Negative Psychology: Recent Episodes
Nick
Our strategy in life is to compel ourselves to change by FORCING - which is to say, by 'taking away our own freedom to do otherwise'.
There can be no such thing as 'concrete goals' in mental health because we don't know what mental health is!
To be continuously striving for the advantage, and never being put off by any set-backs, is held up as the ideal way to be in our culture. We are exhorted to 'try, try and try again'. This message is essentially one of denial however! If we were truly 'intelligent' we would examine what we're trying to do (in a reflective rather than a logical / analytic way) and see if this changes our outlook. We're not machines, after all - unlike machines, we can be reflective about our situation, and this 'non-machine quality' is what can help us, not the obstinate perseverance with our agendas and goals, no matter how badly that might be going for us...
Most therapeutic approaches to anxiety are 'positive' in the sense that they offer methods that are said to provide a helpful way of working with the condition. There is however no 'method' that can help with anxiety - we live in a culture that is based on the principle of controlling and rationalizing everything and so the idea that there can be such a thing as a 'method' to help us stop worrying or a 'strategy to deal with anxiety sounds eminently reasonable to us. This is merely our cultural bias though - any reflection the matter will show that the idea of being able to control anxiety when it is our over-emphasis on controlling (which is to say, our neuroticism) that breeds the anxiety in the first place to be necessarily self-contradictory.
Everywhere we go we project a bubble of positive (or 'defined') ahead of us, so to speak, such that we can't actually leave this thought bubble, What's more, we're not able to know that we are 'living in a thought bubble'; we're not able to know that because we don't know anything else, we never come across anything else and so we think that this is all there is. Needless to say, this has psychological implications the nature of which we are quite unaware. We're unaware of what's going on here, but that doesn't mean that we don't suffer from them, because we most certainly do...
What ‘mental health’ consists of is a complete mystery. It doesn’t sound right to say this of course because we always think of mental health as being something that exists between specified parameters, as being some kind of defined set of normative values. Nothing could be further from the truth however – mental health is a disequilibrium state, not an equilibrium one. It’s not part of the ‘Realm of the Known’ at all – it’s ‘off the chart’! It's not on any of our maps...
What happens when we are ‘afraid of newness’? What are the dynamics of this particular sort of situation? What consequences can we expect from it? What sort of process will ensue as a result of the situation where we are afraid of newness, afraid of change? The answer to these questions ought to be very well known to us given that this is the situation of just about every human being you are ever going to meet! We’re all afraid of newness. We’re all neophobic – inasmuch as we are identified with a mind-created notion of who or what we are, we cannot help being afraid of anything that is genuinely new. ‘Being afraid of newness’ is the key attitude that creates the self – neophobia is what makes the self be the self. There’s no such thing as a ‘non-neophobic self’, in other words!
One of the oldest, most fundamental myths is that of the conflict between the two opposing forces of Light and Darkness – the Eternal War. Every culture has its own version of this story – this is such a commonly encountered theme that we have grown blind to its psychological significance. It has become a cliché, a stereotype. We ‘tune out’ when we hear it. We think we know what it means. We have become blasé about it and so the myth has quite lost its power.
The old amoeba has been around for a good while and it is wise in its tactics. Instead of fighting to eradicate its competitors (and anything that is not it automatically constitutes a competitor to the rudimentary viral logic of the giant metaphysical amoeba) the thing that we are talking about learns all about its enemies, woos them, absorbs them into its self, and then manufactures a copy that – superficially-speaking at least – exactly resembles the original article. Then – and only then – does it dispose of its competitor.
The thinking mind can do nothing but copy - in everything it does, it copies (or repeats) its core assumptions, over and over again. More than this, when thought encounters something in the world around it, it copies it, it renders it in its own terms. When thought encounters reality it copies it, and produces its own inferior duplicate, and this is Baudrillard's hyperreality. Copies always invert the value of what is being copied however, and what we hope to gain turns to dust in our grasp, as the traditional fairy tale of Mother Hulda shows.
Just as long as we remain identified with the purposeful self in its headlong question to reach its goals we can't see any problem with our situation. Bring a bit of awareness into the situation and what we see then is a whole different story however! This actually isn't a story that we want to see, and that's putting it mildly....
Our fortunes are hitched to a mental construct that we can't see to be a construct, and this construct is our idea of who who we are, our concept of who we are. Everything we do is on this basis and we are not free ever to question our basis, or look at it in any realistic way...
When we seek equilibrium we are seeking the absence of change or 'newness' and yet - in our normal modality of being - this is all we can do. This is - however - not at all healthy! Neophobia as a way of life isn't 'healthy - it brings great suffering, great alienation. When we seek equilibrium (or 'the never-ending re-affirmation of the known') we are actually running away from the challenge of life itself...