Why Conspiracy Theories?

[luka]

one thing I've learned also is that there is a kind of Goldilocks position on the spectrum and that if you fall outside of that experience itself, affects, noises, the sensation of things against the skin, the feeling of organs inside you, all can become intolerable. Too much too intense too intimate too intrusive. Or at the other end you might be effectively numbed, deadened, ahedonic, so pleasure again becomes impossible, any intensity at all become impossible

 

[luka]

All this stuff to me feels prior to and formative of ideology, more basic and more important

 

[luka]

Music in particular can offer kind of map to this.

 

[shiels]

How do you get trapped in a self which can't move past a certain point in any given direction? You as in us, you, me, everybody, we are all occupying botched selves, crippled in all sorts of ways

A stable and reliable pattern is entrenched i think, and the parameters are set by a superstructure, a schema, expectations - a sense of enoughness - enoughness in needs fulfilled an dangers avoided. Its less about a blockage around knowledge or an energy limit, ambition, fantasy, will etc, but a cycle along with others, bound up in their lives

 

[luka]

A stable and reliable pattern is entrenched i think, and the parameters are set by a superstructure, a schema, expectations - a sense of enoughness - enoughness in needs fulfilled an dangers avoided. Its less about a blockage around knowledge or an energy limit, ambition, fantasy, will etc, but a cycle along with others, bound up in their lives

It's certainly true that we police one another using all sorts of subtle and not so subtle cues to establish an understanding of what is acceptable in any given social situation. There is a thread about it called 'the teaching machine.' What's not so clear is what establishes the parameters of the solitary self. Yes, certainly the pressures exerted by others are still operative even when we're alone and our sense of what is normal or wise or good is conditioned by other people but there's something more fundamental in operation I think

 

[shiels]

where does the solitary self exist - we exist for others - this is the main function of self, to serve a purpose and protect a territory within a network of other selves, defined by and drawing energy from and against - of course we behave differently away from the eyes of others, alone, but the eyes of others exist within us at all times. and like you say we police ourselves on behalf of others - higher self, super ego, big other, moral compass etc.

what is more fundamental than this? of course the biological drives are there, and physical limitations , the genetic predisposition, ethnicity, gender, height, big tits, deep voice, small slow brain etc. so within these biological and cultural structures, a whole lot is assigned... to be deterministic

 

[luka]

What I mean is although I think how we negotiate the parameters of social space and behaviour within that space is very, very interesting what I was talking about here was our own experience of ourselves, how joyful our joys are, how noisy noise is, how intrusive, how threatening, how much pain we can bear, arousal, excitement, the grain of our experience itself

 

[luka]

The parameters of which I think are certainly something to do with the social violence we have suffered although not wholly attributable to those pressures

 

[luka]

If you imagine an arbitrary blob drawn over a space of potential affects incorporating and some and falling short of others

 

[shiels]

So badly constructed armour. Personality as a shit knight costume ...

 

[shiels]

Personality is a shit knight costume ...

CLEVEREST FUNNIEST THING IVE EVER SAID

 

[luka]

I'm not talking about personality or armour I don't think

 

[luka]

I'm not talking about what you can express to others I'm talking about the parameters of what you can feel and be aware of and partake in

 

[luka]

Which you could think of in terms of armour certainly, in that you can think of your self as being armoured against the upper or lower registers of particular affects as a means of self preservation.

 

[luka]

To avoid disintegration in forces too powerful to withstand for example

 

[luka]

So not what you choose to present but the bedrock of your being and what it is comprised of moment to moment. The grain of your experience.

 

[constant escape]

I'm not talking about what you can express to others I'm talking about the parameters of what you can feel and be aware of and partake in

If there is any layer prior to the kind of value-mapping that ideology entails, I'd be inclined to think of such a layer as more of a chemically regulated pre-cognitive state, a state that is prior to any reflective action/revision/optimization administered by the psyche.

What gets one stuck in a/their self? I'd say the process of identification, identity being a perfect congruence between two things such that they are not two distinct things. So to identify with someone is to make your self however much more congruent with them, or perhaps by merely acknowledging your partial congruence/identity with someone, you reify that congruence/identity.

But to the previous point, if you're talking about a layer of the self before ideology factors in, a sort of psychic substratum of ideology, yeah I'd say that is more of an id-like chemically driven soft machine, and that the emergence of something like a self is correlated to the emergence of values and beliefs.

 

[constant escape]

So not what you choose to present but the bedrock of your being and what it is comprised of moment to moment. The grain of your experience.

But isn't this kind of momentary primal being still riding the wake of previously established values?

 

[constant escape]

I think the self as a psychic being/organ comes into definition/being as a sort of cluster of values start taking form, start being reflected upon and evaluated, transvaluated, etc.

There can be a psychic presence prior to the self, but it arguably wouldn't experience the kind of reflexivity that a self would.

And to be clear by "values" I mean any significance ascribed to objects of thought or sense, seeing as the ascription of a value involves taking a position, involves not taking any of an array of possible alternative positions. Only, this position-taking is rarely a conscious act, and usually a falling-into-line with the values ostensibly held by others.

 

[constant escape]

one thing I've learned also is that there is a kind of Goldilocks position on the spectrum and that if you fall outside of that experience itself, affects, noises, the sensation of things against the skin, the feeling of organs inside you, all can become intolerable. Too much too intense too intimate too intrusive. Or at the other end you might be effectively numbed, deadened, ahedonic, so pleasure again becomes impossible, any intensity at all become impossible

Yeah I think Freud talks about this in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that our sense organs only let in so much signal, so as to prevent an overload of our hardware. Thus the sensory layer/stratum that insulates the psyche is a sort of callous cortex that has certain receptors/inlets through which certain raw signals enter to be processed.