Belly Button Lint

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Tag: fear

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    Great Art Must Be Hated

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    1–2 minutes

    Any great art stirs emotions and provokes a reaction because it goes where others have not dared to tread: it is not neutral.

    Novelty alone does not account for great art, but the revelation of something beyond current acceptance and understanding.

    To create something not hated (emotionally neutral) is to put forth a bland platitude of comfort, to placate consensus with style. To invoke passion or sublimity, one must introduce tension and fear.

    Hatred, then, is not failure but a sign of impact. Art that dares to matter must be brave enough to offend.

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    Leverage as a dance

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    1–2 minutes

    As we should remember, leverage is about applying effort at a critical point, not spread out to the trivial.

    Applying pressure in the wrong way, the wrong spot, or at the wrong time will step on toes and trip you up.

    The problem we encounter is being wrong-footed (ill-positioned) or out of step (ill-timed), because we are not tactical (elegantly specific), but stumbling and stomping, anxiously and constantly gyrating.

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    Everyone is Stupid

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    1–2 minutes

    Everyone I talk to agrees on one thing: everyone else is stupid.
    If you agree, a bond can be formed; if you disagree, you are dumb… or more likely argumentative, which reveals your idiocy.

    This is not about smartness; it is a prod for social cohesion.

    “Smart” is really about acceptance, which reveals our deepest fear and prejudice: to be seen as unintelligent.

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    The Invisible Hand of Power

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    1–2 minutes

    The greatest privilege of power is being able to overlook that you are even using it.

    ~ Adrian Tchaikovsky

    Power’s subtlest privilege is its invisibility to those who wield it. As Adrian Tchaikovsky notes, the powerful need not acknowledge their influence—it simply operates, unchecked. Intellectual dominance masquerades as brilliance; rhetorical flourishes silence dissent.

    Subordinates, outmatched and dependent, feign agreement not from conviction but survival. The powerful, unchallenged, conflate fear with admiration, mistaking submission for validation. This unchecked authority breeds delusion: the belief that one is always right, never merely unopposed.

    True power is not shown in coercion, but in the illusion that no power was used.

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    No identity without Desire

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    1–2 minutes

    When your desires are denied, you are no longer yourself, which causes anxiety (to lose yourself.)

    We identify with our desires. To be without desire is to be no one or nothing: unrecognizable, unrelatable, “lost.”

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    The Power of Uncertainty

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    1–2 minutes

    Operant conditioning seems to deny "free will" if we can be programmed to react, to attain rewards or avoid pain. And yet, variable interval reinforcement reveals a more profound truth: consistent rewards bore us; unpredictability excites us.

    Sports, gambling, and social pursuits thrive on uncertain outcomes. In relationships, inconsistency heightens desire—binding others to the thrill of unpredictability. Those “trained” in this way become attuned to every subtle cue, craving approval without knowing when or how it will come.

    Yet, this instability breeds insecurity and dependence, leaving individuals trapped in cycles of validation-seeking, unable to trust stability or find self-worth beyond external rewards.

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    Affluent Apathy

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    1–2 minutes

    Money and protracted non-binding alliances have become our social immune system.

    Given wars, familial relationships, poverty, or climate change, we gesture support with one hand and throw money with the other, spewing placating platitudes as we retreat into our affluence.

    We build walls of resources around infections while we distance ourselves from direct contact, often through attenuated proxies and abstract language. The problem is that we neither excise nor subsume the toxin, the damaging agent. In our active avoidance, we never cure our spreading symptoms, leaving less and less ability to maneuver in a disease-ridden body.

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    Illusory self construction

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    1–2 minutes

    We have a concept of who we are, an amalgam of accrued parts and patterned responsive behaviors. This notional “self” has stabilizing benefits: we can ask ourselves what we would do, and the “self” develops faster responses until our allegiance to “our self” is an unthinking, habitual reflex.

    Yet many of us experience pain because of “our self,” yet we do not correct it or escape. Our suffering is maintained by affiliation to an intersubjective conception of self: not only are we convinced of who we are, but others have bought in, accruing upon us in a petrifying abstraction. We assume this is who we are.

    And yet, under tension (extreme anxiety), we find we never knew ourselves: the abstractions are fractured when we must move to survive.

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    Facism: aestheticization of politics

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    1–2 minutes

    Fascism is fear and pain amplified until we beg for strength to save us.
    Fear is created through a conspiracy without facts: we can protest for our rights without affecting change. In this neutered, weakened state, we turn towards strength, even if it is only an image of strength, a memory of power.
    Once affiliated, communally anxious quick fixes are applied: symbolic interactions and stylistic switches. Watchwords, repetitious dogma, flags, and costuming precede conversation, curiosity, or insight. In so doing, we sacrifice self to the tribe.
    What must be considered is that we would love to remain individuals, strange and selfish, but when stripped and trapped, we will turn back to primal instinct and scapegoating. The reason for fear is because it is natural.

    "Benjamin said that fascism tends towards an aestheticization of politics, in the sense of a spectacle in which it allows the masses to express themselves without seeing their rights recognized, and without affecting the relations of ownership which the proletarian masses aim to eliminate." ~ The aestheticization of politics, wikipedia
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  • Theme:

    perfect = invisible

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    1–2 minutes

    The perfect child is invisible, a non-entity until trotted out to perform childhood cuteness, which is more often than not a parody of adulthood.

    Many children are taught to hide from confrontation and never stand out, a “good boy/girl” coping tactic to avoid the ire of a tantrum-throwing, belittling bully (parent, sibling, teacher, classmate). The best strategy to avoid causing ripples is avoidance and disappearance: to be perfect is to be perfectly invisible, a polite genie that appears when the lamp is rubbed.

    Yet, this conflict avoidance increases relationship conflict: there is no intimacy with an apparition.