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Tag: community

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    utopia: no psychoanalysis

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    1–2 minutes

    Todd McGowan argues that psychoanalysis opposes utopia (the good or perfect place), as an ideal society would eliminate the central antagonism between individual and society, rendering therapy unnecessary as we would be untroubled.

    Yet, many attempt to “therapize” society into a utopia. By normalizing discontent (shifting perspective to become comfortable with your distance from a good place), we foster empathy and wisdom, seeking a communal collective that labors to tolerate dysfunction.

    However, the structural, historical inversion of “the good place” reasserts itself: materialist corruption perpetuates alienation (Marx), ensuring psychoanalysis remains essential for populace pacification.

    In short, therapy cannot create utopia—only structural transformation can eliminate the need for therapy.

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    Hitchcock’s Psycho: the ego

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    1–2 minutes

    Slavoj Zizek offers a metaphorical example of the superego, ego, and id through Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece Psycho, with the character Norman Bates.

    In a Freudian psychoanalytic interpretation, Norman Bates, as the ego, is bombarded by the superego authoritarian mother who commands and belittles from above. From the basement, Bates’s id of primal desire also cries out to him.

    Split between the dueling demands, he snaps and moves his mother (now a mummified corpse, an apt metaphor for uptight restriction) from the “thou shall obey” attic of the superego to the “thou shall indulge” of the cellar.

    When the strain between the won’t and the will becomes too strong, the character’s subservience (to the superego) falls into obeisance (to the id), causing a downward collapse of the ego.

    The point is: If I am made ridiculous (by superego), I have nothing left to lose, and I will at least take glee in making my folly my own: I will take pleasure in my perversion and embarrassment.

    (from "Pervert’s guide to cinema")
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    Middle Class

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    1–2 minutes

    The squeeze is on: the egalitarian equality we seek is the dwindling middle class.

    The conservative elite wealthy do not want their autonomy and voting to jeopardize their wealth expansion, while the progressive socialist poor do not want the middle class’s self-reliance to jeopardize state subsidies.

    Choked from both sides: fiscally and socially, the middle dissipates as everything moves to extremes.

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    “I’m fine”

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    1–2 minutes

    “How are you doing?” ~ “Fine.”

    Most greetings are symbolic exchanges: a social nicety, a nod to politeness, in no way meant to be answered as a genuine inquiry. They start an interaction and establish a minimum harmony between people.

    As an aside, the correct response, “I’m well,” instantly reveals an exhausting pedant, thrilled with a minor win and unaware of the larger loss.

    More interestingly, the phrase operates on multiple implexed levels:

    1. First, for the exchange to move forward, we pretend “fine” with an acknowledgment of the querier’s illusion of care, a pastiche nicety without genuine concern. It is a passcode, sussing out those who cannot react appropriately, which is to say, in the trained way.
    2. Second, it is somewhat true that we are “fine” if we function in society.
    3. Finally, we are never “fine” on a darker level because society inherently perturbs comfort and familiarity with the symbolic guise, the artificial interaction as a necessity to functionality.

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    No one wants to work

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    1–2 minutes

    “No one wants to work anymore.”

    Most people don’t mind work if it gets you somewhere: in physics, “work” is force multiplied by distance. That is to say, it is no longer “work” when apply effort and can’t move.

    More accurately, “no one wants to be stuck anymore.”

    This illuminates a core cynicism beyond hard luck: people no longer trust meritocratic truisms and consider the game rigged. Work will not save you, it is a suckers game.

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    Belief as community

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    1–2 minutes

    To say “I believe” is to say “I am part of a community of believers.” That is, “we believe.”

    It is not an individual thing to believe.

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    Proselytizing: Faith or Force?

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    1–2 minutes

    If you truly believe, do you attempt to convert others? Do you proselytize your truth?

    If truth is self-evident, there is no need: Your faith (your truth) will succeed on merit.

    However, if there is a kernel of doubt in your faith, you must overcompensate both in the number of people and their fervency. Only zealotry and sycophancy can quell the occasional contradiction and squeamish dissenters. Your faith will succeed on tyranny.

    Naturally, this simplification highlights the success of bad ideas and the failure of good ideas, but more importantly, is to consider the idea itself shifts over time to a new set of values carrying the faith but weaponizing it and deteriorating the founding principles.

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    moral panic: luxury morals

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    1–2 minutes

    Today’s discourse is typically moral panic, with a pinch of cherry-picked reality to support our side.

    The right perceives certain groups and individuals as destabilizing and prioritizes protection, whereas the left criticizes a lack of empathy and emphasizes ethical progress. Both claim righteousness while selectively aggrandizing, an option only available on the back of established, robust infrastructures built by earlier sacrifices. (Morality over reality, luxury morals).

    This mirrors historical cycles of societal introspection vs. external threats and should challenge us to reconsider the historically failed first-world perspective as gluttonously myopic. But we won’t until it serves us.

    (a nod to Rob Henderson’s “Luxury Beliefs”)

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    Resilience: brainwashing as stability

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    1–2 minutes

    Resilience is an often touted word: the ability to withstand fluctuations and hardship.
    But there is a version of resilience taught in FBI circles: resilience to extremism, which is programmed resilience to being programmed. Brainwashing to prevent brainwashing.

    Your resilience is also your ability to close your mind or at least to prevent ideas from dislocating ideas.

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    the communal self disrupted by capitalism

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    1–2 minutes

    The competitive nature of the capitalist economic struggle, while it produces progress in products and raises the overall quality of life, also converts humans into individuated consumers, themselves produced and desires manipulated.

    To know yourself as an individual (sovereign, autonomous) is to not know yourself as part of a community with reliant ties. You cease to know yourself as we once did, as a piece of a whole in which your identity is integral and there is no desire to differentiate or stive out of it.