Standing Around Being Defective 2

My father was unhappy with social rules that he simply couldn’t comprehend. He sympathized with my complaints about female socialization and gave me a pass on conforming to what we both judged to be ridiculous and humiliating demands placed on women. Once in awhile, at some critical stage when my mother would insist that I dress up “like a lady” and attend some social function, he would sacrifice me to marital peace and order me to obey.

When I directly contradicted his strict adherence to the triumvirate of science, technology and mathematics as the only worthwhile human endeavors, he withdrew angrily. When I defended art, literature, foreign cultures and music as areas of growing interest to me, I witnessed the rigid and deranged male vision of superiority. I was swiftly demoted from being an equal and temporarily cast out as one of them, a category that included all lesser beings: women, minorities, artists, musicians, writers - literally, anyone who was not a white male engineer or scientist. It hurt terribly and compounding his vile attitude was the equally legitimate observation that my father was not an unkind man. His kneejerk hatred toward categories of lesser humans did not play out in daily life. He was helpful to neighbors and to strangers regardless of category, to the point of exasperating my mother with his generosity. He was an unrepentant chit-chatter with any and all who came his way. I never heard an unfriendly word in his conversations unless the topic turned to politics. It was then that the conservative white male monster emerged and we had to drag him out of the situation to avoid a confrontation. In the 1950s such unhinged political behavior was rejected as out-of-bounds, but today it has become main stream political behavior spread by rabid and irrational media ‘news.’


One of the highlights of my father's career in engineering
was the monumental leap from slide rule to the HP 35.

I was stuck with a schizoid model: Everything human was on the other side of the divide in my father’s male world. Female thoughts and opinions simply didn’t matter, and worse, formed some kind of cosmic threat to men. And yet, my father did not impose the standard “women are stupid, emotional, and should never attempt to think” regime on me, but encouraged my heresy. I think he also grasped that any censure of my particular interests would be fruitless. This conflict set me up for a lifelong interest in human behavior.

My hidden analysis of the family proved that both my father and mother were extreme cases of people who were locked into behavior they could neither understand nor modify. It turned out to be not that simple. Although their extremes were dysfunctional, each parent reflected common cultural beliefs promulgated by a particularly unhealthy supernatural script, which had been enacted over and over with tragic success for two millennia.  

When I look back to my childhood I see it ironically. The painful dysfunctional predicament in which I found myself provided material for a favorite type of Asperger challenge. What a mess! I bet I can figure it out. I'm still working on it.  

Man at the top of a garbage heap, but closer to God.

When I watch popular programs on brain science or read academic papers, I often become irritated. It is of course interesting and useful to understand our most important organ, the generator of all things we subjectively experience. But this fascinating excursion has taken on the dull drama of dismantling a Swiss watch. The need to perfect what is a natural organic object becomes a desire to tinker with and improve upon an organ that is not broken. Some human brains need repair, or medical support, or special understanding, but in the extreme focus on imperfect brains, all brains have become defective; the human brain is viewed as a malfunctioning electrical device and not the core of a unique living being. The result is an explosion of pathologic diagnosis and partitions of humans into normal, abnormal, treatable, sort of treatable and intolerable - a pile of rejects created in the search for a perfect supernatural Man.

Researchers have become Lords of the Brain, the prescribers and manipulators of human destiny. Who are these individuals who have taken it upon themselves to decide which human beings are normal and which ought to be “tweeked, changed or fixed,” whether with drugs or biomedical engineering? Some scientists have abandoned life in order to create perfect obedient robots to replace an imperfect creature of evolution. 

What a dangerous idea. Humans have been ‘perfecting’ the environment for thousands of years; perfecting domestic animals and plants, overriding natural processes and polluting the earth. Know-it-alls have brought us to the brink of self destruction and created a mess of social disharmony and physical suffering justified by an archaic idea: God gave the earth to man to disrupt, loot and rape. Man at the top of a garbage heap, but closer to God.   

Empathy; the Religion of Psychology

                                                     

The ease with which the psychological concept of Empathy has been co-opted as a religious / moral value, and infantilized in the process, suggests that rather than having a real existence, Empathy is supernatural. 

The unexplained transfer of emotions, thoughts and experiences between 'normal' humans, without any objective or explicit communication between them, would seem to require a magical transcendence of physical law. The public can be forgiven for assuming that Empathy powers miracles.                                        

"Is all this thinking really necessary?" - My Mother

I thought too much. How do I know? My mother told me so. It began when I was very young and I could not stop doing it. My mind chewed on everything that came my way. Why this? Why that? I was told that thinking too much was unattractive in a small girl who ought to keep her mind on what other people thought and keep her opinions to herself. My mother told me that this negation of self was vital to securing my future as a wife, who must adopt her husband's thoughts, at least in public. It seemed to me that childhood was only a perverse rehearsal for the death of the intellect in this life, and for pot luck suppers in the next. 

 

An afterlife? I rejected the idea as silly. How could adults who worked during the week as engineers, accountants, and teachers, turn into pudding heads on Sunday? Did they believe the nonsense about invisible beings that lived in the sky, or were they pretending in front of us kids? If it was a pretense, why would they lie to their children?

There I was, barely aware of myself as a human being and with a huge mystery already pecking away at my mind. Why did this extraordinary gulf exist between how I experienced the world and how everyone around me claimed life worked? Why were children asked to be inventive and creative, and then told not to ask questions and to merely repeat ‘correct’ answers? This absurd situation taught me that I didn’t exist: only the ability to reflect what was told to me by others could make me acceptable.