1. This was originally a beautiful post, but it was eaten by Mozilla Firefox. I shall not attempt to reconstruct it. It was about how Reeducation was designed to engulf people in the “true feelings” of shame, fear, and self hatred. It connected this to the book I was trying to write in that period, and which people kept telling me I should write Boiceanly — despite my already excellent skills in realistic goal setting and time management, despite Reeducation, and despite the book’s topic, which was problematic in many ways (and no, that is not just an “excuse,” in case any Boicean monkeys want to preach here in the comments section). The post went on to discuss my escape from Reeducation. Up to there it was very poetic and clear.
2. Notes for the conclusion were:
a. It is said on the one hand that what does not kill you, makes you stronger. It is also said things happen to you it is because you “attracted” them, so that if things happen it is your fault. It is said, in addition, that wounds mean permanent impairment. You become a lesser being. So, stringing it all together: you, because you are impaired, caused certain things to happen, for which you should be grateful, because they give you the opportunity to grow stronger. It is a most Christian redemption narrative and it places all responsibility on the individual — and on the victim.
b. I would say that wounds only leave weak spots where it is unwise to inflict new ones. Reinfliction may not kill you, but it will make you weaker. As far as “attracting” things goes, I believe this is a disabling accusation, likely written by a perpetrator. At the very least it is simplistic. Verbal abusers use their tactics on everyone, seeking the individual chinks through which they can penetrate. Each of us is vulnerable to some of these entities, but not to all. If these entities are not skilled or lucky, I escape them early on, as we all do. But if their first sally is a certain shot, I sit through it all — not because I “choose” to, but because I am already frozen to my chair. Saying “It was your fault, because you continued to sit there,” only compounds the problem.
3. I recently told some foreign friends — people who have never been to an Al-Anon meeting, or seen an American psychotherapist — about Reeducation and its theories of life. They said it was ridiculous on its face. It was marvelous to see people react so simply and directly.
They are of course right and I wondered how I ever took Reeducation seriously. They said this appeared to be a result of high expectations and misplaced trust. Those are good diagnoses, I think.
But note my recent discovery that it is at societal structures and not to individual psychologies (or “dysfunction”) one must look for the keys to these problems.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
“Honesty” is another related key word. In Reeducation we were considered incapable of honesty, which was why Reeducation was by definition more “right.”
The thing is that Reeducation, which claimed it was about “feelings” and not “thought,” was a model for thought about the self, and that as such it interdicted actual introspection, which was seen as lust for power. VERY odd, I must say.
or maybe its the *usual* thing:
what re-educators actually want,
but can’t admit they want,
they demonize and “project”
onto the re-educated…
as in “you keep wanting to talk about
[the actual problem] power relations…
so *you* must have a problem
with authority” (or somesuch jujitsu).
notice that “honesty” has here been
a victim of *logocide* since in at least
some of its ordinary uses…
“cash register” honesty, i’ve heard
said for example…
one is already assuming some
*fact of the matter*,
one that moreover is valued
more or less precisely for its
verifiability *independent* of feelings.
the word is not only being misused,
in other words, but *subverted*…
we can think of it as disinformation.
again, this is more or less standard
organizational practice on my model.
how much of it was learned from
saul the apostate (author of a bunch
of greek scriptures you’ll have heard
something about) i hesitate to say.
but this right here is a good place
to followup on the logocide idea:
http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/cohen.htm
(comments on the book i got it from:
_the_mind_of_the_bible_believer_
by edmund cohen).
Vlorbik, that article describes Reeducation so well, it is shocking. Perhaps what one of my colleagues says, that you have to have your children join a church and all so that they will know what the Christian strategies are and recognize them easily later in life, is true. I want to Facebook the article but it would freak everyone out.
I already put it on facebook
Well, now I have too. I import from your blog, re the “jab”:
“You can’t deal with it [that psychological jab] by will power. You actually need to train your mind to think in a different way, to handle pressure as normal, rather than as aberrant.”
“Also, even more of it is about understanding one simple thing — that a jab is not knowledge, and has no innate knowledge about it. It’s about getting knowledge of your behaviour…how you are likely to react. So in a way, when you keep moving you are calling its bluff. That is so key to understand. The jab doesn’t know your next move. It has no innate knowledge of you unless you do something stupid so as to somehow make it ‘true’.”
***All true, but not the kind of situation I want to have with friends or anyone else I deal with on an optional basis. I do this stuff at work but if I am friends with someone it is because I don’t have to engage in this kind of self defensive game with them.***
***All true, but not the kind of situation I want to have with friends or anyone else I deal with on an optional basis. I do this stuff at work but if I am friends with someone it is because I don’t have to engage in this kind of self defensive game with them.***
All true. But we are living in a very misogynistic era, where women are expected to be the emotional punching bags for society’s ills. Best you can do is learn a few self defensive tactics — or become a hermit like me.
I’d say, actually, just not give people who only seem half all right the benefit of the doubt in the first place, as I tend to do. When I do that is when I need the self defensive tactics, but who wants to spend the energy and time … ? More practical is just not to be so kind.
Yes — but it is part of current day misogynistic practice for ppl to misunderstand kindness, taking it as weakness.
Yes, that is definitely true and I definitely do not take it enough into account.
When I forget “my place” I often do not take it enough into account either. However, we now often find that anything that is in human nature that is benevolent and noble and redefined as “feminine” and trivial or as maliciously undermining the carefully crafted status quo.
Yes. It is disgusting, although worth noting.
I am really not convinced I want to plan for it, or try to get around it, or engage with it in any way except to notice when it is happening so that I can understand more quickly.
Noticing is a large part of Eastern meditative practice, which is, of course, linked to the martial arts. Actually noticing is a very good form of self defence.
Also, like I have been saying, the point is not to “engage with it” but to pursue your own agenda despite it. That is what I’m learning in martial arts these days. You know when Bruce Lee makes those weird sounding animal noises before attacking? They’re to transfix you and get you to engage with his game, on his terms. That means you lose.
Yes, war cries work like that. It’s important to realize that that’s all they are, yes. Noticing, yes, and pursuing own agenda despite it, yes … this is something that’s hard for me living in a culture not my own, I’m much better at it in places I understand better. (Proust: “Car je ne savais ou` j’e’tais, je ne savais pas qui j’e’tais” … as Leo Bersani used to remind us, back in the day.)
Yes, it is much harder living in a culture not your own. It’s not just the aspect of not knowing where you fit into the other culture, and which cries to take seriously and which can be safely ignored. Part of the background to writing my memoir was the sense of being very emotionally depleted by having to pull up roots and start again at exactly the age you are when you have just about found your footing in your own culture. You’ve exerted all that effort growing up, and then you’ve found that you’ve made absolutely no progress at all, in terms of an entirely different system and way of thinking. The parallel with plants and the root shock they experience is almost exact. So, its a mode of being that makes you very — unconsciously, no doubt — submissive. You are grateful for anything small that makes sense, and your deepest desire is to be accepted and in this sense “understood”. And wanting to be understood so badly, you go out on various limbs, which all turn out to be political mistakes.
I didn’t move cultures until at least 30. 34, I think. I am only just starting to understand it.
I think, over 15 years later, I finally am creating a social positioning that corresponds to me. All my favorite friends are under 30 or over 60. Those over 60 are wise old types from around here who really know what is going on and have figured out how to handle it. Those under 30 have less baggage than older people. My friends of this age group are either from here and elsewhere oriented, or from elsewhere and aware of their difference. All of these people have some sort of vision, some sort of critical distance, that is neither condescending nor aspiring, but is merely awareness. None of the people in either group feel guilty about liking what they like and not liking what they don’t. The people from 30-60 years of age are more confused and more committed to enmeshment / have vaguer identities / are more invasive.
At the age of 40 I feel a lot of pressure to have a vaguer identity. It’s hard to explain, but there is really nothing in the media anymore that is addressing me as I am. It’s all geared to people who have taken very different routes in life than I have. That is why I think that by this age, the battle with regard to patriarchy has been decisive in either one way or another for women. Most have been worn down by now and have diffused identities, that are tied up with the families and the status quo.
It’s also around 40, perhaps, that people start to really project into one. Earlier here in LA.
*
I’ve now read large parts of your book. The African part is very lyrical and vivid and the Australian part seems discursive and rushed by contrast. I see why it came out that way.
I have various comments but they aren’t on the right things, as in, there are details in it that are new to me but that aren’t main points in the story. One is on how avoiding the “negative” is a main feature of Christian culture. This explains a LOT and I could go ON about it, but then I wouldn’t be talking about the main things in the book. So I’ll have to get my thoughts together better before actually writing anything about it. It will take a few days.
I hope you got the right version of the book. I’d like to check the final pages of it with you, to be sure.
The Australian part is discursive, but by no means rushed — rather it was the hardest part to write, that took me the longest. That was because nobody would get into a discussion with me about it. It was denied that I could be in the position that I in fact claimed that I was in. And still is.
In fact, the reason why I have had so little feeling for Australian culture or its landscape was precisely because people would not engage with me on my own terms. It gave everything a superficial, “just passing through” or unreal quality for me. As I said in the book, I could relate via academic texts, but I could not relate to the thing in itself. Rather, I had to engage with a certain hostility towards me on the basis of my nationality.
So there is an aesthetic change in pace, but it mimics my psychological state, rather than denies/betrays it.
…in other words, the book is written phenomenologically–looking out at the world. It isn’t supposed to depict the masterfulness of ego in aesthetic recreation of the event so much as it is emphasising rather the opposite approach which is more quintessentially psychological: that is, to reveal the actual experience of looking out at the world from within a limited field of knowledge, and with a limited degree of psychological nourishment.
I do see why it is as it is.
I’m relieved. Because, this is a final way of communicating for me, the things I couldn’t communicate before about who I am, as well as the frustrations of not being able to communicate them. My inner soul is indeed very pleased with this truth telling, and I am honouring that.
For me it is very much about suburbia and its values. It is fascinating the world over to see how many parents suffered so much to give their children suburbia, with the effect that nobody had fun and everyone resented each other. And I was amazed to find that one was supposed to want suburbia as a reward for having studied. And dream of the less tamed, more direct life of before.
I think there are some typos in the copy I have, i.e. phrases repeated that I don’t *think* were meant to be … ???
You may have an earlier version by mistake. I have written to Lulu about it, so let’s see what they say. I gave the go-ahead to this shortly after new year, but then changed it a number of times. I was hoping you would have bought a copy from Lulu.
There are at least a couple of typos even in the final version — I had to stop working on it because it was traumatising me so deeply, and I am committed to getting my thesis done.
Ultimately there will be another edition, once the thesis is already done. I sincerely hope not to have to edit it myself, as really, this book has opened up too many wounds.
I think Amazon is selling older copies, yes. And someone else should do the editing, yes, especially on this kind of manuscript.
Not having met very sophisticated Australians seems to be one of the several things about your experience of emigrating there.
It’s interesting how long ago that period actually is now. It does not seem long ago, but so much has happened since.
Hopefully somebody else will do that for me in due course. You know, when you are a pariah, you do as much as you can for yourself, because you do not want to jeopardise the project by having it sabotaged at an early stage. You have to work out who you can trust, and part of that is working out what you want to say, which means you end up doing almost everything yourself.
The pariah thing — is it really due to a lack of sophistication or due to a guilt complex that is more deeply Western (see Pandagon for Jessie’s latest critique of race relations in the US and consider with regard to both wingnut and liberal guilt).
Paragraph 1 – yes indeed.
Paragraph 2 – I don’t know. For one thing, I am not comfortable with these broad generalizations about Western and non Western. But then I also haven’t had the particular insight you’ve had / am not familiar with the guilt complex (although it may be that people have it and it is just one of those things I do not comprehend).
I would say that “wingnut” and liberal guilt are just two sides of the uneducated, unsophisticated, mainstream, or untraveled coin. There’s a lot more in the world than those two positions, even though they are the ones allowed on television! 😉
Well, you’ve given me an excuse to pull the book down from sale for awhile. That is a good thing, because I’m more motivated by the idea of things unfinished than by the completed work. I have an idea for a slightly different cover, too, improving upon my first attempt. I like the idea of a kind of greeny blue, like sea-sickness.
I think we are both probably agreeing more than disagreeing on the second point. The lack of sophistication IS the situation for the majority, and the majority do respond to a particular history in a particular way.
I’m subscribing to the idea that we all have national or cultural souls, that are influenced by power relations and have defensive as well as nurturing facets that differ from other’s political souls.
Oh, I wouldn’t pull it down from sale yet. Not until you finish your dissertation … then pull it down while you’re working on the new edition.
I like the new cover idea. The current one doesn’t capture the weirdness (isn’t weird). I think it should be an illustration within the book.
Hm. I have been told I am better at reading cultures than I realize — I know I’m good at it, but I tend not to realize how unusual that is, I am told. I might just be way elite insofar as I travel so much and most people I know do, too. Yet the cultures I do not understand are the suburban one and as we know, the “Reeducated” one … I really cannot figure these out at all. Consumerism plus Christianity plus envy plus fear of change plus security in limitation plus WHAT ELSE … it boggles the mind. !!!
It’s no biggie to pull it from sale, as it is relatively easy to make another edition.
Yes, the cover is too innocent, and doesn’t capture the weirdness really, but it was not a bad debut cover, as it happens, since it gives an idea of innocence, which belies the content, and then there is the AK47 ambush of weirdness — so there. 😉
In shamanistic innocence….
I like the AK47.
I like the book and I see why it was done as it has been. But to go classic it needs to be edited by some creative writing person with skills and experience in memoir.
I am fascinated by the way the shelteredness of that childhood worked, and how nobody critiqued that suburban existence. I think there are a lot of people who have that childhood, especially around here, and a lot of immigrants freak out in those suburbs but aren’t allowed to articulate why.
I would say — introduction by someone else, material in your introduction pulled into the African part of the reflection, Australian part condensed less or worked on somehow, to read less like notes, although I do understand why you have it that way in this version. But this is just my reaction, and it all depends on what you want to do with it next.
There are some really interesting perceptions in it about how things work, that get sort of short shrift, and some of the things about the happiness of a childhood spent in nature, are easily understood and could be condensed. Although once again, I do see why this version of the book has to be as it is.
Thanks.
Maybe I will write a more conventional memoir some day, but this will never be such a thing. It’s not really a memoir, so much as it is a study of the pre-oedipal dynamics that formed my existence. So I think the best thing is just not to read it too much with the expectation of reading something in the memoir genre, and also to read more deeply into the puzzle, since that is primarily what it is — an intellectual puzzle, not a memoir per se.
Yes – it’s two different projects, really.
They are intricately connected. I think your classical mindset wants to separate them, but you need to say no to that tendency of yours. It is necessary, for the sake of the unity of my mind not to separate them. It does put more pressure on the reader, to try to think differently than they would anticipate, I admit. However, the oedipal mindset that wants everything nice and ordered is getting a firm “no” in this book.
So — then it’s just one project, and the new edition is: different cover art, and fix typographical / copyediting errors? Then you’re right, new edition = relatively easy. 🙂
Yes. The new edition will be precisely as you say. Many of the copyediting errors have already been fixed. Frankly I am happy with the story that this tells, as well what it fails to tell. There are some things that I have kept semi-concealed like the lower section of icebergs. The intellectual meditations give a hint of what these are. No need to press them further. I realise that a lot of people will not like this kind of approach to genre, but they do not matter to me. In fact, the only person who matters to me is me, since the book is a gift from me to myself and I am its prime reader.
Yes. Icebergs below the water line, I like that.
They’re in there. I didn’t want to make them too obvious. I am averse to speaking too directly, but there is the issue of gender and “containers”. In conservative societies, women process the emotional material that the men find too intricate or too deep to handle. But what if the “masculinity” of the male is so great that he cannot even imagine passing this task as a JOB to the female in line. Rather, he imagines that he, himself, has no emotion, and all the masculinity, but she has all of it (and no reason). In that extreme case, he divorces himself from part of his brain, in order to feel strong.
A direct question: was that world actually so free of adults (so to speak) as it appeared to me as I read it? This was one of the striking things about the representation — it seems to keep the adults at the margins. One wouldn’t see them for hours, it seemed as I read, or they would impose themselves upon one’s consciousness only slightly. So is that how it actually felt, or am I mis apprehending, or is it that way in the book because you are marginalizing the adults on purpose? (You’ve said elsewhere that you had a ‘wild’ upbringing, less constrained than the kind I had, for instance.)
Yes, it was. Actually, I said to one of my reacquainting classmates recently, I had a different face for authority than I had for my friends — and the face I had for authority was hardly my true face.
So, adults didn’t effectively impose themselves upon the child’s adventures.
My mother describes this with nostalgia. We could have done it in a practical sense but not with the psychology of the family. Now, it seems, it is either not done or not feasible.
The psychology of the family is partly what I am getting at with the difference between the old ways and new — for what was the family but the instillment of the oedipus complex (as against nature)?
Yes. And what do suburbs do but reinforce the isolation of the nuclear family and so on…
They do — although technically I was actually living in the “suburbs” prior to migration. However, the nature of these african suburbs were semi-rural indeed.
It was interesting in the 60s and 70s, lots of people showing up from former African colonies, although not yet SA of course. My father was always whispering, look, be nice! They weren’t rich there, and now they’ve lost everything, and are displaced here! They’re new, and their parents are freaking out, working in restaurants! Ask them something non prying but real, like about the landscape in their region, or the food! Find out what they liked to do there, what they miss! Maybe something similar or related is available here and you can let them know about it!
Your father was very wise. The assumption that I was very rich there, and that I had to be brought down a peg or two seems to have been the attitude of any of the Australians who bothered to think about my situation. Actually, this was compounded by the fact that many of the lower middle class tend to think of anyone with a British accent as the colonial oppressor, due to Australia’s own history.
The idea that someone could lose everything, and this could be meaningful to the one who has lost everything was the essential factor that escaped these people, and which turned them into oppressors of the worst sort — because they presumed they knew something about me that they didn’t.
What I’m saying (in the moderated comment above), is that it is as if I’ve been dealing with reeducation all of my adult life. These were people who wanted to reeducate me as to how to behave and think and be correctly moral, and yet had not psychological theory that would have allowed them to operate within the field of empathy or understanding.
Also, I think most people cannot conceptualise how much control the culture and management of a workplace can have over workers. The predominant ideology says that we are all individuals, so we cannot be controlled in ways that disrespect or take away our individuality. I, however, didn’t want to go back into a situation that was like the abusive one, especially in a context where ethics were missing to the degree that nobody could acknowledge, along with me, that the prior situation had, indeed, been abusive, and that it had been beyond my capacity as a mere ‘individual’ to control that.
So, I was out of work for many, many years, simply to avoid reeducation. It wasn’t that there was something wrong with me, but there was something wrong with a system that would push me into another situation, more than likely, in which the processes of reeducation would be allowed to be resumed.
Even a single signal that people (anybody) realised that the prior situation had, in fact, been abusive, would have been enough for me to trust that there was at least some consciousness of ethics governing Australian working life. However, nobody ever gave me such a signal, so I took that to mean that nobody considered reeducation to be abusive, but rather that it was acceptable in Australian society.
My father actually reads the news and has more than a vague idea of what is going on abroad — this is the difference. Also, part of his job involved hosting many various foreigners, so he was used to figuring out what state of mind they might be in / what might help make them comfortable.
A whole life in Reeducation, my God — but yes, that appears to be what happened. And yes indeed, it is frightening when everyone says Reeducation type events aren’t abusive. That was actually the most traumatic aspect of it for me and that is why I practice rebuttals to Reeducation’s ideas here — so I can use them in daily life when necessary.
And yes indeed, it is frightening when everyone says Reeducation type events aren’t abusive.
It is deeply disturbing when people take that line. After many years, it clearly outlines for me an upside-down version of the world, whereby submitting to authorities no matter what is considered to be a sign of personal strength, whereas standing up for yourself and what is right is depicted as mere weakness or hysteria.
To live in such a society is to live in a non-society or an anti-society, where one is simply not believed at all. What value can there be in participating in it so long as this is the case?
To give you an idea of how it was (and this danger is not yet removed for me:
I have reflected more than once about difficulties in life — how I have overcome so much, gone skydiving, experienced freesparring beyond my limits, survived my father’s illness, and so on. I considered those who take the black belt, and how much discipline and pain there is involved in this complex test, which would stretch an exceptional person to their limits — and I have decided that it is within me to pass such a test.
However, when I thought of re-entering the Australian workforce in a fulltime capacity, I KNEW that this was beyond my limits. To me, you would have to be someone who was super, super elite, who didn’t feel anything day after day, and who could breathe fire and smoke, in order to survive it.
So, I don’t think it wrong to draw a line and accept one’s limits.
Your new book will be in the post today.
Also: even when I’ve tried to enter new fields, such as middle school education, I find that my cultural instincts are Zimbabwean, not Australian. A lot of it has to do with gender, and how women are supposed to only act indirectly on a situation, rather than authoritatively. I can’t function in this way, as it isn’t part of my make-up. If I think something, or believe something, I say it directly, but this is not what’s expected, not what’s accepted, not what is desired in Australian culture. It gets people’s backs up and makes them think you are asserting yourself precipitously (which is often how it ends up feeling, in the end, as well, as if one was driven to continually overstep the mark.)
What has amazed me, though, is that having considered my culture to be long dead, and myself that last mutated expression of it, I have now found that black Zimbabwean men think in almost the same way that I do about the world. The women are more demure, in general, so there is not this equivalence with them so often. The white Zimbabweans I have met seem to have gone more towards a defensive right wing posture, which I can’t relate to, but black Zimbabwean men, more often than not, have the same psychological makeup that I do.
What a relief!
Yes. And I can never be super successful in this part of the country, because of not having the right feminine behavior, and also not being elite enough to truly breathe fire (some super elite women can).
It’s a truism here, by the way, that Black men and white women are each in their way only one step from the white male ideal, so both know via gender OR race (but not both) what it’s like to be in the in group and what it’s like to be in the out group.
[Oh yes — this is why in this blog I am a Latin man from the West coast (that stela), and why everyone originally thought this blog was by a U.S. Latino man !!! I’d be the ghost of Emiliano Zapata if this identity were a little less hackneyed.]
Yes, the fire you’d need to breathe would have to be cultural fire, seeded with the correct buzzwords and cultural tropes of belongingness and necessity, which would be unconvincing coming from my mouth.
Also regarding black and white culture in Zimbabwe — there are slighty different cultural weightings given to things. In the white culture, wildness (of many sorts) was considered to be noble. Animals were bred for their ‘spirit’ not for tame domesticity. To be wild was the highest possible value affirmed by this culture. In black Zimbabwean culture, though, wildness is merely “natural”. This is a step down, but not too bad, compared to some situations. I would say that in Australian culture, tameness is considered the norm in terms of both what is natural and what is civilised. There is no — or little — conception of the wild, despite the images the Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee portray. There is also little or no cultural conception of noble attitudes, behaviour, or so on. There are attitudes, instead, of necessity, and cultural attitudes governing what is taken to be ‘common sense’. (But! The “common sense” of Australians is highly specific to their culture.)
Hmmm — sounds very British and repressed, perhaps also Danish (to the extent I still understand DK, which may be limited). In the US or at least in significant parts of it, that wildness is understood (and it isn’t feared that it is mayhem).
The most vivid descriptions of AU I got before talking to you were from a French Canadian traveler in the Andes long ago. He said it was very staid but that there was utter mayhem just below the surface, so you could feel violence brewing, whether or not you actually saw any. (And that model of being was what Reeducation expected to see in Reeducands, of course.)
It may be improving slightly in Australia as it becomes Europeanised, but the staidness with violence brewing beneath the surface captures what I experienced very well. Since there are few avenues for rational mediation of problems, repression functions in place of giving direct attention to problems. Finally, the ability to repress gives way to institutional hysteria and cries that “heads will roll!” Until recently — and perhaps still — this has been the typical Australian way.