Tuesday, December 08, 2009

On the development of an alternate personality

On the development of an alternate personality.

I leave this scrap to the winds, hoping that professionals will learn from my own experience.

I'm in the process of developing an alternate personality. It's not something that I have total control over, and in fact am trying to resist its attempts to surface.

However, its logic is compelling, attempting to justify itself in order that I might bodily and morally have some sort of escape clause built into consequences of any of my actions. The escape clause is 'mental illness'.

So, you can see it's contrived , yet it actually isn't because, as you see, I'm trying to resist it. I would compare this to the compulsion to shoot yourself in the foot to avoid military enlistment.

It's not something I really want to do, but here it comes again, saying how easy it would be to slip into dissociation in a serious way, thereby eliminating all responsibilities of life.

Now, I want to say that some days can be really bad, and some situations we find ourselves in can be trying, or bleak, or relentless. So this little voice, or not even a voice, but a word game being typed, shows up and starts typing suggestions to you. And you actually find yourself wanting to type it a reply.

Is this from loneliness? Oh, the phantom typist can come up with all sorts of reasons why it is present.

Anyway, professional head doctors, this is how it develops.

Do you know what a defense against it is? To assert that reality is NOT fluid, and other materialistic types of statements. But this is just a shadow defense, because to say that assertions can affect our minds is to say that in some fashion, reality IS fluid, and if it is, then there you are.

And all of this without drugs!

Thursday, December 03, 2009

The Lost World - A Careful Attention


The president was on TV today. I didn't watch. It's all so boring nowadays. The real machine is in California, and it won't be stopped.
In a few years, the 1900's and the days before it will be lost to us. We are losing the ability to read and reason and especially to step outside of our own skin and imagine what is like to be in someone else's .
I'm not saying that this is a bad thing. It's being replaced by something else, is all. The hive mind.
It won't be long before we are all connected by much more than just wireless communications. The day is upon us when our thoughts will be even more influenced than now by our peers.
Actually, this has happened before in civilization. We usually associate it with times of oppression, but really, the oppression is somewhat voluntarily accepted. There have been periods when individualism was celebrated, such as the Renaissance, and others when conformity was the only way to survive. But in most instances, those within the situation were unable to conceive of things being any different. Oh, we can judge other eras, but try judging your own. It's very difficult.
However, in the early 21st century A.D. , we have a unique opportunity to see our own world-view changing before our eyes. Technology is about to put us in more than constant touch with each other. Socialization is about to become the defining characteristic of society. (That sounds tautological, doesn't it.)
Many would argue, and many have, that this process has been continuous for decades, and in some sense they are right. But for many years, society has paid lip service to the concept of individual heroes, scientists, innovators, and celebrities. Never mind that many of these are manufactured by a mechanism of capitalism precisely for profit to the corporate world. It seems however, that our cynicism is about to give way to acceptance. Consider the rise of media-mob partnerships in choosing the next american idol, or the public awareness campaigns that have made cigarette smoking, global warming, and now avian flu into major evils in our society.
With the increase in available information (thanks to technology), the average human being is becoming gradually incapable of coping with life as an individual. George Orwell's groupthink is becoming a necessity for survival.
It is just a short step from this to the ridicule and eventual vilification of those who would dare go against the consensus. (Yes, Ayn Rand wrote about this 50 years ago. But her evaluation was itself appropriated and altered by the same capitalistic forces that she praised. Today her philosophy is equated with the mindless group materialism championed by the latest dysfunctional celebrity.)
Of course, the internet is both a cause and possible solution to this problem. The virtual frontier will become the shelter of the independent thinker, their bastion against the tide of group bohemianism that purports to know everything that is good for us. ( I believe this week it is hairball dissolvers).
For now the individual thinker is tolerated, though ridiculed. Eventually he or politically correct she will be looked upon with suspicion, and then discarded. The sad thing is that our own children will never miss us.

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