An Addict's Story
Don't let this happen to you!!!
It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then - to loosen up. Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker.
I began to think alone - "to relax," I told myself - but I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.
That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's.
I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself.
I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?"
One day the boss called me in. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job." This gave me a lot to think about.
I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..."
"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"
"But Honey, surely it's not that serious."
"It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors, and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't have any money!"
"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently. She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama.
"I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door. I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche. I roared into the parking lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors ... They didn't open. The library was closed.
To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night. Leaning on the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye, "Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked. You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinker's Anonymous poster.
Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker.
I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's." Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.
I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed ... easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking. I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.
*.*
Never hit a man when he's down . . . kick him, it's easier.
*.*
What interesting property do these words have in common:
body day how one place thing time what where?
Each forms a new word when appended to the word "some."
*.*
"Say," said the smooth operator in a confidential tone to the host of the party, "there's a lot of hot babes at this party. If I find one that's ready to grab a quick one, would you mind if I used your extra bedroom?"
"What about your wife?"
"Oh, I won't be gone that long. She'll never miss me."
"No, I'm sure she won't miss you," smirked the host, "but fifteen minutes ago. She borrowed the extra bedroom."
*.*
Definitions and cool meanings
Cigarette: A pinch of tobacco rolled in paper with fire at one end and a fool at the other.
Love affairs: Something like cricket where one-day internationals are more popular than a five day test.
Lecture: The art of transferring information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the students without passing through "the minds of either".
Conference: The confusion of one man multiplied by the number present.
Compromise: The art of dividing a cake in such a way that each person believes he got the biggest piece.
Tears: The hydraulic force by which masculine willpower is defeated by feminine water-power.
Conference Room: A place where everybody talks, nobody listens & everybody disagrees on later.
Classic: A book which people praise, but do not read.
Office: A place where you can relax after your strenuous home life.
Yawn: The only time some married men ever get to open their mouths.
Etc.: A sign to make others believe that you know more than you actually do.
Committee: Individuals who can do nothing individually and sit to decide that nothing can be done together.
Experience: The name men give to their mistakes.
Philosopher: A fool who torments himself during life, to be spoken of when dead.
Opportunist: A person who starts taking a bath if he accidentally falls into a river.
Optimist: A person who, while falling from the Eiffel Tower, says midway, "See? I am not injured yet."
Pessimist: A person who says that O is the last letter in ZERO, instead of the first letter in OPPORTUNITY.
Boss: Someone who is early when you are late and late when you are early.
Politician: One who shakes your hand before elections and your confidence afterwards.
Issue of the Times;
Tony Gibson’s Theory of School Violence By Michael S. Rozeff
Hamilton Bertie “Tony” Gibson (1914-2001) was a British anarchist, conscientious objector (for which he was imprisoned) and psychologist. Gibson wrote Youth for Freedom (1951), a provocative pamphlet. From this work, we may extract a theory that explains school violence, which is a worldwide phenomenon and not uniquely American. Being worldwide, youth violence cannot be explained by the means of violence used, be they guns, clubs, knives, rocks, spears, fire, or whatever.
The theory can be partly stated as follows. Children have certain behaviors that come naturally to them, instinctively one might say. If they are allowed to have a childhood that lets them vent and live through these instincts, they will develop into adults who are not unusually aggressive. But if adults make the child live in ways that go too much against these natural instincts, then the child retains its asocial and ferocious instincts into adult life, rather than living through them as a childhood stage of development. Adults then look adult and act adult but retain child instincts and behavior. As he says “The nice young men who lightheartedly fly bombers and devastate towns are simply neurotic beings who have had to wait until their twenties to give proper expression to the instincts of infancy.” Later he writes “The children who grow up with a satisfactory gratification of their instinctual life in the various phases of their development are more likely to have sound adult instincts at a comparatively early age and therefore resist the fantastic demands of the State in the matter of military service.”
The more that a culture (mainly through public schools) anywhere in the world attempts to suppress mildly aggressive or simply physical behaviors that are peculiar to children and make them behave in adult ways that restrict them too greatly, the more likely we are to observe extremes of aggression breaking out and the more that aggressive instincts will be nurtured in adults. Giving drugs to children to suppress their activities and tendencies will tend to produce a greater tendency toward excessive violence, not simply or only by the physical aspects of the drugs but also by psychological reactions to the behavior control. The same outcome will come about by preventing boys from being boys, over-controlling rough and tumble play, overly suppressing taunts, fights, shoves, pushes, and rough sports. Children need the freedom to play with other children, to shout, to roughneck, and to play all kinds of games. They need the freedom to roam around on their own. They shouldn’t be prevented from learning how to shoot rifles or bows and arrows, if this appeals to them. Vicarious video game experiences may or may not provide adequate substitutes for play; I suspect that they do not in general do so.
The basis of this theory is Gibson’s observation that children are weaker than adults, and that to survive as weak beings under the thumbs of adults, they have behaviors peculiar to being children. “The child is a gregarious but not a truly social animal; when in mental and physical health, it is aggressive to the point of ferocity and capable of a ruthlessness which normal adults do not possess. It is entirely self-centered, and its love for other persons is of an essentially different nature from the affection which an adult may feel for another person.”
Aggression in adults and therefore approval of the State’s aggressions is, according to this theory, fostered by social systems and adults that overly control children. Since public schools exercise such control, they produce more adults who support the State, not simply or only by indoctrination or false history but by psychological means that make people comfortable with violent aggression and immorality.
“The well-meaning social moralists who bring up children according to an idealized adult code of behavior have to bear their full share of the blame for the supreme immorality of adult behavior.”
“The State in its drive towards totalitarian dominion assumes more and more the aspect of a hypocritical and repressive adult controlling a lot of children. In all the aspects of State interference with individual liberty we see the nasty schoolmarm, the pompous father.”
Guns do not explain youth and school violence because it is worldwide and doesn’t always involve guns. There are other theories than Gibson’s that attempt to explain school violence. There are theories that directly challenge Gibson, arguing that childhood aggression is not a playful thing that children grow out of. They argue that aggression is learned and therefore must be countered or suppressed in one way or another by adults. But if this is true, why are Americans and others experiencing even greater school violence as the attempts to suppress it are heightened?
I think Gibson’s theory has merit. If we are observing greater school violence, it is at the same time that we observe society constricting the schools, enforcing more and more rules, attempting to feminize boys, and going to extremes to suppress even mildly aggressive, even verbal, behavior. We see greater amounts of drugs being administered to children to dampen them down. This is tending to prevent normal childhood development. In the vain quest of reducing person-on-person violence, it is enhancing it. Not only that, it is producing adults who are comfortable with high amounts of State-inflicted violence and aggression.
Quote of the Times;
As the Romans knew, if you're not going to colonize a conquered territory, the correct strategy is to go in hard, break things and kill people, then immediately leave. Repeat as needed.
Link of the Times;
http://www.unz.com/isteve/a-terrific-graph/
Subscribe or Submit to the Internet's elite source;
Send E-mail to efreem2@alumni.umbc.edu
to complement The Field!
Or
Follow me on Twitter: @aod318
Don't let this happen to you!!!
It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then - to loosen up. Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker.
I began to think alone - "to relax," I told myself - but I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.
That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's.
I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself.
I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?"
One day the boss called me in. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job." This gave me a lot to think about.
I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..."
"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"
"But Honey, surely it's not that serious."
"It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors, and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't have any money!"
"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently. She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama.
"I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door. I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche. I roared into the parking lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors ... They didn't open. The library was closed.
To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night. Leaning on the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye, "Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked. You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinker's Anonymous poster.
Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker.
I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's." Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.
I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed ... easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking. I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.
*.*
Never hit a man when he's down . . . kick him, it's easier.
*.*
What interesting property do these words have in common:
body day how one place thing time what where?
Each forms a new word when appended to the word "some."
*.*
"Say," said the smooth operator in a confidential tone to the host of the party, "there's a lot of hot babes at this party. If I find one that's ready to grab a quick one, would you mind if I used your extra bedroom?"
"What about your wife?"
"Oh, I won't be gone that long. She'll never miss me."
"No, I'm sure she won't miss you," smirked the host, "but fifteen minutes ago. She borrowed the extra bedroom."
*.*
Definitions and cool meanings
Cigarette: A pinch of tobacco rolled in paper with fire at one end and a fool at the other.
Love affairs: Something like cricket where one-day internationals are more popular than a five day test.
Lecture: The art of transferring information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the students without passing through "the minds of either".
Conference: The confusion of one man multiplied by the number present.
Compromise: The art of dividing a cake in such a way that each person believes he got the biggest piece.
Tears: The hydraulic force by which masculine willpower is defeated by feminine water-power.
Conference Room: A place where everybody talks, nobody listens & everybody disagrees on later.
Classic: A book which people praise, but do not read.
Office: A place where you can relax after your strenuous home life.
Yawn: The only time some married men ever get to open their mouths.
Etc.: A sign to make others believe that you know more than you actually do.
Committee: Individuals who can do nothing individually and sit to decide that nothing can be done together.
Experience: The name men give to their mistakes.
Philosopher: A fool who torments himself during life, to be spoken of when dead.
Opportunist: A person who starts taking a bath if he accidentally falls into a river.
Optimist: A person who, while falling from the Eiffel Tower, says midway, "See? I am not injured yet."
Pessimist: A person who says that O is the last letter in ZERO, instead of the first letter in OPPORTUNITY.
Boss: Someone who is early when you are late and late when you are early.
Politician: One who shakes your hand before elections and your confidence afterwards.
Issue of the Times;
Tony Gibson’s Theory of School Violence By Michael S. Rozeff
Hamilton Bertie “Tony” Gibson (1914-2001) was a British anarchist, conscientious objector (for which he was imprisoned) and psychologist. Gibson wrote Youth for Freedom (1951), a provocative pamphlet. From this work, we may extract a theory that explains school violence, which is a worldwide phenomenon and not uniquely American. Being worldwide, youth violence cannot be explained by the means of violence used, be they guns, clubs, knives, rocks, spears, fire, or whatever.
The theory can be partly stated as follows. Children have certain behaviors that come naturally to them, instinctively one might say. If they are allowed to have a childhood that lets them vent and live through these instincts, they will develop into adults who are not unusually aggressive. But if adults make the child live in ways that go too much against these natural instincts, then the child retains its asocial and ferocious instincts into adult life, rather than living through them as a childhood stage of development. Adults then look adult and act adult but retain child instincts and behavior. As he says “The nice young men who lightheartedly fly bombers and devastate towns are simply neurotic beings who have had to wait until their twenties to give proper expression to the instincts of infancy.” Later he writes “The children who grow up with a satisfactory gratification of their instinctual life in the various phases of their development are more likely to have sound adult instincts at a comparatively early age and therefore resist the fantastic demands of the State in the matter of military service.”
The more that a culture (mainly through public schools) anywhere in the world attempts to suppress mildly aggressive or simply physical behaviors that are peculiar to children and make them behave in adult ways that restrict them too greatly, the more likely we are to observe extremes of aggression breaking out and the more that aggressive instincts will be nurtured in adults. Giving drugs to children to suppress their activities and tendencies will tend to produce a greater tendency toward excessive violence, not simply or only by the physical aspects of the drugs but also by psychological reactions to the behavior control. The same outcome will come about by preventing boys from being boys, over-controlling rough and tumble play, overly suppressing taunts, fights, shoves, pushes, and rough sports. Children need the freedom to play with other children, to shout, to roughneck, and to play all kinds of games. They need the freedom to roam around on their own. They shouldn’t be prevented from learning how to shoot rifles or bows and arrows, if this appeals to them. Vicarious video game experiences may or may not provide adequate substitutes for play; I suspect that they do not in general do so.
The basis of this theory is Gibson’s observation that children are weaker than adults, and that to survive as weak beings under the thumbs of adults, they have behaviors peculiar to being children. “The child is a gregarious but not a truly social animal; when in mental and physical health, it is aggressive to the point of ferocity and capable of a ruthlessness which normal adults do not possess. It is entirely self-centered, and its love for other persons is of an essentially different nature from the affection which an adult may feel for another person.”
Aggression in adults and therefore approval of the State’s aggressions is, according to this theory, fostered by social systems and adults that overly control children. Since public schools exercise such control, they produce more adults who support the State, not simply or only by indoctrination or false history but by psychological means that make people comfortable with violent aggression and immorality.
“The well-meaning social moralists who bring up children according to an idealized adult code of behavior have to bear their full share of the blame for the supreme immorality of adult behavior.”
“The State in its drive towards totalitarian dominion assumes more and more the aspect of a hypocritical and repressive adult controlling a lot of children. In all the aspects of State interference with individual liberty we see the nasty schoolmarm, the pompous father.”
Guns do not explain youth and school violence because it is worldwide and doesn’t always involve guns. There are other theories than Gibson’s that attempt to explain school violence. There are theories that directly challenge Gibson, arguing that childhood aggression is not a playful thing that children grow out of. They argue that aggression is learned and therefore must be countered or suppressed in one way or another by adults. But if this is true, why are Americans and others experiencing even greater school violence as the attempts to suppress it are heightened?
I think Gibson’s theory has merit. If we are observing greater school violence, it is at the same time that we observe society constricting the schools, enforcing more and more rules, attempting to feminize boys, and going to extremes to suppress even mildly aggressive, even verbal, behavior. We see greater amounts of drugs being administered to children to dampen them down. This is tending to prevent normal childhood development. In the vain quest of reducing person-on-person violence, it is enhancing it. Not only that, it is producing adults who are comfortable with high amounts of State-inflicted violence and aggression.
Quote of the Times;
As the Romans knew, if you're not going to colonize a conquered territory, the correct strategy is to go in hard, break things and kill people, then immediately leave. Repeat as needed.
Link of the Times;
http://www.unz.com/isteve/a-terrific-graph/
Subscribe or Submit to the Internet's elite source;
Send E-mail to efreem2@alumni.umbc.edu
to complement The Field!
Or
Follow me on Twitter: @aod318
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