You can - if only you decide you will!

photo S. Thomas.

Writing further, furiously: More from Wikströms' book (see earlier postings). In the popular self-development literature it is said that the human being just can’t blame her misfortunes on unfortunate circumstances (!!!), a sad and unfortunate childhood (!!!) or existential weariness (!!!). Who and what is she then to blame? (Herself? Her genes? Her unwillingness to do something or to change? Or what? This ought to be said out in plain words!? Shouldn't it?)

Talk about moralizing! What about what’s lying behind? Is anybody interested in that, in bringing this to light? Bringing both this and that to light! For instance how it is with many emperors' new clothes!?

The human being therefore has to “take hold of her life” and see so she is steering her soul’s bark [herself], realize (or as one says today “implement”) her innermost dreams of success. But what about the American dream?

And she shall do this “now,” live now, instead of just planning for to live, to not having to realize when she is old that she hasn’t really lived. And this is nothing wrong with actually I think. There are a lot of contradictions – and confusions here and there.

Wikström thinks the lust-principle has started to rule on a cultural level, not the postponed drive-satisfaction’s gloomy reality principle.

But what are those needs about, maybe those urgent needs, needs that have to become filled immediately? And what are those bottom and endless needs about, which can never become filled? Surrogates, substitutes? See Alice Miller here.

The lightness in the existence has disappeared for many in everyday life’s trivial treadmill, confused home situations, children’s demands (justified and/or “perverted” needs because of earlier unfulfilled needs), relations that aren’t straightened out. All those things together make one want to maximize the small zone that’s left for oneself. No wonder!

Moralizing or being ironic over life style literature and dismiss it as drivel is too simple. But I want to take a step further he writes. And ponder over what those dreams are an expression of.

For some this reading leads to a lot of improvements in those particular persons’ lives.

But despite many people are trying to think positively, take command over their lives or are striving for a conscious presence, they fail. And that the popular culture constantly reminds them about that it is only on themselves the whole existence (AND success) is lying, the feeling of lack of satisfaction and self contempt increases. As self blame and shame (convenient for the power and power abusers!?).

My addition: And also the shame over how incapable and incompetent you are. So the one in question stops questioning the state of affairs out of shame (keeping silent of shame), or as she is told: has no right to complain, she has all tools and options to succeed she is told (if she is legitimately complaining she can be called spoiled)?

Blaming the victim.

We are on the one hand treated like children and on the other we are demanded taking responsibility as grown up! Damn if you do and damn if you don’t. See Berit Ås on Master Suppression Techniques.

Addition in the evening: read Oscar Flowe in "The hitting stops here!".

Voices in Sweden about the financial crisis and the state of affairs in the world…

the family Bonnier eating dinner.

[Slightly edited October 5, quite angrily written, so I wonder how my English was?]. Voices in Sweden about the financial crisis and the state of affairs in the world today: It has been about creating needs in a constantly, perpetually ascending spiral in societies all over the world. A have-mentality. But do we need to be slaves under consumption?

The bank bosses have gotten million bonuses and million parachutes.

The worst enemy to the finance and corporation world is contentedness.

Still the most important idea of business is to create needs and desires (or cravings) in a constantly ascending spiral. Nobody shall be satisfied.

Quite ironically: at the same time we are blamed for being too demanding!!! One of the contradictions and confusions again!?

It stood about the bourgeois’ scale of value and view on man. Are there people wanting to live outside their (the bourgeois’) conception of the world, in another world we think is possible a writer wonders?

Can the time come when having two cars will be seen as something embarrassing and not – as it is now – something enviable.

One writer writes that the modern “extortion”, with the help of media, advertisement, pr-consults, lifestyle-agents and trademarks, forces a lifestyle on people that has shown to be deeply destructive, but all this is (or could be, even if I think it is difficult, with all the pressure around) something one can do something about oneself, in contrast to the wage-slavery during the former turn of the century.

In the middle of this I saw that tonight (or tomorrow, I didn’t look properly) they are sending a new version of “Let’s dance”, this time the competitors are learning to dance on ice (with skates!!). Yes, this is what people are entertained with…

One can rebel against oneself and ones own have-desire, the desire you have been enticed into. You can start to grin at medias holding up the rich as models and idols (as even the newspaper ICA-kuriren here in Sweden started to a couple of years ago, and then I unsubscribed); the same medias who have been worshiping the finance-men and managers whom now have thrown the world into crisis. Haven’t they “forfeited their pound”?

No, they need to make even worse things?? But people lower on the status-scale failing aren't apologized, sometimes at all. Yes, people are treated differently, depending on their status, where on the scale they stand. What about people's equal value only seen to the fact that they are born to this world? Quite ironically. And others get ashamed for much smaller "crimes”!! That about proportions…

This obsession with the rich and successful, supplied by the media, doesn’t it all of a sudden feel incredibly out-of-date?

One person here writes about (not least) a moral fiasco for Bush, for a politics that has failed so much and in so many areas.

Does the free market actually function? Isn’t it ruled by a few actors actually?

One writer thinks it would be honorable if the ones analyzing the finance-capital as a positive, creative power in the economy some years ago (the written words are still there, and can be read even today), stating that the new global market with all its insurances and reinsurances is sound, could apologize for their analysis. Admit to what they wrote some years ago.

Or that they at least could search on the words “the economy’s ability to function” and get surprised over that they only a few years ago thought that a big welfare state and high taxes are checking for the (the economic, and overall) “growth.” Sweden and the Scandinavian countries are proofs that a big welfare state and quite high taxes aren't curbing for the economical growth? But our current government is now rapidly destroying this? (but the situation here hasn't made us lazy workers I think. We are, or have been, hard workers? And interested in other countries and phenomena in the world? Our society hasn't been a closed society, even if we have had social democratic, i.e., "left wing", government for long? But a government that has turned more and more to the right, yes!).

The most usual prevarication today is the statement that the problem is about “anonymous owners”, which means owners not steered by a steady “owner hand”, like the Wallenberg’s or Bonnier’s in Sweden.

People try to earn money on money, instead of investing them in our real lives.

The financial crisis isn’t an accident, but an element belonging to the capitalism.

It’s the taxpayers who have to pay for the speculators loans, instead of seeing their money going to school, care and nursing, or what it’s called in English. All those instances are forced aside by what the (many times well paid) speculators have done.

The ones winning on all this are the members in corporations’ managements, because the system makes so they get their bonuses and bizarre wages apart from the fact if the businesses goes well or not.

It’s a myth that the market is stable; the ones winning on these situations are those living on the differences in prizes, so what’s happening isn’t an accident.

How can one interpret our current finance minister saying that the world economy is influenced by “raw avariciousness”?

Can there be two comments to this?

1/ He is an eager supporter of market economy and this statement only reinforces the myth that this ought not to happen, that the crisis has nothing to do with the system itself.

2/ On top of it he individualizes the problem. He says that the speculators are greedy in the same manner as he says that the ones with no job are lazy!

What we see now is a saving-action for the capitalism. There is no movement which can take over. What’s so dangerous about our time is that there is no strong worker’s movement, and this increases the risk somebody else takes over, in the worst case the fascism.

See the American neurologist Jonathan Pincus on his findings, and further about perversion and perverted needs.

Texts I have used in this posting you find here.