of some people’s anti-religiosity. In my experience, most of these people are upset because religion is, according to them, both superstitious and hypocritical. (For me the key point of this discussion is that religion is an ideology and all ideologies induce the same behavioral pathologies regardless of their specific orientation, content and phrasing.) On that basis, why aren’t other individuals furiously upset that scientists are allowed to continue spreading their filth unchecked despite their discipline’s once having held that the earth is both flat and the epicenter not merely of the solar system but of the universe? As for hypocrisy, the term “orthodoxy” (=upright thinking) exists to characterize entrenched opinion, especially of a power elite capable of enforcing public allegiance to an official credo through social pressure, professional repercussions, violent force or all three together regardless of how the elite or the people living under them actually conduct themselves. I fear the frenzy of disgust aroused in some folks by the very idea of religion destroys their objectivity, and I think the root cause of such a thing must be a personal experience that is far more traumatic in its impact on sensibility and mentality than religious disillusionment by itself is capable of being, although it is common no doubt for such a trauma to be clothed in religious trappings, given the frequency with which religious belief plus ignorance plus emotional maladjustment results in a claustrophobic, spirit-smothering, anxiety-rife domestic atmosphere. And yet quite famous scientists have told of being brought up in households terrorized by fathers who strove to compensate for having failed to make their mark in science, while Beethoven very nearly didn’t survive his childhood because his frustrated drunken father, who on the best day he ever had as a musician showed himself to be a ludicrous mediocrity (at least Mozart’s papa didn’t drink to excess and exercised only psychological terror on little Wolfy), beat the hell out of him every single night. Sick people behave terribly and damage innocent children all the time no matter what they “believe in” and regardless of whether they are superstitious or enlightened. Conclusion flowing from the argument: Anyone who thinks he is free of superstition or ignorance because he doesn’t believe in religion needs to think again.
