"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Jun 24, 2010

"A Thing That Evokes Fear And Wonder"

A few questions, on the way towards some future post:

What difference can an attentive observer detect between person, persona and personality?

Why do the ruling powers spend so much loot and devote so much capital to the shaping of personality and the undermining of personhood?

Why do they insist so strongly that we must fear, most of all, the monsters among us?

So much, in fact and deed, that we cannot define them except to use their own terms - as bad men, as monsters, as betrayers of the common good?

Thereby perhaps reinforcing the colonization of the mind and persona which makes their power so stable, despite the many changes in leadership?

3 comments:

Ethan said...

This is one of the many investigations to which I find Marcel Duchamp's "infra thin" applicable, which is one of the reasons I've been posting his notes on the subject. While thinking about these things, it can be a useful, or at the very least interesting, lens.

Jack Crow said...

That's an interesting insight. Using the ephemeral lens of the thin and absurd moment, an experience which has a residue but no immediate depth, to understand personality.

Nice.

Ethan said...

Huh, I think you just proved wrong Duchamp's assertion that you can't define infra thin, only give examples.