Also in Reeducation, it was important to suffer so as to prove one could feel pain (pain being the only actually admissible feeling). One could not feel pain and do something about it — that would be “impulsive.” One had to feel pain and “grieve” it, lament and suffer.
I had always found that to move ahead in life, which is not long, it was best not to become enmired in suffering if one could avoid it. Prisoners and concentration camp members, for instance, survived by finding ways to alleviate suffering and breathe more freely.
I think this is key to those days in which I so tried to move out of “procrastination” via time management and discipline. I already had so many yokes upon me that to try to think of work in that way was not liberating.
I had formerly thought of creative and intellectual work as a form of rebellion, a space of freedom. Although I do believe in keeping regular hours and working in small pieces, I do not like thinking of work as a space of limitation and suffering.
I also think that telling myself, in those days, that it was a question of time management and that I had suddenly become a poor manager of time was just one more way of discounting myself, of discounting my professional point of view.
In sum: deciding one has the right not to suffer is really important.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
When I was growing up if you had a problem you had to suffer – a LOT – visibly – in order for someone to help you.
They didn’t always help, of course, only if they felt like it, but if they didn’t somehow that was your fault, too.
It wasn’t proper to just ask for help or advice. So the only way to get help with your problems was to wallow in misery. Is it any wonder that I became depressed? And that medication didn’t help?
Then one day I said, “F— this, I am going to take control of my life.”
Well, you can’t always control everything, or fix everything that is wrong. But fixing what you can fix certainly helps.
Yes. And I do not know where Reeducation got the idea that I had too much control over my life, if not out of thin air … perhaps it just meant I was not messed up enough, so I just must be faking not being… ENDLESS are the convolutions of Reeducation (and abusive reasoning in general) … !
I think that abusive reasoning is jealous of presence of mind and the fact that some ppl appear to have a centre of gravity about them. This seems like the most impossible indulgence on the part of those who have it. What reeducation doesn’t see is the enormous effort that it takes, sometimes, to keep centred in the midst of a rain of ongoing abuse. But the fact that you don’t crumple and give in looks like some kind of vaingloriousness.
Sin or mental illness, if it’s a woman who does not give in.
Or if its a black who doesn’t give in, it’s the same. Anyone with low status is supposed to give in, otherwise they look like they’re chafing against the bit, making things harder for themselves, when, if only they gave in, things would suggestibly be so much easier!
Yet, we know that this is just the way that mendacious society threatens those who do not immediately conform — and that things rarely become better after giving in.
Why do we look to gain control of our lives and change things? It’s because we don’t like what is, and want to reach for something better.
To control one’s own life is to say, “I deserve better than this.”
But someone who thinks that they must suffer, that suffering is required and not optional, does not hear “I deserve better” — instead they hear “I think I am better than you.”
Because where do you get off thinking that you don’t have to go through the same suffering as everyone else?
So they put all kinds of social pressure on the person who says “No, I will not suffer,” in order to try to make them toe the line. The nail that sticks out is hammered down. And children learn it. And pass it on in their turn. And that is how people learn to suffer, and to make others suffer, even though it really is optional after all and nobody has to, at least not if they have the basics of life.
When I moved out of Louisiana for good, I saw this in action. I was unhappy; I didn’t have friends in my city; I didn’t like my job; I didn’t like living with my parents. My friends said, “Come to this city which you love and stay with us until you find a job and an apartment.” So I did, just like that.
My co-workers were angry and resentful when they learned that I was leaving, and why. They tried to shame and frighten me out of doing it. This was hard to understand until I realized… it was a personal affront to them. They read it as me saying I was better than them, because I insisted on improving my personal circumstances. If that crap job and small town was good enough for them, why not for me? And so on.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s a kind of solipsistic dedication to suffering as the basis of one’s worth, or something like it.
I think it’s less egotistical, more human, than that. It’s an assumption that the way things are is the way things HAVE to be. It’s a failure of imagination. It’s a conflation of what is with what ought to be.
So for some people, it hasn’t occurred to them that they deserve a better life than what they have. And unfortunately, when they see other people who do have that belief, they react without thinking. If they thought, they would be able to apply it to themselves, “She deserves better, and I also deserve better,” but instead they stop at “She thinks she deserves better than me,” and lash out.
It’s also — especially the conflation of what is and what ought to be — a part of the way America thinks; we’re very Calvinist-influenced and many, many people in the US believe that what happens to them — good or bad — happens because they deserve it. They may or may not believe that God did it to them because of their righteousness (or lack thereof) but they have absorbed the deeper message that they deserve what happens to them.
So! The person who refuses to accept their circumstances is not only offending against others around them; he is blaspheming against God! For those who think that way, anyhow. That helps to explain the animosity, doesn’t it?
Amazing, human, but I guess true — frightening — and I associate it with Louisiana although I suppose it is not just here (or is it especially here?).
P.S. I just saw your second comment — so I see … I certainly get it, and would now like to study the sociology of it!!!!!
You should! Someone should, definitely.
Maybe — this is pure speculation — maybe it is because Louisiana has a lower standard of… I don’t want to say standard of living because that implies purely income and economic matters, and we’re talking about something that reaches beyond that.
Standard of being?
In other words, more people are unhappy with their lives, of lower social status than they want to be, dislike their jobs and living situations, with few prospects for improvement in their situation.
So if that’s the case, that Louisiana has a lower “standard of being” then maybe there’s just that much more resentment and anger to go around.
But I am just talking out of my ass, so maybe not.
I mean, a big difference between Louisiana and other places I have lived is that in other places, people have this idea that you can just pack up and move wherever you want, whenever you want. Some people in Louisiana have that idea, but others are like, “Why the f__ would you do that? You can’t just pick up and MOVE.” You can see why, too. They live down the street from their parents and grandparents. They can drop off the baby and go out. Mow the yard when dad’s sick. That’s something I never learned to value until I left. It’s still too high a price to pay for all the other things I had to endure — for me. But for others, it’s too much to give up.
I think Louisiana and Perth may have a lot in common — both isolated cities with a relative degree of semi-rural amenities, which ppl may feel reluctant to leave behind. My experience has taught me that there is also a lot of religiously inspired and backwards reasoning. In proportion to the lack of genuine possibilities for choice, ppl do use the rhetoric of choice a lot — for instance in the sense that if something happened that was very bad, it wasn’t due to anybody else doing anything, but rather, you “chose” it.
That’s fascinating – rhetoric of choice substituting actual choices. Very true.
And on things not improving after giving in – that is KEY.
Lower standard of being – people are emotionally disabled such that they need that family help, I think.
Also, human — the resentment and anger, yes, which is why people drink so much I do believe!
Drinking. Yeah, maybe. Alcohol sure does help with resentment and anger, doesn’t it? About needing family help though, don’t you think it is normal to need that type of help from someone? Either blood family, or the community around you. Neighbors looking out for each other, that sort of thing. I think it is normal. I think it’s pretty sick the way suburban transplant people living outside of urban areas completely isolate themselves from everyone around them. It is no way to live.
Yes but in Louisiana it can only come from family. And it comes at a huge cost. And yes — if you have no sex education so you get pregnant at 16 and have to have the child then yes you need some kind of support. For example. And since support is only available from family in Louisiana… the whole thing feeds itself…
Why only family? What’s up with that? I remember learning from my mother when I was a child that you don’t ask for anything from someone who is not family, ever. I wasn’t in a position to really question it then but it seemed wrong to me, even then. Why is it like that in Louisiana?
I think because family is the only insitution there is?
It’s the only bourgeois one.
But there’s church.
Ah, tell me more tell me more … so the state isn´t bourgeois, I want to know know know…
The state is also bourgeois, but I wouldn’t turn to it in an intimate sense.
Could it be because people feel that within the family they can get away with misbehaving?