EMBRACE NOTHINGNESS: BUT IT SEEMS LIKE A CAGE

Every morning I wake up suspended somewhere between weeping and laughing.  Don’t we all these days?  In an attempt to return to idealism about government, I went back to watching “The West Wing” but it was the wrong move.  Netflix ignored the point where I left and threw me into the last episode about the Sheen character’s end and the Smits presidency beginning, which didn’t happen.  Once again I was suspended between sorrow and cynicism.

My constant bamboozlement over internet computer issues, esp. those coming from changing my email address, has included the loss of the feature of Blogspot that sends the comments on my blog points to my email.  I forgot to check, thinking there were none, but then I got curious and looked.  One was a comment from Sam Vaknin so I answered it.  Then he answered me.  His work has been a big help to me and I got a thrill out of contact.  Today I watched two of his vids on YouTube, as follows.

Vaknin on "Physical Abuse, Rape, Battering:Victim, Perpetrator, Society Collude"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U-MJtEMCCA

“Embrace Nothingness: Antidote to Narcissism”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dwes1kXq9U8

More weeping and laughing, but this time not alone.  Sam is as good at the rant as Tim is and I like both for about the same reasons.  Sometimes I even get into it myself.  Ranting does restore proportion (which is sanity) sometimes.

Here’s where I jump.  Watching and thinking about these guys does not have the effect they intend because whatever else I’m thinking about, I’m always thinking about writing and how to break up old categories and predetermined methods.  After watching Vaknin, it occurs to me that he is a philosopher of human life as it reflects on itself.  The "psych" categories are up for grabs.  Some claim they are actually genres of literature, stories.

Humans are obviously a form of temporary, coded, creaturely existence governed by internal systems of proteins and other molecules captured in little balloons, fluid streams, and oxygen exchange, enclosed over-all in a skin that allows limited and coded permeability with the environment.  It arises in a meiotic collision of codes between two people, carried internally as long as possible by one of them and then expelled into a world of chance.  From then on it is controlled by confrontation with the environment, which includes other people.

It is this actual-and-real unsorted stream of chance and its effects on individuals that is described by various humanist disciplines which are divided from each other arbitrarily:  the various psychologies, many philosophies, histories, narratives and other art forms, and even theologies, moralities, and liturgies.  These interweave, explain and challenge each other and can change our arrangements for existing on the planet, even hosting viruses that can destroy us all.

When I was in undergrad college, I ignored my technical assignment to “speech education” by inventing a combination of theatre and comparative religion classes.  It was driven by a felt need, a curiosity, not out of personal hope but just for knowing the ideas.  I was not the only one.  We had excellent teachers.

We forget and resist that environments are expressions of existence quite apart from humans, life, and substance — subject only to time.  Not God/Not Science.  They determine the existence of us all.  Disease, climate change, volcanoes, earthquakes, unknown cosmic forces, maybe gravity itself.

Vaknin’s psych is a form of theory between philosophy and narrative, esp. novels   Also theology.  His anchor is the individual’s self-management or compensation for chance so that he or she may exist as long as possible.  His insight has been the idea that there is a boundary to one’s psychological self (self-generated) and that this boundary might be mismanaged as narcissism, which takes many forms from being defensive against invasion to being predatory intent on destruction.  I would love to read any novel he wrote.

I’d forgotten the term “decompensation” which Vaknin used in the second vid linked above.  I’ll define it to keep us on the same page.

Decompensation - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompensation

Decompensation may occur due to fatigue, stress, illness, or old age. When a system is "compensated", it is able to function despite stressors or defects. Decompensation describes an inability to compensate for these deficiencies. It is a general term commonly used in medicine to describe a variety of situations.

Decompensation | definition of decompensation by Medical ...
https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/decompensation

decompensation 1. any failure of homeostatic mechanisms. 2. inability of the heart to maintain adequate circulation; it is marked by dyspnea, venous engorgement, cyanosis, and edema. 3. in psychiatry, the failure of defense mechanisms, which results in progressive personality disintegration. 

So now I’ll say that this planetary human life is being challenged past its ability to compensate and consequently we are all pressed to compensate for some major disfunctions of our own, more so than usual.

At seminary — which could be defined as “practical theology” meaning ideas that really work — we were asked to participate in sharing circles, guided by a very big, black and Baptist counselor, not particularly liberal.  Reacting to me, he once said,  “You seem to have no defenses,” as though it were a problem.  I thought defenses were bad, that they were an evasion of the truth which is always guilty, a shortfall.  I had been denying them, trying to be defense-free.  The consequence was my psychological decompensation.  I burst into tears.  He was startled and the others were scornful. They passed the Kleenex box.  And sat quietly while I fell apart.

My narcissism -- constructed boundary -- was meant to keep other people out of my identity, to be mine for myself. I came from two people who were meant to be exceptional so that they would “save” their families.  The Blackfeet were a people who lived for the group as survival.  It has been an echo to me that no one should be above the others, though they’re beginning to catch on to personal narcissism.  But many tribal members still put family ahead of most everything.

Eric Fromm, philosophizing about love, drew circles representing individuals and proposed that some stay apart, others overlap, and many try to swallow any other circle that comes close.  I’m just competent enough that others try to swallow me in order to use my energy and skills.  This is how men treat women in our society. It worked well for Bob Scriver for a decade.

If I wrote novels, which I do not, this would be the issue.  All in the shadow of the environment and dressed in the memories of previous experience, I would tell how comfortable it is to be swallowed up for a good purpose — at first — but how eventually some can no longer compensate.  The embrace is a cage.  As in marriage or ministry.  And then how trying to swallow up other people, related or not, can also cause a dreadful decompensation.  While I was in seminary, Jonestown happened.