December 15, 2024

Psychology today

You’re not supposed to achieve your goals. They’re guides. Stars, you can’t touch.

If you’ve ever actually achieved a goal, you’ll know the resulting feeling is often disappointment.¹

My mother created an entire new career for herself at the age of 40, in a new country, in a new language. A second PhD for a woman born on a dirt floor, to an illiterate mother and an alcoholic father.

How’d she do it? Honestly, I’ll never know and, frankly, I hope – and I’m sure she does as well – that I’ll never have to learn how to survive 1) poverty 2) civil war 3) fascism (in Cuba, it’s pronounced “communism”) 4) being a refugee 5) being a professional woman 6) surviving breast cancer, twice! and so on.

But one of her habits is quite simple to emulate: never stand still.

When I sat down to eat lunch on Friday, I decided I could better use my free time by simultaneously chewing and picking up the lemons off the floor. And when I had finished stacking them on the table, I decided to continue in my father’s footsteps: being a witness to an unpopular truth.²

So I recorded a short video making the simple observation that the best way to rob a bank is to buy one install a toadie to run the FBI and the DOJ, while appointing extractive capitalists (pillagers, looters) to run the regulatory bodies that govern banks, financial markets, our industries.

Someone who follows me with a good number of followers must have shared it on Saturday because, for a few hours, my typical audience of ~50 friends and acquaintances became a few thousand strangers.³

I knew because I started to get comments from private accounts that read: “Liberalism is a disease”, “Why is this liberal doosh in my timeline,” “Do you drink your own pee?”, “Lay off the drugs” and, best of all, “What about the Biden crime family?”

Twenty years ago, before I understood the Internet, I would have replied to each and every one. But, wiser, I simply deleted each comment and blocked each user.

My job was done.

You see, I know how to make videos for Instagram – I had to learn, to earn a living – and so I began the video with a strong visual and an interesting fact that goes contrary to conventional wisdom:

When life gives you lemons… did you know that lemons are man-made?

And then I proceeded to read the fascists for filth.⁴

People like to learn new things as long as they can easily jettison their old beliefs.

But the nature of confidence games – which is fundamentally what “Don the Con” and his fellow crooks in the GOP have been playing for years (“trickle down economics”!) – is they are psychological maneuvers.

The person being conned REFUSES to believe what their lying eyes are telling them because the psychic pain – the wound to the ego – of accepting they’ve been had is too great for their soft, untrained minds to handle.

(Yes, some people – often REFUGEES and poor IMMIGRANTS, actually!!! – are trained to handle pain. Such people don’t need crystals, ketamine or raw milk to withstand the unimaginable suffering of having all their basic needs met.)

In any case, there’s no need to answer a hit dog hollering.

They need to let out their pain. They deserve to! I am, to them, the foot of the bed they’ve stubbed their toe upon. I’d curse me, too!

The best thing I’ve read this week

It’s not even close: Spencer Ackerman on the apparent assassin of Brian Thompson

Here’s an excerpt:

There’s something horribly wrong in this country. Most people can feel it. They can feel that we seem to be on the cusp of widespread violence. Conservatives are desperate to brand their own enemies as agents of a corrupt system and manufacture support for violence against them. But the system is hard to disguise. W. E. B. du Bois had it pegged a hundred and forty years ago in Black Reconstruction: “[T]he prevalent American idea [is that] labor could be emancipated from the necessity of continuous toil and that an increasing proportion could join the class of exploiters, that is of those who make their income chiefly by profit derived through the hiring of labor.” Health insurance is a remarkably efficient engine of that exploitation.

Thompson’s murder has been celebrated across a political divide most of us were lamenting as impassible last month. Conservatives are yelling the same things at Ben Shapiro that liberals are yelling at Adrienne LaFrance: that their loved ones are dead because UnitedHealthcare didn’t give them the treatment they needed or the dignity they deserved. It’s particularly clarifying in light of the way some of Donald Trump’s supporters adopted his mug shot as a badge of honor. Of the Trump supporters I talk to, every one is convinced that his various indictments are proof that he opposes a system we all know to be corrupt.

I will repeat myself: there is more instability in our system today than ever. The future is incredibly uncertain.

That uncertainty does not necessarily mean that the fascists will lose and liberalism will triumph again. (tbh, I fear eco-fascism most. I dread it, in fact. It feels very fucking likely.)

But it does mean that most Americans want what progressives have been working towards for decades.

Unfortunately, most progressives with power appear to lack a basic understanding of human psychology or the nature of crime.

Sheltered, soft, middle class white people, my beautiful and kind classmates and colleagues: I love you so much but you’re fucking killing us, lol.⁵

postscript

Speaking of satire: Jonathan Swift, I hope you’re having a blast in Heaven.