Daily Archives: May 2, 2014

A fascist soul

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Yesterday, Hitler. Today, fascism.

It’s not what you think.

Therapy day, good sessions, etc. But this time I really mean it. I think that today, my therapist and I managed to chase a main component of all my problems into a corner and get a really good look at it.

In a nutshell, the basic problem is that as bad as my interior government is, on some level I feel it keeps me safe. Those harsh barbs of cruel self-judgment, the incredibly restricted, near-invalid (or prisoner) lifestyle, the outsized fears and amplified anxieties, they are all part of the fascist inner system I developed as a child abandoned to the harsh cruel world of the playground when I was far too young to cope with it.

Despite how smart I was.

All of that self-torture is meant, at its root, to keep me safe. Because bad things happened to me when I was so young and because I had absolutely nobody to turn to who could or would help me, the system I developed was quite primitive and relied entirely on avoidance. No fight…. I was outnumbered and wimpy. No flight… I was fat and slow and anyone could outrun me.

That only left hiding, and so I hid. Oh, how I hid. The only safety lied in avoiding detection. You have to fade into your background like you don’t even exist.

And you get so good at it… you start feeling like it’s true. You really don’t exist. And that feeling can get so powerful that it completely blocks out reality and you feel like at any second, you could just disappear. The flame that is your life feels so weak that you worry that at any second it could go out.

Not rational. But still very real.

But it is your own demons who chase you into that deep dark hole you live in, and keep you there with their lashes of self-destructive discipline. They work for you. They are just doing the job you hired them to do, which is to keep you safe by scaring you away from doing anything risky, and punish you for stepping even an inch out of line.

Once you realize this (how did I end up in the second person?), you realize that you could make them stop. You could end this cruel and sadistic inner regime. But you won’t because… what then? You would have to face the world outside your cell without the restrictions imposed by your hyperactive superego. And they are all you know. By doing their job, your demons have kept you from experiencing enough of the world to have some sense of what is really out there.

Instead, you get their propaganda about how awful the world is and how you are better off locked away from it and all the bad, bad things it will do to you.

It’s like your entire existence is The Village.

And so there you are, getting a really good look at your demons for the first time. And for the first time, they are looking back at you. You now know that you are their employer and you can dismiss them any time you want. Even if you decide to keep them where they are for now, punishing and frightening you for your own supposed good, you will have chosen to do so.

Me, I am not sure I am ready to live without them yet. Deep down, I am still very sad and very hurt. Now that I can see my demons as mine, as me, I can see that they have been trying to protect that massive wound in my soul from the stimulus and hence the pain of the outside world.

They did more harm than good. But they meant well. And they were working for you the whole time.

It will take me a while to truly process this revelation, but I feel good about it. I feel that now, I have the option of just turning off the whole complicated machine and going out to find out what the world is REALLY like for myself.

I don’t know if I am ready yet. But I have the option.

On the more physical side of things, there is something up with my left knee. Every time I put weight on it, it hurts, and while the pain is not severe, it is very… worrying. (I am going mad with the ellipses lately. )

It feels very much like bone pain. Bone clicking against bone, bone grinding against bone. I have had broken bones in my life, so I know what bone pain is like, and this feels like it.

My other joints don’t feel right either, especially my knees and elbows. I am worried that I am finally developing the arthritis that is endemic to older fat people, and if so, what the heck I can do about it.

Orthopedic shoes would be a good start. I would do more walking if it didn’t hurt so much. Nothing quite like physical pain to make it hard to maintain your resolve. It is like the universe is conditioning you not to do that.

I have wondered what it would take to get me exercising. I would love to go to a gym with a good Universal (or similar) weight system for me to work out on, assuming it is not too late for that at my advancing age.

And what would it take for that to happen? A ride. At least, a ride there, I could probably bus back. Getting there has always been harder than getting back for me. The walk to school always seemed ten times longer than the walk back.

And the thing is, I might be able to get a ride. I am on full disability now, so I qualify for the HandyDart system of door to door busing for cripples like myself.

So the door is open there. I could totally do it.

I just don’t want to… yet.

Talk to you tomorrow folks!

What price Hitler?

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I have been slowly making my way through Zeitgeist : An Addendum, the sequel to Zeitgeist : The Movie, which I have also seen, and I thought I would share some of the thoughts it has generated with you nice people tonight.

It is slow going because between the things it says which are stupid and wrong and the things that it says that are depressing and true, it is not what one would call a fun ride. It offers a wildly oversimplified view of how the world works, which is almost always the case when people try to come up with a single coherent view of everything. Suddenly, the facts are shaped to fit the theory, not the other way around.

But it has me thinking about corruption and the current world situation where everything seems rigged to pump money up to the top and keep it there. This nightmare of a fraud of a system is clearly in need of comprehensive reform, yet nobody seems to know what to do about it. A lot of people are angry, as they should be, but there is also a great deal of fatalistic apathy. People saying “Yeah, it sucks, but whatcha gonna do?”

The revolutionary in me replies “Band together against them and act as one! They are stronger than you, but not stronger than all of us working together! The elite always govern by divide and conquer. We need to unite and reform! SOLIDAT! ”

Sorry, I always get a little excited when I talk like that. Did you know I share a birthday with Pol Pot?

Anyhow, even if we had our revolutionary army, we would still need a battle plan, and I think that means that we have to contemplate all options, no matter how distasteful, in order to find the one most likely to be effective.

The biggest problem with any kind of reform movement, from the Protestant Revolution to the new rules for D&D, is that those who current benefit from the system, no matter what that system is, will use their wealth, power, and social status in order to fight reform tooth and nail, and the problem is they have more teeth and nails than any of us common folk.

This is not an ethical decision on their part. They are not defending any sort of ideal, despite what they say. They are greedy, spoiled children fully in the grips of the corrupting power of money and power and therefore they are not even truly capable of supporting any sort of moral philosophy because those sometimes involve doing things you don’t want to do and to the spoiled brats who run the world, nothing could possibly be worse than that.

It is also true that human beings react to any threat of lowered social status as if it was death, which in a sense it is, because it is a threat to their identity.

So any plan that involves the cooperation of the elite is doomed to failure. Any plan which relies on being able to overthrow them by force is going to mean a protracted war of ants versus elephants. They are few but mighty, and we are many but weak. For something like that to succeed will require a lot more solidarity and self-sacrifice than modern life ever requires of us.

We work, and we amuse ourselves. And that’s it.

There has to be a third way, and I think I have found it, but people are not going to like it at all. It will fly in the face of fairness and justice and a lot of people will reject it out of hand as unthinkable.

We have to pay them off. We have to rig it so that the people currently acting as oligarchs not only lose nothing, they gain quite a lot from our reforms.

We can use their shortsightedness and childishness to our advantage. We can dismantle the system that got them where they are while we have them distracted with the shiny big rewards we are offering them.

And they won’t fight us over it because it doesn’t threaten them. They have, as a group, blinded themselves to all the details of how people like them get where they are because by the time the corruption has truly got them in its grips, they believe that they are where they are out of the sheer wonderfulness of themselves, and so they lack the kind of vision it takes to care what happens to the future ambitions of others who want to be like them.

In fact, to be honest, they are not fond of the competition to start with. They will be more than happy to destroy the ladder of success once they have climbed it. Serves all those greedy bastards right for trying to take what’s theirs!

And yeah… this plan does not make me flip with joy. We all want these awful brats punished for what they have done to the world and we sure as hell do not want to see them rewarded for their crimes. They deserve to be pulled from their positions of power and cast down into poverty for the rest of their lives, so they can see what it is really like under the system they have built and profited from.

The only virtue of my plan is that it might actually work. If you can assure the people in power that they will keep their money, their social status, and their luxuries, they will be indifferent to what you do to the rest of society, and will bus themselves with all their usual self-congratulatory bullshit while we the people get on with making the system work for us for a change. It could be that simple.

Heck, maybe we could work my “new aristocracy” plan in there somewhere.

In order to win the war, we might just have to cut a deal with the Devil.

But if it gets the Devil out of power, it will be worth it.