Comment by jauntywundrkind
4 days ago
I found this fun and interesting. It's a bit long, but it felt like there was a lot to build out. Doing that reading while not knowing where things are going is tough, but I found the reward, the synthesis of different sides, to be a surprisingly good conclusion to the piece.
And just having the pleasure of this paragraph, I think, will impact me forever:
> Most people I spend time with — leftists prone to anxiety and depression — are skeptical of "self-improvement." Many of us, following the critic Mark Fisher, think that depression reflects an encounter with the harshness of reality, rather than a merely pathological distortion. We definitely want to feel better, but we don’t want to be hijacked by acronyms or worksheets or positive thinking in the process. We try to attribute suffering to crappy world systems rather than personal deficiencies. We find ways to trust that our negative emotions signify something other than our own inadequacy — that they contain a deeply rational response to the world’s irrational injustice.
Fisher died by suicide in 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fisher
Be careful here.
There's a pattern to suicide: people don't commit suicide merely because they're miserable, or because they think their situation is hopeless. It is also necessary to believe that you have lots of options, but all of them are unacceptably bad.
Indian sustenance farmers didn't have high rates of suicide, until they got access to microcredit.
Schizophrenics, who often have distorted feelings of agency (e.g. seeing something on the TV, they may feel with deep certainty that they somehow caused that thing to happen), have sky-high suicide rates.
Men, for whatever reasons, have higher feelings of agency than women. And men of course have much, much higher rates of suicide than women - even though in terms of pain, misery etc. it's not clear women have it that much better.
Black Americans and Native Americans in the US both have a history of being subject to racism and oppression. But the former, stereotyped by racism as being basically good for nothing, have low suicide rates. Native Americans, whose racist oppression was historically accompanied by painting them as great noble spirits etc. have sky-high suicide rates. Economic conditions don't explain the disparity well, difference in sense of agency does.
So, blaming things outside yourself, whether correctly or not, may be a defensive psychological reaction to misery. Fisher thought something could be done; if he had had a weak sense of agency, he wouldn't have done all that writing for one thing.
The bog reason for male suicides being higher is having higher gun ownership. It makes effective suicide easier.
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But not before encouraging everyone to blame things on "capitalism" which even Marx would have said would be solved by more capitalism.
(Namely cost of living in Anglo countries, which is largely caused by their practically feudalist land usage policies.)
What edition of Marx are you reading?
I mean, late stage capitalism hasn't been working out so great; so he kind of has a point.
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It's a fantastic paragraph. It lays one of Fisher's most striking claims at the feet of the reader and simply asks, "And you agree, right?"
If you do, sally forth, you've probably walked down this road before. You know it well. If you don't, it gracefully folds in to give you a glimpse into how the other side lives and thinks with just enough detail to feel real. Either way is a good time in a sense.
Long reads can be fine, different readers might need to pull in different parts of the context.
> We try to attribute suffering to crappy world systems rather than personal deficiencies.
> We find ways to trust that our negative emotions signify something other than our own inadequacy — that they contain a deeply rational response to the world’s irrational injustice.
Believes suffering is caused by impermanent and changeable features of the world, and that the only alternative is a personal "deficiency"? Believes negative emotions are rational and arise due to clear causation by external forces? I've heard that one before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_marks_of_existence
What the article calls "dialectic" is called "non-dualism" in Buddhism; the author has gotten to the point where they recognize them, but maybe not to the important part which is to remember they aren't real. (Note that something being real or not real is also an incorrect dualism.)
DBT is based on Zen Buddhism, created by a psychologist suffering from borderline personality disorder
That's not very promising. Most versions of Zen are made-up export products designed to flatter Westerners. Kind of like the samurai movie honor bushido stuff.
https://vividness.live/zen-vs-the-u-s-navy
(Japanese people think Buddhism is a thing you do at funerals. If you get into it more seriously, I vaguely understand it's mostly a religion that tells you not to have sex.)
In this case the more important question is whether it actually works.
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Marcuse wants to have a word.
I'd encourage you to flesh out this comment. I've never read Marcuse, and I'm curious what you had in mind.
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