Alla inlägg den 2 juli 2008

Av dennis hägglund - 2 juli 2008 11:42

Apathy is one of the feelings. We will look at several feelings one at a time as a supplement to the class below.


If man produced an environment, placed you inside it, and you felt apathy for this existence, what would be the problem? It would be a problem with the environment, and a problem of you being too evolved for the environment. If this were done, could you be conditioned to accept the environment, even to admire it? Could you be brought to lower your demands to mere, "No pain.". With applied pain, of course, you could. It feels so good when they stop torturing you. Painkiller addiction works that way. No pain is ecstasy.


We are born highly critical of the human environment (as noted earlier, almost all mothers tell us we were serene babies to cover their negligence and win our devotion), but the criticism fades away so that by the time we have become authorities over our own children we have more or less abandoned the rebel cause entirely. This does not mean the apathy has vanished, but that a force has been conjured called conscious which makes apathy unconscious.


Apathy is a painful process of having to be forced to do anything except survive. The edge between apathy and suicide is very sharp, so that one day a child may feel forced to do what survival dictates, and the next day he laughs at the idea that he wants to survive. A child who has stepped off this edge rarely confides in us, because he knows we will stop him. But most of us cling to life; most of us understand instinctively that this is our problem to solve, not someone else's, and that solving it, even if it seems impossible to do, is not a waste of a lifetime but the very essence of living. This is where no creature has been before. The utterly alien.


From our parents we all become convinced that apathy is a problem that can be solved by some contrivance. We become certain it's a competition, that we all have to spend a lot of money to get rid of apathy, for example, but it is mother's money; mother always wins. And it worsens when mother wants to remain the star of the strip show (as well as the winner of the money), and the daughter grows into that slot as mother ages out of it. Then the daughter has to play father against mother; she has to acquire a heterosexual skill, making contempt for a man seem devotion to him (which mean pretending she thinks him having assigned her a slot as his sex-object is not an exhibition of his contempt for her).


The granddaughter enters as a natural born victim. Grandmothers all but put the big kettle on the fire. But somehow apathy doesn't return even in old age; apathy is a realm of the young. This phenomenon is called "authority", a synthesized immunity to the manmade environment. Authority has us all convinced that it is winning the game to evade apathy by winning the game of living better or more securely in this manmade environment, while in fact it is only better at getting senile than we are.


Where can one distance oneself from reality? In a mental storage space! In this space one labels things past, although they are not taken from past reality. A small girl with makeup on, for example, expects everyone to see the makeup, because she certainly would. She doesn't know that the men who react didn't even know there was any makeup; that they just responded to a cue without actually recognising it. They put her into memory, assuming that what they put into memory is actually her. She is in their memory as erotic, but she is not remembered with makeup, or as erotic solely due to the makeup. So we have a distance: a girl who is not erotic to a man has been collected into his erotica. (Reality does not go through the eyes' lenses into the head. There is a science where we know reflected light goes through the lenses making an image, but this is not the science of seeing, just the science of eyes as organs. Only if a person is dead do the eyes work this way.)


Now memory has someone in it, but the image is synthesized, not even a direct optical projection. Why is this person in memory? Because this memory is useful; this memory will, for example, be used as erotica. This usefulness is a future. This future is also not a real time, not a real other.


Sex is an escape into the not real. The physical stimulation is in the present, but the driving force is not real. The pleasure has been put above the realism. The realism would invade as apathy; apathy arrives with reality or the present, because it is our real feeling for what man has wrought. In memory the habit of pleasure has decided what is real to it, instead of the real deciding what something is worth.


Sex and sweets are intense. Intensity crosses the distance between the present and the preoccupation called self in the memory. Something so intense is like pain. No matter how you concentrate or fixate it is still there. You want to stay away from the present, because apathy is there, but the pleasure gets through to you even though you are not there in the present, like a perfumed letter from a girlfriend to a soldier at the front. All you can want is more pleasure.

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When a feeling is comparatively higher, what is the zero? If I say something is higher, I must define the zero, the higher-than-what.


So when I say that sex is higher, what is it higher than? The problem here is that there are two of these zeros, just like on thermometers. The one is man-made, and the other was there before man started to make things, to make an environment of his things.


The act of conceiving in nature produces a higher feeling which is higher than joy. But when man is having sex it produces a higher feeling which is only higher than apathy.


Man is perpetually haunted by this problem. Man has changed the world, and man needs man in order to make and maintain these changes, but all that these changes can offer man is apathy. Even those who drive man because man is making them rich have nothing to put them beyond apathy's constant grip. This is why man moves his life into his head. In his head he is no longer the slave of reality, no longer evolved and burdened with evolved expectations. In his head he can indulge in belief in all the lies and promises he has been given. In his head he can consider the masks others wear, all the feelings they register (like in acting: to register mournfulness at the fake gravesite), as genuine experience.


Finding apathy as other, we find authority. Is there a decent way to get authority? Does anyone have authority decently? There is no way to find out except to find what has become of apathy where it is being expertly managed. (This is like the one about the zebra who can't feel the real predator lurking behind some cover, because he assumes the killer feeling as his own.)


Is it a crime to steal into your toddler's room while he is asleep and rob him of the little coin his father gave him? And then berate him for losing it the next morning? If it seems so you are naive about marriage, motherhood...


There's a fair chance you can find out what authority is if you take this class from the start.

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