Dad

Cognition, dieting, masculine virtue. Bunch of stuff

Fundamentally I lack motivation. Call it drive, will to power, if you want. I don't think that's enough. I have plenty of irrational drive, aimless energy. I’m full of the stuff and it’s causing me to act out in very stupid ways. The trouble is I need direction. Aim. Reason d'etre. I think everyone needs that, and more than that, I think they need it reinforced by their immediate environment. I'm speaking purely descriptively, mechanically here. It would be good to be able to give more to your environment than you take. I think it's an absurdity to think you can only give, while being independent.

It is good to be a Christian. It would be good to be the only Christian in the world. It world be better if your brother was a Christian too, and your father, and it would be better to live in a Christian town, and it would be better to live in a Christian nation.

Psychologically I conceptualize most of human cognition as digestion. I think the stomach is a better metaphor for the mind than the head. I think cognition is physically located in the torso, and we only think otherwise because our eyes happen to be located elsewhere.

You take in, in vulgar terms, sense data from your nervous system etc, to generate "the world experience", as you take in food to physically generate your body. The process involves sorting out useful from useless input, which are then discarded as bodily waste. The mental equivalent I believe is dreams, and it's the reason we need to sleep. Interpreting dreams, then, is a very disgusting thing, but can on occasion have medically diagnostic value.

In a more loose sense, like the human body is not a perfect machine, so too are out minds not perfect, and part of our imperfection is that we generate various emotional states which are unpleasant, like guilt and shame and regret. To wallow in these things is if course rolling around in your own shit. But if you don't have a custom to solve for the fact that this is a part of human nature, you're just going to walk around with shit in your pants and demand that the world somehow change, to prevent you from shitting yourself.

Guilt and shame are inseparable parts of human life, and we must have civilized customs for dealing with the fact of their universality. When moderns pathologize guilt, when we call all our negative emotions "irrational" and "sick", we are not solving a problem, but pretending it doesnt exist. we try to make it “unreal”. The emperor hasn’t shit his pants.

I say this because so far in my life, I have seen two major schools in response to the psychological question of Guilt. My assersion is, due to our imperfect bodies, we cannot naturally digest guilt, but must apply a certain diet in order to get the ensymes that allow us to break down the guilt fibers. It must be sourced elsewhere, from the world. “Absolution”, we can call this hypothetical mental ensyme.

The question of guilt is here not to determine the validity of the emotion, but purely mechanically to describe how it functions. In psychological terms, you either source your Absolution, which is a necessary part of a healthy diet, from Father or from Mother. How this works out in practice, in the real world, is either you source your absolution from God, or from literal random women who physically exists in the world, who you can touch and feel. I think Don Juan sourced his absolution from women. I think that’s what I was doing when I was trying and failing to be him. When I was drinking every day, the goal was always to find some woman who would validate me, who by her mere precense would prove I was worth anything. That I exist. Men act, women judge. Woman is the arbiter of value. If I conquer the world in a forest, but there are no women around to see it, did it really happen?

In more provokative terms I think this is an essentially difference between Paganism and Christianity. Paganism is the step above literal women, where you source your absolution instead from the, in our time so much discussed, "Great Mother”.

I think all attempts to paint the war drums and radical brutal violence of tribal prechristian europe is an atttempt to please Mother. I think the fundamental difference between “rythmic” and “melodic” (read: classical) music is on this front. Melodic music is phychologically complex, and references the complex experience of living in the world. “Rythmic” music emulates being in the womb, and hearing your mother’s heartbeat. When I watch a movie like the Northman, and the scene where they all get into a berzerker rage before a raid by chanting a 4/4 beat, I see that as returning to the womb.

If your picture of men and women is that men are brutal, mindless beasts, unpredictable and randomly violent, and women are plotting, scheming and manipulating due to her “weaker nature”, etc, then I’m afraid you’re not thinking about men and women, but about a man and a boy.

Empathy, much lauded as a female virtue, is the first necessary part of succesful warfare. It’s the first part of tactics and strategy. The greeks christianised, because they realised Wisdom is not a woman.

The child is feminine, acting on instict, lashing out in rage, and he is tempered by the tutelage of his father, into a man, who can strategize. Strategizing is the height of masculine virtue. Name a female architect.

This is all to explain what I want to say, which is, I’m not writing because I’m a bit sad. My mother provides more absolution than I want, she excuses sins I haven’t even commited. And my father does not forgive me. I know I should be going to the Big Guy and not my own literal father, and that is ideal, but as I said in the beginning. It’s good to be a christian. It would be better if you lived in a christian town. The world is literally real and actual events are happening, every day. It’s important to remember that, I think.

My father is at an age where he would like to be retired and play with his grandchildren. Problem is, he doesnt have any. I can sympathize with that. On this front we have the same aims, we should be united in vision and purpose. There is nothing I want more in my life, than to accidentally give him what he also wants. It’s not the I want to do it to please him - genuinely. I just recognize that we want the same thing. So it’s very hurtful that instead of making up for his shortcomings in raising me and my brother well enough that we could become the sort of men, who would be able to provide grandchildren for him, that he instead speedruns widows and divorcees, to get access to grandchildren. He adopts families like a cat, to get the old age lifestyle he wants, but didnt earn.

Now, that is probably in part my own shame about my life expressing itself. I’m ashamed of myself. But I also happen to know the man, and I know him pretty well. He is like me in many ways. He also feels alone in the world, and has done so all his life, but at some point, he embraced it, and has been thinking he can commit fraud in open daylight ever since, because no one is paying attention, because everyone is stupid. 99% of the time he is right, and 99% of the time he does get away with it. It makes me sad that he doesnt make an exception for me.

My father is a pagan. He cannot stand to be alone, because when you are alone, you have to source your absolution from God, and that is a lot more difficult and demanding than just finding some random woman, and letting her passively provide meaning to your life, allowing you to just go “well that’s what she wants”, “happy wife happy life”, and not have to think too hard about your 15 years of repressed guilt over feeling like you couldn’t save your son from being run over by a car, and letting your wife divorce you, and probably a bunch of weird hangups I don’t even know about. Irrational guilt, all guilt is technically “irrational” - it doesnt matter. Then shift her out for a new one when the internal pressure from the contradictions get too much.

No one in my family lives in the real world. Anything we do together is a macabre play-act for the sake of women. We are not a family, and when we get together, it’s just to let the women play house. It is hard for me to condemn them, because in a sense, I would like to be able to play along. I would like to give them what they want. It would be nice to be able to give, while not being dependant on recieving. But I can’t take any more christmasses, where we put on a play-act for children that doesnt exist. I can’t take any more inversions of rituals, where rituals that are supposed to be done for the sake of children, I do for my aging parents. I can’t take another conversation where my father talks to me on the phone, about people I have never met, but he talks about them, as if they were my nieces and nephews and brothers and sisters. I can’t sacrifice my own time, to give my father absolution for his guilt, to please him, while doing so makes me even more of a bachelor and makes the chance of real grandchildren grow ever smaller by the day, because I spend days and weeks being upset about it.

And the trouble is, I can’t do without them either.

Punchline haha. Anywyas, It’s vampyric and evil and wrong, and I am betraying myself, and I am betraying them, and I am betraying God. In not condemning them, I am betraying everything. And just because they ask me politely to betray everything for their comfort, I know deep down, thats not what they want. That’s not what I wanted when I was acting out. I wanted someone to stop me.

I was thinking instead of not writing all the big ideas I have, I would try sitting down and writing a literal blogpost about my expressionist feelings and pop the pimple. Writer’s block isn’t real, you’re just a coward who’s afraid to write about what you care about.

I was gearing up to have a real adult confrontation with my parents about some of these things, but then my uncle almost died recently, so I felt bad about kicking a man while he was down and worried about his brother. In retrospect I should have done that. I should have mercilessly and machiavellianly kicked him while he was down, because that might have been a chance to make him drop the facade he puts on for everyone, because he is just like me.

I know people generally like these things, but I don’t feel good about it even though it’s anonymous. I’m compartmentalizing, and im writing this instead of telling my dad to grow up. Like the long, very accurate and true, blogpost about I made about a guy who was discourteus to me once. I wrote that because I didnt fight him in real life. I don’t want to write this to avoid change. But ultimately that is an irrational fear. Not writing it just leads to me doing absolutely nothing for two weeks, completely isolating myself, and not responding to messages from anyone, because I felt completely and utterly abandoned. Which is childish behavior on my part. My bad. I’m trying my darndest.