A lot of what we call "social anxiety" is actually shame.
I figured that out during my burnout crisis this time last year.
The realization helped me offload what remained of the "social anxiety" that resisted treatment my whole life.
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As I fell asleep, I reflected on how this is actually a great example of what Jung meant by the collective unconscious. It was never anything mystical or inherently new age. The mechanism is simple:
A significant portion of the population has had common experiences that shaped us, particularly to do with being taken for granted and exploited by abusers and capitalism now in late stage collapse, and feeling generally powerless to defend ourselves. Add this to our common cultural background (Aesop, Grimm, Untitled games with a previous meme cycle), and our knowledge of the properties of reality (cute animals but loud and fast with long necks and built-in weapons and will attac).
These ingredients mix together similarly for each of us, such that we instantly understand a meaning that wasn't intended by its out-of-touch corporate creator. This validation, in addition to a particular irony that makes our oppressors look like fools, gives us a common emotional and creative response.
(There's a similar effect that underlies the concepts of the "zeitgeist" (also a Jungian idea) and the attitudes of generational cohorts.)
Of course there are exceptions. Some may lack one or more of these ingredients due to diverse experiences, backgrounds, sensory processing, trauma copes, sense of humor, and exposure to the source materials. But that doesn't change that it happens, or why.
And I'm here for it.
Shame is a lot like ego. It makes a bunch of noise but resists being noticed for what it is.
Shame and ego are intrinsically tied. And they're both part of manipulative coercion.
Much of that we call "trauma" is actually a system of beliefs reinforced by emotional triggers which keep us obeying a coercive group or individual. C-PTSD is more like conditioning than trauma. Trauma is just one part of it. Recounting isn't just about telling the body we're safe now. It's also about unpacking the belief system that triggers anxiety and shame wherever we go out of the bounds that we installed in us. Emotional barbed wire executing us until we pick through each strand.
Not just that we had bad experiences, but what they taught us about our identity, behaviors, and worldview.
Being groomed by one abuseror cult makes us open to abuse by manipulators later on. Each of us who were selected in childhood and conditioned into the role of ready-made victim are passed along in the unofficial abuser network like a worn out bible.
A lot of what we call "social anxiety" is actually shame.
I figured that out during my burnout crisis this time last year.
The realization helped me offload what remained of the "social anxiety" that resisted treatment my whole life.
🧵
"The axe forgets what the tree remembers."
There can be no such thing as equal rights when any of those rights include "the right to gain power over others."
That's what property rights include in our current society.
#deconstruction #decolonization #AbuseCulture #QuestionEverything
We look back at the founders and say haha can you believe they bought the idea that only land-owners should vote??
Well today we think that only land-owners should have full rights to security, sovereignty, building design, and the ability to set boundaries in the place they sleep.
It's terrifying!
We're not just in an increasing rent economy. We're in a society where our core rights come down to rent.
Will you have enough money (units of power) to rent your rights back once the monopolies really kick in?
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#deconstruction #decolonization #AbuseCulture #QuestionEverything
I think people SHOULD have a place where what they say goes (within limits). Where we live should be sacred space, where we can say who gets to be here, where we put our personal things that are protected from theft or destruction, where we can sleep soundly. Where we can build and rearrange and paint and plant and do whatever we want to fit our needs and aesthetics.
In our society, this freedom or right is attached to the concept of property. Which is why some people get very upset at the idea of taking that away. Every man needs his castle, but it isn't the castle he wants so much as a little place to rule.
Freedom ultimately is that, right? A sovereign, self-ruled little place. Power distributed equally amongst everyone, each person inside their own place of sovereign boundaryship.
But we've tied that right to ownership of land.
So they can just buy that right up.
And now where have your rights gone?
The slogan is wrong. Property isn't "theft." It's a separation of you from you liberty. It's an alienation of every person from our inherent rights.
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#deconstruction #decolonization #AbuseCulture #QuestionEverything
Like money, property becomes an abstraction layer for the language of power, and isn't much different from fuedalism of old. "Property" is merely a justification for why the lord gets to tell everyone forced onto it what to do.
But at least then, serfs could keep a much larger portion of their labor than we do. They had clean air to breathe and wholesome food they knew where it came from and what was in it.
Moreover, at least then lords had a sacred duty to protect those who lived on their land.
We've got all the noblesse without the oblige.
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#deconstruction #decolonization #AbuseCulture #QuestionEverything
So unpacking a little further: The concept of land-property is an abstraction of a type of micro- warfare and empire put into terms that make it feel ok.
It's disturbing to me to dig this deep, because I'm a former libertarian who likes the idea of property, a type of order within freedom, where I am theoretically able to earn a square of land that is mine, where I are nearly completely free to do with it and on it whatever I like.
But zoom out. Consider the rent economy. Not scary when it's just an elderly couple with an extra house or a duplex with which they make supplemental money.
That becomes an empire when it becomes a sky rise. Or a corporation buying up every cheap property in a town and jacking up prices for shelter.
It is land upon which they can do whatever they want and set whatever rules. Lots and lots of land. In some cases, all the land as far as the eye can see.
They are Kings of vast segments of area that they didn't (themselves) raise a sword to gain. But don't let that fool you into thinking it wasn't conquest. They spent their units of power (money), that when traced back far enough, the methods of its "earning" were, in fact, quite violent in nature. In order to gain enough units of power to buy a kingdom, violence was surely done. Freedoms were surely taken.
And once they have purchased enough land, they are effectively lords, and no one has any freedom but they.
Viewed through this lens, property is antithetical to core libertarian values. Property is a form of tyranny and empire. An instrument of theft and inherently a fraud.
I hate it. But that's what's under the curtain.
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#deconstruction #decolonization #AbuseCulture #QuestionEverything
The point of unpacking these concepts is exactly the same as unpacking the cult doctrines ones has been raised with. A word like "money" or "property" are thought-terminating clichés that get us to skip over all the good questions that we might have asked in childhood but now everything is too "obvious" to revisit. We save on cognitive load that way, but everything we take for granted is really a puzzle.
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#deconstruction #decolonization #AbuseCulture #QuestionEverything