psyche

I fail at everything I want to be good at - and most things I don’t, with the principal exception of failure. I’m good at that. However, this ridiculous self-deprecating deathbag alter-ego cunt chutzpah Weimar reinstallation FUCK FACE RADIO FREQUENCY SHITBAG will not break me. Neither will the continued success of others slapping me in the face every day, or the death of everything I cultivate (that really happens). No! Because I am decadent! AND THE BOURGEOISIE JUST DON’T DIE.

You know what? FUCK THIS SHIT. I scapegoat no-one. I only have myself to blame, so I do. It’s simple - why doesn’t it turn out right?

Maybe this is how it’s meant to turn out.

League tables, pressure, depression, failure, hormones combined with comfy middle-class decadence. I’m not good at sport and I’m not good at academia. I don’t mean anything to anyone. If I studied hard I could improve and then be my reputation. They’ll grade us on a curve! They’re including everyone! Shit, fuck, fuck it. Fuck. Did I mention fuckshit? Well, I tried. I tried fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck cunts. I don’t believe your lies! I don’t even want this to swim cunt. SHIT. Don’t give up on me! Wait, do. That way it’ll be less disappointing. TROGDOR! You may see someone tonight. Will you be the one that saves my life?

:’(

Pax

I’m not sure what it is. There are few people who are very good at a game but choose to resist the allure of profundity. Most competitors will begin to become so entwined in their art that they become ideal gamers and really don’t have to win all the time - they learn and adapt - but as a result of this, they do win. The few that keep the “play to win” attitude develop differently, training with demented intensity and becoming elitist to the core. I prefer this approach, to be honest. It is simpler and clearer, even if it’s less genuine - there’s no genius-level understanding, just hard work and foresight.

Perhaps this is a reaction to my own major malfunction (apart from having a small penis and being a nerd) - I’m not very good at maths. Granted I’m good enough and will probably not be really bothered by it in terms of employment or interpersonal life etc. but I have a cringing feeling that I know is accurate which tells me that it will bother me my whole life. Perhaps I’m just lazy. I don’t know what it is. What takes other people seconds to understand takes me minutes. Systems which I have interest in confuse me unendingly. It’s infuriating and cruel; I am just too stupid. I think I’ll make the best of it and on the surface it’ll look like I’ve conquered it and am happy to suck at chess and connect 4 and be unable to make simple arithmetical calculations as fast as the average eight-year-old, but tragically I don’t think I will ever forgive myself.

Pssht. Where did I go wrong? I don’t know. I’m not so bad that it’ll impede my life but it’s bad enough to hold me back from any kind of excellence. There is now nothing that I can say “Yeah, that’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at and what I’ll always be good at.” I don’t think there ever was.

I also think something else is wrong; sometimes when I see shadows moving or trees rustling in my peripheral vision, I think they’re people. Not like, I stop and consider the motion and think “Hmm, it might be a person…” but my gut reaction - what my brain immediately decides - is that it’s a person or animal or something, because I immediately freeze and have to look round etc.

I don’t know what it is. I don’t think I ever will. I predict I’ll always be stupid enough to fail to achieve really remarkable things, but work hard and have enough intelligence to seem like a hardworking unintelligent person or a lazy and slightly intelligent person.

So when you feel my contemptible loser’s gaze at your back, know that I am not ignorant. I am consciously aware of my failure. With slow applause I praise those of you with natural talent or the willpower to really be excellent. I, it seems, am a total fraud. My success is isolated and requires really hard work. I don’t know why it is!

Every part of me is disgusted by what I am; there are people with situations so many hundreds of times worse than my own that I cannot even begin to express my dismay at what a self-pitying wretch I am.

I wish I knew what it was all about! I don’t think I’ll gratify myself by descending into depression or anger. I’ll even smile, look: *smiles*. This is absurd. For fuck’s sake. If in months or years I look back on this and think “Ah, at least I predicted that my stupidity would persist in ruining my life like a crayon up my nose… I must’ve been somewhat intelligent…”†

Also, fuck.

Pax

† Hey, if I can’t fucking make bad jokes, I can’t do anything, right?

Note to future self:
Work hard, you fool! There’s a chance your intellectual inadequacy can be overcome! This is no fiction, where people are strange like you! This is life! Be a man!

No matter how I look at it now, life really is just perpetual shopping, whether it’s to keep oneself alive or to satiate one’s psychological need to have more stuff. As you may be able to tell, I enjoy randomly italicising things.

Marx implied that politics was governed by the economics of production and Baudrillard revised this to also include the philosophy, psychology and semiology of consumption.

People in crappy factories = factory farmed Other people = free range

But they still serve to continue civilisation, which is essentially a framework for mankind in which life is not good for everyone and profits are diverted to a small percentage of the population. Or so I reckon!

Pax

Maybe this is why I’m not a people person but again I am highly annoyed by people doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, or in this case choosing the right worldview for the wrong reasons.

Take, say, Elliot or Richard Dawkins or Dr Zetie. They are firmly atheist and secularist because they have considered the problems of faith and religion and have reached a logical conclusion. Now take several other people: they champion an atheist view because it’s easy to defend and it’s still countercultural. This makes me annoyed. If at some point they dropped the mind-melting arrogance and superiority complex they gain from touting such statements as “Religion was invented to control people.*” (Great, now stop telling people who worked that out when they were eight and go find some zealots to cleanse, you attention-whoring piece of… human) and perhaps sit down and really think hard, they could be nice!

Of course in Dawkins’ case as he said (paraphrasing): it’s okay to be arrogant because he’s right. But it’s not if you’re just being a twat and utilising some of the most clear and beautiful philosophies in the world for fucking social fodder, so FUCK OFF.

Pax

* Controlling people is difficult and annoying - so probably to make money off people, not to control them (although controlling them is a natural extension of making money off them in the most efficient way possible [cf consumerism])

Check this out: it’s pretty interesting. One of those Google guys is involved; this technology is pretty impressive. My dad is excited at the prospect of a business-oriented version. Aggregation of feelings - welcome to Web 2.0!

http://wefeelfine.org

I feel oxymoronic.

Pax

I think life will be fun. As far as I can tell, it’s full of hypocrisy, jealousy, suffering and delusion; it seems like a good challenge. Everything I see is based either on some random cosmic chance, a human selfish desire or a human misconception. Maybe the right thing is never done for the right reasons. I think my viewpoint is skewed because I’m not much of an empathy guy, but what if it’s a trick? The most extreme end of this viewpoint is fairly egocentric and consists of the belief that the entire world is a fabrication to deceive the believer. As one traverses the scale one enters “deception of masses”, “deception of humanity” and finally “lack of reality” territory. Applied specifically to this situation, these principles yield the possibility that no-one is really a good person - neutral at best - but no-one admits it. A sad facet of our strange tradition of, well, tradition? The involuntary absorption of the ideals and beliefs of our forerunners and contemporaries!

No-one really does the right thing, and even when it seems to be the right thing, it’s never for the right reason!

I am neither a pessimist nor a nihilist - by choice at least. I don’t choose to see a set of beliefs and adopt them. I choose to describe what I see in the simplest terms possible and what I end up creating is a rather sobering vision of a completely twisted species, entangled in its own perverse artifice.

Alas.

Pax

I’m sure everyone knows the deal by now, so please consider this a footnote to what you already believe. Physical attractiveness is an indicator of health and in females, fertility and in males, the ability to protect his mate and offspring. This is inextricably embedded into our genetic coding; indeed it is one of the main reasons that we evolved constructively - the attractive, the superior genetic specimens, survived. How blunt! What hope for the ugly? None, apparently. From birth we place extreme emphasis on the physical appearance of our peers and make judgements about people mainly based on what they look like. If you had the choice between hiring a very attractive secretary and a less attractive one, you would probably choose the attractive one unless they were severely less competent than their competitor.

I wonder; should we attempt to bypass this biological discrimination? Is it right to - does the system balance itself out? Can it be bypassed?

I don’t know. I guess unattractive people can only rely on other people doing this, though, or perhaps they must lead a solitary life and simply contribute to humanity in ways other than enhancing the genepool and hope that when news of their deeds is handed down to posterity, the future will not judge them so harshly as we did!

It’s lucky I’m not a people person or I’d be fairly depressed by my disgusting nature.

In other news, by some miraculous chance I managed to get an A* in the German mock. It was probably in some way connected to the fact that there was no mock oral. When we have the oral, I will … probably not do very well. But I’ll try.

Pax

I don’t know why, but you’re likely to read this and immediately find an excuse to use your new hard-hitting argument against me. I implore you to wait and actually absorb what I say before doing this.

I believe the following:

Religion, which often leads to suffering, is a global cultural phenomenon. All attacks on religion cause personal distress and conflict. A large attack on religion might shift the way large populations think and therefore eliminate religion from the cultural cycle and really help to reduce suffering. However, it takes a certain “activation energy” to make a significant change. If you attack individual people on the basis of their beliefs, you get the negative effects of criticism (pissing people off, being viewed as irrational) without the positive effects (improving people’s philosophy, reducing suffering). That is why it’s counterproductive.

I am not saying religion’s good! I’m not saying anything specific about anything! The twitchy people of today appear to be itching to read a whole world of meanings into what I say, probably based on misconceptions, preconceptions or simple personal motives.

Blind faith is always risky and almost always leads to something bad. You sometimes have to step back, examine the ethical implications of what you’re doing and really think. This includes in social behaviour (*glares*). Many religious people are good but religion overall is bad. I KNOW that the petty conflicts over slightly different interpretations of the same thing are stupid. I KNOW that blind faith is not good.

I will not be here and be raped by people’s cool rhetoric, impressing others with their zealous secularism or their fervent godliness or whatever. I respect good people, and there are good people in both camps. Usually when people criticise my arguments, I rebuild them as stronger and more wide-ranging philosophies. How the fuck can I do this when people pretend I’m saying something I’m not and then debunk that? I don’t know what it is about me that attracts these kinds of attacks. I really don’t. Is it that I once had a religion? Is it that I believe that it’s not always right to go in with all guns blazing, condemning and despising people who have no idea that their innocent faith that something good will happen has in fact lead to most of civilised humanity’s suffering, instead of helping them understand? Is it that I’m a hypocritical, attention-seeking neek with no apparent purpose? What is it? I’m sorry, I’m not ranting. I haven’t said anything I regret, nor anything I don’t mean. I believe that there is a neutral path and I intend to follow it.

Sometimes, stop showing off. I understand you can make sentences. I’m so sorry that you picked me.

Pax

For whatever reason, I choose to fail

UPDATE: About self-depreciation/deprecating and fake modesty - perhaps I’m just bitter that people took them away from me. Nevertheless, it’s better this way.

Pax

I only found out today that Jean Baudrillard is dead! It’s so strange for someone you have some interest in to die during your own lifetime. He answered as much as he could, I guess.

I don’t know what to say.

Pax