In every interaction with other human beings–and as far as that goes, within our own heads, but most of that is a distillate of times long ago, when actual people were involved: there is the chance for understanding, and misunderstanding, for connection and distance, for building, and for not building and for destroying, all in subtle ways.
There are times, and we have all experienced them, when our own open expression of emotion makes possible the reaction in the other of love. This is the reaction we expect. When it is not forthcoming, this is a communication. A decision has been rendered, even if no words are ever spoken, even if you never ask the question, and they never verbally provide the answer.
I think the children of parents congenitally, temperamentally, incapable of empathy–which is really nothing but a precursor of the larger capacity to express love–learn to accept this process, and learn to stop tacitly asking the question, but more importantly reject the question itself since, never have received a positive answer, it comes to seem a ridiculous question.
Microtrauma is the thousand tiny cuts, which add up to a pattern of a large trauma, but without any perceptible, single precipitating event. You were not molested, you were not savagely beaten, or forced to go without food or shelter. In fact, your parents mouthed both in public and private the pieties they were supposed to. If they never said they loved you, that was the way of the world then.
And in truth, saying “I love you” really is superfluous, because the reality is what it is, and on some level everyone understands what that reality is, even if they cannot consciously access that understanding absent considerable work.
In my own case, I tell my children constantly that I love them, but I also mock them regularly, as indeed they mock me. Our back and forth banter at times would likely offend traditionalists, who so often mistook and mistake outer form for inner reality. I respect them and they respect me. I love them, and they love me. Our very confidence in this allows us to take it for granted when we have fun at the expense of each other.
As far as microtrauma, could we perhaps call it “Psychological Fabianism”? Fabianism is about breaking down all social rules, all culture, all instinctive affections, all honesty, all honor, all love, all duty, in the name of “Social Justice”, and in reality as a result of deep seated psychopathologies on the part of those who follow this path, which is defined morally entirely negatively, as seeking to cause individuals to lose their way morally, and in turn to come to depend entirely not just for material goods, but their very sense of the self on the State.
Now, few parents plan CONSCIOUSLY to destroy their children’s sense of self, itself the root of the capacity for developing happiness in this world–although these people plainly exist, and we justly call them evil–but as I ponder depth psychology, it seems to me that if we posit that we all have many “selves”, particularly those who have themselves experienced trauma, there is in fact a “self” in such parents that suffers from no illusions, which does in fact consciously and sadistically with damage upon those children.
That self presents itself in moments, in split seconds, in the gap between spontaneous emotion and the well learned habit of concealing it–from both the world, and the banal but seemingly kindly facade which enables social existence.
This is, I think, the role of Sade as role model for many modern “thought esthetes” [in the same respect that I reject the word Liberal for those I split into the categories of Sybaritic Leftist, and Cultural Sadeist, I want to propose a more accurate word for what so-called “intellectuals” do. Within my typology, you have–at least–the categories “Thought Esthete”, and “Thought Worker”. I consider myself the latter. But do I need a type for those who simply use abstraction for the rationalization of emotional pathology? Probably. I will have to ponder it]: he breaks away the mask for the terminally confused, those who hate, and cannot admit that they hate, cannot rationalize or explain their hate, who are split between inner demons and a banal, seemingly kindly outer face.
Sade makes all that OK, so that their new mask is placed over their faces consciously. They can now embrace an evil whose genesis they still do not understand, but which they claim now as their own.
At root, of course, such evil is the result of some combination of large trauma and microtrauma. It represents a failure of courage, and we must be honest and admit that in the modern world, much of the problem is the failure to come up with adequate REASONS for courage. We are, after all, merely machines, in the idiotic and counter-empirical prevailing narrative. What can be expected of us? Who can look too long at their inner world when all they will find is a cage and living death?
Our world is made for superficiality; it damn near demands it. And in that world, how does one process deep inner wounds? There is no God there. There is no salvation. 0’s and 1’s are palliative. All else is suspect.
And think about the risks of empathy in such a universe. Human consciousnesses built on a house of cards do not want the wind of risk blowing through them. They do not want to risk seeing people with differing views as humans. They must view them through the same prism of alterity that has animated all death and cruelty between human communities since the first preverbal protohuman killed a member of another genetic strand for being unknown to him, and thus inherently a threat to all he felt to be familiar and familial.
Of course, I am talking about me. I am all this. You can only see that which you have in you. I have all this. I have hate and love, mockery and truth, cruelty and salvation.
It is confusing to be me. But only the confused can truly value clarity. And when one wants to distill something, it is best to be able to draw from a large pool.
When I write syllogisms, and I can do that extremely well at times, it is only because I was able to see in the process my insanity, which is to say all of our insanities. Madness is inherent to the human condition. That will be my next post.
As for this post, can I not admit that there are many sorts of exorcisms, many ways home for the wandering? And on a long journey, are there not little huts along the road, to shelter from the wind?