Maybe.
I had fun, though. I’ve relearned that I’m not a person that anyone in their right mind wants to piss off.
Last night, I felt very angry. I recognized that bad parents are terrified of suffering the same fundamental abuse that they inflicted on their own children – emotional abandonment and deprivation – that they want to ensure lasts the rest of their lives. They feel afraid of being abandoned in turn by the children that they inappropriately use to fill their bottomless hunger for affection that they never received themselves when they were young.
I think that this is the closest thing to justice.
I also wanted to emphasize the highly radical and volatile nature of the ideas that we deal with in this community. The more anxiety that the larger world feels about rational philosophy, the more that it demonstrates that they unconsciously understand the threat that it poses to the structure of the civilization.
Emotionally, though, I responded to the helpless terror of the corrupt with rage and invective. Regardless of how much they may deserve to be hated – and how much I genuinely enjoy ranting – I don’t think that my sadism is an attractive character trait, to say the least.
I have difficulty accepting and feeling helplessness and terror in my own personality. I can recognize and sympathize with it in other people. I have experienced some of it in myself – more than I have allowed myself to in the past.
2 Comments
December 14, 2008 at 1:14 am
I must disagree with you here, sir. My view of the anger you expressed in the previous posting was one of righteous anger and justice being spoken to those who have reason to fear it.
Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.
December 14, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Well, it’s interesting because I am ambivalent here, I agree with Michael yet another part of me agrees with you John. He’s right though, man it’s hard.