How brainwashed am I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) still today at age 75+ years? As a child I was subjected to the psychological analog of what oncologists do to leukemia patients with the small difference that the physician tries to transform their patient from sick to healthy whereas my parents and school teaches – aka: my masters –, whether inteitionally or not (were they fully self-accountable human beings?), endeavored to transform me from healthy to sick.
They tried to destroy my semiotic immune system: my autochthonous faculty of judgment, and then inject their social conditioning to make me think and feel what they wanted me to think and feel, not what I would have wanted to think and feel. Unlike apparently for most children, it did not completely succeed in my case. I never wanted my Mapo. I could be coerced by threat of abandonment to tell my female primary childrearer I loved her, but I never really did [love her, i.e.]. What was love, anyway? I did know what having an enema syringe inserted up my anus and the bulb full of soapy water squeezed was.
"All social customs are shared hallucinoses aka social psychoses." (Wilfred Bion)*
I was subjected to a lot of clatptrap about how life in the Soviet Union was bad. Better dead than red. Well, how bad was it, really, on the other side of The Iron Curtain? Would I been prohibited from reading Das Kapital? Would I have been allowed to read The U.S. Declaration of Indeendence? Would I have been allowe to read Shakespeare's plays? Sophocles? Heracitus? The Bible? Would I have been coerced to help keep the Soviet Union beautiful by getting a haircut? Would I have been genitally mutilated ("circumcised") as a helpless newborn? What would really have happened to me had I lived in the place where people around me were apparently convinced it was better to be dead? How bad would it have been for me behind The Iron Curtain? Not: How bad would it have been for some other male child who wanted his Mapo or wanted to be like his "dad", but me?
It wasn't exactly paradise for me (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) for me on this side of The Iron Curtain. Aside from being genitally cut once and haircutted every other Saturday, [fill in the blank]. Of course it was better, i.e., less worse than Dachau would have been. The most powerful essay about human freedom I have ever come across was written by a Polish sociologist who lived in Warsaw Pact Poland. But there' a catch: He was interested in freedom to create in the arts and sciences, not in "freedom" to grub a lot of money. And he did not spend his time being a "dssident" trying to overthrow the government. He was a scholar not a muscle men.
His kind of freedom is freedom to cook up more pies, not to take a bigger slice of the pie inventory. You get your kicks from baking pies not from eating them (while also nobody goes to bed hungry at nite). A creative idea adds value without taking any existing value from anybody; it's not trying to get people to buy something. It would be compatible with lack of entreperheurial fredom. Turn Amazon over to the employees and let Jeff Bezos work for a living, maybe as a janitor or, he he has what it takes, as an epidemoiologist or master structural engineer.
Each day I get more disgusted with this place. I might well have felt differently had they coopted me to persecute other kids instead of being one of the persecuted: a non-ocular pupil who had to do meaningless ass—ignments and get tested like a public swimming pool gets tested for its clorine level.
Maybe In Soviet Russia I could have got a doctorate in Marxism-Leninism and written propaganda for motivating laborers on collective farms? I could not have cared less about my "fellow students", my teachers, my parents, you name it, either here or there, except that I needed my pragmatic needs met for food, shelter, medical care, etcetera and so forth. Where did they come from? What were they? Animal, vegetable or mineral? When hey were not causing me trouble, at their best, they were dilatones. ☏
Professor Szczepanski distiguishes between individualism and individuality. My image: "Individualism" is the freedom to jump up and down like a chimpanzee for a banana and tread on other people's toes. It's the right to be a big bully: to not give a shit about anybody else. The right to be a self-made man propped up by the police, or, if you really are a real rugged individualist, to compete in a lawless Darwinean chaos with arms and body armor, where the person with the best survival skills dies last. "Individuality", on the other hand, is the freedom to create something in the arts and sciences that nobody else ever imagined. Not being diverse but producing something unique of value which makes you not just diverse like a sheep with different color wool, but unlike anybody else who ever was or will be. Invention but not Chimimpanzeeing may be difficult in free Dodge City; profiteering but not scientific discovery may be difficult in an economically repressive People's Republic.
I think a lot of people who like it on this side of The Iron Curtain want freedom for enterprise, freedom to make a lot of money. So if on the other side of The Iron Curtain they could not reant workers to extract sutplus value out of them, they would ptotest that they were not free. I want freedom from enterprise: I want nothing to do with economics. To not need to waste any of my life on money except to spend it when I need to acquire something,for instance a book – not a vacation to Dizzzneyland. I want what Founding Father of The United States of Americe, John Adams, wanted for his grandchildren who have long since passed so why don't I have it at tis late date:
"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." (John Adams)
So who are the real conservatives: (A) money-grubbing macho capitalists like Jack Welch, or (B) effete intellectuals who can't even ride bicycle straight? But if my parents had been in the John Adams class I would not be asking such petty questions, because these things would be taken care of like presumably Venus and Serena Williams don't have to worry about whether the U.S. Open has nets for the tennis courts. For me, to spend my days making a lot of money would be involuntary servitude – the good thing about it being if I could make so much money quick enough to be able to stop doing it, permanently.
The ony good nation is The United Nations |