Voicing Opinions

At the basic level, work is the expenditure of energy.

In everyday terms, work is an activity done for someone.

But the theme of this blog is that of subversive indoctrination, so I am referring to our indoctrined definition of work is an where you perform an activity for someone else for money.

You see how there are two deviations from the everyday definition of work :

1. That the work must be for someone else
2. That it must be paid for

We are so heavily conditioned to see work in this way that it blinds us to many of the real values humans can offer to the World. One of the very very basic examples is that of a ’Housewife’, a demeaning term for a fundamentally crucial role. Normally a female role, because there is no direct payment for the service of bringing up children, caring for the home, shopping, and preparing meals, we treat it with way too much disrepect.

I have personally been proccupied with guilt on too many occasions when I take my daily or twice daily trips to coffee shops. I do recognise how very lucky I am to do this. But that I am merely lazing around, and ‘obviously’ not working is also a reflection of a global indoctrination.

Let me give you an example.

A friend I have acquired via these cafe visits has been struggling with his life lately. I have chatted with him, giving him emotional support, and some guidance gleaned from some of the many books I have read. he was sufficiently grateful to hug me. Twice.

Yet to a bystander, we wee just idling time away. At best, I was being a good friend. But no way was I deemed tyo be ‘working’. Yet in a very real sense, I was. I was expended energy to help him. I was working for his benefit. Because I was not qualified, employed, or paid to be a counseller, then what I was doing was not work.

So I was only ‘not’ working because of arbitrary labels. If I did the very same things as a counseller, I would have been deemed to be working.

More subtlely, I was applying knowledge hard earnt reading books. So when you see me reading in a coffee shop, rather than see me as ‘just’ relaxing, it may be more prudent to see me as both relaxing and researching – extending myself for the benefit of both myself and others.

One of the sad things is how much of my 51 years I have been oppressed under the weight of such indoctrination. I am trying to peel away these layers and give myself the credit I deserve for doing what I do, paid or otherwise.

This process is very similar indeed to that I went through to liberate myself from religious indoctrination to become an atheist, albeit one who respects religious people.

It is only in the process of addressing the indoctrination that you first become aware of it. This itself is an enlightening exercise.

The catalyst to this article was this anti-indoctrination article :  http://www.anxietyculture.com/purpose.htm.

When you think about people toiling away at work, just realise that the capitalist mechanism, underpinned in many ways by competition, results in many many people duplicating in large what their competitors do. This is fundamentally wasteful – each Insurance Company has their own suite of extremely expensive computer systems that do pretty well much what their rival systems do.

Imagine what we could do without that duplication of effort?

I hope to add to this entry over time. The theme is the failure of good intentions.

 ‘But you are always …’

Ill, injured, unhappy. You fit the word to suit your condition. I happen to be described by many of my friends as ‘always injured’, for example. The reasons elude me, but I am regularly nursing an injury or two.

But there are a number of aspects to these statements :

1. I am not always injured. So the statement is an exaggeration.
2. The tone of voice people use is a negative, demeaning one. They are telling me off for being injured.
3. I never, ever want to be injured. I never try to get injured. I hate it how slowly I recover from injury.
4. There is a paradox : the more often someone is ill, the less sympathy and support they get, yet the more that they need.

It is for this last reason that people are dismissive – they do not want to get drawn into repeated support or sympathy. So they try to detach themselves from a supportive role by casting the victim as a foolish instigator of their own recurring condition.

As I said above, and repeat now, I never want to get injured. I never want to have recurring headaches. But the more that I do, the less likely that I will receive sympathy of support.

I feel that the old proverb that Ignorance is bliss has a fairly solid foundation in real life. I can only judge this by observation since it can only rarely be applied to myself, but feel convinced of its vailidity.

Observe that ignorance is a weakness of awareness. Many a builder is content to cement brick after brick into place, seemingly oblivious to the tedium of the work.

Compare such a person to a severely autistic person. They are bombarded on a minute by minute basis by sensory awareness of details of their surroundings. Details that wash over normal people, simply by the expedient that they are mostly not relevant.

For myself, I have a different kind of overload – a tendency to overreact to events. I obsess when the weather is very bad. I feel instantly angry when I hear someone sneeze. I cry when I am criticised. I am so moved by the beauty in the apperance of some people that I can sustain a living as a Wedding photographer. And artist.

I often do not know when I will get a severe emotional reaction to something. I really do not ask or want to be reactive like this. Those around my put the blame on my conscious decision to get worked up about something. And this matter (or not) of choice, is what I want to focus on here, along with the conesequences of emotional overload.

And I do know what it is like to be unreactive. After vigorous exercise, this is how I am. Things gently wash over me and it is so profoundly relaxing. By contrast, my daily life is like a kind of fight against a stream of reactions to many things.

Let me look at the strange situation where something apparently innocuous like a sneeze can drive me mad. I can be happily engrossed in a book at a railway station, oblivious to my surroundings. 2 seconds later, after the person next to me has sneezed loudly, I am dragged out of my book and forced by my brain to feel angry – I get to feel the angry type sound of the sneeze entirely against my wishes.

And this is part of the problem with overreactions – they happen involuntarily. Once started, the conscious effort required to suppress them is so huge that it wears you out.

And here we het a cascade of problems. The frequent emotional overloads drain your adrenal system so that you can suddenly hit a brick wall of tiredness. This then mkes you extra vulnerable to any more emotional situations until you are too tired to react. This is itself at least the source of some relief.

But the night may bring nightmares as you relive and try to rationalise the unrationisable reactions of the day.

So you awake tired and more vulnerable.

And wary of the kinds of situations that might affect you.

So you develop two distinct coping strategies.

First, avoidance of potential overload situations. For example, you may play the peace maker rather than get into an argument.

Second, you may try to change the World so that these events cannot happen so often. For example, you tell people to eat  noisy food in another room.

Both of these strategies are doomed to failure, but what else can you do? Humans are designed to seek optimum route through life. So you read lots of self help books. And wade through many many techniques, often contradicting each other. For example, “You only have one life, so ditch those friends who are not so good to you.” is at odds to with the concept of facing up to people.

All sorts of phobias and emotional baggage are accrued as a person on an emotional rollercoaster traverses life. Additionally, the extent of your rollercoaster ride is rarely understood simply because there is always something wrong with you. As if the more problems you have, the less justified you are to sympathy!

Meanwhile, compare with the builder type. Someone who is easy going, where things wash over him. He accrues very little baggage, acquires lots of friends who enjoy his easy going nature, and sails through life. Mostly – easy going people are likely to get in debt, miss appointments, and so on.

But it is sad that easy going people are admired for this characteristic that they have always had, and which, virtually by definition, they do not work at.

However, you try to get an easy going person to act fast and decisively in a time of great urgency and you’ll end up doing it yourself.

 What do you think?

I had one of those rare moments of enlightenment today. Stumble had stopped me accesing atheist sites, so I stumbled instead on psychology sites. It talked about introversion, and how it is so often misunderstood.

There were two concepts that the article discussed. One, that shyness and introversion are not the same. And two, that introverts are often very happy to chat.

You see, I had assumed that my daily habit of visiting coffee shops to chat meant I was at least partially extroverted. Apparently, introverts are not all shy, and often do engage in good conversation. It is just that they need to spend a larger time on their own, ruminating on matters, or engrossing themselves – too much chat overloads them.

An extrovert needs human contact to get energised, needing little or no time to recover. They despair of the dullness of being on their own.

Additionally, the article describes how extroverts misunderstand introverts, thinking them ignorantly quiet. And because they are indeed often quiet, the extroverts never get to learn that the introverts dislike the in-your-face attitude of extroverts. But the key frustration for introverts is that the extroverts rarely ever want or try to get to understand how introverts feel.

I do try to understand how others feel, so I guess I am indeed more of an introvert than I thought.

Extroverts tend to get on and get involved in exciting things that would overwhelm introverts.

Introverts often get their kicks from computers, books, and other non-people things.

They tend to misunderstand each other.

But neither behaviour is right. Just different ways of living. Where it becomes a problem is when the natural behaviour of one type simply does not fit a situation.

With the enormous power of thousands of years of indoctrination, with massive churches and cathedrals legitimising their activities, religions can carry out otherwise criminal acts. We appear to be morally obliged to accede to all requests made in the name of religion.

Islamists butcher the genitals of young females. Americans ostracise non-believers.

But religion, like atheism, is a belief system. You act according to what you believe to be true in the absence of form corroborating truth.

I would like to claim that my belief that the World was not created by an almighty power be respected in the same way that a religious view claims the converse. But more importantly, I want to claim freedom for those oppressed in the name of religion. And have the weight of numbers of atheists as my support – atheism is hardly a fringe, eletist belief system.

On this theme of fairness, I thought I would add another insight.

The last week or two, I have been having progressively greater pain in my teeth. Initially when very hot or cold food was eaten, and now for hours at a time with no obvious trigger.

The pain is in a molar on the lower left side, and the matching molar on the upper left side. Now how unfair is that – not just one toothache, but two!

But then I thought about it.

It is exactly the opposite of unfair. It is nicely timely that problems in two teeth should manifest themselves at the same time, thereby requiring only one sequence of visits to the dentist.

Then I wondered about the pain itself. Is it really necessary to feel such pain? And I realised that I have done absolutely nothing about these teeth simply because the pain comes in fits and starts – there is literally not enough pain for me to take action.

Instinctive gut reactions to discomfort, such as when it gets too hot, and we moan of poor sleep, are often misjudged. They represent shallow thinking – merely emotionally driven verbalisations.

Fundamentally, fairness is only really meaningful when dealing like with like. It is basically fair to apportion an inheritence equally to offspring. But what if one of the offspring is severely disabled?

 We are different, so life will necessarily not be the same for any of us. To one degree or another, some will get a better deal than others.

But people often do not ponder long on the degree with which this difference manifests itself in the real World. Insomnia is a very common complaint, disturbing sleep and leaving the poor sufferer somewhat less than fully energised each day. I discivered today that my friend Nick cannot remember at all ever failing to sleep well. Even allowing for a poor memory, he essentially falls asleep within 3 minutes if hitting the pillow every night, his mind free from worries or thoughts that might keep him awake. Each morning he awakes fully energised, ‘like a bullet’ in his words, often working for 12 hours.

Additionally, and at least in part a corollary of the good sleep, he cannot remember when he was last ill.

So, every day as far as he can remember, he functions effortlessly, unrestrained by tiredness or illness of mind or body.

For many people, never in their whole life have they had a day as good as Nick’s normal day. Yes, of course, you get used to good and bad, but I certainly know which I would prefer.

Statistically, Nick is stratospheres healthier than almost everyone in the UK. He is a nice, pleasant, friendly, happy fellow, and you wonder what on earth he has done to deserve this. But this is life – indiscriminantly treating people very very very differently.

I have often heard the suggestion that you should ‘be yourself’, targetted at others and myself.

The most likely reason why people suggest that I do this is that I stress myself out being patient with others.

So I thought to myself, it would indeed be prudent to be more natural. Besides, I am a pretty good guy, with good social skills. But after a few weeks of doing this, I notice the consequences. Simply that when less inhibited, my subconscious has a frequent tendency to blurt out inappropriate things. And to be very intolerant of others who fail to hear or understand me first time. I have had to apologise a number of times for being ‘curt’.

So now I understand why I have adopted my chameleon behaviour – adpating to each person so as to make them feel confortable being with me. It is not such a bad thing to do, because often the real me is actually not so nice. When I am abrupt or impatient or tactless with someone, I actually do not like myself doing it.

What people really mean by ‘Be yourself’ is to be the natural, easy going fellow you can often be, rather than say and do everything someone wants of you. But my point is that this state is not always the natural one – the impatient, intolerant state is often the natural one.

Catch those kind of people who are indeed always themselves on the wrong day and they will not hesitate to be rude or abrupt with you. And not apologise if you question their behaviour.

 As to what is the best way to be, there is no real answer. A smart way to be is possibly to be relaxed when you feel in a good mood, and be very wary of what your brain will do when you are in a touchy mood. But this is still chameleon like behaviour – you are controlling how you are with others, rather than being ‘yourself’.

Oh to be someone who is basically in a stable, socially acceptable mood all the time. Life must be so much less tiring when you are like that.

One of the key tenets of most juridicial systems is to punish in proportion to the crime.

If it is recognised that you are not responsible for a crime, and did not, indeed carry out the crime, then you are generally not punished.

 According to many religions, however, a lot of our suffering on this planet is a punishment for the crime of our forefathers. Such as Adam and Eve. Is God being entirely fair or rational in dispensing punishments in this manner?

When I play the Oriental game of Go on the Internet, I like to chat to my opponent. Of course, it is up to my opponent whether he/she wants to chat.

However, I am getting up set because many players simply ignore all that I type. When I question them, they see no problem in doing this, and not saying why.

 I really have a problem with this – I really really should not get upset that they ignore everything I type. But underlying all this is the general anonymity on the Internet that legitimises a flippant, dismissive attitude to others. It is like a breeding ground for antisocial behaviour. Just as in a car when you cut someone up, they cannot address you face to face, so you have some anonymity, and can treat others without the respect you would give them if face to face.