January 9, 2025

How To Self-Destruct Your Way To Happiness

Note: This issue is something of a follow-up to The Amiable Reaper. You don’t need to have read that to understand this issue, but it is available in the archive or through direct request by email. Some of the points in this letter will also be expanded upon in individual issues, this is a broad piece, an introduction of sorts before particular chapters.

Note Jr: I’ll say it upfront that I have never actually been in a recovery program, but I have spent a good deal of time around them – more space constrained mental health inpatient services can see one becoming witness, but not party, to all sorts of normally more private events – and have spent essentially all my life dealing with addicts in some capacity outside of very early years that are mostly beyond recollection anyway. I’m very lucky to be someone who can drop a substance when I truly stop enjoying it or if someone else asks me to. I say lucky, but it’s also knowing when to deploy stubbornness constructively. Also keep in mind that people in the grips of psychotic detachment from reality, dementia, or in conditions of truly extreme deprivation and/or danger are outside the boundaries of this discussion except when referred to. When I talk about people struggling with mental disturbance below, I am referring to disturbances which  still leave the afflicted connected to a common, shared reality. 

I have a recurring pattern in my life where people like to open up about their very unique struggles – that active listening stuff works too well sometimes, if we’re being honest– and then vehemently deny the facts when I tell them that these problems have actually been described extensively, and have several proposed treatments that have each worked for at least some people. This usually repeats until I get annoyed enough to browbeat them into looking into the relevant material before I’ll drop it, and they then go “Oh, wow, look at that, you were right”. It’s a unique frustration when someone tells you there are no words for their problems until you make them put them into words, the words describe textbook executive dysfunction, and then they immediately agree it’s pretty nail on the head when they look it up.  It makes me want to crawl up the ceiling and chew on a cinderblock in a corner when the profound uniqueness of their issue was how they explained the supposed insurmountability of changing their shitty behavior. I could never be a therapist. I don’t think I’d be bad at it, exactly, but I don’t think approaches like out-raging someone with anger management problems in an enclosed space neither of you can easily walk away from until they can’t handle the escalation and retreat back to more moderate behavior are approved of by either professional ethics organizations or practitioner insurance provider, despite my personal evidence of efficacy. I think if I were to break this cycle, the lesson might be that I should be quicker to harshness, but I think most people would consider that a bad take-away. It is increasingly what I do indeed take away from these situations, but I get the objections. 

I would say I am a deeply cynical person, not because I think people or systems are mostly incapable of change, but because I believe people are very good at convincing themselves of that incapability, and are often motivated to do so by internal and external forces. We have quality evidence of populations being able to pull together during times of catastrophe – remember when people were trying to get disaster socialism to catch on as a term for that? –  but there is a widespread myth of inevitable, rapid descents into all-consuming dog-eat-dogism. There’d be a real problem if all the people who buy into it were to act as if it were true in a crisis. If enough individuals assume everyone else is a myopic asshole, and act in what they think is a rationally aggressive manner, you are in fact stuck with a bunch of myopic assholes. The problem did not need to exist, but in trying to protect against it, it was created. Classic self-fulling prophecy, sans guys whose headaches end in birth. Insert your own horrific “splitting” pun/double entendre here. Also, a little freebie, Forehead C-Section would be a great name for a terrible band. Anyway, point is, people are great at creating a terrible life for themselves by convincing themselves life will be terrible. I’m here to offer you hope. 

I decided to bring up anger management issues earlier for a reason. That’s because it’s within a cluster of impulse control problems that are real, but are usually hyperbolic to describe as loss of control rather than impairment. There are truly furious people who will unleash themselves on just about anyone who sets them off. But I would say that’s a relative rarity. What’s more common are people who get aggravated by things throughout the day, and take it out on people who are in a position that makes it difficult to respond with proportional aggression. Partners, children, service workers, ect. Whenever someone feels demeaned at work, but keeps on smiling until they get home only to scream at their family, they are making a choice and a calculation. They may truly have a deficiency influencing their actions, but even then they are choosing to direct their anger not towards their source, but at someone who offers less consequences. It’s a sadly common cowardice.When you can out anger an angry person until they descelate, it demonstrates they are capable of self de-escalation in the right circumstances. These facts ultimately reflect poorly on the anger impulse impaired, but they’re demonstrative that people being entirely unable to control themselves is an unusual condition, even in the context of an abnormal condition. 

 Alcoholism is a disease that can come with physiological effects when not indulged, but staying functional for work and then missing little Timmy’s baseball games so you can slam back vodka that comes in a plastic bottle is still making a choice semi-independent of the dependency itself. It may be technically logical: little Timmy feeling disappointed is less of an immediate issue than little Timmy losing the roof over his head because you got plastered at work and tried to make sweet love to the potted plants, and recovery can be costly in multiple ways if you have inpatient needs, so simply quitting might not seem to be on the table in practical terms. It is still a choice though. There is a level of control being exerted, even if it’s in a context of diminished capacity. I get told I sound unsympathetic to addicts and troubled souls despite my stated agreement with progressive methods of treatment and intervention from time to time, and I would say that’s somewhat true. If someone can own up to having made those choices and is trying to change, I don’t feel the need to make judgements beyond the practical. You know, don’t invite Fred to anything boozy if other people drinking is a source of great temptation. That sort of thing. If someone won’t do that, I do indeed think they’re an asshole and don’t trust them to have reformed in character even if they’ve corrected specific behaviors. 

I think anyone who has dealt with someone who completely externalizes the source of their behavior while disturbed or while struggling with addiction knows that can be a problem. Genuine “the blank made me do it” believers are incredibly hard to get any restitution from, including legally mandated forms of it, when they dig into a position of “I’m not really responsible, when you think about it.” Trust me on that if you’ve been blessed to never have had to deal with it. But that’s the most blatant form of denying self-control. There are more subtle forms. Before I continue, I want to be clear I’m not trying to have a bit of a go at Alcoholics Anonymous and similar twelve-step programs. That’s absolutely what I’m doing, but it’s fairly effortless. 

I’ll say this for TS, it does encourage making amends and taking responsibility on paper. I’d say the execution can be murky though, and there are limitations built into the steps themselves. If you didn’t know, the twelve-steps are an explicitly spiritual recovery system, albeit secular groups are becoming more popular,  and surrendering to a higher power is the second step. Technically it's a non-denominational understanding of higher power –same for God as mentioned in later steps– but you do get more dubious groups that push pretty heavily towards Christianity in a classic bit of exploitation of vulnerability, you know,kind of like sending out youthful missionaries loaded with promises of eternal familyhood to middle class neighborhoods during the period of summer right after kids will have left the nest to off to college. But let’s look at six and seven for a moment (they’re written in the past tense in material, so it reads a little oddly when individual ones are isolated from that frame): 6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. 7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

I can’t tell you exactly how recommended best practices or the founders want these statements to be interpreted, but I can tell you how they are too often interpreted, in my experience. The psychological effect I see develop in members with a concerning frequency is them coming to view defects as neatly separable from some true core self, and able to be pruned out with that core unchanged. They wind up in a similar place as “the blank made me do it”, even though they are making what sound like acknowledgements that it was them that did x things, and not some less interesting Mr. Hyde. They’re not a neglectful person, you see, the booze was the root of neglectfulness, not necessarily a pre-existing propensity that was made more severe. Now the booze is gone, so obviously they’re better on that front, but they do happen to be so darn busy with this new lease on life that they couldn’t tell what the kids are up to at the moment. Or any moment. But it’s fine.  I think a more familiar dynamic to the average reader might be people who refuse to entertain the possibility that they have a problem until they knocked on their ass by a hard reality check, come out of treatment with a remarkably undeflated ego, and proceed to essentially treat the everyone else like they must all have the same issues to a slightly less dramatic degree. They’re very similar to, and overlap with, born-agains who catastrophically fuck up their own lives, get into religion anew, and then talk down to everyone not sufficiently into Jesus like they must be fucking up in the same way. I may have made many mistakes in my life, Steve, but I can confidently say that not everyone who is cold towards the wine and wafers combo is going to ruin their marriage because they called their wife in tears while having a panic attack about how they were unable to perform with a prostitute because the cocaine abuse had finally wrapped around from helping you get excited to inducing erectile dysfunction. That’s you all over, baby. You may have heard the joke that the sort of person who treats addiction and recovery as revealing universal truths as  “Became alcoholics for our/your sins.”

 Credit where credit is due, in recovery circles there are calls to be more humble, and they even have terminology for people who do things like shunt immoderate behavior into new pursuits rather than address the base dysregulation –see: Dry Drunk Syndrome–  although that doesn’t mean any given group will have people who know how to contend with these sorts, and they can really fuck up a space. The construction of those sixth and seventh steps without more refined guidance leaves room for followers to isolate themselves from their choices. They made those choices because of their addiction, so to treat the dependency is to treat the other downstream problems too, even if that sort of mental accountability dodging is frowned upon by the program material.  But, as I said with anger management, to be able to exercise some discernment in how one indulges, to be able to direct who is on the receiving end of one’s behavioral problems, does reveal something deeper about the person. The core is not being  unilaterally corrupted, the core is also shaping the expression of corruption. Granted, this is not the most immediate issue with the typical problematic AA type group. That’d probably be the deficit of personalities strong enough to both realize when sharing has descended into counter-productive, romantic reminiscence and know how to curb it. Or it might be the behavior towards new and younger members that’s remarkably similar to grooming.  There are a few contenders to pick from, but, to bring this back to the  broader point, there is a more fundamental issue that makes the 6 and 7 problem a predictable one if we consider the first rule: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable. 

Powerless. Unmanageable. These are not nuanced terms. Unmanageable. But not everyone in AA, despite the invocation of ideas like “hitting rock bottom” by members, has totally lost all control. Their management is maladaptive, and may have finally run up against its own limitations if they’re there as part of an agreement with a court, but there are members who maintain a siloing of some parts of their lives from their own worst excesses and bad behavior. They are capable of some management. Powerless, but there are those who remain able to shape the pattern of indulgence of the addiction to various degrees. To be fair to AA, material like The “Big Book” is aimed at people who have lost the ability to moderate their drinking to an extreme degree rather  than people who can moderate or voluntarily cessate to a point independently. Problem is, in suffering from success, twelve step programs, with all their unnuancedness, are all too often the only programs accessible in a number of places, or even available, to all the various types of people who want to change their relationships to addictive substances and behaviors in some way. Even more so if they need to find a program to attend as part of some agreement with the law.  You’ll find that there’s a matter of some disagreement to the recovery rate of AA participants, and much of it comes down to what you count as participation. Poking at the data, the very lowest rates tend to look at total attendance estimates and subsequent adherence to the program. The highest rates tend to focus on people who have engaged with the program at some minimum threshold. Part of this discrepancy stems from the fact that a large percentage of people only attend a single or small number of meetings and bounce off the program, while people who consciously commit to the twelve-steps specifically have more success with it, with people who engage voluntarily having the highest recovery rates. I bring this up not to say AA, or NA and other groups, doesn’t work at all, but because this “higher power” construction is why some people don’t follow up. That and the more immediate problems within specific groups. 

In psychology, there is a concept called Locus of Control, which is how much someone believes they have agency in terms of being able to influence the outcomes of events in their lives. Someone with an internal locus tends towards believing they’re in control of their lives, while someone with an external locus tends to feel like outside factors control them, but these points exist on a spectrum rather than a binary, and, in practical terms, there are always outside factors affecting us even when we accept full responsibility for individual actions. Interestingly, there’s not a consensus on whether internal or external individuals are more predisposed to alcoholism, but with the concept we can take an educated guess as to why some people are so quickly repelled by something like AA. It asks individuals to accept externalization of agency. I would say it’s reasonable to assume that that approach is not going to be as compelling to people who feel agency comes from within, even if that agency is undermined by dependency, as it is to people who already tend towards external beliefs. This is not an entirely original thought, and there have been efforts to make more internal locus friendly approaches to recovery. That specific term is not on the back cover synopsis of books like Allen Carr’s The Easy Way to Stop Drinking, but a significant part of its approach is to reframe the reader's relationship with alcohol in their own mind, rather than appealing to something outside of the reader. Carr’s books alone sold well enough that I feel safe in saying there is an appetite for this sort of treatment. His book on smoking cessation found some support for its efficacy from third-party studies. In the aforementioned book on treating alcoholism, he expresses both admiration for AA in that it has helped  people, and open disdain for its broader philosophy of addiction. These are not in tension. That it is a successful method to some degree, far better than nothing, does not mean it is the best possible method, nor that it is a universal one.  

Now, the thing about twelve-step programs is that they are focused on dealing with addiction, and sometimes more addiction-compulsion overlap behaviors like hoarding, rather than holistic treatments. They aren’t built to also treat comorbid disorders or general dickheadedness.  That treatment is valuable by itself, but tedious condescenders are not the worst possible consequence of this focus. The worst case scenario is something like Mike Lindell,  the crazed Pauper-King of Lumpy Pillows himself,  a man who dropped coke and gambling without seeming to have learned a single lesson about behavioral moderation and impulse control. He is a man who managed to Dry Drunk his way into enthusiastic participation in, and proliferation of, a far right conspiracy theory. He is an exemplar of the phenomenon, but is not at all unique in this reactionary evolution post-recovery, or after being born again to loop those fellows back in. Lindell, it should be noted, is a rather religious man. The surrender to the external did not improve his character. One last bit of terminology we’ll pull from recovery circles real quick is terminal uniqueness: the belief that one's specific experience is so special that they can’t relate to others or be helped by pre-existing methods. Sounds a bit like the people I mentioned struggling with, doesn’t it?

It’s easy to criticize, to point out shortcomings. It’s harder to be constructive. But I’m going to have a crack at it. There won’t ever be a universal system for self-improvement, but what I can offer you is advice on how to change yourself based on how I changed myself in ways that have been well-received by others and have made me feel better about my life and myself. This is the Semiurge Kill Yourself Happy method, one of the only methods that experts in the field –me, myself, and I– recommend not only as way to better yourself, but also get worse if that’s your jam. 

“That’s an inflammatory name, don’t you think?” you might be asking yourself. Yes. But not pointlessly. Well, not entirely pointlessly.  There’s a bit of uncommon common sense, a sentiment popular within certain “why can’t we all just get along?” circles. It’s basically that someone who feels Divinity is real and someone who doesn’t perceive reality in mutually exclusive ways, and one won’t be able to convince the other of so different a fundamental reality. This might be true on the extremes –e.g. for someone who has never felt any interpretation of divinity was convincing in any way– but is bullshit in the spaces inbetween. I’m not qualifying that one with any sort of maybe or might. I was raised religious. I was drawn to kinder interpretations of the Christian God, and anything diabolical in imagery and reference tickles my psychosis. Trust me, that last part is pretty inescapable living in America. Say what you will about the Devil, but even his haters are fascinated, for some reason. I’ve always seen the figure as dull and a bit of a loser, despite being plagued by it in a pseudo-literal sense thanks to my truly deep-seated schizophrenia, but that’s neither here nor there. In my younger days, my skepticism was a very meager thing. I would say that before some point I can’t quite pin down, I never even doubted the existence of God, just the interpretations on offer. But as I got to know believers and their theologies, lumpen to formal, I decided to feed the doubt, in spite of my religious experiences and ecstasies that masses of the faithful would give their eyes for — I have dealt with waking visions at various points in my life. I was simply looking to be more thoughtful than the people around me; not be content with shallow answers. Thoughtfulness was a virtue, after all. A righteous thing. Now I don’t feel compelled by any interpretations of the divine I have seen elucidated at length. Not only that,  I don’t think any particular god existing would be in and of itself a good argument for listening to what they have to say. I’m not particularly tempted to give the idea big g God credence when angels and Satan try to tempt me into doing so. Which admittedly seems a little bit out of character for the latter, but psychosis doesn’t always make much sense. I dare say, it’s mostly known for the opposite. I voluntarily extinguished not only my belief, but also the part of me that wanted to believe in that god in the first place, that saw squaring the circles as meaningful. I did it with little in the way of guidance. I’m an auto-heretic with the mind of a street prophet. If I can do it, so can you. 

Doubt is common, every religious faith I can think of acknowledges that its adherents will struggle with it. They prescribe renewal, but to acknowledge that the path can be obscured in such a way is to acknowledge an ability for belief to be extinguished. Doubt that paralyzes isn’t terribly helpful, but one should try to follow the path as long as next steps appear, new questions to be asked are developed. There are those situations in life where we must act on faith, where things must be played close to the chest, but we should at least be able to have context for why we can’t get answers, at minimum. If you are navigating danger under the direction of someone who is tasked with getting you out of it, a lack of explanation beyond the necessary in the present makes sense. If a friend wants to show you something they think you’ll like, but won’t say what it is, there is  a pre-existing trust that they do intend to show you something enjoyable. When people tell you that you simply can’t understand, you should be skeptical. Even emperors have to justify wars. That was my grasping of the thread of skepticism, a thin thread that led out of the labyrinth. I once questioned how God could be all-powerful if he didn’t have the ability to give us understanding of his workings. If he could not overcome our limitation, doesn’t he have a limitation?  This led to a lot of quibbling about the precise meaning of omni, all,and free will, and at a certain point I realized that while maybe there were compelling answers to my question, an awful lot of time had been spent across human history creating ways to not address questions. If you can argue over definitions for a lifetime, you can avoid admitting you haven’t developed a more satisfactory answer to fundamental questions than “works in mysterious ways”, despite the denomination having hundreds of years to work on it. A similar thing happened when I asked that, accepting some evil is necessary in order for choice to exist, why has evil been allowed to take the specific shapes that it can? Todd Akin may a dull bastard, but why can’t the body shut down reproduction when raped? So that the bearer may “choose life”? There are so many matters in which people have no or little choice, why present one in the matters of pregnancy, but not other circumstances?  Why can that conundrum, that choice, be foisted on one by another? Why can the greed of a few cause cancer across a community that has been deceived into thinking they are safe via environmental pollution? Communities that may not even benefit from, or create the demand for, what is being produced. The explanations always cycled around to a need for blind faith at some point. But why should I accept less of an explanation from the highest powers than I would demand from terrestrial leaders? I would not accept that poisoning a river was necessary with no explanation, why would I accept the necessity of the possibility for a river to be poisoned from the author of creation? 

Disagree with the theology if you like, but the point remains that doubt is not a failing, it is a guide. This is the first lesson in being able to change yourself. Following doubt may lead you to change a belief or reinforce it depending on what your inquiries reveal, and either is fine. Hell, it's fine if there is no clean resolution, but to be able to pursue doubt rather than avoid it is a way to avoid mental calcification. Certainty is a tricky thing, because it can feel like the truth without any supporting evidence. When you feel like your problems are incomprehensible, test that feeling rigorously. Someone has probably felt something like you have at some point, even if the words they use to describe it aren’t exactly the same. If you feel that you are doomed to be a certain way, really ask yourself if the change feels impossible or merely more painful than you wish to endure. 

Doubt need not be an obscurant, it can be a thread through the labyrinth of what your more irrational feelings and the outside world are telling you. I always thought there were foolish parts of the dogma in my life, what doubt did was lead me to discover that I thought the base was unsatisfactory too. I was freed of struggling with pieces of contradiction and vaguery by confronting the presuppositions of the faith as it was presented to me. If I could imagine a world in which people still have the ability to choose for themselves, but even one sort of harm is lessened, am I not more benevolent? If I made the world the same, and made a plant used by ancient physicians to treat the pains of pregnancy not have the slight potential to cause birth-defects, a side-effect they were perhaps unaware of, would I have not made a better world at no real cost to choice? Or was this rare side-effect some sort of lottery of sorrow for having defied the multiplied suffering of Genesis? But then no more potent modern epidurals used in childbirth cause something as gruesome as Cyclopia, and the plant that was used for pregnancy pains doesn't cause that tragedy, a look alike does. What does false hellebore achieve in the great design that would be absent in its absence? If this small, seemingly ludicrous danger cannot be explained to my satisfaction, why should I believe that I would be satisfied with answers to more complex questions when I am told that I will never grasp the whole, even in paradise? Why should I accept this indignity from the almighty when  I wouldn’t accept it from something so lowly as a pharmacist? I asked these questions, I followed this doubt, and I did not shed my faith alone: I shed my interest in it. In my younger years, I had some “Why, God, why?” moments, but I wasn’t asking these questions in anger anymore.  I was simply following that golden thread, and watching the mystery that had been built up turn to vapor. That God no longer feels any more real to me than Aries feels real to a Methodist, despite all the vivid  images of the world beyond painted in my mind. I found the concepts of all-powerful and all-good at odds when other faiths invoked them too. Maybe there are gods, but no depiction feels compelling, I can’t imagine any worth worshiping, and I’m not interested in thinking of what those would be like. I can conceive of what I think would be a “good” god, and it’s not one that is all-anything or looking for us to praise it. I followed the thread and I no longer feel the realness of the divine. I struggled with myself, and, in trying to be more thoughtful, changed how I thought.

   That is the second lesson in how to change yourself: accept that people can be changed profoundly and that you can change yourself. This may seem like first point material, but doubt is how we here at Semiurge trick people into arriving at this point. When you follow your doubts, you are, to some degree, accepting that your mind could be changed on a matter. You are accepting that you could, theoretically, be wrong. A creature that can accept that it is wrong and can be persuaded to amend an opinion is a creature that is capable of change. If we can independently choose to take in new information to change our mind, we can change ourselves. And if we can do both of those things in small ways, it stands to reason we are capable of doing it in more meaningful ways, even if it’s difficult in practice. For any Antichrist types out there, this is why you have to learn to sow doubt before you step up to the big stage, it is indeed a tool for creating mental malleability.  I’d prefer we all use it for self-affirming and pro-social ends, but if being a destroyer is your path, it’s got its utility in twisting up the poor suckers who don’t know how to handle it. If you can follow it up with engendering certainties of your choosing, you can get a cult of personality going. 

The third lesson is an extension of the second: To accept that we can change ourselves, is to accept that we can control ourselves. If we can control ourselves, we can control our behavior. Now, that’s easy to say, but it’s also easy to demonstrate. That’s right, reader, you’re in for one weird trick. And it’s not the grapefruit one. Here’s the thing about both anger and guilt: they’re selfish emotions. They’re useful. They have their places, but they are selfish. I’d go so far as to say that guilt is often a solipsistic experience. It has value in that it can indicate to us that we have crossed a boundary we have set for ourselves, but it does so by inflicting emotional distress on us. There is an element of ridiculousness when you analyze the experience from a distance. I say something more mean than was necessary —I make somebody feel bad — my mind responds by making me feel bad. It sounds sympathetic, but notice we recognize guilt as a feeling distinct from being wounded by others. We are discomfiting ourselves, or worse, to compel ourselves to act. We recognize another party is wrong but we partially re-center ourselves. We are suffering with the wronged party, but in a parallel fashion. And by understanding guilt, we also understand that there is pressure on the wronged to forgive, or else it’s like they’re hurting us even though they are the victim and have done nothing in retaliation. This guilt niggles and chews at us until we perform some ritual or act to alleviate it, but humanity has developed a remarkable number of rituals that serve as ways of removing guilt even if we’ve done nothing to make amends. It’s my sincere belief that we’re better at listening to what wronged parties want if we can eliminate guilt beyond that initial warning bell. You arguably don’t need guilt to be sorry. Everyone who's ever committed some faux-pas in ignorance but is able to recognize the need to apologize before understanding why it was wrong and why you “should” feel guilty has done it, at least to some degree. You can sometimes teach the emotionally blunted and stunted to intellectually understand why we mind certain manners and make amends even if they don’t have a strong enough empathy to be moved by guilt at the emotional level. I wouldn’t recommend divesting oneself of guilt entirely, but we should try to recognize when we are fulfilling our emotional desires in our attempts at contrition more than we are trying to fulfill the desires of the wronged party. 

The want to be forgiven can be an ugly thing. Sometimes an offer of reconciliation is met with a desire to be left alone. Consider carefully whether a part of you that insists on reoffering, or making a more significant second attempt at an apology, is grasping some unstated desire by the other party, or if that part is telling what you want to hear to give yourself permission to perform some act that will relieve you of your burden, regardless of what the offended wants. This is not to say that you take all things at face value, people come back around or say things they don’t believe when hurt, but you should give them some distance and time. This is the bare minimum. They may have something they want as a show of sincerity in addition, and that’s reasonable, even if the distance felt like punishment enough. Because it’s not punishment if they really do need space and time to get to a place where they are open to mending relations again is it? It feels like it, but it’s the opposite, it’s them taking a step in towards giving you a second chance. This is where it helps to extinguish the guilt. That feeling that there needs to be some more immediate and less passive healing may very well be a self-consideration more than a consideration of the facts or others.  By recognizing that it is working against our greater goal of righting a wrong and being considerate of another, we can learn to dismiss it. And when you do that, the waiting, the distance, is easier. You must realize the waiting is not nothing happening, it is giving the other person time. That is your action, your part to play.

 Of course, some people will try to hurt you back in ways that are also wrong by manipulating these situations, and you’ll probably meet someone in your life who tends to withdraw to such an unhealthy degree that someone will need to bring them out of themselves again, even if it shouldn’t be you. Those are situations requiring individual discretion rather than broad stroke guidance. But this control of guilt will help when people try to abuse it. Think of it this way: if you believe something is wrong, the wrong exists no matter how bad you feel about it once perpetrated. As such, if you believe there are limits on what are reasonable and unreasonable acts of recompense, those thresholds exist whether or not you, or the other party, or outside observers feel personally satisfied. If you have sincerely made offers you followed through on when asked, and respected reasonable wishes, but the demands keep coming, it’s alright to walk away. You don’t need to feel guilty about that separately. Although, I would suggest allowance for people to be somewhat unreasonable if they’re still heated. If they’re ever going to cool, you can reassess then. This is the beginning of grace. Of course, if you were some sort of guiltless reptile, you could always use this advice to fake having struggled with guilt that you mastered, but no self-help is free of potential for abuse. If you can learn how to reinforce your good behavior, you can learn how to reinforce your bad ones too, after all. That’s free advice on how to read all self-help: ask yourself “how could a dickhead use this to refine their dickery or justify it to themselves and others?” It’ll help you develop personal countermeasures and discover where your natural boundaries are. Not me though, I don’t have boundaries. I have strict borders, and the people who cross them without permission are met with force and forced back over. 

Anger is similar. While it’s easy to dismiss most people who get all in lather and talk about how “things would have been different if they were there” as nothing but talk —not to mention fun when doing so also gets their goat —there are also more practical reasons why you should show discretion in certain moments. Let’s say you are a parent and your child reveals they have been hurt by an adult in some serious, intentional manner. The internet tough guy thing to do is say “I’d have done [insert violent fantasy] if that were my kid.” Anger is great when a situation requires immediate action, but we, as anti-Thatcher thought-leader The Joker once said, live in a society. A complex organism. We also have our more immediate social units like the family. Dependent organisms. Anger is loudly selfish, it insists on quick fulfillment, which means not much thought to consequences. Parental anger makes sense, but making sense isn’t always the same as being useful.  Being angry on behalf of others is a tricky business. It's a healthy instinct to want to take action, but the impulses anger plays on are often a little too primal. To get atop the beast and wrangle it, first consider if what it wants as satisfaction is in line with what the person who was wronged wants. If your child is coming to you primarily for comfort, seeing you get extremely aggravated or fly off the handle is not going to help the mood. It’s one of the reasons you should often put anger in your back pocket rather quickly in many situations. You need to get it in check to be calm enough to remember to inquire as to what the other person wants. After that, you should consider the practical and likely consequences of your actions. The thing is, you probably don’t want to live in a society where accusation is a blank check for retaliation without the need for evidence. You might feel self-righteous, but realistically your word alone is not, and should not be, enough of a justification for an action by itself. It’s not that you should do nothing, but you should consider how you might make the best case for whatever you do. Think of it as delayed vs instant gratification. Now your child would also have their word, but that’s going to expose them to the unpleasant processes of justice. It’s a good idea to bring action against people who abuse children, and I would, in an ideal version of a terrible situation –stick a pin in that –encourage a child to face the process on the grounds of it preventing other victims, even if they want to move on completely. But it’s admittedly hard to thread that needle while also not making them feel unduly pressured to do so, which can have some serious downstream consequences on trust and mental stability. Although, as an adult you have options like investigating the possibility of there being other people who are willing to talk and provide more evidence so that the child is not the sole source on which things like prosecution rely on. Beyond the immediate needs of the victim, there are also long-term consequences to think about. If you kill somebody and go to prison, you’re not going to be there for your child in a very direct sense for a long stretch, and they probably don’t want that, even in those instances where their own short-term instinct is for harsh retribution. If they feel you’ve done something on their behalf that derails your life, there's a decent chance they’re going to struggle with our old unhelpful helper guilt too. You can end up doing a lot of damage trying to prevent harm. See US intervention post-WWII for further, more macro, examples. This is why anger is so tricky, the world is not really built for it to be deployed in a simple way despite presenting seemingly simple solutions. In a better world we would have some sort of  professionals who are taught to be clear-headed and detached from individual instances of harm, a dedicated service which can intervene and investigate so that justice can be pursued without random individuals having to balance their emotions and social obligations in a high tension and deeply personal situation. Instead we have cops, and a world of law enforcement and  judiciary that is one big toilet positively overflowing with turds. As some advice, from personal experience and inventory of experiences, having a reputation of having a short fuse does not necessarily protect your child, and can do the opposite. It can be a source of leverage against your child sharing if an offender can convincingly argue that telling you will result in a big mess, so don’t do it. Also, to be frank with you, you're probably not going to know how you immediately react to that sort of thing until it happens. I’ve witnessed angry people crumble, and it’s also not great when your child has to end up comforting you. It gets weird, trust me. That anger has also paralyzed people when knowledge of abuse is shared, but the abuser is beyond reach in some way. If you can’t control it, and it has nowhere to go, you can end up stewing in it aimlessly, which is also unpleasant to be around and makes people regret sharing. You won’t know how you’ll react, but if you can learn to control anger and guilt and other strong emotions like sorrow – we covered briefly in The Amiable Reaper issue how giving into displays of worry and sadness publicly can be a form of capitulation– you’ll at least be more able to do something, like console. Baby steps are still better than getting locked in. There aren’t simple solutions to certain  conundrums, but you can at least be mentally present and able to consider options soberly.

This is why I went dramatic with terms like Kill and Self-Destruct. To master emotions, or even just get a better grasp on them, you often need to learn to suppress the instinctual excesses and culturally/familial ingrained expressions of it that aren’t useful. This is not repression. When you're working on controlling these emotions you should allow yourself to feel them, but recognize when they’re beginning to cloud your thinking and argue against them using reason. Long term, I do think the repeated suppression allows you to pretty effectively, in day to day life, get rid of the parts of you that are tempted to indulge the unhelpful demands of  your emotions. You starve them of sustenance. You improve yourself through subtraction. You don’t need to maintain all these various traits in some abstract balance, you can marginalize and shed ones you find unhelpful. You don’t need to accept you are a fundamentally angry person, even if you are presently. You can identify the sources of anger and address them, and you can use reason to moderate your responses. This can feel fake for a time, you will still be angry even though you aren’t outwardly expressing it. But to other people, you are mostly what they see rather than whatever you feel you are internally . If you appear less angry, they will generally see you as less angry. In a sense, this means you are less angry. Perception shapes reality. And when you start  reasoning through anger and moderating responses, you may be surprised at how that does, in the long-term, make you less tempted to stay in anger. Those sparks may still be set off, but the fire won’t burn as hotly or for as long. The goal, again, is not repression, but to use reason to identify whether or not what anger is telling us to do would really fulfill our higher aims, or only satisfy  itself.  You’re not killing the emotions, you’re killing the parts of yourselves that can’t handle them; moderating at first, but eventually and gradually excising them if you can manage it. You know, Vulcanish stuff. Cognitive Behavioral  Therapy has a not totally unearned reputation as a psychological doormat factory, and I think that comes from practitioners who really do over-intellectualize. They’ll say you should never let yourself go full monkey mode so as to put the fear of the laws of the jungle in someone, but we at Semiurge say it’s an occasional necessity. The wrinkle is that you should be going monkey mode as a matter of conscientious choice rather than because you’ve lost control. We are animals, but we’re thoughtful ones. Might as well use all the facets nature gave us.

That brings us to lesson four: We should learn to accept we are unique in aggregate, not as fact of any one experience or struggle. I won’t give you that men’s self-help “you are nothing special” guff because, frankly, it usually veers into a patheticness deeper even than the excessively sunshiney “you’re so special, remember to drink water” tripe. Your internal life is going to have a feeling of special significance even in healthy mindsets, but it’s important to remember that you probably won’t have any truly novel experiences. Some of the people living through Hiroshima and The Black Plague both effectively saw their worlds destroyed and lost everything but their lives. The circumstances diverged wildly, but there are similarities still, and in both cases people got pretty depressed about it. Your dad getting cancer does indeed suck, it is important and significant to you.  It might take you to depths of sadness you’ve never touched. But it’s not taking to you depths unplumbed in all of human experience no matter how much it may feel it is. It’s important to realize that everyone also feels personal profoundness to their suffering. That may seem very Kindergarten to some readers, but you’d be surprised how many people need to be regularly reminded that all the stuff that goes on between their ears also goes on between other pairs too. Anecdote time: I got a lot of shit for not seeming sufficiently upset when a parent got sick for a number of years. I was upset, I just didn't feel like performing like it was the worst thing that ever happened.  I was trying to control my upset so it wasn’t other people’s problem. I reeled in the initial anxiety by looking at the available information and seeing that it wasn’t a death sentence level diagnosis. Some found this upsetting, which was a formative experience in discovering that there’s no pleasing some people. I was also the one who called that a certain, admittedly consequential, medical procedure would actually provide a better quality of life in the long run by simple analysis of the costs of not doing it, and I nailed it. It ended up being done anyway.  It worked out. My contention is that the method succeeded and people let me down. Being right, I choose not to put that more humbly. 

Lesson five is that we should discover what level of responsibility we are comfortable with before we agree to demanding undertakings when possible, and we should be honest about it.  A number of people like to imagine they would be willing to give up their lives for a glorious enough cause. It seems like a rather ultimate sacrifice. But how it's framed is pretty much always as a fantasy cleaner than reality. Find a good cause, pick up a rifle, die in a way that achieves something. But the work of revolutions, revolts, and even just reform movements demands more. When you attach yourself to a cause it’s not a simple question of if you will give your life for it, it’s a question of what you will give up in your life. Can you accept that your family and friends may also suffer in retaliation? Can you accept not just death, but a life of suffering in a cage, making as much trouble as you can in ways that will potentially increase your personal suffering, if you are captured? Will you endure indignity with dignity if that sort of martyrdom would be useful? Will you manicure a presentation and appearance across all facets of your life that will make you as sympathetic and respectable as possible if that’s your role, not speaking out as freely as you would like, but as will have the most impact if ever get the chance to state your case? Will you be willing to give up privacy to that end? Could you demand someone else do all these things and more? Could you choose which stories to emphasize and which to let pass? Rosa Parks was not the only woman who had that sort of experience on a bus, after all.  Once you frame it this way, things get less appealing. That’s a very dramatic example, but returning readers may remember in the inaugural issue, Moloch Runs the World, that people in very specific professions that are supposed to have special ethics and responsibilities seem quite comfortable retreating into “what about myjob/family?” when faced with a conundrum they technically knew was possible with potential legal consequences.

 I’m going to get into thorny territory here and talk about mandatory reporting. Conceptually laudable. It’d be great if it was attached to more robust mechanisms. In practice, I’ll say as someone who had to interact with people who fit the description but lacked follow through as a very wronged child, it’s a confusing clusterfuck. There are technically legal consequences for failure to comply, but there are exceptions and, as a child, it’s easy to get buried if you don’t have adult advocates. And everyone has a reason to bury you, even if they aren’t good ones. Members of institutions and organizations don’t want to see their good works besmirched. Some people have their own traumas that they don’t want to have dredged up more than they want to prevent other people from being traumatized. Parents of other victims who don’t want their kids getting dragged into future shit-slinging can just remove their own children from the situation and  leave you out to dry. I have something of a bone to pick with teachers. I saw, in my case and most others I was aware of, an absolute failure to rise to the occasion. It was a failure rate at odds with how a fair few of them described the depths of their commitment. There's a complication with reporting, in that it’s ultimately low level of commitment, which may sound odd to say about a state-mandated commitment, but it is ultimately a procedure, you’re not “required” to do anything except follow it. Even when things are properly reported, the individual agencies and systems responsible for the follow up can fumble it, neglect their own duties, or plain make bad judgments. So if you have no other support, the person you’re telling it to doesn’t seem like they’ll do anything except the minimum, and it’s common knowledge the local authorities are incompetent, it can feel like expressing your suffering will cause more grief than it’s worth And that’s not always the wrong call, not exactly. Child welfare mechanisms are poor enough that there really isn’t a both good and reliable way to get help. Asking for help can be a gamble with daunting  odds, rather than a mostly good process that has a chance of not working out. We should still encourage children to ask for help, but the most effective thing you can do to help is be reliably helpful. Charitable contributions and calling your Congressperson will only go so far in these matters . Now, it’s not fair to expect teachers to do more than they are supposed to, but then the ones who say they’ll do more seem to rarely be speaking truthfully, which leads me to my next point. The worst feeling problem to run into is perhaps when you open up to someone who can’t be bothered. 

There are levels of “can't be bothered”. We have no fucks given at the bottom. The problem there is pretty self-evident. When I was a youth, I had rapport with someone in education that I proposed a “hypothetical” situation to. I asked if she’d report a situation like what I had been through . She was immediately quite insistent she would. I added a caveat.  I asked if she would do the exact same thing if she knew the offenders were guilty, but also that the family of a person being reported would harass her because of it, or that an offender would commit suicide and put the blame on her. She chewed that over. She’d look down at her desk, and then look at me, back and forth until she gradually stopped looking down and kept staring at me. After a couple of minutes of scrutiny, I ended up staring back. We both sat there awkwardly looking each other in the eyes for an uncomfortably long amount of time. Finally, she frowned and gave me a look I can only describe as collapse . Not deflated, defeated and heartbroken. She never gave me an answer. After all that staring, she wouldn’t look me in the eyes when she talked to me after that. She didn’t talk to me anymore than was necessary. She chatted less in general after that, and became much more distant to, well, everyone. She left the profession a couple of years later. Never worked with children again, far as I know,].  I think we both realized she could be bothered to care, but not to care as much as she liked to think she could. Not enough to give up any considerable measure of peace and quiet. She didn’t have her own children or dependents at the time, so it really was her peace and quiet too. I used to carry around this horrible guilt that I had derailed the life she planned. Maybe her change in demeanor and life direction was unrelated. I can recognize that possibility, but when I sat down  to sort out that guilt, I asked myself “if I did cause that change, did I ruin a life?” In the end, I settled on no. I had merely asked her a question before it was necessary for her to ask it herself, and it’s perhaps for the best that I did. If she would have folded in the face of this possibility, maybe it’s better that she never had a chance to face it.  It’s not something I can take credit for as a thing done with intent, but not a thing I feel bad about either. Ask yourself those sorts of questions, try to be honest, difficult  as it is to be able to accurately predict what one will do in tough situations. If you have doubt you could face the possible repercussions of a responsibility you intend to take on, follow that thread, even if it ultimately leads you away from a dream. I hope it doesn’t, but if you can’t carry your self-appointed weight, someone else will have to bear it instead , and it’s better to say you can’t manage a duty openly than to falsely believe you can. It can be hard to live with those kinds of self-limitations, to acknowledge a weakness so openly, but it’s better being forced to be confronted by those weaknesses because you failed. But to know this about yourself is not to accept that you can never carry that weight even if you must step back from something for the time being, it is the first step in killing that weakness within yourself, which is the first step in changing yourself for the better. Our method is not to merely acknowledge our limitations, but to try and break through those we see as obstacles to becoming who we want to be. 

Lesson six is this: we must accept that our weaknesses and failings are not merely aberrations from a true self, but that they are a part of who we are. They are a part of our character.  This, in turn, should not be a source of guilt. No one is perfect is a useful cliche as long as one doesn’t use it as a minimization of error. To identify a weakness accurately is itself laudable. A fair few people lack that sort of self-awareness. To be honest about it is a virtue. To work on it is righteous, even when one fails. To overcome or find a way to manage it, that is a worthy triumph, even if it seems minor to everyone else. The expectation of ourselves when we embark on self-improvement should not be that we will perfect ourselves, but that we shall persist in trying to improve ourselves. We may never become the person we want to be exactly, but we can get closer, and any progress is better than none at all. By acknowledging our weaknesses as part of ourselves we are not accepting it as unchanging , but identifying the parts of ourselves we want to destroy. Accepting that we can change in those early steps can seem like adding a burden of responsibility into our lives, and it is, but it is not a responsibility that is all burden. If we believe we can change, we don’t need to despair when we confront our unworthy dimensions. We have the lightness of believing we can be rid of these faults. That is a benefit of accepting it, the satisfaction of figuring out how to dispose of it. The core can change. The reason we make this acknowledgement and have this acceptance is so that we do not fall into things like the Dry Drunk trap. If you notice your drinking brings out petulance, do not stop at thinking that cessation of drinking is the solution. Do address the problem drinking, but also accept that there is some unfortunately petulant part of yourself. If unaddressed, it still exists to be brought out through other circumstances. If you can work on it, you can prevent that. Addressing this as its own issue may also provide one with a source of a feeling of progress that can be beneficial if the drinking is a sticky problem. You may feel less stuck. 

Lesson seven is that it’s important to avoid the trap of “you made me do it”ism. To be clear, it is good to manifest appropriate consequences for people who are doing wrong or trying to provoke. Sometimes at the individual it’s good to let things go, sometimes it’s more beneficial not to. The thing we should not do is attribute any particular decision we make to third parties if there isn’t manipulation beyond aggravation present. The world is unfortunately full of “look what we made me do” enthusiasts. That is a core of modern reactionary politics, it maybe always has been to some degree. I don’t have particularly eloquent arguments on this matter, I just think it’s just the lowliest way to live. It’s a great way to believe things without accepting responsibility for believing them, which is a shortcut around dissonance. All the dipshits that say love thy neighbor while hating their neighbor don’t have to feel like they're not living their faith if that resentment is some outside entity foisted on them. It’s your fault they aren’t more loving, actually. These people are spineless, to speak plainly. The Great Man theory of history is a blinkered one, but these sorts of emotional infants are part of a very real fickle and unable to meaningfully self-motivate mass that people with genuine conviction have to find ways to shift about through some means or another to achieve their own ends.  By previously accepting that we can control our behavior, we can now accept that others do not control our individual actions, within reasonable parameters. Even if they do something that demands a response, we can choose what actions we take when responding. That said, if someone is trying to make us angry, then they are also responsible for what happens to them. 

Control is an ideal and a maintenance goal we will fail. When people try to make us fail, on their heads be the consequences too. Never let a provocateur convince you they are blameless, and don’t blame someone who crumbles to pressure more than the person who is undermining them, unless there is some sort of hierarchy of power in the relationship, like parenthood. Kids will poke at you, and you do have an additional level of responsibility to respond constructively. This lesson applies to quotidian and commonly exceptional —like dealing with parents who were abusive in the past — struggles. In circumstances of exceptional deprivment, right and wrong and abstract choice are inadequate ways of understanding individual decisions. Where there is persistent, harmful action, reaction of some kind is inevitable, and some of that reaction will inevitably be violent. There is an insufficiency in telling someone whose family has been slaughtered in Gaza by Israel that Hamas is also bad. They’re suffering great tragedy, historical tragedy is what put them in that cage, and very few outside entities are willing to use force or even significant pressure to address either. The option to join will be attractive to people wanting to take action and see, with quite convincing evidence, that non-violent resistance has proved insufficient in halting the suffering. There is a certain logic in the choice to join, and as easy as it is to say from a distance that October 7th created the current ruin, the systems in place were already destroying Palestinians in slower and more piecemeal ways. If the people who aren’t stopping the rapid destruction weren’t going to stop the slow death either, why not fight? What other good choice is readily apparent? The rightness or wrongness of Hamas is, in a sense, irrelevant. If the fight seems necessary, and they are fighting, why not fight with them? Pain, suffering, devastation, oppression, these all shrink the horizons of the mind and real life possibilities. When you really, truly take away people’s options, whatever extreme options are left will be taken. That is not surrender to immorality as the writers of fiction and other propaganda would have you believe, it is the human spirit enduring.

I will say as a note here, that it is always good to acknowledge the humanity of an enemy. I don’t share the details publicly, but suffice to say I speak from experience when I say that when you choose to harm someone while still seeing the sameness of them, it is deeply unpleasant, but I am much more at peace with the things I’ve done than people I know who try  to “they made me do it” their actions away, or failed to see that humanity until they were in the act of harming. Perhaps I don’t sleep as well as the absolutely heartless, but even they wouldn’t want to live in a world full of people like them. 

Lesson eight is brief. We control ourselves because we owe each other self-control. I feel this one is ultimately pretty self-explanatory, despite all the garbage floating around that would tell you we each owe each other nothing. Maybe that’s true in some grand “life is a meaningless accident” sense, but it’s a shitty way to organize society. Plenty of people are like that, and we have a lot of lonely, unhappy people. Ask yourself if people being more selfish and self-involved would make things better. If you said yes, I can’t help you, you have shit for brains. Either clean out the mess or take a long walk off a short pier, please and thank you. If you said no, then yeah, people trying to control their actions and emotions would probably make things nicer, no?

Lesson nine may seem like a contradiction at first, but the thing about rules is you should consider the exceptions too. We can control ourselves, and part of the reason we do so is because the things we do affect other people, but part of  personal responsibility is to be able to decide for ourselves when it is right or necessary to act in ways contrary to what is desired by others who matter to us. This is a lesson that is truly downstream of the previous rather than something that can be learned contemporaneously. To try and act considerately is something we can do while we are working on ourselves. We need to have knowledge of our values, our goals, and our weaknesses, and possess self-control before we can act constructively but contrary to others’ desires with clarity. There are circumstances in which a problem is bigger than the desires of any one person. There are times when we must make decisions for others. That doesn’t mean we don’t consider other people’s feelings, or that we bypass those tips on not acting in anger, but exceptional situations can call for exceptional behavior. What those situations are is a matter of personal discretion, and I can’t identify them without case-by-case details, but if you feel you are in one, it’s not contrary to the method to consider options others are not comfortable with. That is a culmination of the method, to be able to shape yourself into someone who can act when others cannot. To become someone who can act in accordance with what they think is right not only when it is in line with consensus, but when it is against it. By knowing ourselves, and controlling ourselves, we can better trust ourselves when there are no signposts to guide us. If you can carry that weight, and someone should and must, might as well. You might not get it right, but you’ll at least be able to say honestly that you tried. 

So what’s the final lesson? It’s perhaps counterintuitively the thing that might help you start down the road of the preceding lesssons. It is the lesson of many Passion inspired works. We do not become a thing by mere existence, we become a thing by acting like it. I bring up the Passion for a reason. If I may indulge my background, Jesus is not, in some branches of the faith, the Savior merely on the grounds of being himself. Were he the Son of God and he did not suffer, there would not be salvation, and without salvation he would not be a savior, lower or capital s. He was not the Savior until he chose to go up on the cross. For more secular readers, in the film The Green Knight, Gawain wants to be a knight worthy of Arthur’s court, but he treats it as a thing that will happen passively to him. He is tempted to cheat the Knight’s seemingly lethal game, before seeing a vision of the future in which he rules as a man who ran from danger. The kingdom crumbles, costing him his life anyway, losing parts of it here and there along the way. So he decides not to cheat and face the game, thus becoming the subject of the legend. It is through that act that he becomes a knight in more than title.  I usually don’t like to lean hard on pop cultural references to get real world points across, but here a graspable fiction may be helpfully straightforward. To bring in the real world, if you want to be a writer, the words will never just appear. They must be written, you must perform the process of writing. It can feel silly at first. Like not acting angry when you are. Who's going to read some words from some nobody? But if you never put words down, you will have nothing to be read and thus remain nobody as a writer. Success is not guaranteed , but success does require the attempt, if you can’t afford to have someone do all that attempting for you. The words will never feel as good on the page as in your head all the time, or even most of the time, but to commit them to paper is to be able to read them again, to share them, or store them, or do whatever you like with them. The sentences may not seem as grand, but to have written a complete thing is an accomplishment greater than having made any single part of it. It’s almost another useful cliche, fake it ‘till you make it, except it is not faking to write before you have readers, it is the primary method of gaining them. To be a writer, you must write. To improve ourselves, we must try to improve. To change, we must try changing. This is what is frustrating about those people who insist on the uniqueness of their struggles to such a degree that they refuse action. If they take no action, they can expect no change but by the fickle hand of fortune. Sometimes they accept that, wallowing and demanding commiseration without ever accepting help. Sometimes they hold out hope for change anyway and grow bitter when it fails to arrive. But things can be changed, and there is the greatest potential for change when we take action to change things. The action that precedes all others is to kill that part of us that would stop us from ever acting. Hopefully this provides someone out there with the rationale and desire to do so. Hopefully they don’t do it so for the purposes of causing calamity, but, hey, getting people to do anything meaningful is more than some self-help gurus ever accomplish, so I can live with it. 

Furthermore, I consider Palestine to need to be freed.