Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto.

—Terence

Dismissals

boobs

yokels

pinks

Amok Anonymous

(Which is not to blame the Goth milieu in any way — reality is a rohrshach that presents itself as it is perceived: perception determines reality, which in turn confirms percpetion. The bible, for instance, can and has been used to justify and feed any ethic and philosophy.)

Futsie

(Speaking of Judge Dredd, forget the film; the early comic books must count as one of the most sociologically (and politically) sagacious and prescient works of fiction in our time. The authors and artists exhibit a deep and intuitive understanding of our world.)

The Futsie is an ordinary citizen who has grown stressed from the fast-paced life of Mega-City One - and has completely flipped out!

Futsie is a common phenomenon on worlds experiencing a sudden and exponential technological increase, culture shock, or future shock; futsies are people who can't deal with the future.

Futsie — a slang term for those suffering from "Future Shock", a madness caused by the stress of life in the giant, future city.

Alienation

Identities are socially bestowed. They must also be socially sustained, and fairly steadily so. One cannot be human all by oneself and, apparently, one cannot hold on to any particular identity all by oneself. The self-image of the officer as an officer can be maintained only in a social context in which others are willing to recognize him in this identity. If this recognition is suddenly withdrawn, it usually does not take very long before the self-image collapses.

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Looked at sociologically, the self is no longer a solid, given entity that moves from one situation to another. It is rather a process, continuously created and re-created in each social situation that one enters, held together by the slender thread of memory.

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The individual, then, derives his world view socially in very much the same way that he derives his role and his identity. In other words, his emotions and his self-interpretation like his actions are predefined for him by society, and so is his cognitive approach to the universe that surrounds him. This fact Alfred Schuetz has caught in his phrase "world-taken-for-granted" — the system of apparently self-evident and self-validating assumptions about the world that each society engenders in the course of its history...Society predefines for us that fundamental symbolic apparatus with which we grasp the world, order our experience and interpret our own existence.



...the molecular texture of the unconscious is constantly being worked on by global society, that is to say, these days, by capitalism, which has cut individuals up into partial machines subjected to its ends, and has excluded or infused guilt into everything that opposed its own functionality. If has fabricated submissive children, "sad Indians," labor reserves, people who have become incapable of speaking, of talking things out, of dancing — in short, of living their desires. Capitalism mobilizes everything to halt the proliferation and the actualization of unconscious potentialities.

In contemporary Western culture this polarity [perceiving objects in both their uniqueness and their generality; in their concreteness and their abstractness] has given way to an almost exclusive reference to the abstract qualities of things and people, and to a neglect of relating oneself to their concreteness and uniqueness. Instead of forming abstract concepts where it is necessary and useful, everything, including ourselves, is being abstractified; the concrete reality of people and things to which we can relate with the reality of our person, is replaced by abstractions, by ghosts that embody different quantities, but not different qualities.

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In other words, things are experienced as commodities, as embodiments of exchange value, not only while we are buying or selling, but in our attitude towards them when the economic transaction is finished...

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But the abstractifying and quantifying attitude goes far beyond the realm of things. People are also experienced as the embodiment of a quantitive exchange value...

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The process of abstractification, however, has still deeper roots and manifestations than the ones described so far, roots which go back to the very beginning of the modern era; to the dissolution of any concrete frame of reference in the process of life.





The dimensions with which we deal are figures and abstractions; they are far beyond the boundaries which would permit of any kind of concrete experience. There is no frame of reference left which is manageable, observable, which is adapted to human dimensions. While our eyes and ears receive impressions only in humanly manageable proportions, our concept of the world has lost just that quality; it does not any longer correspond to our human dimensions.



This is especially significant in connection with the development of modern means of destruction. In modern war, one individual can cause the destruction of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. He could do so by pushing a button; he may not feel the emotional impact of what he is doing, since he does not know the people whom he kills; it is almost as if his act of pushing the button and their death had no real connection. The same man would probably be incapable of even slapping, not to speak of killing, a helpless person. In the latter case, the concrete situation arouses in him a conscience reaction common to all normal men; in the former, there is no such reaction, because the act and his object are alienated from the doer, his act is not his anymore, but has, so to speak, a life and responsbility of its own.



By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts — but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside productively.



What is modern man's relationship to his fellow man? It is one between two abstractions, two living machines, who use each other... Everybody is to everybody else a commodity, always to be treated with certain friendliness, because even if he is not of use now, he may be later. There is not much love or hate to be found in human relations of our day. There is, rather, a superficial friendliness, and a more than superficial fairness, but behind that surface is distance and indifference...



The alienation between man and man results in the loss of those general and social bonds which characterize medieval as well as most other precapitalist societies. Modern society consists of "atoms", little particles estranged from each other but held together by selfish interests and by the necessity to make use of each other. Yet man is a social being with a deep need to share, to help, to feel as a member of a group. What has happened to these social strivings in man? They manifest themselves in the special sphere of the public realm, which is strictly separated from the private realm. Our private dealings with our fellow men are governed by the principle of egotism, "each for himself, God for us all," in flagrant contradiction to Christian teaching. The invidivual is motivated by egotistical interest, and not by solidarity with and love for his fellow man.





What is the relationship of man toward himself? I have described elsewhere this relationship as "marketing orientation." In this orientation, man experiences himself as a thing to be employed successfully on the market. He does not experience himself as an active agent, as the bearer of human powers. He is alienated from these powers. His aim is to sell himself successfully on the market. His sense of self does not stem from his activity as a loving and thinking individual, but from his socio-economic role... That is the way he experiences himself, not as a man, with love. fear, convictions, doubts, but as that abstraction, alienated from his real nature, which fulfills a certain function in the social system. His sense of value depends on his success: on whether he can sell himself favoriably, whether he can make more of himself than he started out with, whether he is a success. His body, his mind and his soul are his capital, and his task in life is to invest it favorably, to make a profit of himself. Human qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness, are transformed into commodities, into assets of the "personality package," conducive to a higher price on the personality market. If the individual fails in a profitable investment of himself, he feels that he is a failure; if he succeeds, he is a success. Clearly, his sense of his own value always depends on factors extraneous to himself, on the fickle judgement of the market, which decides about his value as it decides about the value of commodities. He, like all commodities that cannot be sold profitably on the market, is worthless as far as his exchange value is concerned, even though his use value may be considerable.



The alienated personality who is for sale must lose a good deal of the sense of dignity which is so characteristic of man even in most primitive cultures. He must lose almost all sense of self, of himself as a unique and induplicable entity. The sense of self stems from the experience of myself as the subject of my experiences, my thought, my feeling, my decision, my judgement, my action. It presupposes that my experience is my own, and not an alienated one. Things have no self and men who have become things can have no self.



(But let me first say that to suggest that Capitalism causes futsie is as absurd as suggesting that being raised by alcoholic parents causes alcoholism. But it is correct to say that these things are the soil in which the seeds of these illnesses can blossom.)

Breaching Walls: Connection & Community

Terminal Conversions



Erich Fromm states that "there is good clinical evidence for the assumption that destructive aggression occurs, at least to a large degree, in conjunction with a momentary or chronic emotional withdrawal."... Again, some of the mechanisms that facilitate this process include: Cultural distance, such as racial and ethnic differences, which permit the killer to dehumanize the victim

Moral distance, which takes into consideration the kind of intense belief in moral superiority and vengeful/vigilante actions associated with many civil wars

Social distance, which considers the impact of a lifetime of practice in thinking of a particular class as less than human in a socially stratified environment

Mechanical distance, which includes the sterile Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight, or some other kind of mechanical buffer that permits the killer to deny the humanity of his victim

Downward Spiral: Alcoholism of the Soul

Stop Bullying



It's not only the bully's fault you know!!

It's the teachers and principals fault for turning a blind eye, just cuz it's not their job. You fuckers are pathetic.

It's the police's fault for not doing anything when people conplain (oops, my mistake, the cops are corrupt sons of whores, so it's not like they can do anything about it.)



FUCK THE POLICE



It's society's fault for acting like it's normal for people to be assholes to each other. Society disgusts me.

It's everyone's fault for being so apathetic towards fucking everything that doesn't affect them personally. FUCK YOU SOCIETY.



People kill each other

Rape women

Molest children

Deceive and betray

Destroy lives

Bullying and torturing each other at school



What kind of world is this? What the fuck is wrong with people. This world....this life, is worst than hell.

I am locked in an invisible cage within my head. There is no chance of escape.