The interesting thing about pop-mo socialists is how sure they are that Marx was right yet have never read Marx. You would think someone who considers himself even left of right would have at least read The Communist Manifesto. Yet look how much time they put into reading the secondary sources about or derived from Marx. That’s not intellectual laziness, it’s also the history of Christianity, and science; it is disavowal in order to be told what to believe. Now that you've already agreed with the glossy, seductive, poorly reasoned sophistry of whatever secondary text or article you're proud to say you read, the primary sources are a threat—what if it's not so simple? What if they're boring? What if they tell you something else? What if it says you don't actually stand to benefit the way you were promised, e.g. and i.e., what if the other doesn't stand to lose the way you were promised? The study of Marx interferes with the use of Marx.
When they describe the utopia of their fantasies in which the capitalists lose their power, but critical questioning fails to elicit any further concrete details, you should take them at their word: their utopia is only that the other is deprived. Do they fantasize they will take the power? No. If by accident they get it they will not want it, they will push it up the party until something else—some other omnipotent entity—takes it. When their answer to what they want is an ideology, they will only be satisfied by a tyranny, even at their own expense. A benevolent one, whatever, but as long as it makes sure the rival is losing his power. Not has no power, not lost his power—zero isn't satisfying, not past tense but present participle—a continuously decreasing function. Whatever the cost to you, it will have been worth it.
Silence is the gambit of every overanalyzed teen asked about his day by someone who knows all his tricks. Not knowing which defense to use—defenseless—against an omniscient interrogator, he would try to preserve the status quo by dead silence or; if forced: irony, cynicism, criticism—and finally rage. To be clear, all I might do is sit there and say, “well, I doubt if there's any benefit at all in discussing what it means. But why don't you tell me why you think we should keep talking about it?” Try that with sexual abuse if ten years of talking about it hasn't gotten anybody anywhere. “Do you expect me to just live with it?” But you are living with it.
“But when I was a kid I know I didn't fantasize about being with my mom.” Are you not listening? The unconscious is armed to the eyeballs with dependent clauses. You can't fantasize. It's not about your childhood but about your adulthood. The “successful resolution” of the Oedipus Complex is not “moving on to a suitable object choice.” You have no problem getting naked for plenty of suitable object choices, however unsuitable they might be. The resolution is identification with the Father. So? How's that going? Cynical ironic detachment and mistrust of power, strongest orgasms when you're by yourself, and a serious interest in TV. I'm going to suggest not well.
While there may be plenty of negative effects of porn on men, turning them off to real women simply isn't one of them, it isn't how lust works—and women, of all people, should know this instinctively, after all, they've been lusting after cave trolls for millennia. “But men are visual creatures.” Quotes the generation glued to their teleprompters, you may want to consider you were taught that for a reason.
On your behalf the media separated love and lust. Now it must separate lust and porn, now lust is the threat: whatever the man is looking at will always be less dangerous than whatever the man is thinking about. Porn doesn't suppress love, love was repressed, by us, and it returned as porn.
The fault is as much men's as women's, as much a problem of society as individual psychology, as much about expectations as aspirations. Different things are at stake, but there is a common pathology, here it is in bullet form, along with its defense: inability to love, manifesting precisely not as not loving but as loving someone without satisfying them27 a terror of growing older, manifesting precisely not as fear but rage—rage at how the world that once belonged to you, or should now belong to you, is being wasted on everyone else; a disdain for the very idea of preparing the world for the next generation, manifesting precisely not as dismissing the future, but disconnecting the past from the present so the future starts today and the benefits are yours; a fear of dependency, manifesting precisely not as off the grid individualism nor universalizing economic supports but as a demand for all manner of social/psychological controls all which must appear invisible the despising of peoples, manifesting either as a well reasoned desire for central planning or unsophisticated devotion to laissez-faire—both are admissions that outcomes can not be left to ordinary people=you an inability to be alone, manifesting not as loneliness but as a horror vacui—when you're by yourself in a house with greater than two rooms, always will the TV be on.
If you don't have what you want, there are three possible reasons.
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Since it's what you want, you can't act to get it.
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It's not what you want, but you feel obligated to pursue it.
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What you want is a defense against satisfaction.
Privacy leads to fantasy, and fantasy leads to action. Privacy deprives the public of knowledge, it leaves them to fantasize, it forces them to have to act; so publicizing things, even superficially or stereotypically, makes them more knowable, keeps them at the level of images and—reality. Under our new Overlords, privacy as a possibility must be obliterated. So whatever wants to be private must be repressed.
The desire to display gigawatt devotion with zero responsibility is the standard maneuver of our times, note the trend of celebrity soundbite social justice, or children’s fascination with doing the extra credit more than the regular credit, and as a personal observation this is exactly what’s wrong with the worst medical students and nurses. They’ll spend hours talking with a patient about their lives and feelings while fluffing their pillow to cause it to be true that they are devoted—they chose to act, chose to love—while acts solely out of ordinary duty are devalued if not completely avoided. “Well I believe the patient’s spirituality is very important.” It will be if you don’t get this NG tube in. You may think you have very valid personal reasons for not wanting to assume responsibility, like apathy or minimum wages, but the overwhelming motivator for devotion by choice is the rewarding reward of giving gifts of oneself, seemingly selflessly, because these publicly “count” more than discharging duty. The retort to this is that often times the selfless acts are done outside of everyone else’s sight, so what possible reward could there be? But one doesn’t need to be seen by individual people, it's enough to imagine being seen by a hypothetical audience.
In order to succeed in life, you don't have to be any good, you just have to be the best. But being the best does not entitle you to believe you are any good.
Any attempt at repressing a thought is never fully successful, there's always a leftover. This leftover is misleadingly called “the return” of the repressed, but it doesn't return so much as transmute into a different form. You can reliably identify something as “the return of the repressed” because repression is an identifiable process, it causes the leftover to appear in typical ways—for example, as a negation or an excess.
Humans peacefully coexist by analogy and metaphor, or in a pinch, jargon and cliché, you may think you know what inflammable means but if you want to know how it's used you better make sure the guy who said it has the same education or at least watched the same TV show. Now we don't even share war coverage, most people are not quite sure if we are, or are not, at war, and it's fair to say many Athenians were equally ambivalent. Which means that for the educated—not college educated, not people who are smart because they learned but people who learned they aren't smart, people who are driven by purpose—they will inevitably resort to subjects like ancient history as the shared avocational experience because there is no other valid signal that both crosses class/gender/education lines and also reliably excludes the lazy.
You should consider how you avoid novelty in everything else—the way you take your coffee, your drink, your opioid; your hyperspecifically critical gaze (ask your girlfriend, though she's not going to tell you because she'd like to avoid the unnovel response); the very position you sleep in; not to mention your brand loyalty, interest in sequels, similars, upgrades, derivatives—this isn't novelty seeking, it is flooding the room with amber after bricking the exits. Why in sexuality do you claim you are chasing infinite novelty—that approaches an asymptote of highly specific criteria? As if the next MMMF/interr/glasses is any more novel than the first. “Well, admittedly I chase novelty in consumer products—” but they just come at you slower, like elections: it isn't novelty seeking, it is planned obsolescence, in some cases by the marketers and in all cases by your own psychology: you don't want something novel, you want a status quo that takes you by incremental steps into the future while you hang on tight so you can take credit for the movement. “Capitalism can’t last! Things must change!” Not if you can help it. “But isn't playing the same slot machine for twenty hours novelty seeking?” Yes, you have been told that, and nothing has changed. “But look how much I've changed just this year!” You need to check your units, this isn't zero velocity but zero acceleration: it's no change in the rate of change. As a child you were offered the appearance of novelty as an escape from boredom, but quite quickly you discovered it is an excellent defense against dependency, against change. “I’m kind of a news junkie, there’s so much happening right now it’s hard to keep up with it.” Yet no one depends on you keeping up with it, they’d benefit much more if you didn’t. Devotion to something with the appearance of importance, of velocity, of kinetic energy; that you don't really need, that you can always claim in an emergency doesn't “actually” define you. “This stuff doesn't really matter,” you say as you watch the xth hour or push the nth button, “but right now, I'm satisfied.” Look around you to see who you’ve deprived.
The usual mangling of the word hypocrite places the emphasis on the bad thing being hidden, but the Greek word that Jesus uses means performer. A hypocrite isn't a man who cheats and lies about it; he'd be a hypocrite only if he benefitted by playing the part of the kind of man who would never cheat, the benefit being not that he gets to cheat but what he gets from acting like he doesn't. Neither is it hypocritical to denounce a cheater even though you are cheating yourself, though it is hypocritical to denounce a cheater when you tell everyone how non-judgmental you are.
It's sometimes hard to figure where Jesus stands on the truly important issues, his positions on sword fighting are wildly contradictory and many have complained he is enragingly lenient with the female orgasm, but the one sin that Jesus explicitly warns against over and over is hypocrisy, in this performative sense. Not “don’t pretend you’re good when you’re really not” but “don’t show anyone you are good.” Pray by yourself, be invisibly charitable, don't look for rewards for good acts. Well, what’s wrong with bragging a little, as long as you do what God wants of you? What makes this a hypocrisy isn’t the personal benefit you obtain—the desire “to be seen by others as a good person”—that very obvious desire—your willingness to shamefully admit to it—is a defense for yourself against what the performance is really used for, it gives you the certainty that what I am about to say is wrong, but Jesus's overweighting of this sin—yes, even above female adultery—is otherwise unintelligible. The theological significance is formally psychodynamic and manifestly pornographic, and anyway literally in the passage: by appearing to give God exactly what he wants, you deprive him of his satisfaction.
You have to read the book. Not read about the book, read the actual book, the one thing that best characterizes the problems in American style education isn't the grade inflation or guaranteed loans with unguaranteed repayment but the dominance of secondary sources. You might not get much out of a week reading Thucydides, but you will only get lies from a semester reading about him. “I really liked that class.” Then it worked and you didn't have to. Right here someone usually says that reading Thucydides is hard, you need some context, but calculus is hard yet no one has ever offered me a biographical sketch of whoever invented the Hamiltonian.
The prevalence of secondary sources is neither laziness nor academic expediency, it is the quotable maintenance of the status quo. Flooded with secondary sources students probably learn nothing useful about the primary source but do become accustomed to accepting all knowledge in this way, second hand and pre-selected, so that when we're confronted with a later life question it's natural for us to parrot someone else's phrasing and understanding. “That's called 'appeal to authority.'” I feel smarter already. But what they didn't tell you in college is that by adopting the thoughts of another, you also accept their unconscious motivations for having thought it. “Come on, that's not true.” Who says? And so we're full circle, these are the kind of mistakes you get from a ROM full of secondary sources. We want to be “relevant to the debate.” But as long as we believe we are relevant, we won't try to be relevant, if you believe your voice should be heard then the only thing you'll want to do is be louder, we are way past the time when drunken and leaden discussions about how to pull the supply curve to the left resulted in prompt political action and tea in the harbor. “Lead poisoning from pewter is a myth.” I didn't say it came from pewter, and do you even know which authority you are appealing to? That this is in line with what you want—no responsibility to a position or ethic, safety and branding inside a hierarchical group—is why it works. That this is in line with what the system wants—media as the only forum for discussions and debates, appeals to authority, everyone's disorganized rage safely decomposed by Fourier transform—is on purpose, and if once in a while someone goes offline or off script and acts up or acts out, it only reinforces that media is where the conflicts are supposed to be enclosed. But the whole reason they acted out wasn't to be heard but because no one had heard them.
And so we come to the answer of the unasked question of Fifty Shades Of Nay: why do the readers have this fantasy of equal but mutually reduced power supervised by omnipotent parents, and not simply fantasize more power for themselves? You’re not going to want to hear the answer, but unfortunately it will satisfy a lot of you. The 50 Shades demo feels women have gained equality in rights but haven’t gained anywhere near as much power, they still lack it. This is duh, ok, so the men still have it? That makes sense. But when you check with men—not the primary sources, obviously, that would be stupid, but “men's media”—those sources are quite vocal that men are upset they have lost power, they assume to women. Now there's a problem: both can't be true, so either men are all lying or the power is being siphoned off before everyone's eyes. Hold that thought. Wherever it went, a loss of male power has not resulted in an equivalent gain in female power. Certainly HR has made men more docile around the cubicles, but it's hard to say this made a 21st century woman feel more powerful than a 19th woman, otherwise there wouldn't be so many shows about powerful 19th century women. Having not taken physics, they are surprised to find that power is not conserved. The result of this math is that as much as they say they want more power and etc, as much as they know that it's possible, they actually don't believe that it's possible—it is not even fantasizable. The only fantasy they can imagine—i.e. the pornographic one they are shown by approved media sources, which therefore must have some other purpose—is not that women should get more power; it is that men might be deprived of theirs, taken not by women but by some other omnipotent entity. That men might subordinate themselves into a new role as an equal sibling under the supervision of the parents.
That many/most men now find cumshots arousing is an indisputable fact which I do not dispute. But its ubiquity—that it became the standard turn on for men 12-65 is not because it is degrading to women or arousing to men but because it was convenient to photographers and we want to be told how to want. Never mind dominant; prior to VHS, the female perspective on the male orgasm was that it was when he was at his most vulnerable; it was the moment of her power over him. So now even if it was factually a fact that facials are degrading, the degradation is the collateral damage of a single camera setup. None of this is driven by “male desire”. There is no male desire. Not until someone tells the males how to desire.78 In porn, as in all media, males don't dominate, women don't dominate, the medium dominates, you will come to it to tell you how to come.
Video games or imagination play? It's universally acknowledged that the latter is “better”. But is it normal? Go to any middle school: the kids who played video games are more... normal than the ones who did not; the imagination kids are more likely to lie at the extremes of the curve of socialization, grades, mental disorders, happiness—and, since you care, income. One might say that odd kids are naturally drawn to imagination play over video games, but this implies the kids made the choice from equally available options, as if the parents offered them both but they played with the stuff that doesn’t play itself. Yes, double entendre. Then you could say the type of parent who doesn't let a kid play video games is outside +/-2 SD themselves, but that only pushes the question back a generation. Whatever the “cause”, what becomes normalized is a way of thinking, a way of wanting; so that the person who reads someone else's derivative work of BDSM feels no shame but rather empowered—because it is someone else's derivative work, normalized, approved by society. They are more a part of society, it is encouraged by the system; whereas a moment lost in fantasy is either disciplined as a waste of time or... abnormal. Like most of my examples, I chose “BDSM” not because I care about it but because it’s easy for you to agree with, here’s the word I actually wanted to use: “journalism”.
As you’ve been encouraged to criticize what trigger warnings mean you won’t have paid enough attention to where they are used—in secondary sources describing a primary source—and how they are used: by walling off the primary source, you get the knowledge from the secondary source, the one that announces the trigger warning. You'll say many people blow past the trigger warnings and read the primary sources anyway, but the purpose isn't to block knowledge but establish authority. That trigger warnings on knowledge occur almost exclusively in universities and popular media isn't ironic but entirely the point: secondary sources have to be the authority. The ones applying the warnings become authorities. They exert power not over people or their behaviors (this they cannot control) but over knowledge. So you can follow the order: first, there is no desire for power. In order to cope with this—not the loss of power but the lack of desire for power—one conveys the impression of having knowledge. The warnings aren’t for the victims to protect them from their impotence, but for the impotent warners to signify omniscience. They aren’t fighting oligarchs and oppressors, they have no power to fight them, they are medieval clerics, their purpose is to distinguish themselves from the rest of the impotent, whom they consider irredeemable anyway. “We know how things really work.” And we can only learn it from you? They are traitors.
In even the most socialist parts of America the basic practical strategy is merely to give those with a disadvantage a leg up, which for some reason drives those with the advantage bananas. But even if this reversed the winners and losers, it cannot change that there are winners and losers, so in the future the dream will be to handicap the advantaged, make them do math with half a slide rule or swim the 200m butterfly wearing all previous medals. This may seem like an idiotic strategy for promoting productivity or excellence, and it is, except that this strategy is not for promoting either. It is for making people equivalent, by which I mean cattle, by which I mean chattel. If you want you can get on the internet and argue about what this means for humanity, but if this strategy is a structural response to a structural problem, then there must be some structural benefit separate from how this might benefit individual people. Based on the form of this analogy, a good guess would be this keeps everyone else betting, so the house can profit from the bets.
If you’re clever you can take any ideology and make it work for you, or use it to deprive someone else, which is the criticism Marx had about ideology before he was reworked as an ideology to deprive everyone else.
The first horror movie I saw as a kid that scared me was the original Halloween, and more than scare me it shook my soul, for the first time I was seeing a true psychopath, pure will with no other needs or desires, its force directed towards only one goal rendering all other events meaningless, including gunshots, his will made him supernaturally invincible; but the moment his mask came off for two paused frames on the VCR my only thought was how easy it would be to cram his head into a microwave and set it to clean. I didn’t know a lot of physics back then, but I just got a crash course in psychology. For this reason the mask is often labeled the “cause of desire”. Take that mask off and it is never as scary or erotic as it is supposed to be (which is why in horror movies they cheat and use a second mask (uncanny face; no face; the victim's own face)). The cause of desire (or terror) is the mask—not what lies underneath.
If you follow this logic of lust and anxiety, then it's a simple translation to tragedy: whatever is actually under that mask logically cannot be what causes your desire. The mask negates the desire for what is actually underneath. It’s not like this is a recent innovation. They wore masks in Venice in 1268, but not just during Carnival or the Purge or to get away with chucking eggs at the chicks. In fact, everyone had already been wearing masks intermittently for the past 6 months, not to hide their identity but to negate their class, giving everyone the otherwise sociopathic freedom to intermingle freely. Taking away knowledge meant everyone could act. And ancient Greek actors wore masks, for the same reason they never showed graphic violence on stage. Did you think it was because they were uptight? A culture as sexual and violent as theirs didn’t make the show PG because they—the men—couldn’t handle PG-13. They may have wondered if Jocasta was really hot, but no one looked at the masked actor who played Jocasta and wondered if she was really hot, or a she. The mask negated the actor, converting the stage biped into a blank screen for the projections of each audience member’s unconscious. Which means the masks also negated any underlying universality of the character. All that was left is the story. You weren’t supposed to learn about Oedipus and his motivations, you’re supposed to fantasize your Oedipus and motivations into the concrete story. There’s nothing universal in the character of Oedipus, what’s universal is the story of Oedipus. In order for your Oedipus to feel guilty, it had to be for something that could make you feel guilty. Not the shameful act of incest, but the repressed guilts each individual would have that could safely manifest in the play as incest. The masked Oedipus becomes each viewer’s Oedipus; then the story “adjusts” you, to improve you. You came at it individually, you come out of it together.
In the Hauge-Truby Handbook of Clinical Psychoanalysis, the authors describe the stages of character development, and make the assertion—more accurately it’s an observation, based on years of working with poorly developed character structures—that what shapes the person’s character isn’t his internal state, nor the sum total of his past experiences—though something like a trauma may be relevant if it is used as something to overcome—character is formed by action only, and only in response to conflict. Literally nothing else matters.
It’s hard enough to get people to sufficiently accept the difference between the manifest dream and the latent dream such that they don’t make arguments derived from the manifest content, ignoring the need to interpret the dream. But often when people do reliably substitute the latent meaning for the manifest, they then completely ignore the dream work, the process by which the latent thoughts become a manifest dream. Movies get dreams wrong: they’re full of symbols which are used as devices to convey information about or to the dreamer, instead of as the consequences of the attempt to hide information. Now the cultural shift from psychology to sociology makes it harder to get people interested in dreams at all, “they don’t mean anything” really stands for “they won’t mean anything to anyone else,” no one else wants to hear them and telling them is a very inefficient way of signaling how complex you are when you’re not really. You need a story.
This is why journalism today is both the most popular form of continuing education while simultaneously being utterly useless as actionable knowledge: even though the story might be factually accurate, it Gay Taleses the facticons using the structure of narrative fiction, the purpose of which is to create a central conflict in order to produce an emotional reaction. Throw in some eye candy, comic relief and state of the art CGI, cut the dialogue down to soundbites and zingers, and have all the big set pieces dazzle the audiences with infotainment. I doubt any of the writers at The New Yorker know what a beat sheet is, but all of their articles follow one.
What I should do is explain why wanting to be the main character in your story is bad for everyone else in your blast radius, but this is pointless because: 1) you have no interest in anyone who is in your blast radius, only those who aren’t; 2)— and I can’t believe I live in a world where I would ever write this—you don’t want to be the main character in your story. You want to be the main character in a story written by someone else.
Wanting to be the main character in an other’s story requires a series of sacrifices. The first one is a consequence of a social=technological change: story=video. Even podcasts have to be videos, how else is anyone going to see how much you spent on a mic and pop filter? There’s no way you could ever imagine yourself as the main character in a novel. Everything with you is seeing, your primary sensory intake that makes your dream live is seeing: reflections, mirrors, images. So you pursue life moments that script like shots, the modern innovention is to actually shoot those shots. “Here’s me hitting squats back in Act I.” Foreshadowing the deadlifts, nice. No, a nap? Oh well. The trade off of using video for story is that you can shoot cool moments, but you can’t shoot your inner journey. It doesn’t work. Of course a movie character can have an inner journey, but it has to take place as a result of action that can be seen by the audience, the pursuit of a clear external goal, against conflict. The consequence of a video life is that any inner life that cannot be videoed cannot be lived. It cannot even be imagined. What are you going to do show quiet desperation, or even math homework? Cut yourself? Actually do math?
The second sacrifice is that the more detailed and intricate your character is—surprise—the worse the story is. What you have so far for plot, setting and theme could fit on the back of a 3x5, but for your character sketch you could write a novel, which is curious because you didn’t, see above. “I really wanted there to be a strong symbology there.” Symbology? It seems like we have a new heir to the King Bonehead crown, I’m sure the word you were looking for is symbolism. “A person’s character is mostly genetic.” I think you mean genitive. Since story requires the character to change, your intricately delicate character must avoid story, or you will break. You have put yourself—a highly characterized character—into a series of hyperbolic situations which you react to—which are absolutely 100% unable to affect you. There can be no growth there, no desires can be fulfilled, as evidenced by the relationships you have with other people just like you, whose favorite force is centripetal and it points towards a television. Weeee. “But why do I feel like I’m being pushed outwards?” I know it feels like there’s a force vector pushing away from the television, but in reality no such force exists.
The third sacrifice—and these are 100% amateur mistakes any UCLA Annex student would pick up just from the pitch—is that “despite” wanting to be the main character, you don’t know what the main character wants. So nothing can be pursued, and the 3D character in full symbology just wanders through cool scenes and situations like he’s on vacation in Prague. A car chase needs a destination; a Glock needs a target; a kiss needs a purpose unless the purpose is the kiss; otherwise such adventures are boring to an audience, which is why you perceive your life to be boring and blame the adventures, or audience. You want nothing, so you are nothing. Even the deplorable “to do the right thing” or “to be desired” could still be legitimate story desires, as long as the character pursues those desires. That is not you. You’ll tell me you’re out there grinding every day to attain your goal, but anyone in the audience could see there’s no connection between what you’re doing and what you vaguely think you might want to be doing later, you are yet another guy who thinks upping their powerlifting PRs is going to lead to—to what? $$$$$? How? It barely worked for Lou Ferrigno and now the Hulk is CGI. I can squat 315x5 like anybody else, the difference is what I wanted was a physical hour to listen to math lectures, so I could write a book about pornography, so I wouldn’t destroy the lives of the people around me. See that? Clear desire, clear goal, clear actions, even if they are insane.
Let’s look closely at what you have so far: highly detailed character, careful attention to wardrobe—authenticity is soooo important—but no clear desire line. A series of intense but disconnected needs, no visible overarching goal. A series of visually exciting scenes; but no rising tension. Plenty of overdramatic dialogues and punchy one liners, but which don’t move the story along. Conflict everywhere; no central conflict. The character reacts dramatically, emotionally—reactively—to events which carry them along, but never deliberately acts on the desires they don’t have. Maybe I’ve got the genre wrong: are you the victim in someone else’s horror movie? Or a chick in a porno? The Final Girl Finally Cums? In structural terms, the problem with your script is that you haven’t written a story, you’ve written The Neverending Act I. Let me tell you a little secret: in movies the big battles are in Act III, but in real life the body count is in Act I. Most people never make it out of there alive. You’ll nod introspectively here and own up to your failing: “I’m waiting,” you’ll admit, “waiting for the Call To Adventure.” But stupid, it isn’t an actual call to you, it’s simply an event, in Star Wars he got someone else’s call and his first impulse was to erase it. Now the liar in you will admit your shame: “truth be told, I’m afraid, afraid to Cross The Threshold into Act II.” So you got the Call, but you’re Refusing it? “No, if I got the Call, I wouldn’t refuse it.” The Call is Refused not because it’s dangerous, but because it requires the character to give up some part of himself in advance of the pursuit, which in movies they shortcut by taking away some part of himself. No chance, you’ll go as far as Anchorhead but you need to be home by midday to jerk off yourself or your boyfriend for another 6 mos too long or until one of you finds a new identical replacement. “It’s complicated.” And now it isn’t.
Having no clear desire and not wanting to act, you’re waiting for a Mentor to be the Call, to tell you who you are supposed to be and what you’re supposed to do. Unlike movies the Mentor should have been your parents way back in backstory, but now with college educated genitalia and a pre-K attention span you need a guru or that great unpaid internship to plug you into your own individual monomyth. Worse, now that psychology is no longer satisfying, that Mentor becomes less individualized and more socialized, it can’t be a personal relationship since the point isn’t to teach you anything but to invite you to the adventure, so it has to be an idealized entity, a corporation, a hierarchy, an authority. “I just want a seat at the table.” You can have mine, I am done with these stupid meetings, I have work to do. Even though you’re the main character, your new hope is that the movie will be produced and directed by some other omnipotent entity, who will put you with a great cast, set safe boundaries for experimentation, shoot a lot of great footage and then fix it all in post. This is terrible movie making, and madness, and will fail because you’re not actually an actor, you’re an idiot. You want to be lead.
“If only I knew more about myself.” Yes, you are being lied to, by yourself. “If only I knew what to do with my life.” As if the reason you can’t act is that you don’t know enough. I’ve seen that movie before, too, when you finally get the knowledge you think you need in order to act, you gouge out your eyes to ensure that you can’t, and everyone else’s to ensure that they won’t. Blindness as a defense against impotence. Or did you think you were punishing yourself?
Whatever your personal religious and political beliefs, it is a fact that our Western morality is a straight line from Judeo-Christian traditions, and our political beliefs a straight line from Greco-Roman traditions, and regardless of how much you believe times have changed or how bad you are at math you should still be able to observe that those are two separate lines. Your personal conscience, however improvised, followed a different line than your political ideology, however plagiarized. You may think that they are 100% congruent or at least parallel but ask anyone else, they are not. The best you can do is change the angle between them and affect the rate of their con/divergence, under your guiding principle of maximally depriving the other.
This was not the case for the Greeks, not at the beginning, anyway. Personal morality was inseparable from the state's morality, they were not overlapping, they were the same single thing; but in the opposite way you’re imagining it, not because the State was all powerful but because the state was themselves. Personal morality vs. social standards; public behavior vs. private thoughts—for at least 50 years it would have been inconceivable to an Athenian that those were different things. I don’t mean they thought whatever the state wanted them to think, that’s as meaningless as saying people think what their brains want them to think. And I do not mean there weren't bad people; I mean there was no recourse to the psychological position of “I'm not a bad person, I just did a bad thing.” When we say the Athenian democracy required full participation, it should be taken literally. The citizens didn't just make up their own laws or fight their own wars, they thought the same thought: the state was the highest—not power, not might—but good. The highest good. Think about this. Think about whether you can think about this. Think about whether you have no other way to think about this except to think “O’Brien”—assuming you could even think “O’Brien” and not default to “Hitler”. Yet early Athens was not a surveillance state, it did not need to know—though admittedly every government will patronizingly embrace its sycophants—it left the accumulation of knowledge and power to the citizens so they could act, as it. This is why that period of history is so unique and so unrepeatable. For the first time and the only time and never since time, knowledge was used for action; the purpose of knowledge was to act; the purpose of earthly knowledge was to be able to act like gods with restraint. Not only for a handful of “great men”; they all thought this, it was the cultural standard. And then the war came, and the plague came, and the plague came again, and the sophists came, and the idea of man's greatness through obligation became more fantastical than 12 hairless gods on a cold mountaintop wrapped in bedsheets, or on them. What good are gods in heaven if they won’t send my neighbor to hell? For all but a few, math became arithmetic and philosophy became accounting, and getting some power was far less satisfying than depriving the other of theirs. And here we are.
“We are all secular humanists now.” I don’t know what those words mean, and you don't know how right you are. It's a commonplace to divide the millennia long history of philosophy as a transition between “God is the measure of all things” to “Man is the measure of all things”, and of course everyone's learned that the Athenians were able to shift their whole psychology from one to the other in only a few decades. But what gets obfuscated in the secondary sources and what should stop your blood dead cold is that the first maxim came last—they started with man and moved towards god, man was observed to be an invalid and wholly unreliable measure of anything, god came at the end of the experiment. That could only happen because people did not consider themselves free anymore—so the state was no longer considered just, let alone ideal. Let's be precise: it came when their state was no longer considered just. Wait, still not right: it came when they did not want to be free and prayed the State was unjust so they could justify stealing from it. Let me tell you exactly what kind of a person you are so you can plan your obsolescence or at least your contraception: so desperate were they to get away from the responsibility of their freedom that whenever they won major battles they then turned around and exiled their generals, even Thucydides was ostracized and Paches was so annoyed he killed himself in open court; but when 404 came and they lost the long war, when the Spartan general Lysander beat them at their own game and conquered them once and for all, not only was there no weeping or gnashing of teeth, but the people were so relieved that they worshipped him like a god. Read it—and despair.
Medea’s rage seems so modern not because the institution of marriage still carries the same structural imbalances but because she uses the trick everyone today thinks we invented as a social critique: she takes a personal rivalry and casts it as a structural problem. It has to be patriarchy, because otherwise she got screwed by a nut. While it is coincidentally correct that her plight mirrors the plight of many women, she has no interest in women, and I know this because she kills not Jason but his new wife; and not even because of a rivalry with the new wife but only as a tool to hurt her real rival: Jason.
Reframe your understanding of power before it gets us all killed: applauding a person’s non-choices because a type of person made them and they deprive another type of person isn't justice, it is envy. Worse, it is envy that longs for tyranny even as it pretends to hate it. The first thing she did on the path to defeating the patriarchy is subordinate herself to an even bigger patriarch, that lucky accident was step 1, it’s what allowed her to do everything else. You think she's able to imagine an alternative modernity? You can't find the true feminist play Prometheus staged anywhere, but a thousand college campuses, every one of them does Medea, this is the play that resonates with our future thought blockers. “I understand why she acted that way—she just went too far.” Are you sure? Because it looks to me like every verb in that sentence is a lie. Poor Medea, it's not Jason's cheating per se, what he did that was so terrible is taking her and all the glorious things her nobility and master’s in sorcery promised, moving her to the middle of nowhere and then abandoning her. No one thinks she was going to do anything anyway, and it's certainly not clear she loves him, but now he’s disrupted her status quo and the prospect of decades in front of the television. What can she do? He knew about her nobility and her master’s, of course, but still didn't agree to see her as a noble master’s kind of woman. So she'll show him. Everyone parrots the one sentence disclaimer about the excessiveness of revenge scheme, “I don't condone it, but I understand”, but you need to pay much more attention to the scheme’s form. She originally wanted to gut him with a sword but decided against that plan, do you know why? “It's wrong? It doesn't represent justice? The kids would be sad?” No. Because if she fails, people will laugh at her. I wish I was making this up. But there will be some/all of you who so closely mirror her psychology that you will read this backwards, you will defend shame as socially useful, you will say it was that very shame of failure that kept her from stabbing him, but this is wrong. If she wasn't driven by shame, she would not have wanted to kill him at all. “But then what was she supposed to do? How could she make him suffer?” Yeah. A thousand college campuses.
Of course that ancient democracy informs our society even today, to the point where it has become a standard criticism that it shouldn't. But how does it? Consider that while we've built an entire liberal education out of selected excerpts from that time, the average Athenian citizen would have had a real time immersion to all of it. A modern student will spend years studying the secondary sources to understand their meaning, but a semi-literate Athenian would have been expected to get the point from hearing the primary source once, and then use it. And yet they collapsed. So the question is, what happened? And what chance could we possibly have?
What happened to them is what's happening to us: we want to know more—in order to do less. Every generation prides themselves at discovering anew what no one in history had ever thought of before: that democracy is a majority of idiots preventing the noble judgment of a wise minority from forcing the majority do what needs to be done. “Is democracy really the best form of government? Discuss.” How about we start with something a little more basic, like what’s the worst form? The single reason the Athenians chose democracy is so trite that it's easy to overlook, but it is the reason that makes everything else that happened intelligible, including the paradox of a democracy that excluded women and slaves but in which therefore the wealthy were expected to fight all the wars. It wasn't class struggle, it wasn't a belief in the wisdom of crowds, it wasn’t racial pride and it wasn't a shared sense of community. They did not think a democracy would make the best decisions or the fewest mistakes. No. They chose democracy simply because the alternative was tyranny, and they for sure didn't want a tyranny. That's it. The successes and failures in every other metric do not weigh in its grade, the only question on every exam was circle Yes or No: was a tyranny prevented? They ostracized their most powerful and celebrated men, men they actually needed—because they were too high risk, not just that they might be tempted to want to become tyrants but that the people might be tempted to want them to become tyrants.
Monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy aren't opposites, they can co-exist and share power. The logical negation of these is a tyranny. Tyrannies arise when oligarchies disagree internally. And oligarchies arise when democracies disagree externally. I realize you learned that in the opposite direction.
“All of this is ancient history. Democracy doesn't work anymore, we need __.” Fill in the blank, I dare you. Because your personal psychology's premise is that you know what needs to be done but can’t do what needs to be done, you know better but can’t do better, so what's going in that blank that you're not even aware you want? A tyranny. There are no other choices. “No, not a tyranny, I just want a government above populist pressures, one that has all the power, whatever it does is just, it acts in the best interest of its people.” That used to be called a Dad. Sometimes it takes 2500 years, but the repressed always returns.