1:26 PM 1/23/2015
I’m not sure how long this post will be, but I always go off on tangents. I’ve been using vivarin pills for the past few weeks, which is contributing to my extremely lengthy blog posts. I have a bunch of stuff that all starts to come up in my mind as soon as I start to write, and I can’t say it all fast enough.
1. what happened at the church dinner
2. ‘entitlement,’ the indigo kids
3. socionics
4. anaya religion
5. applying for govt benefits, riding my bike out there
I guess I will try to say the quickest things first. I was reading something online about ‘indigos.’ I’ve heard of them many times before. After I went to a church dinner last night, I heard voices in my head saying that somebody thought I must be a ‘starseed.’ I like to fantasize that I’m something special, so I went along with this idea. Sure, I’m a starseed! I have some kind of alien soul in my body and I’m here to help prepare Earth for the Ascension so that we can start some intergalactic trade with all those other planets and aliens that are out there. I’ve been fantasizing that I was ‘somebody special’ ever since I was a little kid, so this ‘indigo’ and ‘starseed’ stuff works for me.
In theory, I do believe in the existence of aliens. I also understood the ‘Fermi Paradox,’ if I’m recalling the name correctly. Some people asked, ‘If there are aliens out there, why haven’t they contacted us?’ and then they thought of a bunch of possible scenarios to explain why they had not (including the scenario, ‘they already have contacted us, but the government is hiding it,’ which was quickly dismissed with contempt but he said he had to mention it).
In reality, I have no way of knowing whether aliens are already contacting us – I have no means of gathering the evidence, and I’m preoccupied with my own life struggles at the moment, so I can’t devote myself to the project of finding evidence for and against the presence of aliens on this planet. It’s kind of not urgent, unless they’re threatening to blow the planet up. I probably could not do much about it if they were.
But I like the idea of Ascension. It’s one of those New Age beliefs. I’ve dabbled in it from time to time. People tell themselves that there’s something special about them, and that’s why they feel like they don’t fit in to the rest of society. Sure! That applies to me!
I also know about mind control, and so I have no way of knowing if, perhaps, everything these people are experiencing, such as telepathy and remote viewing of alien planets and aliens themselves, are nothing more than fake images implanted into their minds by human beings on earth. How disappointing, but how believable – that’s something somebody would do. It calms people down and soothes them. They reassure themselves, thinking that superior aliens are coming along soon to help us fix this planet. Somebody’s gonna come along and give us immortality, and people will behave a lot better when they’re not scared of death anymore. That kind of thing. Soothing the humans of earth, giving them pleasant fantasies, is something that the mind control system is always trying to do. (Although, if you’re taking prescription drugs or antidepressants, then the mind control system suddenly becomes the enemy, and it will attack you and harass and torture you until you snap and go kill other people or yourself.)
My own particular mind control program has been training me to believe that I’m somebody special, that I’m going to do something really big and important (besides suffering from lifelong chronic fatigue syndrome and spending a huge amount of time in bed or writing blogs). So yeah, if I go someplace to eat dinner at the church and I come home feeling like I’m somebody big and important afterwards, sure, why not?
I was reading about the Indigos. Supposedly, some person noticed that a lot of people were being born with an indigo aura. This coincides with the time period during which more and more people are being born with deformities, more people are being born to mothers who were using prescription antidepressants during their entire pregnancy, more people are getting autism from vaccinations, and so on – basically, more deformities and more mental illnesses resulting from drugs, malnutrition, chemicals, vaccines, and other factors.
There is also a phenomenon called ‘highly sensitive people,’ or ‘sensory processing sensitivity,’ and I believe in this. I’ve noticed that some people are more verbose, and some people are more terse, regardless of their personality type. Some people can say it in five words or less and be done with it. You quickly express one brief emotion and one quick observation sums it up, and it’s over and done with and nothing else needs to be done with it. But with me, or other highly sensitive people, your brain wants to keep on worrying and worrying over that piece of information, picking it apart further and further, extrapolating it in more detail, and you just can’t say it in fifteen words or less. If you don’t get out all the details, then you haven’t said what you needed to say.
That applies to me. I can’t enjoy deep conversations with other people, and I describe everyone as ‘shallow,’ because they get impatient whenever I try to dig deeper and deeper into some piece of information that we are talking about. I can’t just spit something out and then move on to the next shallow topic. I have to dig deeper and deeper and deeper into this one, particular, fascinating topic, which can go on for hours and hours if someone is responding the right way.
The last time I had this type of conversation was with my best friend Rachael many years ago, and I have not had any opportunities for that kind of conversation since then. ‘They’ forced me to immediately destroy my developing relationship with Rick as soon as I discovered him online. He was a highly verbose ENFP, and in our very few emails, before we were ripped apart by the mind control attacks forcing me to harass him, we *did* start to get into deep, detailed conversations, and I discovered his ability to do this, to talk that way, to extrapolate or whatever the word is, to unfold every detail within every phrase of every sentence, only to find that there are even more details underneath that. There’s a word I’m looking for, I just can’t remember what it is. It means something like ‘to unfold.’ Explicate – that’s it. I guess that’s the opposite of ‘implicate.’
It’s this awareness of the infinite detail of reality. Reality’s detail has no end. You can go deeper and deeper into a piece of information and its meta-information and the meta-meta-information, only to find infinite endless layers of more information about that information.
So… that describes me.
Oh, ‘entitlement.’ I was just going to comment that, while reading about indigos, I saw somebody said indigos project a sense of ‘entitlement,’ the feeling that they deserve to be here. That was a strange and interesting thought. A young child who projects this awareness that they deserve to exist. It’s like some alien race put their soul here for a purpose (according to this belief system). I was put here, I belong here, I deserve to be here.
I was seeing a different form of entitlement yesterday. There is this idea of self-esteem, of knowing that I deserve to exist. Then there is also the ‘church dinner entitlement.’
Somebody online told me about a particular church that made free dinners on Thursday nights every week. In the distant past, my parents (my mother, actually) were officially Episcopalian. We didn’t go to church, and I grew up as an atheist, although I have always been interested in religion and tended to be attracted to people who were religious. When I got therapy, briefly, from Judith Swack, one of her questions was, what religion was I, officially, even if I wasn’t practicing it? She was using the official religion as part of the therapy because she believed that it played some important role in your psychology and your beliefs even if you didn’t go to church.
Note, I am not condoning Judith Swack’s therapy. I watched her on youtube recently and was… displeased… with all the same things that had bothered me while I attempted to get therapy from her. I only discovered she existed because Nathaniel Branden (R.I.P.) mentioned her, along with the Thought Field Therapy dude,
what’s-his-face, as being another interesting therapist who was using unusual methods and getting results.
I researched both of them and taught myself TFT, which *does* actually work, although nowhere near as miraculously as they claim. It is a method of temporarily soothing yourself while you are anxious, by pressing on particular points on the body, and you can accomplish similar effects by getting a hug or a massage, but it is more focused, more prolonged, and you can do it to yourself while meditating on some subject that makes you anxious, angry, etc.
I have used it effectively, but you cannot use it while being constantly bombarded by electronic torture. It requires you to focus, and if you are being electronically zapped, or being electronically polluted with non-directed radio smog from cell phones and everything, then all the constant noise and zapping will undo all of the relaxation and focus that you can achieve with TFT. In a shielded room, yes, it works quite well, and you can give yourself therapy and change your own mental processes, which is what I was always trying to do, for as long as I can remember, change my own mental processes, control my own mind, control my own beliefs, make myself able to do things and improve my life. I cannot do that now. It will not happen until I either get an effective shield, or relocate to a place where, for some reason, nobody is attacking me (Green Banks, WV, with the big satellite dish antenna thing, maybe, or maybe an extremely isolated and underpopulated region in the Arctic, or something).
So anyway, I took the suggestion from Nathaniel Branden’s web page and was curious to try her therapy, but for me personally, it was absolutely horrible. I only gathered a few tiny ‘grains of truth’ from it, which I have remembered. I suspect she might possibly be a conflictor, and getting psychotherapy from your socionic conflictor is probably not the best idea. I’m not 100% sure of her socionic type though.
I’ve been reading about religions. I read about Buddhism. I read about Bahai, because it turns out that’s my landlady’s religion. She discovered it while traveling in Fiji, and it felt better to her than her original Catholic religion, which she was struggling with at the time. Bahai is a more recently created religion, kind of like the way Mormonism is a recent religion, something that came up in the past few hundred years, and Scientology.
I’m interested in intentional communities, and I absolutely love Diana Leafe Christian (I once typed her as an LSE, but I’m probably wrong – most likely, she’s just another EIE). Being mind controlled, ‘steered,’ and trained to believe that I’m ‘somebody special who’s gonna do something big in the world,’ I, too, have created my own religion called Anaya, with the participation of the voices in my head. Everybody’s got their own religion nowadays, apparently. It’s like fan fiction! Everybody’s writing their own story and calling themselves a god and somebody special and I’m some kind of special soul who’s different from all the mainstream people in society around me.
And this is a genuine feeling, the feeling of not fitting in, the feeling that you are somehow very different from the majority of the people around you, that maybe there is something wrong with you, some weakness, but there is also something *better* about you, something you can see that they can’t see. All these people writing fan fiction on the net, all of them have their own fantasy worlds and their own little polygods. I’ve suspected that fan fiction writers might possibly be ‘my type,’ my duals or activators in the Delta Quadra, but probably not all of them are. I just suspected a correlation and thought I might someday look into that, if I were looking for an easy way to find a whole bunch of Delta NFs all crowded together in one place.
While reading about Buddhism, I found one well-written page (one of the first google results) that gave a quick summary of the idea of karma, which I almost understood – but not quite. I still had to make this leap of faith into ‘this is just an analogy, not a literal thing.’ I was imagining this image, which is only an analogy, only a model, and not a literal description of any physical phenomena. It was this field of waves, analogous to the electromagnetic fields. Your consciousness is part of a particular frequency in that field. When you’re born, your brain and body resonate with that particular frequency and are tuned to pick it up.
There may or may not be grains of literal truth in this, because, indeed, there is a real electromagnetic field surrounding the planet, and I assume it has always been here for as long as all living creatures have been here, and so it has always been part of us, and we have always been resonating with it and our nerves are being induced by it, like antennas.
So this Buddhism description made it sound like there was this big field of consciousness, and when you’re born, you sort of manifest this field, either more or less purely. I also connect that with socionics – you can more or less purely represent your socionic type.
I always thought reincarnation made sense in a way, but you wouldn’t keep your memories. I just thought that everybody else has that ‘I am myself’ feeling, that sensation, that awareness of being alive and seeing through their own eyes, and so, if you die, someone else will be born who will also have that same feeling you had, that feeling that you are seeing through your own eyes and existing, and in that sense, it is as though ‘you’ were born again and reincarnated, because somebody else was born with that same feeling you had. However, all the details of your life were forgotten. (Children are reporting events from their past lives a lot lately, but again, in a world of mind control, it’s easy to plant some ideas into a kid’s head and make them say this stuff out loud.)
So then, when you die, in my visual image, you’ve made these sort of ‘waves,’ which are the potentials, the unfinished series of events created during your lifetime. Those waves are still affecting the world after you die. So when you’re born again, you still feel the effect of those waves you created in your past life, which is karma.
However, it was used to explain why someone would be born into a bad life, through no fault of their own. They had the idea that when you manifest consciousness, when you are conceived, it’s something that happens to you by force, not by choice (which differs from some other religions, who claim that you chose this particular body for a purpose), and is the inevitable result of that karma you built up in the past life, which must coalesce into this life now, so as to resolve itself.
I was imagining transverse waves as the ‘potential’ waves in the field of karma, because I was reading about Tesla recently and reading the claims that he discovered ‘free energy,’ which was in the form of potential waves, scalar waves, which go at right angles to the electromagnetic waves that we are normally using for energy and for communication. I have just barely enough of a mathematics background that I can sort of visualize what this means, waves which move at right angles to other waves, but I am too lazy, preoccupied, etc to do all the detailed math necessary to really get into it, prove it, and apply it to an invention that will give me free energy right this instant. (A cynical voice says that I’ve been applying for some government benefits, though, trying to get stuff for free.)
I did go off on the tangents and I’ll exhaust myself before finishing them all. Basically I sort of understood the karma explanation, but at the same time, was frustrated by it, because I still felt that it was an analogy, a struggle to explain something without really knowing it for sure. In some twisted way, it is still merely an attempt to convince evil, stupid people that they will someday have to pay for their actions, just like ideas of hell and punishment are used to threaten them in other religions and social systems. If only you can scare those people enough, maybe they will stop doing stupid, evil things to other people. Make them believe that they’re gonna be reborn as a Jew being murdered by Hitler, so they’ll be in the position of the victim next time, so they’ll stop doing what they’re doing now in this lifetime. And yet, that threat doesn’t seem to be working very well, becauses Buddhism is throughout all of China, and China is known for being…. not very nice, with regard to human rights violations. Buddhism does not seem to be achieving its goal as well as we would like.
And yet I like the idea of Buddhism because it’s more ‘intellectual’ somehow than Christianity is to me. It has more of a focus on self-improvement. Christianity tells you to be a better person too, but they’re not really as consciously obsessed with all the details of self-improvement, describing all the pathways to enlightenment and what not, in quite as much thorough detail as Buddhism does. Also, Buddhism is more colorful. You can look at all these images with complicated colors and details, and Asian art is, I believe, much better than European art. I was looking at traditional Chinese embroidery and my heart was being ripped out of my chest with envy – I would do such things if I could.
I got to that google search by first looking at Chinese foot binding, and noticing the beautiful embroidery on those tiny little shoes. I don’t need to explain that I am opposed to Chinese foot binding, but in general they’re not doing it anymore, although it might happen occasionally here and there.
I also do not like the declawing of cats. Both foot binding, and declawing, slow down a person or a cat, making it uncomfortable or impossible to run, and the result is that they are forced to stay home and stay enslaved. Declawed cats cannot run or put weight on their feet as well as cats with intact feet. It is a major, severe, non-trivial disability. Spaying and neutering them afterwards is the last nail in their coffin, because then they simultaneously become severely obese as a result of having their testicles or uterus removed, and an obese cat, trying to run on declawed feet, is painful to watch. I suffer every time I look at my cat Jacob.
Some stupid person on a website claimed that if you do a
catch-neuter-and-release program on all the feral cats, some of the cats will… ‘put on a little bit of weight,’ as though they were ‘too skinny’ prior to being spayed and neutered – since when is ‘putting on weight’ viewed as a healthy and positive thing? but it was when this author wrote it! They ‘put on some weight,’ which was portrayed as a good thing for feral cats who are usually portrayed as ‘starving,’ and then, they also will tend to… ‘form surprisingly strong bonds with humans.’
The reason a spayed, neutered, declawed cat forms a ‘strong bond’ is because it’s terrified of being left alone anywhere! It can’t defend itself or get its own food! Jacob takes a walk down the sidewalk with me, but he won’t go far, and gets upset if I walk too far away, and meows and sits there wanting me to turn around and walk home with him. He has a ‘strong bond’ with me. Max, however, while he loves to go on walks with me, he also doesn’t mind running off and doing his own thing, and doesn’t necessarily have to come right home after our walk, or sit there meowing for me to turn around and come back so I can put him back in the house. Jacob is more obviously helpless and dependent, and apparently, some people out there *like* their cats and their wives to be helpless, dependent, and needy, instead of independent and happy.
But I won’t go into this, I’m gonna run out of energy before I finish all the tangents.
I went to this church dinner. I found the church. It was the Episcopal church. I used to be officially Episcopalian, and I thought of what Judith Swack would say in this situation – she would have felt that this was right and appropriate and symbolic for me to be getting help from an Episcopal church when my family used to be officially Episcopalian. My karma’s finally coming for me!
You really can learn a lot from your conflictors and superego types. You learn ‘verbal’ information, which goes through your conscious functions. It’s just that you will never be happy if you go your entire life surrounded by nothing but conflictors and superego types, where you always have this feeling that you sort of like these people, you sort of respect and admire these people, you admire what they know and what they can do, you admire them as people, but yet, you never feel satisfied or understood in the way that your soul wants to be.
I worked at McDonald’s. For some reason, that particular store was filled with millions of Deltas. It was truly a great group of people. We loved each other. I worked with SLIs all the time. I loved them so much. I still don’t want to go back to work there, but I wish I could just scoop them all up and take them with me and give them all the happy lives they deserve. I want to tell them the answers they’re looking for. I want to matchmake them with all their duals, because there were SLIs who hadn’t found love yet, although a few of them had dated people temporarily. I fantasize that I could put them all together in one big pile and let them sort it out, just throw all the Deltas into one big house and let them mix with each other until they fell in love. I would be happy living in a Deltas-only house with hundreds and hundreds of Deltas. I have this intense desire to rescue my fellow sufferers and give them what they need, at the same time that I am rescuing myself.
I went to this church dinner. As soon as I went in there, I started picking up on the Beta vibe. There were lots of Beta STs in there, and some Beta NFs. There were one or two people from around town who I recognized, who I had typed as probably Alpha NTs.
I said hello to this one guy who used to know me when I was homeless. He was always sort of annoying to me, just like all the other homeless guys and people around town who recognize me and assume,
automatically, that I am ‘one of them’ and therefore I’m their new best friend, when actually I find them annoying and just wish to be left alone and don’t feel like being dragged into this conversation.
I could say, perhaps, that some of these people are showing the weakness of the ‘Fi’ function, because they are Beta STs. They think you’re their friend, but you’re not, and you really don’t like them and you think they’re annoying and wish they would shut up and leave you alone (Woe betide me if any Beta STs are reading my blog right now, I apologize profusely to you, because I do not mean for this to refer to *ALL* Beta STs all of the time in every situation – it’s just these particular homeless people who all assume that I’m their best friend because I’m homeless too).
A person who uses +Fi strongly, a Delta NF, is able to start up a close relationship with you, and really be your best friend, and know that you want it, and have the power to make you want it, whereas a weak user of +Fi is someone who seems to just wrongly assume they’re your best friend, to every random person who walks by, and this seems to happen a lot with Beta STs.
It’s analogous to Delta STs who are unable to suppress their cheerful friendliness and have to act nice and happy all the time and smiley, regardless of the circumstances and regardless of who they’re talking to, because we have a weakness of +Fe, and we’ll either show no emotions at all, or just always show a default shallow smiley face because we just can’t emote fast enough to keep up with all the nuances in every interaction.
Both Beta STs, and Delta STs, have weaknesses in how they express emotions and form relationships, it’s just a different ‘flavor’ of weakness depending on the quadra.
I’ve just observed that almost all of the homeless people seem to be Beta STs, almost all the time. Why? I don’t know, I have some type-related theories, but I’ll leave that aside for now.
So this church room was full of Betas, it seemed. I walked around, and I can see it on people’s faces. I can see by their visual appearance, the shape of their eyes, the expressions, the whole style of how they look. It is based on four decades of experience with other humans. I know that people who look like this, will act like this. Now that I know socionics, I can go into more details. Socionics visual identification is a real thing, and it *does* go so deep as things like bone structure. It is genetic. It is like a whole different ‘race’ or ‘tribe’ of people. The personality structure is so deeply engrained in the personality that it is connected with the physical structure of the bones and the body and the brain, all of it, from your DNA. It is more than merely the type of clothes they’re wearing or their hairstyles or their makeup.
I looked all around the room, and knew with a few quick glances that there was not a single person here that I could bond with deeply. I was completely alone. The room was totally full of incompatible people. I did see one table with a small group of people sitting there who I suspected *might* possibly be compatible, but I didn’t talk to them, and still had a bad feeling about them, and did not try.
Instead, I ended up sitting with one of the Beta ST homeless guys who I had known from before. Actually I’m not sure if he’s homeless, but he spends all his time in town going from place to place, and was always sitting at Dunkin Donuts when I was there. We talked, but I didn’t really want to talk to this guy. He’s nice, he’s cool, but I really don’t *like* him, other than the way you simply like another human by default because they haven’t actually done anything *bad* to you, as in you like them merely because they exist.
I wanted to talk about ‘entitlement.’ I had mentioned that the starseeds and indigos supposedly had the ‘entitlement’ feeling, that I deserve to exist and I was put here for a purpose, and I radiate this sense of entitlement and purpose and specialness from a very young age. (I suspect this is a Beta NF characteristic.) It is a healthy, strong sense of self-esteem.
But there is a different kind of entitlement, which to me seems contemptible. It was all the Beta STs there in that church, eating the food and being ‘entitled’ to it. You could say that they are seeking the same form of enlightened, positive entitlement and self-esteem that the Beta NFs have, but it’s being manifested in sort of a twisted way, badly done, which results in this selfish, greedy, entitlement attitude, sometimes blatantly ungrateful to the point of being ridiculous. The guy sitting with me complained about how some of the people here would insult the food, saying that this or that was too dry, etc, complaining that the food was awful, when they should be grateful that it’s being given to them for free. I’ve seen people like that, and I know exactly what type they almost always are – the ungrateful complainers are the SLEs. (We had a McDonald’s customer who we all recognized, who was always drunk, who would make these exact same kind of ridiculous complaints and expect us to dance to his every little demand.)
It is shockingly inappropriate to be complaining loudly about how bad this food is, when some kind person is giving it to you for free as an act of charity. I want more, I am entitled to more, I am entitled to even better than this, I am entitled for you to dance to my slightest whim and each and every petty demand, all of the time. If I say ‘jump,’ you start jumping right now, and while you are jumping, you say, ‘How high?’ while still jumping. Don’t even wait to ask how high first, just start jumping before you even know. My mom used to say that – that phrase came from her – I don’t remember what story she was telling, but it was something where a person tells you to jump and you’re supposed to say ‘how high?’ I don’t remember the context, I don’t remember whether this behavior was viewed as good or bad, I don’t remember if it was my mom or if it was on television, I just remember people saying, ‘If I tell you to jump, you say “how high?”‘
I myself felt like I was *not* entitled to this food, and going there and eating it gave me a strong urge to give help to others. I started fantasizing about how I might make my own charity, or fantasizing that I might volunteer to work in the kitchen there making the food. It was a powerful urge to make my own charity, to do something for others.
The guy I was sitting with told me that there was a place you could eat for free, food donated by a church, and years ago, he remembered an incident where a couple of buses filled with medical students from the college had stopped there and gone in there to eat for free, all at once. That’s right, it’s the medical students who are going and getting free food donated by the church. I laughed and did a facepalm when he told me this and said ‘oh no!’ WE ARE ENTITLED. SERVE US.
I did gain something by talking to these people, these Beta STs. It’s a way of pseudo-dualizing, kind of. They, too, use the Ne function, as a weak function, but they use it nevertheless and it contains useful information, just as my own weak functions may contain useful information that other people can extract from me and use. The information might not be updated as fast, or might not be as nuanced. But I can get information about ‘opportunities that exist’ from these Beta STs. And that is what I did. I learned that there is this, or that, opportunity here and there around town, places to get free food, charities that exist.
When you converse with these people, your subconscious functions are being triggered. I see it all in terms of Model B. You actually feel a sort of attraction to your quasi-identicals and extinguishers, because they are triggering your vital functions, the subconscious functions, even if they are doing it in a weak way for your dualizing functions. You still will struggle to get some kind of ‘nourishment’ from them, albeit weak and unsatisfying nourishment. Surely, those Beta STs notice every time I do my weak expressions of Fe, or my use of Ni where I complain that surely something will go badly wrong if somebody does this and gets into that scenario. I call this pseudodualizing, which is something we do when we are starving to death for our duals and not finding them. You can also pseudodualize with your 1. business relations, 2. supervisor, 3. supervisee, 4. kindred. All of those are viewed as ‘forbidden’ or ‘unlikely’ relations according to the traditional Model A, but I use Model B, and I also base it on experience – I am drawn more strongly to
supervisors/-ees than I am to the ones that I’m ‘supposed’ to be attracted to, the benefactors/-ficiaries. I am drawn more strongly to kindred and business than I am to the illusionaries and semiduals.
You can have a *verbal* relationship, which can be fairly satisfying at the intellectual level, with illusionaries, benefactors/-ees, and semiduals. Verbal relationships are enjoyable and worthwhile. You get to talk about a lot of stuff. But your passionate feelings aren’t being triggered, you aren’t being motivated in the way that you are if you have your subconscious vital functions being triggered. At my workplaces, I always formed very good friendships with the ILIs, my business relations, allegedly a ‘bad’ relation that hardly ever would happen – but it does happen, all the time, and for me Model B explains why.
I also was always attracted, all my life, to kindreds and
supervisors/-ees, the Gamma NTs and Alpha SFs. I loved John Denver, surely an SEI from the Alpha Quadra. I dearly loved him so much (and I’m remembering it because I watched him on youtube the other day). I love my SEI coworkers, and we feel a ‘desert island attraction,’ as in, if all else fails, I could form a relationship with this person, a sexual relationship, and it might not be ideal, but it really wouldn’t be too bad either, and I have the same feeling with business relations, the ILIs, who are attractive and yet not completely what I want, but on the desert island, it wouldn’t be too awful and we could make it work.
I seek out supervisors and supervisees, and then, with a lot of effort, I form some kind of friendly relationship with them, which varies depending on their gender – if they are male, it is a bit easier to admit that we are attracted to each other, but if they are female, and worse, if they are in a position of power and are also a supervisor, it can be bad (I frequently encounter female ESEs who are managers in the workplaces).
I remember finding a female LIE at McDonald’s, and I paid careful attention to her and tried to ‘guard’ her against the attacks from the male SLIs, who all seemed to simultaneously kind of like her a little bit, but also to be very annoyed with her and exasperated with her all the time, and they were often cruel to her, treating her like she was stupid. I knew what she was, I knew why this was happening, I understood socionics, and so I made a conscious effort to be nice to her, to try to treat her with respect, instead of just assuming she was stupid and incompetent.
They had complaints that were legitimate grievances – she took too long to do stuff, she bossed people around instead of doing it herself, she had to run to the bathroom because she had digestive problems, and her trips to the bathroom always took a long time – I myself could troubleshoot her digestive problems if only I had the authority to do so, but I did not, and so I did not go advising her about what was causing her to have this problem. It has something to do with her baked goods. She was baking cookies and bringing them in and sharing them, and whenever I ate them, I myself seemed to have unusual bowel movements. I do not know which specific ingredients were at fault, but I could say that in general it probably had something to do with her baked goods.
It’s just that I was aware of socionics, I figured out her type, I could see those male SLIs supervising her in a harsh and cruel way, I knew exactly what was going on, and I made a conscious effort to, at the very least, try to avoid being outright cruel to her the way they were. She and I got along well when we worked together, perhaps too well, because people would yell at us for wasting too much time having conversations with each other instead of working. We would talk to each other, and not care that the screen was filling up and it was taking too long to make the food.
When you are talking to someone, it doesn’t matter that you’re running a business, making money, serving hundreds of customers as fast as you can, because… relationships matter. Conversations matter. Getting to know people matters. We really are not supposed to be living this way. We are supposed to be living a more laid back life, with less hurry, less pressure, less money, less competition. We are supposed to enjoy each other’s company and have conversations and get to know each other. And so, I myself will temporarily ignore the real world and its threats and its pressure, and I will focus my attention on her and our conversation.
There is a feeling of strain and anxiety, mixed with attraction, in those supervision relations. It is because of the inequality, the asymmetry of the functions, which Rick explained to me in an email eons ago, which I will not bother to explain, since this blog isn’t really about socionics, and others can explain it better, and I’m too lazy, and I would feel better if I could draw a diagram.
My relation with this girl wasn’t always perfect. One time she told me that I was cooking the bacon wrong. I wasn’t supposed to do it that way, I was supposed to do it this way. I got irritated and I stubbornly refused to do it the way she told me, and I continued doing it my way. That probably made her distrust me and hurt her. It’s the little things like that, which you sometimes are aware of, and other times are unaware of, that cause the strain in supervision relations. You actually *like* this person, which makes it hurt all the more.
So I call these things ‘Desert Island Socionics’ and
‘Pseudodualizing.’ You can get those crumbs of duality from the ‘wrong’ types, but it’s a struggle and a strain that doesn’t really satisfy you. You can do it, and it will keep you from starving.
The benefactor relations are asymmetrical too. You have this feeling of ‘YOU’RE AWESOME! EVERYTHING YOU DO AND SAY IS AWESOME!’ at the same time as ‘YOU’RE SCARY! YOU MUST BE JUDGING ME! EVERYTHING I DO IS PATHETIC COMPARED TO YOU!’ It’s a verbal relation where you are kind of an apprentice to the other person, learning something from them.
I found a young girl at McDonald’s who I suspected was an LII, my benefactor, a very unusual type to be working at McDonald’s. The male ESE was all over her and loved her from the first instant that he met her. I found her to be mysterious and interesting, somehow, quiet and brilliant, yet scary. She sort of understood me, and seemed a bit scared of me, and also scary to me. I did feel inferior, even though she was just a tiny young girl a lot younger than me. She had nothing to teach me, really, she wasn’t a genius, she wasn’t a scientist, she was just a much younger female McDonald’s employee, clueless and incompetent, inexperienced, and yet, she was mysteriously intimidating to me in spite of all those things. When she talked, no matter what she said, no matter what she observed, whatever insights she had always seemed to be just a little bit smarter and more insightful than my own. And yet she was also stupid in ways that were obvious to me, but I didn’t want to criticize her about those things.
Ah yes, Buddhism and Marxism. I wandered off the tangent. I was thinking, I’ve been reading Marxism as a religion. Like Buddhism, it explains why there is so much suffering in the world. The explanation has to be palatable and believable and satisfying to you. We are suffering because this whole capitalistic system is all based on the theft of our land, and we all used to be happier back in the days when we were subsistence peasant farmers working for ourselves directly, and perhaps paying a small but reasonable tax to the feudal lords above us. The explanation for ‘why is there so much suffering in the world?’ must be something that resonates with us, with our own feelings and values and way of seeing things. For the libertarian and objectivist, ‘Why is there so much suffering in the world?’ results in ‘Because of too much government intervention,’ and they do have valid arguments to back this up, which is why I went with them for all these years. People in every religion are asking that question – why is there so much inequality, why is one innocent person born into a horrible family, while an ungrateful asshole that everyone hates is born into a wealthy family and never experiences the slightest obstacle or discomfort for his entire life? How can this be a fair and just world? Why does God allow such things? Every religion asks this question. How can it be fair? Why am I suffering? Why doesn’t anyone give a fuck?
Believe it or not, going to the church dinner last night made me feel better. I did feel that there were some options out there, that there were charities who were trying to feed people. I actually became more convinced of the libertarian argument that if only we would *let* them, the charities would be doing a whole lot more than they are doing right now. I brought home a loaf of seeded rye bread for free, even though, ideally, I probably do not want bread in my diet, but for now, okay.
I also rode my bike out to the office where you apply for food stamps. I brought home an application and started looking at it.
This is where I am being brainwashed into an entitlement attitude by ‘them,’ and yet, I sort of feel like this is the right moment, like I am ready for this now, like I am secure enough that this isn’t going to hurt me or destroy my life. I feel like it is going to be ‘safe’ for me to try to get money from the government.
However, I still have some anxieties. My mom has been paying my rent, and I am going to have to list that as some form of income that I’m getting.
Also, if I want to get the ‘jackpot,’ which is, just being paid to live and not have to work, and get welfare and food stamps and the whole prize, and disability payments, then I will have to talk about ‘medical conditions,’ and if you talk about ‘medical conditions’ at all, that leads to being ‘treated by a doctor,’ which means, I *will* be harmed. The best way to stay safe is to avoid all doctors for as long as possible.
In order to get ‘the jackpot,’ chances are, I probably will have to say, ‘Okay, I have schizophrenia, and so I’m taking prescription drugs to treat my condition, and I have to take those drugs in order to receive my disability payments, to prove to them that I’m trying to help myself, trying to treat my condition, not leaving anything untreated when there are treatments available, not just taking money for the heck of it while doing nothing to treat my condition, I’m really making a sincere effort to solve my problems, which can only be solved by means of prescription medications, so you’ll give me these disability payments if I take my meds as prescribed by a doctor.’
The only way that I could do that would be to go out and get the prescription meds, for free, I assume, and take the bottle home and dump it down the toilet, and thoroughly wash my hands and any objects that I touched, because transdermal drug residue contamination is on the outside of the bottle of pills. I’m NOT… JOKING. That is what would be necessary for me to comply with the requirement that I ‘treat my conditions’ and ‘leave no condition untreated’ while receiving government aid for my disability. Will they mind if I wear a pair of disposable gloves while I’m picking up my prescription at the pharmacy? I can say I have a germ phobia, ha ha, the very opposite of the truth, but an LSI pharmacist will find that to be socially acceptable, because his beloved Beta NFs all have irrational germ phobias and are inclined to do such things as walk around with gloves on their hands to avoid the germs.
Beta NFs handle things like chemical sensitivity differently than I do. They, too, suffer from chemical sensitivity, but they are more likely to make a loud and noisy complaint about it to stop people from wearing offensive perfumes, etc, whereas I myself will silently tolerate the foul odors and foul perfumes and other things triggering my chemical sensitivities, knowing the limits of what my body can handle and knowing that this particular whiff of perfume isn’t going to kill me this time.
A Beta NF might discover that washing their hands frequently somehow mysteriously reduces anxiety, without ever realizing that sometimes, in some situations, there really is a transdermal contamination (not merely ‘germs’) that needs to be washed off. They will wash obsessively to avoid ‘germs,’ and then somebody will tell them that they have obsessive compulsive disorder, and they will always believe that authority figure who tells it to them, and they will conclude forever afterwards that anybody and everybody who has to wash their hands and avoid touching certain objects is always, necessarily obsessive-compulsive and is suffering from a neurosis, not realizing that there are situations in which this behavior is totally
appropriate, due to their weakness of sensing and weakness of logic.
I’m thinking of angry discussions I’ve had in socionics forums in the past when I tried to explain to people that I was suffering from mania caused by transdermal drug residues, and it was just *not possible* to convince them that one individual person, by themselves, without the help of a team of scientists at a government-funded scientific institution, was capable of using their own individual senses to observe a physical sensation and physical symptoms in their own body and draw correct, accurate, logical conclusions about cause and effect, on their own, without the aid of an authority figure or a team of scientists. I’m remembering those arguments. I’m remembering how frustrating it was to always get this knee-jerk reflex response of ‘Shouldn’t you be getting treatment?’ And not just from conflictors, but from people who typed themselves as duals and activators in my own quadra as well. I’m remembering the battles and the fiascoes from back during the mania time. I know what not to do. I know I will never take any drugs that they prescribe for me.
So, will I be willing to do what I have to do to win the jackpot? Infinite free money, if only I pretend that I have a treatable illness which is being treated by my obediently and compliantly picking up this prescription drug bottle and taking out a pill and swallowing it, and NOT throwing the pills down the toilet where they belong?
The answer is, I don’t know. I am not sure how hard I am going to try to win the jackpot this time. I *am* becoming more and more convinced of the wrongness of work, which is why I’m reading Marxism, that nice, soothing religion which explains why we have so much suffering in the world and why I hate my job so much.
And there is a real threat, a real and permanent danger:
osteoporosis. My knees and hips are bad. If I let this problem continue, while I keep working myself to death, running around vigorously at high speed, riding my bike around, taking a million caffeine pills and cups of coffee every day so I can drag my exhausted body out of bed, ignoring the pain – I can ignore the pain of arthritic hips and knees when I take lots and lots of caffeine. The pain is numbed down to a very low level, and I can ignore it, and keep on walking, keep on standing, keep running, keep moving, keep doing my slave labor, run around, run around, run back and forth to the french fry vats, to the cash window, to the kitchen to make the burgers, during a football game, and get paid only just above minimum wage to completely destroy my body and all of my joints, for a few more DECADES, until I am so old that I cannot walk, and I must get knee replacement surgery – knee replacement surgery, and hip replacement surgery, the worst and most dreadful fate that can befall a person. You can’t walk anymore. You are totally dependent, like a foot-bound female Chinese slave, like a declawed cat. You need a wheelchair, or an exoskeleton (and, no joke, I’ve wanted to invent a cheap bamboo exoskeleton to help people with eroded knee and hip joints who can no longer walk). It’s permanent bone loss, like tooth cavities. You permanent lose bone, which wears away and never grows back. It happens if you are eating any foods and drugs that cause osteoporosis, and if you don’t get enough nutrients like the RIGHT KIND of vitamin D and vitamin K and other things. It happens if you eat nightshade vegetables, which cause calcium to deposit in the soft tissues where it doesn’t belong, causing arthritis and wearing of the joints.
My hips and knees have been much worse since I started riding a bike around everywhere and walking up and down the mountain every day – that’s when it started, when I lived on Mt. Nittany. Riding a bike is making it worse. Working at an extremely energetic and stressful job, at an understaffed McDonald’s during a football game, is making it worse. I cannot, and should not, run around vigorously at high speeds anymore. I cannot and should not do this every day. It would not be so bad for me to wander slowly through my little farmer’s field on my little plot of land, reaping the grain (or whatever starchy vegetables I chose to eat on my grain-free diet), at my own pace, without someone behind me cracking a whip and shouting at me to hurry because we have a long line of people out the door who are all waiting to be served food RIGHT NOW.
A few decades from now, I will have such horribly damaged hips and knees that, like many other victims of modern society, I will have to consider getting hip and knee replacements. And that is the sure path to hell. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. You get to where you just can’t walk at all, but if you get a hip or knee replacement, then you will constantly be poisoned by an extremely toxic implanted object – and after my plastic dental fillings, I know that *NOTHING*, *NOTHING* that they implant in your body will EVER be a ‘safe, nontoxic’ substance. NEVER. I don’t care what it’s made of, I don’t care if somebody reassures me that it’s a safe nontoxic material, I don’t care if an entire team of scientists personally knocks on my door and informs me that this substance is perfectly safe to implant inside my body. IT… IS… NOT… SAFE. All implanted objects, regardless of the material, cause chronic poisoning. Not only are they poisonous, they also are disgusting and painful. If you actually see an x-ray showing you where this hip replacement is going, it’s the most disgusting and horrific thing that you can possibly imagine. They basically stab this big metal thing down into your bone, and then all your weight has to be supported on top of that. It is the most horrible sensation imaginable. It causes further damage which cannot be undone. Once you’ve done it, it’s over. There is no hope of taking it out and changing your mind.
I do not want to ever get any hip replacements or knee replacements. I would rather do something now, to treat my hips and knees and legs more gently, to eat a nutritious diet that doesn’t cause osteoporosis, to avoid drugs and chemicals including caffeine, to avoid toxic pollution in the house, to do whatever is in my power to protect my body now and minimize the damage which has already been done. I’m already damaged, but I can stop making it worse and worse and worse so quickly.
It’s that kind of thing which is in the back of my mind when I say that I don’t want to work anymore. I’m really damaging my body, and I’m starting to feel it. I’m 40 years old now. This is when osteoporosis really starts to kick in. I can see that the texture of my skin has changed, too. I have ‘old skin texture’ now. There are these fine lines and wrinkles. If I scratch an itch on my face too vigorously with my fingernails, I feel like I will rip the skin more easily than before. I am malnourished and am not getting any sunlight in this dark little house. I use tons and tons of caffeine. I cannot do a decon and cannot troubleshoot my chronic fatigue syndrome, and ran out of money so I cannot experiment with any of the other things that I was going to try. So, this is in my mind now when I say, very seriously, that I want to stop working now. I don’t want to go 20 more years doing what I’m doing.
I also talked to Mary Jo, my landlady, who has the same thing. She has horrible arthritis and deformed, twisted toes. She has such horrible knee arthritis and hip arthritis that she cannot bend down or move into certain positions. She is older than I am. She’s still working very hard, although she told me last night that she’ll slow down when her daughter finishes college, as she’s been helping to pay for the college. But that is our society! You slave away, killing your body forever, so that your daughter can go to a ridiculously hugely overpriced American college which will do nothing but brainwash her to continue the status quo working in some kind of high paying ‘profession.’ Mary Jo is considering knee surgery, and the other day, she fell on the ice while visiting her sister, and hurt herself pretty badly, compressing at least one of her knees when she fell. Now she’s continuing to work.
(Note, the libertarian within is kindly pointing out that the reason why our colleges are overpriced is because the government has mandated that somebody somewhere must supply college loans to anybody and everybody who asks for them, and the colleges have responded by saying, ‘Hey! Wow! Gravy train! Let’s raise our prices higher and higher and higher and higher, because government’s paying the bill! Let’s make huge, fancy, new, gigantic, multibillion-dollar fancy architectural masterpieces at Penn State!’ when all that we actually need is a tiny little box-shaped cottage in which the students will sit at desks listening to a lecturer, when they ought to just be reading the books themselves without a teacher even being necessary.)
It’s just my emotions, my growing cynicism, my bitterness, my growing awareness that I am permanently destroying my body and will either end up in a wheelchair, or have to get knee and hip replacement surgery like so many other people. My feelings are telling me that I’ve just had enough of this and don’t want to do this anymore.
It already started happening during those ridiculously understaffed football games, when we had a skeleton crew at McDonald’s, me and the other dear SLI, Eric, who became a manager. Dear Eric had to handle this horrific experience in a position of responsibility, and had to be blamed for it all, and no one cared, because a SLI will not complain. A SLI won’t complain! Even when it is so, so, so, so appropriate to complain!
This is a time when a mean old nasty capitalist is taking advantage of a meek little helpless victim who’s too timid to complain! This is it! This is what they were talking about! I had it happen to me! It was worst when I saw my dear Eric the SLI manager and one of my absolute favorite people at McDonald’s, suffering during these football games with his skeleton crew running around like crazy serving thousands of people. I could see it most clearly when I saw it on him. Not in myself, but on him. When *he* suffered, suddenly it mattered. It was unfair, it was wrong. He is just a young guy and a sweet person who I always loved. They were making him suffer and piling it all up on him, and he felt that he could not complain, and felt unable to go seek anything better for himself. He does not know how to just tell them to fuck themselves and walk out the door and go get something better.
And he, too, loves all the people there and doesn’t like to cut off all those relationships. We all bonded with each other and it was painful to leave the people behind. People don’t like to leave! And the mean old nasty capitalists were taking advantage of this very thing, and not giving a fuck, and I saw it with my own eyes, and felt it, and I was angry. And I began writing nasty notes and leaving them on the managers’ desks, saying that everyone who worked this evening needs a VERY LARGE SUBSTANTIAL BONUS on their paychecks. I think they might possibly have given me a slight raise as a result of this complaining, because later on, I noticed that I was making $8.99 an hour, when I didn’t remember how much I had been making before – a trivial little concession if it was anything.
Then I heard other people talking about the maximum pay rate that supposedly we could not go higher than, but the one girl said that she herself had been making that maximum rate when she was just a crew person, before she became a manager, and I thought to myself, ‘Wait – you were a CREW PERSON, and you were making the MAXIMUM RATE, and I didn’t even know?’ I forget what the amount was, but the point was, it made me realize, I could be making A LOT MORE than I was making, but I didn’t get that money because I was a timid, submissive person who never complained, who was willing to KILL MY BODY every single day for decades, and not speak a word of complaint to anyone. THAT’S CAPITALISM!
(Since then, I’ve heard stories about jobs where you’re simply not allowed to discuss how much anybody is being paid, because if you do, it will be obvious that some people are getting paid a lot more to do exactly the same, or LESS work than you do. Maybe that’s what they talked about on the State of the Union and the chat afterwards – I think it was the chat. I actually listened to Obama giving the State of the Union. I was able to listen almost all the way through!)
That’s capitalism. That’s the bad kind. That’s what everybody was talking about. That’s what all these people were complaining about all this time, when I brushed them off, thinking to myself that nobody was forcing me to work there and I could leave any time I wanted to – except I am a mind control victim, I cannot focus enough to muster up the will to do anything, and what about my fellow sufferers – are they able to leave? Do they?
Eric had a college education in criminal justice or something like that, and he tried once or twice to get a job at a jail, a government job, highly sought after, with so much competition that there was just no chance. Can someone go to college and know exactly what career they want to be doing, and know exactly which careers they will be able to do, which career they can *stand* to do, and not hate it every day of their life, and also be able to quickly and easily run out there and find a job which is guaranteed which you get instantly as soon as you apply, and if you don’t get it, then you never give up, and you keep trying and trying, applying to job after job until you get it?
Did Eric do that? Did anyone want him to? No one wanted Eric to leave during the brief time when he left us. I don’t remember why he left – he tried to go somewhere and get a job elsewhere, but he came back eventually, and we were all so happy to see him.
I’m going to try to finish this up. A summary: yes, Marxism is a soothing religion that explains why we are suffering. Libertarianism says, it’s because of too much bad government that we are suffering. But sometimes, that explanation is incomplete. I couldn’t see how, directly, the government was causing these corporations to do the stupid stuff they were doing. Maybe the effects are roundabout and indirect – there are grains of truth in that. I know the entire system is distorted by the fact that we have this banking system and all these laws and regulations, and that the world would be a very different place if those things were not there.
However, the Marxist explanation seemed simpler and easier to understand, in some ways, at least the historical part that I am reading now. It supports my growing belief that land ownership is somehow the root of our suffering. There are some categories of other people who oppose land ownership – they might call themselves some kind of anarcho-capitalist, and stuff like that, and maybe I will read them sometime, but for now, it was Marxism. And sometimes it’s just simpler and easier to say, ‘Those greedy capitalists are taking advantage of their workers who are too timid to protest!’ rather than, ‘Those capitalists are doing the best they can just to stay in business and keep their heads above water when the competition is so aggressive and the laws and regulations are so expensive.’
I just couldn’t buy that explanation anymore, not after reading about the extremely huge salaries of the highest level employees at big corporations, or maybe the board of directors too (I don’t know how that works, who pays them?). It just seems to me that *lowering those huge salaries* is one possible option too, besides just keeping the lowest people at the bottom at the lowest possible wage, without making the slightest effort to improve their working conditions, hire more people, let people work overtime and get the time-and-a-half overtime pay so they are at least getting a partial, temporary raise and not having to work two jobs – unthinkable!
No matter how bad it gets, we will NEITHER hire more people, NOR will we allow anybody to work overtime! The remaining two or three people in the building are expected to do all that work, while we’re shooting ourselves in the foot because if only we had MORE PEOPLE WORKING those football game nights, we’d be able to serve MORE CUSTOMERS and make MORE PROFITS!!! DUHH!!!
The stupid insanity of this whole situation, the fact that the big corporation was totally disconnected from reality, had no idea what was going on and DID NOT CARE, that was what made me start to realize that this was ‘capitalism’ at work. The bad kind. There was more to this than just too much pressure from the regulations, or too much economic distortion as a result of the paper money banking system.
Here’s the other thing that I have to explain, but this is subtle, and I might not be able to describe it, and I was trying to finish this up. Bear with me while I try to get this idea out there.
Capitalism is good, until somebody starts screwing up. Then capitalism is bad. In theory, capitalism is supposed to allow a business to fail. That’s part of capitalism. Sometimes one business will out-compete another. That’s supposed to be normal.
So I’m supposed to say that McDonald’s sucking is just another normal day in the world of capitalism. I’m supposed to say, this is merely another business in the process of failing. Another day, another business failure, that’s capitalism. Don’t cry when it’s your turn to fail.
If we were succeeding, if we were super-profitable and everybody was making tons and tons of money, including the lowest employees, capitalism is good. We wouldn’t care so much that there was a huge difference between the wages of the lowest and the highest people. We wouldn’t pay so much attention to the injustice of paying those upper level managers a million dollar salary.
But when they start making ridiculously bad business decisions, shooting themselves in the foot, not hiring enough people, not being able to keep any employees, not paying people enough, not letting anyone work a single hour of overtime regardless of the situation and regardless of how desperately we need people during football games, regardless of the fact that we are UNABLE TO SERVE CUSTOMERS due to not having enough employees there, while two or three people run around back and forth to every station to do everything at every step of the process, and how we’re losing profits because of that but WHO CARES WE MUST NOT EVER ALLOW ANYONE TO WORK A SINGLE HOUR OF OVERTIME! NEVER!
And there were other bad business decisions that led up to this, which made me more receptive to the idea that ‘Capitalism Doesn’t Guarantee Success.’ That’s what I’m getting at. There was that little thing of the cash register system – remember that? Our horrifically bad cash register system, which, once again, although I am not a computer programmer, I feel absolutely certain that I could program that cash register ALL BY MYSELF without even having a team of helpers, and do a better job than they did? I’ve only dabbled in programming but I know enough to imagine that I could do it if I tried.
And then there was the rebuilding of the store. Once again, WHY, GOD, WHY? WHY MUST THIS HAPPEN? Did a government regulation somehow cause them to make horrifically, appallingly bad decisions with regard to how the new store would be designed, and the equipment that would fill it up, and every detail of it, and how the customers would react to it?
Capitalism – the very same. Perhaps capitalism gave us the greatness, but it also gave us the awfulness. It gave us the miserable failure. That’s what I’m trying to say. The libertarian brainwashing inside of me has this belief, this interpretation: if things are going well, capitalism is the reason; if things are going badly, government intervention is the reason. Capitalism can never be the reason why things are going badly. Government intervention can never be the reason why things are going well. You’re not allowed to say that capitalism was the cause of misery and suffering at some moment in time, and you’re also not allowed to say that government intervention was a helpful force that fixed a problem or made things better at some particular moment in time. Brainwashing!
I started to undo this brainwashing somehow. Capitalism gave us greatness? Well, it also gave us this horrific fiasco at McDonald’s. The dark side of capitalism, capitalism in the process of failure, capitalism, in the floundering of a sick, dying business. Capitalism, the very same force that gave us the greatness and the profit before. Capitalism allows a business to fail? Well, this is failing, right now. This is it. This is capitalism. Capitalism has two sides. It has huge wealth and success and joy and prosperity and winning and being on top. And it has failure, and collapsing and dying, and going under, and bankruptcy. It’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt. I’ve looked at life from both sides now, from win and lose, and so on. Everyone loves war and the army until you get deployed to Afghanistan and an IED goes off at random while you’re driving your car down the road, and suddenly, war is bad! It’s all the same thing!
So maybe I am trying to say, capitalism gives us this huge, glorious high, but it also gives us this horrible crashing failure. We can’t all succeed all of the time. Perhaps I would rather be a subsistence farmer and a peasant, making a living, not being super-wealthy, but at least I have stability and peace.
That’s just one way of looking at it. I’m trying to explain, trying to understand, trying to interpret what is happening in my life and in the world, and I need some explanation. Maybe my explanations will change.
I’m aware of the official libertarian explanation, which is that, overall, capitalism as a whole is better than the alternatives. I wouldn’t really disagree with that, either. But I’m not sure. I’m really not sure now. I’ve read that people in the Soviet Union actually were happier when they were allocated their little plots of land to live on, and now that they have been ‘set free,’ they are less happy. So, I’m not sure. There are so many people desiring to start intentional communities, desiring to have chickens in their backyards but not being allowed to because of the zoning laws, so many people who want to go back to being farmers and having control over their own food supply instead of having to buy food at the grocery store – this movement is so popular that it says something. If it’s so hard to buy land, and pay the enormous price of it, and the enormous taxes on it, even knowing that the banking system is the root cause of the price distortions of real estate, even so – should people really have to buy land in the first place? Should they have to buy it at all? And yet, so many people desperately want to become subsistence farmers. People are BEGGING to become subsistence farmers.
I remember reading in history class that, as soon as the glorious factories were invented, people voluntarily chose to leave their subsistence farms and go to the city looking for opportunities, because life in the city was so much better, and they could make so much more money working in a factory. But now, reading Marx, I’m finding out that that’s not how it was. These people were FORCED OFF THEIR LAND, which resulted in their going to the cities because they HAD TO SURVIVE. They didn’t go jump into the factories because the factories were awesome and because they would have a better life there! My history books told me that’s what happened! The history classes told me that people WANTED to go work in the factories because they would have a ‘better life’ there.
But Marx is telling me that people were violently forced off their peasant farms, and ended up wandering the world with no place to go, and ended up in the factories working as miserable slaves, just so they could feed themselves, since they no longer had a farm to live on. I am telling you, my history books told it that way: people happily, joyfully, excitedly joining the factories because of all the money they could make and how much of a better opportunity it was for them – NOT A WORD about anybody forcing people off the land – or if they DID tell us, they glossed it over really quickly and emphasized that, for the most part, it was Glorious Capitalism that they were seeking when they went to work in the factories. Sure, okay, maybe a peasant or two was forced off their land but GLORIOUS CAPITALISM!!!
So, once again, very interesting to read a perspective which is actively hostile to capitalism itself. A whole different religion. Telling me it’s okay to hate work, to hate being a slave, telling me that it shouldn’t be this way, that it wasn’t always this way, that maybe this isn’t the best of all possible worlds.
I don’t know yet, and I don’t know what I will do, or where I will take this. Surely, Marxism won’t be my final answer – I’m sure that intentional communities will be a better solution for me. I have no control over what the government does, and if I suggest to them, ‘Hey, guys, why don’t you mandate that every human being in the USA be officially given a chunk of land to live on for free?’ I doubt that they will just run right out and implement that idea this very instant. I might have to wait a while for that. So, for now, intentional communities are the only way to build the world we want.
Enough… I need to do something else besides sit here blogging. Hours and hours of blogging. What is life without blogging? I wonder what that would be like.
Retmeishka 