WelcomeSentimentality
"Boo, hoo!" (BMcC[18-11-46-503])
A surprise ending is a secret. In the The New York Times Sunday Magazine, 03 December 2000, p.77, Luc Sante wrote "What Secrets Tell": "People need secrets because they need the assurance that there is something left to discover, that they have not exhausted the limits of their environment, that a prize might lie in wait like money in the pocket of an old jacket, that the existence of things beyond their ken might propose as a corollary that their own minds contain unsuspected corridors. People need uncertainty and destabilization the way they need comfort and security. It's not that secrets make them feel small but that they make the world seem bigger – a major necessity these days, when sensations need to be extreme to register at all. Secrets reawaken that feeling from childhood that the ways of the world were infinitely mysterious, unpredictable and densely packed, and that someday you might come to know and master them. Secrets purvey affordable glamour, suggest danger without presenting an actual threat. If there were no more secrets, an important motor of life would be stopped, and the days would merge into a continuous blur. Secrets hold out the promise, false but necessary, that death will be deferred until their unveiling."
What is sentimentaity? It's fake emotion. The child has emotions. The adults do not approve of said emotions (the kid may tell his mommy: "I hate you!"[1]); So the adults intimidate the child to not exhibit, andeven more important: not have said emotions. So then the kid has to do something. They get rewarded for displaying the emotional symptoms the adults want the kid to have. But there is no actual emotion behind it; it's just a Potemkin emotive facade with nothing behind it. Soon enough, the child, having lost his (her, other) own feelings does the dance of the exhibition of the emotions the adult wants. Some new situation comes along The kid knows it is not advisable to have his own emotion, so he is an empty husk until adult fills it in with the right response. Do this enough times and the kid starts to figure out how to do what they adult is going to want before the adult wants it out of him, and then everything is perfect forever after. The child has no soul of his own left, and the adult gets the show the adult wants to see. Sentimentality has replaced sentiment. The kid grows up and does it to the next generation, world without end, amen. Adolf Eichmann probably felt good about having obeyed orders, until he got caught by the Mosad who had different sentiments?
Summing it up again
To "hurt somebody's feelings" is not to hurt a person. It is to trigger defensive mechanisms which therir social conditoning implanted in their minds to protect its enactment of its agenda from being questioned an thereby threatened. [Contrast to "hurting a person's feelings": causing them consequential material harm, e.g.: "You killed my pet cat", or: "You stole my life's savings".]
Persons' social conditioning made them be useful human resources for the society in perpetuating and aggrandizing itself and its agenda: workers, soldiers, baby factories, etc. In other words, the person imagines they are living their life but they are really unwittingly being lived by their social conditioning as agents of reproduction of the society's social life.
"Hurting a person's feelings" attempts to shield this zombified state from being shaken up and awakened for the individual person to question what's really going on. "You're hurting my feelings. Stop it! You're upsetting me!" i.e.: upsetting the "dogmatic slumber that has colonized the person to render them to be a "good citizen", a human resource for the society's agenda.
Arousal of "hurt feelings" protects the person's social conditioning from being breached and questioned and the person realizing they have choices instad of unreflectively instantiating their social role. "People's feelings" protect society like a wall protects a city from enemy attack. (See: here, for instructions how to help free a person from their social conditioning if you hurt their feelings in a caring way.)
Life is meaningless (which is good)
"See if there's anything good on." "Why bother?"
I do not know what it would be like if kids' souls were not hollowed out and restuffed per above. Would most children who kept their own minds be bored to death because they could not find anything interesting in life and lacked ability to cook up anything for themselves? That too might well be be a social problem: that the adolts(sic) provided them a social surround that had nothing in it that would arouse any emotion in the kids. I don't know.
However people get there, however, I think most people face the untenable prospect of "lives of quiet desperation". And that I have an idea about:
There once was an inmate in Alcatraz prison who was kept in solitary confinement for months in a totally dark cell where he could not see anything and had nothing to do. How did he keep his sanity? He ripped one button off his prison uniform shirt. He would throw it wildly, some random place in his cell. Then for hours he would crawl around on the floor looking for it in the pitch black darkness. When at last he found the button, he started this little game all over again. By repeatedly searching for the button he kept himself from going insane.
This may be suggestive of how of all the crap about things like repressing children's (and even adults') sexuality works: If people have nothing meaningful in their life, take away something that does have meaning for them and then give them the opportunity to recover what was taken away from them. Like that prisoner looked for the button.
But there is a difference: The prisoner was in a sense free. Nobody was extracting surplus alue from him, so he ws starting from a blank slate (or cement floor, more likely). But the ordinary man has to work a 40 plushour per week job plus commute plus.... So he's tarting off in the red. And he may not be as intelligent or creatie as that prisoner either was or had to become. So it is imperative that society throw the button for him to try to fetch since otherwise he might jus stare into the void after giving at the office.
The problem, of course, is that when the human bests of burden see the intelligentsia enjoying themselves they will resent it and governments need manpower more than they need poets, so the intellecuals get thrown under the bus if neseccary to keep th masses under control.
Those who cannot create can still procreate and that is a kind of creation, i.e., making something out of nothing (sperm and ova), and the people get sold on how wonderful they feel to hav ebrought new life into society which so badly needs replacements for the people who wear out and go to the cemetery. Itchy, kitschy, coo!
More sentiment over persons + inhumane ethics
Somebody whose father was killed when the Islamist suicide bombers desroyed the New York City World Trade Center towers, 11 September 2001.This man is complaining that the FBI has evidence that actors in the Saudi Arabian government abetted the suicide bombers but that the American government is not releaseing the information nor accusing the Saudi government of their crime. The person when asked why this mightb e happening, specifically says that it could estabilize oil prices and lose America large military contracts and [I did not hear this one clearly so he may not have said it, but it is obvious anyway] potentially increase problems in the very volitile Mideast. He doe notcare about all this collateral damage what he selfishly wants to have happy fantasies in his head would cause. He wants the Amerian government to be ethical, to: "do the right thing", i.e., bring the-cat-is-out-of-the-bag justice to bear on theh Saudi Arabian goernment and the human cost to world politics and economics, i.e., currently living persons be damned. Sentimental feelings about corpses over realpolitiik. He wants to spill some milk to give himself an excuse to cry about his dead father so that he will feel better about a corpse that has been dead for 20 years. Guess what? I don't agree. I believe in material conditions of life for the living, not sentimental "feelings".
Footnotes
- ↑ Sandor Ferenczi wrote, in an essay evocatively titled "The Adaptation of the Family to the Child": I am reminded of an incident with a little nephew of my own, whom I treated as leniently as, in my view, a psycho-analyst should. He took advantage of this and began to tease me, then wanted to beat me, and then to tease and beat me all the time. Psycho-analysis did not teach me to let him beat me ad infinitum, so I took him in my arms, holding him so that he was powerless to move, and said: "Now beat me if you can!" He tried, could not, called me names, said that he hated me; I replied: "All right, go on, you may feel these things and say these things against me, but you must not beat me." In the end he realized my advantage in strength and his equality in fantasy, and we became good friends. (Sandor Ferenczi, "Final contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis", 1955, p. 75)
 Unfortunate for themself, the person who lacks one; unfortunate for others, the person that is one. Don't be an a**hole! |
