Intellectual Shamanism: exploring irrationalist psychology, to escape narrow categories of identity
After training
You can see why I don't wear much make-up as a rule; why I am "a man" because I am a bit chaotic with it.
After running on the beach
Maybe I was irritated, too. I saw a lot of disturbing naked, nude guys, and had to draw back to run with Mike, whilst mentally running through my self-defence techniques.
Ah, the hazards of the wild.
Enter the wild
My views about Western civilization are totally different from most. As you know, my civilization was all but totally wrecked. It was, at any rate, emotionally inhabitable. So, I tried to look at it in the opposite way. What could be an advantage in this? An advantage of a wreck is always the wilderness. The more something is wrecked, the more the wilderness opens up. This is an aspect of experience I find extremely enjoyable. It's much better than perpetuating the same thing over and over.
Freedom to escape
On the Origins of Bullying | Clarissa's Blog
My parents didn’t belittle my emotions, although they were inclined to demean, dismiss and undermine my intellect. That was an entirely different thing. It made me confused about a great number of my perceptions. Rather than dismiss my perceptions, as I’d been taught to do, I began to make a project of recording the phenomenology of my everyday experiences — which was how my writing started.
And what really pisses me off is I did this to redeem myself, to restore my sense of my own experiences in order to stop myself from going crazy — and then people distort that, according to their ideologies of ego and the individual, and make it out to be something it wasn’t.
My parents didn’t belittle my emotions, although they were inclined to demean, dismiss and undermine my intellect. That was an entirely different thing. It made me confused about a great number of my perceptions. Rather than dismiss my perceptions, as I’d been taught to do, I began to make a project of recording the phenomenology of my everyday experiences — which was how my writing started.
And what really pisses me off is I did this to redeem myself, to restore my sense of my own experiences in order to stop myself from going crazy — and then people distort that, according to their ideologies of ego and the individual, and make it out to be something it wasn’t.
Allegedly hidden motives -- and metaphysics
I’m not close enough to tell if American religiosity is hysteria. What I do notice is compared to British crime dramas, Americans tend to make out that there is such a thing as real, palpable, evil — and not just psychological states.
This assumption, that people are, at their baseline, nasty, appears to me to thread itself throughout American culture. For instance, see my conversation with cliff arroyo yesterday, where I was trying to get across the idea that men who are anxious to read women as highly emotional creatures will end up mis-reading any failure to confess all one’s emotions as signalling intent to willfully manipulate the other. Cliff constantly misread everything I’d written as if I were saying: “Yes, women are deceptive or manipulative.”
This is the effect of the weight of religiosity on America. It has entered even secular life, to the point that neutrality is hard to understand. I’m not saying America is the only country with this problem. Australia also has it to an alarming degree, in its embrace of identity politics, which does not allow anyone to take a neutral position without seeming to harbor some evil intent or manipulative orientation.
A truly secular view would dispense with the notion that we all have knowable but hidden motivations. Communication becomes hindered to the extreme when “demographic” or “identity” suffices to clue others in one “hidden motivations”, which do not actually exist, but are ascribed to one.
2. About the commonly held view that women are emotional and manipulative: this whole assumption makes communication seem to be redundant. Of course, the key word here is “seem”. If women externalize their minds, via the medium of emotion, one always knows what they are feeling. That would be logical. Each woman would be an open book. First, she’s crying, now she’s acting hysterical in another way, now she’s belly-aching about the other thing she belly-aches about. No need to ask her what she’s thinking, as it’s written all over her. That is, unless she is deliberately withholding something in a way that isn’t true to her emotional nature. Well, it’s true to her manipulative nature, but not to her emotional nature — that is, true to her evil side, but not to her good side, which is where she allows herself to be read like a book. She’s holding something back, probably acting “like a man”, and this necessitates that one attempt communication with her for the first time.
But communication on neutral premises is impossible for a religious mind-set. To such a mind, one must find out what has corrupted her true female emotionalism, giving the impression that she’s holding something back. One must find the hidden, nefarious motivation she is harboring.
This search for something evil is called “communication” by those tainted with religiosity.
Western incongruities regarding emotion and reasoning
Hahaha. Trying to understand how much or how little emotion is necessary to get a point across within a particular cultural matrix is seriously not worth it. Seriously. Not.
Better to rely on one's own resources. I'm no longer prepared to throw the dice, and I have enough knowledge, now, that I do not have to. I have a whole philosophy of life, which I didn't have before. I was still trying to work it out.
I've reverted to just being myself, rather than engaging with the practice of adapting. This means I no longer feel obliged to express the requisite amount of emotion in order to prove myself authentic -- the one you mention here: "It is interesting since at the same time, not to express the correctly conventional emotion at the right time is considered suspect."
In short, I no longer care whether I appear suspect. I'm sure I'm very, very suspect, but, oddly enough, not trying to adapt makes me feel less suspect, and in all it seems to come across much better than when I do try to adapt to something I don't fully understand nor have any natural feeling for.
If one thing has become very clear to me over the years, it's that I can't guess at the correct amount of conventional emotion to express in conventional settings. Under-doing it is my natural inclination, but I also tend to be too effusive if I'm impressed with someone. So long as the setting isn't politicized by workplace competitive haggling, nobody gives me a hard time about any of this. I'm not playing any kind of weird game in an unconventional way; I have nothing hidden up my sleeve.
No longer trying is the best solution also in terms of firming one's instincts. If someone cries or belly-aches and I don't know what it means, I'll just do whatever makes me feel comfortable. After all, isn't that what they are doing? They are perfectly comfortable within their own culture and they are belly-aching and it's supposed to mean something. I don't like it; and I also don't know what it means. I'm in a poor position to figure it out. In any case, the meaning isn't for me, but for someone who understands it.
I've found the worst mistake I've made in my life is to assume that I'm responsible for understanding everything that takes place around me. To draw too close to people who have fundamentally different ways of thinking about the world makes them believe that you need something from them, which has probably been true only in a limited sense, in the past. I've needed to confirm my own efficacy through understanding them. However, I haven't needed anything from them emotionally. A foreign emotional organization makes me cringe, and I don't like it at all. Not to get too close to it is my natural instinct.
Then you get too close, and these people blame you for everything wrong in their lives. I'm duplicitous; I'm manipulative, blah-blah. This is all because I don't experience a genuine emotional resonance with those whose emotions are organized differently from mine. I don't feel reality in the same way. The assumption some people have drawn, that I want to feel it in that way, but cannot, is untrue. I've actually never wanted to adapt to a Western way of feeling things. I've tried to do so out of duty, but I've never liked the feel of it.
So, definitely, definitely, I'm not what I appear to be to Western people. Whereas they seem to be hard on the outside, but are liquid caramel inside, I can appear to be effusive on the outside, but my emotions are sometimes very hard to get hold of, even for me. I employ various strategies so that I do not crack internally. Kickboxing is my main means to keep myself emotionally supple.
Avoiding Westerners and their confusing back-to-front natures also keeps my stress levels down. And not trying to solve their puzzle. They are alien, and I will leave it that way.
L'Etranger
Ask Clarissa | Clarissa's Blog
Reading Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir, Force of Circumstance, I see Camus and I have a lot in common. The idea that L'Etranger not crying at his mother’s funeral made him suspect … Camus seems to be celebrating stoicism among other qualities. Beauvoir is suspicious of him, because he seems to identify, at times, as a colonial, rather than as a true leftist. Beauvoir especially doesn’t like the pieds-noirs, which of course she is right to dislike. They are naturally opposed to her feminism. I have experienced similar opposition. She is sufficiently detached from their cultural milieu to find the obnoxious behavior amusing, whereas I was never so removed.
I think the reason why emotions are considered manipulative is because in a setting of relative affluence and not much objective hardship, emotions are cheaply expressed. Perhaps one does stand to risk much, objectively, by giving full rein to one’s emotions.
In my case, there was much more at stake. The colonial order is very rigid, and is kept in place by an embargo on emotions, male and female. To express an emotion is to destroy the whole social order — if not externally, then at least in one’s head. I had learned to keep it all inside and walk around rigid and stiff.
Because of this, I can’t understand the relationship Western people have with their emotions. Certainly, I would love them tone it down rather than create unnecessary disputes. I take communication very seriously and never dismiss anything as “merely an outburst of emotion”.
At the same time, I also wonder how much of what I’ve said over the years has been to various degrees misinterpreted because of Western (not just American) norms. If emotions are cheap, and the more so the more they are expressed, perhaps my increasing assertions about the urgency of my situation were ignored the more I turned the volume up.
It seems everything works in the reverse way to how one would expect. Communication rarely works at all, but different sorts of gesture, if already part of the cultural milieu, can be effective.
Reading Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir, Force of Circumstance, I see Camus and I have a lot in common. The idea that L'Etranger not crying at his mother’s funeral made him suspect … Camus seems to be celebrating stoicism among other qualities. Beauvoir is suspicious of him, because he seems to identify, at times, as a colonial, rather than as a true leftist. Beauvoir especially doesn’t like the pieds-noirs, which of course she is right to dislike. They are naturally opposed to her feminism. I have experienced similar opposition. She is sufficiently detached from their cultural milieu to find the obnoxious behavior amusing, whereas I was never so removed.
I think the reason why emotions are considered manipulative is because in a setting of relative affluence and not much objective hardship, emotions are cheaply expressed. Perhaps one does stand to risk much, objectively, by giving full rein to one’s emotions.
In my case, there was much more at stake. The colonial order is very rigid, and is kept in place by an embargo on emotions, male and female. To express an emotion is to destroy the whole social order — if not externally, then at least in one’s head. I had learned to keep it all inside and walk around rigid and stiff.
Because of this, I can’t understand the relationship Western people have with their emotions. Certainly, I would love them tone it down rather than create unnecessary disputes. I take communication very seriously and never dismiss anything as “merely an outburst of emotion”.
At the same time, I also wonder how much of what I’ve said over the years has been to various degrees misinterpreted because of Western (not just American) norms. If emotions are cheap, and the more so the more they are expressed, perhaps my increasing assertions about the urgency of my situation were ignored the more I turned the volume up.
It seems everything works in the reverse way to how one would expect. Communication rarely works at all, but different sorts of gesture, if already part of the cultural milieu, can be effective.
USapes
The very fact of there being such a giant Western culture, with a different organisation of values and experience than mine, means my own communication is thwarted. For instance, I’m not afraid of using emotion, but when I use it, it is misunderstood as some signal for desiring attention. I have to deliberately make an effort to understand it in that way, because to my mind it is not something outlandish; a special way of signalling that applies specifically to women. I was brought up not to express very much emotion at all, so to my mind, I enter the mainstream when I express emotion. I’m just as comfortable not to, in fact it takes a lot of energy for me to emote, much like if I had to suddenly start to master Italian and communicate via this medium.
So–when people say, “Ah! You expressed yourself emotionally, and therefore you’re a crybaby,” it has the same impact on me as, “Ah! You tried to learn Italian suddenly, and therefore you are crying out to us!”
I have no idea what that very common response means. I’m stymied by it.
I’d prefer not to have to communicate at all, if using a lot of energy produces this result.
This depicts my main confusion with Western society and why I wish to distinguish myself from it.
ASU
Here's something you could read as regards USApes. http://shrink4men.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/is-your-girlfriend-or-wife-a-professional-victim/
From where I stand, it seems USA gender relations are very pathological, and feminism is just a disguise for more pathology. From your blog, I'm starting to understand that most Americans are pretty affluent, even if they happen to have jobs that aren't the best. So to claim extreme victimhood at the hands of men seems justified only in the most extreme of situations, where the female partner is unable to stand on her own for very good reasons.
I, myself, have been mistaken for a USA feminist at times, but my cultural background and expectations are entirely different. The opposite cultural conditioning may have been applied. I had a very rigid, militaristic upbringing, but with all the space I needed to explore, take risks and enjoy myself. USA people of the present generation seem to have had the opposite conditions: a very permissive upbringing, but overprotected, denied freedom in play and not allowed to take a risk.
Therefore, my incentive for being a feminist seems to come from the opposite place of much of USA feminism.
Tiny minds
What I Didn’t Give Up | Clarissa's Blog
“To me, these “false starts” are evidence that a person is growing, exploring, trying to figure things out.”
Yes, but people penalize those, in their little heads.
Basically, I did a lot of things because I thought I ought to. The remnants of religious guilt were certainly there, but I continued to pluck them out, like so many splinters of glass that had become embedded in my body. Each time I did so, I freed myself a bit more. But each time I did so, people said, “She’s failed at what she really tried to do!”
Actually, the opposite was true: I explored the possibility, encountered my error and released myself from it.
I’ve learned that people don’t like to see things in this light, but are habituated to seeing everything in opposite terms, as if one only ever escapes a noose when one has engaged in falseness and succumbed to one’s own weaknesses. The fact that one needs to have courage not to submit is denied. The ability to see that there was a weakness, but that the weakness was in attempting to submit to mores not of one’s own making, is rare.
Sharing your dirt
Stalinism Deniers | Clarissa's Blog
There’s a certain sense in which people are allergic to the real world — and I don’t mean this in the same way as right-wingers do, when they throw around the expression as a means to condemn you.
It’s more that people are addicted to their idealism, and they won’t let historical fact get in the way. They create imaginary friends and imaginary enemies and the enemies can never be allowed to win, but the friends must always be allowed to win, even if they commit atrocities. They have a lot of excuses available for their atrocities, because “they were oppressed”.
Is it any wonder that I had so much difficulty understand my own history when this black and white schema was constantly being applied?
Only Marechera’s work made clear to me the real lay of the land. I would have had no idea, without him. All the other writing that has come out of Zimbabwe has expressed some form of idealism, as if the color of one’s skin made one’s actions good or evil.
I think most people really struggle when challenged with the idea that this isn’t so. They think it must be a trick, to suggest to them that the world isn’t neatly demarcated along easily readable moral lines. Life is kind of dirty in that way. Also, it is necessarily so. You can’t get rid of your own dirt, and neither should you wish to, if you want to remain breathing on this Earth. Best thing you can do with it is to make your “evil” and your malice work for you. Write searing critiques of the real exploiters. Donald Trump is not your friend. Throw your excrement around in a more merry way.
What I cannot stand are the hyper-moralists who target and condemn those who are most similar to them, in bizarre moral purification rituals. I had a run-in with someone who had recently turned radfem. She used to be much more normal, but then she went nuts and I had to shoot her.
There’s a certain sense in which people are allergic to the real world — and I don’t mean this in the same way as right-wingers do, when they throw around the expression as a means to condemn you.
It’s more that people are addicted to their idealism, and they won’t let historical fact get in the way. They create imaginary friends and imaginary enemies and the enemies can never be allowed to win, but the friends must always be allowed to win, even if they commit atrocities. They have a lot of excuses available for their atrocities, because “they were oppressed”.
Is it any wonder that I had so much difficulty understand my own history when this black and white schema was constantly being applied?
Only Marechera’s work made clear to me the real lay of the land. I would have had no idea, without him. All the other writing that has come out of Zimbabwe has expressed some form of idealism, as if the color of one’s skin made one’s actions good or evil.
I think most people really struggle when challenged with the idea that this isn’t so. They think it must be a trick, to suggest to them that the world isn’t neatly demarcated along easily readable moral lines. Life is kind of dirty in that way. Also, it is necessarily so. You can’t get rid of your own dirt, and neither should you wish to, if you want to remain breathing on this Earth. Best thing you can do with it is to make your “evil” and your malice work for you. Write searing critiques of the real exploiters. Donald Trump is not your friend. Throw your excrement around in a more merry way.
What I cannot stand are the hyper-moralists who target and condemn those who are most similar to them, in bizarre moral purification rituals. I had a run-in with someone who had recently turned radfem. She used to be much more normal, but then she went nuts and I had to shoot her.
Hearing ideas
What I Didn’t Give Up | Clarissa's Blog
Even though Clarissa's list is impressive, it does not convince me I would be suited to academia.
The point that resonated with me the most was being free not to be sociable. That is also my requirement, otherwise energy pours out of me, and I am left an empty shell.
At the same time, academia itself does not spur my thinking processes. I tend to sleep through conferences, although lectures used to sometimes give me something to chew on. I don’t find a well-constructed thought all that interesting. I was reading Simon de Beauvoir’s memoir, Force of Circumstance, recently. She said she would often enter the library to find writing that was already formulated, as a diversion from the strain of writing her own words. She became a very prolific writer, and obviously loved words, but I have no special love for them.
I love ideas, but I can’t seem to feel them within academia — at least, not so well. I recently lost the capacity to feel them at all, but then I did a round of sparring with Mike, and suddenly my capacity for awareness returned to me.
In a full time job in academia, I doubt I would be able to feel very much, as I constantly need to peel off a skin that has grown too thick around me. I am doubtlessly a yabby, a freshwater crustacean, that needs to shed its shell once in a while. It’s very important that I don’t lose touch with my ability to inwardly feel something, since that is always a tendency, when life just trickles on and I don’t make an extreme effort by risking something of myself.
In short, academia is too placid to wake me up. I do kickboxing because it gives me what academia cannot. It doesn’t pay me anything of course.
Also, I don’t have very much need for social approval or self-esteem building. I may be anomalous, because my self-esteem is strongest when I am alone. I sometimes can’t hear what I am thinking when I’m in a crowd, but when I retreat I’m able to hear it better. What hurts me is when people don’t respect ideas enough. It’s very difficult to entertain a sharp, little idea, as this requires a lot of effort.
Even though Clarissa's list is impressive, it does not convince me I would be suited to academia.
The point that resonated with me the most was being free not to be sociable. That is also my requirement, otherwise energy pours out of me, and I am left an empty shell.
At the same time, academia itself does not spur my thinking processes. I tend to sleep through conferences, although lectures used to sometimes give me something to chew on. I don’t find a well-constructed thought all that interesting. I was reading Simon de Beauvoir’s memoir, Force of Circumstance, recently. She said she would often enter the library to find writing that was already formulated, as a diversion from the strain of writing her own words. She became a very prolific writer, and obviously loved words, but I have no special love for them.
I love ideas, but I can’t seem to feel them within academia — at least, not so well. I recently lost the capacity to feel them at all, but then I did a round of sparring with Mike, and suddenly my capacity for awareness returned to me.
In a full time job in academia, I doubt I would be able to feel very much, as I constantly need to peel off a skin that has grown too thick around me. I am doubtlessly a yabby, a freshwater crustacean, that needs to shed its shell once in a while. It’s very important that I don’t lose touch with my ability to inwardly feel something, since that is always a tendency, when life just trickles on and I don’t make an extreme effort by risking something of myself.
In short, academia is too placid to wake me up. I do kickboxing because it gives me what academia cannot. It doesn’t pay me anything of course.
Also, I don’t have very much need for social approval or self-esteem building. I may be anomalous, because my self-esteem is strongest when I am alone. I sometimes can’t hear what I am thinking when I’m in a crowd, but when I retreat I’m able to hear it better. What hurts me is when people don’t respect ideas enough. It’s very difficult to entertain a sharp, little idea, as this requires a lot of effort.
Anti-Narcissus
The Last Psychiatrist: The Second Story Of Echo And Narcissus
Principles from Georges Bataille opposed to narcissism:
1. Stop self-improving, but instead seek out your own limits, and keep seeking them out as an engagement with reality that tells you something -- but never something final.
2. Face death, which is rotting matter. Revel in it. Ugliness is as much a part of life as beauty is, and being able to recognize this enhances one's strength.
3. There is no "better class of people" but rather people in various stages of incompleteness or wholeness. Those who live according to imaginary ideals are incomplete; those who face their own demise as rotting matter are more whole, since they accept reality as it is and don't require outside adulation.
4. Keep challenging reality and don't be afraid of anything it tells you about yourself. You are a dead man (or dead woman) walking, anyway. You have nothing to lose. You might even stand to gain something.
5. Introspect, but also partake in periods of active challenging of anything or everything around. Who knows, but maybe one of the outcomes of a challenge taking place within reality is you will reconsider some of your conclusions based on introspection.
Principles from Georges Bataille opposed to narcissism:
1. Stop self-improving, but instead seek out your own limits, and keep seeking them out as an engagement with reality that tells you something -- but never something final.
2. Face death, which is rotting matter. Revel in it. Ugliness is as much a part of life as beauty is, and being able to recognize this enhances one's strength.
3. There is no "better class of people" but rather people in various stages of incompleteness or wholeness. Those who live according to imaginary ideals are incomplete; those who face their own demise as rotting matter are more whole, since they accept reality as it is and don't require outside adulation.
4. Keep challenging reality and don't be afraid of anything it tells you about yourself. You are a dead man (or dead woman) walking, anyway. You have nothing to lose. You might even stand to gain something.
5. Introspect, but also partake in periods of active challenging of anything or everything around. Who knows, but maybe one of the outcomes of a challenge taking place within reality is you will reconsider some of your conclusions based on introspection.
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