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dreamsandroots · 10 months

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The Freud-Hole, and Bernays' Extimate Space

There’s possibly no greater malady for a writer, in our day and age, than to be stuck in the Freud-hole, and yet here eye am. My former friends (please note here the playful melodrama) are glad to have escaped the event horizon of my eternally unsatisfied, ouroborean questing. Truly, they’d have rathered gouge out their eyes in favour of reading anything written by the hand of such a swollen-footed, motherfucking dreamer, affixed only to the chase of his own tail. The teaching staff where I study smile politely but you can see the apprehension in their Is. What’s he gonna do next?, I hear them thinking, what might he be projecting onto me at this very moment? Into what kind of strange, subconscious streamscape has he lost himself this time? What monstrous slips of the tongue? In truth, my close reading of Freud has been minimal over the years, though to admit this might only make things worse.

Because it could be reasoned that the only sin greater than the writer who finds himself stuck in the sinkhole of Freudian thought is the sin of finding one’s way there unwittingly. A few chapters of The Interpretation of Dreams, maybe a few chapters of The Wolf Man, and at one point, on the edges of memory, Civilization and its Discontents and besides these some sections of papers: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Uncanny. If anything, based purely on reading I’m probably more of a Jungian. I said earlier that there’s nothing so frowned upon than a writer who has become affixed in the threads of Freud’s various orbits, but within academia this is perhaps not quite accurate: to be an open Jungian might give your peers the impression that at any moment, you’re likely to begin spouting Swedenborg, or quoting lines of William Blake’s obscurant poetry, or pontificating on the profundity of the writings of Aleister Crowley in relation to man’s collective unconscious. Of course, I’ve probably read more Nietzsche than either of them, but there are some things you dare not admit. In his biography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung writes, of reading Nietzsche:

I felt like the old peasant who discovered that two of his cows had evidently been bewitched and got their heads in the same halter. “how did that happen?” asked his small son. “Boy, one doesn’t talk about such things,” replied his father.

Recently a team of students from Western Sydney University (WSU) were provided the opportunity to visit New York as part of their training in Digital Communications. One photo, dated 16.07.23 depicts the gang visiting the Museum of Public Relations to learn about “the history and evolution of American public relations.” As part of this tour, the students got the chance to observe and interact with original materials from the offices of Ivy Lee, Arthur Page, and Edward Bernays himself, who, the poster points out in what she describes as a ‘fun fact’ was the double-nephew of none other than the father of psychoanalysis himself. It’s certainly not my intention to grate on the team or the poster here, I’m sure they’re doing a fine job in their role as students, but I can’t help but feel as if this connection may be somewhat understated in contemporary society. That he was Freud’s nephew was certainly never understated by Bernays himself. By all accounts, he used every opportunity to prop up his own reputation by reference to the relation. There is also widespread evidence that many of Freud’s ideas formed a central core of tenets for Bernays’ ongoing practice, his upbringing in Austria putting him in close proximity to his uncle’s rising notoriety.

I bring this up, not just to be a stickler, or as some kind of Freudian knight errant who demands recognition of his Lord. But personally, I can think of no better tale of history to illuminate more succinctly the particular kind of media PR hell we experience today, than that of the application of Freudean theory by Mr. Edward Bernays. Freud’s theories arose from his experience as a medical doctor, beginning with his fellowship with Jean-Martin Charcot, a French neurologist who had developed treatments for hysteria based on hypnosis. Freud developed his ‘talking cure’ as a method to uncover and shed light on strange behaviours in patients, often women, which, to his view, had no seeming basis in objective reality. Freud posited that such behaviours, often otherwise labelled simply as ‘hysteria’ (and perhaps, by a retrospective extrapolation, we might notice the historical proximity of madness with the ‘feminine’ within medical discourse, not to mention the witch-burnings) were in fact victims of psychical events which had played out at some point during their personal history (and in most cases, as he would discover, at various points) beneath conscious awareness, and well beyond the ability to articulate such wounds into language. Noting his uncle’s work in uncovering the power of psychic phenomenon that seemed to operate beneath the active purview of consciousness, Bernays developed his theory of propaganda as “the mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale.” As a practice, Bernays posits propaganda to be a kind of philosophical art-tool grounded in a teleological ends-based politics, utilised best by an ‘invisible government’ for the good of the people. Such an overbearing, yet shadowy agency, according to Bernays, seemed the only way to bring about a socially cohesive zeitgeist, something which could ensure the election of the right candidate (the one funding Bernays, that is) and the dissemination of the right kinds of products (those who hired Bernays as consultant). All for the good of the people. At the time of the publication of his seminal text, Propaganda (1928) Bernays had already forged a reputation for himself, being instrumental in shaping international views regarding America leading up to and during their intervention in WWI. One fan of Bernays’ assertions that “only through the active energy of the intelligent few can the public at large become aware of and act upon new ideas” was Joseph Goebbles, who utilised this vision to construct the Nazi propaganda machine that would sell the population of Germany a concentrated and clearly exaggerated vision of the anti-semitism that had been festering throughout Europe during the 18th Century and beyond. Freud would flee Austria 04.06.38 despite reluctance to do so, even after Hitler, on the 15th of March that same year, had been welcomed by the state leading to an extreme escalation of violence towards the Jewish population. Bernays would move away from the term ‘propaganda’, declaring loudly that any tool, psychological or otherwise, can be utilised for good or evil, depending on the ones that wield it. The new term he coined was ‘Public Relations’. Consulting with Austrian-US psychoanalyst A.A. Brill, Bernays would go on to popularise smoking for women in the adult population of The United States by organising groups of (paid) women to march while smoking cigarettes in the Easter Sunday Parade of 1929, as a way to battle against taboos relating to women smoking, being some considerable market restriction for those paying Bernays. Despite the organisation of these spectacles, Bernays vehemently opposed his wife’s smoking, indicating that he knew at least some of the dangers involved in this.

Of course, one could write an entire thesis on this relationship. The trajectory we see forming here is undoubtedly more complicated than simply asserting that Freud = Bernays (propaganda) = modern advertising. I’m not out here demanding we hold a parade for Freud and throw Bernays in the trash can, but I would be open to the idea of a world in which I could admit freely that I found value in Freud’s endeavour, notwithstanding the many things I found disagreeable and short-sighted about the man. If I’m to accept (as some of my colleagues keep telling me) that Freud’s legacy is just another ghostly voice of the old dead white hegemony, well then at least I’d like them to recognise that same undead ghost in their freedom torches, their 3am tik-tok deep dive eyes and their Barbie ads.

#writing #creative writing #psychoanalysis #freud #public relations #propaganda #bernays #writers on tumblr

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sk1fanfiction · 3 years

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the many faces of tom riddle, part 2

-you dislike frank dillane’s portrayal of tom riddle only because you don’t think he’s attractive-

FULL DISCLAIMER THAT THIS IS JUST MY OPINION OF A CHARACTER WHO DOESN’T HAVE THE STRONGEST CANON CHARACTERIZATION, AND THUS ALL THIS IS BASED ON MY CONCEPTUALIZATION (and this time, featuring a bit of armchair child psych from a student).

Wait, don’t clutch your pearls just yet. Compose yourself.

I am about to explain why it’s not actually that bad, and Dillane’s portrayal is vastly underappreciated.

I definitely agree that his portrayal comes off as ‘creepier’. It’s not helped by the stylistic decisions in the scene -- the smeary, green filter gives the scene a sinister quality.

Even Slughorn looks suspect here, which is somewhat appropriate, given that he is complicit in this crime.

Again, this scene is very much intended to be slightly off.

You’ll notice (and I’ll discuss this again when I talk about Coulson’s portrayal) that Dillane is almost always shot from at least slightly below, which makes the lower third of his face look bigger (and thus more menacing). The lighting also makes his eyes glow in a really unnatural way. There’s an echo-y effect to make his voice (and not Slughorn’s) sound unnerving.

People talk about how Coulson would have looked in this scene, and if he was filmed in the same way (monotone, smeary/shadowy filter, and always from below), he’d look a bit creepy, too.

But all of this, imo, is for a pretty good reason. Slughorn isn’t the POV character. Harry is. Harry is learning about how a young Lord Voldemort wheedled the secret of Horcruxes out of an unsuspecting teacher. Unlike in COS, he expects Riddle to be evil. And, so, Harry’s new perception of Tom Riddle literally colors how we perceive him.

Take this shot, for example: he does that head-tilt thing that Coulson does, and it’s actually... kind of... cute???

Imagine Dillane filmed from slightly above, like Coulson usually is, and it looks even more innocent. (I mean, come on, he does not look like he’s killed four people, does he?) It’s not hard to imagine teachers being taken in by this kind of act.

Even that little smirk he does when the camera (aka, Harry’s gaze) pans in, is for Harry’s benefit. No one else noticed that.

However, I still fail to find this creepy, like, at all. Yes, it’s a fake smile, but he’s portraying a different side of Tom Riddle to Coulson. Whereas, in COS, he’s in his vindictive, murderous element, where he’s free to express himself, in this scene, Tom Riddle is doing what he does best -- manipulating and managing appearances.

This entire scene is an act. And because Harry knows it’s an act, it should look a bit stilted.

From the Hepzibah Smith scene in the books: Voldemort smiled mechanically and Hepzibah simpered.

So, Harry is pretty adept at parsing Tom’s fake expressions.

But just look at the expressiveness in his face: he goes from brooding, he blinks, and his entire face changes to this charming (fake) smile.

At the risk of sounding elitist, I’m a bit tired of seeing the word ‘psychopath’, which is not an actual medical diagnosis recognised by any psychological or psychiatric institution, being tossed about, especially with reference to Tom Riddle (and from a neuroscience perspective, it’s doubly annoying). There’s no such thing as ‘insanity’ or ‘psychopathy’ or being ‘crazy.’

-although I use it too a shorthand in conversation to distinguish ‘canon’ Tom from his ‘softer’ OOC counterparts, I really shouldn’t-

Unfortunately, I’ve seen the ‘psychopath’ comment used time-and-time again as an excuse or a full explanation of ‘why Tom Riddle went evil’ (JKR in fact, has made a weird comment in an interview, basically saying that ‘psychopaths can’t be redeemed or learn adaptive coping skills’ or whatever), which really just goes to show the lack of understanding and compassion when personality disorders, especially, are concerned.

But what I like most about the opening of this scene, actually, is that first, listless expression. And this is where we get slightly into headcanon, but Tom Riddle is the opposite of a happy, mentally healthy teenager. By Dumbledore’s own admission, he has no real friends. He has no parental figures, no real attachments. Yes, he might derive some pride or enjoyment from being good at magic and top of his class and all that, but I really don’t think even Tom finds that truly fulfilling. There is nothing that makes him happy.

In fact, although some might perceive it as ‘creepy’, I think that listless expression is an accurate window into Tom’s psyche.

I know people aren’t big on Freud, but I think that he does make some interesting points (also, cut the guy some slack for being relatively open-minded for the Victorian Era, and inventing psychoanalysis and while yes he did say some sexist stuff, good luck finding a field of science that isn’t male-focused and makes crazy generalizations about women, especially back in the day) about the possible origins of thanatophobia, the fear of death.

According to Freud, thanatophobia is a disguise for a deeper source of concern -- he did not believe that people were capable of conceptualizing their own death to that extent. Instead, he believed that this phobia was caused by unresolved childhood conflicts that the sufferer cannot come to terms with or express emotion towards.

Now, I know Freud almost always attributes mental distress to childhood experiences, but I think in this case, it really has some merit.

According to attachment theory, the basis of how we form attachments in adulthood is dictated by learning it from experiences with caregivers in the first two years of life. We know Tom was born in an orphanage, and that he didn’t cry much as a baby, and subsequently, probably received very little attention. Compounded with possible genetic factors and his caregivers being afraid or wary of his magical abilities, he later struggled to form attachments because of this -- I would actually go so far as to say that by the time Dumbledore meets him, Tom Riddle is severely depressed.

And that flat affect and anhedonia, I think, comes over very well in Dillane’s portrayal. There’s kind of this resignation -- a very deep sadness and loneliness to his character.

Of course, he doesn’t derive any comfort or fulfillment from human interaction, because (to borrow the description from the Wikipedia article on ‘Reactive attachment disorder’, which Tom meets all the criteria for) he has a “grossly disturbed internal working model of relationships.” In other words, he is unresponsive to all offers of attachment because of this unacknowledged trauma.

(You could arguably class Tom as having an avoidant attachment style, but I think in his case the trauma and its effect on him are severe enough to call it disordered.)

RAD isn’t particularly well-characterized (especially neurologically) and quite new in the literature, but here are some links if anyone is interested in doing a bit of digging: Link 1 | Link 2 | Paper 1 | Paper 2

And, instead of trying to resolve this conflict in a healthy way, or at least recognize that this is why he can’t be happy and try to learn how to cope from there, he (a) represses the desire for human attachment and (b) funnels that negative emotion into being the fault of Death, the Grim Reaper (again, to borrow Freudian terms).

And we all know how that turned out...

(And now, this should go without saying, but psychoanalyzing fictional characters has nothing to do with assigning a morality to mental disorders. Mental illness is neither a cause nor an excuse for criminal behavior -- in the same way that the cycle of violence is a phenomenon, not an excuse. Tom Riddle did not become a genocidal murderer because, in common parlance, he was a ‘psychopath’ -- he was not necessarily ‘predisposed’ to evil and could just as easily chosen to not follow the path that he did -- instead, he willingly made poor choices. This is a descriptive analysis, not a justification -- a ‘how’, not a ‘why’)

Here’s a Carl Jung quote that articulates it better:

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”

Yes, he’s a bit stiff (and a lot more formal than in COS during his *conversation* with Harry). But, and here comes the controversial bit, this is appropriate for a portrayal of a schoolboy in the 1940s. The upright posture is accurate -- respectful, polite -- everything Tom Riddle would have been expected to be (and even Coulson, in that scene with Dumbledore in COS, is quite stiff). Even the way he looks at Slughorn and maintains eye contact is very *respectful.*

And, Dillane (I think he’s seventeen or eighteen here) actually looks like a believable sixteen-year-old. I’m sorry, I love Coulson’s portrayal as well, but he looks around nineteen in COS; so in HBP, he probably would have looked at least twenty-two or so. (Sorry, not sorry).

This may be influenced by my own interpretation of the character (because I imagine Tom always looks young for his age, and Dillane fits that archetype, but I don’t think that’s very popular), but I think young Tom Riddle is supposed to be *cute* and a bit stiff/shy/awkward (being charming and awkward is very much possible), if you consider the way Dippet and Slughorn treat him.

To support this, he says very few words to Hepzibah Smith (in the book, that scene’s not in the movie), and is very... bashful and coy during the whole interaction? I think yes, he’s charismatic, but he’s not loud, suave, openly flirtatious or particularly verbose. Tom Riddle should have a quiet magnetism, and to me, that came across in Dillane’s portrayal.

"I'd be glad to see anything Miss Hepzibah shows me," said Voldemort quietly, and Hepzibah gave another girlish giggle.

...

"Are you all right, dear?"

"Oh yes," said Voldemort quietly. "Yes, I'm very well. ..."

Even the ‘ugly, greedy look’ described in the books, when Slughorn starts spilling his secrets, is there. This is how he’s supposed to look! Slughorn glimpses it, but doesn’t understand its significance. Harry does.

“Slughorn looked deeply troubled now: He was gazing at Riddle as though he had never seen him plainly before, and Harry could tell that he was regretting entering into the conversation at all.”

Remember the context of this moment, as well: He’s just discovered how to create multiple Horcruxes. Excuse him for looking a bit creepy (if not now, then when?).

Here’s two direct quotes of Harry’s impression of Tom Riddle in that scene:

“But Riddle's hunger was now apparent; his expression was greedy, he could no longer hide his longing.”

“Harry had glimpsed his face, which was full of that same wild happiness it had worn when he had first found out that he was a wizard, the sort of happiness that did not enhance his handsome features, but made them, somehow, less human. . . .”

Tom Riddle’s Horcruxes are a direct metaphor for his refusal to allow himself to heal from his trauma -- instead, he continues to inflict destruction on himself and others.

His desire to continue creating more Horcruxes sort of resounds with the fact that self-harm can also become a compulsion.

I’d also like to digress a bit to discuss the Gaunt Ring, while we’re at it. While we’ve talked about his attachment issues in general, this discussion is particularly pertinent to father figures. And while Tom’s attachment issues are extensive, I think there’s ample evidence that as a child, he craved acknowledgement and acceptance from a father figure -- the man who gave him the only thing Tom truly owned -- his name. He would have had a vaguely defined mother figure in Mrs. Cole, perhaps.

"You see that house upon the hillside, Potter? My father lived there. My mother, a witch who lived here in this village, fell in love with him. But he abandoned her when she told him what she was.... He didn’t like magic, my father ... He left her and returned to his Muggle parents before I was even born, Potter, and she died giving birth to me, leaving me to be raised in a Muggle orphanage ... but I vowed to find him ... I revenged myself upon him, that fool who gave me his name ... Tom Riddle. ..."

We know that by June of 1943 (COS flashback) Tom has already uncovered the truth of his parentage; he knows he is the Heir of Slytherin via the Gaunt line, and he describes himself to Dippet as ‘Half-blood, sir. Witch mother, Muggle father.’

In Part 1, I discussed the high probability that as a presumed ‘Mudblood’, Tom Riddle was treated rather poorly in Slytherin House. But by this scene in the fall of 1943, he is surrounded by a group of adoring hangers-on. Why?

In my opinion; the Gaunt Ring. We know that Tom stopped wearing it after school, so its sentimental value couldn’t have been that great. We know he likes to collect objects (which I believe stems from his attachment issues -- he seeks comfort in things instead of other people).

Signet rings (such as the one belonging to Tutankhamun seen above) were used to stamp legal documents and such, in order to certify someone’s identify -- like an e-certificate, if you will. Like Tutankhamun’s ring, the Gaunt Ring bears an identifying symbol -- Marvolo Gaunt tells us proudly that it bears the Peverell family crest.

By the Middle Ages, anyone of influence, including the nobility, wore a signet ring. Rings in antiquity were auspicious -- they signified power, legitimacy, and authority. And so, I believe that all the Sacred Twenty-Eight families would have worn these, too.

And so, bearing the Gaunt Ring would have established Tom Riddle, symbolically and in the eyes of the Sacred Twenty-Eight (his future supporters and followers), as the legitimate heir to the House of Gaunt. This is why, I believe, Tom coveted the ring as soon as he saw it -- not just because it was a family heirloom, and not just because he thought it was a pretty toy for his collection.

(He curses it so that no one else but him can wear the Gaunt Ring safely.)

This is why, to make the legitimization literal as well as symbolic, Tom murders his father and grandparents. It’s not just an act of vindictive, murderous rage due to his perception of being rejected by his father (although it is that, too). And so, Tom, abandoning his search for a father figure (and possibly also giving up on the possibility to allow himself to heal from his own personal trauma rather than continue to inflict it on others), ‘cleanses’ his bloodline, to make himself truly legitimate. It’s rather telling that instead of affirming his legitimacy as a Riddle, which would have put him in line for a nice inheritance, and hey -- money is money -- (thus accepting his half-blood status), he simply kills them all. He has done all the murdering he needs to become immortal (and he hasn’t had the discussion about multiple Horcruxes yet); but yet, he does it again. Frightening stuff.

(Just look how the others look at Tom. All but the one to his left -- possibly Nott, Rosier, or Mulciber -- have their torsos turned towards him. Their attention is on him, while he knowingly regards the viewer/Harry. Tom seems a little uncomfortable with the attention.).

“And there were the half-dozen teenage boys sitting around Slughorn with Tom Riddle in the midst of them, Marvolo's gold-and-black ring gleaming on his finger.”

...

“Riddle smiled; the other boys laughed and cast him admiring looks.”

...

“Tom Riddle merely smiled as the others laughed again. Harry noticed that he was by no means the eldest of the group of boys, but that they all seemed to look to him as their leader.”

The ‘gang’ are true hangers-on; Tom doesn’t seem to pay them much attention.

So, if not via careful flattery or charisma, the attraction must be status.

And perhaps yet more telling...

"I don't know that politics would suit me, sir," he said when the laughter had died away. "I don't have the right kind of background, for one thing." “A couple of the boys around him smirked at each other. Harry was sure they were enjoying a private joke, undoubtedly about what they knew, or suspected, regarding their gang leader's famous ancestor.”

That, in my opinion, is as good as we’re going to get as proof that Tom’s shiny new signet ring (and by extension, his new status) made a big impression on his fellow students.

So, when he returns to Hogwarts, he is ‘pureblood’. He is cleansed of his Muggle roots, and becomes the legitimate heir of the House of Gaunt, now well on his way to becoming Lord Voldemort...

Watch the scene again, with a critical eye, and imagine Slughorn’s perspective, instead of Harry’s. There’s nothing creepy about Tom Riddle... unless you know what he is...

Strip away all the effects of Harry’s gaze (and notice, here he’s still looking at Harry), and he’s quite the charmer, actually.

(I will concede that I don’t like the promotional images where they have him looking like he’s up to no good. And I do wish he blinked once in a while.)

My challenge to you: Rewatch the scene with an open mind, and let me know if you agree that Dillane’s portrayal comes off as depressive rather than ‘creepy.’ And if not, why do you dislike his portrayal?

#tom riddle #character analysis #character study #the many faces of #tom marvolo riddle #frank dillane #i literally could not find any pictures other than these #literal crumbs i swear #i know this is unpopular #people really dislike him i guess #watch the scene again with an open mind i promise you'll like it #i seriously do think he did a good job #tw: mention of child abuse #tw: mention of self-harm #i'm not trying to oversimplify things but you can't deny that maybe if tom was hugged as a child it would have helped #say it with me: psychopathy is not an actual medical diagnosis #it's actual more of a legal/criminal justice term #and people just use it as a synonym for 'evil' at this point so the original meaning is pretty much obscured #and personality disorders should not be moralized #people with personality disorders are not 'evil'

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majingojira · 5 years

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Monsters of the 20th Century

I had this odd notion. A (brief) analysis of the origin of various supernatural creatures, as I wondered what ‘new’ monsters/supernatural beings had been created in the 20th century (roughly). I’ve completed some of the research, and I’d like to share it with you all. I’m also gonna tag @tyrantisterror because he is one of the more knowledgable people about monsters I know about on tumblr and I’m sure he can correct me a bunch in this!

1. Frankenstein - 1817 - The oldest literary monster and outgrowth of the concept of the Homunculus and Golem as an artificial being. So pervasive is its reach, western ideas of Tulpa are tainted by it (every time you read about a tulpa ‘going out of control’, that is the influence of Frankenstein).

2. Dinosaurs - The Dragons of the age of science entered pop culture in 1854 at the latest with the opening of the Crystal Palace Park. Other prehistoric animals had captured people’s imagination before, and they didn’t start to enter fiction until 1864 (”Journey to the Center of the Earth”) and a short story by C. J. Cutliffe Hyne had an ancient crocodilian in his story “The Lizard” (1898). Ann early Lost World style adventure, “A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder” by James De Mille in 1888 has the first true dinosaurs in them. There, Antarctica has a warm spot where prehistoric monsters and a death cult lurk. In 1901, Frank Mackenzie Savile’s “Beyond the Great South Wall” had a Carnivorous Brontosaurs worshiped by Mayan remnants. “Panic in Paris” by Jules Lermina had dinosaurs attack a city, but it was published first in France so few saw it. Finally, we have Conan Doyle in 1912 with “The Lost World” which solidified dinosaurs as a thing in fiction.

3. The Evolved Man/Mutants - After “The Origin of Species” is published, it wasn’t long until Evolved Men or Mutants started showing up in fiction. “The Coming Race” and (1871), “The Great Romance” (1881). They are generally big-headed and often have ESP of some sort. In “Media: A Tale of the Future” (1891), they can control electricity too. It wasn’t until 1928 (”The Metal Man” by Jack Williamson) that Radiation was thrown in as a cause for Mutation. Cosmic Rays would follow in “The Man Who Evolved” by Edmond Hamilton (1931). After that, we have “Gladiator” by Philip Gordon Wylie (1930) where we have an engineered “Evolved Man”, and “Odd John” by Olaf Stapeldon which grants us the term “Homo superior” followed by “Slan” by A.E. van Vogt which has Evolved Humans as a persecuted minority. And with that, everything that makes the X-Men what they are is collected.

3. Man-Eating Tree - First reported in 1874, the idea of man-eating plants grew since then to encompase many monsters, but started as Folklore about ‘Darkest Africa” (Madagascar) in the New York World. They’d print anything back then.

4. Hyde - While it is tempting to link him to Freudian Psychology, Freud did not publish his work regarding things like the Id until much later (he didn’t even coin “Psychoanalysis” until 1896). What is springs from, I currently cannot say without more research.

4. Robot - Though there were automata since the days of the Greeks (Talos), the first Robot in modern fiction is from “The Future Eve” by Auguste Villiers de I’lsle Adam (1886). THough the term Robot is not invented until 1920 with “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” They definitely offshoot from Frankenstein, but with a more mechanical bent.

5. The Grey Alien - The modern idea of an Alien has it’s first antecedents in the 1800s. Specifically with the essay “Man of the Year 1,000,000″ by H. G. Wells (1892-1893). He speculates what humans will evolve into, and basically invites the Gray by accident. It wouldn’t achieve it’s alien attachments until much later.

6. Morlocks - With the Evolved Man, there is also the ‘Devolved Man’. That is what the Morlocks are. They are, as the name implies, tied to Well’s “The Time Machine” (1895), and the word has become a catch-all for subterranean monster-men, be they Mole People, CHUDs, or straight up Demons (’GvsE’).

7. The Martians & Their War Machines - The First Alien Invader, and the first Mecha can be traced to “War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells, 1897. Not much more to say as far as I’m aware.

8. The Mummy - The 1800s saw an Egyptian craze in England, leading to some really nasty habits (google “Mummy Powder” if you need ipecac). 1827 saw “The Mummy!: Or, a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century” which is more a bit of futurism with an ancient protagonist. Though “Lost in the Pyramid” (1868) by Louisa May Alcott predates it, it is overshadowed by Conan Doyle’s horror story “Lot No. 249″ (1892) which has the classically animated mummy going out and killing people under control of another. The former is a “Curse” story rather than a monster.

9. Cordyceps - Everyone these days knows the Cordyceps fungus as a great source for making zombies, and I’m lumping that fungus in with these other monsters because, well, fungus’ that take over humans is a monster of the 20th century. Best known for Toho’s film adaptation “Matango” (1963), it is inspired by a short story from 1907 by William Hope Hodgson called “The Voice in the Night”. There, the poor victim doesn’t realize they’ve completely become a fungus monster, acting as a warning for those near the island.

10. Aerofauna - Conan Doyle strikes again with “The Horror of the Heights” (1912). A pretty tight little horror story of a whole ecosystem high above our heads in the clouds. Many a sky tentacle owes its existence to this one.

11. Lich - Possibly derived from Kosechi the Deathless of Russian folklore, the idea of undead sorcerers became a staple of the works of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smyth, dating back to 1929. Though Gary Gigax coined the idea together for D&D and based it on Gardner Fox’s “The Sword of the Sorcerer (1969)

12. Bigfoot and The Loch Ness Monster - I lump these cryptids together, because (thanks to a ton of research by Daren Naish, Daniel Loxton, Donald R. Prothero, and others) we can trace them back to the same source: King Kong (1933). The idea of prehistoric animals being out in the world in hidden places goes back to Conan Doyle’s “Lost World” (1912), but Kong made it widely popular. And between the giant ape and the Brontosaurus attack (and the timing of sightings picking up), we can blame Kong for this.

13. The Great Old Ones - Lovecraft’s primary contribution to fiction first appear in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) and expand upon from here. As near as I can tell, he made a LOT of monsters. These include “Ancient Aliens” & Shoggoths (1936 - “At the Mountains of Madness”), Gillmen (1931 - ”The Shadow over Innsmouth”), & The Colour Out of Space (1927). 14. The Thing - The Ultimate Shapeshifter. It first appears in 1938′s “Who Goes There” by John W. Campbell, Jr. Though Campbell's square-jawed heroes literally tear the Thing to bits, it reached its zenith of horror in adaptation. I can think of no earlier shapeshifting humanoids of such variety at an earlier time, or of such fecundity.

15. The Amazons - The Amazons do indeed come from Ancient Greece, but it was a way for the Greeks to rag on Women. It wasn’t until later that women co-opted the image of the Amazons as a source of empowerment, and that was codified in 1942 with one character: Wonder Woman. She helped spark the Amazons further into the culture, or at least, Amazon women who have superpowers (as they did in those early stories). From there, we get a more recent direct descendant that was part of the reason I started this list: Slayers from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

16. The Hobbit - Though ideas of ‘Wee Folk” are part of worldwide Folklore, Tolkien took them out of the realm of Faerie, and made them... idyllic middle-class Englishmen with his 1937 book of the same name. With the Lord of the Rings following in 1954-1955. His works also gave us other monsters and supernatural beings: Orcs, Ents, & Balrogs.

17. Gremlins - An Evolution of the wee folk once again, this time adapted for the mechanical era and of a more malicious bent. It became slang in the 1920s, with the earliest print source being from 1929. They were popularized by Roald Dahl in”The Gremlins” (1942). Later they were used to vex Bugs Bunny (1943′s “Falling Hare”), and then they got their own movies in the 1980s. The rest is history.

18. Triffids - There are a LOT of fictional plants out there, and a lot of carnivorous ones, but the Triffids were the first to be extremely active in their pursuit of prey. From 1952′s “Day of the Triffids” by John Wyndham, the story is a keen example of the ‘Cozy Apocalypse’ common in British Fiction, sort of like the whole ‘schoolboys on a desert island make well of it’ thing that “Lord of the Flies” railed against. This paved the way for everything from Audrey II to Biollante.

19. Kaiju - 1954. You know what this is. Between Primordial Gods and Modern Technology, the Kaiju are born. The difference between a Kaiju and a Giant Monster is a complex nuanced one, sort of like what makes film noir. But, in general, if the story has Anti-War, Anti-Nationalist, and/or Anti-Corporate Greed leanings, it’s probably a Kaiju movie. If not, then it probably isn’t.

20. The Body Snatchers - Another horror of 1954 from the novel “The Body Snatchers” (1955), which includes aspects that the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” did not. Like that the Duplicates only last 5 years and basically exist to wipe out sentient beings with each planet they infest. Clearly drawing from the idea of the Doppelganger, these Pod People have evolved into a new form.

21. The Blob - That 1958 movie has one catchy theme song. The whole thing was inspired by an instance of “Star Jelly” in Pennsylvania, circa 1950. It was tempting to shift this under the Shoggoth, but I think they are distinct enough.

22. Gargoyles - Longtime architectural embellishments, they did not become their own “Being” until 1971 with “The Living Gargoyle” published in Nightmare #6. The TV Movie “Gargoyles” came soon after in 1972, firmly establishing the monster. Though it was likely perfected in the TV Series “Gargoyles” (1994).

23. D&D - From 1973 Through 1977, D&D was formulated and many of its key monsters were invented. Partly as mechanics ways to screw with players and keep things lively. This brought us Rust Monsters (1973), Mindflayer (1974), Beholder (1975), and the Gelatinous Cube (1977).

24. The Xenomorph - Parasitoid breeding is applied to humans to wonderfully horrible effect in the 1979 film “Alien”. It became iconic as soon as it appeared.

25. Slasher - The first slasher film is often considered to be ‘Psycho’ (though the Universal Mummy films beyond the first prototype the formula). The idea of an undead revenant coming back to kill rather randomly started in the film “The Fog” (1980), but was codified by Jason Voorhees in either 1984 or 1986. I am no expert on this one, though, so I am not fully certain.

26. The Dream Killer - Freddy Krueger first appeared as a killer in dreams in 1981, but there were other dream killers before him. They could only kill with extreme fear, though. Freddy got physical! I think. Again, more research is needed.

27. Chupacabras - This is another cryptid inspired by a movie. In this case, “Species” (1995). No, really. This is what it comes from. I know a lot of these are really short down the line, but the research for this one is thorough and concise!

28. Slender Man - The Boogieman for the Internet Age. An icon of Creepypastas and emblem of them.

Needs More Research: The Crow/Heroic Longer-Term Revenants, Immortals as a “Group” (might go to Gulliver's Travels, but I’m trying to track Highlander here) are also on the list, but they are proving extremely difficult to research, so I thought I’d post what I have at the moment. Shinigami might also be on the list since they are syncretic adoption of the Grim Reaper into something more.

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interestinginfotips-blog · 5 years

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How the Blessing of Isaac is Working Out

Therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine:

Let people serve thee, and nations bow down to thee: be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother’s sons bow down to thee: cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee.

Genesis 27:28-29

And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

Genesis 12:3

Isaac blessed his son Jacob and Jacob’s name was changed to Israel. Jacob is the person who grew to become the nation Israel. Jacob, the nation of Israel, received the blessing of the dew of the heavens, the fatness of the earth and plenty of corn and wine. He also received the blessing of having the nations bow down to him and becoming the lord of his relatives.

These blessings have carried through the centuries and made Israel and the Jews become who they have become. There is no other explanation that can help us understand why this small group of people should be so distinguished in the earth. Even more amazing is the fact that this group of people has been persecuted, expelled, hated and murdered by so many nations and yet has continued to stand out and shine through the centuries.

Even though there are many ethnic groups of people in the world, none of them has stood out and affected the world the way this group of people has. It is worth analysing and discovering the secret behind the unusual achievements of the Jews. As usual, the Bible gives us the answers. The wonders of the blessings and the curses are working! The blessings spoken by Isaac over his son, Israel, are prevailing and counteracting the hatred that exists against Jews. Nothing but the power of a blessing can explain the success and prosperity of the Jews. Let us now look at how the blessing of Isaac is working itself out in the lives of the Jews today.

1. The blessing of Isaac is working because the most famous person ever was a Jew. Jesus Christ was the most famous person that ever lived. Jesus Christ is the Son of God. The Jews were blessed and God chose them and used them to bring His Son into the world. All the history of mankind is dated and related to when this most famous and outstanding Jew (Jesus Christ) was born into this world. The Jews are a famous nation and have been used by God to impact the whole world.

2. The blessing of Isaac on Israel is working because many famous people of our world have been Jews. There is no way to explain why so many outstanding, unique and famous people come from Israel. Apart from the most famous person who ever lived, many other very famous people are Jews. Indeed, many Jews changed their names to protect themselves from persecution; and so it is likely that many more famous people are actually Jews. Let’s have a look at some of the famous Jews of our world.

Sigmund Freud: Sigmund Freud is one of the world’s famous descendants of Jacob. Sigmund Freud explored the human mind more thoroughly than any other who came before him.

His contributions to psychology are vast. Freud was one of the most influential people of the twentieth century and his enduring legacy has not only influenced psychology, but art, literature and even the way people bring up their children.

Freud’s lexicon has become embedded within the vocabulary of western society. Words introduced by Freud through his theories are now used in everyday English. They include words such as anal (personality), libido, denial, repression, cathartic, Freudian slip, and neurotic.

Freud believed that when we explain our own behaviour to ourselves or others (conscious mental activity) we rarely give a true account of our motivation. This is not because we are deliberately lying. Whilst human beings are great deceivers of others, they are even more adept at self-deception. Our rationalizations of our conduct therefore disguise the real reasons.

Freud’s life work was dominated by his attempts to find ways of penetrating this often subtle and elaborate camouflage that obscures the hidden structure and processes of personality.

Freud was the founding father of psychoanalysis, a method for treating mental illness and also a theory that explains human behavior.

Karl Marx: Karl Marx was a Jew who has been both lauded and criticized. Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history. Many intellectuals, labour unions and political parties worldwide have been influenced by Marx’s ideas, with many variations on his groundwork. Marx is typically cited with Emile Durkheim and Max Weber as one of the three principal architects of modern social science. Marx’s work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought. He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being “The Communist Manifesto”.

Albert Einstein: Perhaps, Einstein was the most intelligent descendant of Jacob. Einstein was a German-born Jewish theoretical physicist. He is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass–energy equivalence , E = mc², the most famous equation of the twentieth century. Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, “ For his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the Law of the Photoelectric Effect.” Einstein published over 300 scientific works and over 150 non-scientific works. Einstein is revered by the physics community, and in 1999, Time Magazine named him the “Person of the Century”. In a wider sense the name “Einstein” has become synonymous with genius.

Siegfried Samuel Marcus 1831 –1898: The very first car was made by another descendant of Jacob. Siegfried Samuel Marcus was a German-born Austria-Hungarian inventor of Jewish descent. He was the first to use a gasoline-powered engine to propel a car, creating the first ever self-propelling vehicle. In 1870 he put an internal combustion engine on a simple handcart and this made him the first to propel a vehicle by means of gasoline. Today, this car is well known as “The first Marcus Car”.

Because of Marcus’ Jewish ancestry, his name and all memorabilia were removed by the German Nazis. His memorial in front of the Vienna Technical University was removed. After World War II, the monument was rebuilt.

Marcus was removed from German encyclopaedias as the inventor of the modern car, under a directive from the German Ministry for Propaganda during World War II. His name was replaced with the names of Daimler and Benz.

3. The blessing of Isaac on Israel is working because the Jews have won a disproportionately high number of Nobel Prizes as compared to other groups of people. The Nobel Prize is regarded by far as the most prestigious prize in the world; and is awarded to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.

Since the Nobel Prize was first awarded in 1901 approximately 193 of the 855 honourees have been Jewish (22%), even though Jews make up less than 0.2% of the global population.

4. The blessing of Isaac on Israel is working because many of the richest and most successful people on earth have been Jews as compared to other groups in humanity. Note this list of the descendants of Jacob below and be amazed at the wonders of spoken blessing.

a. THE FOUNDER OF GOOGLE: Google, the world’s largest Internet company, was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Sergey Brin, whose father was a Soviet mathematician economist, was born to a Jewish family in Moscow. In 1979, he and his family fled persecution and migrated to America.

b. THE FOUNDER OF FACEBOOK: Zuckerberg was raised Jewish and had his bar mitzvah when he turned 13. Unfortunately, he became an atheist afterwards. One of the other co-founders of Facebook, Dustin Moskovitz is also Jewish.

c. THE FOUNDER OF VIBER: Viber was founded by four Israeli partners: Talmon Marco, Igor Magazinnik, Sani Maroli and Ofer Smocha, with Marco as its CEO.

d. THE CEO OF MICROSOFT: Steve Ballmer, is Jewish.

e. THE FOUNDER OF ORACLE: Lawrence Joseph ‘Larry’ Ellison was born in New York City, to an unwed Jewish woman. He founded the world’s second largest software company, Oracle, and is listed as the world’s richest Jew, and by Forbes as the sixth richest person in the world.

f. THE OWNER OF CHELSEA FOOTBAL CLUB: Roman Abramovitch who owns the Chelsea Football Club, as well as a private investment company, Millhouse LLC, is also a Jew and a descendant of Isaac.

g. THE FOUNDER OF TESCO STORES: The descendants of Isaac are to be found prospering and flourishing everywhere. Tesco supermarket, the largest supermarket in England is also Jewish. Jack Cohen, the son of Jewish migrants from Poland, founded Tesco in 1919 when he began to sell war-surplus groceries from a stall at Well Street Market.

h. THE FOUNDERS AND OWNERS OF GOLDMAN SACHS INVESTMENT BANK: Marcus Goldman was a Jewish banker, businessman, and financier. He was born in Trappstadt, Bavaria and immigrated to the United States in 1848. He was the founder of Goldman Sachs, which has since become one of the world’s largest and most influential investment banks. The Goldman Sachs CEO and Chairman: Lloyd Blankfein recalled the role of his rabbi and Jewish organizations in helping him realize he could succeed despite growing up in a working-class neighborhood. “The only person I knew who put on a suit everyday was our rabbi,” Blankfein told a crowd of 1,700 fellow Wall Street insiders one night at a $26 million record-breaking fundraising dinner for UJA-Federation of New York.

i. THE FOUNDATION OF WAL-MART: Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, married Helen Robson an English Jew whose father was a wealthy banker, lawyer and rancher. Sam Walton’s Jewish father-in-law gave him his first loan of $20,000 with which he started business.

j. THE FOUNDER OF LEHMAN BROTHERS: In 1844, 23-year-old Henry Lehman, the son of a Jewish cattle merchant, emigrated to the United States from Rimpar, Bavaria and opened a dry-goods store. In 1847, following the arrival of his brother Emanuel Lehman, the firm became “H. Lehman and Bro”. With the arrival of their youngest brother, Mayer Lehman, in 1850, the firm changed its name again and “Lehman Brothers” was founded. It was acquired by Barclays in 2008.

k. THE FOUNDER OF MACY’S: Isidor Straus was a Jewish German-born American who co-founded Macy’s department store with his brother Nathan. He and his wife, Ida, died when the RMS Titanic sank in 1912.

l. THE FOUNDER OF MARKS AND SPENCER: Marks & Spencer was founded in 1884 by Michael Marks and Thomas Spencer in Leeds, UK. Marks was a Polish Jew from Słonim. Some people even stopped shopping at Marks & Spencer because they suspected it was Jewish.

m. THE FOUNDER OF SEAR’S: Julius Rosenwald was born in 1862 to the clothier Samuel Rosenwald and his wife Augusta Hammerslough Rosenwald, a Jewish immigrant couple from Germany. He was born and raised just a few blocks from the Abraham Lincoln residence in Springfield, Illinois, during Lincoln’s Presidency of the United States.

He is best known as a part-owner and leader of Sears, Roebuck and company, and for establishing the Rosenwald Fund which donated millions in matching funds to support the education of African American children in the rural South, as well as other philanthropic causes in the first half of the 20th century. He was the principal founder and backer for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, to which he gave more than $5 million and served as President from 1927 to 1932.

n. FOUNDER OF VOLKSWAGEN: The all-time most popular car, the Volkswagen Beetle, was not invented by Adolf Hitler but by a Jewish engineer, Josef Ganz. With 21.5 million sales since production in Germany until its layoff in 2003, the Volkswagen Beetle was the longest running and most prolific car in history.

o. FOUNDER OF MERCEDES BENZ: One of the most famous cars in the world was also brought about by a descendant of Jacob. Daimler and Maybach; two Germans created the first car for the market. However, they could not sell it until Emil Jellinek an Israeli and the son of Rabbi Aaron Jellinek, took over the business. He convinced Maybach to build a new and improved car, to be called “Mercedes”, named after his daughter Mercedes. The Mercedes quickly shattered all records, going 60 km/h and easily winning the competitive Nice races. It was branded “the car of tomorrow” and took the world by storm.

p. FOUNDER OF CITROEN: André-Gustave Citroen, was the 5th and last child of Jewish parents, diamond merchant Levie Citroen from the Netherlands and Masza Amelia Kleinman from Warsaw, Poland. In 1900, he visited Poland the birth land of his mother, who had recently died. During that holiday he saw a carpenter working on a set of gears with a fish-bone structure. These gears were less noisy and more efficient. Citroën bought the patent for very little money, leading to the invention that is credited to Citroën: double helical gears. This is also reputed to be the inspiration of the double chevron logo of the Citroën brand.

q. THE CEOs of many huge companies are Jews: Companies like Walt Disney, Time Warner, Warner Music, Warnervision, ESPN, ABC, NBC, Dreamworks, Universal Pictures and many famous banks are all descendants of Isaac.

5. The blessing of Isaac on Israel is working because many amazing scientific discoveries of our world have been made by Jews as compared to other groups of people.

1. Israel developed the PillCam – the first pill that could be swallowed to record images of the digestive tract. The capsule is the size and the same shape as a pill, and contains a tiny camera. This invention is used very widely and was an extremely significant development in the field of medicine.

2. Israel was the country to develop the USB flash drive. Used by nearly everyone I know, it surely is one of the most useful modern inventions. It allows you to store all your files in a compact way, making it easier to access and work away from your computer.

3. Israeli inventions in the consumer goods market continue to thrive, as seen by the invention of the epilator. An epilator is an electrical device used to remove hair by mechanically grasping multiple hairs simultaneously and pulling them out. The first one, Epilady, was originally manufactured by a Kibbutz in Israel in 1986, and has since sold more than 30 million units.

4. Israel is “the land of milk and honey” thanks to its “super cows”, which produce far more milk than cows in other countries. Israeli cows produce up to 10.5 tons of milk a year – 10% more than North American cows and almost 50% more than Germany’s cows! A combination of air conditioning, constant monitoring and pedometers to tell when the animals are getting fidgety helps to keep the milk flowing, according to Bloomberg.

5. Israel developed the BabySense device, which helps prevent cot deaths by monitoring a baby’s breathing and movements through the mattress while they sleep. An auditory and visual alarm is activated if any irregularities occur during their sleep, which has helped parents prevent cot death worldwide.

6. Viber is also an Israeli invention. It is an app that allows you to call people around the world for free. Available for download on any smart phone, the app allows you to make calls across the world for free, using Wifi. Its high speed connection and ability to keep in contact with anyone anywhere truly makes it one of Israel’s best inventions.

by Dag Heward-Mills

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republicstandard · 5 years

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Gay Pied Pipers of “Polymorphous Perversity” Penetrate Schools

What do gay and transgender activists penetrating Britain’s schools have in common with the Jesuits?

Jesuits were said to take the attitude, “Give me the child for his first seven years, and I’ll give you the man.” Jesuit co-founder St Francis Xavier tweaked the axiom to: “Give me the child until he is seven and I care not who has him thereafter.”

Atheist missionary and pulpit thumper Richard Dawkins plumbs the potential of the Jesuitical proposition and points to “the useful gullibility of the child mind,” in The God Delusion. The Jesuit boast “is no less accurate (or sinister) for being hackneyed,” he agrees.

Gay activists have discovered the same truth. By fusing this Ignatian truism with the Freudian dogma of “polymorphous perversity,” the Pied Pipers of Stonewall are wreaking revenge on heterosexual conformity and leading our children into the Weser-like waters of sexual and moral morass, where they will drown like the mass of mesmerized rats, as in the dark legend of the Rat-Catcher of Hameln.

The bullying barrage of militant gay and transgender ideological activism would embarrass Soviet propaganda commissars for strategy and residents of Sodom and Gomorrah for shamelessness. Gayducation is now a non-negotiable item of the curriculum in British schools and who in Stonewall gives a fig if half of British children are leaving primary school unable to read and write properly?

The sexualization of our children is now a national pandemic, spreading like swine flu. Drop in at one of the Kama Sutra sessions offered by a local primary school in London and listen to 5-year-old children shouting “penis” and “vagina” like communist slogans and waving around Play-Doh models of lumpy genitalia they’ve made. Talk to Muslim academic Dr. Kate Godfrey-Faussett, a psychologist and Dialectical Behavior Therapist, who receives complaints from parents all over Britain about the pornification of the school curricula.

The pansexual proselytizers want our kids to be sexualized from Kindergarten. Lynnette Smith of Big Talk Education wants lessons to start “in nursery.” Five-year-olds at a London primary school are being taught about pornography, a BBC documentary reveals. Mick Manning and Brita Granström’s textbook How did I Begin? graphically explains procreation to 5+ years kids: “As they cuddled, your dad’s penis moved gently inside your mum’s vagina and the sperms flowed out.”

The eroticizers of education want to quarantine parents from the poison injected into their children. A 2010 Ofsted report found that schools rarely consult parents about sex education, even though the guidance encourages them to do so. Now that Ofsted has stepped up its inquisition against conservative schools, its recent report on sex education doesn’t mention consulting parents at all.

The golden coupling between sex and marriage is never mentioned. Only two commandments of safe sex and consent guide the discourse. “Making love is like skipping. You can’t do it all day long,” says the illustrated text Where did I come from? by Peter Mayle for 7+ years children. The Living and Growing DVD for 5-13-year-olds shows a group of little boys a public toilet where there’s a condom machine. “They have even got different flavors,” says a child in the film. Sex is as amoral and recreational as sit-ups and as multi-flavored as ice cream.

The goal is to brainwash kids into an anti-traditional family and promiscuously pansexual worldview. Seven-year-old children learn that anal intercourse is “sexual intercourse where a man puts his penis into another person’s anus” and oral sex is “using the mouth and tongue to lick, kiss or suck a partner’s genitals.” Subjects for discussion include homosexuality, bisexuality, abortion, rape, incest, sex abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV and Aids.

Heather, who runs her own workshops in schools in East London, helps teens to discover sadomasochism. “Maybe you read a really hot bit of erotica while looking up Dominance and Submission. Maybe you saw some awesome strap-on porn or just found some cool looking sex toys you’d like to use,” she writes on her website, urging the child to share the discovery with their partner.

Apart from pushing its gay agenda pretending it is “creating an inclusive school environment,” Stonewall brainwashes toddlers with transgenderism: “Babies are given a gender when they are born. Trans is a word that describes people who feel the gender they were given as a baby doesn’t match the gender they feel themselves to be,” its literature advocates, thus reframing gender dysphoria as a chic identity badge.

Drag queens are brought into taxpayer-funded nursery schools to read nursery rhymes and sing songs so 2-year-olds can learn about gay and transgender issues. The Drag Queen Story Times website says it aims “to capture the imagination and fun of the gender fluidity of childhood while giving children a glamorous, positive unabashedly queer role model.” Transgender lifestyles and same-sex relationships should be “promoted” to children as young as two to reduce hate crime, says the National Union of Teachers (NUT).

Except for very few Catholic, Jewish and Muslim schools, faith schools are falling like ninepins before Aphrodite’s chariot, with the Church of England going out its way to garland the new cult of gayducation. Anglican bishop Stephen Cottrell tells the House of Lords that the “Church of England works closely with Stonewall,” while Catholic bishop Philip Egan attacks Stonewall for burying Britain’s “Christian patrimony” and proposing “Orwellian changes to our language” and “draconian restrictions on religious expression.”

Egan is right. Gayducation is unrelentingly absolutist. According to Shraga Stern, thousands of Charedi Jews will leave Britain unless ministers back down from forcing faith schools to teach children about gay and transgender relationships after the Education Department forcibly introduced “homosexuality, same-sex relationships and gender reassignment” lessons in classrooms. On Thursday, the head of Ofsted Amanda Spielman said that all children must learn about same-sex couples regardless of their religious background.

Confused parents are asking two questions. First, how did we begin sexualizing our children—not just providing them biological instruction about human reproduction, but eroticizing them into accepting deviant sexualities? Why is this junk touted as scientific?

Remember Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis? He designed the scaffolding for sexualization children. Children are “polymorphously perverse” he said. Before a child is educated in the conventions of civilized society, it will turn to bodily parts for sexual gratification and will not obey adult rules that determine perverse behavior. But traditional education will suppress the polymorphous possibilities for sexual gratification in the child, said Freud.

Sexologist Alfred Kinsey took this further claiming that even the tiniest of infants have the “capacity” for orgasm. Hence, sexual satisfaction is a childhood goal to be pursued. Kinsey’s theory of early childhood sexual development became the standard for sex education in schools. A scandal broke when Kinsey and his associates were accused of masturbating thousands of little children for scientific data to confirm Kinsey’s theory. Kinsey also claimed that 10-47% of Americans are gay. His two “findings” paved the way for gayducation.

Second, parents are asking why Pied Pipers of polymorphous perversity are not tolerant of real diversity. Why the bigotry and totalitarianism? Why are gay and transgender evangelists desperate and determined to convert innocent and impressionable minds to their cult of Eros (even though they hate “conversion therapy”)?

The gay liberation movement began with a libertarian argument. Leave us to do our thing. Western society then gave LGBTI+ folk freedom to do their thing. That wasn’t enough. The plea for tolerance became a demand for equality (and same-sex marriage). Equality implies that people are equal before the law. It doesn’t go far enough and sanctify certain practices as morally good. To achieve this goal, you’ve got to aggressively and subversively push for normalization—starting with the most malleable minds.

Children are powerless and offer the least resistance. Once you’ve have brainwashed them—you’ve got them for life. This is the goal of the sex education industry—as it milks the government (and taxpayer) for millions of pounds. “I have come to indoctrinate your children into my LGBTQ agenda (and I’m not a bit sorry),” says children’s author and activist S. Bear Bergman.

There will be pockets of resistance opposing your project for normalization and moral canonization. You’ve got to eliminate them by orchestrating a coup d’état and establishing totalitarian control. Even the tiniest resistance poses a threat. Why? Because the struggle between light and darkness is unequal (as the soaring prologue to the gospel of John poetically and philosophically portrays).

For darkness to triumph, it must be complete and total. “The light of a single candle, somewhere in the universe, defeats it; there is now light where formerly there was none,” writes Michael Walsh. “Either there is Light or there is not; there can be no synthesis.” The tiniest flicker of candlelight is sufficient to expose and unsettle the hegemony of darkness.

From September 2020, the state wants to make Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) and teaching LGBT+ concepts compulsory in all primary and secondary schools. StopRSE is resisting the darkness of polymorphous perversity. Parents of all faiths and none are lighting candles to help save our children. The debate on the new RSE will take place on Monday 25 February at 4.30 pm. You can sign the petition to Parliament demanding you choose what your child learns.

Parents of Hamelin! Your taxes are paying for the Pied Pipers of polymorphous perversity to lure your children into Des Teufels Lustschloss (The Devil’s Pleasure Palace). It’s time you sang to the state-funded Piped Pipers: “We don’t need no gayducation. Hey! Stonewall, leave our kids alone.”

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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MARI RUTI IS a Distinguished Professor of Critical Theory and Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Toronto. Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life is the first of two books she will publish in 2018. It’s her 11th overall, and the fifth since 2015 — which means that in the past three years alone, she has written about queer theory (in the Lambda Literary Award–nominated The Ethics of Opting Out), evolutionary psychology (The Age of Scientific Sexism), the Hollywood rom-com (Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman), all of which engage the Lacanian psychoanalysis at the core of her entire oeuvre.

Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings is both consistent with that canon and stands apart. It shares with Ruti’s other work the disarming lucidity that characterizes her writing and teaching, and her insistence that critical theory ought to directly address the contours of lived experience. But whereas her previous work has often centered on mapping out the intellectual connections between heavyweight theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Žižek, Penis Envy combines philosophical and autobiographical explorations. It’s not so much theory being applied to the real world, but rather — in a similar vein to “autotheoretical” texts like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts — holding ideas and life alongside each other, searching out what she refers to as “the art of living.”

Penis Envy opens with Ruti’s memorable first encounter with the Freudian concept. Reading Freud when she was in college, Ruti found herself in such visceral disagreement with the idea of penis envy that she flung the book across the room and declared the foundational psychoanalyst “a fucking idiot.” Revisiting the concept now, she concedes that it’s worth rethinking penis envy in ways that reinterpret it as a precursor to feminist politics and culturally produced “bad feelings.” Ruti’s intellectually generous approach is one of “thinking out loud,” drawing candidly on her autobiography — her difficult childhood in Finland; the strain of being a woman in academia; her urgent relationship to writing — and weaving these episodes together with her theoretical reflections. Ruti invites the reader into a conversation about our common vulnerabilities, with the idea that naming them might go some way toward making them easier to bear.

Penis Envy, then, represents something of a turning point in Ruti’s career. Speaking with Ruti over email, our conversation centered on how this intellectual shift informed her writing process: the questions she feels compelled to revisit, the psychic risks and rewards of creativity, what it’s like to write “autotheory,” and the question of how best to actually sit down and write.

TAJJA ISEN AND PHILIP SAYERS: In the introduction, you frame Penis Envy as a way of revisiting the questions — self-fashioning, singularity, creativity, desire — that have been central to your earlier work. At this point, how would you distill the question of what preoccupies you? How has the approach you’ve taken in this book changed the way you think about these questions?

MARI RUTI: It seems to me that life, generally speaking, is a matter of repeatedly returning to what doesn’t quite feel “done.” That’s why the repetition compulsion — repeating hurtful patterns of behavior that aren’t conducive to our flourishing — was an important concept for Freud. He understood that what most fascinates humans, at least on the unconscious level, are their failures. Buried in this compulsion to return to the site of failure is the wish to make things right, to ensure that this time, we won’t make the same stupid mistake. But of course we usually do.

For me, writing has been a generative way of coping with this tendency to repeat. I discuss bad feelings, traumatization, and other painful experiences on the written page in the hope that this keeps me from repeating them in life. I’m not saying I’m always successful. But understanding that writing is always an unresolved process — that I’ll never be able to exhaust a topic — has helped me come to terms with the fact that the same is true of life, that there are no definitive solutions or easy fixes.

What has always most interested me is what one might loosely call “the art of living”: living the kind of life that feels meaningful. The themes you mention — self-fashioning, singularity, creativity, and desire — are all subsets of this theme. It continues to be my main preoccupation. In Penis Envy, I describe a scene where, in 2016, I was standing in front of a mirror in a Harvard bathroom and realized that nothing about the bathroom had changed since I finished graduate school in 2000. It was I who had changed. It was a moment of recognizing that more than half of my life is over. So now what? How am I going to live the rest of it in ways that feel alive? The personal approach that I took in writing this book has made this question all the more urgent.

Your writing in the past has sometimes used examples from your personal experience to illustrate the real-life relevance of theoretical concepts, but in this book, it’s not just that there’s more of the autobiographical element — it often feels like the “bits of memoir,” as you put it, are themselves generating the book’s argument. One way to think about this approach — and you talk about this — would be to call it “autotheory,” after writers like Paul Preciado and Maggie Nelson. But there’s also a longer history of writers doing similar things: for example, you’ve taught Maggie Nelson and Chris Kraus alongside Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin. Thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, and even Freud could also be on that list. How would you locate your own work in relation to that tradition?

With this text, I explicitly set out to write an autotheoretical treatise. All the authors you mention have been foundational to my intellectual formation, and what I’ve always admired about them is their dexterity in weaving the personal into their theoretical or philosophical reflections. Without Freud and Nietzsche, I wouldn’t be who I am. But the author with whom I feel a special kinship is Roland Barthes, the Barthes of the 1970s who wrote beautifully personal books, such as A Lover’s Discourse and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. I was also drawn to Maggie Nelson’s style in The Argonauts. Yet somehow I wasn’t entirely ready to produce something like that. The lucidity of my writing style — all my years of striving to stay pedagogical — got in the way; I wasn’t able to replicate her more elusive style. Moreover, it felt important to develop a distinctive voice of my own: what came out was a hybrid text that contains bits of memoir, along with a great deal of theoretical reflection and cultural critique.

As a kind of flip side to that question: you’re often especially critical of thinkers for whom there’s a real split between their radical theoretical positions and their privileged way of life. You give the example of a prestigious academic complaining that his hotel isn’t nice enough right before delivering a lecture critiquing neoliberal capitalism. Priyamvada Gopal has used the term “critique-washing” to describe this kind of thing: being vitriolic in your critique of hegemonic systems as a way to mask the fact that you benefit from those same systems. In contrast, you’re extremely upfront about this uneasy sense of complicity. How do you negotiate that dilemma in your writing?

I admit that, in recent years, my pet peeve with my field — progressive critical theory, defined here loosely as a mixture of continental philosophy, French poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer theory — has been its tendency to produce theoretical positions that sound radical and cool but are in fact completely unlivable. It’s like there’s this race to be on the cutting edge of the most extreme position conceivable. Yet most of the critics writing these treatises lead relatively normative, and often extremely privileged, lives.

But, frankly, intellectual generosity is a more comfortable style for me. Somehow I lost track of this around 2015, when I staged vicious critiques of some of the very colleagues from whom I’ve learned the most. I regret having done this: it’s not my place to tell anyone how to theorize. Still, in my own writing, I try to stick to ideas that I can live by. I like critical models that have real-life relevance.

One way in which this book seems especially current has to do with your critique of the crushing expectations that heteropatriarchy puts on women (to be adept in “the masquerade of femininity,” to be emotionally intelligent and sensitive to men’s supposed deficiencies), and the way that it lets men off the hook. A lot of feminist responses to talk of “the redistribution of sex” and “enforced monogamy” have made a similar point. Do you have a sense of why this disparity seems to be especially prevalent today?

This disparity has existed for a long time. And feminists have always complained about it. But now the problem has hit the collective consciousness of our society in ways that are making waves. If we stick to the North American context, one of the root causes of the problem is what I call “the gender obsession disorder”: the stubborn insistence on a clear-cut distinction between men and women. At the core of this disorder is the assumption that men are “naturally” more sexual than women and that women are “naturally” more emotional than men. Consequently, women end up doing more emotional labor because they’re expected to automatically know how to handle it — even though they have in reality had to go through a coercive process of social conditioning to gain the emotional intelligence that they may possess. Men, on the other hand, aren’t expected to pull their weight because they’re assumed to be incapable of emotional labor, like they’re expected to be incapable of doing the dishes without breaking your favorite plate. Sex, on the other hand, is supposedly “their” domain and the male sex drive is portrayed as a force of nature that’s in constant need of satisfaction. And depriving men of this satisfaction is presented as a betrayal of their inalienable rights.

Perhaps the most controversial chapter of my book has to do with the ways in which straight women are pressured to put up with their partners’ online porn consumption. I’m not making an argument about the morality of pornography or suggesting that it should be censored. I’ve always been a “pro-sex” feminist. But I think that we have reached a point where we have to admit that not all forms of sexuality are emancipatory. Most heteroporn, which is produced by multinational corporations, is a tool of what Foucault calls biopolitical conditioning: it teaches men that sex is — and should be — available to them at the click of the mouse. And if their girlfriend complains, too bad for her. She’s immediately labeled prudish, uptight, or anti-sex. So this is a situation where heteropatriarchy has reinvented itself to guarantee that men get what they want whereas what women want — in this case, porn-free sex lives — is deemed irrelevant.

Online heteroporn has changed the sex lives of millions of people, and while there are obviously women who happily participate in the phenomenon, my sense is that the change has been mostly at their expense. Not only does it make many women feel terrible about themselves when their partner prefers online porn to sex with them; women are also deprived of sex. The idea that women don’t need sex as much as men is a heteropatriarchal myth. And now that so many men are getting their sexual needs met online, women are left in the painful position of not knowing what to do with their sexuality. One option would be to join the porn consumers. But much of what’s available on the internet isn’t exactly female friendly. This is a topic that needs to explode on the social level, and soon, because it’s becoming too big a problem to hide. Too many women who are upset about it are afraid to complain. I think it’s high time to start complaining, and loudly.

One argument that emerges a few times in the book is the idea that, whereas consumerism is capitalism’s way of harnessing our desire for its own gain, writing (or creativity more broadly) can be a healthier or more authentic way for us to deal with our innate sense that we’re lacking creatures. Sheila Heti recently wrote a great piece in which she pointed out that shopping and writing are similar ways of articulating yourself by choosing things — products or words — but the way they make her feel is different in the end. Shopping makes her feel anxiety, and it’s never satisfying: as soon as what she’s ordered arrives, it loses its allure. But writing is more satisfying — maybe partly because it doesn’t promise once-and-for-all gratification of our desire. Our sense is that you’d agree with this. Why is writing a better way of responding to our lack and desire?

I agree with Sheila Heti. The most succinct way to explain the matter is through Jacques Lacan, who gives us two relevant concepts, namely that we’re all beings of lack and that we’re all filled with what he calls jouissance, an excess of drive energy. Lack causes desire and jouissance demands an outlet. Consumerism seems to offer a solution to both problems: you buy stuff to fill the void within your being and you exhaust yourself in the process. But usually the satisfaction that this brings doesn’t last. Writing, in contrast, gives you an endless resource for coping with both lack and jouissance. It doesn’t fill your lack in any definitive way, but words have a way of easing that sense of emptiness. And writing is an effective means of burning off excess energy: it both augments jouissance and consumes it so that it becomes more manageable. I don’t know about Sheila, but I feel the least anxious — the most “at home” with myself — when I’m writing. Both lack and excess jouissance recede so that there is space to just “be.”

Penis Envy is very critical of contemporary versions of love and romance. We were surprised by what felt like a dialing-back on the descriptions of love from The Singularity of Being. We’ve already touched on how writing and other acts of creativity provide a more reliable source of fulfillment. But do we always have to think of the two as separate? What if we think of love as a form of creativity — could it become something that might “enrich our existence” as sustainably as those artistic activities?

What may seem like a shift in my thinking about love is due to the fact that in Penis Envy I use a Foucauldian (biopolitical) lens to analyze love as a commercial enterprise whereas in my earlier books — such as The Singularity of Being — my lens was primarily Lacanian, with the result that my emphasis was on the transformative power of love, on what Alain Badiou calls the amorous event. I still believe in the amorous event. And I appreciate your idea that love can be a form of creativity, a form of artistic activity — an important part of “the art of living” that interests me. Your way of articulating the matter is one way to comprehend what Badiou means when he talks about staying faithful to the amorous event.

It’s true that one reason I thought that you might not like all aspects of the book is that I know that you’re in an exceptionally fulfilling and sustaining relationship. But my goal isn’t to disenchant love. It’s just that in Penis Envy, I examine how capitalism manages to turn love into a commodity, into the kind of “romance” that’s supposed to be safe and controllable. This, for me, is the very antithesis of the amorous event.

You’re very forthcoming in the book — generously, helpfully so — about your attachment to your “personal creation myth” and the fact that, as much as you might criticize the performance principle and the “good life,” you’ve also chosen productivity as a way of being. How do you balance the necessity of writing to live, and writing that brings with it ever more pressures to perform? Do you ever just want to withdraw from your professional obligations and merely write for writing’s sake?

My “personal creation myth” — the story of rising from the ashes that forms the backbone of the personal narrative that drives the text — is the thorniest part of the book. On the one hand, I’m critical of the American dream as an ideological ruse that places responsibility on individuals to succeed and brutally blames those who fall behind for not trying hard enough or performing well enough. This dream ignores the social inequalities that prevent many people from carving out livable lives for themselves. On the other hand, I can’t deny that the trajectory of my life has fallen within the parameters of the American dream: I grew up poor, in a house without running water, with parents who worked in low-paying and soul-slaying jobs, yet somehow I made my way to my current blessed life. There’s a lot of guilt I carry about this because I know that I was given the kinds of opportunities — such as a scholarship to Brown University — that my parents never had. So when I think of it, I cry, and I’m not sure if I’m crying because I made it, or because they couldn’t. And when I look at the ways in which many Americans are damaged by racism and other social impediments, I don’t know what to do. The one place where I feel I can perhaps make a difference is in the classroom, where I discuss structural social problems.

I’m extremely lucky that usually I get to write for writing’s sake. After my first book — which started as my dissertation — most of my writing hasn’t been out of professional obligation. So my “productivity” in the context of writing is more a matter of a personal compulsion: books sort of just leap out of me. They press on me. And they come out at different frequencies. I’ve written some strictly academic books, but I’ve also written “crossover” books — books that are aimed at both academic and mainstream readers. Penis Envy falls into this category.

The hard part is to ensure that the other obligations that are part of my job as a professor don’t close up the space of writing. There are long stretches when I can’t write because I have to attend to countless other demands. But when I hit a period when I’m free to write, I withdraw from the rest of life almost completely because the time for writing feels so precious.

Throughout the book, you offer a complex portrait of your relationship to the act of writing — as productivity, as pathology, and as living itself. You also suggest various conditions that make writing possible: cutting ties that feel “opaque,” decluttering one’s living space, forgetting the weight of the past. It was a surprising but illuminating moment when you admitted that only when you wrote those words — “lucidity, uncluttering, paring down” — did you see the connection between your life philosophy and your writing style. Now that you’ve found that connection, could you say more about this link between writing and paring down?

It was a surprising moment for me as well to realize that there’s a connection between my minimalist lifestyle and my lucid writing style. This realization made me even more determined to get rid of murkiness: no more ambiguous relationships; no more excess consumption of anything; no more clutter; and no more pining for a better life than the one I have because my life is better than I could ever have imagined. Giving up these other pursuits — and sequestering myself in an apartment with no internet access — creates space for writing, which, for me, for some enigmatic reason, feels like the key to my singular art of living.

Tajja Isen is a writer and voice actor. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in publications such as BuzzFeed, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, The Globe and Mail, and Catapult, where she is also a contributing editor.

Philip Sayers is a PhD candidate in English and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.

The post Ideas to Live by: A Conversation with Mari Ruti appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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viesolivagant · 6 years

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The Hero’s Journey

In narratology and comparative mythology, the monomyth, or the hero's journey, is the common template of a broad category of tales that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, and in a decisive crisis wins a victory, and then comes home changed or transformed.

The study of hero myth narratives started in 1871 with anthropologist Edward Taylor's observations of common patterns in plots of hero's journeys.Later on, others introduced various theories on hero myth narratives such as Otto Rank and his Freudian psychoanalytic approach to myth, Lord Raglan's unification of myth and rituals, and eventually hero myth pattern studies were popularized by Joseph Campbell, who was influenced by Carl Jung's view of myth. In his 1949 work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell described the basic narrative pattern as follows:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

Campbell and other scholars, such as Erich Neumann, describe narratives of Gautama Buddha, Moses, and Christ in terms of the monomyth. While others, such as Otto Rank and Lord Raglan, describe hero narrative patterns in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis and ritualistic senses. Critics argue that the concept is too broad or general to be of much usefulness in comparative mythology. Others say that the hero's journey is only a part of the monomyth; the other part is a sort of different form, or color, of the hero's journey.

Campbell borrowed the word monomyth from Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939). Campbell was a notable scholar of James Joyce's work and in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944) co-authored the seminal analysis of Joyce's final novel.[5][6] Campbell's singular the monomyth implies that the "hero's journey" is the ultimate narrative archetype, but the term monomyth has occasionally been used more generally, as a term for a mythological archetype or a supposed mytheme that re-occurs throughout the world's cultures.[7][8] Omry Ronen referred to Vyacheslav Ivanov's treatment of Dionysus as an "avatar of Christ" (1904) as "Ivanov's monomyth".

Campbell describes 17 stages of the monomyth. Not all monomyths necessarily contain all 17 stages explicitly; some myths may focus on only one of the stages, while others may deal with the stages in a somewhat different order.[page needed] In the terminology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the stages are the individual mythemes which are "bundled" or assembled into the structure of the monomyth.[11]

The 17 stages may be organized in a number of ways, including division into three "acts" or sections:

Departure (also Separation),

Initiation (sometimes subdivided into IIA. Descent and IIB. Initiation) and

Return.

In the departure part of the narrative, the hero or protagonist lives in the ordinary world and receives a call to go on an adventure. The hero is reluctant to follow the call, but is helped by a mentor figure.

The initiation section begins with the hero then traversing the threshold to the unknown or "special world", where he faces tasks or trials, either alone or with the assistance of helpers.

The hero eventually reaches "the innermost cave" or the central crisis of his adventure, where he must undergo "the ordeal" where he overcomes the main obstacle or enemy, undergoing "apotheosis" and gaining his reward (a treasure or "elixir").

The hero must then return to the ordinary world with his reward. He may be pursued by the guardians of the special world, or he may be reluctant to return, and may be rescued or forced to return by intervention from the outside.

In the return section, the hero again traverses the threshold between the worlds, returning to the ordinary world with the treasure or elixir he gained, which he may now use for the benefit of his fellow man. The hero himself is transformed by the adventure and gains wisdom or spiritual power over both worlds.

Campbell's approach has been very widely received in narratology, mythography and psychotherapy, especially since the 1980s, and a number of variant summaries of the basic structure have been published. The general structure of Campbell's exposition has been noted before and described in similar terms in comparative mythology of the 19th and early 20th century, notably by Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp who divided the structure of Russian folk tales into 31 "functions". (Wikipedia)

#mythology #the heroes journey #joseph campbell #monomyth

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