Pills of OUR History (16)
Between inside and outside, there is no difference.
"We all deal with a difficulty [...] social, of a cultural nature and undoubtedly negative: we have not been educated to live long with contradictions. Such an ability, that is, inner resilience, requires strong humility, a conscious acceptance of one’s limits that clashes squarely with the individualism that most are soaked in from childhood. It may happen, then, that in order to exorcise fear, the conscious compromise on behavior gradually transitions into a compromise of consciousness, shifting the threshold of the unbridgeable. It is the beginning of the fall on the path of dehumanization.
I will now describe this potential fall in an inevitably abstract way. I will outline the mechanisms that, from an ideal standpoint, often lead an individual to dehumanize themselves but which, fortunately, encounter real-world resistances, a process far from linear: one falls in the first part of the journey, one rises again in the second...
False consciousness is essentially a matter of making a virtue out of necessity, a gradual removal of the awareness of conflict, and of the positivity of its existence within consciousness. The loss of inner balance is a sort of sin of pride; one becomes unable to recognize one’s limits and instead becomes capable of lying to oneself. The individual then constructs a false unity—false because impossible—between consciousness and behavior. They represent to themselves an increasingly fantastical world, in a solipsistic spiral that I believe resembles that of the paranoid, where others become increasingly unreal or surreal, more and more “tools” or “obstacles.” The boundary between fantasy and reality becomes thin and confused, as does that between lies and self-deception. For example, it often happens that between one cell and another, someone’s desire becomes a “voice” which, for others, will become a certainty to be spread until it transforms into a collective illusion. In all prisons throughout time and countries, there is always an anticipation of some project of clemency or an event that will inevitably change things for the better. The need for hope becomes an “infantile” attitude, an expectation that entrusts one’s future to others, rendering the boundaries between fantasy and reality ever more tenuous [...] we are dealing with a childish regression, childish because it discharges responsibility, discharging responsibility because it self-justifies: it indeed leads the subject to find in themselves a coherence that can increasingly disregard behavior, becoming less and less aware of it. The former, in fact, represents themselves as someone to whom much is owed because they are good, whereas the latter is someone who owes nothing to anyone because they have received only harm. And as the inmate distances themselves from a sense of reality, we will notice that this corresponds to the acceptance of the reality imposed by prison. While the mind...
Between inside and outside, there is no difference.
"We all deal with a difficulty [...] social, of a cultural nature and undoubtedly negative: we have not been educated to live long with contradictions. Such an ability, that is, inner resilience, requires strong humility, a conscious acceptance of one’s limits that clashes squarely with the individualism that most are soaked in from childhood. It may happen, then, that in order to exorcise fear, the conscious compromise on behavior gradually transitions into a compromise of consciousness, shifting the threshold of the unbridgeable. It is the beginning of the fall on the path of dehumanization.
I will now describe this potential fall in an inevitably abstract way. I will outline the mechanisms that, from an ideal standpoint, often lead an individual to dehumanize themselves but which, fortunately, encounter real-world resistances, a process far from linear: one falls in the first part of the journey, one rises again in the second...
False consciousness is essentially a matter of making a virtue out of necessity, a gradual removal of the awareness of conflict, and of the positivity of its existence within consciousness. The loss of inner balance is a sort of sin of pride; one becomes unable to recognize one’s limits and instead becomes capable of lying to oneself. The individual then constructs a false unity—false because impossible—between consciousness and behavior. They represent to themselves an increasingly fantastical world, in a solipsistic spiral that I believe resembles that of the paranoid, where others become increasingly unreal or surreal, more and more “tools” or “obstacles.” The boundary between fantasy and reality becomes thin and confused, as does that between lies and self-deception. For example, it often happens that between one cell and another, someone’s desire becomes a “voice” which, for others, will become a certainty to be spread until it transforms into a collective illusion. In all prisons throughout time and countries, there is always an anticipation of some project of clemency or an event that will inevitably change things for the better. The need for hope becomes an “infantile” attitude, an expectation that entrusts one’s future to others, rendering the boundaries between fantasy and reality ever more tenuous [...] we are dealing with a childish regression, childish because it discharges responsibility, discharging responsibility because it self-justifies: it indeed leads the subject to find in themselves a coherence that can increasingly disregard behavior, becoming less and less aware of it. The former, in fact, represents themselves as someone to whom much is owed because they are good, whereas the latter is someone who owes nothing to anyone because they have received only harm. And as the inmate distances themselves from a sense of reality, we will notice that this corresponds to the acceptance of the reality imposed by prison. While the mind...
DeRank ™: 4,87 Comindeb
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