One Hundred and Fourteen

All animals compete to survive. But they also co-operate. 

Even animals whose relationship is normally that of predator and prey co-operate when necessary. Only human animals are so conscious of their own weakness, and so fearful that others will take advantage of that weakness, that they will not co-operate, not even with others of their own kind, not even when it's necessary to survive. 

Other social animals submit to the leadership of the strongest member of their society because, in return for the privileges they grant him, the leader protects the other members of the society. Only human animals submit to the leadership of  the most antisocial member of their society because they regard indifference to others as a sign of strength. They need their leader, but he appears not to need them.

This leader is usually male. Most human societies are patriarchal, and divided into masters and slaves; a combination that's rare, if not unique, among social animals. Most animal societies are matriarchal; and although hierarchal, few are divided into masters and slaves. 

Men need women for the same reason masters need slaves: to do for them what they can't or won't do for themselves. Patriarchs pretend to despise women and slaves because admitting they need them would be an admission of weakness. But even men who've persuaded themselves that they despise women and slaves admit they have their uses. 

Every woman is potentially a mother. She can give a man children, particularly sons, which are the only immortality any man can reasonably hope for. By giving him children, she also validates a man’s membership in the patriarchy, the ruling class of fathers.

Possessing a woman also enables a man to become a boy again.

According to Freud, a boy gives up his mother reluctantly, because he fears that his father, to whom she rightfully belongs, will punish him if he doesn’t give her up. But it’s not only fear of his father that persuades a boy to give up his mother. 

He believes that if he accepts his father’s authority and imitates him, becoming a patriarch like him, he will obtain a woman of his own. That woman will be only a substitute for his father’s woman, but a substitute mother is better than no mother.

Boys grow bigger, but seldom wiser. Most merely learn to impersonate their fathers because they want a woman like his, a substitute mother who will enable them to be boys again. But their fear of their fathers causes them to seek virgin brides, girls who have never belonged to any man.

The more a boy, or a man, seeks the approval of his father, and of male authority figures in general, the more misogynist he becomes. Some prove their devotion to the patriarchs by giving women up completely, because it was competition for a woman that turned father and son against each other.

But they fear being too too submissive, because no father wants an effeminate son. It calls his own masculinity into question.

Freud didn't understand homosexuals any more than he understood women because he misread the myth on which he based his theory. Before Œdipus came Laius who, according to the myth, was the first homosexual. We pretend homosexuality is unmanly, but it defined Laius as a patriarch.

Most men, whether they're called heterosexual or homosexual, want to dominate other men for the same reason they want to dominate women - they fear being dominated by them - and it's easier to dominate others by seducing them, inducing them to surrender willingly.

Laius was a patriarch, but he was not a man. He was a frightened boy who saw his own son as his rival for the woman he saw not as a wife, but a substitute mother. He therefore tried to kill his son while Œdipus was still a baby; but he failed, ensuring that Œdipus would take his revenge when he became a man.

Neoteny, social and biological, defines our species. Most boys and girls never mature, never become men and women. They merely learn to impersonate adults, and live in constant fear that their fraud will be discovered. 

What most men, those we call heterosexual as well as those we call homosexual, desire most in another man is the same thing they desire most in a woman. Heterosexual men want virgins, girls who have never belonged to another man. Homosexual men also want virgins, boys who have never belonged to another man. A boy is not a patriarch, and will therefore love them as their father never did. That's why pædophilia has been the norm throughout human history. 

We outlaw pædophilia and pretend to find it abhorrent because, as Freud said, we most hate what we most desire. We hate the power that desire has to make us helpless fools. 

One Hundred and Thirteen

I watch too much television. I do little else now except watch television, the dream machine. But all our machines are dream machines. We've always preferred dreams to reality.

A recurring feature of our television dreams is the exploding machine. Not a bomb, a machine built to self-destruct, but a machine built to make life better that instead makes it worse, and even destroys it.

Le Corbusier called the house a machine built for living, but so is the city. He called the city of New York unlivable, but so is every city. When he heard what the residents of Pessac had done to his planned community, he said that life is always right, and it's the architect who is wrong.

Cities that self-destruct are the stuff of human history. Every machine for living eventually breaks down, and every dream proves to be an illusion.

The house and the city aren’t the only machines that self-destruct. Almost every television crime drama – and all television dramas are crime dramas now – features an exploding building or car. Whenever someone is shown walking to a car and climbing into it, almost always the car explodes. What better evidence can there be that we know our machines can’t be relied on to take us where we want to go?

Where we want to go is not another place, but another time. Another persistent dream, one which even those we call scientists dream, is of time travel. We dream of returning to the scene of a past crime, and undoing it.

We used to imagine we know more than our ancestors did, and thanks to science would avoid making the same mistakes they did. We now know that even if we do avoid making the same mistakes, we'll make different mistakes. In order to change the world and make it better, we'd have to change ourselves. We'd have to stop dreaming and wake up.  

One Hundred and Twelve

But none of this matters.

Freud and Marx, science and art, all the things to which I’ve given my attention all my life, don’t matter. We all know now that all the things to which we used to give our attention, and used to call civilization, don’t matter. We created those things to keep us from thinking about the things that do matter.

Scientists say that what matters most to them, the question they all ask, is why there is something rather than nothing. They should ask instead why there’s something and nothing.

This world, which seems to us to consist of things, really consists almost, but not entirely, of nothing. All the things that seem to our eyes solid are really only a few particles swimming in a sea of nothing. Even those particles aren’t what we call things, but only loci or foci in fields of force, waves of energy.

Einstein said mass is the form energy takes when a particle is at rest. Now scientists say particles are never at rest. They’re always in motion, and what we call mass is only one form of motion.

A particle’s motion varies according to its frame of reference. Not things, but the nothing from which all things rise, is real.

 

But understanding this doesn’t matter. Philosophers, Marx said, have always tried to understand the world, but what matters is to change it.

One Hundred and Eleven

The older I get, the more disgusted I become. I’ll die of disgust, if that’s possible, before I die of cancer.

I live like a hermit, seeing no one for days at a time, speaking to no one except salespeople when I go out to buy food, which I seldom have enough money to do. The closest I come to having a conversation is reading and/or posting comments online.

People who regularly read and/or post comments online, as I do, have a lot of free time and few if any friends. Other people regard them as eccentric at best, and at worst deranged. That’s also how most of them regard each other.

Most people are either uneducated or miseducated. Yet they think they know all they need to know, so it’s difficult to have a conversation with them, online or in person. But it’s more difficult online. They allow themselves to say online, to strangers, things they would never say to someone in person. At least I hope they wouldn’t.

It’s difficult to believe they could behave any more badly than they already do; yet the comments I’ve seen posted online since Trump’s inauguration last Friday have been more bigoted than any I’ve ever read before. The success of this disgusting man has given people permission to be equally disgusting.

One Hundred and Ten

It’s a mystery to me why so many people say it’s a mystery to them why people commit suicide. Are they so obtuse that they’ve never felt a despair great enough to make them consider suicide?

Perhaps their despair is so great that they’re afraid if they ever did allow themselves to consider suicide, they’d do it. Why they’d think that is a mystery to me. Knowing I can always end this misery if and when I choose consoles me, as it did Nietzsche, and gets me through many a bad night.

One Hundred and Nine

Only fools say it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Love is an illusion, the last illusion left in Pandora’s box when all the others are gone. I’ve always known it, and always striven not to know - striven to believe, or suspend my disbelief, in love.

I was a child and she was a child
In this kingdom by the sea
But we loved with a love that was more than love
I and my Annabel Lee.

A love that’s more than love is all that remains of what we used to call religion, which Marx called the sigh of the oppressed and the heart of a heartless world.

The sea is calm tonight.

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand.

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

We are like pebbles which the waves fling on the sandy shore. We rise from the sea, that eternal nothing from which all things are born, filled with love for this world so new and beautiful to us; but soon we learn it doesn’t love us as we love it. How could it, when it doesn’t know and love itself as we do? Our mission, the reason why we’re here, is to teach it how to love. Or so we think.

She and I loved each other with a love that was more than love. In loving her I loved the world as I knew it could and should be, because with her I was the man I could and should be. And if I could do that, anyone could. Or so I thought. But now the world’s as dead to me as she is. The man I was with her is dead, and I hate what I’ve become as much as I hate what the world's become.

One Hundred and Eight

Long before the infant becomes aware of sex, it becomes aware of power. Whether it perceives itself as belonging to its mother, or its mother as belonging to it, the infant knows they differ in power long before it becomes aware they differ in sex (if the infant is male, as it always was for Freud).

Eventually the infant realizes it is powerless and dependent on its mother. The first society is the family, and it’s a matriarchy. If the infant is well cared for, it's content to be dependent on its mother. Namque pauci libertatum pars magna iustos dominos volunt. But even the best mother eventually fails to satisfy her infant’s every need, whereupon it seeks to become independent of her.

It fails. The human infant remains helpless for a longer time than the young of any other species; an unnaturally long time, during which it grows increasingly restive. Eventually it rebels.

The son’s rebellion against his mother is the first revolution (Daughters don’t rebel against their mothers; they succeed their mothers as matriarchs). Even if his revolution is successful, for the rest of his life he’ll seek to dominate women in order to avoid being dominated by them, as he was by his mother. But his success doesn’t last. Every revolution is followed by a counter-revolution.

Society is a macrocosm of the family, founded and ruled as a patriarchy by the sons who successfully rebelled against their mothers and became men, fathers. Just as every rebel take the place of the ruler he overthrew, so does every mother's son become a father.

Every father, precisely because he successfully rebelled against his mother, fears his son will rebel against him. Laius feared his son would kill him and take his throne even while Œdipus was still an infant. By trying, and failing, to kill the infant before he became a man, Laius ensured that Œdipus would kill him when he did become a man. Œdipus, who Freud thought naturally violent, merely responded to his father's violence with violence.

Freud’s solution to the Œdipus Complex was for the son to surrender to his father instead of challenging him, and wait to become a patriarch like his father just as daughters wait to become matriarchs like their mothers. But being a patriarch himself, Freud couldn’t conceive of women as matriarchs, women with power. He saw women as childish, or castrated, powerless men. Even less could he imagine a society without powerful men, patriarchs who rule women and powerless men as adults rule children.