There's nothing more painful than when people do their glib, know-it-all trick on others. I've had that so many times, on my way out of the forest of confusion. Whereas you turned to books that could point you in the right direction, I resorted to experimentalism. I'd had extremely nasty things done to me, and my whole digestive system had collapsed so that I couldn't eat very much or anything solid without my stomach swelling like a balloon. From this evidence alone, I knew something terrible had happened to me. People would glibly pass by whilst saying that I was overreacting or that I ought to snap out of it. I was so confused that I thought maybe they were right, so I began my own experiments. I began addressing some of these others with a bit of the condescension and hostility that had been directed at me. It didn't take much to make them react. It's amazing how sensitive some people can be -- way, way more reactive than I. I'd been extremely stoical, throughout the abuse and long recovery period.
But the severity of my circumstances had not been caused by me or even by my capacity for stoically bearing up. In reality, I had come from a very severe culture and high intensity situation, and my level of emotional attunement to the culture I had entered was not refined or exacting enough. I did not have any sense of what was normal behavior in the new culture and wasn't able to observe the different sorts of people that populated it, or to read between the lines enough.
Also my capacity to respond with adequate emotional attunement had been damaged by my father's personality and his extreme rages, which had caused me to expect that I would only be in danger if someone were directly raging at me. In fact the opposite was true, and I was being subtly but consistently undermined.
The people who kept saying that what I needed was more stoicism were in fact out of their minds, because it was my very capacity for stoical persistence that had led me to be able to endure a hostile situation to the point that my organic system was breaking down. Additional idiots were those who said I was too socially sensitive. The opposite was again true, since I'd had no exposure to contemporary Western culture before the age of 15, so I really wasn't able to ascertain clearly whether somebody insulting me subtly or was being genuine and straight-up. Therefore I could hardly have taken offence at something I was unable to ascertain in the first instance.
It has taken me decades to put the pieces of the puzzle together, and nobody helped me. Even those I thought would logically be allies backstabbed me and ran away.
Your videos, though, have been of great value.
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The abject failure of most people to focus on reality is one of the most frightening things I have found about modernity as such. It's like you have an accident and your leg is broken. You go to the emergency ward and all the doctors come out to examine you. After many hours, and much humming and hawing, one of them finally addresses you in the most serious manner. "We think we have found the problem finally," he says. "The problem appears to be that you are registering a lot of pain."0Add a comment
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Vlog CCLXXVI - YouTube
Thank you, for the shoutout. :) I understand the nature of an extreme experience....I so hear the authenticity. Also you have a high level of logic and reason in facing your situation, whereas I was trying to deal with mine intuitively. One of the growing sensations I had, way back, when I was being attacked, and it was a race between my ability to get more knowledge and the likelihood of being attacked again (because I really was in a vulnerable position, with a questionable state of health, a lack of cultural knowledge and no means to earn an income), was that even if others did not understand the seriousness of my situation, I would certainly reflect to them that it was so, through the seriousness of my counter-attacks. I had such small margins of well-being and survival to play with, that I had to make the seriousness register on another level. I did make it through, but only through studying power, almost obsessing about it, and moving to the extreme left. It should be noted (since you gave me the shout out) that a lot of left-wing philosophy, since it is so concerned about power, veils itself on a number of levels, since it doesn't want to be easily ascertained and understood. Only those who need it very desperately indeed will perhaps come to understand it. But there are many levels of reasoning and devices of protection, some of which make it nearly impossible to enter. I consider myself to be one of the privileged, as I entered, although under great duress. We survive how we can. If a guy as smart as Freud was so afraid of power that he wasn't able, or was unwillling, to tell the truth, we need to clothe ourselves in .....something-or-other. Sometimes it is at a level of clownliness. Did you know that there is a whole martial arts school, Capoiera Angola, that is based on SEEMING to clown, but which is actually deadly serious? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF9lfOAWTxo0Add a comment
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