I think we need to keep in mind that not all black people buy into the narrative , however the media apparatus does what it does best & creates a narrative. It would be rather beneficial if more independent-minded folks keep away from broad assumptions, only united can the beast be slayed.
Of course not all Blacks buy into the victimhood narrative. Neither for that matter do all Palestinians, all gays or all lesbians. Those who don't are typically those who succeed most because they rely on their own agency, skills, and ingenuity to improve the quality of life for themselves, their families, and their communities.
Strong urge, desire, compulsion, better angels that? For justice? From very early in life “fair” is understood, & very highly valued. An ultimate value, even, out of the mouths, attached to fresh (isn’t that better than “innocent”?), as yet less defiled brains, of babes.
Well, relatively fresh & undefiled … the bent childhood aluminum adjuvant schedule, among other forced/frauded interventions, seems bent on bringing tykes up to adjuvanted adult (juveniled adults?) surpassing speed ever-faster. “Ramming speed …!” ~ Ben Hur
But just as early on, before angels fear to tread, the desire to obtain that justice value is thwarted - by the much smaller big people. Justice thwarted is the surround.
Like Rand’s title re capitalism, justice is more an unknown ideal, a theory, philosophizing, than it is, or ever has been, reality. Narrative-puffery. Walter Mitty talking about his Medal of Honor. And pragmatist real/reel ‘em in politicos letting him.
Which is not to say that ‘shadow’ still don’t know. Or stops pulling at hearts & minds … & asses in slings.
But people, mainly, “adapt” to the thwart. And become it themselves. Monstrousness begets monsters (V For Vendetta … eloquent mutterers become martyrs, too, same flick - made by brothers then, who are “sisters” now …). Good ol’ “real life.” Among the inversion-zombies. So long as they are “our kind of” zombies.
So there are victims. No shortage. Justice denied is victim generation times two. For the victimized. Two for the price of one. Bargain bins of efficiency.
Victimizers, to add fractions, are also victimized. By themselves.
Forget karma. Remember “instant” (John Lennon).
Remember The Alamo. (Californians & “border” crossers have dusted that one off.)
And don’t ever forget Palahniuk. The Fight Club fulcrum is schizophrenia (just to label it - I’m still likeminded/action’d Tom Szasz & Tom Paine …).
Orwell minds eyes a boot on a human face forever … well, people punching themselves in their own faces, forever, is much more accurate. Fistface comes well before kickbox(“sport of the future” - John Cusack - Say Anything)face.
Is that aluminum pump bringing up the fluoridated water yet? Gotta have wet to make/eat/be “Instant/iated…” ra!/men noodles… that’s using the old noodle. (But Exley thinks aluminum may be overcooking that other noodle … which, concerted an onslaught as it is, would seem needs be others using their noodles with much malice aforethought.)
And that estate is passed down to succeeding (@failure) generations, too; it’s in the will.
Denial of justice & granting of victim-status bennies-bribes to people unprincipled enough (whether due to desperation actual, or just perceptual or pandered-perceptual … or just verbal acuity avarice) to take them, to take whatever crumbs ~ or chunks ~ are offered further unjustly divides & weakens. It hooks. It addicts. Becomes entitlement.
(Who doesn’t love the scene in Cinderella Man where Russell Crowe as “washed up” boxer James Braddock is offered a fluke fight for desperately needed cash (its 1934, the “great” depression), unexpectedly wins, & takes some of the purse down to the welfare office to pay back what he’d been previously doled? Braddock earned the world heavyweight champion title. The Crowe character, at least, didn’t pretend unearned entitlements were his.)
This robbed Peter pays Paul mounds - with nuts. Lots of nuts. But not the almond kind. The i-ain’t-by-virtuous-“insanity”/conformity-defense kind. Or 3rd generation welfare payments birthright. Or manifest destiny. Or “social” “security” “I paid into.” Or “defense” contracts. Or too big too fail, too little to succeed, essential businesses, non-essential businesses “regulatory capture” … ♾️
Part of *that* appeal runs all through the natural Natchez Trace (den of cutthroat thieves) world: get what you can the easiest way you can.
Conserve energy.
If possible, don’t move at all.
Have everything delivered, subcontracted.
If you are a bear, or identify as a bear, with or without bear/eassignment surgery & hormones, eat from the garbage can depots instead of woods & waters.
Bears gots the belly pH to digest garbage. People don’t. So humanimal swallows it, thinking s/he’s eating it, & instead it eats him/her alive from the inside out. Yogi Bear-uh: Its deja vu all over again.
And force-feeding those bennies, sometimes that enrages the forced as much as the forcers already are (from their own, partly maybe, gavage/Xperience?). Probably all the time. But many swallow that, the rage, down, too.
Or “force-feeding,” too:
Help a man against his will & you do the same as murder him. ~ Horace (&/or “against his will”)
Murder, to remind, is crime. Unjust.
(Suicide is not, as the bennie-givers say, murder. But force/fraud “euthanasia” is.)
No matter the merits or demerits of forgiveness & forgetness, above spiral is how it works. Within the margins. Where the marginal majority resides. Always has.
The wry Catcher In The Rye truth: suffer unto the little children pretense of non-phonyness, then, pretty quickly, that double-phoneyness is outed, & go along to get along the rowed up garbage cans Happy Meals kicks in. Usually.
Always plenty of unoccupied wide open space for rule-proving exceptions, tho.
J.D. Salinger seems to have found a nice opt out spot. The phonies almost murdering him in ww2 (one of those “great resets”) had a little something-something to do with coming to an accurate conclusion, & decision/action.
As for Israel, I don’t care who its filled up with so long as the tank-topping doesn’t come out of “american-mine” pockets. But there it is. Justice. On the half-baked-cracked shell. By fractions that prefer to turn dishonest, unjust, fractions. Much of it via fractional reserve mountebanking.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em is the most well-worn credo-path of them all. That ouroboros feedback loop is not going to change - because not feeding/back into the frenzy would be unsocial animalia. So malum in se soup nazis will continue to be the order-giving/taking of the day.
( Not that the Seinfeld character was the bad guy. Elaine was the bad guy in that one. Well, that whole crew, the fulsome foursome we laughed at - with? - were always the bad guys, weren’t they? Good funny, bad funny. “When I’m good, I’m very good. But when I’m bad, I’m better.” ~ Mae West …
Just remembered another train/of thought - & a prison, too: I hear the train a comin'
It's rolling round the bend
And I ain't seen the sunshine since I don't know when
I'm stuck in *Fulsome* prison, and time keeps draggin' on
But that train keeps a rollin' on down to San Antone
When I was just a baby my mama told me
"Son, always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns"
But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die
When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry ~ The Man In Black )
“Fight” that or comport more accordingly - your bio-wiring will decide. And afterward many will call it their idea. Or their ideal. We ain’t the dealers. We’s the dealters. Δ Animal House - the Delta Tau Chi fraternity.
Some parfait accompli’s are digestible nutrition. Others be digestin’ yousetrition - in the forever Sopranos wars of attrition.
Cause was “found,” like noses on faces are, in childhood (not Rousseau’s preschool, tho). And not so much lost there, too, as rooted out, kid by kid - not “collectively.” Betrayal, really. Jennifer Grey, cute Dirty Dancer, whydja’ get that nose-job? Who put Baby in the corner?
The glorious “Lost” Cause is exactly like the guy I read about who lost all his money speculating in futures contracts because he didn’t have the courage to just divorce his wife. So he set it up ~ however un/sub/consciously ~ so she’d divorce him. (Goldbrick & broke: never the twain shall meet, or stay met.) According to the somewhat guys-sweating-in-a-teepee-while-drumming woo-woo author who recounted that divorced-divorced-at-last! tale “everybody gets exactly what they want from the markets.”
Pridectomy. ✔️
Couragectomy. ✔️
Survival of the shittest. ✔️
Until the checkmate comes back ‘round again.
Speaking of … how’d those toilets turn out reante? 😀
As with most things I think the less taken for granted lanes are faster to the accuracy - so Bierce, et al, for me.
But I see “the ought to be” too.
Diogenes was a sort of hunter-gather, but not my sort.
“It was the best (of all possible worlds) times, it was the worst (of all possible worlds) times ….
Populism is just another of the many synonyms for “might makes right” &, like all mob actions dilutes away all individuals involved responsibility for the lynching of the reality-truth that might is just might, another hubris, that is usually only “right” coincidentally.
CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
Sounds like we’d agree some, disagree some, on the sports angle. I’ve put that nutshell in here already. And maybe not agree much on the rectitude of cynicism.
You write with great, maybe even utter, assurance about ”The Way We Were” (doubtful difference would have ensued but fun to spitball Jennifer Grey conferring with Barb Streisand before rhinoplasty …). That strikes me a tell that calls for “raising your head off” (remember George Kennedy, Cool Hand Luke?).
Also smells like Rousseau on the barbie. Since none on my experience, observation, reads of history & betwixt lines history, supports auld lang syne at all.
Prehistory? Theorizing, no matter what. But I don’t conceive a punctuation of the equilibrium that the massive inertial momentum of long history, & my own shorter occupation, overcame - & I have a good imagination (that knows its place.) … Another but same turtles all the way back-down.
I can’t think but that the in-group/out-group, both inter & intra, mayhem & carnage has not always sprung eternal. Biology is “institutional.” And people are “institutions.” (Corporations are people - but not as the SC sophists have legalized it.)
And evolution “selects” for the damndest things. Very much does it select for “the house” & very little, if any, & more commonly/often against, the individual wagerers. Big Casino/Little Casino, Pat Garrett/William McCarty.
Dunno if you’d say your cognitive apparatus is wired optimist/ic - even with what you’ve written about Billions in process of being Sold downriver by the Mickey D’s boys (if you saw Michael Keaton’s action in The Founder you’ll know what I mean) - but I do know tolerant optimists often have little or no tolerance for cynicism & will home in on the most easily “cancellable”-dismissed definition-version of the word.
We’s all related. Cassandra & Sisyphus could have been siblings. Sis was surrounded by dismissive optimists (&/or other deniers) could say. Camus puts the boulder Bro optimist/ic.
I put Sis fooled once-twice-♾️. And Bro, he was an institutional man. Like Brooks Hatlin, in Shawshank Redemption. Except BH was able to do something about it.
Kaleidoscope is a reference I make, too. Jeff’s “@scale,” as well. It’s all fractal. Patterns at whatever scales are manageable or comfortable or preferable … they will all extrapolate up & down the turtle-chain. And even if there does pop up rule-proving exceptions, the way to bet is clear.
I offered a couple of definitions. One official, one funnier-better. (Ambrose Bierce vs The Professor & The Madman? C’mon. No contest.) And there are others that are babes, rather than the bathwater, too.
Main jab, pop-pop-pop, is defense for the little guy: rectitude o’ cynicism does exist. You’ve some pockets filled with it yourself. And not just because we agree/align - I ain’t projecting … well, anything but that left hand. (Need a smiley here that’s got a mouthguard in.)
I often codicil the “rule-proving exception” clause because I don’t know everything & there’s all kinds of outliers. (Bet those small, when cheap, tho. “Shoot it all” is great fun to watch somebody else do, tho.) Here it refers to the possibility of the time you suggest things were different. Those Fair Animism days. For some reason I’m right now flashing on Disney animation - the old school, sweet PG stuff. (Maybe here a smiling lemming.)
(You know about Disney’s White Wilderness “documentary” about the cliff-diving lemmings? I ain’t casting aspersive lemming-bombs your way … if you’re a lemming then you escaped from Jurassic Park, not old Walt. See? That’d easily qualify as a rule-proving exception. Fractal, too.)
Dryden’s main function was to follow on “Dry well.”
There are some quotes on that first page I like better than others. The one you picked is pretty enough (confidence is an interesting thing to court) but I’d likely not be competing with you over her.
Dryden, in any event, shape or usage is grist for my mill. Not the other way ‘round. Probably goes, or is beginning to go, without saying/writing that language is, too. A tool. Whose place I know.
Cynical about imposed reality is lush, for sure. Foolish? I’d have to disagree. We may be close on this. Or not.
Creative destruction isn’t necessarily constructive, but I gather that Schumpeter types maintain it is. I’m creative & have confidence in my destructions. And constructions. And that’s now. When I was your age? More. Despite ("despite") knowing less.
Blake brandishing in the context of working the fractal/s you’re comfortable with, competent at, is perfectly sensible in that section.
Noble savages (Rousseau)? Forget it. We’re back to Disney PG animation.
Hobbes was an apologist for Leviathan. You see me pledging allegiance to that? Not a chance. That bet will never pay.
Big L’s the biggest purveyor of the violence the Lost Poise bow down to, too, obviously, right?
But I do like Roy Hobbs. The Natural. Almost as much, but not as much, as I like Jeremiah Johnson.
Ha. No goths in my HS days. The down South rednecks would have had a field day with that, tho. I started working outside the domestic grapes of wrath vineyard when I was 13. Not that I would have “hung out” in HS otherwise. & those schools down there did not delve into any of this stuff.
“Individual” was specified. That puts “the house” as populations, or population level. That’s the cohort red (I’ve read) in tooth & claw clause ma nature (& “emulative” humanimal, inside the nature-jar, does too) operates at. She don't care about lil' ol' Islands, anymore than Leviathan does. It's up to us indies to care. Which is matter of course. If not - litmus - then indies aren't involved - but "clods of the continent" are.
But I also wanted to bring in casinos, Vegas, odds setters (imposers) & what those “institutions” do to individuals - card counters, say - who can outplay them even with the stacked odds.
I allude & I assume its picked up or its looked up (or its ignored, which is fine, too) - &/or including that if someone doesn’t understand what I allude to, they will ask for clarification.
If you don’t know about Billy the Kid & Pat Garrett, they were pals. Nicknamed, by Garrett, pals. Little Casino & Big Casino. Then Garrett took a deal with the house. And shot pal Billy dead. According to the history. But that also accords with the rhyme & the refrain that goes back to the days you describe when fair precluded -?- that kind of fair-weather friendship.
Ties? Lol. Not for decades. But slow is fast. Sometimes. And loose is tight. Sometimes.
The fair times you write about aren’t historical. Rousseau’s fantasies were not historical. So all that’s left is pre-history. That’s gotta be theoretical, right?
Are we there yet? Almost? Stop somewhere - I have to use the toilet. (Doc Bronners, huh? The Castile’s the stuff I use on me.)
To answer McCartney's question, you don't broadcast their victimhood. They need it for domination. But, if you are the man in power why wouldn't you. It is a money making machine like no other. Now, for the rest of us...
Jung makes the statement that if there is something wrong with society then there is something wrong with the individual, and if there is something wrong with the individual then there is something wrong with me. He seems to suggest that when something is due to erupt in the collective, the only safety and sanity to be found is in the firm sense of your own individuality. Otherwise there is no way in which the eruption can be channeled without you becoming a victim of consciousness. Then you are blindly carried along with it, and because it is blind and undirected by consciousness it doesn’t reason politely and set up careful standards to assess who should pay and who shouldn’t. These eruptions run like a torrent, with a ruthlessness that one finds only in blind nature but not in the reflective mind of an individual. One finds it in the natural side of civilized man, the collective instinctual side of him of which he is largely unaware. The collective doesn’t theorize. It flows toward its goal in the same way that a baby is born. If you’re caught by it, then you must go along with it, and there is no guarantee of the outcome. You might have a renaissance, which happened around 1500, or you might have a Nazi Germany. Both potentials exist in us, both in society and in individuals. So understandably Jung is concerned with these things, and whenever he writes about the phenomenon of Nazi Germany he repeats again and again his feeling that if we do not want a repetition of this experience, we cannot expect laws and legal structures and religious ideals and political parties to prevent it. We have no hope at all except to see where the battle is being fought within ourselves, and to try to distinguish between our own individual values and the urgent movement that is erupting around us. - Liz Greene, The Outer Planets & Their Cycles
Thank you, Gwyneth, for the inspiring response. The Quality of Life Resistance Movement offers three calls to action (https://open.substack.com/pub/qolrm/p/intro-to-calls-to-action?r=7hc45&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web), the third of which is a return to local autonomy -- which corresponds to your observation that difficult times in the collective are best advantaged by a return to the safety and sanity of individuality. The same holds true for media. The farther they get from our own dinner tables and backyards, the less trustworthy and more insane they become.
Mattias Desmet's "Psychology of Totalitarianism" breaks down the phenomenon of collective madness pretty well, as did Hanna Arendt in both "The Origins of Totalitarianism" and "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil". I wrote about collective madness as a prominent feature of 21st-century totalitarian society in my essay, "9/11 and My Descent into Collective Madness" (https://open.substack.com/pub/qolrm/p/911-and-my-descent-into-madness?r=7hc45&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web).
Yes, individual heroism in the face of collective madness is the only way out.
"We have no hope at all except to see where the battle is being fought within ourselves..." I think Ms. Greene and Carl Jung were speaking of the fundamental responsibility of each individual to bring the unconscious contents of the Shadow to light. Liliane Frey-Rohn (1967), wrote‘‘Bringing the shadow to consciouness is a psychological problem of the highest moral significance. It demands that the individual hold himself accountable not only for what happens to him, but also for what he projects. . . Without the conscious inclusion of the shadow in daily life there cannot be a positive relationship to other people, or to the creative sources in the soul; there cannot be an individual relationship to the Divine’’.
And there certainly cannot be peace in this world.
Many thanks, as always, for reading and responding, reante. Yes, the structural victims identified by the woke faithful are only the latest entrants in the victimology sweepstakes. Both the pace and the diversity of victimization seem to be accelerating commensurate to the pace of societal/institutional collapse. Cannibalization of our own under the circumstances seems not just natural, but -- like heroism -- adaptive. Like eating bugs...
There's a great scene in "The Marx Brothers Go West" where Chico and Harpo cannibalize an entire train for wood to feed the locomotive while Groucho shouts, "More timber!" Eventually, the passenger cars are stripped down so only the seats and the befuddled passengers remain. I guess we can always cry, "More timber!" But who's the hero?
Thanks for the sobriety check, my friend. Of course, Palestinian victimhood is still in its infancy as opposed to its far older, far more evolved Jewish counterpart. Nevertheless, the irony you mention did not go unnoticed by yours truly, and I fully appreciate the divisive nature and class function of the conflict. I also know who benefits and who loses in the end.
A quick correction: the central thesis in my essay is victimhood culture at large, not Palestinian victimhood specifically. I only co-opted Palestinian victimhood and the current war up front as a surefire means to reintroduce my aversion to victimhood culture.
Finally, there's a simple reason why I chose to republish an essay I wrote three years ago rather than write something current: because I have nothing new to add (a failure of imagination not limited to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, BTW). Of course, that hardly distinguishes me from anyone else right now. Fortunately, we're no longer dealing with the fog of war. Unfortunately, we're dealing with industrial strength smog...
No apology necessary, reante. Our emotions are always on the edge of apocalypse when Israel is involved, simply -- I think -- because it already represents such an epochal cycle of progress and tragedy. And no one wants to start over again from scratch.
The only safe assumption in the 21st century -- thanks to the confluence of state-sponsored default addiction and digital scale -- is that the squid's tentacles never end until proven otherwise. Organic resistance will prove only as effective as the plastic packaging will allow...
I think we need to keep in mind that not all black people buy into the narrative , however the media apparatus does what it does best & creates a narrative. It would be rather beneficial if more independent-minded folks keep away from broad assumptions, only united can the beast be slayed.
Of course not all Blacks buy into the victimhood narrative. Neither for that matter do all Palestinians, all gays or all lesbians. Those who don't are typically those who succeed most because they rely on their own agency, skills, and ingenuity to improve the quality of life for themselves, their families, and their communities.
I was just reinforcing what you said it's beyond refreshing to see judicious and head on takes. It's sadly rather rare in the media place today.
Keep rocking in the free world
Well, justice.
(Dry well? Sure not artesian springing. Pumpin’ that pump and just a hole lotta’ dry.)
((Here’s some John Dryden whistle-wets:
https://www.azquotes.com/author/4153-John_Dryden
))
Strong urge, desire, compulsion, better angels that? For justice? From very early in life “fair” is understood, & very highly valued. An ultimate value, even, out of the mouths, attached to fresh (isn’t that better than “innocent”?), as yet less defiled brains, of babes.
Well, relatively fresh & undefiled … the bent childhood aluminum adjuvant schedule, among other forced/frauded interventions, seems bent on bringing tykes up to adjuvanted adult (juveniled adults?) surpassing speed ever-faster. “Ramming speed …!” ~ Ben Hur
But just as early on, before angels fear to tread, the desire to obtain that justice value is thwarted - by the much smaller big people. Justice thwarted is the surround.
Like Rand’s title re capitalism, justice is more an unknown ideal, a theory, philosophizing, than it is, or ever has been, reality. Narrative-puffery. Walter Mitty talking about his Medal of Honor. And pragmatist real/reel ‘em in politicos letting him.
Which is not to say that ‘shadow’ still don’t know. Or stops pulling at hearts & minds … & asses in slings.
But people, mainly, “adapt” to the thwart. And become it themselves. Monstrousness begets monsters (V For Vendetta … eloquent mutterers become martyrs, too, same flick - made by brothers then, who are “sisters” now …). Good ol’ “real life.” Among the inversion-zombies. So long as they are “our kind of” zombies.
So there are victims. No shortage. Justice denied is victim generation times two. For the victimized. Two for the price of one. Bargain bins of efficiency.
Victimizers, to add fractions, are also victimized. By themselves.
Forget karma. Remember “instant” (John Lennon).
Remember The Alamo. (Californians & “border” crossers have dusted that one off.)
And don’t ever forget Palahniuk. The Fight Club fulcrum is schizophrenia (just to label it - I’m still likeminded/action’d Tom Szasz & Tom Paine …).
Orwell minds eyes a boot on a human face forever … well, people punching themselves in their own faces, forever, is much more accurate. Fistface comes well before kickbox(“sport of the future” - John Cusack - Say Anything)face.
Is that aluminum pump bringing up the fluoridated water yet? Gotta have wet to make/eat/be “Instant/iated…” ra!/men noodles… that’s using the old noodle. (But Exley thinks aluminum may be overcooking that other noodle … which, concerted an onslaught as it is, would seem needs be others using their noodles with much malice aforethought.)
And that estate is passed down to succeeding (@failure) generations, too; it’s in the will.
Denial of justice & granting of victim-status bennies-bribes to people unprincipled enough (whether due to desperation actual, or just perceptual or pandered-perceptual … or just verbal acuity avarice) to take them, to take whatever crumbs ~ or chunks ~ are offered further unjustly divides & weakens. It hooks. It addicts. Becomes entitlement.
(Who doesn’t love the scene in Cinderella Man where Russell Crowe as “washed up” boxer James Braddock is offered a fluke fight for desperately needed cash (its 1934, the “great” depression), unexpectedly wins, & takes some of the purse down to the welfare office to pay back what he’d been previously doled? Braddock earned the world heavyweight champion title. The Crowe character, at least, didn’t pretend unearned entitlements were his.)
This robbed Peter pays Paul mounds - with nuts. Lots of nuts. But not the almond kind. The i-ain’t-by-virtuous-“insanity”/conformity-defense kind. Or 3rd generation welfare payments birthright. Or manifest destiny. Or “social” “security” “I paid into.” Or “defense” contracts. Or too big too fail, too little to succeed, essential businesses, non-essential businesses “regulatory capture” … ♾️
Part of *that* appeal runs all through the natural Natchez Trace (den of cutthroat thieves) world: get what you can the easiest way you can.
Conserve energy.
If possible, don’t move at all.
Have everything delivered, subcontracted.
If you are a bear, or identify as a bear, with or without bear/eassignment surgery & hormones, eat from the garbage can depots instead of woods & waters.
Bears gots the belly pH to digest garbage. People don’t. So humanimal swallows it, thinking s/he’s eating it, & instead it eats him/her alive from the inside out. Yogi Bear-uh: Its deja vu all over again.
And force-feeding those bennies, sometimes that enrages the forced as much as the forcers already are (from their own, partly maybe, gavage/Xperience?). Probably all the time. But many swallow that, the rage, down, too.
Or “force-feeding,” too:
Help a man against his will & you do the same as murder him. ~ Horace (&/or “against his will”)
Murder, to remind, is crime. Unjust.
(Suicide is not, as the bennie-givers say, murder. But force/fraud “euthanasia” is.)
No matter the merits or demerits of forgiveness & forgetness, above spiral is how it works. Within the margins. Where the marginal majority resides. Always has.
The wry Catcher In The Rye truth: suffer unto the little children pretense of non-phonyness, then, pretty quickly, that double-phoneyness is outed, & go along to get along the rowed up garbage cans Happy Meals kicks in. Usually.
Always plenty of unoccupied wide open space for rule-proving exceptions, tho.
J.D. Salinger seems to have found a nice opt out spot. The phonies almost murdering him in ww2 (one of those “great resets”) had a little something-something to do with coming to an accurate conclusion, & decision/action.
As for Israel, I don’t care who its filled up with so long as the tank-topping doesn’t come out of “american-mine” pockets. But there it is. Justice. On the half-baked-cracked shell. By fractions that prefer to turn dishonest, unjust, fractions. Much of it via fractional reserve mountebanking.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em is the most well-worn credo-path of them all. That ouroboros feedback loop is not going to change - because not feeding/back into the frenzy would be unsocial animalia. So malum in se soup nazis will continue to be the order-giving/taking of the day.
( Not that the Seinfeld character was the bad guy. Elaine was the bad guy in that one. Well, that whole crew, the fulsome foursome we laughed at - with? - were always the bad guys, weren’t they? Good funny, bad funny. “When I’m good, I’m very good. But when I’m bad, I’m better.” ~ Mae West …
Just remembered another train/of thought - & a prison, too: I hear the train a comin'
It's rolling round the bend
And I ain't seen the sunshine since I don't know when
I'm stuck in *Fulsome* prison, and time keeps draggin' on
But that train keeps a rollin' on down to San Antone
When I was just a baby my mama told me
"Son, always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns"
But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die
When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry ~ The Man In Black )
“Fight” that or comport more accordingly - your bio-wiring will decide. And afterward many will call it their idea. Or their ideal. We ain’t the dealers. We’s the dealters. Δ Animal House - the Delta Tau Chi fraternity.
Some parfait accompli’s are digestible nutrition. Others be digestin’ yousetrition - in the forever Sopranos wars of attrition.
Cause was “found,” like noses on faces are, in childhood (not Rousseau’s preschool, tho). And not so much lost there, too, as rooted out, kid by kid - not “collectively.” Betrayal, really. Jennifer Grey, cute Dirty Dancer, whydja’ get that nose-job? Who put Baby in the corner?
The glorious “Lost” Cause is exactly like the guy I read about who lost all his money speculating in futures contracts because he didn’t have the courage to just divorce his wife. So he set it up ~ however un/sub/consciously ~ so she’d divorce him. (Goldbrick & broke: never the twain shall meet, or stay met.) According to the somewhat guys-sweating-in-a-teepee-while-drumming woo-woo author who recounted that divorced-divorced-at-last! tale “everybody gets exactly what they want from the markets.”
Pridectomy. ✔️
Couragectomy. ✔️
Survival of the shittest. ✔️
Until the checkmate comes back ‘round again.
Speaking of … how’d those toilets turn out reante? 😀
Which perspective, or definition?
As with most things I think the less taken for granted lanes are faster to the accuracy - so Bierce, et al, for me.
But I see “the ought to be” too.
Diogenes was a sort of hunter-gather, but not my sort.
“It was the best (of all possible worlds) times, it was the worst (of all possible worlds) times ….
Populism is just another of the many synonyms for “might makes right” &, like all mob actions dilutes away all individuals involved responsibility for the lynching of the reality-truth that might is just might, another hubris, that is usually only “right” coincidentally.
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/cynic_adj
CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
Sounds like we’d agree some, disagree some, on the sports angle. I’ve put that nutshell in here already. And maybe not agree much on the rectitude of cynicism.
You write with great, maybe even utter, assurance about ”The Way We Were” (doubtful difference would have ensued but fun to spitball Jennifer Grey conferring with Barb Streisand before rhinoplasty …). That strikes me a tell that calls for “raising your head off” (remember George Kennedy, Cool Hand Luke?).
Also smells like Rousseau on the barbie. Since none on my experience, observation, reads of history & betwixt lines history, supports auld lang syne at all.
Prehistory? Theorizing, no matter what. But I don’t conceive a punctuation of the equilibrium that the massive inertial momentum of long history, & my own shorter occupation, overcame - & I have a good imagination (that knows its place.) … Another but same turtles all the way back-down.
I can’t think but that the in-group/out-group, both inter & intra, mayhem & carnage has not always sprung eternal. Biology is “institutional.” And people are “institutions.” (Corporations are people - but not as the SC sophists have legalized it.)
And evolution “selects” for the damndest things. Very much does it select for “the house” & very little, if any, & more commonly/often against, the individual wagerers. Big Casino/Little Casino, Pat Garrett/William McCarty.
Dunno if you’d say your cognitive apparatus is wired optimist/ic - even with what you’ve written about Billions in process of being Sold downriver by the Mickey D’s boys (if you saw Michael Keaton’s action in The Founder you’ll know what I mean) - but I do know tolerant optimists often have little or no tolerance for cynicism & will home in on the most easily “cancellable”-dismissed definition-version of the word.
We’s all related. Cassandra & Sisyphus could have been siblings. Sis was surrounded by dismissive optimists (&/or other deniers) could say. Camus puts the boulder Bro optimist/ic.
I put Sis fooled once-twice-♾️. And Bro, he was an institutional man. Like Brooks Hatlin, in Shawshank Redemption. Except BH was able to do something about it.
Kaleidoscope is a reference I make, too. Jeff’s “@scale,” as well. It’s all fractal. Patterns at whatever scales are manageable or comfortable or preferable … they will all extrapolate up & down the turtle-chain. And even if there does pop up rule-proving exceptions, the way to bet is clear.
The William Blake bit complete:
Auguries of Innocence
By William Blake
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage
A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons
Shudders Hell thr' all its regions
A dog starvd at his Masters Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State
A Horse misusd upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fibre from the Brain does tear
A Skylark wounded in the wing
A Cherubim does cease to sing
The Game Cock clipd & armd for fight
Does the Rising Sun affright
Every Wolfs & Lions howl
Raises from Hell a Human Soul
The wild deer, wandring here & there
Keeps the Human Soul from Care
The Lamb misusd breeds Public Strife
And yet forgives the Butchers knife
The Bat that flits at close of Eve
Has left the Brain that wont Believe
The Owl that calls upon the Night
Speaks the Unbelievers fright
He who shall hurt the little Wren
Shall never be belovd by Men
He who the Ox to wrath has movd
Shall never be by Woman lovd
The wanton Boy that kills the Fly
Shall feel the Spiders enmity
He who torments the Chafers Sprite
Weaves a Bower in endless Night
The Catterpiller on the Leaf
Repeats to thee thy Mothers grief
Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly
For the Last Judgment draweth nigh
He who shall train the Horse to War
Shall never pass the Polar Bar
The Beggars Dog & Widows Cat
Feed them & thou wilt grow fat
The Gnat that sings his Summers Song
Poison gets from Slanders tongue
The poison of the Snake & Newt
Is the sweat of Envys Foot
The poison of the Honey Bee
Is the Artists Jealousy
The Princes Robes & Beggars Rags
Are Toadstools on the Misers Bags
A Truth thats told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent
It is right it should be so
Man was made for Joy & Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro the World we safely go
Joy & Woe are woven fine
A Clothing for the soul divine
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine
The Babe is more than swadling Bands
Throughout all these Human Lands
Tools were made & Born were hands
Every Farmer Understands
Every Tear from Every Eye
Becomes a Babe in Eternity
This is caught by Females bright
And returnd to its own delight
The Bleat the Bark Bellow & Roar
Are Waves that Beat on Heavens Shore
The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath
Writes Revenge in realms of Death
The Beggars Rags fluttering in Air
Does to Rags the Heavens tear
The Soldier armd with Sword & Gun
Palsied strikes the Summers Sun
The poor Mans Farthing is worth more
Than all the Gold on Africs Shore
One Mite wrung from the Labrers hands
Shall buy & sell the Misers Lands
Or if protected from on high
Does that whole Nation sell & buy
He who mocks the Infants Faith
Shall be mockd in Age & Death
He who shall teach the Child to Doubt
The rotting Grave shall neer get out
He who respects the Infants faith
Triumphs over Hell & Death
The Childs Toys & the Old Mans Reasons
Are the Fruits of the Two seasons
The Questioner who sits so sly
Shall never know how to Reply
He who replies to words of Doubt
Doth put the Light of Knowledge out
The Strongest Poison ever known
Came from Caesars Laurel Crown
Nought can Deform the Human Race
Like to the Armours iron brace
When Gold & Gems adorn the Plow
To peaceful Arts shall Envy Bow
A Riddle or the Crickets Cry
Is to Doubt a fit Reply
The Emmets Inch & Eagles Mile
Make Lame Philosophy to smile
He who Doubts from what he sees
Will neer Believe do what you Please
If the Sun & Moon should Doubt
Theyd immediately Go out
To be in a Passion you Good may Do
But no Good if a Passion is in you
The Whore & Gambler by the State
Licencd build that Nations Fate
The Harlots cry from Street to Street
Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet
The Winners Shout the Losers Curse
Dance before dead Englands Hearse
Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to Endless Night
We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see not Thro the Eye
Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night
When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light
God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day
A very good bad man among lesser bad men:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aekxEIC3eok
I offered a couple of definitions. One official, one funnier-better. (Ambrose Bierce vs The Professor & The Madman? C’mon. No contest.) And there are others that are babes, rather than the bathwater, too.
Main jab, pop-pop-pop, is defense for the little guy: rectitude o’ cynicism does exist. You’ve some pockets filled with it yourself. And not just because we agree/align - I ain’t projecting … well, anything but that left hand. (Need a smiley here that’s got a mouthguard in.)
I often codicil the “rule-proving exception” clause because I don’t know everything & there’s all kinds of outliers. (Bet those small, when cheap, tho. “Shoot it all” is great fun to watch somebody else do, tho.) Here it refers to the possibility of the time you suggest things were different. Those Fair Animism days. For some reason I’m right now flashing on Disney animation - the old school, sweet PG stuff. (Maybe here a smiling lemming.)
(You know about Disney’s White Wilderness “documentary” about the cliff-diving lemmings? I ain’t casting aspersive lemming-bombs your way … if you’re a lemming then you escaped from Jurassic Park, not old Walt. See? That’d easily qualify as a rule-proving exception. Fractal, too.)
Dryden’s main function was to follow on “Dry well.”
There are some quotes on that first page I like better than others. The one you picked is pretty enough (confidence is an interesting thing to court) but I’d likely not be competing with you over her.
Dryden, in any event, shape or usage is grist for my mill. Not the other way ‘round. Probably goes, or is beginning to go, without saying/writing that language is, too. A tool. Whose place I know.
Cynical about imposed reality is lush, for sure. Foolish? I’d have to disagree. We may be close on this. Or not.
Creative destruction isn’t necessarily constructive, but I gather that Schumpeter types maintain it is. I’m creative & have confidence in my destructions. And constructions. And that’s now. When I was your age? More. Despite ("despite") knowing less.
Blake brandishing in the context of working the fractal/s you’re comfortable with, competent at, is perfectly sensible in that section.
Noble savages (Rousseau)? Forget it. We’re back to Disney PG animation.
Hobbes was an apologist for Leviathan. You see me pledging allegiance to that? Not a chance. That bet will never pay.
Big L’s the biggest purveyor of the violence the Lost Poise bow down to, too, obviously, right?
But I do like Roy Hobbs. The Natural. Almost as much, but not as much, as I like Jeremiah Johnson.
Ha. No goths in my HS days. The down South rednecks would have had a field day with that, tho. I started working outside the domestic grapes of wrath vineyard when I was 13. Not that I would have “hung out” in HS otherwise. & those schools down there did not delve into any of this stuff.
“Individual” was specified. That puts “the house” as populations, or population level. That’s the cohort red (I’ve read) in tooth & claw clause ma nature (& “emulative” humanimal, inside the nature-jar, does too) operates at. She don't care about lil' ol' Islands, anymore than Leviathan does. It's up to us indies to care. Which is matter of course. If not - litmus - then indies aren't involved - but "clods of the continent" are.
But I also wanted to bring in casinos, Vegas, odds setters (imposers) & what those “institutions” do to individuals - card counters, say - who can outplay them even with the stacked odds.
I allude & I assume its picked up or its looked up (or its ignored, which is fine, too) - &/or including that if someone doesn’t understand what I allude to, they will ask for clarification.
If you don’t know about Billy the Kid & Pat Garrett, they were pals. Nicknamed, by Garrett, pals. Little Casino & Big Casino. Then Garrett took a deal with the house. And shot pal Billy dead. According to the history. But that also accords with the rhyme & the refrain that goes back to the days you describe when fair precluded -?- that kind of fair-weather friendship.
Ties? Lol. Not for decades. But slow is fast. Sometimes. And loose is tight. Sometimes.
The fair times you write about aren’t historical. Rousseau’s fantasies were not historical. So all that’s left is pre-history. That’s gotta be theoretical, right?
Are we there yet? Almost? Stop somewhere - I have to use the toilet. (Doc Bronners, huh? The Castile’s the stuff I use on me.)
To answer McCartney's question, you don't broadcast their victimhood. They need it for domination. But, if you are the man in power why wouldn't you. It is a money making machine like no other. Now, for the rest of us...
Thanks, Persephone. No doubt, the victimhood business is plenty profitable for everyone except the victims.
Jung makes the statement that if there is something wrong with society then there is something wrong with the individual, and if there is something wrong with the individual then there is something wrong with me. He seems to suggest that when something is due to erupt in the collective, the only safety and sanity to be found is in the firm sense of your own individuality. Otherwise there is no way in which the eruption can be channeled without you becoming a victim of consciousness. Then you are blindly carried along with it, and because it is blind and undirected by consciousness it doesn’t reason politely and set up careful standards to assess who should pay and who shouldn’t. These eruptions run like a torrent, with a ruthlessness that one finds only in blind nature but not in the reflective mind of an individual. One finds it in the natural side of civilized man, the collective instinctual side of him of which he is largely unaware. The collective doesn’t theorize. It flows toward its goal in the same way that a baby is born. If you’re caught by it, then you must go along with it, and there is no guarantee of the outcome. You might have a renaissance, which happened around 1500, or you might have a Nazi Germany. Both potentials exist in us, both in society and in individuals. So understandably Jung is concerned with these things, and whenever he writes about the phenomenon of Nazi Germany he repeats again and again his feeling that if we do not want a repetition of this experience, we cannot expect laws and legal structures and religious ideals and political parties to prevent it. We have no hope at all except to see where the battle is being fought within ourselves, and to try to distinguish between our own individual values and the urgent movement that is erupting around us. - Liz Greene, The Outer Planets & Their Cycles
Thank you, Gwyneth, for the inspiring response. The Quality of Life Resistance Movement offers three calls to action (https://open.substack.com/pub/qolrm/p/intro-to-calls-to-action?r=7hc45&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web), the third of which is a return to local autonomy -- which corresponds to your observation that difficult times in the collective are best advantaged by a return to the safety and sanity of individuality. The same holds true for media. The farther they get from our own dinner tables and backyards, the less trustworthy and more insane they become.
Mattias Desmet's "Psychology of Totalitarianism" breaks down the phenomenon of collective madness pretty well, as did Hanna Arendt in both "The Origins of Totalitarianism" and "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil". I wrote about collective madness as a prominent feature of 21st-century totalitarian society in my essay, "9/11 and My Descent into Collective Madness" (https://open.substack.com/pub/qolrm/p/911-and-my-descent-into-madness?r=7hc45&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web).
Yes, individual heroism in the face of collective madness is the only way out.
Thanks again, Gwyneth.
"We have no hope at all except to see where the battle is being fought within ourselves..." I think Ms. Greene and Carl Jung were speaking of the fundamental responsibility of each individual to bring the unconscious contents of the Shadow to light. Liliane Frey-Rohn (1967), wrote‘‘Bringing the shadow to consciouness is a psychological problem of the highest moral significance. It demands that the individual hold himself accountable not only for what happens to him, but also for what he projects. . . Without the conscious inclusion of the shadow in daily life there cannot be a positive relationship to other people, or to the creative sources in the soul; there cannot be an individual relationship to the Divine’’.
And there certainly cannot be peace in this world.
Many thanks, as always, for reading and responding, reante. Yes, the structural victims identified by the woke faithful are only the latest entrants in the victimology sweepstakes. Both the pace and the diversity of victimization seem to be accelerating commensurate to the pace of societal/institutional collapse. Cannibalization of our own under the circumstances seems not just natural, but -- like heroism -- adaptive. Like eating bugs...
There's a great scene in "The Marx Brothers Go West" where Chico and Harpo cannibalize an entire train for wood to feed the locomotive while Groucho shouts, "More timber!" Eventually, the passenger cars are stripped down so only the seats and the befuddled passengers remain. I guess we can always cry, "More timber!" But who's the hero?
Don't know. Is honesty prerequisite to anything that survives the moment? Does modesty preclude heroism?
Thanks for the sobriety check, my friend. Of course, Palestinian victimhood is still in its infancy as opposed to its far older, far more evolved Jewish counterpart. Nevertheless, the irony you mention did not go unnoticed by yours truly, and I fully appreciate the divisive nature and class function of the conflict. I also know who benefits and who loses in the end.
A quick correction: the central thesis in my essay is victimhood culture at large, not Palestinian victimhood specifically. I only co-opted Palestinian victimhood and the current war up front as a surefire means to reintroduce my aversion to victimhood culture.
Finally, there's a simple reason why I chose to republish an essay I wrote three years ago rather than write something current: because I have nothing new to add (a failure of imagination not limited to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, BTW). Of course, that hardly distinguishes me from anyone else right now. Fortunately, we're no longer dealing with the fog of war. Unfortunately, we're dealing with industrial strength smog...
Thanks again.
No apology necessary, reante. Our emotions are always on the edge of apocalypse when Israel is involved, simply -- I think -- because it already represents such an epochal cycle of progress and tragedy. And no one wants to start over again from scratch.
The only safe assumption in the 21st century -- thanks to the confluence of state-sponsored default addiction and digital scale -- is that the squid's tentacles never end until proven otherwise. Organic resistance will prove only as effective as the plastic packaging will allow...