A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is brilliant, and better than the play or the movie. Williams’ introduction (included in the Signet edition, the one I read, and surely in at least some others) really is essential reading for any writer.
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R means rage, resentment, regret, resistance, and of course Reeducation. Today my specific irritant is a condescending bourgeoise, but more generally it is the assumption of bourgeois chaos which is of course the principal sign under which Reeducation operated.
I am not well enough educated to be able to explain that sign and its operations but I see that I could become well enough educated to explain it if I were to study philosophy. I must do this.
For now I can say that I see darkly, that the reason Reeducation is a recurring theme here is not that it is an experience I cannot seem to get over, but that it is the air one breathes in this society which passes as normal and natural.
I suspect it is that, and not some mysterious woundedness in me, that causes the concepts exposed in Reeducation to continue to rear their ugly head(s). I shall turn my attention toward this question, which is a societal and philosophical question, as opposed to continuing to cannibalize my own heart and past over Reeducation’s R.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
The concepts rear their heads because the problem is systemic, as you say. However, the fear of being bullied again might be linked to woundedness. I couldn’t be in the bourgeois workforce for many years because I knew I hadn’t recovered from my wound, which meant that I didn’t fully understand its cause or how to stop it happening again, among other things. Nonetheless, one does not create the problem out of one’s own head — it’s not as individual as that. Can you imagine this mode of bourgeois reasoning applied to the 20th century and its events? We would have to say that the holocaust of world war two happened because individual Jews, finding themselves to be masochistic, somehow co-ordinated themselves to enter concentration camps so that their essential desires could be fulfilled. And so on. That is what a completely individualised reading of human experience looks like.
Yes — this is what I explained to these interlocutors, who said yes, they knew, but they were trying to train themselves to actually take responsibility for their own chaos.
What they do not see is that the typical person — at least the person I tend to socialize with — doesn’t have so much chaos and already takes responsibility for their actions. To tell them they have “invented their own reality” when in fact they have not is just rude. And presumptuous.
I can handle the bourgeois workforce, but not the bourgeois social life … I hereby officially announce myself to be OUT.
I couldn’t handle the bourgeois workforce since I didn’t understand it implicitly. My earlier schooling was not in terms of that culture.
I think that when speaking to those imbued with bourgeois thinking (I hesitate to call it “philosophy”), there is a tendency for communication to become very screwed up, due to the different emotional valences that they give to different terms, compared to me. For instance, in your writing above, you speak of inventing your own reality in a negative sense, with negative connotations. However, it seems to me that to invent one’s own reality might be (although I cannot say for sure) the sense that the bourgeois type gives to “taking responsibility”. That is, not to invent one’s own reality could be seen, by them, as shying away from one’s responsibility. I am only talking about the emotional valence they could give to the idea, though. I’m not referring here to the consequences of this individualistic thinking. My views on that are revealed in the previous comment I made.
The people I am complaining about need to learn that they DO in fact invent their own reality, in the following senses:
Example 1. One of these people was turned down for admittance to our PhD program on academic grounds. He imagines it is for personal or political reasons and does in fact need to realize that this psychodrama is something he has invented.
Example 2. The same person could invent himself a better reality by not attributing the low motives he attributes to people without justification, and by not justifying and defending outrageous behavior the way he does.
HOWEVER he, while not doing either of things, preaches, for instance, to Jews about how they attracted the Holocaust to themselves by emitting negative energy. [He didn’t actually say THAT, but he constantly discourses on how problems beyond the control of an individual have in fact been created by them and should be controlled by them.]
Yes, it seems paradoxical, doesn’t it — the reduction of everything that happens down to being the responsibility of the individual, except when something happens to you, personally, that you do not like, and then “it’s the system! it’s the system!”
One wishes, at least, for some moral consistency, but rarely does one see any.
Moral consistency would require responsibility, but many people do not want that.