coldhearted scientist وداد

This was actually proposed in the United States in the early twentieth century. There is an explanation in Swedish, by an author called “Wage Slave.”

The requisite symbols of anarcho-syndicalism are a black cat and a red and black flag. I wanted to post those but found the above image, which is far more interesting.

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16 hours a week is the amount of research and writing time to which I aspire. This has to be time in which one is not tired or preoccupied, and can be comfortable and calm.

It does not sound like a great deal of time, but consider that it would be eight sessions of two hours. That would mean, for instance, M-F 8-10 and three other two hour sessions. It is a lot of time.

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Why was Reeducation bad? someone asked today. I almost could not remember the short answer but it is that: a. it said all of my achievements, strength, tastes and sanity were false – they “could not be the real me” and b. Its ideas on how to live were the polar opposite of anything a whole person might recommend.

My most recently rediscovered example is that in Reeducation, one was to name passing emotions “true feelings” and deeper feelings “mere thoughts” (thoughts were considered false, and deeper feelings were thus denied). One was to get oneself into this state and then try to be “serene.” You were, in other words, to be histrionic, yet contain this.

I would have said – did say – that the better strategy was to use your judgment while remaining in contact with the cosmic flow, but this was not acceptable because it involved using too much authority. I disagree and I point out that the Reeducated plan meant replacing one’s own authority with external ones, feelings with passing emotions, and flowing tranquility with strategies of containment.

In other words: the paradigm of sanity, here explained as feeling + judgment + meditation, was replaced with emotion + obedience + restraint. In other words, life was replaced with a prison. And of all the elements I lost in Reeducation, the hardest to recover is my own authority.

Not having authority was, of course, why I could not sustain a long thought or write a long piece. I do not think I am the only person who has had this problem. It is another of the issues I think the Boice book does not address.

Axé.