Saturday 30 April 2016

E.g. Neoliberal psychology.


I put the following paragraph in quotes to illustrate that it is a subjective expression to someone who is intentionally causing me harm.

"You are entirely convinced, to the extent you don't even consciously notice it, that I will defend myself by harming you.  On account of that your fear of me rises every time you assault me.  You are in a compulsive cycle of believing the stakes are rising and so the imperative to assault me is rising too.  You are being driven insane by your fear of being attacked as if by virtue of simply existing you will be abused.  This is the almost inevitable result of your formative experience of being born into an abusive environment."

This dynamic is self consistent.  It also illuminates the perceived need to assault the victim on the grounds that the perpetrator was assaulted and is still alive.  The false rationale including such notions as "It didn't do me any harm."

The ritualised practice of infant circumcision (or any genital mutilation) engenders a profound abstract and almost inaccessible paranoia (this is much written about in academic circles).  It is an accepted practice by mainstream Judaism (and other religions and cultures).  It is no coincidence that the self acclaimed "Jewish" State of Israel exhibits the characteristics described above on an almost incomprehensible scale.

"Au contraire!  We have an anti-Semite."  No - there is nothing anti-Semitic in what I say.  Quite apart from the fact that the term is a misnomer in the first place, the common meaning is "anti-Jewish in a negative prejudicial manner".  I have serious criticisms of all the Abrahamic religions and the consequential manifestation of behaviour.  Religions are very powerful mechanisms of psychological conformity.  It would be starkly insane not to examine them with an open mind.  My expressed observations are exactly not prejudicial because they are born of, and rely on, careful objective observations and interpretation.  There is no pre-judgement assumed or applied to any group or individual.  And, in addition to that, my observations are sympathetic to the perpetrators of abuse on the grounds that there seems no other explanation than that abuse is the consequence of abuse.  I am not going to elucidate that issue here but suffice it to say that it is self evident and self defining that "harming" children causes them to malfunction.  How could it not?  If it made them work better it wouldn't be described as "harm".  The relevant question might be whether circumcision is harmful or beneficial.  That subject has also been researched ad infinitum and the general consensus determines that in general it is harmful.  That is also my perception with all my experience and consideration of the issue.  Of course the argument remains because it is clearly a good thing from the perspective of the abuser on account of the fact it confirms their prejudicial beliefs insofar as the result is a dependent who compulsively defends their oppressor.  How the abused compulsively defend their abusers is well researched and studied if you need to know more.  It is a profound, self perpetuating, destructive, self-contradictory "survival" mechanism.

Theodor Herzl, regarded as the father of modern political Zionism, essentially takes the perspective of the injured party who has a "right to survive".  At the outset this is a perfectly reasonable position.  However, the possibly reasonable resolution is based on the premise of a presumed enemy.  The problem is that having resolved the issue the method of resolution is no longer functional because there is no longer an enemy.  It seems to follow that for the method to continue to be valid an enemy is required.  And there is an obvious and not entirely unreasonable tendency, if something produces good results, to do it again.  The method becomes a mechanism by which one believes one survives.  It is in danger of becoming compulsive.  The problem with the philosophy and the psychology of Zionism is that it requires an enemy.

Neoliberalism is essentially Liberalism out of context and to an extreme that fits the same model as described above regarding Zionism.  It seems to be one reason they work so well together even to the point of sometimes appearing indistinguishable.  The first assertion is the right for individuals to be free or "liberated" from oppression.  The entrenched defence is that if I have something you do not have the right to take it away from me.  The philosophy, the laws, the cultural paradigms and in fact the entire edifice of Neoliberalism focuses on the right of an individual to maintain the benefits of what they produce or what they do.  But it, yet again, assumes an environment that may have been the case at the outset but is changing in response to the actions within it.  It leads inevitably to power rising and concentrating in the upper echelons of the culture.  The idea that a corporation has an inalienable right to defend itself against an arbitrary pregnant woman who has no money and so "steals" a loaf of bread is obscenely out of proportion.  But that is where Neoliberalism goes.

Our economic structures reflect this same dynamic.  We live in a pyramid economy.  Yanis Varoufakis recently described the current problems in the EU, between the IMF and Greece in particular, as "Ponzi Austerity".  He is entirely correct.  The philosophy of making money by taking it from other people only works if the money is reliably circulating.  When the conceptualisation of money is formed and defined by the people who have it as a justification for their right to have it the result is a one way trip to the top.  This is the problem many don't understand when it comes to pyramid marketing.  On a local scale, where the ocean of available wealth is treated as infinite, the rationale makes sense.  But in a closed system the boundaries create a place where there are no resources to continue the process and the net result is the concentration of all that is available in the centre of the system depriving the whole of the resources to survive.  It literally eats itself like a cancer.

My sibling's behaviour (that is four sisters and a brother) of evicting myself, my daughter and my nephew from what is tragically ironically called the family home, clearly exhibit the profound error elucidated above.  They are beating a dead horse on account of their numskull interpretation which is a consequence of their abusive upbringing.  It seems no coincidence to me that in our family the youngest male died as a result of abuse and in the two female families born of my sisters it is the youngest male which has received the most damaging abuse or that as my sisters determine what to do they are currently assaulting the youngest remaining male in this family (that is me) and it is ironic that my nephew, one sisters damaged youngest male, is conveniently collateral damage because he is being assaulted by his mother who put him here in the first place.  The females, oppressed by a virulently sexist culture, abstractly perceive the father (an austere Victorian authoritarian) as the male representative of their oppression.  As is so often the case their legitimate need to destroy their oppressor combined with their conviction that "he" is indestructible (otherwise they would not be compulsively repressed by the internal construct within their psyche) turn on the easiest victim available in the outside world which too often is not the object of their problem but a place holder to vent their frustration and vengeance.  It is understandable why their attention is taken by the most vulnerable male in their vicinity.  All of this is the same construct of dynamics as described above but with emotional validity rather than money or material existence.

It may be that my subjective experience incorrectly assesses and understands the world at large.  It even raises my suspicions that my subjective experience so well matches my concerns and interpretation of human behaviour in general.  However there are a few objective observations that suggest something quite different.  The most obvious is that some of the most respected minds in our history appear to agree with me.  Yanis Varoufakis, Thomas Piketty, Naomi Kline, Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud ... and the list cascades across cultures and history.  It also makes sense of how these dynamics so profoundly affect our cultures because they resonate in such a fractal manner from the whole right down to the individual experience.  My experience is subjective but my observations are objective.  The subjective and the objective are just aspects of the whole.  When people attempt to over objectify, that is to take their subjective experience out of the equation, by depersonalising their cognitive constructs and academic pronouncements, the results become sterile to the point of extremism as outlined above.

The consequences of these incredibly damaged minds operating in the world can reasonably be described as hideous, obscene, disgusting and generally evil.  To mistake this observation as a valid description of the people creating these circumstances is to both miss the point and to become just another polarised oppressor.  The people are not evil, they are grossly damaged.  Vengeance should not be wrought on them but on the consequences.  The people should simply be ignored or stopped or, if necessary, incarcerated to prevent further evil.  The consequential subjective result is that I am hurt and angry to a degree I hardly imagined possible for one human being.

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