psychosis, mania

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anon (not verified)
psychosis, mania

This inquiry is inspired by the anews podcast no. 199 in which Chisel speaks about people containing multitudes (paraphrase), that this had interested Chisel for a time.

I have BiPolar I. The manic episodes have included psychosis.

Do any of you have opinions about psychosis and anarchy? I know that there is the library ... I am feeling social okay?

My thoughts: "What is freedom when one loses control and does shameful things or regrettable things? Who or what within me was free during the psychosis? Who or what was bound ? How does one apologize, excuse oneself, communicate psychosis and regret ? Are all regrettfully harmful behaviors a result of illness? Is there anything essential about me, since I have a mood disorder and psychosis?"

These might not be anarchist questions (just person questions). Maybe there is something to speak to here. Just throwing this topic (psychosis, mood disorders) at the wall to see what sticks.

PS: there is no wall. Haha

TLDR: Looking for anything relevant to psychosis or feeling "out of control" as an anarchist. Please also challenge the premise!

chisel
i can't answer any of that

but i will say that when i was a lot younger i had different internal personalities who i played at being, including different walks and character traits, etc. different parts of me/ways of being that were worth naming and considering...
and i definitely do think that we all have multitudes inside us, so psychosis (or w/e label) is a matter of degree not kind (when does kind become a function of degree? gdmt)...
but also that multitudes are not just personalities, but also things like the microbes in our intestines, and the things we breathe out and in... the amorphous line between our bodies and the rest of the world.
we are individuals, but that means some thing really different than how we usually consider it...

re: doing bad--i've been thinking a lot recently about how hard it must be to live with having hurt someone badly by accident. when we do it intentionally there is always some kind of validation that can come into play, but running over someone accidentally, or making a mistake in surgery, or any number of other things that can happen that irretrievably fuck up someone else's life... how hard that must be to live with, and yet also how the idea that we don't bump into people harshly is kind of a bizarre, alienated expectation.

yep, no clarity, just pondering!

@critic
various psychoanalytic-inspired contributions

The self in alienated society is fundamentally split, the mind is alienated from the body. In the classic version there's a first split (self-preservation ego from desire-based id) then a second (moral superego based on parent, from the ego) and neurosis happens when the parts are too conflicting. Psychosis seems to involve both more and less alienation. People diagnosed bipolar (also schizoid, schizophrenia, autism, ADHD, etc) are usually pre-Oedipal in character-structure, with a desire-structure closer to early childhood and without the strong affect-blocks and binding mechanisms found in neurosis. So in a way, pre-Oedipal types are less alienated and closer to an anarchic state of being. On the other hand, infantile splitting mechanisms are still at work and there's often early traumas involved, so the symptoms can be more intense, and sometimes the dissociation and derealisation dynamics are much stronger than in neurosis. That's what I've picked up from the literature.

Useful on mania and bipolar states: Klein's papers on mania and schizoid mechanisms in childhood, Deleuze and Guattari's body without organs, Freud's Mourning and Melancholy. Useful on psychosis: Lacan, particularly his sinthome book, Lowen's "Betrayal of the Body" and the last chapter of "Language of the Body", Deleuze and Guattari, Laing, Reich's pieces on schizophrenia in Character Analysis. The Kleinian approach seems to fit with what you're describing: a loss of self-control during manic patches followed by an intense sense of guilt and desire to make reparations. In the Kleinian account this corresponds to splitting entities and people into "good and bad object", harming the "bad object" during periods of forceful affect and self-valuation, then realising one has also harmed the "good object" and being afraid various that you're evil, the world is ruined, you're ruined, you'll be destroyed or abandoned (originally the good/bad objects corresponded to parents or parts of their bodies). Depression is a state arising from the sense of having irretrievably lost the good object, usually as a result of your own actions to destroy the bad object; mania is a kind of defence-mechanism which compensates for depression or powerlessness by positing the self as omnipotent or suchlike, and the "lost" object as intact. "Hallucinations" are perceptions of things which are real either in the virtual field (auras etc) or in the inner life, but are misperceived as aspects of the outer world. For example, a harsh persecuting superego is misperceived as a government agency controlling your thoughts, or an area with bad vibes is misperceived as a literal vortex, or bioenergetic flows such as rising kundalini are perceived as if they are external physical forces literally entering and altering the body. These ways of thinking are quite normal for everyone in dreams.

Pre-Oedipal types fit well with the kind of libidinal radicalism found in (say) Situationism, Bey, Deleuze/Guattari. Not so much with the stuff based on will. I've always re-read Stirner in ways which shift will back towards the id. But I often find assumptions of self-control and ego-directed will even in non-leftist, non-idpol strands of anarchism (e.g. the false assumption that people can hold out from snitching under torture indefinitely). I think the psychoanalytic view that the ego is not the master of its own house, the body is ultimately under the control of the id and the ego only has an illusion of control and some secondary checking abilities of limited strength (and no strength at all if the ego is overwhelmed or the other parts are disassociated), is basically valid. This is juxtaposed to the rationalist, behaviourist and cybernetic view(s) of people as basically rational and self-interested nodes in incentive/deterrence structures.

>What is freedom when one loses control and does shameful things or regrettable things? Who or what within me was free during the psychosis?

Possibly the id, or the aggressive drives, or a dissociated/exiled part of the self. The ego and superego are correspondingly "not free", but they are also typically holding the other part in a state of internal unfreedom - hence why it rebels and seizes power, or basically riots in your body from time to time. Shame and guilt are aspects of the superego, non-moral regret (e.g. for harms one had no desire to cause) is an ego function. We can't talk about the entire self being free unless the parts are harmonised and working together. In a free/wild/disalienated person this is the case, but not for most of us today; the point is effectively to build "anarchist" relations (rather than relations of domination) among the different parts of yourself.

Within psychosis, there can also be a part which serves as the "persecutor" or the source of the hallucinations; this is often a superego variant, possibly modelled on a strict or abusive parent/carer (the superego is precisely the internal part which is constantly watching and judging the other parts, shaming them for immoral actions, etc). Again this part takes such a vicious form because it is drastically cut off from the rest of the parts and excluded from normal functioning. Paranoia works by projecting this part onto other people or things, or projecting it in a mixed state with real persecutors. So if for example you attack someone who you think is about to hit you from behind, you're acting in a perfectly rational and anarchic and ethical way in relation to the information you take to be true, but it might also be an unprovoked attack if your unconscious has projected the dissociated superego onto the other person (who in fact poses no threat).

>How does one apologize, excuse oneself, communicate psychosis and regret?

On a general level, I think people can't be held liable/accountable for acts committed when psychotic because the ego-parts which handle responsible agency are literally not functioning at that time (probably the anterior cingulate cortex in neurological terms); it's no different from how blind people can't be expected to see, or cornered animals might bite even if you're trying to help them. Ought implies can. Plus, psychotic actions are often entirely justified IF the delusional beliefs or hallucinated realities are real, i.e. to the best of the person's knowledge; people can't be judged for an incapacity to form viable reality-judgements, any more than from acting on false information. This status of psychosis outside liability has always been recognised historically - whether as "loss of self-control" in ancient texts, "spirit possession" in the Middle Ages and indigenous cultures, or "insanity" in modernity; it is only with neoliberalism that people start pretending it doesn't apply, because behaviourist bullshit has become so entrenched. People nonetheless will often feel guilty whether or not they are blamed by others, this is built into how the superego functions. You may well have internalised a sense of responsibility for things you logically can't be responsible for, even for things you know are impossible (such as causing someone's death by thinking bad thoughts about them). Melancholic/depressive states often involve this kind of enormous guilt, whether or not the person ever did anything bad; the dynamic is a kind of self-flagellation carried out by the superego (which is gaining some kind of sadistic satisfaction) against the ego (which might be getting masochistic satisfaction), often with the ego being identified with some previous love-object (a person, a social movement or cause...) which has been lost. IMO from an anarchist point of view the melancholic dynamic, which tends to produce a sense that the self is evil and the world is irredeemably lacking, is much more politically dangerous than the manic dynamic.

Communicating is a lot more difficult. It helps if the people you're interacting with have some knowledge both of anarchism and of psychology or psychoanalysis. At the moment we don't really have a language to communicate this stuff, we can narrate it from "at the time I felt/thought..." or from an objectivist "in mania such-and-such happens", and this is enough for some people, though it won't necessarily stop you feeling guilty/responsible.

>Are all regrettfully harmful behaviors a result of illness?

I think it's of limited use to see psychological difference, character-structures and neurotic/psychotic symptoms as "illness", because the structure and causality are very different from physical illnesses. Sometimes they're similar to wounds (particularly PTSD) but this metaphor also has its limits. Your symptoms and problems are parts (or effects) or your personality-structure, which is different from other people's.

"Regretful" implies ego-dystonic (i.e. you don't personally value the action or its effect), though ego-syntonic actions can also have regrettable harmful effects because (for instance) someone acts on incomplete information, and I'm also guessing the manic or psychotic acts aren't necessarily ego-dystonic at the time of the act. Ego-dystonic acts always come from parts of the psyche which are alienated from the ego, and in this sense are likely to be felt as "illness". However, acts of this kind can happen in people who seem quite "normal"; see for example Freud's discussion of parapraxes (slips of the tongue, "accidents", etc). A distinction should also be drawn between psychoses, neuroses, "perverse" acts (in the sense of the Lacanian perverse personality-type), impulsive acts, and masochistic or self-sabotaging acts. Psychotic acts are often so mediated by unusual beliefs or perceptions that there is no real relation between motivated action and social or physical effect. Neurotic symptoms are a lot more illness-like in that they're separate from the main personality and ego-dystonic. Impulsive acts are often "freer" than those of neurotics and reflect a relative weakness of the ego relative to the id. Masochistic acts involve a desire of one part of the self to harm another part. Most of the more serious "crimes" come from the perverse character-structure which rests on disavowal (simultaneous acceptance and denial of particular traumatic claims), and are correspondingly strange in structure; they are carried out wilfully (though possibly in dissociated states) but are felt to be compelled by or on the behalf of something seen as an "other" (a Stirnerian spook deemed to have ontological solidity, e.g. History, Destiny, God) and to this extent non-responsible; however, perverts also typically feel responsible in the sense of being guilty and liable, but in a fatalistic way where they could not prevent either the crime or the punishment, and where the punishment is in a sense existentially deserved (and may even be the motive for the crime). At the same time, this guilt may be disavowed, neutralised, rationalised to varying degrees in line with the disavowal structure. Because of the disavowal structure I find it very hard to decide whether acts of this type are deliberate/wilful or are analogous to neurotic/psychotic acts.

I'd add that as an anarchist I want to eliminate punishment, social-scale normativity, opposition to difference, harsh self-judgement, and expectations of strong self-control and strong integration of self; these ethical commitments affect the way I approach deviance and harm, whether or not they are deliberate/liable by my definition. But there's also issues here with contradictions in, or inability to live by, one's self-chosen ethos, which arise from splits and conflicts within the structure of one's desire (due to alienation). My guess at a way out is to think of the Stirnerian ego as an end-point in which the different parts are working together in a kind of cooperative union or Clastrean balance, and one has to find a way to harmonise the parts to arise at the Stirnerian ego. At the same time, however, the Stirnerian ego is in a flow-state and is not an integrated self or ego-driven in the psychoanalytic sense. Deleuze and Guattari value fragmentation of subjectivity and lines of flight, but also talk about untying the knots which produce neuroses. So a free desire would be multiple but also unknotted if that makes sense.

>Is there anything essential about me, since I have a mood disorder and psychosis?

Not sure what you mean by "essential about me". Is there something different about people with bipolar diagnosis or psychosis, yes but it's not well understood what, and it's a "property" of the Unique One and not its essence. Do you have an essential self even though you go through self-states which are drastically different from each other? TBH I'm not sure anyone has an essential self, everyone has parts, yours just differ in being more dissociated and less repressed. The feeling that you don't exist as a continuous or integrated self is quite common in psychosis from what I've heard; I think this particular feeling is related to dissociation from the lower body (the base chakras) and resultant difficulty forming a sense of subjective meaning. It's also arguably a true claim at a quantum level, so take your pick.

>re: doing bad--i've been thinking a lot recently about how hard it must be to live with having hurt someone badly by accident

Thanks Chisel... yeah I'd also say I feel (retrospectively) about actions in altered states and those arising from gaps between motive and effect in much the same way as about accidents (& also, think how bad this must be if you're dyspraxic).

>and yet also how the idea that we don't bump into people harshly is kind of a bizarre, alienated expectation

Yeah, agreed... I think what's often missed is 1) everyone's different, nobody understands others all that well, 2) everyone's got all this unconscious stuff going on and it's invisible... and when these different, mutually semi-ignorant, control-impaired, self-unaware creatures get together, there's gonna be chaos and nuisance and inadvertent harm, same as when nature throws together any other kinds of living creatures (even if we leave aside the fact that a lot of them want to eat each other). Today people handle this by blaming each other and blaming themselves, most often with the more-different blamed for the harms which result from difference, and the more powerful better able to shift blame where they want it. A better approach is to look for ways to try to make differences run as smoothly together as possible, or else to separate along lines of differences and coping thresholds. Most ethical thought starts from some kind of dogma of prior cosmic/moral order, whereas actually, the order is what results if the contingent process of negotiating differences happens successfully.

anon (not verified)
Practically.

Practically.

Have a group of friends who know this about you. Make a plan for when this happens to you. Tell them you're going to be Not Okay for a while at a certain point in the future and that they need to be prepared for that. Let them know the warning signs.

When you are in a headspace (for me it's suicidal ideation) where you can't, or it's really hard to, make healthy and helpful decisions for yourself, make sure your friends can tell you what to do.

Did you have a bad break-up and it triggered an episode? Make sure that someone is there to tell you "No!" at every step.

"Should I send her this weirdly phrased text?"

"No!"

"Should I drive by and see if she's with her new boyfriend?"

"No!"

"Should I lay in bed all day?

"Maybe, but I'll be there with you, watching silly shows and doing my best not to judge. I will take you to get medication, if that's what you want to do. I will drive you to the hospital. I will read and sift through all your communications to the outside world, so you don't start some shit you didn't mean to. I'll let you wax on like an asshole and try not to interrupt. I will try my best to steer you to make better decisions. When I feel like you've got your groove back, the reason we're friends in the first place, I'll relinquish control back to you."

It sucks to hear as an anarchist. but from someone who has needed something like that, someone to hold my hand, I wish more anarchists would be willing to do this for their friends. Less people would get kicked out of the "movement" and we'd prove that anarchy isn't some little kid knee jerk to authority and for autonomy, it's something a little more nuanced than that.

anon (not verified)
On needing something like that, vaguely

My first psychotic episode (hallucinations, dellusions) was when I was living and working with other anarchists. I was eventually made to go to the ER by my anarchist friends. There, I was tranquilized enough get a night's sleep, then promptly kicked out of the hospital in the morning.

(Weird story kind of unrelated: In the intake room, I thoroughly believed I was in one of those staged psychological tests that doctors will conduct for insight into human behavior. Have you heard of the professor who somehow convinced university students to pee themselves? He told the students they couldn't conclude the study until they wet themselves. He timed them- how long until they did it. Anyway, I was convinced that if I pissed myself in the intake room, they'd let me go. So I stood up infront of this nurse and pissed all over myself. It was some childlike, gutter punk escape plan that did not work.)

But back to my anarchist friends, they were not *not* supportive when I came to. I got sympathy and shelter. But I wasn't productive, I needed babysitting or nurturing when more pleasant, pressing, thrilling or whatever things were happening. I didn't water the garden. I got kicked out of the plasma center for smelling that bad. Wow, how little I could or chose to contribute. I left. Bless them. "BiPolAr pEoplE doNt HavE a mONopoLy On suFferiNg," Bart Simpson style.

It probably did not feel good strong arming me into the hospital. They were anarchists after all. A bit awkward. They didn't want to make me do anything against my will. But I must conclude they needed professional help when it came to my condition. We didn'thave the DIY skills or network to take care of ouselves in this manner.

I still honestly like these people , and I wonder what I could have done differently to have made it warmer. Should I have asked if they wanted me to be around directly, right away after the hospital? Did I relax into my self entitlement? (You married me right? We are anarchist friends! *irony*) I could say they were abelist property owners. I could say they needed too much of a grand fight with the world to be holding hands with my needy ass? Maybe they were just assholes. Maybe I didn't leave soon enough. Maybe I just fucking ghosted them all and it hurt? Will I ask them anytime soon? Probably not.

(By the way: bipolar folks are natorious ghosters. I learned that from forums. It felt weird to learn and also relieving in a way.)

As for that "holding hands and saying no," it reminded me of proper bdsm arrangements. It's like you agree to sub, they agree to dom. Would boundaries be sorted out? Would there be a safeword? So formal for a situation created by irrational impulses and all that. *dry*

Gonna pop a bunch of sleep aids, get some sleep, bounce back from the social anxiety writing can give me, read up on @critics pertanant suggestions, think about how rigid I am, about spectacular dichotomies, the fluidity of matter, the dynamic nature of being, the suppositions in my head, breath a bit, poke at the woodstove.

How's everyone doing? Okay, hitting submit.

Fuck you.

lumpentroll (not verified)
"I got sympathy and shelter"

"I got sympathy and shelter"

... and you're still complaining? like, a lot? and saying it's their fault for "marrying" you?

what in the actual fuck did I just read

anon (not verified)
Good on you, now you know

Good on you, now you know that whining is your strong point!

anon (not verified)
I'm speaking about what it's

I'm speaking about what it's like being in one of those anarcho activist, tense work ethic scenes when bipolar 1 manifests, especially the depression that follows mania. "Good vibes only and get to work" isn't what I'm about. I got morose 3 glasses in and drunk-dialed anews. Lol. Something in that waxing was worth responding to for others, and though I am a bit chagrinned, I hate for my own self-dorrogatory humor to insult the nice (positive meaning) people who pitched in. Talks about "mental health," interpersonal relations, expectations, philosophy of the self, et al are like nails on a chalk board (or a wet blanket) for some people, or at least for some people at sometimes.

There isn't a kick me sign on my back. You're just uncomfortable.

anon (not verified)
Sorry. Morose isn't the right

Sorry. Morose isn't the right term. I don't know what the word would be. To gaze at one's navel. Also sad. It's not the most attractive quality. Now I'm judging my own value judgements. I'm just gonna call this Pisces shit. Have a good one.

anon (not verified)
Hey, I'm a pisces, just

Hey, I'm a pisces, just saying, thoughit means absolutely nothing, its a spook, but I'm an upbeat person who admires stoicism and just showing it to the man that his filthy depressing society ain't gonna get me down, in fact, I'll dance in my own desolation, and I'm not masochistic, though their doctors would love to box me within their rigid psychological geography, no way hahaaa. Good luck at gaining inner hilarious peace. Life is a beautiful tragedy!

anon (not verified)
Thank you. I love your take.

Thank you. I love your take. As invigorating as a cold brook. Life is a beautiful tragety, and I really like how I'm now visualizing inner peace as a dance (instead of, say, sitting cross legged on a yoga mat; it works better for me.)

I'm not sure if I'll ever have faith or believe in the causation of houses and personality types (and that is also interesting: "types") but I find the signs useful in expressing something about tolerance. It bipasses things like tone policing and coersive / malignant psychological manuvers. (Weird phrasing.) You can just say, "Wow, what a Libra!" If people are getting judgy. BUT, still on astrology, I have wondered if something comes about from knowing one's sign from a young age and that influencing a person. "You're this and that and the other!" Tell a kid they're a driven, hard working person long enough and one wonders if its more nuture than planetary positions. Right?

anon (not verified)
I got way off-topic.

I got way off-topic.

MeHappyUsad (not verified)
No on the contrary very on

No on the contrary very on topic, childhood nurturing and world view are related by feedback, life deals out some wild cards sometimes, if certain doors are opened everyone has the same hilarious potentiality.

anon (not verified)
Yep, like the step stool on

Yep, like the step stool on the library's logo. I had a whim to see if there were any Anarchy/ism ASMR videos on YT, and yes, they exist. There's even an entire channel called Anarchy ASMR, but I didnt see any topical videos.
Speaking of ...uh, life as a hilarious tragety.

Here's one about books.
https://youtu.be/JARS5Nc3ILo

Ooh, "Anarchist Affirmations" - comedy skit style. They could even be specific for different tendencies.

I'm off for the night. Thanks for writing.

anon (not verified)
He's (and I'm not from the

He's (and I'm not from the identity crowd but it's probably a he, deal with it) probably reacting to my post where I said practically instead of saying "ideally these would be practical steps".

He saw what I outlined and realized it would help, but that no one would do it for him. People get excited about all sorts of things and drop their friends. The riots/protests this summer were enough to keep most anarchists who are FOR lockdown outside during a lockdown.

Also, anarchist communities are IRL, for the most part, heavy on identity politics. This means friends of his, who might agree with him about a lot of stuff and even like him when he's not like this, are split, because they work everyday with anarchists and allies who are super PC and sold on IdPol and he probably doesn't do great with that crowd. The reason I think that is because of the way he (you, because you're obviously reading this, so please respond) ) said "abelist property owners" which leads me to believe, he's white, poor and a guy and obviously wouldn't use those words against someone unless he was trying to speak to them on their level, in words they understood, and if he does do that then those ableist property owners for sure aren't going to take it well.

But it's in our desperate moments that we self-sabotage, say crazy shit to our friends, post random shit online, make weird phone calls, get really drunk and do something stupid, or worse unforgivable. I know you shouldn't be shitty to people who gave you shelter, but it's not exactly you, or it is and it isn't.

I'm not going to harp on about drives for too long, but that's why the dividualist thing appeals to me at all. It's recognizing that I have all these pulls inside me and some are stronger than others. Some of the stronger drives, when they've been at the forefront, help me. I'm not into strengthening only one, like a certain mustachioed german was later on in his life because he thought it would give him superpowers. When I'm in a mental health crisis and all I can think about it suicide, the drives that are more prominent, that are driving me to fatalism, I have to remember that those drives don't serve me. They're real, they're always there, but I have other drives to, stronger ones that I can reinforce with others.

Say I had a kid. One of my strongest drives would be to be their father. Now let's say I also have depression. I might have a depressive episode, but by strengthening my drive towards fatherhood, which are all wrapped up and supported by other drives (drives like: play, making music, baking, telling jokes, woods walks, etc.) that align or support the over arching drive (being around for my kid) I can see the difference between drives that serve me and drives that don't.

I will never say your mental health episodes are gifts because it's our own unique perspectives that are smushed into the pavement of civilization and that you need to be wild and crazy to fight against it. I would be dead without meds. But there is something that deepens you as a person when you've been the lowest a punk can get, and I don't hear that explored often enough.

anon (not verified)
On the ablist property

On the ablist property owners thing that I wrote: Some of the things that I think were going on during that time:

Some people really want to "make people happy." When this doesnt happpen (housemate just cant be cheered up or feel excitement for the positive stuff), resentment can manifest. Soon enough, the depressed person just becomes a super annoying point of impotence or power ... something like that. It's a codependency thing, imo. I'm pretty good at verbally confirming what's good, but I would obviously be much changed from the chipper, enthusiastic person they were excited to let in.

Also, I would have gotten people's hope up about what work I would put out. All those winter talks about the spring garden are worse than no verbalized plans at all. Which I get, it's asking for an eye-roll in the future. This is something I do understand. "Do it. Make it happen. Follow through on what you say you're going to do. Don't waste my time future-faking anything." 100% and I don't talk about what I *want* to do anymore, because I've been humbled by my depressions and (this just came to me) it's kind of rude to ask people to act like they believe me. Kind of an emotional labor thing.

Also, my trigger is getting called lazy. My chilhood was full of derogatory character assessments like this, and it's an insecure thing I've got. (I was actually a high-achiever in my youth, but family knows where to stick the knife). So, back to adulthood) I would get resentful and find the irony in all the talk of inclusivity, solidarity, property is theft and all that. It doesn't go anywhere because they could also play this game. They'd lived and worked the land longer (whoa now) and association was voluntary, they wanted what they wanted. I wasn't happy. Moving on. I was happy to leave where I wasn't wanted, but I got my hopes up too. I'm sensitive and I did honestly care deeply about these people. Was this story interesting or helpful? Me me me me me. :-)

I'm just throwing this out there. Have you seen the movie The Beach? Leonardo DiCaprio stars in it. If so, remember that scene where on of the commune members gits bitten by shark. He didnt immediately die and kept yelling and moaning in pain for a long time. The other people couldn't stand the wailing and the emotions of watching him slowly die, so they dragged him to a far away spot on the isand to die alone. This topic has me think of it (when I am not feeling generous.)

Another reference is the essay "I want friends not community" which cuts both ways for me. Calling me a lazy burden feels like "community" but so does my "pRoPerTy is TheFt" attitude.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/apio-ludd-i-want-friends-not-com...

I know I didnt reapond to what you wrote about (drives). That does interest me, but I'm goingbto take a break.

13:11 (not verified)
Oops

I said I dont tell people what I'm *going* to do anymore, having the other day doing just this about @critics help in pursuing knowledge, etc. Habbits! My bad. I appreciate you all responding. It's not everyone's cup of tea, topic-wise. Also, holy cow, can I use a handle?

anon (not verified)
That The Beach scene you

That The Beach scene you referenced hit home and I was having some conversations with someone I really respect when it comes to psych stuff, and hear me out, have you ever looked into disability justice frameworks?

I was dubious (and still am) about the language and the kind of weaponized/shield-like use of it that can all to easily (imo) occur, but I think there is something definitely worth exploring there. It's something I've heard many anarchists preach, but not practice.

In practical terms I took it as demystifying mental illness and how we think about it in our social spaces (roommates, friends, lovers, maybe not affinity groups (for security reasons)). It's about making room for people when they are in places where they don't have the control over themselves that they normally, or would ideally, like to have.

In a way this is a kind of anti- Call Out culture (it's not, but in a way?) when it's directed at someone for mental health or other reasons they aren't totally themselves (but still themselves). It's less about creating a dualism of good and bad behavior, and more about opening space for people to have their problems and not shun them for it. It's also, probably, because I didn't do that much reading, about creating practical steps for us all to help people when they're not fully in control, like what if your roommate is having an episode? Who do you call? What resources are available online, in zines, etc.? How do I separate my roommates behavior towards me from what they're going through?

Maybe I'm reading the framework wrong, and certainly the terminology is suspect at best, but I was kind of thinking about it last night and thought of some of the positive aspects of de-specialization of skills and their integration into our everyday group dynamics. We kind of say that we do stuff like this already, but in practice I've seen more sob stories than I'd care to count.

And maybe if those Beach goers would have had some basic understanding of first aid (demystification) and also the desire to help (that culture of care and understanding) then they might've bandaged him up, boated him to the mainland (I forget this movie, did they have a boat?) had a couple people do rotating shifts to be there for him and when he got better, gave him a nice chair to sit on (he probably lost a leg).

anon (not verified)
to 11:41

I know that there are all sort of complex problems and that people are really creative and can come up with cultural innovation to deal with them, but a lot of these "frameworks", like pop-psych parenting advice, can have the downside of what I would call "breathing manually". Turning empathy and personal relationships into a triage algorithm, but then again, knowledge that is currently seen as specialized, as is medical knowledge including mental health and first aid, should be more widespread and common knowledge. I guess there must be many people that are so awful at caring for others that they would benefit from a "framework" to tell them what to do in many situations. Maybe all society's problems, specially those of the confines of domesticity, should be dealt with by education, the public school systems giving course with frameworks for each kind of daily interaction: in the house, out and about in town, with all the different kinds of people, other animals and plants, taking into account functional diversity, and all their specific needs and how to care for them, and this would help reduce many kinds of abuse and produce more harmonious and caring relationships. But these skills can get rusty, so continuous learning and remedial workshops at the town hall should be provided, as well as rigorous discussion and shared self-examination in both household meetings and neighborhood assemblies.

anon (not verified)
I'm going to ignore the stuff

I'm going to ignore the stuff that I take issue with, I think we don't see eye to eye on many things . . .

But, you know what, we do! I really like that "manual breathing" metaphor. It would suck to have to read from a manual just to keep breathing. And it could very much get rigid and cold instead of warm and contextual if you do it to-the-letter.

If I had a kid in public school, I would very much like them to be engaged in learning important skills like this. It would be great if there were more classes in Town Halls. Yet, alas, I am against schooling and libertarian municipalism, so I believe we part ways here. But I'm also not going to fight the school board if they tried to implement something like this. And that you're gutsy enough to even have a plan is something, right?

anon (not verified)
Just checking in, how're you

Just checking in, how're you doing? Has anything in this thread helped you? Are you trying anything new? If so, are you sticking with it and is it "working"? I'm rooting for you!

OP (not verified)
Hey, I'm actually doing

Hey, I'm actually doing really good. I've been listening to a lot of Dr. Ramani on YouTube. Her work is about explaining narcissism, narcissistic abuse, and malignant reactions to it. I don't swollow it all whole hog, but it's very validating in an invalidating environment. (Just what I needed for the confidence to uncurl, so to speak.)

I just read @critics recent post. Don't want to do that outreach a disservice. I'm feel very lucky, @critic. Let me show up later. I'm off to an appointment right now. So many hearts.

@critic
:)

Just ignore the trolls. You probably didn't get the support you should have, and needed to keep going. And of course this stuff has to be talked about on a personal level. Complicated question whether this is just free choice on their part, but I don't think it's as simple as, "it's just self-entitlement" (TBH I think we all expect those closest to us to do what they can to us in worst-case scenarios). And if you're a pre-Oedipal personality type, you're looking for your social world to be more like a loving family (perhaps substituting for your real one) and less like a business relationship. I think they are abusing ideas of voluntarism and consent if they're kicking you out for having a mental crisis, being unable to work during the crisis, or being a killjoy... it belongs in roughly the same category with a community kicking out black people and claiming "muh freedom of association". In idpol and managerialism BTW there's a weird double standard, never discriminate based on "disability" which includes "mental illness", but if it's about "your behaviour" then it's OK to discriminate... but of course you've only been classified with a "mental illness" because of "your behaviour", they can't separate the two. And taking someone to the hospital for a psychological crisis is really fucking dangerous, not far from turning them in to the pigs IMO. These two things together... do seem to indicate they aren't reliable friends/accomplices. I've encountered a similar vibe sometimes, the work/feelgood ethos is not helpful when someone's in a real crisis whether it's a psychological crisis or anything else. Actually I think a lot of anarchist types are running on the spot to ward off collapse themselves, and get pretty terrified when it happens to someone else. And it produces a kind of general disposability, which encourages burnout and discourages trust, and raises worries about the viability of anarchy as a way of life if the big institutions weren't there to pick up the pieces. The other possibility is that you needed something they couldn't give. For example, you were hoping for some kind of insight into what you're going through. I think we need an anarchist theory of psychology, we need mutual aid and support networks among those of us who have crises (and others who understand), we could even do with forming therapeutic communities again like Laing in the 70s. We're a very, very long way from the point where we can assume anarchists have anything like a good understanding or, of sympathy for, psychological issues. I don't actuallly know if an anarchist community can provide the "holding" necessary if you're reliving a feeling of infantile abandonment for example, but there needs to be quite a high level of nurturing to come close. In my view, people who have themselves repressed parts of their psyche (and that's a lot of people) often have fear reactions to anything reminding them of the repressed part. And the "forced breathing" metaphor applies to a lot of the ways people live if they've repressed a bunch of stuff and have to compensate for the functions that aren't there.

I agree with several of the other posters BTW... yes, it's good to despecialise "skills", but some of the current psych stuff isn't really "skills" so much as unhelpful routines... and yes, it's certainly good to have conversations about what you'd prefer others to do if certain things happen. I've worked with other people with psychological problems and it helps me a lot if I can reconstruct what might be going on from their point of view and what dynamic is going on. If I talk to someone who's severely depressed after reading the Klein pieces, I start to notice the way the things they're saying echo with the theories, then I can say things which are maybe more helpful, and I can avoid getting affected so much by their despair that I struggle to talk to them.

anon (not verified)
Hey,

Hey,

Looked into Klein. I thought all that titty stuff was just pandering to all the narcissistic male egos she was working around. Finding a work-about to all that [redacted] . I guess to "apear reasonable and of sound mind" [see: my lofty hand fluttering, page crazy bitch, chapter duh.)

"Well, be reasonable and go along with Freud smearing his poop on the windows." Says the establishment.

Okay.

Anyway, enough with my unfortunate mishandling of this opportunity. :-P

Yeah, ... Content Warning.

My father was a raging alcoholic who slipped and molested me once pretty young. Came back the next morning and told me not to tell my mom and I didn't. He abused all of us pretty bad, but I got the sexual bit.

anon (not verified)
My bad on gendering all the

My bad on gendering all the egos of Kliens' coworkers as male. I don't think it's gendered.

@critic
I think there's a lot more

I think there's a lot more truth in psychoanalysis than in current pop-psych, behaviourism and CBT. Psychoanalysis is a similar method to anthropology. Qualitative study of individual cases, based on particular signs of unconscious/dissociated content (dreams, parapraxes, free association, play, art, as well as symptoms themselves), which if done right, is related to one's own symbols and associations. There's big dangers in it of over-interpreting and basically forcing everything into the same categories, and some of the analytical schools are politically quite conservative. Others are more anarchist-friendly, particularly the ones with a libidinal liberation focus (such as Reich). Yeah it sounds funny cos there's a bunch of poop and breasts and phalluses and stuff. But did you ever wonder why all these body-related things are either hilarious, disgusting/offensive/degrading, or sexually arousing? And why they can carry all three of these contradictory significations at once?

I definitely think this is the direction we need to go in for anarchist self-therapies and mutual aid, rather than just crowdsourcing the current mainstream stuff. Like, we don't learn to cook by copying McDonald's, we've got our own ideas like permaculture and freeganism. Our version would probably merge Reich and his followers (Lowen, Theweleit...) with Situationism and with Guattari's schizoanalysis, while also looting Freud, Jung, Klein, Lacan and the rest, and things like existentialism and ecotherapy.

Klein's breast fixation is probably a counterbalance against Freud's penis fixation. The child's first experience of intense pleasure is probably breastfeeding or bottle-feeding and so the breast or bottle becomes the first object.

But ignore the breasts and penises if that's not helpful. We can say instead: as an infant you had an idea of a loving mother and father who were always there, and a distinct "bad" mother and father who were absent and/or abusive. You wished to protect, merge with, and stay forever with the former pair and to destroy the latter pair, maybe by biting, eating, stabbing, poisoning with your body. Back then, you think you can do this with your thoughts. But as you start to realise the two pairs are the same people, you become afraid that you've irreparably destroyed the good parents, and feel very guilty about this. At other times, you feel very threatened by the bad parents and this makes you feel terrified, enraged, or paranoid. But you start getting afraid and trying to restrain these emotional states because you might destroy the good parents. You've also brought images of both sets of parents inside you (one set by fusing, the other by eating/biting), and you start getting afraid of the bad parents inside yourself, or that the good parents inside you are dead. Abuse in childhood will cause or exacerbate the usual problems in relations to introjected parents and part-objects, because the introjected bad object (the fear that the abusive parent or their body-part is permanently inside you) is stronger and the introjected good object is weaker, so your inner life is in a state of conflict among different introjects.

anon (not verified)
u got a klein & freud

u got a klein & freud fixation

OP (not verified)
Bits, bobs, and terrycloth monkeys

What comes to my mind is that horrendous study of that tortured baby monkey deprived alongside two maniquins. One maniquin was bare and cold metal but *did*provide food through a fixed bottle in the manequin's breast. The other maniquin did not offer any milk, but *was* covered in terrycloth. The baby seemingly prefered to starve with the terrycloth maniquin rather that cling to the maniquin with food. I don't think this rules out the good parent and bad parent dichotomy(?) binary(?) theory of Klein's, but it might confuse the situation. Or no? Just seems to indicate that human connection might be more than caloric support. Who knows, maybe the warmth is somewhere lower on the pyramid of needs... Maslow's heirarchy. Does this animal study (f* science) confuse Klein's theory or merely validate?

My emotion reaction to the bits and bobs theories was one of degredation. Something about the terrycloth story has me doubt it or want it discussed from a different angle. Where is the soul (so to speak?) Or where is the dignity? Idk. Maybe I just need this topic dressed in terrycloth as twisted be the origin.

anon (not verified)
Its all about getting cuddly

Its all about getting cuddly hugs and not food. Food isn't as important as affection and love. Sure one will die without food, water is more urgent, but not counting dietary nutrients, all one needs is hugs.

anon (not verified)
That leaves out all those

That leaves out all those with PTSD who have serious issues with being touched.

anon (not verified)
Hmm, first case of hugphobia

Hmm, first case of hugphobia I've heard about?

anon (not verified)
i know many folks (male,

i know many folks (male, female, and other) with for-real ptsd. most of them have serious issues with being touched unexpectedly. that does seem to dissipate as they get to know someone. but that shit is real. and serious.

OP (not verified)
@critic comment on Reich (omg Klein!? Whyyyy?)

Ended up watching a YT lecture on Wilhelm Reich.

(What a coincidence that that fellow who died fighting against the ICE detention centers (USA) a few years ago shared a name. I don't come across it much. [This is a complete tangent].)

"Rereading the Psychology of William Reich" YouTube channel Stillpoint Spaces Berlin https://youtu.be/0YqNW2w9vWc

When it got to the early 1930's, I was like, "How did the state co-opt this one?" BUT it was all utterly banned! In the NAZI piles of burned books!

On the orgasaming, could not a real, consentual laughter be a type of cuming?

Watching it the whole time with my jaw dropped, rewinding it periodically as to catch it all.

Thank you! Saved it to a "Lectures" playlist that I made so that I won't likely lose it. Need to get to "Body Without Organs" still. Might have already caught it, but it would have been awhile. I've read some Deluze(sp).

20:20 edit (not verified)
*Wilhelm

*Wilhelm

@critic
last bit

Everyone knows sexual abuse fucks children up, but can anyone tell you WHY sexual abuse fucks children up? Most of the mainstream stuff it's just an observed fact, they can't say why.

Psychoanalysis kinda can. If the bad parent's bad genital has actually been inside you, this may reinforce the sense that this bad part is still inside you and you're permanently contaminated or poisoned or made bad, or that the good objects are dead because they can't exist in your inside along with the bad object. So there is probably a part inside of you that you identify with your father. There's probably part of you which does not want to forgive your father, ever, whatever his excuses; and then there is a sense that you have some aspect of your father inside you, meaning that you, too, are unforgiveably bad and to blame for everything (doubly so if you ever desired fusion with the good version of said parent; triply so if they also try to blame you for the abuse). Alternatively, one part of you thinks the father-identified part is unforgivable. But there's other parts which value the good objects and want to reconcile and repair everything, and turn the bad objects into good objects (for instance, to have a good internal father). The depressive trend becomes strongest when you have a strong sense the bad father is permanently inside you, the good objects are irreparably destroyed or dead, and as a result, there's a kind of cosmic collapse, nothing has value any more, etc. You might also become hostile or suspicious of others, who stand for the father in various ways, or if they are symbolic siblings for instance then they also have the bad father inside them. The manic trend if I remember rightly is a defence mechanism which posits instead that you are powerful, the good objects are not destroyed and you can protect them, and the bad objects can be destroyed without harming the good objects. Klein prefers the depressive stage to the manic, which worries me rather, but it's based on the fact that there is a more realistic integration of the good and bad parts of the self and of other people in this stage; in her theory, one passes through it through a kind of reparation and rebuilding which transforms the internal bad objects into good objects and builds a kind of harmony among them (turn the wastelands into land projects, the police stations into squats, the evil pigs into harmless wild boars, etc) while also letting them be imperfect, and to be whatever they are. I think with anarchists the affinity-group, scene, project, community, movement, and/or the desired liberated future are substitute good objects which recreate the imagined happy family on a higher level, in rebellion and defiance against the bad objects identified with the system, state, capitalism, and often the "real" family. Action takes the form of trying to reshape the outer world in line with the harmonised inner vision which is projected into the future, in response to the cosmic collapse of the present. This is why political failure and defeat can be so debilitating.

OP (not verified)
I like what ypu said, for

I like what ypu said, for sure, but I must add that I know intellectually that cycles of pedophilia are cyclical (it's spoken of with the regrettable sighs). I am stupid lucky that I am a cis femme so I don't deal as much with the scary belief that the cycle is enevitable, ie: I get a pass. This feels cheap and opportunistic to me. What if I were not a cis femme? Is it my destiny to destroy this socially constructed inevitability for my "other siblings?" I believe if I am good enough at it, I might make such dainty inroads. BOOM! What have I done? I'm going to tell more about mu molestation following. PLEASE if you are stimulated uncomphortably (I'm sorry) pitch in with me and seek medical theraputic intervention. Thete is no shame in your game. I get my lucky cis femme pass.... though, wait, that's [redacted?]

anon (not verified)
Content warning:

Content warning:

My.mother was off for her grandfather's funeral, he got in my bed and said, "it's okay you can tough it." He placed my hand on his whisky dick. I went still. He got up not a minute later and walked out. The next morning he came back to me and said, "Don't tell Mom."

anon (not verified)
*touch

*touch

@critic
attempted interpretation

OK... not sure how deep to go with discussions here since it's all in public. I'm not a trained therapist anyway, just read a bunch of stuff and try to apply it in anarchist settings. I'm prepared to move to email if you want.

I don't think there's any inevitability to abused children going on to abuse others in similar ways, any more than there is about children copying any other specific aspect of their parents. If someone identifies with the abusive parent they are more likely to repeat the same pattern, but most people will hate and fear this parent (in the same way someone with a very authoritarian parent might become very authoritarian or they might become very anti-authoritarian). They will have an introjected part based on the parent (which also happens in everyone) and there will be particular issues around fearing this "internal object", rejecting it particularly radically (e.g. the persecutor in paranoia), or yeah... fearing you are "really" like that or destined to become like that, which can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I doubt you will go on to abuse anyone, but some of your previous comments about feeling you've done things when manic that are unforgiveable or feeling you will do these things, do sound like they might actually refer to your father doing abusive things when he was drunk, or you're afraid you might do similar things when manic. Though this kind of thing (i.e. worrying about doing bad things when manic) is also quite common in manic-depressive cycles because of the oscillation between not-giving-a-fuck and self-hate. ... A lot of the notorious "psychopaths" have a particular background where their father is abusive, and their mother is very loving to the child but is a pushover with the father and is also heavily abused; boys in particular can take away from this that being good or "nice" means being fucked-over, and try to be like the father, even though they hate him. This leads to a weird situation where their superego (moral ideal part) is identified with being evil. I suspect the people who systematically sexually abuse children are of the perverse type as theorised by Lacan: they're caught in a strange worldview where they're actually acting on behalf of "the big Other" (the social or cosmic order; the all-powerful parent...) and are governed by a kind of fatalism. This is the same personality-type that gives us Stalinist apparatchiks, technocrats, bullying managers, and probably a lot of the idpols. You might well have been dealing with something completely different though. An impulsive person who does abusive things in out-of-control states so to speak. Which of course overlaps a lot with your own worries about being out-of-control, doing unforgiveable things, accountability, etc.

You say you "went still", this sounds like a freeze response. This is quite common in traumatic situations, it's a variant of fight-flight and it's the one which most predisposes to developing trauma. Animals which freeze in this way tend to shake it off right after, but humans seem not to, and it gets stuck in the nervous/limbic system somehow as unresolved fear, sometimes held in tense muscles at particular points. Sometimes it means you've not fully felt whatever you were feeling at the time because the freeze-up blocked the other feelings. A lot of the short therapies for PTSD work with blocked content and look for full re-experiencing to get the experience into a person's main memory-system. Obviously this is an added layer of trauma but, unless this happened in infancy, your "bipolar" structure had probably formed already - this is usually a pre-Oedipal formation meaning you never resolved the stuff that was going on when you were a toddler, and you didn't develop a stable ego so the later traumas hurt you more than they would have. Hope this helps a bit.

anon (not verified)
So I should confront them and

So I should confront them and deliver onto them the damage that they did to me and this will free me from my trauma? Thank you, @critic. I agree. The medications sometimes cloud my judgement and suppress my violence but your therapeutic interpretations are more helpful. Where can I email you at?

anon (not verified)
Umm, that translates as an

Umm, that translates as an eye for an eye, the vengeful justice system devoid of humor. You DO know that it originated from a binary perception of reality?

@critic
not sure

I don't know, that's a personal decision, and I've read different things different places... In Herman's trauma theory it's desirable to accuse or confront them in some way, even if you don't get closure from it, but this comes at the end of the healing process, after the memory's already integrated. In Klein the whole internal/external objects issue makes it complicated, often someone will want to harm the bad object but then they feel they've absorbed it or they've destroyed the good object as well. But there's also a strand of argument from people like Fanon where the act of standing up or fighting back is really important (although this is more in situations where the abuse is present/ongoing). So think through first why you want to speak out/hit back/etc, try to figure out which parts are pushing for it and which parts don't want to and why (there must be forces in both directions if you think about it but haven't done it), also what you're trying to achieve and how it might unfold.

Don't wanna put any permanent emails on the internet for obvious reasons so I've set up a temporary one at acritictemp@protonmail.com. Email me there and I'll move it to another email later.

lumpentroll (not verified)
yeah, fanon's point about

yeah, fanon's point about transforming your consciousness through struggle only applies if you haven't already done that work. once you successfully shift your thinking around your own personal power, it immediately becomes obvious that it's only the very first step.

anon (not verified)
Its not much help though

Its not much help though lumpo' if struggling is prevented by the ever looming presence of iron bars, straightjackets and sadistic prison guards is it?

lumpentroll (not verified)
what is your point here..?

what is your point here..? you're saying ... the state exists, as if that's news? or what?

anon (not verified)
I think the complaint is

I think the complaint is about your lack of insight into the psychology of dissent is all.

anon (not verified)
struggling is prevented by

struggling is prevented by the ever looming presence of iron bars, straightjackets and sadistic prison guards"

Classic slave-dog mindset.

Nothing "prevents" people from struggling, other than fear, cowardice, apathy, and other pathos rooted in servile minds (like yours).

anon (not verified)
No again, I think the

No again, I think the complaint is about the psychology of dissent, how the tangible fear of the State calls for an alternative MO which replaces the Sisyphusian struggling with no end in sight.
And it comes down to a mental exercise and a more nuanced engagement and discourse.

@critic
psychology of dissent

Yeah that's the trouble Lumpentroll: Fanonian standing-up is well enough documented as psychological liberation, but only when there's enough social movement (or dispersed individual) power to overcome the fear of the powerful while still achieving real effects. Compare James Scott's discussion of "charismatic" moments (in Domination and the Arts of Resistance), and Freire's "cultures of silence". Transforming consciousness from some kind of happy-consciousness just-world-fallacy or therapeutic self-management of distress, to a ruptural consciousness in which the system is an adversary, only feels empowering when there's effective forms of agency to sustain the sense of power; otherwise it's immiserating, even though it's basically true (and this is one of the trajectories of recuperation for anarchists: people feel disempowered, burn-out, then gradually give up the distressing consciousness and tone it down into reformism). I think lumpentroll's comment is directed more at anarchists who want the standing-up without the power to act, but there's also a problem that therapeutic models (Judith Herman's for example) want the psychological effect of breaking the culture of silence without actually rupturing the dominant order or exercising counter-power. This only works if the silencing is radically localised and its structural aspects either don't exist or are denied, e.g. if it's a case of exposing or avenging oneself on an individual abuser. Similarly with the whole therapeutic release thing, taking out the anger on a pillow or whatever... it makes sense if the anger is directed against something that's imaginary or that's completely in the past, but not so much when it's a present structure and someone's re-encountering the source of anger over and over.

Lumpentroll, the general gist of your comments gives me the impression of a melancholic pattern: at some point you stood up and broke the culture of silence, but then you were defeated or lost your movement or accomplices, and the whole rebellious impulse turned inward, against yourself and other anarchists. You don't seem to have much hope that it's actually possible to rebel and succeed, to exercise power, but you haven't made your peace with the system either. Probably you're getting some kind of unconscious satisfaction "trolling" other anarchists and bursting people's idealistic bubbles, because they also used to be your own idealistic bubbles except at the time you felt them as real sources of empowerment (and feel free to swear at me if I'm way off here).

"Nothing "prevents" people from struggling, other than fear, cowardice, apathy, and other pathos rooted in servile minds (like yours)."... straight Stirner/Nietzsche but also not quite true IMO. For one thing, fear, cowardice, apathy and the rest are psychodynamic effects arising from particular conditions; they can't necessarily be overcome through will. They're only overcome through will when there's a correspondingly strong affirmative force juxtaposed to the terrorising ones. And also, in order to struggle, one needs to identify an enemy, find effective ways to attack it which aren't futile or suicidal (unless that's part of what you're looking for), etc. There's a lot of weird stuff can fuck things up... not only an unconscious superego that's still saying you shouldn't revolt (or that you're never revolting hard enough), but questions of whether you're getting enough pleasure or fulfilment to sustain the energy to revolt, and ego self-preservation instincts kicking in involuntarily. Revolt is sustained by flow-state, but there's a lot of things can disrupt a viable flow-state: the mere existence of prisons etc won't, but if the repression effectively interrupts every flow before it gets anywhere, or you're experiencing a lot of brutality with no real successes or pleasures, this will rupture the flow.

anon (not verified)
'nothing prevents people from struggling...'

just going along with your idea of 'struggle' for a moment, the suggestion that there's nothing in the way of an individual other than their own lack of will is silly. off the top of my head, i can think of: being in prison, being enslaved (tens of millions of people working with a literal gun pointed at their head right now), having no arms and legs, being bed-bound by illness, being house-bound by age, having dependents who will go hungry if you get arrested... i could go on for pages and pages, but you get the idea.

anon (not verified)
Again, you're taking material

Again, you're taking material or even reified abstract conditions (such as property, monetary value) as determinisms that force people to do or not do things, which isn't just typical of conservative bootlicker worldviews but also damn false.

You had stories on this site of prisoners doing strikes and other types of struggle... Slaves revolts... Plenty of handicapped people fight to dominate their condition and some also get into other struggles even with their physical limitations... solidarity can help your "dependents" not to go hungry when you get detained... and a gun pointed on your head can be countered assuming your brain has the wits and pace to save itself.

None of these external things prevent people from struggling. Resignation, fear, apathy, weakness, those are the only things that do.

WILL is intrinsic, duh. Even if it arises as response to external pressure or stimuli.

lumpentroll (not verified)
where'd you get all that from

where'd you get all that from @critic? haha, sure you're not projecting? you could always ask instead of pulling assertions out of your ass like that. i troll people who richly deserve it, from my perspective.

anon (not verified)
"I am the smartest anarchist

"I am the smartest anarchist on anarchist planet. Politics has an equal and opposite force." *in Hawking voice*

@critic
Being the smartest anarchist

Being the smartest anarchist these days would be like being the fastest snail IMO.

wil (not verified)
Helllo @critic, #40 and #45 here, same person who's also not LT

"For one thing, fear, cowardice, apathy and the rest are psychodynamic effects arising from particular conditions; they can't necessarily be overcome through will."

Yes, but my point about will is that (1) it doesn't come from externalities but your inner self, and (2) it is the diving force, or maybe impulse, behind what will push you to overcome things like fear, cowardice or apathy.

Everyone experiences these latter things on a regular basis and can find ways to overcome them. I got obesity issues from being too lazy and eating too much? That can be solved by doing more exercise or physical work outside and drinking a lot of water, and ideally replacing sugars with fats. But adopting these practices as daily habits depends on YOUR WILL, unless you get changed by a new external influence (like the military, or a religious group, etc).

If you wanna stick to psychodynamics it is somewhere between the It and the Ego While it can be corrupted by external influences but that doesn't make it less intrinsic.

Also honest question that's a daily pissue to me... according to you, how can the Superego's despotic rule be broken, at least for some specific aspects, so to bypass some inhibiting effects on the conduct?

@critic
superego

Yeah I've always read Stirner's ego as close to Freud's id, but that doesn't seem to be how other people are using it. I think with neuroses/psychoses of any severity, the whole "do more exercise/make a daily habit" approach doesn't work. There's various reasons for this, one of these is that part of you is dissociated and doesn't agree with the act of "will", another is that you don't have full access to the energy sources in the id and thus can't channel them by will. Another might well be that the desire to replace your real self with your ideal self through self-disciplining practices is itself coming from the superego.

There's schizophrenics who would tell you something like, "I can't exercise my will because the alien mind-controllers are controlling my mind and body with telepathy". Likely it's actually some dissociated psychological part that's interfering, but that's actually what it feels like to them. Compulsions are similar, except the neurotic has less awareness of their lack of control. Panic attacks and real phobia-level fear can take over and neutralise "the will" in the same kind of way. A depressed person can't get out of it by will because their will is split and paralysed, with one part endlessly berating the other part.

How to break superego controls: well, first off, you'll have something closer to an autonomous will if all your parts (id, ego, superego, whatever other shit is in there) are conscious and are talking to each other, and you work with a purpose which is kinda fine with all of them. Second, historically people only get superegos in certain historical conditions, so changing these conditions (authoritarian parenting, authoritarian schooling, capitalist workplaces...) weakens the superego in people coming up. Third, superegos can be partially neutralised by anything that disinhibits the id and encourages spontaneity (anything from riots to weed), although that will tend to be temporary. Exercises which loosen the muscles might also reduce the power of the superego within the internal system. Fourth, an integrated superego should in principle be responsive to ethical commitments made by the ego: it doesn't mean you'll act on the commitments, but it means your superego will judge and punish you in line with them. So if you keep affirming something like Stirnerian ideas, the superego (if integrated) should take this on and hold you to these standards, which is to say, the standard of not living by moral standards but by desire (i.e. the superego should effectively "negate itself").

anon (not verified)
Its been proved that

Its been proved that incarceration and corporal punishment inhibits and eradicates superegos eventually. Something to think about?

anon (not verified)
At first I could have

At first I could have mistaken you as a troll but no, anarchists MUST reevaluate the cringe that most people in the world feel when they hear anarchists saying abolish prisons and criminal justice.
Let's face it, the average person is a harmless decent "nice" creature who likes to be led, there's no changing this human condition, and its not determinist to say it is an innate quality, to be cuddled and a member of a hugging team and family of similar folk. Everyone wants to see the rapist and murderer punished, beaten and suffering, and if you don't, well, then you must be a sick nasty person yourself, who needs a beating of sense into them.
So yes, let's beat the superego out of narcissists And megalomaniacs before they harm someone.

anon (not verified)
"there's no changing this

"there's no changing this human condition, and its not determinist to say it is an innate quality"

Okay, dawg.

> Humans are biologically determined by instinct

> Nothing deterministic about it!

Dis all makes sense! Coz they said so.

Also heard that now 2 + 2 = 5.

anon (not verified)
No, its called "fusion of

No, its called "fusion of desire", when the collective desire intuitively gives way to a lifestyle aesthetic, or is this too pomo for you?
There is an art required to administer justice in a harmonious way. I think the penal island where sociopaths are placed and permitted to create their own lifestyle dynamic away from the majority of social orientated folk live. I mean, that's what the totality of human history has been struggling with for millenia, how to live with one another in a respectful manner.
I can't see this society without punishment ever eventuating, sorry.

anon (not verified)
its called "fusion of desire"

its called "fusion of desire", when the collective desire intuitively gives way to a lifestyle aesthetic, or is this too pomo for you?"

No it sounds very fascist. Like in the former sense. Also exactly what Reich was talking about in the sublimation of personal desire toward an imagined collective. Assuming that society is made by the "fusion of desires". Conservative trolls are so fucked up.

anon (not verified)
Okay cool, you're some anti

Okay cool, you're some anti-anarchist who likely due to some interpersonal butthurt keeps coming here to impose your socially-inculcated religious convictions about the totally-not-deterministic determinism of master-slave relations in society... instead of just reading from the stuff being posted here often and possibly opening your mind to other perspectives than that of the dominant ideology.

VERY INTERESTING. Now what else you got?

@critic
late reply

Only just saw this subthread.

>Its been proved that incarceration and corporal punishment inhibits and eradicates superegos eventually. Something to think about?

Where the fuck did you pick THAT up?

No doubt people become less moral in prison, and their trust in authority might be reduced if they're treated badly by powerful people, so I guess that would count as loss of superego. But there were prisoners in Auschwitz still bootlicking the guards till the end.

I bet you're confusing superego with ego, since there's plenty of evidence that torture, harsh prisons/camps, cruel/inhuman/degrading treatment, and also abusive families, undermine ego-functioning. If you're imagining this makes people more other-centric and compassionate, think again. The ego handles reality-checking and instrumental actions. Ego-collapse due to punishment/abuse either leads to extreme impulsiveness (since the ego's check on the id is gone), severe depression (the superego keeps flagellating the weakened ego), or psychosis (the ego-functions disappear or fuse with those of the id and superego). In the rare cases where punishment produces a kind of attachment relation, the result is to STRENGTHEN the superego. There's a discussion in Theweleit of Rudolph Hoss, the Nazi who became head of Auschwitz. He'd been jailed before (for murdering another Nazi) and initially had a psychotic collapse, but then came to identify massively with the prison as an institution because it provided a the totality-machine functions he sought. He was remoulded into the perfect screw basically, and tried to run Auschwitz as a smoothly running machine. 'Arbeit macht frei' was also his doing: in his philosophy, most prisoners are scum who deserve the worst possible treatment, but those who endure, work, and remould themselves into fascist personalities should be freed. Most of the other people Theweleit discusses suffered extremely cruel treatment in cadet training schools and this was a big part of how they were turned into fascists (a desire-structure in which pleasure is excluded, the body is only a site of pain, and the rigid armouring is always turned against anything living).

Superego =/= big ego. Superego = internalised moral part which criticises and punishes the ego, usually modelled on a parent or authority-figure who has been introjected. "Psychopaths" either have no superego or (more likely) a superego oriented to a self-image as evil (or "tough", ruthless, etc... a Machiavellian ethos). "Narcissists" (in the current sense of the term) identify ego with ideal-ego to avoid any possibility of superego criticism (i.e. they have a high ideal of who they want to be, but instead of trying to achieve this ideal, they pretend they already ARE what the ideal demands).

>So yes, let's beat the superego out of narcissists And megalomaniacs before they harm someone.

Same issue as above... superegos can't be beaten out. Not sure in this case if you're saying this yourself, or attributing it to the bigots you're discussing. If yourself then you're clearly confusing ego with superego. I'd also add: you can't tell someone's a narcissist or whatever, until they harm someone.

There's easy proof that punishment or the desire to punish is not innate: if if was innate then it would be found in all societies; it isn't; therefore it can't be innate.

@critic
continued

It is, nonetheless, deeply entrenched in many people's character-structures, and hard to change. It has various origins: channelling of frustration-aggression onto outgroups ("criminals"), fight-flight response triggered by lurid media coverage, sadistic desires which are sublimated by only being taken out vicariously on "criminals", etc. It might also involve a corruption and exploitation on an immense scale of more basic mechanisms of restitution for harm or restoration of an imagined cosmic order (if the world is a balance of elements, and deviance is imbalance, then one rebalances by reversing the imbalance, responding with equal force in the opposite direction); or it may even have started as an attempt to avoid supposed vengeance of angered gods/spirits being taken out on the entire community (since every mishap was blamed on gods/spirits, and the only humanly conceivable reason they'd harm someone is that they're angry about something).

The additional "cringe response" to dissent from the pro-punishment orthodoxy is derived from superego mechanisms designed to check potential opposition. The average normie submitted in childhood and tried to be a "nice" child, and the cost of this is that part of their id is repressed. This part is felt to be evil. This normie will once have had thoughts (as a child) that the whole adult world needs to be destroyed (or somesuch), has internalised a parental-modelled superego which deems such thoughts "unacceptable", and has internalised fear of punishment for having such thoughts. An anarchist's comment opposing pigs or prisons then resonates with this thought they don't allow themselves to have, triggering their superego to attack their ego and id. The ego responds by disidentifying with the thought without even thinking about it (since it's scared of the superego), identifies with the superego, and reacts to the anarchist much as the superego reacts to the repressed thought: outrage, anger, silencing, suppression, etc. (This is, incidentally, exactly the same mechanism which happens in rightist types of crimes such as femicides, racist murders, etc: the only real difference between a punitive bigot and a far-right murderer is that the former vicariously identifies with the state, letting it act out their sadism for them, whereas the latter at least acts in their own right). So all these "nice", "decent", "harmless" people are at the same time both "psychopathic" sadists and nihilistic insurgents, at different levels of their personality.

>There is an art required to administer justice in a harmonious way. I think the penal island where sociopaths are placed and permitted to create their own lifestyle dynamic away from the majority of social orientated folk live. I mean, that's what the totality of human history has been struggling with for millenia, how to live with one another in a respectful manner.
I can't see this society without punishment ever eventuating, sorry.

First off: exiling is not necessarily penal, and I agree that the best way to avoid interpersonal harms is often separation into smaller, more compatible groups, so exiling of people who prefer a more sadistic or predatory way of life to a community of such people makes a lot of sense. Over time, I'd expect them to turn into a bandit-bolo or a cluster of warlike tribes. Personally I'm more worried about sharing a community with authoritarian personalities, punitive bigots and judgemental moralistic normies/idpols/left-authoritarians. In a stateless world I would certainly exile myself from such communities of my own accord.

@critic_mail (not verified)
Hey, manic again

Check this out (feel free to edit)

FS: I am sorry, feeling guilt about referencing the African bachelors ... BUT

Title [The Bible for Stupid People]

1) Mary Magdalene was a prostitute in a cat house, right? @critic! she made a sleeper cell to coop the then monarchy! She was ...uh working? with the bachelor johns to get King David(?) by the short-and-curlies.

PS: I make a manic joke like stupid ppl are stooped over people, anti-civ style. Stooped over row crops, linked to grains, etc ...

I think about your memes a lot. ;-) sorry tag you're it? Or I have more _Bible for Stupid People_ . I was thinking the forward would explain anti-civ, and the conclusion would allude to the mystery of Roman(?) wolves amd twin siblings. Eh?

sour (not verified)
I hate to feed this comment cascade but..

Personality-building's not only based on the parents. Developmental psychologists for the most part have done this mistake of overlooking the "schoolyard" as society's embryo, from where many patterns form and are often set to remain.

In my case, I am close to the psychopath's background you're describing. I've learned that being good and nice can be worth it, yet it's not the good people who "win" in society, but the cold-blooded hypocrite gets the upper hand. One who doesn't hesitate to impose himself on others never gets flamed or shamed for it, yet dare being hesitant and you're get all the finger-pointing. They're the chads who get the girls, as the normative women are also programmed to be gong after hawkish, bullish male role models who always do the first steps without showing even a hint of desire.

You learn to be hateful from your milieu hating you, and rooting for the bullies and the manipulators. You quickly learn, around the age of 8, that there's little hope for the good, naive guys in this world, as naiveté is a expensive commodity compared to the mind tricks and bullying going on around. Society is a war from early on in small school. Some of these patterns remain part of people's subconscious as they grow up.

Those here who parent wealthy parents sending them to lovely private schools don't know this. This whole dog-eat-dog aspect of the world is alien to them.

@critic
schoolyards and alienation

The account of alienation in Reich and Fromm follows similar lines to this: the child learns early that survival depends on conditional love which is earned by being successful; and this produces a split between the id and the ego (self-preservation). They build up a persona, kinda like a Scottian public transrript, which is basically a social role, a spook, but they come to identify with it, to take it is as the true and complete self, and to only consciously think and feel things which are compatible with it. The other parts of the self then only appear via dreams, free associations, symptoms and so on. Typically the child also learns to "be good", but only for instrumental reasons, as a kind of virtue-signalling. You may well be right that school is more fundamental than family to this kind of alienation: the core relations of adults to children are commandist and non-intimate, there's strong reliance on reward and punishment, and there's competition and competitive ranking from very early on.

In early Freud, sadism is always one of the component aspects of infantile "polymorphous perversity", along with a bunch of other stuff. It starts as a relatively innocuous desire for "power-to", to be able to do things, but easily turns into a desire to control and then sometimes also to degrade, hurt, etc. Certain social formations will encourage the sadistic element in sexuality, often while forcing it off sexual paths (sublimation). It does seem that school structures are designed to channel mainly sadism and masochism, along with possibly epistemophilia (desire to know) and scopophilia (looking/being looked at). Psychoanalytic theories split later on around the question of origins of aggression: the later Freud posits a "death drive" to return to inertia/homeostasis/undifferentiation which is externalised as aggression, other theories emphasise frustration-aggression, or (in Klein) aggressive desires towards the "bad object" (bad breast, bad genital, later bad mother/father) which one may also feel guilty about once one associates the good and bad objects. I've just read Abraham on manic-depression, which is disturbing and interesting: he thinks depression is a self-judging reaction arising from an earlier strong sadism. A lot of the feminist stuff on male violence suggests that boys/men are trained to convert shame and fear into anger. We all know the harms arising from this, but it's probably also useful for people in contexts like the army and police, or in industrial labour where people need to keep exerting forceful effort without collapsing.

BTW those who've been to old-fashioned private schools like the English Eton/Harrow type ones, probably DO know what you're talking about, they seem designed to mass-produce psychopaths and certainly explain why the elite are like they are (Trump for instance went to a boot-camp military-style school). There's a whole section in Theweleit about the role of elite officer training schools in turning children into the fascist soldier-male type through brutality and competition. Someone once summarised this to me in the phrase "violence is sex for fascists", which is not far from the truth. Historically in these kinds of schools, the bullies would be favoured by the teachers and would also be the prefects. In working-class schools there seems to be a split, the bullies are often the outgroup in official terms and the favoured students ("swots", "asskissers" etc) are some of the most bullied - I'd expect this to produce a split superego.

The intermediate classes in the liberal professions might be insulated a bit, because their social role is rather more to act as an (ineffective) check on or legitimiser of the elite. The intermediate strata also learn to play roles to an extraordinary degree, probably more so than the poor, but they rely more heavily on guilt and conditional love rather than outright threat, and lean towards using rewards rather than punishments.

anon (not verified)
Its the prevailing morality

Its the prevailing morality which messes with kids heads the most, like not having ownership of their bodies, like chattel slaves.

anon (not verified)
I agree AND I see too many

I agree AND I see too many times to count that kids aren't even given their minds to own as their own. They have an opinion another takes offense to, and the outcome is a shaming, gaslighting , a type of assault (which I oppose since is the theft of a person). "Your thoughts are unreasonable." "You don't get it." If the kid persists in pointing out evidence to the contrary, the adult will fall to lying. What is the mind then, but property? I believe anarchy exists between spaces, the absence of metaforical fences, the absence of objectification. What do you think? Anything to add or any ships to steer, so to speak?

How do you navigate these anarchist waters?

05:36 (not verified)
I see contradictory logic in

I see contradictory logic in my own writing. It's a first draft.

If the mind is property ... i don't know. Perhaps the metaphor is sinking. Lol . If anarchy exists between spaces, then lying is a theft of the water? Or the ship?

Individual entities are ships, the water is anarchy, lying is a theft,...

Hmmm. But we all know that matter is not entirely.

But, back to kids, I feel that lying is an assalt. But I also limit the territory, keeping the kid in a lagoon.

@critic
Yeah, the root of a lot of

Yeah, the root of a lot of the problems (and why childhood fucks us up) is that children aren't treated as human beings. Most people seem to think that the whole point of a child's life is to be molded into whatever it is adults want them to become. Alternatively, that the main issue with children is to stop them bothering adults. This is done with some mixture of coercion, bribery and trickery. And from here it's only a short step to any of the recognised kinds of abuse (as if the whole situation of coercive control and denial of agency isn't already abusive). Probably why it's all so common.

anon (not verified)
I heard anarchists can't have

I heard anarchists can't have children. I guess I've taken offense to that having been in special ed as a kid, havng had the abuse, the oVEr PoPUlaTion. Don't reproduce! Don't reproduce! I thought we were past Eugenics and past my body being on topic. Lol

What do you think, @critic? Can anarchists have kids?

@critic
umm yeah...

Of course anarchists can have kids. I know anarchists with kids, it seems to make living anarchically harder, and there's a load of problems with how not to fuck them up and how not to let the state fuck them up. Quite often people have kids, drop out of the "scene" and go mainstream. Very sad when it happens. I don't think there's anything inevitable about it, it doesn't help that anarchist spaces aren't very child-friendly, or the whole cult of being super-active, though I think mostly these people are the ones who go through an anarchist "phase" and are always getting back in the rat-race sooner or later. ... Overpopulation's the kind of thing that just isn't all that affected by one or two (or even ten) more or less, and we really don't need peer-sourced Chinese population control on top of all the other control society shit. There may well be too many humans ecologically speaking but the amount each person consumes has a lot more impact. Plus the long-range forecasts have population peaking then plummeting to about 1 billion on current trends (virtually all urban-born populations have sub-reproduction birthrates). Population growth is nearly all a question of rural Africa, rural South Asia and rural Middle East and there's a whole range of issues like low life expectancy and lack of healthcare, no recognised women'sr rights, and patriarchal/transactional relationships where men expect sex on demand without condoms. So "no having kids to stop overpopulation" belongs in the same bin with "no going out to stop covid" in my view.

anon (not verified)
"Can anarchists have kids?" Can you have a brain?

You're jumping steps... like the primary question: Why you wanna have kids in the first place?

You are confusing people questioning social norms and taking ownership of themselves, with "can't do". I want you to provide us with a solid argument as to why anarchists -or anyone else- would make more babies. How is that needed, for all the mess, work and legal/economic responsibilities that represents?

anon (not verified)
I'm one of the posters from

I'm one of the posters from this thread earlier, the one who checked backed in, "hi."

I haven't had a chance to read through this whole thread, but of course anarchists can have kids and having children is part of many anarchist's anarchist project. anarchist. ha.

Many of us have children because not everyone is the flavor of anarchist you are. For many of us our anarchist project is multi-generational and (with hope) connected to a place. That land-project-permaculture-commune anarchy might not challenge authority or capital in the way you like, but for them it's anti-capital and anti-state, which is rings pretty much like anarchy to me.

Multi-generational place based life is crucial to what some refer to as indigenous anarchy. Which Aragorn! talked a bit about.

Also, telling someone that they "can't have a family" rings really not at all like anarchy to me.

anon (not verified)
I'm 1000% for transgenerational anarchism

But how about educating the kids that are already there (what Aragorn! and the rest of the Anews gang seem to be about, more than having kids), instead of burdening yourselves with more family duties and legal obligations? The latter looks more like a severe, heavy impedance to your project.

In the current developed Western world, it ends up being a way to throw more kids in the mouth of the beast. Or what are you doing to prevent your kids from getting sucked in on 24/7 TikTok and easier access to digital money subservience? That's at least what's been happening to my buddies young daughters, and I can easily see a new kind of online peep-show prostitution scheme evolving from that. But these parents for a very control-free approach to education! Convenient.

My position is not to "not have kids", at all. It's more like not being chumps and dumbasses assuming that our anarchist genes will be automatically transferred to our kids so they keep pursuing anarchy, like. Education is what it's about, love or hate the Krapotkin and Ferrer, they were in the money about that, at least. But Rousseau above them.

You gotta program your kids to not go with the program. Like use FOSS on them instead of proprietary. "Gotta" because if you just let them do whatever the fuck they want with the tech feudal candy pills, they WILL end up being slaves. But tech is just an example. If they aren't taught to be self-reliant, more generally, they'll just be sheeple or dogs. Then you realize too late that your 18-years project has failed.

What is a better approach: the Amish approach. Educate and groom them with strong discipline in a cult-like setting dominated by anarchistic narrative, when let them loose in society at 18 yrs old. Then open arms if they wanna come back.

@critic
kids

There's lots of stuff on how anarchic societies "raise" children, generally it involves meeting their needs unconditionally in the early years, their having a lot of freedom to wander off and play with other kids, and then later accompanying the adults in their "work"/activity and learning this stuff through play-learning or apprenticeship. This site: https://peacefulsocieties.uncg.edu has lots of summaries of case-studies, I'd also recommend Genge's and Bolin's work on Andean childhoods (Genge is here: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.562.4080&rep=r...) and works of Smith and Shunear on traditional Roma ("gypsy") parenting (Shunear here: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/uploads/a2df402a-43e1-48bb-9ac4-c...), also Reich's "Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality" is based on Malinowski's work in the Trobriand Islands. There's people have tried to copy this stuff as attachment/natural parenting and homeschooling, deschooling, unschooling etc... often hard to stick to for various reasons. Mostly to do with modern life being organised around the segregation of children and parents not getting enough support from others. Kids are hard work, they're full of energy and bounce, do their own thing, are hard to reason with, and need a LOT of attention, and this easily drives grown-ups mad... at which point their loss of temper or attempts to control the child get excused as "education" or "discipline". Then there's the threats from pigs, child grabbers ("social services") and the school system wanting to know why your kids aren't signed up. All pretty hard.

SirEinzige (not verified)
I like kids. Thanks for not

I like kids. Thanks for not including me among the threats.

@critic
troll spotted

Yeah I really should have included "internet trolls nicking other people's usernames so as to harass/defame them" among the potential threats.

Serious point though: my impression is that nearly all child molestation takes place either in families, extended families, or institutions (like schools and care homes). So it's probably not a major risk in relation to an anarchist having children, presuming you or your partner or close relatives aren't planning on doing it. Obviously worth looking out for, along with wild bears, kids sticking their fingers in electric sockets, dying of diarrhea, etc.

What's your serious point here though? You think anarchists should never have children because they might get molested?

OP (not verified)
Thank you! @critic and others

My manic episode is definitely waning off. I needed to spend a week or so cringing and painting the house before I was ready to read through all these contributions and discussions. I pop online to see your guidance and links to pursue, and that's wonderful. Thank you! I'll have to print them out to really study. But I've recently purchased a laser printer, so it's doable. Woot! Freakin' library charges 20 cents a page. But that's neither here nor there. Thank you. Dang, look what this thread has become. I kinda heart chaos. It me. :-)

OP con't 04:29 (not verified)
Sorry. "It me?" Jeeze, let us

Sorry. "It me?" Jeeze, let us not embrace the manic pixie dream girl trope of anews. Study time. My anarchist affirmations: "I am self-disciplined. I am thourough. I spell-check."

anon (not verified)
Ah, remember when anews had a

Ah, remember when anews had a spelling and grammar troll who would pop in to correct ppl on their mistakes? Reminiscence is a strange drug.

anon (not verified)
Also this Western morality

Also this Western morality applies its materialist values of ownership to the values and thoughts of the child and suppresses the fun and carefree emotional developmental experiments of children into a guilt ridden taboo laden and forbidden thinking space.

anon (not verified)
Yes, I learned to see ratios

Yes, I learned to see ratios of waste(?) in regards to the overpolulation debate. A first-world person consumes so much more of the economy than someone ... okay, um, I was taught that the fossil fuel consumption of a first worlder was drastically higher than that of ...uh, white people so it was pretty much just racist Malthusian fear-mongering WHiTe GeNOcIDe creey fears. This was the same time period that Eugenics was though of in the New World, practiced on the indigenous population, and applied industrially in Europe during WWII. This lesson was in 2005, so it's been a minute - so to speak.

What was that about rural areas? I heard that bachelor men were voicing complaints in Africa? Unmaried and disposessed(?)

Well, even lions have bachelor pads. The juveniles ...

Sorry, I don't want anyone to get hurt. What is going on that is at issue, @critic?

PS: are the climate refugees from the Oceanic archipelagos still being "helped" by Australia? Is that a thing? It was talked about on a podcast.

Thank you!

anon (not verified)
Freaking typos. Aragorn did

Freaking typos. Aragorn did warn me. Lol sorry. No to White Supremacy. Yay!

@critic
I sometimes wonder if you're

I sometimes wonder if you're trolling? or trying to "gotcha" me?

Rural Africa: yes there's a quasi-incel thing going on. African relationship structures have developed a lot of ways and of course aren't homogeneous, but there's a tendency that when export capitalism was introduced, all the modern jobs went to men (because of the colonisers, not existing African values). This criss-crossed with existing patterns of transactional relationships and dowry-like gifting to produce a situation where young men are expected to get rich enough then court a woman using wealth; women worked in the subsistence sector or secondary industries and relied on the man's higher income for extra support. Sexism aside, this works fine as long as there's Fordist jobs or the men control land, but in neoliberalism the work is precarised, there's huge unemployment and some of the jobs are feminised. In some countries the various jobs are strongly gendered and most of the "male" jobs have been destroyed, meaning women are overworked and men are sitting round in bars all day complaining about being unemployed (again a little bit of gender role subversion would go a long way to solving both these problems). Hence a situation where a huge swathe of young men (known as "youth" in Africa even if they're in their 30s or 40s) who can't afford to marry, aren't "real men" until they do, and who often have resentment against women who will "only marry for money". Women, meanwhile, get caught in serial transactional relationships with different men which are often rather dangerous, or go it alone and face stigma (as single women are viewed as dangerous seductresses in some areas). Everyone judges themselves and everyone else for the deviation from "traditional" norms (actually often colonial, religious or idealised innovations) but in reality young people are doing different kinds of relationships. There's anti-sexual guilt from imported western religions as well as an older view that sex shouldn't be pleasurable for either men or women. It's a situation which is ripe for a good dose of Situationism and Reich IMO. An anarchist approach to sexuality would certainly be revolutionary if it took off.

The "overpopulation" problem is a rather different one. The gender dimension is that men expect sex on demand without protection, and women who insist on condoms are viewed as promiscuous (everyone is promiscuous but there's a whole pretence about it). Rural households also prefer to have lots of children because children are extra pairs of hands in household work, the main providers of care for older parents/grandparents and also there's a risk some of them will die (and a gamble that one might go to the city and make their fortune). Women whose lives are limited by patriarchy also tend to value motherhood as one of their few recognised roles. You'd think the "youth" problem would reduce the birthrate but it seems wealthier men will pick up the slack by having mistresses.

New Zealand are letting in small numbers of people from Pacific Island societies under climate refugee visas, about 100 people a year from islands that are literally submerged. Pacific Islanders aren't very happy as they want more secure routes to migration.

anon (not verified)
"There's anti-sexual guilt

"There's anti-sexual guilt from imported western religions as well as an older view that sex shouldn't be pleasurable for either men or women. It's a situation which is ripe for a good dose of Situationism and Reich IMO. An anarchist approach to sexuality would certainly be revolutionary if it took off."

Yesss! Exactly the reflection where I'm at these days. Yet still, the answers are slow.

We're living in a quasi-puritanical mechanistic anti-sex culture not unlike the one Reich identified as the source of fascism. It's not openly repressive as religious-based cultures, which makes it far more complex to tackle. It's what I'd refer to as the "leggings anti-erotism", where sexual attributes are openly displayed yet desire ain't exactly repressed, but rather silenced, as if it has no place to exist. I still have yet to see any sign of desire among the liberal zoomer psyche, as it seems absent, or just disproportionately unassumed.

I don't know what would make "anarchist sexuality" take off, but I noticed that it's lacking as a subject of discussion on and offline, including on Anews.

anon (not verified)
and what exactly is

and what exactly is "anarchist sexuality"?

anon (not verified)
Anarchist sexuality is making

Anarchist sexuality is making sex sustainable and fun by avoiding penetration, population growth and the institute of marriage.

anon (not verified)
Why does it have to avoid

Why does it have to avoid penetration?

I don't think you got anything about Reich.

anon (not verified)
Well mainly because

Well mainly because penetration is invasion, or breaking and entering, its not very nice and has been taken as granted by the patriarchal societies. Unless one is planning to have children, penetration is an extravagant unnecessary aspect of intimate relationships and introduces a toxic dominant/subservient fascistic aspect. Only where there is unconditional love and respect can penetration occur.
Also, things start getting really complicated when penetration enters a reĺationship, such as disease exchange, failure to orgasm, emotional collapse and unwanted pregnancies.

anon (not verified)
It's where one of you dresses

It's where one of you dresses up as a cop and the other one wears a balaclava while doing BDSM stuff to them.

Either that or jerking off to riot porn. Your choice.

anon (not verified)
I remember almost 20 years

I remember almost 20 years ago when I was just getting to know Aragorn!, we were talking about how folks navigate the impossibility of living in this world as an anarchist. His thought was that we are forced to be somewhat schizophrenic. I always appreciated that perspective.

anon (not verified)
yeah, he was the first person

yeah, he was the first person ever to consider that... smh...

anon (not verified)
I think about schizophrenia a

I think about schizophrenia a lot, but not in quite these terms, so this is helpful.

Interestingly for me the most schizophrenic time was just before becoming an anarchist. Possibly I was drawn to people who would have some understanding of the experience as well as some skills navigating the world in a semi schizo state and not ending up totally fucked. Even if no one had got there on the same path as me, there's some thematic overlap.

anon (not verified)
Taboo.

Taboo.

Take that Freud Face! What do you have to say about taboo?

Honestly - taboo! The age of aquarious and all that (meaning, if it pains, normalize it). Now there's Freud-fans - seemingly trying to make something of dissecting a taboo. Taboo. My god. I get to live my entire life swinging a sledge hammer above my head. Round and round. Taboo. Bash. Taboo. Bash.

Taboo.

I both protect and defend taboo. It's a taboo. Taboo. Don't live in the age of aquarius. It's the age lf pisces. The sledge hammer. Taboo.

(A poem!)

Le Way
Excellent poem, taboo or not

Excellent poem, taboo or not taboo?, that is the question, , ,

Ian(: (not verified)
I really enjoy this and would

I really enjoy this and would love to connect further! I also am an anarchist with a severe mood disorder.

Le Way
Moralities are the root to

Moralities are the root to most mental disharmonies or psychogenic problems. These moralities, whether drilled into a child's behavioral framework as lectures or violent disciplinarian exercises using fear, interfere with the development of emotional reciprosity and empathic flow between people in relationships or with the outside world, where the clash of different moralities further complicate psychogenic imbalance.
Kids must be allowed to explore the world with just relevant pragmatic advice minus any behavioral manipulation and brainwashing.

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