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Addicts are complicated and deep people who don’t know how to deal with their emotions.
This is why they often turn to drugs and alcohol (sex or ambition as well) and cannot quit them. Turning inward to deal with your complicated self is more challenging than dying.
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The melancholic philosopher, such as Baudrillard or Milton, will generate an existential paradise that is somehow inaccessible, reflecting their inability to access happiness. The giddy spirit, Deleuze-Guattari, will announce an alternate coding allowing for merging, newness and escape; lines of flight for the hopeful.
Schopenhauer is a curmudgeon, Kierkegaard a hopeless romantic, and Camus a poetic, passionate cynical humanist. Plato fawns over power, and Socrates undermines authority.
Their way of life was their rebuttal in words.
And let’s not forget, the resonance of their message is amplified by their background: time and place are amplifiers for disposition.
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One reaction to the precarity is to return to the body, eschew ecstasy and escapism, get more sleep, optimize your schedule, and stabilize your relationships. This bodily discipline manifests targeted outcomes, and with goal attainment, it swells self-assurance which imbues a sense of control: mastery over your life.
The problem is, it takes cybernetic and Taylorism principles (that is machine orientation) and applies them to the human, creating a series of autistic self-soothing mechanisms that produce a reduced harder, hollower self.
Another reaction is the vitalist, who returns to nature by reanimating their animal spirit. It’s esoteric emotive entrancement provides an independent, esoteric mastery, highly romantic and ephemeral, but leaves little room for readmission to civilization.
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Many boys were taught masculinity by standing up for themselves and confronting the world’s difficulties: don’t complain, do.
Today, as a man, you still don’t complain. But you are told to back down, apologize, and shut up: step aside.
Many women see this as an apropos reversal: men being treated as women were treated.
The reaction from men will be the same as that from women, except perhaps less social and more violent. Feeling alienated and incapable of providing value or worth, men form sub-societies and lean into the traits society was meant to civilize.
How does “don’t complain, do” manifest for a man stripped of socialized, compassionate consideration?
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The melancholic philosopher, such as Baudrillard or Milton, will generate an existential paradise that is somehow inaccessible: a transcendent realm we can no longer reach.
The giddy spirit, such as Deleuze-Guattari, will announce an alternate "coding," allowing for merging, newness, and escape, lines of flight for the hopeful.
Schopenhauer is a curmudgeon, Kierkegaard a hopeless romantic, and Camus a brutally poetic cynic.
Their disposition forms an argument, a rebuttal to the world.
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Hard bondage is coerced and abusive, while soft bondage is when we choose our imprisonment, restricting ourselves, or self-enslaving.
Often there is an aspect of survival in subjugation (soft bondage): the position will help me emotionally, socially, or economically traverse the world’s hardships.
It is familiar to imagine a destitute wife reliant on a callus, abusive husband. But we can also consider the Knight or Soldier, who offers allegiance and loyalty. In both positions, they must self-abnegate and tolerate 1,000 cuts against their personhood to maintain their status.
While the examples are extreme ranges of context, disposition, and agency, we must consider what is voluntary versus compulsory (or obligatory).
The knight undertakes strife for God and King, gaining personal valor, purpose, and authority: the tribe promotes the sacrifice. The dominated individual’s sacrifice is seen not as a sacrifice but as permitted subjugation or failure of choice, thus not a gain or loss to the tribe.
In either case, the role of the submission (self-bondage), according to Erich Fromm, is a choice to escape freedom; that is, the freedom from making choices.
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Freud observes that the invention of the “soul” is an attempt to live forever: we declare an unseen part of ourselves everlasting.
He compares the splitting of the self into some intangible “other” (it is us, but it’s not all of us, but it’s also not fully known to us) as drawing from the tradition of the spirit animal, or the shadow.
The attempt to defy death leads us to partner and externalize a vital component of ourselves.
In Harry Potter the Horcrux Voldemort uses is a soul-fragment reliquary, but its existence outside of his body is a perversion. The soul must remain in the vessel of the body.
Conversely, in His Dark Materials each child has a natural external other, a daemon as embodied reflection or external soul partner.
Leaving fiction, we have the literal and metaphorical shadow, which operates as an alternate self. It is attached but can be relegated to being separate; an oddly unknown dark mirror that is present when we are in the light.
When the shadow self acts we are aghast, as if an external entity has momentarily triumphed and must be relegated outside once again. So, we demote a portion of our soul to live underneath us, behind us, attached to us but ignored so that we maintain interior purity.
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We empower our thoughts by focusing on them: by battling them, by pondering them.
By refusing to pay attention to them, they dissipate; they self-liberate.
Consider thoughts a byproduct of living that we manufacture, like methane or carbon dioxide. When we keep it inside, inside our brain in a little cage made of attention, we never let the idea release. These thoughts then agitate and drive us.
It is not that thoughts themself are poisonous or toxic; it is our attentional focus that retains them until they replace silence and cloud our desires that harms us.
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The true struggle is to do nothing, to remain open without your internal narratives.
Procrastination (doing nothing) is active self-harm, replete with self-centered worrying. To truly do nothing is to lose self-concern. It is closer to a negation of noise or depletion of ego: it is the space in which you can open up before your instinctual response closes you back down.
To subvert our striving or anxiety in order to clearly hear another requires a stance of ready reception: a negative effort, as Simone Weil calls it.
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The Light Triad practices compassion, empathy, and altruism (cooperation), as opposed to the Dark Triad, which is driven by competition, aggression, and dominance (winning).
While both groups tend to make slightly higher than average earnings, those with Light Triad behaviors tend to do better long-term because, as Robert Greene says, they realize there is more than one side to the game.
Simplistically, Light Triad practices self-awareness, resulting in compassion, while the Dark Triad wins by condemning others.
Interestingly, meditation enhances self-awareness and dissolves egoism (self-centeredness) through self-monitoring.
