The trees outside the window are in rapid transformation as we move into fall and everything is so clearly living. In Reeducation it was not acceptable to place negative events in perspective. It was prohibited to stand at the head of one’s own acts. The absurdity of these ideas is shocking.
It grows increasingly evident the further I move away from them. And yet it is so clear how these ideas were inculcated. My youngest brother, calling from New York: “I do not want to go home because of how people are there. Their interest is in exerting control over you by putting you down.”
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I think that at a certain point one gets immune to the force of control exerted through putting others down. I’m not sure how that it supposed to work in the first place. I think that you need to have a lot of sensitivity and malleability to respond to social pressure. I don’t have it, for some reason. If a point is put to me logically, then I will respond, but if force is applied through emotional pressure, I can’t contain my disbelief that people would try that and especially without talking to me first. Something goes through my head like, “Oh –another attack of the western zombies!”
That’s a good reaction to have and I am trying to develop it like a skill. The key for me I think is to see what is happening before the maneuver gets at me somatically. My current stage is to recognize the somatic reaction
for what it is – then I can ward the movement off before it actually lodges in me.
(I went to Reeducation to learn this reaction but learned the opposite. In Reeducation one was not to resist, not to use judgment, and was to let things get to one, as this was ‘feeling’ which was good. To do the opposite of what Reeducation said feels *so* much better. I suppose this is one way in which I am doing the opposite of what the assumed superego of Reeducation recommended.)
There’s a theory that I have, and I’ve been working on it for a while. It kind of involves an extreme extrapolation based on Antonio Damasio’s theory of somatic markers. It also links to an idea of behaviourist principles informing a kind of cultural and social conditioning towards typical behaviour. here is the image of the emotional markers conceptually stored in the body of the man on the horse. He has typically learned to view some aspects of his environment (Cf. Melanie Klein and object relations) as positive and some aspects as negative.
Who is this man? Certainly not a “universal man” as much of conventional wisdom teaches. Rather he is one who has been socially and culturally conditioned for a very specific adaptation towards his environment — an adaptation to which learning about specific cultural rewards and punishments has played a huge part.
Has he learned not to feel because he has so often been punished for feeling? Are the network of somatic wires that make up his sense of personality totally crossed an mis-wired? Feeling, in that case, can never be a real release for him. He has become adapted to a cultural situation from the very core of him, and now this is biologically programmed — so there is no escape.
Interesting. And I wonder: does the typical person not feel? I have heard a lot about this and in Reeducation it was assumed I could not because it was clear I could think, and thought and feeling were assumed to be mutually exclusive (how ridiculous; this was one of the most frustrating aspects of Reeducation). Anyway – do you think the typical person today does not feel?
Not so much that a typical person these days doesn’t feel, but that their emotional wiring is short-circuited by social control when they were children. (Actually Tani Jantsang gets a lot into this. Her example of it is the child who says, “I’m not cold — I want to go out and play”, who is corrected by the parent saying, “Put your coat on anyway.” Or, the child says, “I don’t like that vegetable!” and the parent replies, “Yes, you do. You know you love it.”)
So, due to too much social control, the child learns not to experience whatever it would be naturally inclined to feel. Soon, I presume, it is as if the neurological pathways make a detour around authentic feeling, in order to produce the socially expected response. It may be possible that the child develops into an adult who simply no longer feels their own sensations very much any more.
So reeducation would be a programme to work with these kinds of people who are already wired in the wrong ways. They’ve been taught to do what is expected and not to feel (in other words, not to have sensations).
Yes – I guess so. So is it really that widespread, this phenomenon of people all of whose ‘feelings’ are ersatz ones?
I don’t know. Perhaps so. Nietzsche, anyway, seemed to think it was. I think it all really depends on a lot of stuff. Somebody can be three quarters healthy and have it all whittled away through a series of profoundly negative experiences beyond one’s control (what Nietzsche didn’t seem to factor in). I see that my father was about like that. But eventually the ersatz stuff took over, since he couldn’t be in Africa. Hence the fundamentalism shift.
Ah yes, true, Nietzche would have thought so. If it is true, it would explain a great deal. Ersatz feelings. I will think about this.
The “ersatz” thing — the term — troubles me. I’m not sure that ersatz is exactly it, although in some sense it is. When I think of my father’s behaviour, I think it started to be ersatz when he adopted the principle that he must adapt to the new cultural environment at all costs. He made a special effort in this vein, like it was assurance of membership in a club, or something. Must go where “Australians” go (as if the society were totally homogeneous), must eat what “Australians” eat, and adopt their slang, to prove one’s club membership status.
So it began with this, and turned to punishing me whenever my views or attitudes displeased “the Australians” (actually no homogeneous group at all, but just random sadists within the Australian community).
So, in all these ways there was an avoidance of real feeling — an attempt to squash and deny one’s cultural roots. And, in a sense ersatz feeling replaced the real feeling, BUT never successfully in the long term, because the outrage, the frustration at the self-annihilation programme he’d embarked upon would burst through eventually, in temper tantrums directed at other people.
The well of the real feelings was poisoned. The “erstatz” was never quite a feeling but the will to have a feeling.