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Tag: trauma

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    The Primal Agony of the Unspoken

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    1–2 minutes

    Similar to the fetishist who knows their ‘object’ is a mere adjunct to a deeper reality, we often live in the shadow of truths we cannot name.

    The "primal agony" occurs when we are confronted with a trauma that has already happened—something we have always known, yet lacked the symbolic language to identify.

    This agony is the crushing pain of exposure; it is the moment a long-buried betrayal or loss is dragged into the light.

    To hide behind disbelief is human, but it is also a state of arrest. We only move forward by applying symbolic logic—language—to the wound. By putting words to the agony, we transform a hidden, destructive force into a space where internalization, healing, and eventual catharsis become possible.

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    Resentment as Identity: Wound into Will

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    1–2 minutes

    Resentment, from the French ressentir, means to feel again. This is replaying past injuries as present pain.

    When unprocessed, this repetition ossifies into ressentiment, a deeper existential condition where the original wound is lost, and only the emotional charge remains.

    As Nietzsche and Scheler observed, identity fuses with grievance, shaping a person’s worldview through a lens of injustice. This metastasized resentment becomes volatile—a pressurized self that seeks catharsis not through healing, but through projection or vengeance.

    In such a state, liberation requires not justice, but the dissolution of identity built on pain.

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    voting against their own best interests

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    1–2 minutes

    People "vote against their interests" is a notion that smacks of elitist snobbery and patriarchal disappointment, proclaiming a failure (blindness or idiocy) to perceive future benefits and overcome emotional/social pressures.

    Yet our government permits gambling, lotteries, and alcohol—hardly beneficial to anyone, instead encouraging self-destructive tendencies. So, this reversal of occasionally demanding sober decisions is scarcely consistent.

    Moreover, defining ‘best interest’ is tricky: Is it economic or familial values or pride in honest, hard work despite low pay?

    America’s founding was based on rejecting taxes and religion. I’m sure the crown assumed the ‘best interests’ of English citizens were aligned with the monarch’s desires (such as a new wife, Henry VIII, or empire expansion and war, George II & III). After numerous cases of abuse, the wisdom of leaders and their promises to "care-take" are thinly veiled acquiescence to future abuses.

    And yet, we must outsource our ‘best interests’ to representatives, who should moderate their ambitions/desires to interpret and act on behalf of a populace, some who struggle to envision a better life, but can still allot a portion of hope through a vote. To declare their vote foolish is to become foolish ourselves: to stop listening and play wise for our desires.

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    the unconscious as fantasy

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    1–2 minutes

    Heidegger claims that Freud had to invent the “unconscious” in order to create a causal link between our conscious (thoughtful) actions and our animal urges, which for Freud were principally libidinal and erogenous.

    Žižek claims that the unconscious represents “cuts” in the causal continuity: our trauma or PTSD is a division of causality (the trauma breaks our causal understanding). This requires a fantasy to stitch continuity back together so we may continue in the world.

    The insight is to realize that the “disturbed” need a fantasy, a story. (And we are all disturbed.) However, the libidinal animal spirit has always offered a “normal” remapping of trauma, but it fell out of fashion.

    The fantasy is the unconscious. Freud provided a name and categorization (psychologizing) that provides a quasi-scientific framework. This mythic scaffolding allows us to normalize the premodern human condition (animalism) in a modern (rational) way. 

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    Misusing the Judiciary

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    1–2 minutes

    When politicians rely on courts to advance their agendas, they weaponize a system designed for preservation, using a shield to bludgeon rather than defend—a clear impropriety.

    Yes, use every tool at your disposal in war, but eroding trust in the system for expediency, rather than through the hard work of persuasion, risks losing the shield entirely. What will protect you—and the country—when the very abuse you encouraged grows beyond control?

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    Relationships distract from the trauma of relationships

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    1–2 minutes

    Participation in relationships is often avoidance of traumatic conflict.

    Consider that the majority of our trauma and joy (anxiety and happiness) is produced by social participation. Almost all of our “problems” are interpersonal and emotively subjective, similar to any glee or contentment we feel.

    Social participation is a drug: it keeps our lives meaningfully filled with emotions and exciting destabilization, which we re-label as duty, loyalty, or purpose. To be a good person, we must engage in destabilizing manipulations.

    In our moments alone, we become devoid of “meaning,” which, for psychological and practical purposes, is a lack of external stimulation. This lack of external stimulation opens up a moment to confront or examine internal conflicts or personal distress. Rather than dwelling, healing, or accepting these past problems, we rush to create more fresh drama, overlaying the old hurt with the new “responsibility,” distracting and provoking ourselves away from healing.

    We seek out relations to avoid how messed up relations have made us, inevitably manipulating and manufacturing excess mess. Thus, we replicate the behaviors that created our coping style: histrionic, bipolar, manic, flighty, etc., instead of remaining grounded, abiding, and stable.

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    Won’t get fooled again

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    1–2 minutes

    To not be fooled is not to live.

    Every time we interact, we risk. Every risk presupposes a modicum of trust and faith.

    Some people are wounded too badly to engage anymore, while others immediately jump back into the fray. Some, after more circumspection lick their wounds and learn, returning more cautious, more calculated.

    More interesting are those who are fooled, made fools of, and yet return more wise and wild: wiley.

    Permission to be fooled again granted, but be cautious what will return.

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    How Technical and Moral Elites Reshape Sovereignty

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    1–2 minutes

    Our political regime is transforming, with decision-making authority shifting from a constitutionally based majority (democracy) to a coalition of technical and moral elites (managerial and clerical overseers.) These elites support a state-like entity that expands through the “woke” revolution and the encroachment of technical expertise into daily life.

    Both movements (though seemingly unrelated) undermine traditional practices (meritocratic learning) and promote an anthropology of vulnerability (victimization mining). Thus, the oppressors and oppressed need help, justifying expanded managerial control and discrediting classic common sense. (i.e. You can’t manage yourself, what you know is wrong.)

    Power in both movements is centralized in the Humanitarian Party, encompassing corporations, media, universities, and NGOs. This coalition champions protected classes, but is using them to advance social control and empower a new class of social managers and political opportunists. (The compassion may be authentic, but converting the clients of recognition into mascots repositions marginalized people as shields and prybars for unscrupulous both machinators and the well-intentioned.)

    paraphrased from Matthew Crawford’s “Minoritarian Moralism“

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    victimization: oppression as privilege

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    1–2 minutes

    The Right embraces victimization as much as the Left, in part because it allows for idiocy to continue: you can’t criticize me while I’m oppressed (by you.)

    It’s obvious the Left reveres victims to the extent that they extend and create categories from which shelter from reality or logic is provided. (Because you are/were marginalized, all concessions should be made, we should all accommodate your hardship.) On the Right, tribal/national tradition and faith-over-facts create a populist shelter that regresses. (Because I am normal, I shouldn’t have to change, and am offended you suggest it.)

    The new reality then exists: you must be oppressed to be listened to and valued, leading to “oppression as social privilege.” Yet, the focused attention that grants preference is fickle, swayed by novelty, and so to retain attention victimization must escalate into the fantastical.


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    non-linear nature of psychological healing

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    1–2 minutes

    Healing is not an absolute state; it is a precarious equilibrium.

    Even when your external circumstances appear stable and content, unexpected provocation can reconnect you to a web of unresolved pain, initiating a cascading PTSD.

    This phenomenon disrupts the linear assumption of psychological healing, showing it’s nature to be more circumstantial, ultimately managed rather than following traditional notions of recovery.

    For example, you might be materially successful and outwardly happy, yet with one exchange a profound, gut-wrenching anxiety can still seize you, pulling you into introspection and rumination, fear and desperation that threatens breakage. And this event will seem innocuous or trivial to others, as the emotional linkage is parabolic in it’s descent.