"The value isn't in reaching a certain state of affairs, but in the process, wherever it may lead, whatever shape the results may take." Or: It doesn't matter whether, or in what form, our friendship continues, what matters is the quality of relationship [as a verb: the quality of relating] by which we do it now: if we do the process right, the outcomes can't be wrong. a) fiercely resisting what I neither asked nor offered, b) while remaining apparently oblivious to what I was actually asking, c) and demanding of me what no sensible, self-respecting person could accept."
with as much trust (giving maximum benefit of the doubt) and vulnerability (requiring as little benefit of the doubt)
as they can under the circumstances
-- brave to stimulate growth pains with criticism, but loath to cause injury with insult;
-- sensitive, generous, brave, willing...
thus likely to emerge, in time, with real "mutual understanding", however much
disagreeing about this or that, or cognizant of deep differences
among their respective tastes and temperaments,
-- and ready to discuss "What now?" at whatever degree of cooperation
or shared individuality fits the moment; and
if each were each to tell all to a third person, that person would recognize the two accounts
as contrasting aspects of a single account, and not be left to wonder importantly
which was the more right, and which the more insane?
Short Long Aside...
Sunday, 7 October 2007
See the |EXAMPLE| section at the bottom for clues to making sense of it all (more to follow, in time)...
Tuesday, 2 October 2007
Anita Hill Resisting Re-Invention. See? He ain't the only one!
The NYT publishes an op-ed by Anita Hill, who says that although Justice Clarence Thomas "has every right to present himself as he wishes in his new memoir ... I will not stand by silently and allow him, in his anger, to reinvent me." Hill says Thomas includes several unsubstantiated claims about her and his descriptions are full of inconsistencies. Still, she is not surprised as "this kind of character attack on women and men who complain of harassment and discrimination in the workplace" is fairly common.
Tuesday, 25 September 2007
Coming Soon: Preventing Communication: A Course in Manipulation, Domination and Control of Others, by Eva Oruste-Bigcrane.
Drawing on a treasury of her own real-life examples, Eva Oruste-Bigcrane will demonstrate a wide range of tactics that can be used to control communications, dominate relationships and avoid even the most basic responsibilities of people to each other. We are truly blessed to have her as co-instructor for this Course, because she is uncommonly skilled in the Art of Self-Righteously Hypocritical Control-Freakery, and has a rare knack for textbook-perfect performances that are as scintillatingly clear as they are undeniably corrupt.
While Eva demonstrates the tactics, I will discuss the underlying strategies and principles that those tactics serve. I will discuss them under two main lights of consideration: technical/strategic, and moral.
But the course will probably not begin until November (2007) probably, since I have other things to do until then. Please be patient. If you are hungry for learning, your wait will be well-rewarded.
Strategies and Tactics we will explore (and which Eva will demonstrate richly, often multiply, in her own words) include:
- Conning the Text. The importance of contextualizing your Target's successes (explaining them in terms of context) and de-contextualizing his failures (placing responsibility on his character), while doing the opposite for your own successes and failures.
- Face-Spitting with a Kiss, Gut-Punching with a Handshake. How to disguise insults and abuse as praise and compliments.
- Catch-22 (or "Damned if He Does or Doesn't"). There are many variations on this. One involves casting your Target's attempt to speak for himself (e.g., to stand up against your abusive attacks) as intolerable abuses of yourself. In another, once (a) you've established a pattern of grossly and systematically misinterpreting your Target's statements, and (b) your "communications" have become massive mess of complication and disconnection: claim that you welcome his responses to your attacks, but that you don't have the time or attention span to read long emails. Voila! He is trapped. If he responds succinctly, you will find plenty of space in what he hasn't said to easily mis-interpret it very unfairly to him. But if he tries to preclude your mis-interpretations by addressing in advance your likely mis-interpretations - poor guy! Now you can brush off his response as "too long". (And he can't claim that you didn't welcome his response!)
- The Claim as Deed. For example: rather than risk the vulnerability that comes with directly answering your Target's specific and detailed criticisms, simply assert (with self-righteous anger and impatience) that you have already answered them. Ta-da!
- The Anti-Apology. How to apologize condescendingly and insultingly, without sincerity or remorse, about nothing-in-particular. (Also: The Requirement of Null Satisfaction: the importance of establishing that, if your Target isn't satisfied with that "apology", then nothing will satisfy him, and there can be no understanding of whatever it is he wants you to apologize for: his neediness is beyond all rationality.)
- The Memory Hole. Freely re-invent the past in self-serving ways, to legitimate yourself and de-legitimate your Target. If your Target produces direct evidence that flatly contradicts your current accout of things, simply rememer: ignore, ignore, ignore: he's just making more neurotic noise.
- The Magical Mirror-Shield. If your Target tries to critically discuss something you've done that is (1) directly relevant to the current context and (2) important to its resolution, you should (A) identify the type of failing implied in his criticism, and (B) attack him for that very same failing. Neither accuracy nor relevance matters: the point is to deflect discussion of your failings while implying that he's a hypocrite. (It also serves to prevent the Exchange from being a Healthy Discussion with the possibility of resolving current issues, in favor of a Quarrel of personal attacks and counter-attacks, whose proper resolution is Your Total Victory.)
...and many, many more.
Q: If Eva is such a consummate Master of these techniques, why doesn't she just teach the whole course herself? Why does she need a pinhead like you to explain it all?
A: "Pinhead"??? Hmm. I guess that's not too derogatory. If one has to be a "pinhead" to teach my half of the course, then it's quite a compliment compared to the qualification necessary for teaching the other half (whose epithets – unlike "pinhead" – are generally scorned in polite company, or even banned on TV).
The reason Eva can't teach the whole course is the same reason I can't. Or, rather, the two reasons are "heads" and "tails" of the same coin.
The Art of Manipulating, Dominating and Totally Negating Another Person is different – in one very important way – from the arts of, say, public speaking or break-dancing: it fundamentally involves moral issues, and has deep implications for the integrity of the practitioner. Since people don't like to think of themselves as hateful, horrible schmucks, it's an irony of this Art that its greatest practitioners are under the greatest psychological pressure to justify their practice in terms that are alien to the Art – terms of rightness or necessity, rather than more accurate terms of abuse or circumstantial insanity.
In other words, the greatest Masters are unlikely to be aware that they are Masters. As far as that's the case, we can expect them to be utterly useless, not only for discussing the principles of their Art and the significance of their virtuoso performances, but even for describing what their own relevant actions are (since what they are doing can’t be separated from why, and they can’t correctly tell why).
If Xorgon from Planet Nogrox (where they play no games) watches a baseball game with no understanding of baseball, he may be able to describe – accurately and in great detail – what he observed; but he won’t be describing a game of baseball, because his description will lack the framework of meanings that make all the activities and events baseball. Still, if he can learn the rules and objectives of baseball, he can re-cast his description from being merely accurate to also being meaningful as the game of baseball: his “what” description can now expand to include a “why” explanation. But until he can give such an explanation, he will be unable to join a team on the field and participate.
If Xorgon observes a Great Master of Hypocritical Condescension and Sanctimonious Aggression perform, he may accurately describe what he sees, with no account of why. It is an observer’s account, objectively complete and adequate from his perspective. But if the Great Master, Herself, gives exactly the same account, it will be incomplete from her own perspective, objectively; and when she fills it out with justifications (as her Practice requires), then it will be wrong – fundamentally.
From an Observer’s standpoint.
If Xorgon gives a clinical description of events that I can infer as the hitting of a three-run home-run (and somebody’s checking to make sure he’s using the words correctly): from Xorgon’s perspective, he didn’t describe a home run (he doesn’t even know what one is), but from my perspective, he did describe a home-run. No problem there.
But if Xorgon then explains anger as the reason why the man currently holding the Big Stick hit with so much force the spherical object that the other man threw toward him, he would be wrong (just as he would be wrong if he explained that it was a hundred-yard touchdown pass). The batter might well have been angry, but that’s irrelevant to his hitting the ball hard (as Xogon would know if he were qualified to participate in the game). We may consider his error to be a mistaken inference: he doesn’t yet know enough to be able to invent plausible hypotheses – or plausible lies.
Participant’s standpoint.
Nobody disputes that Eva invited Mal to be with her in
But when she “explained” [July 27, 2006] that she’d only done so “because it would be rude not to” “if [he] wished to” visit her because he “cared for [her] company” (in an email in which she promotes an impression that she was indifferent about their reunion, but he was eager for it, so she condescended to allow him to be with her) – that is objectively wrong.
(Actually, she didn’t first decide to make the trip, and then decide to invite Mal: they planned the trip together from the very first, following their first joint visit to
Here, for example, is a small sampling of some very non-indifferent expressions by Eva, in the months preceding their reunion in
Ø “I miss you more than ever.” (Jan 29, 2004)
Ø “I do appreciate you more and more with every passing day.” (Jan 30, 2004)
Ø “The problem with being here, now, in this moment, is that making love to the fantasy of you does not fit... Oh, the temptation!” (Feb 24, 2004)
Ø “Dear beautiful man - What you say makes so much sense. But more than that - it, again, inspires and opens my mind and spirit to something wonderful... Thank you!!!…Cherishing you…” (Feb 24, 2004)
Ø “The irrational, all-consuming agitation. I am shaking with chills from the overwhelming flood of emotions, thoughts. Calm down, calm down....The magnitude of split tangents, the sense of absurdity in everything familiar, has become so incomprehensible, impossible to articulate, process. Breathe, damnit! I am not sure talking about it will help. Perhaps it's better to wait couple of days before we talk. Christ, I am feeling like I am going crazy... I just want to make love to you” (Mar 15, 2004)
Ø “I am not even sure I am interested overmuch in a romantic affair with someone who despises natural body and seeks for groomed, shaved, impeccable, beauty-pageant, yoga-tight torso. It has changed my life to have experienced every inch of my body being loved not for what it looks like but because it is MY body. You have given me that gift. How can I possibly find joy in anything else?” (Apr 10, 2004)
Ø “
Ø “I don't know if "love" is an adequate or accurate word to describe the complex, all-encompassing emotions I experience in relation to you. You have become an inseparable part of me... inseparable part of the way I think, perceive, experience, relate, any other relationships that may develop.” (Apr 15, 2004)
Ø “Oh, Malcolm, Malcolm ----- My thirst for your spirit, mind, body is unquenchable.... And my appreciation for you bottomless. Thank you for all you said, and all you didn't. Much to contemplate about. Your questions are invaluable and demand deep reflection...” (Apr 29, 2004)
Because she is fully qualified (irrevocably, short of subsequent brain damage) to “participate” in the explicit meanings of her own past statements, her error cannot be credited (as Xorgon’s could) to the innocence of mistaken inference. If she were coldly lying, we might expect her to be able to give an informative account of her lies, along with an unflattering account of herself for telling them.
But considering the following, I find it virtually inconceivable that she was (and has been, and is) lying so baldly and self-consciously that she might explain herself with useful accuracy. It is practically certain, instead, that, like the greatest performers in any field, she has been “in the zone”, in a trance, so focused on the requirements of her performance that the din of the audience has faded to silence, and even the clear tone of her own potential Integrity doesn’t penetrate the dense intensity surrounding her narrowed consciousness, and call her back to a place out-of-character where she can see her doubt-free performance in the clear light of her own rationally necessary doubts.
Indeed, it is more like the focus of an actress so in character that she is truly unaware of acting, than of an athlete intensely aware of the race and focused on the Finish Line, where he will stop running.
Consider the following (most of which will be demonstrated in various ways during this Course, and for which Eva will helpfully provide many masterfully clear examples):
- Early in their friendship, she touted her own Integrity, and has often said things that reveal Integrity to be an important part of her desired self-image; yet…
- Over these last three years, she has made a great many Very Large “Errors” of many different kinds, unified (beyond the gross failure of Integrity) only by the common theme that they self-servingly:
- De-legitimate him as a person by:
- negating his actual concerns and expressions (forbidding them to ever have spoken or written, except a careful selection, carefully de- or re-contextualized and transfigured to suit her purposes);
- similarly misrepresenting, distorting or ignoring his deeds;
- generally making him out to be Needy, Clueless and Ridiculous, under his newly-appointed concerns in her re-fashioned past; and
- demanding (oh, yes!) that he shut up and accept all of the above (and the below).
- Insulate her from having to:
- look toward, see, acknowledge and apologize for the vast Dishonesty, Hypocrisy, Manipulativeness, Meanness and Outright Insanity of the Program that she has (again) demanded he shut up and swallow: a Program to establish:
a. his own negation (while her vindication);
b. his own blameworthiness for his own abuse;
c. the intolerably offensive criminality of his daring to stand up for himself, even on the grounds of the plainest and most immediately relevant facts-in-context – and with cautious hypothesis, straightforward reasoning, an open mind and listening ear, and forgiveness at-the-ready, just in case she should ever pause long enough in her long-running Freak-Out to listen, to hear, to understand, to gasp with horror at the possibility that he might have been speaking truly when, at various times he pronounced that she’d been “…
| i) fiercely resisting what I neither asked nor offered, ii) while remaining apparently oblivious to what I was actually asking, iii) and demanding of me what no sensible, self-respecting person could accept.” |
- Justify her in the role of aggrieved Victim of a desperately unfortunate Creature: Victim of:
- His desperate loneliness sharpend by social ineptitude;
- His relentless, insatiable neediness;
- His pitiful delusions of adequacy, and neediness for constant reassurance and reinforcement;
- His intensely addictive personality; and
- The deep, sucking Vacuum, where normal people have self-esteem, but which nearly sucked hers out from her. àThank Golly she got away, even though her escape required her to be a bit brutal toward him at times…for which she needed to placate him with stiff, ritual, vague apologies (she absolutely prohibited discussion of specifics). And – the monster-man! – when she finally tossed him the apologies he’d been demanding so long, he still wasn’t satisfied! Hopelessly sick!!!
In other Arts, study and practice go together just fine, but in this Art they are in conflict. To a limited extent, one may alternate between being a Student and a Practitioner, or even be partially both at the same time.
For example, Karl Rove and the Republican spin-meisters are famous examples of people who are much better than average at reconciling the opposing roles. They can do this because the roles are not logically incompatible, but are only morally inconsistent. If there were some psychological Law that people could think of themselves only as morally perfect, then "Mayberry Machiavellis" like Rove would be oxymorons, not just the ordinary kind of moron.
In fact, not only can the Study and the Practice of the Art of Competetive Deep-Soul Chicanery both be alive in the same person at the same time, but since we're prone to a rich complex of psychological distortions like self-serving biases such as the "Fundamental Attribution Error", we're quite well-equipped to accommodate both roles (Student and Master) – but just with the bias to study others' Practice more openly and fearlessly than our own. (Seriousness and Sincerity are natural countervalents to self-serving biases, but simply shining the light of awareness on the problem of Bias can mitigate it.) Even such a brilliantly crass Master of Psychological Skulduggery as our very own Eva Oruste-Bigcrane can be highly sensitive to trifling tricks (and self-righteously piqued by them!) when they’re practiced by Others than herself – sometimes, even when they’re so minor that they never actually occurred. During this Course, Eva will graciously demonstrate self-justifyingly manipulative emotionality ranging from Indignant Haughtiness all the way to Blinding, Wounded Fury over offenses so subtle that they never took place at all.
For those of you who are not so easily impressed, Eva will demonstrate Almighty Outrage over offenses of which, not only is the target of her attacks quite innocent (and the strongest evidence against him weak), but of which she herself is plainly, undeniably (and embarrassingly!) guilty.
Such flagrant hypocrisy combined with aggression, alone, may seem like the fancy weapons of a Quarrelsome Ego-Warrior. But when her Target tries to stand up for himself – even where he is obviously trying to acknowledge what is valid in her attacks while firmly rejecting the most outrageous offenses, and while not returning her highly personal attacks in kind, but carefully and specifically criticizing her most immediately-relevant offensive behavior (and being careful to give her the benefit of the doubt wherever certainty is not justified) – when we see that, and we see Eva respond with negatory tactics in programmatic consistency [A-G below], we realize:
· Not only does she not want substantive or healthy or honest and open conversation, nor a reasonable resolution of shared Problems-in-Relationship achieved through any other honest means (she may just be content to believe in honesty); but,
· While she Quarrels, she doesn’t want to quarrel; and
· Though she wages War, she doesn’t want to fight.
If actions reveal motivations better than words do, then her actions show a desire for Total Domination, Total Control, Total Victory, Total Vindication. To attack her Target, and then play the poor, aggrieved Victim of his attempts to speak fairly for himself (which clearly show that he has a Problem, that he’s a sick and troubled soul), is to remove his voice and any defense it might have spoken: to prejudicially strip him of dignity and legitimacy, to negate him: to destroy him, yes, but also to blame him for deserving his own destruction.
Completing the Total Program is her enduring ownership of a fake self-validating Story – made from the remnants of what had been his own potential validation in the context of the relationships in which it mattered, in which it was relevant and right – potential validation prevented from reality by Eva, using a full range of tactics of control and manipulation – of all-out Nuclear Ego-War – a fake self-validating Story which she may now use, comfortingly, to complain about all the unpleasant, disgusting, appalling and exhausting Trouble she had to endure to Destroy her Target, because he wouldn’t voluntarily sacrifice himself to the Purpose, but insisted upon minimal standards of integrity and decency. How dare he!!!
Invulnerable, Unilateral Attack-tics
A. Deny that she attacked in the first place.
B. Re-attack.
C. Flatly deny the substance of the Target’s critical self-defense without showing anything specifically wrong with it (as if his character alone were enough to invalidate it).
D. Flatly deny the substance of the Target’s critical self-defense, using questionable or invalid evidence, making clear that further discussion will not be allowed.
E. Mock and ridicule the Target.
F. Adopt a condescendingly conciliatory-but-unapologetic posture and tone, and vaguely admit excesses or transgressions, but make perfectly clear that responses will not be entertained. With this sort of “response”, Eva leaves hanging in the air – unspoken but loud and clear – the understanding that, while she may be guilty of going a little too far sometimes, her overall Program of All-Out Ego-War – of Total Domination and Control – is deeply justified, and the Target is thus deeply guilty of deserving all but the most extreme of his abuse. (And he’d better start learning to shut up and take it, because, goddamit, she’s getting really tired of dishing it out.)
G. (The most common tactic of all). Simply ignore the Target after her initial attack: she gets the first, last and only word, and has the only Voice befitting a human being. Any noise he might make is simply irrelevant: he might move his lips or labor away typing at emails, but is not allowed a voice, and has none. She may issue her attack repeatedly over years, each time as if for the first time, as if he had never answered carefully and honestly, at length and in detail – thus ensuring that he never did…at least in the context of a dialogue.
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