There are others whom I can understand intellectually, but no matter how hard I try I fail to be able to glimpse an overall logic in their systems of thought. Freud, for instance, only makes sense to me when I attempt to further complete the formulations I have obtained thus far from his oeuvre. I add that perhaps the obsession with the "Oedipus complex" and how pivotal that is supposed to be to family life has to do with a concern about "original sin". For, it is that which is forbidden, it seems to me, that really causes most obsessions of the mind, and so long as sexuality is not forbidden (nor made scarce by arbitrary bourgeois mores) there are surely more appealing objects of desire than one's parents.

Whilst on the topic of sexuality and how that resonates within the psyche, I admit to have only recently cracked another riddle that had perplexed me in the writing of another author whose work in general makes better sense. I refer to Georges Bataille and his concept of sexuality as "excretion". "But surely it is not excretion, but consumption?" I have said. The mystery is solved in the realisation that this concerns differences between the male and female sexual functions.

Finally, I turn to the issue of psychological projection which involves projecting parts of one's disposition into the natures and beings of others. Male psychologists tend to become particularly scolding whenever they suspect that psychological projection might be gallivanting on its hind legs. Only sleuthwork can make sense as to why this is.   Patriarchal reasoning would have it that projection is only possible when a weaker person seeks to project their negative characteristics onto a more powerful person in order to undermine them.   Priestly reasoning has a bad conscience about projection, since patriarchal structures cannot do without it for their maintenance.   Thus it becomes apparent that an almost universal way of becoming masculine in the eyes of others (and perhaps oneself) is to project characteristics deemed to be "feminine" away from himself and into women as such.

In essence, then, the male projects his negative characteristics into others -- and so he takes on his cultural attributes of masculinity as a result of expelling that which is culturally deemed "feminine" away from him. By contrast, women are taught that their real value is not to be found in themselves, but in the man with whom they fall in love. By virtue of such cultural training, women are more inclined to project their positive characteristics out of themselves and into male others, just as men are more inclined to project their negative characteristics out of themselves and into women.

Ideological fiction has always enabled various groups of people throughout history to consolidate their positions of power. Perhaps the oldest of these, (and one which remains a contemporary fiction), is the notion that winners are born, not made. This belief that "I am a winner and deserve to be successful at all times," leads directly to scapegoating, for fate is impersonal, and nobody is a winner all the time. Yet such is the need to be seen as a born winner, that many will alight upon boat people -- desperate refugees from other countries -- to feed their frenzy for success; or upon women (i.e. in terms of right-wing ideology, those whose "natures" are already weak). The long recognisable catch-cry of the right is that it is always the most vulnerable who are to blame whenever either fate deals them a bad hand, or they happen to make fatal errors of judgment.

So it is with extreme right-wingers, who are the majority in our midst:

Flowing down, from the powerful to the least powerful, goes the blame for any project undertaken by management that does not fully succeed.

Left-liberals, by contrast, tend not to see the world as being permanently divided between born "winnas" and born "losas". This political camp tends to modify this notion (above) by introducing the sense of a permeable membrane between two states of being, such that "losas" may become "winnas" if only they try hard enough. Each institution of society is encouraged to treat those who pass through it on the basis of this useful fiction -- namely the idea that each and every one of us is already equal.

Notably it also introduces a false epistemology (although no more false than that extreme right wingers) when it presumed that every individual enters each new field of contest as if it is a level playing field. Left-liberal goals (to achieve equality within the system) are then confused with what already exists -- that is, they obviate the fact that deeply entrenched, systematic inequalities continue to exist, and make it seem as if any individual who has passed through a liberal institution has already been treated with fairness and justness.

In the final analysis, there is only one point of view that does not completely fictionalise the individual, and that is materialism. To view the individual as a material being allows that she or he is subject to various social, psychological and historical forces, which, in turn, produce his or her very being. Despite what propagandists for the other side have claimed, this perspective does not take away free will from the individual, but rather puts him or her into a context that is true to each person's experience, validating what has happened to them.

A materialist perspective is the only one that enables the individual to proclaim, "my misadventures are my own loss although I didn't necessarily have everything to do with it," whilst avoiding accepting blame from those who have power -- those who want to "win" at any cost to others.