Social and Economic Dysfunction

A lot of my darkness stems from the fact that I feel I don't fit in. It's this 'feeling' that I have embraced. I am not saying that I don't fit in.

I do not have an intimate sexual relationship, nor do I have any other types of intimate relationships, aside from maybe my mother.
I see my extended family on special occasions like Christmas or Thanksgiving. I see my mother and daughter and grandson every couple of weeks.
I almost never spend time 'face to face' socializing with friends unless I'm specifically invited out for coffee or drinks or dinner which occurs about once or twice monthly. Occasionally I instigate it. The rest of my socialization occurs via the internet, often with people I've never met face to face.

I have not been able to maintain stable employment at any time in my life aside from a few golden periods of approximately 3-5 years each.
I spend approximately eight months of every year looking for work.
I have a large debt load across several credit cards that I have been unable to pay off because of a lack of work plus the fact that I often have to use them to survive when I don't have an income.

Are the above circumstances a cause for despair? Sure they are. Are they my fault? Maybe, maybe not. Can I change any of it? I try, but I don't believe so. How do I cope?

I embrace darkness. I have let it take me. It seems no one else will.

Okay, that is the cover story, the scum that rises to the surface, or the outer layers of the onion. The deeper problem that has been created by circumstances is something that I have long suspected has larger social and economic associations.

In a 2001 paper titled The Roots of Addiction in Free Market Society, Bruce K. Alexander argues the dislocation theory of addiction:

In order for “free markets” to be “free,” the exchange of labour, land, currency, and consumer goods must not be encumbered by elements of psychosocial integration such as clan loyalties, village responsibilities, guild or union rights, charity, family obligations, social roles, or religious values. Cultural traditions “distort” the free play of the laws of supply and demand, and thus must be suppressed. In free market economies, for example, people are expected to move to where jobs can be found, and to adjust their work lives and cultural tastes to the demands of a global market.


People who cannot achieve psychosocial integration develop “substitute” lifestyles. Substitute lifestyles entail excessive habits including—but not restricted to—drug use, and social relationships that are not sufficiently close, stable, or culturally acceptable to afford more than minimal psychosocial integration. People who can find no better way of achieving psychosocial integration cling to their substitute lifestyles with a tenacity that is properly called addiction.

 My addictions include, but likely are not limited to over eating, coffee, and smoking cigarettes. I can easily get addicted to a television series, work (when its available), a person, love, sex, style, being independent, being dependent, chocolate, not eating, exercise, self-analysis, religion, starting new things, surfing the internet, playing a video game, politics, media frenzy, being nice, being an asshole, meeting new people and being alone. However, I am not addicted to drugs or alcohol.

(when I'm not addicted to being an asshole) I crave to contribute to society. I do art. I suffer. What I do most is hide. I feel ashamed at not being able to live a functional social and economic life. What could I possibly wish for? A better past? A better future? How could I possibly make the present better? How do I make the things I cannot control (love and money) replace my addictions?

Outlook on life is all important. I agree with Mr. Alexander that the roots of addiction are the result of dislocation, both socially and economically. To me, this world is fucked and I've exhausted myself trying to find a cause and affect change in my life and in the lives of those few that I love. I've lost myself in a world of distractions, addictions and coping mechanisms. I'm a dysfunctional product of a socially and economically dysfunctional environment, ad nauseam.

But Mr. Alexander's theories do give me hope. I have always thought there was something very deeply wrong with our culture. I think we've all known it. Actually, when you think about it, there are glaring problems with it that present as problems unrelated to the structure of the culture itself such as the global energy crisis, environmental degradation, religious and political terrorism, drug and alcohol addiction, divorce, and child abuse, to name a few.

I've never ever understood why the 'economy' is more important than the people it supports. An argument of the Conservative Party in Canada, (and all right wing capitalist supporters around the world) is that if we 'take care of the economy, the economy will take care of us.' This theory is as full of holes as the idea that technology will make our lives easier. It hasn't. Think about it this way - machines were made to make doing big or repetitive jobs easier. So those machines replace a few human jobs, right? Aren't those jobs that were lost to the machines now being replaced by jobs to maintain and repair the machines? Not necessarily so. It takes less energy to maintain and repair the machines than it does to do the job without the machine. So a few jobs are lost here and there and before you know it the 20th century has past and our cultural, social and economic structure is in ruin, not to mention the environment.
 I think this industrial and technical revolution has run amok. The film "The Matrix" comes to mind.

Gods I could go on and on but for the limitation of my ability. I cannot wrap my head around the gargantuan issue of the ineffective social structure we live in, its failure to support and sustain us, and our imminent demise if we do nothing about it.

But if I am to survive I have to imagine there is at least one thing I could do - I would ask that you think about the relationship between the social and economic society we live in and do what you can to reveal the inadequacies and inefficiencies. We have to do something about reducing the social-economic divide rather than widening it.

What Do You Want?

Someone once asked me "What do you want?"

At the time I thought it was a strange question with too broad a context.

I searched for an answer regardless, intending to say something humourous about a knight in shining armour or vast sum of money but I remained silent for some time as my brain repeated the statement over and over in my mind coming up with next to nothing until it finally reached through the mire of useless gibberish in my consciousness to the cobwebs and dusty thoughts of my childhood. The only thing I saw there was a dead squirrel laying in the dirt beside the tall chain link fence separating the grade school I attended with the neighbouring homes. I was eleven years old. I knelt down beside it. I mourned for it. I wished I could give it life again. Eventually I covered it with dried leaves and walked on.

It was an answer, although lucid, distant, and not terribly useful but it was all I could come up with.

For the next 18 months I squirmed my way through the rest of my brain looking for a more meaningful answer. I only let go of the need to find it when I realized the only thing I truly wanted was amusement. I guess that is my way of feeling happiness.

Yes, I spent 18 months trying to find an answer to the stupid question.

Roll forward another several years of living for the sole purpose of amusement and we come to....

Now I think this stupid question is paramount and must be answered. If the question cannot be answered, then the point to life, and death, is lost.

God I'm full of shit.  I have no idea what I am talking about and people should really not listen to me.... but do what you want.

Whatever. Point made.

Dark Spirituality

It's one of those days I have too much to do I'm so overwhelmed and I'm getting nothing done at all, although I am feeling better.

My thoughts have been on dark spirituality and how much I think about this. I decided to hash through it yesterday and this is what I came up with:

Everything else. That's what I concern myself with. I refer to everything other than what is commonly considered good. I'm not going to say good vs evil because that is primitive juvenile thinking perpetuated by dogma and fiction. I say 'why do people 'want' to be good and try to be good? To do good things to try to be a better person? To be enlightened even?' I've never understood it and I've never understood the concept of wanting to become enlightened so one does not have to return to the realm of human existence. This is pretty much the highest aspiration for all Buddhists. Why wouldn't I want to return to life here on earth? I like it here. In fact I embrace the here and now here and now. I don't know what else there is so I'm not going to bank on it. I like to flirt with the unknown, which should explain my fascination with death, but I actually really like living and being human. I love human things, like emotions. Even the nasty ones... they make me feel alive. No emotion = not alive... this is not cool. Death is cool and I love to peer into its inky blackness and create from it, or just revel, but not for one minute is death on my wish list of 'states' I'd like to be in here and now.
Is this desire to do good to be good yadda yadda yadda a need for some kind of acceptance? Is it buying into the Christian doctrine that we are sinners and must strive to escape a hellish fate? And as for enlightenment, is that the pursuit of escape as well?
Recently I've been wondering why I don't have too many friends. I'm sure it has to do with my lack of presence on the path to goodness. That and/or my unrealizable goal of trying to sink everyone else into the mire of things 'not necessarily good' and to do it for the pure pleasure of it. Meh,.. I'm (semi)alone in my thinking and I'm unfazed by the view others have of me. Evil is a fiction in a polarized mind. I'll just leave that to them and concern myself with everything else.

After reading Nocturnal Witchcraft Magick After Dark by Konstantinos which was suggested to me by the talented bard Christopher Courtley, poet of dark fantasy fiction rendered in the Gothic persuasion (to appease my troubled mind he offered a simple idealogy suggested in Konstantino's book for framing an understanding of dark spirituality which he himself finds useful. I did too. Thank you Christopher.), what struck me most importantly in that book was the idea, and importance placed on connecting to a spiritual dimension outside oneself. I know that in the past I have flirted with the idea of this, but found nothing personally satisfying to connect to. I realized there might be some sort of trend out there having to do with dark spirituality so I typed 'dark paganism' into Google and lo and behold there is an actual book about that written by John J. Coughlin called Out of the Shadows: An Exploration of Dark Paganism and Magick. Well I'm not so interested in magick per se, but the dark paganism part as it pertains to talking care of my spiritual health does interest me. And while we are on the subject of dark spirituality, if you are also interested in this sort of thing have a look at Adventures Of A Spooky Old City Fox, a blog of interest with an open-minded agnostic skeptic (his words) of an author who also writes about these kinds of dark explorations of the spirit, albeit much more articulately and in depth than I do. I'm just a hack in a forest of dark souls intent on destroying themselves with an overdose of denial... oops, I mean goodness.

Lots is happening for me and I've wasted another several hours writing this and finding all the proper links et al so now I'm heading back to my work on the children's book I'm trying to finish before year's end. Working title is Darkling Child. I'm writing and illustrating it. I'll post about it when it's nearer to being finished.

A Perspective On Darkness Pt 2: The Christians

Understanding my thinking has to do with understanding my reason for living. Why now? Why descend into such darkness at this point in my life? No, I'm not depressed. But I easily could be if it weren't for the life goal I set for myself. The goal is simple - balance the overabundance of 'lightness' in the world with 'darkness.' Sound crazy? Certainly it doesn't sound achievable. But no matter.
As I said in an earlier post, there are few things I dislike more than organized religion. In my opinion most of the problems in western culture are the result of fundamental Christian belief which is taught as truth in our schools and is generally accepted and supported by the mainstream media; television, literature etc. The problems I refer to are the common ones; the global environmental crisis, cultural religious clashes, economic disparity, mass psychological sickness, and poverty to name a few.

Until recently I had a habit of employing a human coping mechanism common to many; addiction. I have the 'addictive' type personality that allows me to escape the helplessness I feel as a result of the injustice and mass insanity that occur around me and around the world by partaking in some activity which is designed to distract me from these troubling issues. If I didn't employ addiction as a coping mechanism, how on earth could I sleep at night?

There is a reason that the youth of the world are the most vocal about the injustices of war, capitalist greed, poverty, genocide, tyrannical government and so on. Youth have yet to resign themselves to the futility of trying to create actual change. I applaud their effort. I've been there. But they will soon realize that human civilization propels itself onward on a scale that is unfathomable and unstoppable. The 2nd human fall from grace (the 1st when we realize mom and dad are in fact not the Gods we felt they should be) happens when one realizes that 1, 10 or even 10,000 people marching to the drum of a self-righteous Christian lie can have little to no effect on a world of billions intent on destroying itself through denial of reality. The veil of Christianity creates self destructive behaviour on a massive scale. The problem is amplified by the fact that we are not only destroying ourselves, but while we are at that, we are destroying the world too.
Frankly I should be depressed. So should you. There has been little to bring me comfort in this world except knowing that something has to bring the Christians down. Their lies are perpetuated by popular belief to their self-righteous claims of salvation.

Western culture is afflicted with an inability to see light and dark, happy and sad, good and evil, along with most other polarities. Christianity recommends we only look at one side of the coin. The Christian gospel has smeared the legitimacy of the yin/yang principle. The dichotomy of shadow and light created by their one sided incorrect view of life's fundamental laws is causing a case of mass neglect that is practically invisible to western culture. Christianity, throughout its history, has managed to coerce conformity of populations, through deception and/or force. Christianity is now the biggest cult ever to reign in the history of the western civilization. This has largely gone unnoticed by almost everyone because there is something the Christians would prefer that you didn't know about. The Christian lies, their fear of the unknown, and the demonic terms they use to define this fear; evil, filth, debauchery.

Well, I have only one reason for living, and that is to take back the shadows, the lies, the dark aspects neglected, rejected.

Einstein wrote that the definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over expecting different results. I figure it should take about a thousand years or so for this to catch on. But I don't care. I have no other good reason to live.

The Problem With Life

There is really little I dislike more than organized religion. It's a matter of distrust I suppose, which goes to say that I obviously trusted at one time and then later was let down, betrayed, disappointed. The proverbial fall from grace.

When we are children, we all think of our parents as Gods; Goddess Mom, Goddess Dad. Parents usually have no idea what they are doing and even if they do, they are doomed to fail because their children will fall from grace at some point regardless of how much care and effort went into their 'parenting' and the children will blame the ensuing horror on the parents... the former Gods and Goddesses of their lives.

Aside from the psychology of it all I figure this is why I dislike organized religion so much. It's just a reiteration of the parent / child relationship that failed to live up to my grandiose expectation of it.

I have some experience with this. I have been a child and a parent. I've seen both sides. It can go wrong. Very wrong. I can't say that I've seen a situation where it has not gone wrong. Even if the parent / child relationship seems to have survived the inevitable fall from grace (I'm talking about age 14... think back people) and been repaired there is residual resentment that causes us to go our own way and not follow in the footsteps of our parents. It is natural.

So how can I believe that following in another's footsteps would be beneficial in any way? This is what organized religion asks of us. It beckons us to follow its doctrines, learn it's wisdom and let it guide our lives.

Hah... like I would ever let that happen.

My mistrust is obvious.

Yet I yearn, as I suspect many do, for a connection with a group of like-minded people. Wanting to connect is something so powerful it can drive us to do things that go against our better judgement. Such as falling in love. Who in their right mind would fall off a cliff in the hopes that someone would catch them before they smashed to bits on the rocks at the bottom? But that is what is happening when people fall in love. They do it all the time. The desire to connect overpowers the rational judgement that following another is not a logical thing to do.

This is also the case in organized religion. Giving one's self, one's sense of moral judgement, even one's center of gravity over to a set of principles belonging to a bunch of people interpreting a fictional character's experiences of the world. Even if this experience seems like good advice, what drives people to abandon themselves in this way?

Well, I'll tell you. Like wolves, humans are pack animals. We depend on each other to survive. We must get along or none of us survive. So people tend to do what everyone else is doing... and this is because of organized religion. The bible, the koran, the saints, the goddesses, they tell us what to do and none of the fallout or the consequences of our actions are our responsibility because they told us to do it.

Our world is built on the insanity of organized religion... and it started with our parents. It's their fault. Lol.

Again its obvious I struggle with this, not in a superficial way, but in an endless war with myself over my actions that has caused my life to be shaped into a perverse amalgamation of addiction, passion, action and the lack of action that leaves my center of gravity wobbling to and fro in in a static nightmare of indecision, like jogging on the spot, looking left to right to left to right and I can no longer move because everywhere I look there is reason to believe I will fall off that cliff if I move.

Hahahaha... why am I not insane? The definition of insane is doing the same thing over and over with the same results. I would say jogging on the spot looking left to right to left to right qualifies.

Well maybe I am insane.

I have no answers.

For sure I am at least a little bit crazy. Maybe when I run out of steam I'll end up somewhere else, by default.

This is my fascination with death and the reason for it. I see no answers in all the places I've looked in life. Death is the only religion I know nothing about and have no mistrust of. No one else knows anything about it either. Therefore there can be no authority to bastardize its existence.

Seems like a safe haven for me.

Agnosticism vs Atheism

I would say that both agnosticism and atheism are beliefs. Neither is scientifically provable, right? Well, perhaps the only provable thing would be atheism because scientifically there is proof that no proof exists. LOL

I consider myself an agnostic due to my strong spiritual nature. I can't deny that it is a part of my life but I'm reluctant to attribute it to anything specific such as Hell Evil God or Goddess. I have no qualms about God though because I don't believe the Christian Bible was written by God. I believe it was written by men. And I'm fiercely opposed to the word of those men and the effect it has had on the people of the world; the wars the genocide and the psychological and physical torture committed in the name of God. It almost makes one want to commit to Hell to express ones wrath over such atrocities. So perhaps the real debate would be about what truth is the argument based upon?

If you haven't already seen this site its a good place to find some definitions http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/agnostic.htm