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Tag: paradox

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    Enjoy your “symptom”

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    Lacan’s jouissance is paradoxical enjoyment that reaches a painful, disruptive state: not necessarily ecstatic, but destructive pleasure.

    Such a state can be neurotic: compulsively scratching your "itch" both soothes and traps the individual in a repetitive cycle (hoarding, grooming, sex, counting, organizing, procrastination, work-a-holic).

    This "symptom" (Freud’s term) is an early compromise of conflicting desires manifesting in a distorted manner, a sign of unresolved unconscious issues. Yet, Lacan says we can recognize—and accept—our unconscious satisfaction gleaned from our symptoms: it is not merely a problem but a meaningful expression of the self.

    Žižek

    takes it further, saying ideologies are a collective "symptom" offering what feels like pleasure/enjoyment while masking deeper issues and contradictions. (For example, consumerism provides satisfaction and alienation; politics is often about tribal affiliation and winning over moral motivation.) Like Lacan, Žižek is not interested in eliminating the "symptom," which only moves the symptom elsewhere, but in learning from it.

    To accept that our pathology is linked to—integral to—our identity reveals our uniqueness as "symptomatic" of our inability to handle conflicting desires: jouissance reveals our sickness, which is our identity.

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    Cognitive dissonance

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    Cognitive dissonance is not only having two non-complementary beliefs that clash, the contradiction producing anxiety about who you are and what you value, but the antagonistic beliefs are handled by doubling down: over investment rather than correction.

    While doubling down may protect the self image (ego) it is merely a temporary soothing of the psychological disjunction, more of a means to displace and distract by acting out and blaming others.

    The longer cognitive dissonance is held, the more pathological the response: to remain traumatically blind we become defensively aggressive; protecting the internal battle through external histrionics.

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    Confusing morality and law

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    The blurred boundary between spirituality, religion, and morals has been appended to the more secular concepts of ethics and law.

    Though distinct terms, we blend and link values, swapping and confounding terms until we have woven a shaky, contradictory moral framework: to be ethical (legal) is to be moral (personal), which is to follow a transcendent higher-good (religious/spiritual).

    Moreover, being legally traitorous is also morally sound given the law’s unethical nature (unjust, unequal convictions at differing rates for different people).

    Heck, to be moral requires rebellion, which is spiritual; ask Satan or the early Christians.

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    Alarm overload: the hospital

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    Hospitals, designed to heal, paradoxically create an environment that intensifies anxiety and sensory overload. The constant beeps and chirps, each signaling a need, blend into a cacophony of emergencies ignored by habituated staff.

    Patients and families are caught in a disorienting field of incredulity: an alarm should be alarming, so why does no one react?

    This annoying soundscape fosters clinical insanity. Jargon-laden exchanges over walkie-talkies interrupt a family’s soothing attempts at comfort, and brusque nurses ignore requests. The unrelenting stimuli are mirrored by the disregard for concern.

    Peace is stripped, amplifying vulnerability and maddening rage. Here, managerial/institutional desensitization obscures the very purpose of care: to soothe, settle, not stimulate.

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    Ironies of Virtue Shifts

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    Certain traits, such as pride and defiance, are seen as toxic, yet they established our nation.

    So… toxic, yet useful.

    In Christian morality, these virtues were always wrong, yet ignoring their role in establishing a nation that can be both religiously free and, paradoxically, demonize defiance and coerce submission from the prideful is a lesson in the drift of power into irony.

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    Limits of individuality

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    We often accuse others of misunderstanding us, putting us in a box, limiting or diminishing us: their stupidity is the source of our frustration.

    Yet, we seldom confront our self-ignorance: we don’t know our limits, capabilities, desires, or how blinded we are by our ego. We drift along simultaneously fragile and inflated, a thin-skinned balloon.

    This refusal to see ourselves while fighting others ironically becomes a form of self-imposed confinement and reductive limitation that we blame on “them.”

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    The Paradox of Safety: Life without risk

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    We live in a time of state intervention aimed at eliminating harm—no violence, no risk—while socially taboo topics like body shaming, racism, and sexual shaming are culturally policed. Despite this pursuit of safety, anxiety and depression are at record highs, even as crime and violence are at historic lows.

    The paradox is to live in the least violent times, when beliefs have only emotional and social repercussions and seldom physical or property consequences, yet the fragility of people and failure to maintain peace is escalating.

    Part of this results in de-escalating objective, reality-based threats accomplishing an increase in symbolic, ideological concerns, which feel subjectively overwhelming and due to their shifting signifiers cannot be easily mitigated by individual effort. As we shift from physical to ideological harm, we -oddly- inhabit a space where safety is elusive and control pervasive.

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    merit + lottery

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    If we believe in the meritocracy, it is odd we also believe in the lottery.
    We believe in hope and redemption, despite circumstance or sin, retaining space for a lottery that rewards idiocy and illogic, despite simultaneously virtuizing (preaching) hard work.

    We systemically maintain and fund luck structures: the logic is to enhance illogical outlets as a balance for excessive efficiency and reason.

    Paradoxically, we also embrace the ideology of scientific progress while upholding the right to make irrational (stupid) choices, and even exploit that as giddy freedom that science and technology should support.

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    ideology supported by fantasy

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    Ideology is the frame in which we understand the world so that it seems non-contradictory. Therefore, it is a necessarily reductive structure that is contradictory; it just makes us blind to anything that does not fit the framework. Yet because ideology often breaks down when we glimpse the contradiction, it must be supplemented by fantasy at its core: an irrational belief that can overcome the discontinuity of reality.
    from Todd McGowan
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    progress undermining Stability

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    Progress is laudable and, by its nature, unstable. However, focusing on some social advancements undermines the founding cause of why progress is possible: that progress must be sustainable, or it is merely an immature, immanent disaster.

    For instance, once a path to financial security, college education has become fiscally irresponsible and ideologically constraining. Its promised utility misaligns with post-graduation reality. Many graduates are left to return to academia or enter parasitic economic prognostics (enter the realm of speculative finance) rather than contributing productively.

    Consider the broader repercussions: Education’s increasingly self-referential logic continually draws on external resources to expand its crusades. The contradiction of taking tax money to condemn the government and citizenry while simultaneously raging against colonialism and capitalism risks the stability of its foundation. When progress overextends its base, instability follows: a correction or a crash ensues.

    This is reminiscent of a plant or tree whose attention is on gaining light until it topples, ripping its roots out of the ground.