by Angry_Chimp » Sat 08 Mar 2008, 19:29:24
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jesus_of_suburbia', 'I')'m sorry, but I don't understand this all.
I can see why roccman would hammer this stuff into his boss everyday. He loves to be right and loves to prove other people wrong. He gloats win he wins and makes plenty of excuses when he loses. At least that's what his internet personally is like. The real roccman might be halfway decent.
Others, however, I really don't understand as much. Why get mad at people for not acknowledging that the remainder of their life will probably be short and miserable? What exactly will fruit trees, gardens and bicycles do to have any significant impact in coping with "a disaster that's just around the corner will far exceed in scale and suffering anything humanity has ever experienced of imagined"?
They should be ignoring you. You should stop bothering them and let them enjoy their life. They may not be into gardening or bicycles or whatever. I know that I'm not going to waste my time toiling away with that stuff if, as roccman often says, "90% of us will be dead in under ten years".
So correct jesus_of_suburbia that the words you speak are almost prophetic. The "truth" was never meant to be discovered by the humananimal. Everything it conjures up is meant to shield the human animal from the “truth”. If you take away the lie of their life what is left to offer except the reality of existential dread?
"We said that the point was that even with the highest personal development and liberation, the person comes up against the real despair of the human condition. Indeed, because of that development his eyes are opened to the reality of things; there is no turning back to the comforts of a secure and armored life. The person is stuck with the full problem of himself, and yet he cannot rely on himself to make any sense out of it. For such a person, as Camus [Albert Camus 1913 - 1960] said, "the weight of days is dreadful." What does it mean, then, we questioned in Chapter Four, to talk fine-sounding phrases like "Being cognition," "the fully centered person," "full humanism," "the joy of peak experiences," or whatever, unless we seriously qualify such ideas with the burden and the dread that they also carry? Finally, with these questions we saw that we could call into doubt the pretensions of the whole therapeutic enterprise. What joy and comfort can it give to fully awakened people? Once you accept the truly desperate situation that man is in, you come to see not only that neurosis is normal, but that even psychotic failure represents only a little additional push in the routine stumbling along life's way.
If repression makes an untenable life liveable, self-knowledge can entirely destroy it for some people [The chimp's emphasis]
. Rank [Otto Rank 1884 - 1939] was very sensitive to this problem and talked about it intimately. I would like to quote him [Otto Rank] at length here in an unusually mature and sober psychoanalytic reflection that sums up the best of Freud's own stoical world-picture:
[Freud 1856 - 1939] A woman comes for consultation; what's the matter with her? She suffers from some kind of intestinal symptoms, painful attacks of some kind of intestinal trouble. She had been sick for eight years, and has tried every kind of physical treatment....She came to the conclusion it must be some emotional trouble. She is unmarried, she is thirty-five. She appears to me (and admits it herself) as being fairly well adjusted. She lives with a sister who is married; they get along well. She enjoys life, goes to the country in the summer. She has a little stomach trouble; why not keep it, I tell her, because if we are able to take away those attacks that come once in a fortnight or so, we do not know what problem we shall discover beneath it. Probably this defense mechanism is her adjustment, probably that is the price she has to pay. She never married, she never loved, and so never fulfilled her role. One cannot ever have everything, probably she has to pay. After all, what difference does it make if she occasionally gets these attacks of indigestion? I get it occasionally, you do too, probably, and not for physical reasons, as you may know. One gets headaches. In other words, it is not so much a question as to whether we are able to cure a patient, whether we can or not, but whether we should or not.28
No organismic life can be straightforwardly self-expansive in all directions; each one must draw back into himself in some areas, pay some penalty of a severe kind for his natural fears and limitations. It is all right to say, with Adler [Alfred Adler 1870 - 1937], that mental illness is due to "problems in living,"—but we must remember that life itself is the insurmountable problem.".
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death