"Abracadabra" versus "Make It So"

This is the erroneous belief at the core of magic, that words have the power to create reality. Modern humans suffer from the ancient supernatural assurance that "saying" is the same as "doing." This is most obvious today in the institutional practice of stating the intention to "fix" a problem such as child poverty, but the actions taken result in...nothing. Stating intent to solve a problem is not problem solving: political statements are not based on correct analysis of the cause or causes and in practice can obscure or cancel out what might be effective strategies. The result is more laws, and the application of a modern magical remedy: money. Money is believed to solve problems, but it doesn't. The sums allotted to even minor projects have escalated over recent years into hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, which the U.S. government doesn't have, but must borrow, and the debt is converted to funds that are "upcycled" to the wealthy. Problems become chronic, institutionalized, and falsely believed to be unsolvable.

Stymied by their own lack of clear thinking, lack of science and technical knowledge, and belief in the magical power of words, officials and experts claim that no matter how simple the problem, it is extraordinarily complex, and that more funds must be allocated to initiate more studies which merely repeat the cycle and prolong the situation. The problem is PEOPLE who cannot take the step from magic to physical reality; people who believe that the social hierarchy is the only path to results, and that those results are conditioned on the "good will" and responsible feelings of those individuals who have gained power. Can you hear me laughing? Social people cannot seem to grasp this fatal roadblock to effective analysis and action. 

 

The anti-magic corollary to "abracadabra" is MAKE IT SO, used by Captain Picard on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. This command is a call to action, based on the fact that the ship has been designed to perform its functions, and that the crew has been selected and trained to utilize the ship's capabilities, and then some. How ominous is it that a Sci-Fi TV show is a real model for teamwork, competence and success, while the social world spirals out of control?

How ironic, when violence against women has high social value, and is advanced and taught by the entertainment industry.

Myths about Asperger Women

This Esquire magazine cover is from the 1960's, and despite equal rights legislation, nothing has really changed, because hatred of women is embedded in American culture. Women are bombarded by the message that we are childlike idiots whose sole purpose is defined by men, and utterly disposable when we fail to conform to their prescriptions. Self-hatred is learned by girls through socialization, and demonstrates the susceptibility of the "normal" brain to "brain-washing."

Asperger females are accused of being unfeminine and unattractive. The old male prejudice that any woman who is competent, intelligent, and ambitious must therefore be 'masculinized' is still being propagated by psychologists. Asperger females are accused of having a "male brain," which effectively ejects us, and all smart women, from the female half of humankind.

It's quite a compliment, if you think about it.

What Asperger children are doing with their brains when regular people think we are standing around being defective.

I was an uncomfortable child. I didn’t like the world much, and it didn’t like me. The world was confusing - disturbing, jarring, and alarming. I was frightened most of the time and most everything frightened me. Within my mind I was adventuresome and fearless, but people and their invasive habits and their intrusive rules and demands, scared the shit out of me. I didn’t know it, I instincted it. They wanted to keep me from adventure, from thought, and from truth. I hid. I still hide, because I was right. Social people confine and limit each other in terrible ways.

Women are confident that the man they live with is a nice guy and a good father. He’s just an average man, not a leader. Leaders know how to bring out the killer in every man. That’s why they are leaders. Men were a giant intellectual obstacle when I was a child. In their estimation of how things work, I was an insatiable little monster whose curiosity, hidden passion, obstinacy, questions, and rational seeking would be fine…if only I had been born a boy. How I learned to hate that pejorative and final indictment. 

Unbelievably, it was adult women who were most often the delivers of this life sentence of inferiority; women whose natural grace was replaced by restrictive clothing, rock hard hairstyles and icing-like make up, until nothing original remained. It was the 1950s and rigid sex rules demanded rigid bodies. Underwear was compiled in layers of girdles, brassieres, slips and garter belts, and stockings with seams that must be straight. Our mothers were Virgin priestesses who had been ceremoniously demoted by marriage, shamed and gagged by the function of their sex. I horrified my mother. I was not what she wanted in a child. My very existence challenged her acceptance of marriage as a woman’s inevitable defeat. My lively mind was a reminder of a dark female presence that she had murdered within herself.

The game unfolded: little girls were soon tamed. Female society ground on like a glacier that rolled over and pulverized every female that resisted its relentless power.

My father was a traitor to his gender. In matters of the mind he never slighted me. He was a mechanical engineer with wide interests, but his knowledge had one boundary, the artificial gulf between the priestly triumvirate of science, technology, and mathematics, the intellectual activities that divided the real world from everything else. He had an eidetic memory (he claimed) and rather than deflect my questions as unladylike annoyances, he fed me information about astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry, history, exploration and industry. He was not a creative person, but populated his mind with wonderful facts and figures in order to keep the world and his unhappy childhood at bay. He told me this, and let me know, without providing details, that he had idolized his father, a strict man who had used corporal punishment to toughen him up. 

Inexplicably, he hated his mother, whose sole flaw, as far as I could understand, was being a woman. His sister was also an object of his rage. He refused to provide any cause for his extreme feelings, and if my questions ventured to close to his wall of secrecy, he would turn on me. The experience was like that of trying to retrieve a bone from an ill-tempered dog that growls menacingly, curls its lip and commits a warning bite. Warning given: warning taken. I had to set aside this mystery concerning his female family members as a contradiction to the father I knew.

 

Standing Around Being Defective 3

My mother and I never were on good terms. She had bought into the myth of female shame and inferiority (I acknowledge the extreme social pressures on her to do so) and did her utmost to transfer that inferior status to me. The gap was too great. There was no place for self-hatred in either my intellectual or emotional life. Besides, my experiences with rejection and bullying outside the family had less to do with my social awkwardness than with a greater crime: the unHoly, unfeminine intelligence that erupted from within me like a fountain, and the audacity I had to use it.

As I moved out and into the world, I quickly discovered that my mother’s negative view of females was not limited to her, but was culturally pervasive. What I had hoped was an aberration, turned out to be open and acceptable discrimination, especially in employment. Within the 1960s - 1970s work place, sexual predation and humiliation were status quo. Accusations of inferior thinking ability, the supposed inability of females to learn skills other than typing, and the intent of seducing males in the office (snaring a husband) had to be born with stoicism or countered with vehement argument. These insults, and the vast invented vocabulary of female biology, which was a legacy of Old Testament misogyny, were counted as perfectly good and legal reasons for not hiring women. The ubiquitous practice of gross underpayment of women employees was a motive to hire ‘girls’ for inferior, servant-like work and was everywhere exploited. Sadly, much of this inequality remains.

The disturbing ‘automatic’ attitude toward women that I saw in my father was also present in many of the men I worked with, and it seemed to drive the lives of the ones who were married. In addition to being regarded as the Alien Invader in a man’s world, I was also cast as a Trusted Confidant, a role I had learned to play for my father, and like him, men young and old shared details about the wife they had committed to and with whom they had children. Home was regarded as a jail. These men were boxed in between a real wife, with whom they played The Husband and males at work with whom they played the misunderstood and trapped victim of a powerful female conspiracy. In essence, they complained about having no one at home with whom they could speak openly and honestly, but didn’t connect this outcome to the practice of being dishonest with their wives.

The use of drugs to 'treat' (mask) depression and anxiety in housewives (happy pills, tranquilizers, sleeping pills, and a lot of alcohol) has a long history. The mass application of drugs to individuals who are made ill by toxic social environments has expanded to outrageous levels. 
 

Much of what I heard was shocking. When speaking to their wives on the telephone, these adult men were pleasant, obedient, contrite, and affectionate. When jousting with each other, the hated clichés came out and were fired back and forth like weapons, as if denigrating one’s spouse was both a competition and entertainment. What I heard in personal disclosures was both sad and repugnant. Men seemed to cling to a little boy fantasy that they were in fact James Bond, but somehow, through no fault of their own, found themselves clinging to women who provided comfort, children, and a home life, which is a normal and healthy state for an adult male, but a union in which they could not fully participate nor enjoy.

On the rare occasion when one of The Wives made an appearance at the office, warnings were given out to be on best behavior, as if the ruling males were soldiers facing a surprise inspection.  Wives naturally required a public display of affection; if it was a peck on the cheek at departure, all was fine, but any more intimacy than this was viewed as a public humiliation for the husband. Some wives furtively examined the physical state of desks, objects on desks, and stray papers as if they were at a crime scene investigation. I was sometimes asked to go powder my nose for the duration of the visit, because I was young and attractive and a prime suspect for shenanigans. These visits were mostly extremely uncomfortable for everyone. I found all of this rather strange and embarrassing but fascinating. 

My parent’s estrangement from each other had appeared to be an extreme case, but the discovery that for many people the person to whom one was intimately bound in marriage was also the person to whom one routinely hid from and lied to shocked me. Where was all the love, love, love in marriage? Fear of the opposite sex seemed to pollute relationships between men and women, voluntary and messed up partnerships that were nevertheless publicly declared to be happy. Women were classed us unequal and inferior at best, as evil and treacherous whenever it suited men, but in their minds a woman had incredible power. She could ruin a man by trapping him in marriage, and deny him true fulfillment as a rogue male. Sex played a huge part in all this. Domestication of the human male had turned out to be a terrible thing according to men.  

Unfortunately, the theme of man as an unbalanced woman-hater, and woman as dirty inferior, as described and prescribed in the Old Testament, has poisoned the relationship between natural partners. In the real world it’s male and female, different and complementary, co-conspirators in the survival of a species. We’ve gone the wrong way, Baby.