Because you're Worth It
GRYTPYPE-THYNNE:
Good evening. Have a picture of Queen Victoria.
NEDDIE SEAGOON:
No thanks, I'm trying to give them up.
GRYTPYPE:
I don't think you'll ever do it, I've tried and failed. May I come in?
SEAGOON:
But I'm outside.
(The Goon Show)
Dear Reader. Statistically, the chances are that you are younger than me. Probably quite a bit younger. The chances are overwhelming that you are healthier. I say this because if you were any less healthy than me, you'd almost certainly be dead, and corpses are not known for reading obscure blogs. Well then. As a younger and healthier person, there are one or two things it occurs to me you ought to know about.
Firstly and most importantly: the Old Age Truck. I borrow the phrase from Gary Larson, but where he got it I couldn't tell you. The point is, it comes for you quite suddenly: beware. In the original cartoon, you turn a corner and suddenly there are tyre marks across your back and dewlaps under your chin. In my experience, you get up one morning, stumble into the bathroom, look in the mirror and see an old face staring back at you, where yesterday there was only a middle-aged one. In a vague panic, you head out of the house to work, only to find you have become invisible. You try to work normally that day. As you leave in the evening, the prospect of going for a beer occurs to you, by force of habit: but now, it stirs no answering concupiscence. You ask yourself "do I still like beer?" and are horrified to find the answer is no. It then occurs to you to cross-examine yourself for signs of ideological drift, and discover, to your dismay, that you have turned Tory in your sleep. And then, to add insult to injury, there's the sex thing.
It takes a while to get used to the knowledge that, from now on, the very few people whose radars actually register your existence at all have you down as a sexless entity. It isn't easy knowing that you could now be arrested for being in possession of an unlicensed horn. But in a matter of a few short years, the acute discomfort of wanting while knowing yourself unwantable (which is how you always felt, but never so much as now, because your inner life was always lived on Far-fetched Possibilities, and now there are none) is quietly resolved. How? Well, that's the thing. Before the Truck came, you had always assumed that Imagination was just that place where you made plans for Real Life. OK, Real Life usually didn't cooperate, hence all the frustration, but that was the way things were meant to be: first you imagined stuff, then you found it or did it, and the finding or the doing was where all the fun was. Supposedly. Now, after the Truck's visit, things have quietly switched round. Now you see Real Life simply as a library of potential source material, supplying models and ideas, and Imagination as where stuff actually comes together, and where all the fun is. In short, you are now, not only by temperament but by conviction, a Wanker.
By which I mean, a Contemplative. Either term will do.
It's a necessary mental adjustment for the ancient of days - ask any doddery old fart - , but I want to argue that Contemplation is a dimension of existence that can and should be cultivated at all ages, as a discipline, as one of these Enlightened Oriental Outlook sort of thingies. Here are some reasons why I think this:
1. Control over your own life. Collectivism is the greatest danger threatening the continued existence of humanity (as I will argue in a later post). We live in a world where governments, corporations and divers manifestations of tribal hysteria (aka religions, plus the odd "movement") vie for control of your behavior through the medium of your will. Ideally (from their point of view) they will tell you what to think and how to feel, and you will dumbly comply. But for those who don't fall into line so easily, sex is a useful stick to beat you with. In corporate advertising, the message is usually straightforward: buy our product, get free T&A (or become expensive T&A). Governments have a more roundabout approach: take our ideological pill three times a day, or run the risk of turning into Marine Le Pen (replace with name of anyone else consensually unlovable, according to clime) and then see how much tottie you can tot up. None, right? There you are, then.
Thus, we go through life with the invisible hand of the System stuffed down the front of our trousers, squeezing menacingly at key moments.
In contrast, there is no one more free that that person who has learned to live, not only without "validation" (to quote the obscene totalitarian language of collective pop psychology), but without sex - or with sex, but strictly on their own terms.
2. Sekkusu shinai shokogun. In other words, it's actually happening, with Japan simply leading the way and Korea not far behind. People are abandoning, in droves, the Great Quadrille of externally enforced, Hollywood-policed courtship and marriage rituals. More and more, the world is going all Independent Cinema, falling in love with uncertainty, instability and spontaneity, with carpe diem, with zero expectations, with the creative subversion of gender roles, with let's just see where this leads, if anywhere.
The only problem being that, as hinted in previous post, the dominant ideology is failing to keep up.
It is disturbing, and baffling, and depressing, to find that even in Insert Current Year, governments (notably that of the UK) are still trying to control and censor Internet Porn, instead of recognizing the bleedin obvious, which is that the proliferation of Internet Porn is one of the most positive social developments of the last half-century, not least because the more porn there is, the less real-world sexual violence seems to occur. There is, of course, no mystery about why governments don't like porn: it makes people happier, and hence, less Skinner-boxable, less breedy, less conjugally stockholm-syndromed, less demographically dependable and governmentally dependent, less married. It is the dignified alternative to going around with your tongue perpetually hanging out, desperate for a common cormorant, and gambling away ("redistributing") your savings on the prospect of same. Yet still, the government- and cormorant-controlled media (with the ineffable Daily Mail in the forefront, which should speak volumes) are pumping out the message that wanking is a low-grade loser substitute for partnered sex, when the reverse is increasingly self-evidently true: sex with a partner is, admittedly with the occasional once-in-a-decade glorious exception, a poor substitute for the sybaritic, ego-dissolving delights of the googled fap, and marriage - or for that matter, monogamy in any of its miserable cardboard flavours - is terminally obsolete as a life choice.
And this, by the way, is why #WeDontLikeFeminism. Feminism had its chance to get on board with individual freedom and autonomy for all, and turned it down in favour of the power grab within the system. Most of what passes for feminism these days is about statism, censorship and control, about extorting money from some to finance the irresponsible life choices of others, about trying to browbeat people into miserable submission with Big Bad Words, po-faces and pursed lips, about the OPEC-style price-fixing of manual-to-mammary contact, and the evangelization of disapproval and hatred. Your mileage, of course, may differ: if you consider yourself a feminist and are actually doing something useful, like educating people out of the barbaric temptation to genitally mutilate children or throw acid on girls, then hats off to you. But I speak of what I have seen. And read. And met. And been walked on by.
3. The cultivation of imagination is a worthwhile end in itself. Ask any williamblake. As I will argue in another post, so as not to overburden this one, the suicidal collectivism that threatens to grip current humanity actually relies on a two-dimensional i.e. single-layer model of human nature; the antidote, logically, being the three-dimensional model, which I plan to advance herein, whereby humans are actually somewhat different from rats, and come in layers. Imagination, in the form of the free, creative association of ideas and images, is one of those layers, and a vital one if we are to unlock our human potential, and be something other than busy automatons and chattering ELIZAs. Without imagination you cannot be an individual, and by the way, you cannot be of use to any other individual either, since imagination is a necessary prerequisite to empathy. And to make imagination the slave of politically condoned and legally permitted praxis is to harness the tyger of wrath to the horse of instruction. The tyger isn't happy, and the horse isn't safe. Unfavourable outcomes can confidently be predicted.
Reader: don't Marry Him. You're worth more than that, and so is he. If you can't see why, start looking.
Good evening. Have a picture of Queen Victoria.
NEDDIE SEAGOON:
No thanks, I'm trying to give them up.
GRYTPYPE:
I don't think you'll ever do it, I've tried and failed. May I come in?
SEAGOON:
But I'm outside.
(The Goon Show)
Dear Reader. Statistically, the chances are that you are younger than me. Probably quite a bit younger. The chances are overwhelming that you are healthier. I say this because if you were any less healthy than me, you'd almost certainly be dead, and corpses are not known for reading obscure blogs. Well then. As a younger and healthier person, there are one or two things it occurs to me you ought to know about.
Firstly and most importantly: the Old Age Truck. I borrow the phrase from Gary Larson, but where he got it I couldn't tell you. The point is, it comes for you quite suddenly: beware. In the original cartoon, you turn a corner and suddenly there are tyre marks across your back and dewlaps under your chin. In my experience, you get up one morning, stumble into the bathroom, look in the mirror and see an old face staring back at you, where yesterday there was only a middle-aged one. In a vague panic, you head out of the house to work, only to find you have become invisible. You try to work normally that day. As you leave in the evening, the prospect of going for a beer occurs to you, by force of habit: but now, it stirs no answering concupiscence. You ask yourself "do I still like beer?" and are horrified to find the answer is no. It then occurs to you to cross-examine yourself for signs of ideological drift, and discover, to your dismay, that you have turned Tory in your sleep. And then, to add insult to injury, there's the sex thing.
It takes a while to get used to the knowledge that, from now on, the very few people whose radars actually register your existence at all have you down as a sexless entity. It isn't easy knowing that you could now be arrested for being in possession of an unlicensed horn. But in a matter of a few short years, the acute discomfort of wanting while knowing yourself unwantable (which is how you always felt, but never so much as now, because your inner life was always lived on Far-fetched Possibilities, and now there are none) is quietly resolved. How? Well, that's the thing. Before the Truck came, you had always assumed that Imagination was just that place where you made plans for Real Life. OK, Real Life usually didn't cooperate, hence all the frustration, but that was the way things were meant to be: first you imagined stuff, then you found it or did it, and the finding or the doing was where all the fun was. Supposedly. Now, after the Truck's visit, things have quietly switched round. Now you see Real Life simply as a library of potential source material, supplying models and ideas, and Imagination as where stuff actually comes together, and where all the fun is. In short, you are now, not only by temperament but by conviction, a Wanker.
By which I mean, a Contemplative. Either term will do.
It's a necessary mental adjustment for the ancient of days - ask any doddery old fart - , but I want to argue that Contemplation is a dimension of existence that can and should be cultivated at all ages, as a discipline, as one of these Enlightened Oriental Outlook sort of thingies. Here are some reasons why I think this:
1. Control over your own life. Collectivism is the greatest danger threatening the continued existence of humanity (as I will argue in a later post). We live in a world where governments, corporations and divers manifestations of tribal hysteria (aka religions, plus the odd "movement") vie for control of your behavior through the medium of your will. Ideally (from their point of view) they will tell you what to think and how to feel, and you will dumbly comply. But for those who don't fall into line so easily, sex is a useful stick to beat you with. In corporate advertising, the message is usually straightforward: buy our product, get free T&A (or become expensive T&A). Governments have a more roundabout approach: take our ideological pill three times a day, or run the risk of turning into Marine Le Pen (replace with name of anyone else consensually unlovable, according to clime) and then see how much tottie you can tot up. None, right? There you are, then.
Thus, we go through life with the invisible hand of the System stuffed down the front of our trousers, squeezing menacingly at key moments.
In contrast, there is no one more free that that person who has learned to live, not only without "validation" (to quote the obscene totalitarian language of collective pop psychology), but without sex - or with sex, but strictly on their own terms.
2. Sekkusu shinai shokogun. In other words, it's actually happening, with Japan simply leading the way and Korea not far behind. People are abandoning, in droves, the Great Quadrille of externally enforced, Hollywood-policed courtship and marriage rituals. More and more, the world is going all Independent Cinema, falling in love with uncertainty, instability and spontaneity, with carpe diem, with zero expectations, with the creative subversion of gender roles, with let's just see where this leads, if anywhere.
The only problem being that, as hinted in previous post, the dominant ideology is failing to keep up.
It is disturbing, and baffling, and depressing, to find that even in Insert Current Year, governments (notably that of the UK) are still trying to control and censor Internet Porn, instead of recognizing the bleedin obvious, which is that the proliferation of Internet Porn is one of the most positive social developments of the last half-century, not least because the more porn there is, the less real-world sexual violence seems to occur. There is, of course, no mystery about why governments don't like porn: it makes people happier, and hence, less Skinner-boxable, less breedy, less conjugally stockholm-syndromed, less demographically dependable and governmentally dependent, less married. It is the dignified alternative to going around with your tongue perpetually hanging out, desperate for a common cormorant, and gambling away ("redistributing") your savings on the prospect of same. Yet still, the government- and cormorant-controlled media (with the ineffable Daily Mail in the forefront, which should speak volumes) are pumping out the message that wanking is a low-grade loser substitute for partnered sex, when the reverse is increasingly self-evidently true: sex with a partner is, admittedly with the occasional once-in-a-decade glorious exception, a poor substitute for the sybaritic, ego-dissolving delights of the googled fap, and marriage - or for that matter, monogamy in any of its miserable cardboard flavours - is terminally obsolete as a life choice.
And this, by the way, is why #WeDontLikeFeminism. Feminism had its chance to get on board with individual freedom and autonomy for all, and turned it down in favour of the power grab within the system. Most of what passes for feminism these days is about statism, censorship and control, about extorting money from some to finance the irresponsible life choices of others, about trying to browbeat people into miserable submission with Big Bad Words, po-faces and pursed lips, about the OPEC-style price-fixing of manual-to-mammary contact, and the evangelization of disapproval and hatred. Your mileage, of course, may differ: if you consider yourself a feminist and are actually doing something useful, like educating people out of the barbaric temptation to genitally mutilate children or throw acid on girls, then hats off to you. But I speak of what I have seen. And read. And met. And been walked on by.
3. The cultivation of imagination is a worthwhile end in itself. Ask any williamblake. As I will argue in another post, so as not to overburden this one, the suicidal collectivism that threatens to grip current humanity actually relies on a two-dimensional i.e. single-layer model of human nature; the antidote, logically, being the three-dimensional model, which I plan to advance herein, whereby humans are actually somewhat different from rats, and come in layers. Imagination, in the form of the free, creative association of ideas and images, is one of those layers, and a vital one if we are to unlock our human potential, and be something other than busy automatons and chattering ELIZAs. Without imagination you cannot be an individual, and by the way, you cannot be of use to any other individual either, since imagination is a necessary prerequisite to empathy. And to make imagination the slave of politically condoned and legally permitted praxis is to harness the tyger of wrath to the horse of instruction. The tyger isn't happy, and the horse isn't safe. Unfavourable outcomes can confidently be predicted.
Reader: don't Marry Him. You're worth more than that, and so is he. If you can't see why, start looking.
Comments
Post a Comment