It is always very interesting to see who is supposed to “let go” and “forgive” for what, and who is supposed to remain angry. If you are the white relative of a white murder victim, it may be “cold” not to be ever angry and vengeful. But if you are a Black person marked by the continued effects of slavery, you need to “let go of the past.” And God forbid you should have any infractions on your record.
Cassandra
I am suspicious of the phrase “let it go” for my own reasons. My self-diagnosis has been the Cassandra Complex ever since I first heard of Troy. It must be noted that the worst aspect of this complex is not that others do not believe the true prophecies of the Cassandra figures, but that the sufferer herself also comes to doubt them.
One destructive occasion on which I have ignored my own prophecies in favor of someone else’s were when I warped my professional identity by taking on an untenable project; a more destructive one was when a licensed therapist insulted me and I, rather than take the comment for the abuse it was, decided to take it into serious consideration as a fair criticism.
It is truly amazing how much trouble I caused myself by listening to evil spirits on just these two occasions. It is yet more amazing that although both were long ago I only came to understand the second one this year.
Garden
The reason I have harped about these and related issues so much this summer is that from the time they took place forward I was exhorted to “let go” and “move on.” While, on the one hand, it was believed I should “feel more deeply” and “grieve” situations I could in fact handle, it was also “inappropriate” to feel pain where I actually felt it. I tried to follow these instructions and never got to listen to my own voice.
People were also quick to say that I need not deconstruct the theories which led me so far on a destructive path. “You just weren’t ready for that. You don’t have to justify disagreement,” they said. But I did not want to say I “just wasn’t ready for that” – to name my experience in that false way and leave its reality in limbo. I wanted to see what my disagreement was and what it meant. I was not seeking to justify, but to understand event.
I think that what people mean when they pronounce these pat phrases is that they do not want to see certain institutions criticized. And the real meaning of “let it go,” as Ravensravings points out, is often “submit.” But you cannot eradicate a poisonous plant by ignoring it. You must pull it out by the root.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Interesting post Prof Zero.
Like you I am amazed by the “let it go” crowd. If I had a dollar …. you know I would be a millionaire for the advice of “moving on” and “changing what you can.”
These are supposedly realistic and optimistic pieces of advice.
I have never been able to see the optimism in “submission’ or the rationalization of “moving on.”
Just a couple of days ago someone told me not to be at ‘war’ with the system. “You must learn to “move” in such a way that you beat the system” was the conclusive advice.
Oh yeah. And spend the rest of my life hating the ‘weeds’ that then grow inside of me.
Not likely. That is not what struggle is about.
Thanks for being on the same page.
Peace,
Ridwan
ps. Why is so much of the “moving on” worldview tied to moving … moving where … and under the assumption of what … progress? Just wondering if progress is the same thing as “moving on” … 🙂
Oh good, so I am not the only one.
On ‘moving on’ – I am happy with the phrase when it refers to moving through a meeting agenda, rather than letting a grandstander try to argue a small point into the ground.
But in this context I think it is like what the police say: “Move along, now! We do not want to consider the questions your presence raises!”
Yeah, I’m on this page as well. I think what got me there is that I wasn’t brought up to have my observations taken as irrelevent. That was the privilege I had within the previous class system I lived within. So, now, when I see people squirming like worms and then just “moving on”, I think you know it is devastating how little power most people have and how little they hope for. That’s a constant culture shock for me — the way people give up so easily, or stab each other in the back for the smallest advantage.
Now you can see in the attitude of Marechera a similar refusal to move on. My suspicion in that he was also infected with Rhodesian moral idealism. He went to an Anglican college, after all. But for whatever reason, he won’t “move on”.
Another thing that made me suspicious about the whole “move on” ideology was the hastiness of it, which seemed to indicate negative emotions like fear or the sense of people advising me in this way because they had something to hide.
I would have been happy to move on from a lot of things much earlier if only I felt that my concerns had at least been heard, if not also addressed. But nobody wanted to hear what I thought the problems were, and therefore it seemed to me that there were problems lurking deeply within the society that simply had to be brought up to the surface and addressed.
“So, now, when I see people squirming like worms and then just ‘moving on’, I think you know it is devastating how little power most people have and how little they hope for.”
Exactly – it is a way of managing, I suppose, powerlessness (and I know that in the current culture we are also supposed to accept powerlessness, but I think that only means submit to authority and I am against it).
“Move on” as an expression of people with something to hide … yes. As a cover for deeply lurking problems … yes.
“Move on” … as the owners scuttling the renters of the property.
Today’s riff on this: it is hard to keep the Reeducation haze off, though – it is as though I had lived outside some of the resignation and authoritarianism that imbues the culture, and was immune, but then caught the bug (although of course Reeducation would say I was in denial before and am now conscious … but they lie).
Since Reeducation I have felt exiled and alienated; the primary issue is that Reeducation taught I had no right to my own life. I gave up making things pleasant, leached feelings of freedom out of myself, and .
Before Reeducation the world was both wide and cozy, but since it has been narrow, empty and cold – alive in itself, but off limits for me.
This lesson was hard to believe so I had to study it very hard in order to learn it. That is why it is so difficult to unlearn. I still tend to forget that this is only Reeducation’s view of things. That only Reeducation wanted one to live that way. That the warm world is still within reach, even for me.
P.S. And it always works. In Reeducation it was sinful to take control, make decisions, or do as one saw fit.
If one follows those instructions life is very depressing. Everything becomes so much easier if one just does these things.
I cannot believe I was so ideologized not to do these things, how deeply they got ingrained.
I gave these things up in my thirties because Reeducation said it was immature of me to do them – as an adult, I needed to learn to obey, play time was over.
I had always thought that to be an adult was to be responsible but Reeducation said I was wrong.
I was right and I am glad to be right – despite the Reeducation mantra, “It is better to be happy than right.”
As everyone can see, I deeply resent Reeducation and I think it was very mean. I am still afraid to talk back to it because everyone else likes it so much, I think I am crazy not to like it. But I do not like it and I am talking back.
P.P.S.: And I am redundant on the topics of Reeducation and abuse but I seem to need it: learning by rote, or learning the same thing in a deeper and simpler way each time.
Abusers: say that if you do not submit to abuse, you are being ‘mean’ to *them*. [They experience your separateness from them as cruelty. They also tie you to them by saying you are mean to them, but they care for you. This means you owe them your loyalty: they love you, and your individuality is hurting them, so you owe it to them at least to stay close by since that is what they want.]
Abusers also: tell you that you are being abused by others and cannot see it. They are going to rescue you from this abuse. Cleverly they get you to believe that the pain they inflict is being inflicted by a third person … thereby alienating you from that person, and again, tying you to the abuser.
Both of these things were principal strategies in Reeducation.
***
I have been told repeatedly that if this happened it was because I ‘needed’ it or ‘attracted’ it. I think this is false: as I have said before, abuse works on all of its victims.
What has for a long time been wrong with me was, I was trained to excuse abuse. I never sought it out or started it, but I did not know how to get away if I was bound by guilt. Reeducation took advantage of this (how could it not – I explained on the first day that this was one of the main habits I wanted to unlearn!).
But now that I have studied abuse it explains the whole reason I went to Reeducation – I had not understood why I was normally fine but vulnerable to coming under the psychological control of mean people and having trouble getting away due to guilt and fear of extreme violence. It is plain as day that these were abuse victim symptoms but I did not know that or know how to name that and, it seems, neither did the Reeducators. That is why I got pushed into all of these odd paradigms, e.g., “you are a naturally depressed person and you have been in denial about it and now you are not, you are admitting you are naturally depressed and must be on heavy drugs for life,” and on and on.
And it was by getting pushed into all of those paradigms and trying to believe them that I got distorted.
The worst distorsion, as I keep saying, was this thing about how since my father drinks, I must want inappropriate amounts of control and believe myself to be too powerful, and that all my perceptions were wrong. Once I accepted the idea that all my perceptions were wrong and I should relinquish power and control over my life, all was lost.
So, as we know, the question in a practical sense is to reacquire power and control, and belief in self …
every time I lose my way it is because I have fallen into Reeducated habits.
The diagnosis is abuse and it really does explain everything if you understand abuse. I have discovered that most people do not understand it. Regular people do not because it is so odd, it is hard to grasp if you have not experienced it, and if you have, part of the experience is extreme confusion. Reeducators do not understand it, either – it seems it is not well covered in typical training. It is easy to ‘get’ if you study it, but very opaque if you have not.
P.P.P.S. The very most depressing dictum of Reeducation was that there was no future and no hope – to retain belief in these was “denial” and lack of “acceptance.” To have hope now seems like a decadent indulgence, and to think of the future feels permissive, luscious. It was soooo Spartan, was Reeducation.
Regular people do not because it is so odd, it is hard to grasp if you have not experienced it, and if you have, part of the experience is extreme confusion.
I’m not sure that the reason you give for the lack of understanding is the true one. I think that everybody experiences abuse to some degree. It is built into our systems of culture, which encourage dominance and submission and a redirection of our drives away from our best interests (away from service of life itself) and towards the service of commodity production and useless emblems that are supposed to assert who we are through their possession.
The reason that most people do not “understand” abuse and what it does to people is because they have been abused themselves, and have already learned to consider it normal.
Us lucky ones who perceive abuse as the anomalie are the abnormal ones.
So a different answer is needed as to why we are so abnormal. I put it down to not having grown up within capitalism and a system of ideological motivation. I also put it down to having been free to run all around the areas where I lived and learning from my environment directly (not through adult mediation).
What reeducation (and others who are like ascetic priests) sense is that your discomfort and pain with not fitting into society comes from the aspects of freedom that you still have inside of you, and how they stand witness against that which is already resigned and eroded (the general acceptance of abuse as the normality in society itself). This (and not the abuse) is what has created the discomfort within you, that has led you to run to the authorities to staighten out your perceptions and remove the discomfort. But the discomfort with abuse is a painful necessary for those hybrids such as us. And, you (like I did once) ran straight into the waiting arms of society’s ideological secret police.
OK, so moving further away from the modern discourse of therapy, we are partly in what a friend calls the Savage Zone (not incorporated into civilization). People see that and want to incorporate us.
It reminds me of the comment of another friend, when we were New Assistant Professors in Louisiana, and (psychologically armed) rebels since we had come not from graduate school but from other jobs. We are both outspoken people and were discussing the common advice not to speak up on policy issues until after tenure. “That is six years,” said I. “I do not know that I can hold my tongue for six entire years.” “It won’t do you any good, anyway,” said he. “They can tell you disagree from the look in your eye – you might as well come out with it.”
It was true enough, and I spoke up all that time, and it was because of Reeducation, not because of the university, that I had tenure trouble. Once they got used to the novel idea of an outspoken young one, the university got used to it. “We already know what she thinks,” they said, “so it as not as though we had to worry about any nasty surprises, or wonder what she will actually do if she gets any power.” It was funny.
Yes, I’m hoping to build in the same accustomisation to outrageous outspokenness in the English department here, but it is risky. My deviations are wild and untamed.
Yes – you have to come at it from a certain kind of traditionalist view, and to have all your information correct – and to understand its context. Then you become challenging but worth hearing, instead of challenging and off the wall.
On the ‘savage zone,’ I had a flash of insight while walking I am not sure I can recapture. Basically, that people are perhaps vulnerable to abuse not because they carry a flaw, but because they carry some bit of visible purity. Which can be scary to those who do not have it.
I do not really know where I got mine but the hunch I had was that it was from reading multicultural children’s books, which always had non-Western settings and thus advertised the possibility of living in alternative systems. Out on the streets in those days also, the demonstrators kept saying, “another world is possible!” Lots of 1968-derived hope for recovery of innocence. It was an expression of desire but I took it as an announcement that a new world was coming in.
Finally, I just realized, there was the question of my father’s esoteric literary tastes. He was addicted to the Oz books – fanciful, baroque tales without horror – and to a series of Futurist and related poets who had a lot of humorous rhymes and word games, and happy athletic images … and one of them was fixated on the idea that this kind of poetry would shave the world down to the brightness it had the day it was born. He figured out that these texts were actually amusing for children and would read them to us, too. An eccentric choice, but we listened and I realize now it had a big impact.
Fanon, somewhere: “…that is why the dreams of the colonized are active dreams. I dream I am jumping, running, swimming. I dream that I cross rivers in one stride.”
Yes. Interesting. I think the aspect of visible purity is something which incites some people to put others down. I think it relates to this fable.
Losing one’s innocence may seem to many like the sacrifice they had to make in order to get along in life, have a job, and so on. They buy into a system of dominance and submission that they don’t like, and then they persuade themselves that what they did was correct and necessary. So, when they see somebody who has not make a similar sacrifice, they are reminded of how much of themselves (their spontaneity, their imagination, their dreams and desires) they have given up, out of “necessity”.
Henceforth, they try to turn their own choices (to buy into the system that dominates them as if it were a necessity) into everybody else’s choices as well. They can’t stand to see that somebody around them has maintained a different outlook because that would mean that the sacrifice they made was hardly as necessary as they had thought.