Brilliant. This binary thinking is so ubiquitous in every part of culture these days. This raised a lot of thoughts in me on cancel culture, and how easily an every day person can be vilified and shunned for (sometimes) minor infractions in these times. This piece does such a great job at illustrating how many of us are too focused on categorizing people as either good or bad, when that's really just the wrong way to go about life entirely.
Cancel culture is a great representation of this for sure. I remember when Contrapoints (one of the most legendary content creators of our day if you ask me) got ‘canceled’ over the weirdest dumbest thing, like the guy who did a tiny two sentence voiceover in her hour long video had made some comments some people had decided were toxic, and then because she had him read something in the video (you had to pay super close attention to the credits to even work out it’s him) the mob decided she was guilty by association and dogpiled so hard she literally had a mental health downturn and had to take months to recover. It’s beyond nonsensical but social media make it so effortless.
There is another way to say it, in the words of the great man from Nazareth, Palestine
“By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.”
I was actually thinking you were going into quite considerable detail on your hypothetical riddle example 😅 silly me! thinking, wow she's a great fiction writer too.
This relates so much to the politics of intelligence piece. "They are bad and stupid. I am good and intelligent" turns out to be an ultimate hypnotic script to be able to control the crap out of someone. Like, great, you just continue right on being the smart, good one while I slowly vampire you of everything you have.
I decided to try out writing a something just for substack, which I'm new to, and my entire feed on here is political, so it made sense to take it as a writing exercise for stretching myself and just seeing what happens when I write on a topic I feel way in over my head in. The result makes me cringe in parts, but it made me realise my relationship with the broader political world has always been very low status. My field of expertise if I have such a thing is hypnosis, and honestly looking inside myself they seem to have somehow skipped me with the "I'm good and smart" script. And woooow it's been such a blessing! I translate so many cultural messages as "good little boys and girls do THIS", and everyone scrambles into that pit of knives and crocodiles. "clever little boys and girls do THIS" and everyone scrambles into that pit of snakes and pointy sticks.
My self image is more of a flopsy headed nincompoop blown about in the wind, which is a bit of an Irish stereotype; the self deprecation thing we tend to do. There's great stories about how we played dumb as a way to scramble English soldiers' brains and have them write us off as simple silly things.
From reading you though, your character seems much more sharp-eyed, like you've got a solid handle on worldly things and a strong moral structure. And yet you also seem to have a very open flexible panoramic view.
How do you do that? If indeed you'd agree that that's something you do.
This is a test, right? Trying to lull me into thinking I’m terribly clever and all? 😅
I just like poking holes in things I guess. Everything is a puzzle. Why is the world how it is? Why did school teach us lies? Why do these people succeed in life while we were always told those other types of people will succeed in life? How come we are served inconsistencies all the time and we seldom question them? It’s just questions. Most of the time I don’t have answers. But the questions are sometimes enough.
‘Like, great, you just continue right on being the smart, good one while I slowly vampire you of everything you have.’ This is it exactly. It’s endlessly fascinating to me how this one simple trick is working at so many levels of society. That and the thing we do with toddlers - framed choices. ‘Either you pay a ton for an education or you work a shitty dead end job’. ‘Either you pay massive rent or you take on massive debt to buy’. ‘Either you hate your job or it pays nothing’. And you get people to go ‘well yeah, that’s how it is, don’t be childish’. But how childish to accept there are only two possible choices in a set of rules we are literally making up.
This is again reflection of the intelligence thing - it’s basically Emperor’s New Clothes. How silly and unsophisticated the child who doesn’t see the fine garment!! Like we’ve all read the story. We recognize this in fiction but not in reality. It’s fascinating to me.
You should definitely write about the Irish approach to life! Reminds me of Dylan Moran, whom I adore.
Ah yes, genuine curiosity; an incorruptible part of us. I read all your above questions again with a slightly different, much more familiar intonation to how I think you intended it, and suddenly they become rhetorical questions. You're ACTUALLY asking those questions, and sitting with the questions, as opposed to what so many people do, the rhetorical question: "I mean; why does our schooling LIE to us!?!" with this intonation that suggests there is no reason why and it's obviously just because the system is made up of clueless idiots unlike me. We're an amazing species that we can say all that plus shut down our childlike curiosity about life with nothing but a slight melody change.
Trying to convince you you're clever. Haha. I'm seeing cleverness like a big game of Go! Right when you think you're wrapping yourself around the other person's pieces, bam, they use your efforts to wrap around you.
And the 'double bind technique' as ericksonian hypnotherapists call it "do you wanna heal from your problems right away now, or after a few weeks?" My mom used to say "do you wanna go to bed now or in 15 minutes?". Worked an absolute charm on us, haha. If I were a propagandist who enjoyed a good challenge I'd be so disappointed that you can just crack out page one of the beginners textbook and have the world already in the palm of your hand. But I guess coming back to basic principles is always good practice in anything. I've come to the belief that we can't actually overcome psychological manipulation, we cannot rise above it, it's more about accepting that our beliefs are totally interdependent all the time and finding ways to flow beautifully with that instead. But sure look, that's a book-sized topic in itself. Dylan Moran is awesome. Peace out ✌🏻😄
Yep I used the double bind a lot on my own kid and it does work amazingly. Do you want the blue shoes or the white ones? Makes you forget you were planning to go out with one sock on and see how that feels. And we keep doing it as adults. Do you want the Red Party or the Blue Party? And don’t you dare say they both suck, because that’s being childish and immature. The mature thing is to keep falling for the same trick we use on toddlers.
Yes I think you are right about the questions. They’re actual questions. The world is made of questions, most of them I think way too complex for any of us to truly answer but the attempts at answering are a good way to spend one’s time I find. Sort of like playing philosophers. The old philosophers were so interesting because when you look back at them today, they knew so little about the world, and made so many hilariously wrong suppositions, but digging around trying to pose different questions and answer them still led them to really interesting thought experiments… Like you have the sort of mystical idea that everything is made of the four elements, but then you also have the first notion of atoms. I think the mind is a big toy and it’s a shame not to play with it.
Tell me more about hypnosis? Does it really work? I have wondered a million times whether it would work on me because lots of things don’t.
Playing philosophers! So good. Our brains are always looking for patterns anyway, searching for the most useful models of the world. So I feel like playing philosopher is a way of being congruent with what our neurology is constantly doing anyway. Making unconscious processes conscious. Which is maybe one reason the act of genuine enquiry itself is often hotter than any specific answers it reveals.
So does hypnosis work? 😁 Well you kinda prove it does with your kids. To me it's inseparable from all the tiny perceptual entanglements of any human interaction. The way we prime and frame expectations all the time. My guess is you're good at being able to tell when someone is trying to dominate the frame, pace, energy and assumptions of an interaction, and then you can take it as a request rather than a demand and decide for yourself whether or not you consent to that frame today. ? That'd be a groovy way for a technique to "not work" on you if so. I think of hypnosis as this stuff pretty much everyone does in all human interactions all the time spontaneously, without even realising it. Just imagine how many times a mom will just unquestioningly assume that going outside = putting your shoes on, so they'll say "red shoes or blue shoes?" without even consciously running a technique or stopping to consider that that assumption plus 1000 other automatic assumptions the mom makes in a day weren't necessarily assumed by the child.
So yeah, I think what most people call hypnosis is just an intentional harnessing of the stuff humans are constantly running on each other in probably every single interaction ever.
A more traditional hypnotherapy approach has been hit and miss with me. It has a top down intention upon the wilds of the subconscious and therefore it either "works" or "doesn't work" meaning you get a behavioural change or not, and often learn zilch in the process. So yes, it works sometimes. And no, it doesn't work other times. And sometimes it does some weird funny in between thing. But I use trancework for enquiry, as a space for playing philosopher with your own inner wilds, making the unconscious conscious, making friends with yourself. Then the paradigm of 'it works or doesn't work' breaks down because it upturns the colonial frame of the unconscious working for the social conditioned self. I find this kinda trancework play sooo lovely delicious
That’s a cool way to describe it, way more intricate than the typical ‘you’re a chicken’ type. It’s fascinating how our brains lean on each other to work properly. I think we don’t appreciate that enough.
That stuff about your dad is tough. Are you wondering, lately, how much of his idealism you inherited? About the politics, I think it always makes sense to ask who is profiting from any given decision, but another question might equally be who is making the decision. Biden is obviously absent now and has been his whole term, and Trump had similar problems, but I also think that the elites of countries can also just be wrong as a cultural matter. For example, The elites running "the west" have certain very counterproductive misconceptions about our identity and ability. They believe we can do things that we simply cannot. I think that's a prejudice more than the knowing rule of self-interest.
You reckon? I think they know exactly what they want, it’s just not what we think.
It is interesting to note, and many have pointed it out, that Biden is just gone and the country is running fine. It’s a little like seeing into the mechanism of the big machine of the Wizard of Oz.
Funny you should ask about the idealism, if that’s even what it is… my friend recently was saying ‘hmm, you had a 3 year long burnout and the first thing you make when you come out of it takes 2 months of drawing and 4 months of setup and promotion and you’re giving away 100% to charity, remind you of anyone? 😅
When I was younger I would catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror or store window and the movement or expression would be 100% my dad and it would make me shudder. Now… it’s all way more complicated. You think things get clearer with age but it’s quite the opposite.
I don't know if it gets clearer, but I think it helps to try to find some way to forgive your parents for what they did. I read what your dad did as sort of a short-sighted, or maybe narrow sighted is a better way of putting it, form of idealism, and it is certainly true that the law is a profession that tends to narrow your choices as you get deeper.
I think the blob is very clear what they want, world dominion, but I think they mistakenly believe they can get it.
I think I have forgiven, or more likely realized there isn’t much to forgive. And I think it was autism rather than idealism - the law was hos thing, these were puzzles he knew how to solve. As opposed to all those other ones, in our family, or in his head. The law was the only place where he knew what to do which is why he found it so important to hold on to. If it were some deep sense of empathy you would think he would have had some for us. It was more ‘I know how to fix this, for once.’
Yeah I dunno the blob is doing distressingly well at the moment, I hope things don’t work out for it but it’s spun quite the spider web.
They’re making money for sure, but they’re taking risks no rational person would take, and the US position in the world has been drastically eroded; I think they think they can ride this out. We’ll see if they can. As far as your dad is concerned, I only hope for your happiness.
I don’t think they’re even tied to the US necessarily. It’s just the horse they’ve been riding into the apocalypse. You know they are building luxury bunkers on private islands for if/when it all goes to irreversible shit, right?
Yeah I do know that. But they are still relying on the west I think. I mean, even Musk may see his fortunes dim when that sun sets, and the 99% of the 1% is going to be in trouble. Or so it seems. I think they’re playing a risky game and believe the bs they’ve been putting out to some extent. Maybe we’ll see.
Brilliant. This binary thinking is so ubiquitous in every part of culture these days. This raised a lot of thoughts in me on cancel culture, and how easily an every day person can be vilified and shunned for (sometimes) minor infractions in these times. This piece does such a great job at illustrating how many of us are too focused on categorizing people as either good or bad, when that's really just the wrong way to go about life entirely.
Cancel culture is a great representation of this for sure. I remember when Contrapoints (one of the most legendary content creators of our day if you ask me) got ‘canceled’ over the weirdest dumbest thing, like the guy who did a tiny two sentence voiceover in her hour long video had made some comments some people had decided were toxic, and then because she had him read something in the video (you had to pay super close attention to the credits to even work out it’s him) the mob decided she was guilty by association and dogpiled so hard she literally had a mental health downturn and had to take months to recover. It’s beyond nonsensical but social media make it so effortless.
Wow
And Sinéad getting giga cancelled for ripping up the pope pic back in '92
It’s always the wrong people for the wrong things…
There is another way to say it, in the words of the great man from Nazareth, Palestine
“By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.”
I was actually thinking you were going into quite considerable detail on your hypothetical riddle example 😅 silly me! thinking, wow she's a great fiction writer too.
This relates so much to the politics of intelligence piece. "They are bad and stupid. I am good and intelligent" turns out to be an ultimate hypnotic script to be able to control the crap out of someone. Like, great, you just continue right on being the smart, good one while I slowly vampire you of everything you have.
I decided to try out writing a something just for substack, which I'm new to, and my entire feed on here is political, so it made sense to take it as a writing exercise for stretching myself and just seeing what happens when I write on a topic I feel way in over my head in. The result makes me cringe in parts, but it made me realise my relationship with the broader political world has always been very low status. My field of expertise if I have such a thing is hypnosis, and honestly looking inside myself they seem to have somehow skipped me with the "I'm good and smart" script. And woooow it's been such a blessing! I translate so many cultural messages as "good little boys and girls do THIS", and everyone scrambles into that pit of knives and crocodiles. "clever little boys and girls do THIS" and everyone scrambles into that pit of snakes and pointy sticks.
My self image is more of a flopsy headed nincompoop blown about in the wind, which is a bit of an Irish stereotype; the self deprecation thing we tend to do. There's great stories about how we played dumb as a way to scramble English soldiers' brains and have them write us off as simple silly things.
From reading you though, your character seems much more sharp-eyed, like you've got a solid handle on worldly things and a strong moral structure. And yet you also seem to have a very open flexible panoramic view.
How do you do that? If indeed you'd agree that that's something you do.
This is a test, right? Trying to lull me into thinking I’m terribly clever and all? 😅
I just like poking holes in things I guess. Everything is a puzzle. Why is the world how it is? Why did school teach us lies? Why do these people succeed in life while we were always told those other types of people will succeed in life? How come we are served inconsistencies all the time and we seldom question them? It’s just questions. Most of the time I don’t have answers. But the questions are sometimes enough.
‘Like, great, you just continue right on being the smart, good one while I slowly vampire you of everything you have.’ This is it exactly. It’s endlessly fascinating to me how this one simple trick is working at so many levels of society. That and the thing we do with toddlers - framed choices. ‘Either you pay a ton for an education or you work a shitty dead end job’. ‘Either you pay massive rent or you take on massive debt to buy’. ‘Either you hate your job or it pays nothing’. And you get people to go ‘well yeah, that’s how it is, don’t be childish’. But how childish to accept there are only two possible choices in a set of rules we are literally making up.
This is again reflection of the intelligence thing - it’s basically Emperor’s New Clothes. How silly and unsophisticated the child who doesn’t see the fine garment!! Like we’ve all read the story. We recognize this in fiction but not in reality. It’s fascinating to me.
You should definitely write about the Irish approach to life! Reminds me of Dylan Moran, whom I adore.
Ah yes, genuine curiosity; an incorruptible part of us. I read all your above questions again with a slightly different, much more familiar intonation to how I think you intended it, and suddenly they become rhetorical questions. You're ACTUALLY asking those questions, and sitting with the questions, as opposed to what so many people do, the rhetorical question: "I mean; why does our schooling LIE to us!?!" with this intonation that suggests there is no reason why and it's obviously just because the system is made up of clueless idiots unlike me. We're an amazing species that we can say all that plus shut down our childlike curiosity about life with nothing but a slight melody change.
Trying to convince you you're clever. Haha. I'm seeing cleverness like a big game of Go! Right when you think you're wrapping yourself around the other person's pieces, bam, they use your efforts to wrap around you.
And the 'double bind technique' as ericksonian hypnotherapists call it "do you wanna heal from your problems right away now, or after a few weeks?" My mom used to say "do you wanna go to bed now or in 15 minutes?". Worked an absolute charm on us, haha. If I were a propagandist who enjoyed a good challenge I'd be so disappointed that you can just crack out page one of the beginners textbook and have the world already in the palm of your hand. But I guess coming back to basic principles is always good practice in anything. I've come to the belief that we can't actually overcome psychological manipulation, we cannot rise above it, it's more about accepting that our beliefs are totally interdependent all the time and finding ways to flow beautifully with that instead. But sure look, that's a book-sized topic in itself. Dylan Moran is awesome. Peace out ✌🏻😄
Yep I used the double bind a lot on my own kid and it does work amazingly. Do you want the blue shoes or the white ones? Makes you forget you were planning to go out with one sock on and see how that feels. And we keep doing it as adults. Do you want the Red Party or the Blue Party? And don’t you dare say they both suck, because that’s being childish and immature. The mature thing is to keep falling for the same trick we use on toddlers.
Yes I think you are right about the questions. They’re actual questions. The world is made of questions, most of them I think way too complex for any of us to truly answer but the attempts at answering are a good way to spend one’s time I find. Sort of like playing philosophers. The old philosophers were so interesting because when you look back at them today, they knew so little about the world, and made so many hilariously wrong suppositions, but digging around trying to pose different questions and answer them still led them to really interesting thought experiments… Like you have the sort of mystical idea that everything is made of the four elements, but then you also have the first notion of atoms. I think the mind is a big toy and it’s a shame not to play with it.
Tell me more about hypnosis? Does it really work? I have wondered a million times whether it would work on me because lots of things don’t.
Playing philosophers! So good. Our brains are always looking for patterns anyway, searching for the most useful models of the world. So I feel like playing philosopher is a way of being congruent with what our neurology is constantly doing anyway. Making unconscious processes conscious. Which is maybe one reason the act of genuine enquiry itself is often hotter than any specific answers it reveals.
So does hypnosis work? 😁 Well you kinda prove it does with your kids. To me it's inseparable from all the tiny perceptual entanglements of any human interaction. The way we prime and frame expectations all the time. My guess is you're good at being able to tell when someone is trying to dominate the frame, pace, energy and assumptions of an interaction, and then you can take it as a request rather than a demand and decide for yourself whether or not you consent to that frame today. ? That'd be a groovy way for a technique to "not work" on you if so. I think of hypnosis as this stuff pretty much everyone does in all human interactions all the time spontaneously, without even realising it. Just imagine how many times a mom will just unquestioningly assume that going outside = putting your shoes on, so they'll say "red shoes or blue shoes?" without even consciously running a technique or stopping to consider that that assumption plus 1000 other automatic assumptions the mom makes in a day weren't necessarily assumed by the child.
So yeah, I think what most people call hypnosis is just an intentional harnessing of the stuff humans are constantly running on each other in probably every single interaction ever.
A more traditional hypnotherapy approach has been hit and miss with me. It has a top down intention upon the wilds of the subconscious and therefore it either "works" or "doesn't work" meaning you get a behavioural change or not, and often learn zilch in the process. So yes, it works sometimes. And no, it doesn't work other times. And sometimes it does some weird funny in between thing. But I use trancework for enquiry, as a space for playing philosopher with your own inner wilds, making the unconscious conscious, making friends with yourself. Then the paradigm of 'it works or doesn't work' breaks down because it upturns the colonial frame of the unconscious working for the social conditioned self. I find this kinda trancework play sooo lovely delicious
(oops edit, kid - singular, right?)
Yes, just one!
That’s a cool way to describe it, way more intricate than the typical ‘you’re a chicken’ type. It’s fascinating how our brains lean on each other to work properly. I think we don’t appreciate that enough.
That stuff about your dad is tough. Are you wondering, lately, how much of his idealism you inherited? About the politics, I think it always makes sense to ask who is profiting from any given decision, but another question might equally be who is making the decision. Biden is obviously absent now and has been his whole term, and Trump had similar problems, but I also think that the elites of countries can also just be wrong as a cultural matter. For example, The elites running "the west" have certain very counterproductive misconceptions about our identity and ability. They believe we can do things that we simply cannot. I think that's a prejudice more than the knowing rule of self-interest.
You reckon? I think they know exactly what they want, it’s just not what we think.
It is interesting to note, and many have pointed it out, that Biden is just gone and the country is running fine. It’s a little like seeing into the mechanism of the big machine of the Wizard of Oz.
Funny you should ask about the idealism, if that’s even what it is… my friend recently was saying ‘hmm, you had a 3 year long burnout and the first thing you make when you come out of it takes 2 months of drawing and 4 months of setup and promotion and you’re giving away 100% to charity, remind you of anyone? 😅
When I was younger I would catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror or store window and the movement or expression would be 100% my dad and it would make me shudder. Now… it’s all way more complicated. You think things get clearer with age but it’s quite the opposite.
I don't know if it gets clearer, but I think it helps to try to find some way to forgive your parents for what they did. I read what your dad did as sort of a short-sighted, or maybe narrow sighted is a better way of putting it, form of idealism, and it is certainly true that the law is a profession that tends to narrow your choices as you get deeper.
I think the blob is very clear what they want, world dominion, but I think they mistakenly believe they can get it.
I think I have forgiven, or more likely realized there isn’t much to forgive. And I think it was autism rather than idealism - the law was hos thing, these were puzzles he knew how to solve. As opposed to all those other ones, in our family, or in his head. The law was the only place where he knew what to do which is why he found it so important to hold on to. If it were some deep sense of empathy you would think he would have had some for us. It was more ‘I know how to fix this, for once.’
Yeah I dunno the blob is doing distressingly well at the moment, I hope things don’t work out for it but it’s spun quite the spider web.
They’re making money for sure, but they’re taking risks no rational person would take, and the US position in the world has been drastically eroded; I think they think they can ride this out. We’ll see if they can. As far as your dad is concerned, I only hope for your happiness.
I don’t think they’re even tied to the US necessarily. It’s just the horse they’ve been riding into the apocalypse. You know they are building luxury bunkers on private islands for if/when it all goes to irreversible shit, right?
Yeah I do know that. But they are still relying on the west I think. I mean, even Musk may see his fortunes dim when that sun sets, and the 99% of the 1% is going to be in trouble. Or so it seems. I think they’re playing a risky game and believe the bs they’ve been putting out to some extent. Maybe we’ll see.
Well, I for one hope you're not mistaken about the "mistakenly" bit