#thecanon

[tsuchiman]

[tsuchiman]

At a certain point, declarations of political identities, allegiances, and other forms of esoteric philosophies become just as annoying to listen to/read as declarations of pronouns, sexual identities and skin tone variations.  Everyone gets their flag, okay great. But what are you doing in the meantime? How do your days pass by? What would you be, if not behind someone else’s idea of you?

[tsuchiman]

[tsuchiman]

The most important requirement for choice is not the availability of multiple options. It is the existence of a savvy, sovereign chooser who is well aware of his needs and who acts on the basis of self-interest. Unlike all previous lovers who ran amok and acted like lost children, the new romantic hero approaches his emotions in a methodical, rational way. He sees an analyst, reads self-help literature and participates in couples counselling. Moreover, he might learn ‘love languages’, read into neuro-linguistic programming, or quantify his feelings by marking them on a scale from 1 to 10. The American philosopher Philip Rieff called this type ‘the psychological man’. In Freud: The Mind of a Moralist (1959), Rieff describes him as ‘anti-heroic, shrewd, carefully counting his satisfactions and dissatisfactions, studying unprofitable commitments as the sins most to be avoided’. The psychological man is a romantic technocrat who believes that the application of the right tools at the right time can straighten out the tangled nature of our emotions.  …In the Regime of Choice, the no-man’s land of love – that minefield of unreturned calls, ambiguous emails, erased dating profiles and awkward silences – must be minimised. No more pondering ‘what if’ and ‘why’. No more tears. No more sweaty palms. No more suicides. No more poetry, novels, sonatas, symphonies, paintings, letters, myths, sculptures. The psychological man or woman needs only one thing: steady progress towards a healthy relationship between two autonomous individuals who satisfy each other’s emotional needs – until a new choice sets them apart. …The trouble is, a bubble bath cannot substitute for a loving gaze or a long-awaited phone call, let alone make you pregnant – whatever Cosmo might suggest. Sure enough, you can have IVF and grow into an inspiringly mature, wonderfully independent single mother of thriving triplets. But the greatest gift of love – the recognition of one’s worth as an individual – is an essentially social matter. For that, you need a significant Other. You’ve got to drink a lot of Chardonnay to circumvent this plain fact.

Romantic Regimes, Polina Aronson  

[tsuchiman]

[tsuchiman]

The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity. Society, by automatically stressing all the collective qualities in its individual representatives, puts a premium on mediocrity, on everything that settles down to vegetate in an easy, irresponsible way. Individuality will inevitably be driven to the wall. This process begins in school, continues at the university, and rules all departments in which the State has a hand. In a small social body, the individuality of its members is better safeguarded, and the greater is their relative freedom and the possibility of conscious responsibility. Without freedom there can be no morality.

Carl Jung, The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious, 1935

[tsuchiman]

So the question [is]: ‘what drives women to move to the top of the [dominance] hierarchy?’ It’s something that’s worth discussing. So if anybody objects to what I’m going to say, then please do, because I’m not dishing this out as received truth. I’ve been trying to figure this out, and this is what it looks like to me. The first thing is that I think, male and female dominance hierarchies both exist but they’re different. And that, females compete with each other intensely, but they don’t compete for the same things, and they don’t compete the same way. One of the questions I’ve always been asked in this class, because I’m going to lay out a hero story, and the fundamental hero archetype, and the hero is masculine in mythology. And so the women always ask, ‘what about the role of the woman?’ And it’s very, very complex ―which of course, all you women already know, because it is very, very complex. First of all, I don’t think it’s a question that would’ve been asked before the invention of the birth control pill. Because we know what the archetypal female is, prior to that: it’s the Virgin Mary with child, it’s a ‘virgin with child’. Which means that the unit for woman is ‘woman with child’. It’s not ‘woman’, it’s ‘woman with child’. And, well, it’s obvious why that is, because as soon as you become a woman, in most societies, you have a child. Before that, you’re a girl, and that’s in some sense irrelevant, in terms of your destiny. Now you might say, ‘what’s your archetypal pattern if you’re not a mother?’ Well, the way it looks to me is that there’s two archetypes for personal development, for the personal path, roughly speaking: There’s the hero, and that would be the person that explores the unknown and discovers something of value and brings it back and distributes it to the community... But then there’s another archetype, I would say it’s a maternal archetype in a sense.   I think really the way to think about it is that for men, the hero archetype is the archetype that’s dominant and in the forefront, and the maternal archetype is subordinate and in the background, inside their own psyches. Whereas with women it’s reversed. So each of the genders can play the role of the other gender but there’s a tilt in each of them towards the… typical human gender-normative behavior. Now the social constructionists believe that no such thing exists. But those people are so pathological, that even considering what they have to say is a mistake. They act as if there is no biology and everything’s cultural, and it’s like: well no, that’s just not right. Now what biology means in practice and what you should do about it, that’s a whole different question, but to think of all these differences as socially [constructed]; height differences between men and women are not socially constructed, and they’re relevant. And the upper-body strength differences between men and women are not socially constructed, and they’re relevant too.

Jordan Peterson, Male & Female Archetypes

[tsuchiman]