A New Year's Resolution

I don't know how I am going to do this but I have decided I will have a New Year's Resolution after all.  It is actually the 14 January 2012 but what the hell.  If you give up after the first failure what hope is there?  I'm a destitute man in an attic whose life has been destroyed by cultural prejudice, abuse and oppression.  Sometimes I write what is on my mind and sometimes I write stuff that I have thought out.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.  But I get despondent and don't write for days.  I did keep a diary once and, on rereading it, even I can see how tedious and boring it can get reading it.  So I decided I will write a blog entry, no matter what, each day.

I will try to be kind to myself and forgive me if I fail but I will try to catch up.  I will try to make at least one interesting entry per day.  I will even "think" about it sometimes.  Maybe it will evolve into a really interesting blog.  Maybe I will find my true purpose in life.  But a lot of it will be straight from the heart.

Fundamentally we live in an "inside out" world.  That will take a lot of explaining but Freud began to understand it.  We are, to some extent, living in a subconscious world.  We think we "understand" what is going on but at every turn we find "the universe" or "reality" is not behaving quite as we expect.  In Jungian terms this is possibly the subconscious conflicts revealing themselves.

I have a little pet theory (I have many of those) which is about "Inside Out People".  That could be my second blog.  Inside Out People are those contradictory, controlling, authoritarian, self opinionated gits that many of us encounter every day.  They are stunningly un-empathetic.  They even seem to have no genuine feelings.  They certainly suffer a lack of rational logical analytical thought.  They seem to work on the principle of saying stuff to get results regardless of its relationship to truth or reality.  So why are they "Inside Out"?

Take two people, say P1  and P2, and P1 says to P2 "There were these three people in a room..."  What happens in side P2's head?  Half way through the statement P2 has formed an idea of three abstract objects that have human qualities.  A bit like an artist's manikin - sexless, size-less,  colourless - mere blobs representing these "three people".  During the second part of the phrase they are suddenly encased in four walls.  The room has no defining features except that it is "a room".  Now P1 says "...and the mother says to her daughter..." and suddenly two of the manikins become female and one is adult and the other is, provisionally, smaller.  The last figure takes on the possibility that it is male and maybe the husband, but it might be another child or someone else altogether.

So we form models of reality inside our heads.  Inside Out People think the model IS reality and non-inside out people think the stuff outside, that is adjusting their world view, IS reality.  I am of the opinion that the stuff out there is reality.  I regard my experience to date to suggest that I am an object experiencing effects from "out there".

To keep this to a few simple examples Inside Out People will typically say things like "It doesn't hurt." when sticking a needle into a child's arm and they cry.  They will say things like "Don't be clever!" when a child questions them with some valid point.  They have opinions about people which have no real substantial meaning like laziness, rudeness, obstinacy, or that they are "spoilt".  Inside Out People are working on the basis that the model inside their head is reality and when a signal is received that conflicts with their current model they criticise the world out there claiming IT is wrong.  Non-Inside Out People have a different response to the same situations.  They will say sorry to the child or something factual like "I know it does but it won't take long."  They will think about the question the child puts to them if it is a valid point.  All those "bad" attributes like laziness are thought about.  They wonder "why" this particular person doesn't actually want to do the thing in question.  People who are the right way out readjust their inner model according to the new information coming in.

This idea of Inside Out People is simplified here.  Of course we all use both methods to varying degrees.  But in the normal hubbub of daily life some people are acting more Inside Out than others.  They are not terribly helpful when it comes to adapting to a changing world and generally the worst cases float to the top of the hierarchy and generally make it very difficult for a lot of other people beneath them.

There!  That's the first blog of my New year's Resolution.