Language and Other Catastrophes

I'm sorry but I never apologize -- including for the junior-voicity Joycity of the previous post. 

First, when I said a couple of weeks ago that  I was going to stop making so much damn sense, I meant it.  Second, I had a larger point that I was avoiding, which is to say, the mixed message of language -- not this or that assertion of language, but of language itself.  It is at once a chiaroscuro of light and dark, or as Joyce would say, clearobscuro.  So let's see if we can shed a little more darkness on the subject!

Again, prior to its appearance on earth, there were no problems.  Does this mean that if we can only eliminate -- or at least control -- language, we can eradicate our problems? This is the left's strategy, but it can only give the illusion of control, while denying the real problems and projecting them elsewhere.

For example, all of the talk about "structural racism," "critical race theory," "white privilege," incarceration rates, etc., are just ways of talking around and avoiding the real issue: black failure, i.e., the achievement gap. We all recognize it.  But the left quickly transforms the concrete perception into a linguistic abstraction, and the purpose of the abstraction is to help one not see what one is seeing.

This is not a new phenomenon. The left did not invent mental illness. "Human nature" (at least the fallen kind) includes an arsenhole of psychological defenses, the most important and pervasive being -- in this order -- 1) denial, 2) repression, and 3) projection.  

In fact, some theorists would eliminate the second and say that the first and third always occur together simultaneously, analogous to location and velocity in quantum theory:  what is denied is necessarily projected.  After all, denial doesn't actually succeed in ridding the mind of what is denied.  So, what happens to it?  Where does it go?    

The correct answer is "all over the place," in that there is no end to the psychic transformations that repressed material can and will undergo. Once it's out of your control -- once you are no longer master of your domain -- the permutations will be endless.  

I didn't intend to travel down this artery in this vein, so perhaps we can apply a tourniquet to stop the flow before this post bleeds out.  But consider the example of something as seemingly simple as "low self-esteem." A perception of inadequacy is rather straightforward, while its denial can take infinite form -- from somatization to substance abuse to promiscuity to narcissism to pathological lying and ad infinitum.

But enough about my ex-girlfriends.  

It reminds me of Tolstoy's crack to the effect that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.  I don't know about families, but it certainly applies to the mind, in that happy minds are alike in certain fundamental ways (there is such a thing as normality), while unhappy minds have an infinite variety of ways to pretend they're not unhappy and to render themselves unhappier still in the process. Does Trump Derangement make its victim happier or more well adjusted?  

That's a loaded question, Bob.  Okay, how about feminist ideology, or critical race theory, or queer studies?  Suffice it to say that happiness and gender/race-based paranoia are at psychic antipodes.  If one were happy, the theories would never need to be conjured into existence. Does a happy woman imagine there is such a thing as patriarchy? 

Back to language.  Again: Mixed. Blessing.  Oh, it's a blessing alright, maybe even the greatest, in that in its absence there are no blessings at all.  Nor any curses, so are we even-steven?

Sprechen sie Joyce, not only was he well aware of the double-, triple- and quadruple-edged s(word) of language, he knew that he himself was the worst offender.  Among the thematic binaries that repeat throughout Finnegans Wake are the brothers, one a man of action, the other a man of words: concrete and abstract; doing and mere talk about doing;  building and criticizing; etc.

Joyce knew he was a scoundrel because he knew what language can do to a person.  First of all, it makes one a liar, and the more facility one has with language, the worse the liar.  Consider, for example, the fake news and phony pundits.  Or academia.  

If we conceptualize it in a Darwinian manner, we see that there exist human environments that demand that we mentally adapt to them with lies of various magnitude.  Truth is not only unwelcome, it is punished.  You will be canceled.  The borgs on TV know exactly what they can say and what they can get away with. They know where the line is, even if the knowledge is implicit. I am always aware of the line, being that I live in the Democratic Republic of California.  

One of the primary purposes of punitive political correctness is to make us all aware of the boundary between the Truth and the Lie.  In between is a kind of demilitarized zone of phony neutrality, but make no mistake: get too close to the truth and the bullets will fly.

Bad language and the people who utter it. A perfect opening for me to discuss a book that's been patiently waiting in line for over two years, The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books they Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literature.   

One might be tempted to ask: what lesson can be drawn from this disparate collection of logophobic psychopaths?  I'll tell you what lesson: in the past we've discussed how one can learn a great deal about normality by studying the most abnormal among us.  My internship was at a state mental hospital, and when you deal with psychotic patients, you have the opportunity to vividly see the operation of various defense mechanisms that are more subtle in the "normal" -- e.g., denial and projection.  

A normal person deals his unwanted psychic material in relatively benign ways such as sublimation, fantasy, humor, rationalization, etc.  An abnormal person projects it into birds, or communication satellites, or space aliens, or white men, or President Trump, what have you.  

As it so happens, an elderly paranoid lady lives right across the street from us.  Her projections are rather fluid, but can go from the mailman to the DWP to even my son, whose baseball flew over a fence into her backyard.  He asked if he could retrieve it, and she responds -- in a voice dripping with suspicion and hostility -- How did it get there? -- implying at once How did it get there? How did it get there? How did it get there? 

Note that it's not a "real" question but a loaded one.  I mean, the answer is obvious, so the question implies something non-obvious.  Is this just a pretext for you to spy on me? Are you in cahoots with the gas company meter-reader?

The other day she interrogated me, with the same tone, about some dog poop near her driveway. I'm surprised she didn't call 911. But she did pour bleach on the street.

In any event, my son is learning all about mental illness (and the wellness of which it is a shadow) without having to toil in a mental hospital or cable news station. All our happy neighbors are alike, while each unhappy neighbor is a Democrat.  

Getting to our main point, isn't it interesting that the Worst People in the World were all writers? Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Hitler, Mao, et al. Is this surprising? Or inevitable?  

Many dictators write theoretical works, others produce spiritual manifestos, while still others write poetry, memoirs or even the occasional romance novel. Indeed, the best-selling book of all time attributed to a man rather than a deity is the work of a dictator: Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

If the worst people in the world were all writers, I wonder if they still are?  No, check me on that.  I don't actually wonder.  Rather, they must be.  It's just a matter of identifying them. Or perhaps we've entered an age in which the Lie is so pervasive and diffuse, that we can no longer point to this or that particular author.  So many minions, partly because so many of them have attended Satan's own seminary, AKA college.  

That's ANTY-INNALLEKSHUL!  

Oh please. Let's not even digniphooey that one. I attended college, and lots of it, so I know as well as anyone what it means to be a proudly intellectual anti-intellectual.  

In the previous post -- or was it the one before? -- we spoke of the boredom of leftist writers and writing.  Why are they so tedious?  And is it merely an absence of something -- a privation -- or the presence of something actively soul-killing?

With all this power and unique knowledge, the dictator of even a small and geopolitically insignificant country should thus be in a position to write at least a moderately interesting book, even if by accident. And yet to a man, they almost always produce mind-numbing drivel. I want to know why.

How, for example, does Obama so effortlessly produce such mind-numbing drivel? Is it a gift, this ability to crank out bestselling autofellatiographies on demand? And who gave it to him? Is there something like "satanic grace"?

Yes, as a matter of fact, but that's a slightly different subject. It occurred to me a week or two ago, but if I discuss it now, we'll never finish with the dictators. Suffice it to say that, just as there is a kind of "spiral of grace" emanating from and returning to God, there is similarly spiraling energy from below, or perhaps even from man, then circling down and back up. 

Why study the blather of a tyrant? Surely not to learn anything he wishes to teach us. But you can nevertheless learn a great deal from a tyrant  -- as did I from patients in the loony bin and professors in the looniversity bin.

A deep study of dictators' works might enable me to map devastating wastelands of the spirit while also exploring the terrible things that happen when you put writers in charge.

Forget about dictators. Let's talk about presidents.  Is it just a coincidence that the worst presidents since 1912 were first known as writers, Obama and Wilson? 

Is there anything better than books and literacy? Or, is there anything worse? "A moment's reflection reveals that"

books and reading can also cause immense harm. To take just one example, if Stalin's mother had never sent him to the seminary then he would never have learned to read and never would have discovered the works of Marx and Lenin. Instead, he would have been a drunken cobbler like his father, or perhaps a small-time gangster in Tbilisi. He would still have spread misery, but on a much smaller scale...

Our bottom line for the day is that "literacy is a blight as well as a blessing," and that we need to figure out why this is the case and be able to distinguish between the two. 

The lie is the muse of revolutions: it inspires their programs, their proclamations, their panegyrics; but it forgets to gag their witnesses. --Dávila

True, but at least big tech is trying to gag us.