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narcasseI seem to have lost my ability to have regular conversations. I can discourse theory at people, I can even cite all my sources verbally but somehow I can’t quite seem to have basic conversations anymore. Though I can find the compulsion to yell about the Euro 2008 qualifiers at least. Turkey are playing Moldova next month and they’d better win.
It’s all very odd but as I attempted to explain to my lieutenant the other day it’s probably quite an understandable part of epistemic community syndrome. The people in the community base their association on a shared experience and develop a culture and language around it and the people outside are excluded simply because they lack having participated in whatever that shared experience may be. That experience can be something as momentous as war where soldiers returning from the front lines can’t really share the experience with their friends and families when they come home because no matter how far human sympathy goes; it’s never going to be exactly the same as having lived through it, or it can be as basic as having been on holiday together where there will be a naturally developed intimacy which simply wasn’t experienced by people who were not there. Nobody can really, completely understand somebody else’s experience unless they really have lived a day as them with their limitations and strengths, their hopes and fears. But the nearest they can come is to share the experience.
Funnily enough the other thing that makes me think of is a line from Tokyo Babylon which may have been awkwardly translated over a decade ago: “People do evil things because they’re lonely”.
I never quite got that at the time and it seemed a little trite at a first glance but with the weight of meaning attached to floating signifiers it does make an awful lot of sense. It’s not something as trite as expressing that people do nasty things because they have no friends, though at a most basic level it is, but rather that if somebody has nothing to care for, no one to understand them and to share their experiences with then they’re caught in an emotional disconnect with the world. And because of that disconnection, because there is nothing to care for and nothing that will care for them they deaden their own sense of empathy regarding anyone and anything, which makes it easier to commit various acts. Because if you’re not thinking about how said action will effect somebody else then you can act on your own compulsion without emotional consequences. The sense of regret or more importantly; consideration of human consequences is deadened because there is nobody to share or discuss those consequences with. At the most basic level it becomes ‘nobody cares if I’m hurt so why should I care if I hurt somebody else’.
And as odd as it may sound that deadening of emotions creates an incomplete person. Regardless of how well somebody may be able to function that way and how much they may honestly not care, in this sort of situation they do really fail at being human. It can happen for a variety of reasons such as chemical imbalances or extreme social conditioning to the point where that deadening of empathy is embraced but it’s still never quite what would be catalogued as human. Which is probably, in some tangent fashion, why psychopaths are often called monsters. Because whatever it is to embrace a lack of empathy and connection to the rest of humanity; it certainly isn’t a rationale that we’d term ‘human’.
In other news, there is new Trinity Blood fic here which may be in part due to my finding this bizarre Hall of the Mountain King remix last week. Though my lieutenant reliably informs me that it may have something to do with Alton Towers.
It’s all very odd but as I attempted to explain to my lieutenant the other day it’s probably quite an understandable part of epistemic community syndrome. The people in the community base their association on a shared experience and develop a culture and language around it and the people outside are excluded simply because they lack having participated in whatever that shared experience may be. That experience can be something as momentous as war where soldiers returning from the front lines can’t really share the experience with their friends and families when they come home because no matter how far human sympathy goes; it’s never going to be exactly the same as having lived through it, or it can be as basic as having been on holiday together where there will be a naturally developed intimacy which simply wasn’t experienced by people who were not there. Nobody can really, completely understand somebody else’s experience unless they really have lived a day as them with their limitations and strengths, their hopes and fears. But the nearest they can come is to share the experience.
Funnily enough the other thing that makes me think of is a line from Tokyo Babylon which may have been awkwardly translated over a decade ago: “People do evil things because they’re lonely”.
I never quite got that at the time and it seemed a little trite at a first glance but with the weight of meaning attached to floating signifiers it does make an awful lot of sense. It’s not something as trite as expressing that people do nasty things because they have no friends, though at a most basic level it is, but rather that if somebody has nothing to care for, no one to understand them and to share their experiences with then they’re caught in an emotional disconnect with the world. And because of that disconnection, because there is nothing to care for and nothing that will care for them they deaden their own sense of empathy regarding anyone and anything, which makes it easier to commit various acts. Because if you’re not thinking about how said action will effect somebody else then you can act on your own compulsion without emotional consequences. The sense of regret or more importantly; consideration of human consequences is deadened because there is nobody to share or discuss those consequences with. At the most basic level it becomes ‘nobody cares if I’m hurt so why should I care if I hurt somebody else’.
And as odd as it may sound that deadening of emotions creates an incomplete person. Regardless of how well somebody may be able to function that way and how much they may honestly not care, in this sort of situation they do really fail at being human. It can happen for a variety of reasons such as chemical imbalances or extreme social conditioning to the point where that deadening of empathy is embraced but it’s still never quite what would be catalogued as human. Which is probably, in some tangent fashion, why psychopaths are often called monsters. Because whatever it is to embrace a lack of empathy and connection to the rest of humanity; it certainly isn’t a rationale that we’d term ‘human’.
In other news, there is new Trinity Blood fic here which may be in part due to my finding this bizarre Hall of the Mountain King remix last week. Though my lieutenant reliably informs me that it may have something to do with Alton Towers.
