kingtycoon: (Default)
kingtycoon ([personal profile] kingtycoon) wrote2012-08-02 09:12 pm

(no subject)

Reading Zizek on the bus everyone looks at the cover.  Today is a day where people do a double take when they see me, people.  At work I loom over the cubicle, I don't enter the cubicle, I lean over to talk to you, elbows up, and almost a spit take.  Almost.  A lady walked into the restaraunt while me and Antonio were taking the bookstore man out for dinner, he bought our books, we went for wraps, a lady walks in and stares, for seconds, and then notices she's staring.  Everyone stares at me today. 

That's kind of usual?  But today it's a notable thing, people staring, "where have you been?"  is what a stranger is supposed to say to you, when they meet you. 

I read about violence, theories and ideas, I think of things I've seen said and about the social media..  I think of conversations with Zizek.  Having just finished Slant  - an alright book, a decent read, guarded recommend, to the right kind of reader, maybe not you.  And then break into violence.  Violence.  You know I think that Facebook is violent, I think it is, I think that twitter is violent, I think that when people stare at you there's an implicit violence - which Zizek comes talks about - Biological Libertarian state?  Something.  I'm not getting out of bed to read or check - he says that the other becomes regarded as unreal as liberty devolves into a sense of entitlement about your own comfort.  That your comfort is your essential right and to achieve it you monsterize everyone around you.  Maybe.  I think about it on the bus and talking nicely to the people around me, just nicely, not a lot, I'm kind, kind of good-natured, but not friendly.  Not me.  And that I think?  I don't know.

I told Agatha one day, she was asking about something, maybe it was ruffians a school?  Ratting out the other kids, or avoiding or being in fights.  I told her:  "everything that happens is an opportunity to demonstrate grace and dignity."  Which I hadn't even thought that I thought before I said it.  It was one of those things, and then I said it again, and I realized I might be kind of tightly wound.   But yeah, no, protocols and boundaries, conscience and benign indifference, I say to those things:  "Okay."

I don't know, there's plenty of things about me that I never have or never will say to another person, I don't know if people are like that.  On the bus there are damaged people, at work, they'll tell you the lowest, saddest thing about them.  They want you to know?  I don' t know why.  They'll tell you their political affiliation, or their opinions, out of nowhere.  That's violence right? 

Be serene.  The ocean is, at the bottom. 

[identity profile] mordicai.livejournal.com 2012-08-05 03:13 pm (UTC)(link)
Shit, you HAVE been reading a lot of Žižek.

I disagree! I think a Theory of the Mind is probably the most important component of ethics. To wit, I offer the pragmatic observation that individuals with damaged Theories of the Mind-- borderline personality disorders, sociopaths, paranoid schizophrenics, whatever we're calling them-- often have severely jeopardized behaviors, super unethical.

[identity profile] kingtycoon.livejournal.com 2012-08-05 07:22 pm (UTC)(link)
Now I disagree with you based on your own diagnostic assessment - because the hyper-attenuated individualism of the mentally disadvantaged is precisely the element that causes their antisocial outbursts! A lack of empathy and of communal integrity is the origin of violent activity no? So having an inability to integrate into the greater self of the society has a dooming quality.

[identity profile] mordicai.livejournal.com 2012-08-06 03:17 pm (UTC)(link)
Then I guess my answer to that is: