PARTIAL TRIAL TRANSCRIPT
These are the main two things I disliked about Reeducation (I know I have identified other sets of “main two things” before, but I keep boiling it further down).
1. One was always a suspect, always under suspicion, always on trial. One had to second guess oneself and watch what one said at all times because if one were not careful the Reeducator would charge one with a further mental illness.
(As we know, evidence of mental illness included competence in life and the ability to think. Evidence of family mental illness included the presence of well educated and competent women in the family – several generations of these, in fact. That some of these women were married to men with slightly less formal education than they had themselves was yet more damning.)
2. One had to let everything in life get to one because if not, one was insufficiently “feeling,” which was also a sign of mental illness. Not to have enough fears, and not to fear the right things, were definite signs of mental illness.
On the day I decided I could not stand Al-Anon any more one of my students, also an attendee, said she had learned from it that the cause of her problems in life was that she was not “humble” enough. This was about the most destructive idea that could have been suggested to her at that point.
The thing I liked least about commercialized psychotherapy was that by definition, one could not know what one’s problem was. “I have come to discuss X.” “Well, whatever you believe the issue to be, must be wrong. If you have come to discuss X, X is the one thing we cannot address.”
By trying this methodology in my all too tolerant way, I have confirmed through empirical experimentation that if you do not address the issues at hand, you will come quite surely to grief.
Professor Zero’s case is being heard today.
THE DIRECTOR
coldhearted scientist وداد 
yeah, women have to effuse, otherwise they don’t provide any porridge worth eating.
Weird what civilisation comes up with.
This reads to me like a sort of denatured Freudianism in which nothing is ever what it seems.
No porridge worth eating, that’s just it – and funny! Denatured Freudianism, yes. This is the problem with the M.S.W. degree. I recommend that anyone who tries psychotherapy go and see someone with either no degree at all – get some form of peer counseling from a person who has had experiences like yours – or else someone with a Ph.D. and a lot of clinical experience. These M.S.W. types have just a little knowledge and that is a dangerous thing, especially when they do not have perspective on their own selves. I discovered late on that this guy had not read any primary sources and was not reading actual psych journals. All of his knowledge came from textbooks and self-help pamphlets. I had not realized this could be the case, that anyone could be licensed and do that.
Last night I went to sleep whilst thinking of Lacanian “castration” and what that means in relation to my experiences. For much of the dream I was participating in a trivial competition of some general obstacle course sort, so that I could be awarded some dubious prize and be accepted into the community.
We were in this very large, maze-like white building when I went to collect my prize, which was a pair of pants. But first there was a ritual of humiliation, which I half forgot about and then remembered.
I decided to escape the cult, as they were turning people into zombies by erasing their faces, and pushing them around in prams.
Someone who came along with me said that we should go downward in the building to get to the bottom of things, but I said that we were almost out of time and that they would lock the exits to the building if we didn’t get out right away.
This morning when I woke up it was as if I had suddenly acquired a concept to apply to my experiences — Yes, western culture has become very cult-like. I wouldn’t trust it or its authorities. And everything is not what it seems.
In my lucid (not dreamlike) state, I am now asking the question: How did the citizens of the West get sold a bill of goods that would enable them to solipsistically stroke their own egos as kings and queens of the material world whilst their very dignity, their human nature, their stature as human beings with reason and rationality was being removed?
But it seems like this is exactly what has happened.
Give the boy or girl a dazzling toy and …
Fascinating dream. The workings of ideology: Christianity plus capitalism?
Yes, I would say Christianity and capitalism. But the third potent and mysterious ingredient? — well intentioned but blind leftism turned against itself. For we are all “child centred” antiauthoritarians these days.
I think that isn’t leftism but some variety of liberalism, and that it fits in with capitalism.
I’m not so sure. I sort of see it as cultural current of leftist thinking that was co-opted by capitalism.
Apparently, “child centred” is a term that came into vogue in the 70s, along with an idea that children are wonderfully creative, self-directed little wondas, and that their natural urges ought not to be suppressed by teacherly discipline.
So it was originally a leftish, hippyesque sort of idea.
However, it does fit in very well with capitalism — with the idea that children innately know what’s best for them in all respects, and that it’s up to teachers and staff to tailor make a course that children will be all too pleased to pay for.
Then there’s Summerhill School, founded in 1921:
http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/
Co-opted by capitalism, yes. The thing about hippie-esque types is that they’re often really just liberals … so it’s leftist thinking after a fashion but how much, is my question here.
I think that there is such a thing as authoritarian anti-authoritarianism, just as there is such a think as racist anti-racism (of which I have often been the unwitting victim!).
Authoritarian anti-authoritarianism says, “Ooh, authority is evil…like Hitler!”
Then it says, “It is correct to subjugate oneself to the worst form of tyranny — by voluntary subjecting oneself to the caprice of childlike thinking and a childlike nature. Anything else is pure evil and ends up with the gas chambers!”
Yes, that summerhill school is quite the thang, ain’t it?
I particularly liked the circular reasoning on the recommendations page: effectively “I feel good and so how can a person who feels this good be wrong”.
I also loved this sentence, which says it all:
” We are precisely the ‘useful’ people their curricula is designed to produce!”
Something gives me a very strong impression that the term, “useful” is meant as it is written — in inverted commas, thus implying a dubious and questionable aspect to it all.
Authoritarian anti-authoritarianism, yes indeed. !!! I could rant on but shouldn’t. Students who don’t want to take authority when they should, because they don’t want responsibility. Faculty who insist on taking authority when they shouldn’t, because they want power. Faculty who will not listen to authoritative proof because they mistake the authoritative for the authoritarian. All of it a great shame and scandal! !!!
I think we just have to withdraw our support.
Coercive power has not been eroded but authority has.
I am withdrawing my support from that state of affairs. I will not give my respect to anyone simply because they have power. The whole coercive mechanism is that people like me need to prove our rights to have any power of our own by subjugating ourselves, mind and body. I withdraw my respect for that arrangement and proclaim in inauthoritative.
“Coercive power has not been eroded but authority has.”
This is really key. It is also why people cannot figure out me and my influence. I have authority but frightened persons think it must be coercive power. If people agree with me or follow my suggestions it is assumed I must have held a knife to their throat – not that they, on *their* authority, could have said, “oh, good idea, let’s do it.”
I have authority but frightened persons think it must be coercive power.
I once encountered an anarchist female who said to me, “We shouldn’t try to influence people, because that takes away their freedom of choice.”
I found that the weirdest ideological notion ever. After all this person was already a product of a myriad of historical influences. The static notion of human nature — that we are each already the most perfect little snowflake that cannot be changed except by being destroyed — is perhaps behind this view.
But seriously, when I read those testimonial blurbs by students on the Summerhill school website, I thought I could here little voices suffocating through being unable to break through an ideological plasma of solipsism. There was a circularity to the thinking (rather than being dialectical): “I feel that something must be a certain way, but why do I feel it unless it must be true, and therefore it must be true because I feel it!”
Such self-confidence and self-reliance before the basic building blocks of thinking have been put in place is surely not a passageway to genius.
Nonetheless…..
The thing is that “feeling,” or what passes for it, is often also ideologically engineered.
Not to have influence, or not to admit one has it, is silly in my situation: I teach, I make recommendations, I present research results, and all of it is *supposed* to have influence. That kind of influence is not necessarily coercive.
Of course feeling is socially constructed. That is why to try to base one’s conclusions upon a feeling that does not reach outwards dialectically for confirmation or refutal is just going to end up solipsistically.
We all influence each other — and if we stop doing so, we stop living.
Yes and yes.