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July 21 - September 21, 2024
A voluntary death-and-rebirth transformation—the change necessary to adapt when terrible things emerge—is therefore a solution to the potentially fatal rigidity of erroneous certainty, excessive order, and stultification.
How to Act
It is easier and more direct to represent a behavioral pattern with behavior than with words. Outright mimicry does that directly, action for action. Imitation, which can produce new behaviors akin to those that motivated the mimicry, takes that one step further. Drama—formalized imitation, enacted upon a stage—is precisely behavior portraying behavior, but distilled ever closer to the essence. Literature takes that transmission one more difficult step, portraying action in the imagination of the writer and the reader,
Everyone requires a story to structure their perceptions and actions in what would otherwise be the overwhelming chaos of being. Every story requires a starting place that is not good enough and an ending place that is better. Nothing can be judged in the absence of that end place, that higher value.
It is for this reason that spirit eternally transcends dogma, truth transcends presupposition, Marduk transcends the elder gods, creativity updates society, and Christ transcends the law
if the new path you see forward, after learning what you needed to learn along your current way, appears more challenging, then you can be reasonably sure that you are not deluding or betraying yourself when you change your mind.)
Rule III DO NOT HIDE UNWANTED THINGS IN THE FOG Those Damned Plates
Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight.
Life is what repeats, and it is worth getting what repeats right.
Just Not Worth the Fight
It is difficult to win an argument, or even begin one, if you have not carefully articulated what you want (or do not) and need (or do not).
Every trivial but chronic disagreement about cooking, dishes, housecleaning, responsibility for finances, or frequency of intimate contact will be duplicated, over and over, unless you successfully address it. Perhaps you think (moment to moment, at least) that it is best to avoid confrontation and drift along in apparent but false peace. Make no mistake about it, however: you age as you drift, just as rapidly as you age as you strive. But you have no direction when you drift, and the probability that you will obtain what you need and want by drifting aimlessly is very low. Things fall apart
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Only careful aim and wakeful striving and commitment can eliminate the oft-incremental calamity of willful blindness, stem the entropic tide, and keep catastrophe—familial and social alike—at bay.
Corruption: Commission and Omission
Corruption of the form we are discussing is, in my opinion, integrally linked to deception—to lying, more bluntly—and more important, to self-deception.
Furthermore, it is not obvious what “believe” means when discussing human belief, nor what is meant by “simultaneously.” I can believe one thing today and another tomorrow and very often get away with it, at least in the short term.
Freud believed that much of mental illness was due to repression, which is arguably and reasonably considered a form of self-deception.
Dissociation of thought and action is necessary for abstract thought even to exist. Thus, we can clearly think or say one thing and do another.
to claim one belief and then to act (or speak) in a different or even opposite manner constitutes a performative contradiction,
Freud catalogued an extensive list of phenomena akin to repression—the active rejection of potentially conscious psychological material from awareness—which he termed “defense mechanisms.” These include denial (“the truth is not so bad”), reaction formation (“I really, really, really love my mother”), displacement (“the boss yells at me, I yell at my wife, my wife yells at the baby, the baby bites the cat”), identification (“I am bullied, so I am motivated to be a bully”), rationalization (a self-serving explanation for a low-quality action), intellectualization (a favorite of the early,
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Freud failed to notice that sins of omission contributed to mental illness as much as, or more than, the sins of commission,
Perhaps this is because there are always good things we are not doing; some sins of omission are therefore inevitable.
Spin doctors call this self-imposed ignorance “plausible deniability,” which is a phrase that indicates intellectualized rationalization of the most pathological order.
Second error: Freud assumed that things experienced are things understood.
If this was all true, traumatic experience would be accurately represented in memory,
However, neither reality nor our processing of reality is as objective or articulated as Freud presupposed.
We process the unknown world from the bottom up. We encounter containers of information, so to speak, whose full import is by no means self-evident.
events in general and interpersonal events specifically do not exist as simple, objective facts, independent of one another. Everything depends for its meaning—for the information it truly represents—on the context in which it is embedded, much of which is not available for perception or consideration when the event in question occurs.
That is why domestic arguments so often spiral out of control, particularly when a pattern of continual and effective communication has never been established.
What Is the Fog?
The last thing you want is to know more. Better to leave what is enshrouded in mystery. Better, as well, to avoid thinking too much (or at all) about what could be. When ignorance is bliss, after all, ’tis folly to be wise.
So, you do not allow yourself to know what you want. You manage this by refusing to think it through.
The fog that hides is the refusal to notice—to attend to—emotions and motivational states as they arise, and the refusal to communicate them both to yourself and to the people who are close to you.
If you make what you want clear and commit yourself to its pursuit, you may fail. But if you do not make what you want clear, then you will certainly fail.
So, what might you do—what should you do—as an alternative to hiding things in the fog? Admit to your feelings.
The admission of such feelings is a revelation of ignorance, insufficiency, and vulnerability. Second, it is unsettling to allow for the possibility that your feelings, however overwhelming and convincing, might be misplaced and, in your ignorance, pointing you in the wrong direction.
Someone with experience knows that people are capable of deception and willing to deceive.
but it also opens the door to another kind of faith in humanity: one based on courage, rather than naivete. I will trust you—I
And part of the way I will do that is by telling you what I am feeling.
Events and Memories
Events, as they lay themselves out in front of us, do not simply inform us of why they occur,
The information in our experience is latent,
We want to know what happened but, more importantly, we want to know why.
Extracting useful information from experience is difficult. It requires the purest of motivations
Our own personal motivations begin in hidden form, and remain that way, because we do not want to know what we are up to.
The world is full of hidden dangers and obstacles—and opportunities. Leaving everything hidden in the fog because you are afraid of the danger you may find there will be of little help when fate forces you to run headlong toward what you have refused to see.
Rule IV NOTICE THAT OPPORTUNITY LURKS WHERE RESPONSIBILITY HAS BEEN ABDICATED Make Yourself Invaluable
What is left undone is often risky, difficult, and necessary. But that also means—does it not?—that it is worthwhile and significant.
just do the useful things no one else is doing.
there is no shortage of genuinely good people who are thrilled if they can give someone useful and trustworthy a hand up.
