I truly dislike being projected into, and I like even less unsolicited, bad advice from people who have no qualification to give it. This is why I dislike Reeducated people. They very urgently want people like me to be quiet and I can literally feel them hitting me in the head, so I cannot think, and crushing my windpipe, so I cannot speak. I dislike them for this reason, and I am always willing to do whatever it takes to defend my psychic life against their deathly message.
*
The other day I listened all evening to an unpleasant person I permitted to speak to me. It was exhausting, and the perceptions gained from the experience required some thought, a decision, and some action. Now, this person, for all her faults, is not Reeducated, and I do honor her for that — it is one reason I was willing to listen to her.
A Reeducated person would say that because this person is so generally problematic, I should not have allowed her to speak at all. But here is what would have happened in reality — what had, in fact, been happening for some time.
*
For several months this person was pursuing me to speak and I kept deferring her, deflecting her, being busy. A lot of energy went to defending against her pursuit and while this was going on, she was discussing me behind my back, to all of our detriment, with everyone else.
Actually listening to what she had to say, although it is not my job and although what she has to say is very irrational, was more useful and more practical. It made me suspect that certain things I had been told were not true. It caused me to cross check some facts.
The person I checked with thanked me for my support and said my comments were therapeutic. The source of various destructive rumors was identified and quarantined. The problem was solved.
In Reeducation, however, you are not supposed to solve problems, but run from them or manage them. Reeducation is designed to get people to prolong suffering, not to mention try to make them feel guilty about ever encountering problems in the first place.
Reeducation would criticize me for the way I handled this situation because I “allowed boundaries to be transgressed” and then “exerted power and control.”
I say I acted like a compassionate and responsible adult, exerting the power and control that correspond to me.
*
Reeducated fools should in my opinion climb back into their test tubes or wherever it is they came from. I dislike them. Why am I angry? Because Reeducation is destructive. Now, in Reeducation anger is not allowed — it is supposed to be a cover for fear, and that is supposed to be a revelation — but I drum my fingers on the table.
Yes, of COURSE, one is ANGRY at DESTRUCTION and FEARS more of it, and has therefore developed an ANGRY war cry against this enemy. Do you see why I find Reeducated peoples’ invasive and irrational lines of reasoning so circular, so exhausting, and so unproductive?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Often by listening and watching we can see how another person operates. But this seeing itself requires teaching. And I fear that the political deinizens who utilise fear in order to pursue their agenda do not create the grounds for even the most basic psychological insights. Those who see themselves a superior, who believe themselves to have greater knowledge, or greater perspective, and yet utilise fear in order to dominate, are leaching the noble aspects out of society itself, and making them impossible. In the end, only a vulgar dominance and submission mechanism becomes possible. The sadists will find that there is nothing left even worthy of domination.
Yes, of COURSE, one is ANGRY at DESTRUCTION and FEARS more of it, and has therefore developed an ANGRY war cry against this enemy. Do you see why I find Reeducated peoples’ invasive and irrational lines of reasoning so circular, so exhausting, and so unproductive?
Anger is not allowed in reeducation because it explodes the top off the ideological bubble that has been historically designed to keep you in your place. The ideological bubble is a closed microcosm of ideas and prescribed and anticipated reactions. It is an ideological system that protects weak people from ever having to experience the world in a way that hasn’t already been regulated by conditioning within this system. Many who are broken and frightened by their various traumas consider such a closed microcosm to be invaluable for continuing their lives. So, there is a kind of counselling (reeducation) which enables the broken people to find their re-entrance back to this place of trust and subservience in relation to authority (although authority in this instance is the submission to rules).
To explode the top off this bubble would be frightening to many people, but for those of us who enjoy wildness, it is our only hope. To constantly explode this bubble (that operates via repression), and to take ourselves out of the comfort zone into the danger zone where nothing or little is regulated is the key to shamanistic self-renewal.
And my last sentence gives me some clue as to why I am angry at people who dismiss Bataille, even if they are doing it for good moral reasons, and even if, I as a feminist, should be outraged about his exploitation of prostitutes. Rather, I am not outraged at all, as I see that he was exploding the top off his container and making himself new.
For example — when I pull the book, suddenly I have space to breathe..an open future! There is an element of destruction to all this that absolutely guarantees a process of renewal.
Furthermore, on shamanism — nietzsche and bataille have been understood as mere political schemers. They were both at war with the mores of their culture ON PRINCIPLE, which is something that could be said of Marechera, too. It wasn’t that they simply wanted to hail in a different kind of society. They had to use the principle of violence and rupture (that was already within themselves, put there by their own traumas), in order to explode whatever container seemed to be closing in on them, making them feel moral and relaxed.
I think the whole pop psycho crap about “just draw a boundary” really means “just keep taking poison and abuse, just in smaller doses and without seeing it for what it is, and without compromising your own capitalist productivity or upsetting the apple cart.”
Your first comment in this thread is also very good and it completely describes the Reeducated person in question …
And I am still studying this first comment, it is quite profound.
I am going to be ranting here about this faux sage – and on Facebook as well, I suspect – for several days.
Why: because abusive people steal your identity. They insist you are something you are not — namely, a person in need of enlightenment and help from them — and I, at least, find myself defending aginst that without realizing what is happening until it is too late.
Then it is as though I have to wrest my self image back.
And I am not talking about people who criticize or disagree or make comments, I am talking about people who make gross errors (in the simple example I used earlier, that I have nobody to speak Spanish with, and need practice, and should be desperate enough to accept just anyone to practice with … 3 errors that bespeak a complete non recognition of the actual conditions of my life, which is heavily populated with Spanish speakers I actually like) and then insist that they are not errors.
And so somehow they get their teeth in my neck because I am arguing about reality with them in a false way — namely, knowing they are confused, I have been overly kind / not used all my powers. ALWAYS an error, and this is my major lesson of the week: never have a serious discussion with someone you pity and thus don’t use your full powers with. Never give yourself a handicap unless it is a really innocuous situation like giving a toddler a head start in a foot race.
So I feel as though I am shaking this person — and actually it was TWO people from two venues, but very similar — to get out of them the pieces of my identity they stole. I do not really need these pieces but I want them in my own possession, not the possession of others who may hold them up at me later or read them like tea leaves. I want to grow entirely opaque again.
FINALLY. Abusive people are siren like because they use their positive characteristics and interests to mask their actual activities. Combine those positive traits plus the pain they’re in and that’s a recipe I will respond to, if I am not careful.
POST FINALLY. How is this different from talking an actual friend through a crisis last week (someone one of these abusive types is jealous of, by the way)? Well: said friend is an actual friend, not some sort of shadow competitor, and isn’t trying to use dark arts on anyone.
POST POST FINALLY. Now, my X, the abusive one, used to claim I was holding a false mirror up to him. I would say, X, I am really uncomfortable with this behavior of yours. And he would say I was being hurtful because I was imposing upon him a negative view of himself.
THAT is some form of sophistry and the person I am most irritated at this week has done something similar … and that is the indirect proof I have that her tactics are abusive.
HMMMMMMMM.
POST NOTE. Intellectual work is a whole lot easier than dealing with Reeducated manipulations. A whole lot.
Also — on the list of signs that things are getting abusive — if you find yourself wondering. If the person seems crazy.
And — intellectual work is easier, but actual friends are also easier. I should post on this: notes toward a separate post: according to what I learned from mother early on, to be in any kind of relationship with someone is to let them do things to you, if they are more powerful. You choose friends because they have something to give you in exchange for that, and spouses because they actually support you in exchange for that. There weren’t relationships that didn’t perpetrate harm, and it was sinful to imagine that there might be … although it was virtuous to pretend that actually existing relationships did not perpetrate harm.
Things were like that in Reeducation, too. You were supposed to give up your old friends who were fun and not mean, and accept new friends you had to “draw boundaries” with. That was because you were supposed to learn that relationships took work — if they just clicked, they were bad. So you had difficult friends, and this really brain breaking thought project of Reeducation. Very exhausting and nothing like real life (thank God).
If the relationship clicks for someone who operates PRIMARILY at the level of primary processes (not in terms of me as per my memoir) then it may be a damaging symbiotic one. However, it pays to bear in mind that not everybody operates in this way. Most people use too little of their consciousness, because most people are not taught ethics in schools.
Yes but how many people really operate primarily at the level of primary processes, and consider it normal? According to Reeducation, most, including anyone who would even consider Reeducation, but I am not convinced.
Well from what you’ve told me, reeducation was geared towards those whose parents were alcoholics, which means that probably there was assumed to be not much maturity in the children of those families.
What I have been learning about primary processes, though, is that we never really leave them behind. So supposing that you or I are feeling weak, we can regress to the level of acquiring a sense of belonging on the basis of primary process thinking. But these processes operate even when we are still thinking in a largely rational way (since emotions are still part of our makeup). It’s hard to draw a line really (at least I’m finding it hard to draw the line between pathological and normal in terms of my thinking on my thesis).
I think that with the decline towards a mechanistic dominance and submission modality, primary processes are automatically invoked as a predominant way of relating. You lose the buffer effect of ego, which is guided normally not only by its own self interest but by a sense of what is ethical behaviour and what isn’t. Without that buffer, we all tend to fall into the modality of primary process thinking more often than we would do otherwise.
Well, yes.
Paragraph 1: Yes, a part of Reeducation was that. But Reeducation did not just assume immaturity — it assumed absolute mayhem, a zero level of responsibility and self possession. I don’t think that is normal even in people with problems.
Paragraph 2: No, we don’t really leave them behind, but I and I think a lot of people are aware of this and of their workings. I think it’s the immature people who just let themselves be led around by this.
Paragraph 3: This is key, I think, and very interesting. I will start watching for it.
If reeducation assumed mayhem then it had no concept of “other minds”, which, I have learned, is one of the features of an abuser. What I mean is that there are people who do not function on the basis of understanding the fact that they are dealing with other human beings. So what do they assume then? Sin? Mechanical disorder?
It would seem that there is little psychology involved at all, in reeducation — but don’t we always imagine somehow that the sadist implicitly “knows” us?
Yes to all. What sadists assume, I believe, is mechanical disorder. Some people in Reeducation called that sin.
Little psychology involved in Reeducation, that was what I finally discovered, to my amazement.
In *Al Anon,* which was only a part of Reeducation, they are big on telling you you are not different from or better than the others. That is because a lot of people evade facing problems by saying they don’t have at least some version of them, and because, as I have learned is actually true, a lot of “codependent” people are very much preoccupied with status and ranking, and want to be better than the others.
A friend of mine who likes Al Anon said that was very helpful to her — the insistence that she was not different from the others — because she had not wanted her problem to be recognizable, to be a problem others also had. She wanted it to be particular, original.
I did not comprehend this and still do not, because I would prefer, if I have a problem, that it be recognizable and non unique. This seems like a much less onerous type of problem to have because then one might find that its solution has already been discovered and can be applied.
(This attitude of mine was very frustrating to Reeducation because it is so rational. It is, of course, an attitude R would have liked me to have had I learned it from R, but since I acquired it before I met R, it became proof of “coldness.”)
I told R that was a crazy idea — anybody with an *actual* problem of any sort would prefer that it be recognizable and solvable. R said that actually, the average person would prefer to continue to suffer. I said that that meant their suffering wasn’t too bad and/or was mostly histrionics. Perhaps this *is* cold of me but it is still what I think.
“R said that actually, the average person would prefer to continue to suffer.”
Hmm, it sounds as though this R person is projecting, and that they romanticize suffering, which is a rampant attitude among certain sections of society. Perhaps because they think it makes them saintly like martyrs, how very Catholic.
Then again, I have always felt that Catholicism has a very strong theme of S+M running through it (something which I oppose), and so the suffering is also masochistic in a way. But so often the masochism is only a myth, spread about by the sadists (figurative and literal) on high to excuse their actions. And so everyone “wants it.” A woman “wants” to be raped, the working poor “want” to work in sweatshops, the peasants want to dominated by a jealous god, and his stand in, the patriarch, or even, those who have gone through Reeducation want to be weak and dependent upon the system. And it all must be romanticized like Jesus on the cross or a starving artist.
Reeducation was projecting, I believe, but also describing himself and most of the people he knew. Had I known how to recognize this retro puritanical Catholic psychology I would have comprehended the spuriousness of it all much faster.
S/M, yes, and come to think of it, the idea (common in New Agers and MSW type self helping therapists) that you “attract” events to yourself is also an assumption of masochism. “You asked for it, and at some level you wanted it.”
Amazing. So I see why these New Age and EST type programs are so successful here, perhaps: they are looser than dusty old Catholicism, but so close to it that they are not scary.
And also: Reeducation was also big on “taking responsibility” — responsibility being one more ethical and moral virtue I notice these hypocritical Catholics constantly evade. It *said* this but what it MEANT was, “burden yourself with guilt, but then say you are powerless to remedy anything and too humble before God to be able to make a change.” Unbelievable, really.
Of course, not to beat on the poor Catholics, I’m sure protestantism has similar themes, though I am not entirely sure (you would never know I was baptized a Methodist!). Perhaps they are the source of the bootstraps ideology, since they are so obsessed with work. And so there is still the underlying assumption of masochism, because if one does not work hard enough, their 0nly reason for poverty or suffering, one ‘knowingly’ gets what one deserves. And since it is within the individual’s control to work harder, if they do not succeed they too were asking for it.
“And also: Reeducation was also big on “taking responsibility” — responsibility being one more ethical and moral virtue I notice these hypocritical Catholics constantly evade. It *said* this but what it MEANT was, “burden yourself with guilt, but then say you are powerless to remedy anything and too humble before God to be able to make a change.” Unbelievable, really.”
Absolutely. But then again there are two sides to that coin. We are not so powerless as a Catholic-styled ideology would assume, but we are also not powerful enough to stop the abuses of society. If you go too far with the idea of personal power, individuals are once again blamed for their problems, and since it was in their control to stop it, they *must* have been asking for it.
It is worth noting that in the place where I received my benevolent gift of workplace abuse, the culture was dominated by catholics. Apparently, in Australia, the right wing of the Labor movement has this quality.
I think American Catholics are a double whammy, because American culture is Protestant, so with a Catholic here, you get both forms of guilt. Catholicism without the Protestant kick isn’t nearly as bad. Maybe Australian Catholics are lie American ones for that reason, too. Maybe it’s the crux of the Anglo Saxon problem, those countries have both … ???
True about going too far with the idea of personal power – it tends to extreme idealism, as Jennifer keeps pointing out, the annihilation of material context and the denial of social reality.