I was dreaming last night I was Wolverine from the X-men (this has happened often). Magneto (Ian McKellen) somehow got control of me, and was going to use me to infiltrate somewhere.
Here is an addition to thoughts I’ve shared in recent days. If you are inside a group, then outsiders look like villains. They are different, incomprehensible. The sort of connection you assume with your family and village is impossible. They don’t even speak Greek. They just say bar bar bar. (I have said before, I think, that the best English translation of barbarian would be blahblahian, as I understand it.)
I’m rambling. There’s something here some part of me does not want to understand.
I’m going to allow some undirected musing.
The “villain” is the person apart. They are the ones who do not respect social conventions, and who thus earn the condemnation on the one side of the community, and who, if they are emotionally normal, would feel shame and repentance for their part.
The real world, obviously, includes unrepentant villains. Thieves, murderers, frauds of all sorts. Can we not assume these people, for their part, feel the impossibility of social connection even if they do everything correctly? That they have the trauma Klaxon going all the time, such that it gets no worse then do actually objectively violate social norms, and gets no better when they do behave themselves? Would this not amount to a deranged conscience, which has lost the ability to reward the good and punish the bad? Remorse is only possible, maybe, if return is possible. If return is not possible, then justifying rationalizations work equally well.
There were a couple of things I used to wonder about as a kid. One, was why governments had to tax people and not just print money. That one I figured out: inflation. And it has been done. It is being done in Venezuela right now. And the United States.
The other was how bad people stayed together. If they are all rotten, they can all count on being stabbed in the back by their compatriots. There is no ideal they are rallying around, and no flag they can trust.
Here is what I will say today: what people who lack the capacity for social connection share in common is precisely the status of being outsiders, of belonging nowhere, and to no one. They don’t belong to each other, but they all hate humanity, which is to say the communities from which their psychic damage causes them to feel excluded.
And its not hard to imagine that if that feeling is already there, that there would be a strong temptation to earn it, so that it does not feel like such a perversion and intrusion. Such a person would more or less be compelled into criminality.
This is the root of much or most crime in this and every other country, at least where genuine poverty is not present as an excuse. It is well known that single parent homes generate kids more likely to engage in everything bad, from drug and alcohol abuse, criminality, prostitution, premature and unintended pregnancies, dropping out of school, being unemployed (and unemployable), etc.
I think most single parent homes have attachement disorders. I think particularly young, single mothers lack the capacity to provide the attunement young babies need. They are scared. They don’t feel secure themselves, so how can their child feel secure?
And I think in many homes this feeling of insecurity continues all the way through childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood.
OK. That’s something. Back to Magneto. What he represents for me, I think, is my anger/shame/fear complex, my chronically triggered limbic system/unmyelinated vagus nerve, my alienation and distance from humanity.
So in this dream, I am being shown using a hero to channel the designs of a villain. This would be the Righteous Idea arising from a bad place. This would cruelty in the name of goodness. This would be the emotional background of rationalization.
And I’ve spoken in recent days of fear and shame a lot, but anger is the other aspect of this. Can you think of some part of our society where anger is continual? Maybe?
If you look at some of these triggered Wokers, who are a whole lot like tweakers, what you see is chronic anger fed by continual anxiety.
Are all these people suffering from clinical trauma? Here is an interesting (to me) idea: social alienation induces shame, which TRIGGERS fear and anger.
A society which does not reliably provide people with a place and purpose will in effect traumatize them, leading to all the effects of trauma, which could be summarized using other words as restlessness and inability to relax, pessimism, frustration, pettiness, and a lack of joy and true compassion.
Pace the Tao Te Ching, when you lose compassion and kindness, you talk about little else. That is what I see. I see people who seem nice, who speak of kindness, who turn into murderous werewolves the moment you mention Donald Trump.
This gets us into an intersection of personal psychology and sociology and even anthropology (is sociology the word we use for our own society, and anthropology what we use for everyone else? I ask as someone who has read a lot of both.)
Macrofactors, like the space of our cities, the pace of our lives, the ubiquity of technology, the size of our houses (kids have their own rooms in many places); and cultural factors like an obsession with work, a rejection of tradition, the loss of religious grounding, the loss of place caused by frequent moves; and habits that evolve in this milieu, like those of thoughtless conformity and reflexive superficiality: all of these play into this.
Andrew Breitbart famously said that politics is downstream from culture. In my own way, of course, I had even then been making that same argument for many years.
To take one example, your stance on abortion will in many respects depend on your religious beliefs. The Left, of course, does not want religious beliefs consulted in any way in the public domain, but OBVIOUSLY the views of any given person on any moral question will depend on their metaphysics. I’ve quoted William James on this, to the effect that little matters BUT your metaphysics. As he said, you would do well, in determining whether or not to rent a room to someone, to find out if they have a sincere faith in God, or not.
In many respects our system was CREATED to reconcile differing religious beliefs. It just happens to also be able to incorporate secular ones, but for most of our history, EVERYONE on every side of every issue was at least publicly a religious believer of one stripe or another. No matter what you believed or why, you were granted a voice, and the right to live your life as you chose, within broad limits. If you were a Christian, self evidently your voice would be informed by your Christianity, as you interpreted it.
In grad school I read a number of books on “Modernity”. This is the basic condition I am speculating leads to literal trauma embodied in the nervous systems of countless particular individuals, which in turn affects their political beliefs, which in the present particularly are OBVIOUSLY fear and anger based.
As an hypothesis, this does much to explain Trump Derangement Syndrome. Everyone has always been free to dislike the guy. He’s arrogant, self promoting, and of course his hair and fake tan.
But the sheer VOLUME of emotion is vastly vastly out of proportion to all that. And the Left even now finds itself repeating the lie that his Presidency was bad for the country. It wasn’t. He did great, even if at many moments things were made to seem by the media as if they were about to spin out of control. They never did. We got nearly full employment, better trade deals, renewed respect for our willingness to protect our own interests internationally, energy sufficiency leading to low gas prices, no new wars, and he was nominated for TWO Nobel Peace Prizes. That’s not shabby, and vastly better than anything Obama did. And of course FJB is pushing things in the other direction.
I will withhold comment on all that for the time being.
But what will fix our politics is renewed personal social connections between individuals. Less alienation will lead to less frustration, less anxiety, less anger, and by definition less shame.
My idea of social groups is a good one. I just feel strongly that if I am going to start this thing, I myself need to be in the right place. I work fucking hard every day, but it’s been very, very difficult.
It’s possible, though, that I may turn a corner in the next few months. I am getting more and more moments where I feel connected to my life, relative to the dissociation and depersonalization (which in my understanding are really what Sartre was describing in Nausea) that have been the invisible water in which I have been swimming so many years.
If you are so inclined, pray for me. Who knows? It may help.
But this is always the end point of my logic. No candidate can fix any of this. There is no political solution to problems which begin in homes, which is, ultimately, in human hearts.
The Wolverine is a great metaphor for me. I love my children, and I can and do show affection in small ways here and there to my few friends. Loyalty is a big value for me. But I am distant much of the time, and irritable more than I would like. I am grouchy. Prickly.
But all this, all this writing, all this thinking: it is my way of showing I care.