thoughts

[paulhope]

• Isn't it kind of weird that we exist in a culture in which a mass media phenomenon, X-Men, encourages everybody to identify with a secret cabal of mutants that are fighting against other mutants in a war over whether or not mutants should take over the world? Presumably, the writers identify with the mutants. Everyone is supposed to identify with the mutants. Who are the non-mutants among us???
• I took the Myers-Briggs personality test thing again, you know, like you do. Two tests agreed that I am INT...and then totally borderline J/P. That's sort of nice.
  
  Thinking about people in my life as the work conversation unfolded, I've realized that I get into really intense friendships/conflicts/relationships with ENFP's a lot. Huh.
• I am really shitty at helping out depressed friends. I seem to have a limited set of tools for helping with this. Probably the best thing to do is forget about it because an external person can't really do much about it except slip medication into their food and that's not my style. But I'm an incurable problem-solving even when it's most inappropriate, and when all you've got is a hammer.... SO in order to better try to understand one friend's depression by reading Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death. He has some really interesting things to say about despair that are way subtler than Nietzsche's. But he also has a far less satisfying solution to the problem (Christian faith.)
  
  Short version: Despair is a result of a failure to relate ones finite self and ones infinite self properly. Vulgar interpretation: one's finite self is the self that's present, physical, embodied, limited by your conditions. The infinite self is your hopes and dreams, the possible person you might be, as a projection (onto the future, say). So you despair either by being locked into your limitations to the exclusion of your dreams, or in a fantasy world which you don't actually pursue effectively or at all.
  
  It's neat to see how somebody can take a Hegelian foundation and take it in a radically different anti-rationalist direction. But I could also see how it would totally mess you up if you actually followed what he's talking about. I think the easiest criticism to make is that both the problem and solution he poses are ones in a philosophical framework that doesn't allow for the possibility of action. Like, his solution is (roughly): have faith. With God, everything is possible! You will become who you want to become by virtue of the absurd! As opposed to: get off your ass and do something that gets you closer to who you want to be.
• On a related note, maybe: a phrase that has popped up a lot for me in the past few months, as if it were a low-grade meme, is "sociopathic tendencies". A bunch of friends--yeah, friends!--I've been thinking about lately seem to have them. My relationship with them is always kind of interesting because my natural social MO is to start drilling into people until I reach a core with which to establish rapport, but these slightly sociopathic people have so many layers of protocol. It's interesting to see who finds that kind of deep drilling as friendly, and who sees it as an attack. I think I get along pretty well with narcissists, for example.
  
  I think there's a great existentialist analysis of sociopathy that just falls out of de Beauvoir, btw. It's like a consciousness that doesn't seek mutual recognition of other consciousnesses besides mere mastery. So, like, doesn't see their mastery as entailing a dependence on the slave figure and so doesn't engage in the liberation project.
• I wonder how much religious background is correlated with personality traits, approaches to life, kinds of psychological crisis, etc. For those who have dealt with religion, it certainly features highly in their personal conscious narratives about such things. But is that just the whole clueless conscious explanation thing going on, or is there something to it?