Gone Native

What's the difference between a schizophrenic and a normal man?
The schizophrenic tries to make sense of the madness around him.

I repeat myself.

Pacifists are but partisans of whoever won the last war.

Learning Precedes Intelligence

I read an article today on how lemon sharks learn from observing each other feed.

And then I remembered that the definition and measure of intelligence in our culture seems to have always been rooted in one key trait: the capacity for training.

Rusty Exercise

There is no substitute for using your power deftly to elevate others, seek their opinion, and treat them fairly (as you see fit, of course, since there really is no "fair").  You can try to apologize for your power, or act like it doesn't exist, or give it away, but these emphasize rather than erase the sin of hierarchy.

That principle, a bit of moral fluff, is going to be true both here and in the Anarchist Utopia, since there will always be some forms of power or--a better term perhaps--advantage that renders others dependent on or observant of you.  Natural advantage is a lovely thing, and present in all spontaneous, undirected order, but can it ossify, in time, and become privilege?  Of course it can.  Humans make habits of everything.

Now it's starting to be my opinion that I have been considering two rather distinct anarchist ideas.  One is a process of collaboration and ally-making with others, not as roles or offices but people.  The second is the classic political project of assaulting and questioning concentrated power.  There is structure and there is also culture.  They interplay and each feeds the other; sapping a poison from one pool will only buy time before the other feeds the one.

What, is this f-ing LiveJournal?

One career step ahead, a car expense back.
Read inspiring passage in a book, get paranoid and bitter e-mail.
Talk to the ex maturely.  Read her get passive-aggressive same day.

See the boys.  Nothing's going to keep me from being a father.
Think about the threats she's made to me and others.

Friend makes a comment about legal process favoring women.  I protest weakly, drift off.  His fiancée finishes my words.  She was wrecked in her own split.  I smile sadly.  Keep quiet.  Don't want my issues with this one woman to affect my feelings toward more of them.

Day upon day of riding high, doing what I need to, helping others, impressing others.  Rise in petty politics, work well with others.  In harmony as much as possible.  Protect those under my eye.  Serve those in power above me.  Liberal dream.

Flip out, feel miserable, sob for hours for the first time in months.  Get told that this kind of thing doesn't go away in weeks or months or even the better part of a year.  Get treated compassionately.  Peer with tunnel vision at the cruel and the treacherous and the vengeful.  Want to scream at her, When did you become so coercive?  When did our love yield to the fixtures and trappings, and when were you the type to prefer us chained together than free, if apart?  Why do you host house party after party now when it was an effort to get you out of that goddamned recliner and away from the fucking Facebook browser games for nearly a decade?  I didn't hate you, though you're trying hard now.  I hated that you lived like a ninety-year-old at thirty-five, and I hate that you'd use words like socialist to describe yourself with me and now you're nothing more than a vindictive bourgeois hausfrau.  Vote for Obama like that makes you different, but a woman who expects others to validate her social blueprint is the same as any other social repressive.

But I know her better than she ever knew me, and I know that to shout at the traumatized and the victimized achieves nothing.  We had our chance to learn from each other voluntarily, and I surely learned from you.

I'm surviving, and I thank anyone who asks or cares.  I teach new staff now, and it is wonderfully cathartic to find a position of both power and raising others to my level--or beyond, depending on their gifts.  I write.  I father.  I hope to return here, but I'm low on the pyramid right now.

I can't wait to not be scared anymore.

Confusion of Tongues

Is there anything as a political system, independent of its cultural context?

"Feudalism" has been used for a variety of ancient political systems, from Northern Europe where it was born to the Mediterranean agricultural estates to even East Asian contexts.  But a closer look, even a cursory glance at that great repository Wikipedia, will show that "feudalism" is but one kind of agricultural-military-political exchange.  There are myriad differences between Roman politics, German politics, the Anglo-Saxon system, the Norman system of land tenure and so on.  Can we really use one name to define these?

Where does power flow?  Power flows from people first and foremost, from the ability to make others do what you want, from the ability to do what you want from the land and resources you hold.  But no one man can work the land by himself.  Others breed the draft animals, others provide the seeds and the fertilizer (whether it's pig shit or synthesized concoction), others provide the defense of fields...  So power is, must be, seen as relational, as a thing that is wielded between people.

But the organization of power is what blocks us from changing things.  Kings can do what they want, right?  But not if their rights are stripped away by nobles and their assemblies, if soldiers swear fealty to subordinates or cities first, which in turn swear allegiance to the king.  And who names a king?  In some countries it was a noble council.  In other places, it was the priests who anointed kings the representative of God or some other divine force.

What we have now is the republic, and the republic is as diverse as any other set of conditions that use a common name.  If Syria calls itself a republic, if China calls itself so, how are we to say that we are more so and they are less?  What do any of these names mean?  Have we lost the ability to describe political systems, or did we ever have the ability to begin with?

This is why leftists are so critical of private wealth.  It is all very well to believe that we have our little bit in accordance with the same law that preserves the right of the rich to their very much.  We "have," but do we really have in the same way?  Is the owner of a factory enriched by the same flow of property and power that modestly enriches his employees?  I don't see it if there is.

Likewise, with our rhetoric that states are all the same, that a president is a king is a pope is an emperor and so on, perhaps we blind ourselves to the ways that all these people are empowered and enriched.  Perhaps we are as blind as those who believed that kings' power stemmed from bloodline and destiny, until we come up with a real mechanic that can explain all of human circumstances--at least in the political dimension.  What we need, what I need to understand things, is a political physics, an understanding and a diagram of how people become more powerful than others.  It is a joint interest to find that kind of understanding between both reformers and dismantlers.  At the present, each is as blind as the true believer in the systems' justness.

Coercive Love

Now that things are a little better, I remember the good times. I'm less scared. I think about the relationship and I can't say that any of the development over the last six months is due to being out of it.

Improvement, save from the most glaringly obvious conditions, is unquantifiable to the point of being imaginary.

And yet, if the future (whatever that is) needs to be rational, then it is held to a standard unreached by any past and all present.

Anyway, I can miss my ex now. Now that it seems she's not going for my throat. Was she ever? Was it all just fog of war? I don't know.

I went from having to know what she was thinking--and I think she felt the same way, for whatever reason--to deciding that I must never try to predict her feelings and thoughts. That was what really led to the end-of-relationship shakes. That was what really pissed her off after the split. I didn't infer. I listened to what she said and that was it. I tried not to be painfully logical--men do that a lot, I hear, and boy, did she do it well too, self-hating masculinized arch-Anglo that her family raised her to be. Anyway.

Now I can see her well, and I hope she can see my positive traits. Even now, I'm desperate for her approval, and I have to give up on that. Ten years didn't get her to see me as I wanted to be seen. Ten years and she still saw me as someone either to tiptoe around or dismiss, the same way her mother treats her father, as bumpkin/dominator.

Okay, so there's still rage there. But what I wanted to say is that the old pack of once-mutual friends, with rare exception, had an interesting way of encouraging compliance with the relationship. Most peer groups don't want what's best. They want status quo. Bros will denounce a marriage or engagement; couples friends will need to see a break-up in terms of betrayal.

One friend who should have known better--they all should have known better, I think, which is to say that I thought them better than they turned out to be--told me that I'd lose the love of my children. I regarded and regard that as an utterly stupid thing to say. A father who loses the love of his children following a divorce probably never had that love to begin with, or suffered an especially vicious smear campaign--which may yet, in time, be undone. I never suspected my wife of being the type to commit the latter, though she has played a bit with actions of the sort. In any case, I wondered what kind of man I would be to present my children with a marriage of coercion. A marriage of fear.

Other "help" appeared in the form of other threats. A marriage counselor--no shit--threatened me with never seeing the kids, living in a tiny apartment, and paying my wife all my money. He was an ugly stereotype, I suppose, down to the assumptions about our relative income and involvement with the children. Then again, when I said I didn't know who I was, his first question was "Are you gay?" I'm still not sure if I forgive him for knowing the bulk of the market or if I'm derisive that I never really felt heard. I prefer female counselors anyway.

As I've said to a few people, I felt myself looking down a path of coercion. We all know or should know what lies down that path. It's monkeys in cages, alcoholism, chronic masturbation, deadening of impulses, resentment of partners, misery being taught to children. It's domestication in the ugliest sense.

I still can't imagine ever being in a long-term relationship again. I pine for some kind of affection, some kind of romantic attachment. But I prefer being alone to being miserable, to being beholden to the choices I made at 19 and 21.

And when I've been called a coward by people who once called me friend, I scoff. Yeah, I really chose the easy way out. I leapt from one branch without so much as holding another. I had no home, a new job, no girl waiting in the wings, nothing. I was honest the entire time, explaining in painful detail how I felt and where I was mentally. If bravery is what I've seen of other people's "relationships," then call me a coward. I loved my wife, but I couldn't anymore. And I didn't believe in the institution surviving the spirit that animated and founded it.