Control freaks never notice when their foundations are crumbling. [View all]

[sibelian]

They only ever see it too late.

Control freaks tend to think in rigid systems that enable their thoughts to move quickly around nice steady, well-understood patterns. They don't want the system disturbed.

You'll tend to find that they will declare things in the system to be unchangeable. But it's not because these elements of the system can't change, it's because the control freak needs to suppose that they can't change because other processes dependent on those elements are attractive to them.

Emotional processes, typically.

The CEO of lampshade-making company X doesn't care about lampshades. He'll say he does, of course. He has to.

But what he really likes is the suits. Being the centre of attention in board meetings. Having a title. Comfy leather seats. Being good at looking important.

Such people have a great deal invested emotionally in these symbols.

They will talk up their lampshades until the cows come home. Thats what they have to do to get the suits.

They know that the lampshades are no better than anyone elses. They know that you know that, too. They don't care. So long as everyone behaves as if the lampshades are better than everyone else's they get the suits.

They'll say anything about the lampshades. They'll measure the extent to which the shades dim the bulb. They'll massage the costs. They'll paint pretty patterns on them. They'll pose with them in front of naked ladies. Sometimes "ironically".

They don't give a fuck.

But one day along comes someone with a bulb that doesn't need a lampshade.

The bulb manufacturer will suddenly become a narcissist. The bulb manufacturer will have no taste. The bulb manufacturer will be a materialist scum-bag. There's always something.

The CEO has to do something. He has to do something to hang onto the suit.

You may think all this is hyperbole, it isn't. The majority of people at the top of the pyramid are actually astonishingly shallow. You'd have to be to get there. You have to be able to stand on the soap-box and say ANYTHING AT ALL in order to get power, because power is almost always generated by collective perception and that's easy to manipulate. All you have to do is say what people want to hear. And you have to be amazingly shallow to be interested in spending your entire life saying what people want to hear.

The only people shallower are those interested primarily in saying what they want to hear.

Mr Lampshade CEO doesn't care if the lampshades in your house improve your life. He doesn't care if you can get a cheaper shade down the road. All he cares about is getting stuff out of you. Attention, time, money... anything. Because that's how his fragile ego gets its nourishment. He has such a deeply inhuman understanding of himself and such a poor understanding of other people that he can't imagine anyone else not wanting other people's time and attention as much as he does.

This being the case, most of the things that get thrown at the bulb manufacturer are things that the CEO is dimly aware of in himself. Mr Lampshade CEO doesn't know anything else. He isn't interested in other people. When other people speak, The first thing he thinks is "how does what this person says make me feel about me?" He can't say so, because he understands that that's against the rules.

But when the lampshade empire becgins to crumble, when the unstated reciprocity that he's built his life on begins to fall apart he starts to lash out in terror. Not because the lampshades aren't being taken seriously, but because he isn't going to get any more suits.

A lot of the time he doesn't even realise that all he wants are the suits. He'll convince himself that his lampshades really are better. The mind doesn't work in straight lines. It works in bends and twists and great coiling clouds of unprocessed symbols all merging and floating through each other, tripping each other off and sparking lightning storms.

The lampshade makers never know what to say when someone's trying to switch on the light.





It takes years of effort and very often many big life battles lost before one learns to disentangle oneself from the mirror of selfdom and learn to speak truthfully. We have to be destroyed again and again. Death stalks us, disease rots us, poverty strips away our pride. All of these things take away the pieces of ourselves that make us unwholesome. All of these things strip the dead ideas away. We have to be smashed into shape. Only the strongest parts of us survive, only the parts that refuse to look away. Only the pieces of ourselves that remain after the harrowing are worth anything. It's only the battle that can do it, and losing is as important as winning. More important, in some cases. Until we have had the crap beaten out of us, we aren't looking at other people properly, we look straight at living adults and see only things that we have scribbled all over them in our imaginations. Why? Beause the scribbling is all we can think of to do.

The alternative is terrifying.

Only when we've bled and dreamed nonsense and had our rotting selfishness flayed away entirely are we real. Only then, through humility and failure, can we become acceptable to ourselves, and then have the power to speak truthfully without fear and learn to hear it when others are speaking the truth.

Only after we've been completely destroyed can we be reborn. Only after all the lies have been told can we see the truth. Only after the last monument to arrogance and selfdom has been powdered and we are walking in its dust will we have the courage to look each other in the face and believe that we are looking at things that are more like us than unlike us.

All the divisions are artificial. They are scribblings, scrawled in place reflexively by people who need to draw, need to draw something. Anything.

I'm no exception.

The lampshade howkers have spent their entire lives lying. They can't afford to let go. They've protected themselves from destruction so well that the mirrored bubble encases them completely. They can't see the truth at all. All they can see is what they want to see.

But the Universe isn't interested in lies. Cracks start creeping through the glass, slowly.

The first thing that happens when a scribbler stops looking at what he's scribbling and what he's scribbling on and the craks in the surface disturb him and he starts looking at his pen and then his arm... is that he shouts "PROJECTION!" at everybody, because that's what HE'S been doing. But it still isn't true.

The truth is easy to see. All you have to do is put down the pen.

We convince ourselves that we remain distinct from our ancestors, that their minds were unlike ours, but a cursory glance at the merest smatterings of history reveal the same problems, the same feelings, the same games, the same tricks, the same lies, the same stories, over and over and over again. We stand on their shoulders just as others will stand on ours.

And sometimes someone comes along with a new light bulb. And the same things are said about them... every time.