"Type A behavior:
A behavior pattern marked by the characteristics of competitiveness, aggressiveness, easily aroused hostility, and an overdeveloped sense of urgency...The risk of accidents, suicide, and murder is higher in type A individuals."
-Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary; edition 20
"Histrionic personality disorder:
A personality disorder marked by excessive emotionalism and attention-seeking. The individual is active, dramatic, prone to exaggerate, and subject to irrational, angry outbursts or tantrums. He or she expresses boredom with normal routines and craves novelty and excitement. Behavior in interpersonal relationships is shallow, vain, demanding, and dependent."
-Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary; edition 20
"Passive-aggressive personality disorder:
A personality disorder marked by indirect resistance to demands for adequate occupational or social performance through procrastination, dawdling, stubbornness, inefficiency, or forgetfulness. The disorder begins in early childhood and may manifest as refusal to complete routine tasks, complaints of being misunderstood or unappreciated, sullen or argumentative attitude, pronounced envy of others, and behavior that alternates between hostile defiance and contrition."
-Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary; edition 20
Many of you have, no doubt, read the above definitional (diagnostic) references and are applying them to various people and or Damned Things you know directly or indirectly and thinking "yeah, that fits them." All sorts of judgments may be going through your head. Or you may be thinking a bit easier now that you know which slots to fit certain people into. (In that case, I am glad to be of service.) However this here rant is not about pigeonholing people. (Even though that can be a fun game. And it's not as if NONE OF YOU/US have ever played that game.)
Think about the sort of world and the sorts of social habits that lead to some individuals manifesting these disorders. Sure, it is correct to say that adults are responsible for their own contributions to their dysfunctions and psychological (whether emotional or cognitive) disorders. But it is also correct to view these disorders as symptoms of people being veterans of a fucked-up world. (Throw in a few more disorders such as paranoias, phobias, and other illnesses and this "fucked-up world" hypothesis seems more valid.) Think about what society, the economy, religion, and cultural habits do to people with their wars, inequality and power issues, prejudices, anxieties, emotional strictures, abuse, and dogmas....you can list a many more problems, I am sure. Many of you who are Discordians will no doubt say that it is because of Eris. But Eris didn't, nor doesn't, do any of this. WE do it collectively. Many of you who are Discordians will no doubt think that we are not a collective psychotherapy institute and are thinking "why the hell should we care?" even if some of these sorry souls have compounded or mixed and matched versions of these disorders? Some of you will no doubt believe that Discordianism, by its nature, attracts people with these disorders. But if you think so, you are forgetting one thing: Play.
And play is the one thing that pisses off most people with the above disorders. Let's face it, we love it when such people who get all wound up in a tight self-focused bundle finally snap, so long as they are far away. But let's not forget about the world that helped stick it to some of these people. Not everyone will suck it up and let it roll off. (Contrary to what some of you have recently suggested.) Just like not every soldier will come back from battle un-scarred mentally or physically. It is okay for Discordians to act like human beings to other human beings every now and then, you know. Inappropriate taste knows no boundaries. I am not suggesting we coddle and nurse such individuals. (Cognitive Restructuring works just fine under skilled practitioners.) I am just asserting that we live in the sort of world that gives rise to such disorders in people. This shouldn't surprise anyone.
Disorder is important but only in balance with order. Anyone who disagrees may have valid reasons at the time, but they may wish to think about the long term ramifications. Balance provides the ability to leap, spin, and to be assured that one will always "land on one's feet" or make it out all right no matter the pushes and pulls, the ebbs and tides, or the highs and lows of living life. Maintaining (or gaining) one's balance is key to avoiding the habitual reactive traps that cause the above disorders, whether in others or in one's self (or selves, for you Chaoists and Chaosophers). Those who cannot use order to balance disorder or disorder to balance order have become automatons cut off from the basic processes of a fulfilled life. Some questions to think about: Do you seek happiness or are you simply here to prove a point? And if you are living merely to prove a point, what will you do on the day you realize that that point is immaterial? (Or that the point is always shifting? Or even that the point is probably some fiction you or others have created?)
You can take a stance and pretend to hate that part of the Principia Discordia that spells out that balance between disorder and order is essential for healthy chaos as you assume an air of neophilia and "smartness." But that stance shows a remarkable lack of reflection. You can take the view that nothing really matters because you have equated chaos with entropy and disorder, even though if you were honest you would see about as much order as disorder arising. You could go so far as to say that life is a fluke in the universal march toward entropy, but that is still an abstraction you choose to adhere to in the face of overwhelming direct environmental evidence to the contrary. How is it that you are alive and conscious of the fact? Are you still getting caught up in linguistic traps? Are you so bewitched by your own cognitive processes, yet you don't even see the sheer magnitude of complexity that even the simplest of such processes is an expression of? If you think that being jaded is a sign of worldliness it is only because you haven't opened up and lived while fully aware. If belief in things being essentially meaningful is the strongest viral meme of delusion, then belief in things being essentially meaningless is merely the flip side of the same coin.
You can say that nothing really matters, but then why are you still alive and doing things? You can say that no one else really matters to you, but then why even bother tell anyone else? You can say that you hate the disease filled "machine" that is the collective global society and then seek to smash it, but then how are you different from any other politician, so-called social reformer, self-diagnosed revolutionary, religious fundamentalist, terrorist, or sociopath that seeks the same thing? You can say you are here to cause disorder as a balance (or counter pull) to the excessive order you see being imposed around you, but you haven't realized the joke of that position. (And being an agent of disorder doesn't really count if you are aware of being so, remember?) Breaking shit without a purpose is just as dumb as breaking shit with a purpose. And what right do you have to break shit that was not created or bought and paid for by you? You can celebrate your destructiveness and assume that that makes you powerful, but that is the oldest trick of Greyface in human history. You can say that the idea of being creative is full of shit. You can say that the idea that being creative gives one power is full of shit, but that is because you are enthralled to the same old authoritarian delusions that every patriarchy has ever instituted as "reality" or "civilization."
In the end, chaos wins. Every act of destructive disorder (and order) and malicious immaturity you cause will only be taken by another and made into the creation of something new that will subvert further attempts at destructive disorder (and order). You can keep spinning around running to stand still all you want, but don't cry when you find that the world has moved on. You can say that illumination is full of shit, but you must face up to the fact that your opinion is only as valid as any other opinion. And are you saying illumination is full of shit because you hate those things you misunderstand? (As if your understanding of something is a test of its quality or validity. Hah, sucker! Fooled again.)
Disagreement for the sake of disagreement seems to be a properly Erisian or Discordian approach, but don't forget that even this is simply a joke we use, and only at certain times. There are no holy infallible positions, no matter what you think. Pretending otherwise is simply another part of the game. Are you going to keep moving around, asleep at the wheel of your life, or are you going to wake up and own up to your choices? At any rate, don't worry all that much about it. They have mental hospitals, drugs, and behavioral therapies for you, if you get too far out of hand. Or you can go manic and join a religious cult which will give you the attractive illusion of solving all of your problems while compounding them into rock solid walls of habit and belief. Is that what you want?
Never mind. We know what you want, don't we?
-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Driving under the influence of Gestalt therapy. Fun for everyone.)
August 13th, 2005