Introduction To ‘A sick culture’
Introduction To
‘A sick culture’
Inherent Resistance to being the social dynamics’ Agent
My entire social interaction has been a repulsion to my style, while their style of consensus has proven itself, in aggregate as the mirage forest of platitudes, to be so contradictory and toxic, in comparison to their self-identified benign congeniality.
What was classically thought of as me being an anti-social misfit, has turned-out over the span of history as a demonstration of the neurotic and accumulative societal pathologies of others. Those “pathologies'' were consensually accepted as the contemporaneous ‘standard of behavior’. Yet those benign, to trivially banal social interactions are and have been the accommodating acquiescence. Its orientation to a general, civil vernacular and colloquial of thought, which provides the false narrative of collegiality. That state doesn’t challenge the macro because it would be uncivilly disruptive, yet it would castigate the micro to the proverbial ‘pointing out the tiny mote in the accused eyes while missing the metaphorical blind-spot beam in their own eyes’.
This plays out in both small cliques as well as institutional protocols, in which the pecking order hierarchy, most venal in small cliques and insidiously destructive in the institutional ones, effect the consequences. How it came to this is up to speculation. My own take is that it’s part of the limbic response to “existential threats"-
those that challenge the particulars of individuals' daily operational conceptions to the point that it’s too great a radical change from their status quo that they refuse the major external accommodation to what has been their status with the group cohesive and adhesive accommodations to those matrixes bonds.
It’s not what I, at the least, did not comprehend until nearly 7 decades into my own life. It took being ‘the iconoclastic’ in grammar school, and the growing recognition by me of being in a social disaffection in junior/middle/high school. I had a beginning self-validation of myself and my ways in college from the demonstrated shallow signifying of others by the preponderance of my peers and the contemporaneous authority figures. In the military service, the hallmark for me besides the importance of consistent self-discipline, was the abuse of title and authority by those whose titles required them to have a fiduciary duty before their own personal self-interests or aggrandizement. Civilian life was not only more of the same recognized abuses of position and authority, but the banal obedience to protocols that inflicted institutional injustice and perpetuated the individual mindsets of both vapid collegiality as well as cynical opportunism.
What makes this worse, is that these forms exist throughout cultures and societies from the most debased to the most privileged, and across all ethnicities and races. This perception I have makes me wonder, how I could have developed to not being one cohesive or adherent to these noxious mindsets. I came to this conclusion: The ‘Tabula rasa’ conception
, noted by Aristotle, the Stoics, John Locke, and David Hume was incomplete, due to their era’s ignorance of the fetus in the womb being affected not only by what the bearer ingests, but the external surroundings’ effects, kinetically and psychologically on the bearer of the fetus. With this caveat to the ‘tabula rasa’, the fetus’s advent to this temporal dimension is one of no conscious predispositions except for its physiological sustainment of nutrients and extra-corporeal "psychological nurturing".
For me the incidental postpartum nurturing had the unique feature of being in a non-consciously intentional, cloistered environment. Many of the ways and “rules” of social interaction weren’t experienced, thus they were never learned. The rules of behavior came from my parents and the logic for their rules. That has been and continues to be my underlying foundation for my logic and its rationalizations.
Reaffirming outside sources from biographies and other media noting the inspirational and the dastardliness of people, their ideas and action gave me an even broader sense of the forms of logic and their unique applications for my analysis of things.
Whether this was attributable to the coincidences of the uniquely shrewd timing and placement of me along the contemporary historical timeline is equally and astoundingly improbable.
It would've been similar to me having a predestined commission simultaneous to the coital precipitation of my physical conception. I dunno.
What I do know is my strong affinity to not only the dicta of Genesis 18: 10-30, Job 1: 6-11, Bhagavad Gita 3: 20-26, Futul al Ghaib 27th Discourse, Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Mask; RD Laing’s Politics of Experience and Self and Others, and the most pivotal self indictment, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney’s The Lonely Crowd. Throw in the corollaries that led to my own improvisations leading to my present character dynamic.
This dynamic has me in the otherwise skeptical-to-cynical mindset of a “grace” of being ‘luckier than deserved’. That “luck” has given me forebodings and deja vus, as well as fortuitous portals of happenstance of my many times clueless-as-a-naif circumstances. This grace has gotten me through many of an eye-of-a-needle circumstance.
During all those times of unfortunate or zealous attitudes by me, it’s never been attributed as being favorable to me because of my relative or comparative ‘goodness’. Perhaps, for my honest earnestness that may have been the only quality for such facilitating redemptions.
Because of the beneficence of that grace, I feel an obligation to pay-it-forward. I have been getting better at ‘paying it forward’ as I acknowledged the more substantial rewards of being a tribune for an inquisitive earnest honesty, than aligning in cohesive conformity or slavish adherence to whatever is the temporal norm of the era.
Being a celebrant of the moment's possibilities, than some pro forma conformist gestures and signification of the social or cultural order has also made me more prudent of the focus to where I extend my energies. The consequence of that has developed me as more monastic
, if not less gregarious, when the opportunities present themselves.
The reason for my more monastic approach is because of the odiousness of the metastatic sickness spreading itself in all the dimensional depths of this culture.
That 'sickness' marginalized, then disaffected and estranged me to their proscribed attitudes and "necessary" behaviors. Those attitudes and behaviors have led me in reaction to a discipline that gave me a greater appreciation of the elegant consummation of the basic mechanics necessity for my sustaining operations.
Those sustained operations, being the primary and imperative priority of focus, allowed for an inner-neural 'RAM-space'.
That extra-'RAM' allowed for a neurally more tranquil disposition to receive or attend to the more subtle signal phenomena, that I'd have otherwise associated with the background and foreground social noise. This "noise" became a collection of aggregated phenomena that spoke of dimensions of meaning discounted and dismissed by pedestrian mundanity.
It WAS the pedestrian mundanity that needed to be dismissed and discounted. The sublime, subtle phenomena provided the anecdotal testimony and evidence for the dismissal and discounting of mundanity's standards. The anecdotal reason for this conclusion will be the subject of the elaboration of this theme, ‘A Sick Culture’.
