re: "For systematic change, I also suggest honoring those who get up everyday and go to work, even if they don't like it. It takes toughness to do that. The thugs on street corners and the killers in schools aren't tough enough to go to work everyday." (bigguns, response to article, "What you never knew about Columbine." Salon. April 6, 2009)
Would need some work, but it could draw them in - -especially if the working world regresses to "Organization Man" manliness (and maybe that's where business is headed -- certainly "Revolutionary Road" understood the draw of such for men; so too Apatow and Ferrel; so too "Mad Men") and away from JPod effeminacy. But it would come at the cost of empathy towards, and understanding of, delinquents, which would not be so okay.
Personally, it was when I understood that much audacious behavior that can strike one as brave or even heroic, is accomplished by bullied people who have switched into a different brain state -- an “alter,” not so susceptible to “disabling” emotions like fear (and empathy) -- that I learned not to be impressed by the audacity and accomplishments of righteous loners. People who are bullied when they are young, dependent, so very impressionable, know the awesome power of angry terror -- threats of abandonment, strong displays of aggression, are writ large and become nothing less than threats of absolute annihilation to the self. They integrate this “voice,” this personality, and it essentially becomes Freud's punitive super-ego, a voice which normally functions to school one away from doing presumptuous things, but which can readily accomplish the horrifying but also audacious and imposing, when it fully takes over in pursuit of righteous punishment of "guilty" others.
Link: What you never knew about Columbine (Salon)
Comments
Post a Comment