Worth dying for

N

nomadologist

Guest
noel emits said:
Here's a question for those that know - when people like D&G discuss schizophrenia as a resistance to being fully 'oedipalised', do they ever talk about the paedo thing as possibly being a similar response? I mean it clearly is, no? At least in some cases. Or is that unthinkable?
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I've been waiting for this one :D

No, pedophilia is more about being stuck INSIDE the Oedipal than anything else, when it's not solely predatory (you can't really change a sociopath or a sexual predator, and children are far easier victims even than women...)
 
G

gek-opel

entered apprentice
I know we discussed this before Nomad but run me through your argument again: is it that Paedos are basically simply sublimating their Oedipally organised desire from adults to children...?

Also (slightly separately) what's the connection between the sociopath and oedipal?
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
Hmm, some would say pedos are "enacting" or simply re-staging their own Oedipal desire power plays, but taking the part of the parent instead of continuing in the role of the child in order to try to find a way "out" (that they, of course, never find)

Sociopathy and the Oedipal would be a good name for an essay, but I'm not so sure they have much to do with one another. In the psychiatric community it is widely held that sociopathy is something like a birth defect.
 
G

gek-opel

entered apprentice
nomadologist said:
Hmm, some would say pedos are "enacting" or simply re-staging their own Oedipal desire power plays, but taking the part of the parent instead of continuing in the role of the child in order to try to find a way "out" (that they, of course, never find)

Sociopathy and the Oedipal would be a good name for an essay, but I'm not so sure they have much to do with one another. In the psychiatric community it is widely held that sociopathy is something like a birth defect.
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Also Sociopathy is hardly inately resistant to Capital. Indeed it sits there very well indeed (although it need not do so of course).
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
I wonder if there were sociopaths before capitalism?

That would be an interesting book to write. Sociopathy and Capitalism.
 
G

gek-opel

entered apprentice
nomadologist said:
I wonder if there were sociopaths before capitalism?

That would be an interesting book to write. Sociopathy and Capitalism.
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That's a big question! In a sense Capitalism certainly provides an ideal habitat in which actual sociopaths may thrive, and perhaps which encourages others on the spectrum to indulge their more sociopathic tendencies... I'm quite interested in sociopathy but unsure as to how you could construct it as a productive model of a progressive political subject, given the obvious evidence that the sociopathic are at a considerable advantage under Capitalism (providing they don't actually start murdering people)... the moral sociopath might be the aim...? Implies you can detach morality from empathy (which I think is pretty vital actually)...
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
gek-opel said:
That's a big question! In a sense Capitalism certainly provides an ideal habitat in which actual sociopaths may thrive, and perhaps which encourages others on the spectrum to indulge their more sociopathic tendencies... I'm quite interested in sociopathy but unsure as to how you could construct it as a productive model of a progressive political subject, given the obvious evidence that the sociopathic are at a considerable advantage under Capitalism (providing they don't actually start murdering people)... the moral sociopath might be the aim...? Implies you can detach morality from empathy (which I think is pretty vital actually)...
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Very interesting...it is certainly important to detach morality from empathy, otherwise every sociopath would inherit the earth---

Or have they already? I sometimes wonder this, especially after working in the private sector.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
Mr. Tea said:
What about someone like Caligula or Genhis Khan? Would they count, or were they just very successful megalomaniacs?
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Good question, I'm really not sure. Back in the day, especially if we're talking tribal/nomadic warfare, men like Genghis Khan served very important social functions.

If GK WERE a sociopath, though...well, this theory would be lent credence given what a huge influence GK had on the genetic make-up of future generations. They keep making the genome and finding random "white" people in the U.S. who have his (patrilineal) DNA !!
 
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gek-opel

entered apprentice
nomadologist said:
Very interesting...it is certainly important to detach morality from empathy, otherwise every sociopath would inherit the earth---

Or have they already? I sometimes wonder this, especially after working in the private sector.
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In a sense Capital makes certain people act as if they were sociopaths even when they actually aren't.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
nomadologist said:
They keep making the genome and finding random "white" people in the U.S. who have his (patrilineal) DNA !!
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My money's on Rumsfeld.

Funnily enough, there's a bit in the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy where the foreman of the demolition team due to knock down the guy's house is unknowingly a descendent of Genghis Khan, and gets these Mongol-type urges for reasons he can't understand.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
You're right Gek. I wonder if *acting* like a sociopath and *being* one are all the much different?

HA that's cool, never read that book. Was afraid that doing as much acid as I do and reading that book would be the biggest cliche ever. Then again I like krautrock a whole lot...
 
N

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
nomadologist said:
Very interesting...it is certainly important to detach morality from empathy, otherwise every sociopath would inherit the earth---

Or have they already? I sometimes wonder this, especially after working in the private sector.
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Damn, why can't I find the Kurt Vonnegut piece that was in the Guardian last year about this. Probably it was in some other paper or something.

Ah - http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,,1691370,00.html

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president.

Makes you want to laugh and cry don't it? Unless you are a sociopath that is.
 
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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
It's surreal humour but not in a 'trippy' way, I would say. Not sure it quite merits its uber-cult status but it is fairly funny nonetheless.

Re. acting like a sociopath vs. really being one, this seems to strike a chord with what I think about insanity in general, which is that a society or culture can be collecively insane at the same time the vast majority of individuals within it are not. A number of experiments have been done that have shown how easy it is get pretty ordinary people to start acting like concentration camp guards. (Stanford Prison Exp., anyone? Not Nazism per se, but a pretty similar mentality.)

Thinking about it, this resonates further with something IdleRich and some others were saying about how situations can arise whereby a company is forced, either by legally or by its own internal rules, to act in a way that no-one involved in the enterprise - the CEOs of he company, its shareholders, its employees or its customers - actually want...it just does it anyway. Must be a whole load of writing out there on societies/corporations as gestalt entities, I'm sure.
 
Gavin

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
Mr. Tea said:
Re. acting like a sociopath vs. really being one, this seems to strike a chord with what I think about insanity in general, which is that a society or culture can be collecively insane at the same time the vast majority of individuals within it are not. A number of experiments have been done that have shown how easy it is get pretty ordinary people to start acting like concentration camp guards. (Stanford Prison Exp., anyone? Not Nazism per se, but a pretty similar mentality.)
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lynndie_england.jpg
 
N

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Mr. Tea said:
A number of experiments have been done that have shown how easy it is get pretty ordinary people to start acting like concentration camp guards. (Stanford Prison Exp., anyone? Not Nazism per se, but a pretty similar mentality.)
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Fascinating and chilling those experiments.

RD Laing was big on this - that mental illness could be seen as socio-structural - experiments were conducted where people could be made to appear schizophrenic to professional psychiatrists (and remember Laing was very much opposed to psychiatrists having the power to decide who was crazy) by putting them in situations where they were given contradictory instructions and information about a given situation.

Psychiatrists R.D. Laing, Theodore Lidz, Silvano Arieti and others argued that schizophrenia could be understood as an injury to the inner self inflicted by psychologically invasive "schizophrenogenic" parents, or as a healthy attempt to cope with a sick society. Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz argues that "mental illness" is an inherently incoherent combination of a medical and a psychological concept, but popular because it legitimizes the use of psychiatric force to control and limit deviance from societal norms. Adherents of this view referred to "the myth of mental illness" after Szasz's controversial book of that name.

Madness is rare in individuals and commonplace in groups.
 
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