Comment on Leslie Jameson essay

Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain

I'm an older white male psychologist who's worked in the field of Post-traumatic Stress these past 33 years. I was drawn this area because the suffering of persons who had undergone horrible experiences was so clearly legitimate. When people have involuntary recurring dreams and flashbacks of awful things and are desperate to get rid of the symptoms, it's difficult to question whether their condition is authentic. After many years and thousands of hours listening and learning to help, I came to understand that the complex adaptations we make to physical and emotional pain stem from basic facts of the human condition. In particular, we are always vulnerable, always needy, and we feel shame when confronted with our inability to prevent bad things from happening to us. It's not anyone's fault but shame drives us to hide, to avoid, to detach, and to deny. Healing is the process of coming to understand and accept ourselves as vulnerable, needy human beings. Our pain is legitimate and expressing it is always a performance in the sense that a musician playing a song with skill and passion is performing. Ms. Jamison's essay is remarkably courageous and honest and it challenges the reader to step up and follow her example. Not everyone can do this and there's no shame in that, either.

Playing the part of me

My life as a human being is a performance. Like everyone, I was assigned a part in the Grand Social Experiment and made to figure out how to play it. Each day when I wake up I have to recreate the world and my role in it, put on my costume and make up, and go out on stage. A day is a string of tasks, each one a little creative piece. I have a need to perform my tasks as effectively as I can and to uphold my standards of style and aesthetics. In 63 years I've gotten good at it, with my bottomless pit of curiosity and my desire to know everything worth knowing about the universe (as long as it doesn't require too much math or deep concentration on complicated, abstract verbal arguments).  And my profound sensitivity and my need to be loved and affirmed and to express my empathy and appreciation for everyone but especially the actresses, the ones bearing the Mark of the Feminine. A writer named Leslie Jamison is my new girlfriend. I know her only through reading part of her essay Grand unified theory of female pain in VQR and then reading a number of reviews of her book of essays on Amazon. Leslie goes around the world doing very interesting things and writing about them as they relate to her attempts to make sense out of her life. She elicits strong reactions all along the spectrum of love-hate. She's thin and pretty, too, if photos are to be believed.  I have lots of girlfriends, most of whom will never know their status or even know I exist. I'm in acceptance of all that. I'm just trying to play my part as well as I can. Lately, I find myself not wanting to get cranked up to take on those little tasks. Today is another case in point. When we get old, it becomes too difficult and someone has to take care of us until we die.

Off to Athens again

The clock in the upper right corner says 6:21 AM. I'm flying out of Baton Rouge to Atlanta at 10:05 AM. Maureen will drive me to the airport, then continue down to New Orleans where she will catch a flight to Dallas. She's living with us while looking for work after being fired from her previous job as new business developer at PIXL, an event planning company with a wicked woman boss who was impossible to work for.

My head is full of thoughts as I get cranked up for my trip. I have tasks and projects on my plate- getting my license reinstated after failing to meet the deadline for Continuing Education hours, preparing to teach Honors 2000 again, pulling the September 11 pre-party together for my high school class 45th reunion weekend, handling my mother's estate, maintaining my life infrastructure and relationships.  I have ideas I want to write about such as "performing the role of myself" and "do I have a theory of psychology/life?" but they will have to wait while I pack for an 8 AM departure with Maureen. Tonight I dine at Hilltop Grill with the planning committee.

Mental vs physical

The mind-body dichotomy is a questionable distinction but, like the idea of free will, it makes common sense. I operate very comfortably in the private world of the mind whereas dealing with objects and people outside of myself is more challenging. When I'm doing something like recording an original song, working with my stamp collection or setting up my new music studio (the converted garage apartment and automobile bay), I tend to focus on the goal while creating disorder around myself. I've often joked about hiring someone to follow me around cleaning up the mess.

When I do focus on taking care of business in the objective world, I'm actually good at it. I'm insightful and able to see ways to do things efficiently and effectively. The caveat is I become fatigued fairly quickly (I'm an introvert with bad posture) and have to take breaks to relax my body and reload my neurotransmitters. In an ideal world, I would have dedicated assistants to carry out my plans; but, another weakness is I don't like to manage people and tell them what to do if they don't have a lot of initiative to help and please me in the first place. My vision of the optimal society doesn't involve me being the CEO.

Why I'm not a revolutionary

I've been critical of many aspects of American society for a very long time but I don't pretend to know a better form of government than the Constitutional one we operate under. Our system creates the possibility of correcting problems through electing enlightened leaders and passing wise laws if enough people agree on an effective solution. For a long time voters have been manipulated by propaganda generated by the wealthy and powerful but there's a possibility of change if enough people see through the smoke to find the fire.

“But all of my life, I have wondered just who people think they are.”

Owen Scott, III (from my song Running backwards)

To be human is to be brought into a world I did not create about which I must be educated, of which I must make sense, and to which I must adapt. Although my parents might disagree (were they still among the living), I was not born human; I was taught to become human. Each of us has a capacity for development and learning and we become human through experiencing a process of socialization. This necessarily takes place within a society that has a culture. Science has found that the development of the brain itself, the physical organ of consciousness, knowledge, and all of our complex abilities, is shaped by social experience. By the time I was able to reflect on basic questions of who and what I am, indeed, in order to reflect, the process had already created me. Therefore, consideration of what it means to be me, a person, an individual human being, necessarily is a backwards look at how I came to be who I am.

The fact we must be taught to be who we are, I would think, is so obvious as to be noncontroversial in applying to everyone.  I would further venture that a large majority of people never give these questions serious thought. They simply take for granted what they’ve assimilated and how they’ve adapted. If they consider the big questions, they let someone else do the thinking and articulate the answers for them. In spite of the amazing complexity of the brain and the universe itself, almost everyone follows the principle “simpler is better.”

That minority of people who do take on the deeper and ultimate questions as a personal mission include philosophers, scientists, theologians, novelists, and mystics. These are the students of reality and truth. I am one of them. Today, at age 63, I look at the world and am concerned about what I see. To my understanding and way of thinking, too many people and too many of their leaders are controlled by false beliefs and faulty concepts about themselves and the world. In spite of the legacy of wise thinkers, teachers and leaders who have appeared throughout history in all parts of the world, people who are revered, people whose teachings converge on themes of compassion, tolerance, and service, and whose words are remembered, studied and repeated, it appears most people are not following the wise examples set before them. How can this be?

One of the first things I noticed as a very young and curious boy was the diversity of cultures and beliefs in the world. Even in the little town of Athens, Georgia in the 1950’s, I noticed there were black people and white people who looked, acted and sounded different from one another. The white people enjoyed obvious advantages. Later, I discovered layers of social stratification within the society of white people as well as great divergences of opinion, belief, and wealth. The more I learned about the world, the more diversity and disagreement I found. And yet it seemed that beneath these differences, human beings everywhere operated very similarly and had done so since written accounts of human behavior were first recorded. As far back as my memory goes, I wondered about these things and in the early 1970s, I wrote a song questioning how people arrive at their dubious conclusions.

Thoughtful and ambitious people, members of the Society of Truth Seekers, move on to other questions having to do with government, law and how societies operate. In the 19th and 20th Centuries, things came to a head in a great struggle between capitalist-imperialist and socialist ideologies. The empires fought it out in World Wars I and II and the greater political fight, between the rich and poor, continues now, long after the empires are for the most part defunct.

Students of reality also consider questions about God. Is there a God and if so, what is this God about? How can we know about such things? During the same time of political ideology wars and revolutions, a parallel struggle with major implications for the world broke out between objective/modernist ideas versus religious/traditionalist beliefs. These fights, which were embodied in the career and writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, continue to the present day (August 10, 2015 as I write these words). The global tension within and between Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Jewish sects is one clear instance. 

Basic ideas in the political struggle go back to assumptions on the nature of the person. Should government and law prioritize protecting the hypothetical rights of individuals or should they prioritize the well-being of society as a whole? What are these rights and what’s the rationale for saying they exist and should be protected? Are these priorities the same or are they incompatible? Should a person, for example, be allowed to own property? Should the law and government put any limits on the right of individuals to own and utilize property? Should religious ideology play a role in the law?

Anything more than cursory thought and observation reveals narrowly defined self-interest (i.e., narcissism) to be the motivating force for many people’s beliefs. "All politics is local." My group, country and religion are intrinsically superior to everyone else’s. I want to have money, power, pleasure, convenience, and status and I don’t want anyone putting limits on them. The highest good is my personal happiness as I define it (in terms of money, power, pleasure, and status). Libertarians believe this is how society should operate. Persons who have less money, power and status view the advantages of the “haves” as unfair. Socialists believe government by agreement of the majority should put limits on individual freedom and property ownership in the interests of a just and healthy society.

Why the great emphasis on individual rights? The “Founding Fathers” who led the revolution against British rule of the American colonies were highly educated, successful, and mostly wealthy persons who had experienced the misuse of power and taken great chances to overthrow the British and set up a new and better form of government. Experience taught them those in power frequently abuse their power unless some controls are put on them. Although they were right and this is true of governing leaders and agencies, it is also true of those who accumulate private wealth. Persons who are highly concerned about government abuse of power often are not so worried about the abuse of power by private individuals. Persons who have been mistreated by one group are often not so concerned about their own mistreatment of other groups.

Marx and his followers correctly perceived the self-serving excesses of the great imperial powers that included Russia, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Turkey, Japan, Austria-Hungary and Italy. They believed the solution was to take power and property away from individuals and give it to a state that would be set up in such a way as to be accountable to its people. In practice, the states set up on this model (always after immense bloodshed and brutality) turned out to be dictatorships that oppressed the people they were supposed to take care of. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Or even worse.

The question that should guide our societies and systems of government is this: What system will work the best for the society and its individuals? How would we know we had created such a system? The vast majority of people living under the system would approve of the system and be committed to keeping it in operation. Art, technology and creative play would flourish and the population would be healthier and happier. The system would be friendly rather than hostile to its neighbors and the environment. Persons living under other systems would look at the successful one with envy and wish to move there or change their own system to be like the successful ones.

So, what do I believe and how is this different from what I see in the beliefs of my fellow human beings? To begin with, humans still have a vastly overblown perception of our own importance in the universe. Nietzsche commented astutely on this and what he said is still valid. We as a species need to grow up and let go of our ridiculous self-importance. We are hypnotized by useful but deceptive features of the languages we learn to speak. Almost every one of us is overly attached to and invested in the fictitious identify assigned to us by our society, a character in our own internal narrative. We try to seize and hold onto illusions, things that exist more as words and ideas than as tangible realities. The desire for a personal advantage in money, power, fame, esteem, pleasure, security, beauty, vengeance or whatever gets us little more than, at best, a brief feeling of power and importance while leading us to act badly and to sabotage our own goals. Guess what? You are all going to die and you can’t take any of it with you. Then again, a desire for certainty and to avoid eternal punishment leads many to adopt rigid and simplistic beliefs about God and to impose these beliefs on others who may or may not share them. Thinking one knows the mind of God is a common and disastrous error.

And, yet, we develop remarkable technologies, produce remarkable art, achieve remarkable feats and have been doing so for thousands of years. Each human life, though small and transient, is amazing, valuable and worth living to the best of ones ability. I believe things work best when I am passionately engaged in bringing out my best and the best of others, when I view myself and every other self as equally valuable and deserving of equal respect and when I view the things of this world as there for everyone and belonging to no one. It matters to create a world that works but not to own or take personal credit for it.

Is the USA an example of a system working well for society as a whole as well as for individual American citizens?  Historically it’s worked relatively well compared to many other great countries. Yet the majority of people, regardless of political views and affiliation, believe our system of government is broken and isn’t working for one or for all. As for the rest of the countries and societies, the problems are glaring. The human world has too much ignorance, too much poverty, too much arrogant narcissism, too much exploitation of people and nature, too much religious fanaticism and intolerance, too much wealth in the hands of too few people, too many weapons, too little mindfulness, humility, love, and open-mindedness. 

What is one to do? That’s the question I think about most. If people thought more wisely, they would live more wisely. Every day I ask myself, what can I do about it? What can I do to facilitate understanding in more people so they will be inspired to go out and help create a society that works better for more of us? I'm still looking for answers.

Mom

I miss my Mom and think about her often. I was just recalling how in the last few years of her life, one of Mom's greatest joys was Skyping with me. I tried to call her at least once a week and I always felt I could have visited her via Skype more than that. But I did my best. And she didn't complain but was always excited when I called to initiate a session. Mom appeared to me last night in the form a recurring dream. She was alive but very old and suffering from memory loss. We were with a group of people, perhaps at my parents' house in Athens, talking to her in an encouraging manner about how we had just wished her a happy birthday the previous week. I've had similar dreams where the old and feeble person was my father or my Grandfather Scott, always barely alive and in need of caregivers for the simplest of needs. There's happiness in the person being alive and an implied awareness of their death. This theme goes back at least a few years. Perhaps it reflects my awareness of the reality of aging, a process I see unfolding in my own life. My left hand, especially my left ring finger, has been suffering from continuous pain dating to when I visited David Stammer in Dallas and spent many hours in my hotel room practicing the guitar. Did I overexert in this practice? Do I need to take a break and let my finger and hand recover? I'm considering consulting Harold Brandt or his Nurse Practitioner, Hillary, about this and seeing what they say. My guitar skills, both mental and physical, continue to improve and I would hate to have arthritis truncate my progress, like the bed of Procrustes. My morale has been somewhat improved of late as I work diligently to pull the Athens High School Class of 70 Reunion Pre-Party together as the calendar closes in on the one month to go mark.

We don't know death, only the idea of death which, after all, is a part of life.

Niches

From a survival standpoint, life is about finding a niche. From a spiritual standpoint, life is about finding meaning. From a wisdom standpoint, life is about finding humility.

Is Reality real?

You have to give credit to the human race for inventing impressive technologies and using them effectively. This has been going on for thousands of years, as our recent visit to the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum reminded me. Of course, I'm using those technologies right this moment to write this blog post.

I've always had a bit of paranoid skepticism about Reality. One cannot prove deductively that Reality is real. Our sense of reality is purely inductive- every day that we wake up and remember who we are, our belief in the idea is maintained. People who think a little more deeply know that the solidity and independent existence of objects is an illusion supported by our language systems but that doesn't change the Universe being real. Beyond that, it's possible all of this is just a very sophisticated computer game being played by a super-being of some kind and one day when the Deus Ex Machina gets bored the game will shut down. Until then, I'll keep acting as though it's a solid reality.

But our technologies provide some of the most convincing evidence. It's not just sending a spacecraft on an eight-year mission to rendezvous with Pluto and arriving within 72 seconds of the projection to beam back amazing photographs of the remote planetoid and it's moons (Pluto being so far out, even at it's closest, radio commands from Earth take 4.5 hours to reach New Horizons!).  It's being able to fact-check the information in a few seconds to make sure I'm meeting my standards of accuracy in blogging.

Wouldn't it be great if we used all our technological wizardry to cooperate and help one another?