Trauma song therapy

Smells and songs are the most vivid throwback triggers for me. Nostalgia is the hardest thing form me when I’m depressed, and even when I’m normal. I can’t listen to songs that throw me back or have past emotional connections. I’m not facing my trauma yet. I have to learn to feel my emotions and past trauma without crumbling or repressing eg through medication. One thing I can do is write down a list of trauma songs for me and get them and make it a project to be able to listen to them, feel them and have a throwback without breaking out.

Negative personality maintenance

People who are smart and socially graceful are often depressive/introverted. 1 reason: their charisma comes from repressing the bits of personality they are critical of in others. This is personality maintenance by pruning and suppressing and being self-critical and self-conscious. It’s negative. There needs to be positive aspects to personality maintenance too.

Species fate and capitalism

Humankind follows its own rhythms and journey. This underlying reality manifests itself in contingent historical facts (that we focus on like treating the symptoms but not the cause, or by arguing over something petty with someone that just wants to argue to release emotion).
Capitalism is the contingent manifestation of humankind’s journey into a new type of consciousness involving individual independence, specialisation, etc. We’re getting benefits and we’re learning about ourselves. When we’ve learnt what we had to, when our consciousness evolves, we’ll move on.

Instinctive connection to essence vs awareness of extraneous issues

People get their values/desires/preferences confused with the myriad of issues that surround their choice. Especially social ones. Eg DB doesn’t connect to his instinctive feeling to music, but focuses on lyrics, market positioning of the music, demographics, style, charisma, its relations to other music and social status of listeners etc. And he doesn’t fully feel his sexuality and is confused about the actual physical animal non-rational impulses but is very aware of the social implications / self-image implications of his own sexuality labels.

Sold illusions become ideals

If you control the people by selling them illusions about their reality you run a risk: the people end up taking that illusion as their normality, and cling to it. Eg if you convince the people that everyone has an equal opportunity to create wealth, eventually they’ll follow things to logical conclusions and end up getting rid of things that prevent this ideal state. So your myth comes back to bite you.

Fragmentisation of collective mind in argument

When things get out of harmony we argue a standpoint even though the range of standpoints are in our head. The whole picture held in each person’s head is overwhelming in its internal emotional conflicts and so becomes writ large amongst the people like specialisation of labour. It’s like the reverse of schizophrenia.

Consciousness of talents

I feel dislocated from my talents and lack confidence in them. I remember on my kindergarten report it said I was capable but surprisingly unconfident of how capable I was. And yet I felt like a failure unless I did it all perfect. I think it’s coz I can’t see them work and don’t understand them and can’t account for them. I never knew if I’d get high marks or low marks in tests - I always thought of myself as doing everything normally at normal speed. Nothing magical happens. I actually feel dopey. But it’s also more than lack of consciousness of my talents as they happen.

Top-down learning

I learn things in a top-down way. I often learn the hardest bits first, or get to the ultimate principle first, and then percolate the knowledge down. Like learning to dive - I learnt to somersault first and then just shortened it to be able to dive.

Gould’s assumption

Page 171ish, Stephen Jay Gould’s “Life’s Grandeur” (“Full House”). He points out that mode rather than mean is a more accurate characterisation of a population in highly skewed ones. Mode of life is still bacteria on Earth. The measure of success in evolution is numbers.

Which brings us to Gould’s assumption: life is best understood by looking at individual organisms. Each organism is allocated an individual value equal to all others. 1 microbe = 1 human. The right tail on Gould’s over-arching graph of life is only a “tail” because of this value assumption, since the y-axis is a measure of individual organisms.

And he’s so Narrator-meets-Tyler Durden right brain arrogant about his quite simple truths. Yes, if you regard numerical measures of individuated organisms as a meaningful picture of life, then of course his arguments hold true. But you’re just replacing one value judgment with another.

Woomera-busting

Find out how many unvisaed people are in Australia. See if there’s any feasible way of spotting them and reporting them and getting them put in detention. Target US and UK white people. Maybe plant operatives in backpackers’ and fruit picking farms. See how Aussies feel when people they consider human (white people) are in cages. See Americans go back telling their white children (paragons of innocence and bearers of their parents’ neurotic obsession with safety and death for white Westerners [let the Africans starve though]) developed mental illnesses.