Caricature of Love

[Cyre2067]

I printed it out, got through the first four chapters and then had to stop. Combination of factors, and I'm probably over-blaming school, but I do have much less time for reading and blogging nowadays.

The hardest part for me is seeing the truth is what Cleckley says. My culture, my identity and my peers are all infected with raw pathology. Gay culture itself has been hijacked - right from the start - and twisted into a pathological caricature. It's classic ponerology, and it blows my mind I hadn't seen it sooner. I guess that I did see it, but without this particular piece of the puzzle it made it much more easy to write off or normalize.

The problem is that the situation is much dire then Cleckley could ever have imagined, and so his mind isolates sexual pathology into a context he can understand - homosexuality. That said, I've seen a good chunk of 'modern western homosexuality' - and it is pretty messed up. I've also seen admirable qualities within the community as well, but that seems to come about in small scale interactions, among a few close friends.

The new difficulty, for me specifically, is to exist within that milieu, to assimilate the new knowledge I've acquired, and to grow and change accordingly. It hurts, a lot.

I feel as if I'm hiking up a mountain, and every so often a brick is added to my pack, and it gets heavier and heavier, and my only option is to get stronger and try harder. It helps to consider the fate of humanity hanging in the balance, but it also rips me up... probably contributing to my dreams being so serious lately.

Anyway that's about where I'm at.

 

[Niall]

Breathtaking comments in the Guardian newspaper recently from famous gay actor Stephen Fry (who starred, rather appropriately, as Oscar Wilde in the movie Wilde):

_http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/oct/31/stephen-fry-sex-women-relationships-attitude



Stephen Fry shocks feminists by claiming women don't really like sex

Polly Vernon
The Observer, Sunday 31 October 2010

Broadcaster and writer Stephen Fry has tried to establish himself as an unlikely authority on female sexuality, claiming that straight women only go to bed with men "because sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship".

In uncharacteristically extreme comments, the openly gay Twitter champion said he believed most straight men felt that "they disgust women" as they "find it difficult to believe that women are as interested in sex as they are".

"For good reason," he declares in a candid interview in the November issue of Attitude magazine. "If women liked sex as much as men, there would be straight cruising areas in the way there are gay cruising areas. Women would go and hang around in churchyards thinking: 'God, I've got to get my -flicking- rocks off', or they'd go to Hampstead Heath [notorious gathering place for sexual psychopaths - Kniall] and meet strangers to shag behind a bush. It doesn't happen. Why? Because the only women you can have sex with like that wish to be paid for it."

Fry, 53, continues: "I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want," he said. "Of course, a lot of women will deny this and say, 'Oh no, but I love sex, I love it!' But do they go around having it the way that gay men do?"

The remarks denote a marked break in tone from a man whose public shtick tends towards inoffensive charm and gently upmarket wit and are likely to be roundly dismissed by those who have embraced the idea of women's ability to have unemotional, uncommitted sex as an empowered lifestyle choice.

Rosie Boycott, the journalist and feminist, said the remarks were "kind of rubbish. Women are just as capable as men are of enjoying sex. We don't go cruising or cottaging on Hampstead Heath because we don't need to. Cottaging on Hampstead Heath is presumably a hangover from the days when, sadly, [homosexuality] was illegal… Women have other ways to get our thrills, and we can go and get them in bars or clubs. Having said which, we probably also do it in parks sometimes too. It's just that we don't call it cottaging. I'm sure I've done it in parks in my time."

Paul Flynn, the journalist who spoke to Fry, said: "I thought it was quite an odd generalisation to make at the time, but he delivered it with certainty and it was clearly something he'd thought about."

The theory has left several commentators bemused. Susie Orbach, the psychotherapist and feminist campaigner, said she was interested in the wider implications of Fry's beliefs: "I'm really intrigued by his notion that men's sexuality is disgusting in some way. Why would he believe that women could be so disgusted by men? Does he think there is something disgusting about sex?"

No, he clearly thinks there is something disgusting about women.

For Flynn, the bewilderment sprang more from a homosexual man's belief in his authority on female sexuality. "Gay men debating the whys and wherefores of female sexuality… for very obvious reasons, we can hardly claim to be experts," he said. "I'm more interested in his feeling that straight men are somehow to be pitied. That's quite a radical standpoint."

Fry's theory that straight women use sex as a currency in their pursuit of romantic love appears to run contrary to the wider movement to destigmatise – or "de--jezebel-" – ideas surrounding sexually active females. The trend has gained ground over the past decade with characters such as Sex and the City's Samantha Jones owing their popularity to a fondness for no-strings, anonymous sex – and lots of it.

Fry is in a relationship with 25-year-old actor Steven Webb. In the interview, he also speaks with frankness about his experiences in the "extraordinary underworld" of cottaging in his youth, cautioning, however, that while he was "slightly obsessed" with the clandestine practice as a teenager it was more for the graffiti and sense of solidarity.

Cottaging: _http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cottaging

 

[Alana]

Breathtaking comments in the Guardian newspaper recently from famous gay actor Stephen Fry (who starred, rather appropriately, as Oscar Wilde in the movie Wilde):

_http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/oct/31/stephen-fry-sex-women-relationships-attitude

Stephen Fry shocks feminists by claiming women don't really like sex

:O

Interesting title from the Guardian too. Because Fry shocks all non-ponerized thinking/feeling men and women with his comments, i would think!

 

[Mrs.Tigersoap]

Rather interestingly, Fry is notoriously bipolar! He even had a BBC documentary made on his disorder. Two characteristics of the manic phase of the bipolar disorder is poor judgment and provocative behaviour. That explains a lot...

Interesting title from the Guardian too. Because Fry shocks all non-ponerized thinking/feeling men and women with his comments, i would think!

Exactly! It says as much about Fry as it does about The Guardian.

"I thought it was quite an odd generalisation to make at the time, but he delivered it with certainty and it was clearly something he'd thought about."

Oh, if he delivered it with certainty, that must be true, then...

 

[SeekinTruth]

Well, having had some time and computer problem with accessing the internet (now fixed), I finally read Caricature of Love, finishing it yesterday. It is exactly as described by Laura, AI, and others. It really WAS a VERY hard read, but really worth the effort. And the last two chapters really ARE beautiful.

Reading this, the updates to the Dec. 12, 2010 C's session transcript thread about the close call with Atreides' health deteriorating in the last week or so, and everything going on in the world -- impending ice age / really disturbing likelihood of mass insanity/food riots/mindless mayhem-every-man-for-himself scenarios, fascist/totalitarian pathology ever more on the march, etc. -- has really knocked me for a loop. I'm really seeing the depth and breadth of what we face, what we're fighting and must prevail against -- internally AND externally -- has taken my breath away.

Everyone around me/in close physical proximity is either totally oblivious or actually doing the kind of mental contortions to try to NOT see what's happening in this world or spin it to make it seem as nothing to worry about. On this New Year's Eve, what's foremost in my mind is that this coming year is very likely to be the year where everyone will be "accosted" by the Terror of the Situation, and will have to make their choice of how to respond.

There are other, personal relationship issues, that also escalated in the last couple of days adding to the wallop of the whole experience that will probably be better to write about at a later time. I feel both exhausted and energized at the same time by the sheer enormity of our toxic, pathological world, and how we need to proceed to keep the hope of a better world alive and likely to manifest for the benefit of future humanity. I think sometimes "an all-out violent assault," so to speak, on our core sensibilities is what we really need to catapult us to the next stage of our Work.

Particularly important aspects of Cleckley's achievement are how he shows the colossal negative/pathological influence propagated through "the arts" and "education" (something I've been grappling with for decades) and the examples of what the heights of true love and caring companionship can be like. The two authors he mentions toward the end of the book -- Dickens and Conrad -- are two of my favorites of all time. Although, I also really loved reading Dostoevsky as well, I came to see him as a "dark, sick genius" and eventually stopped reading his work because of this pathological element lurking in the background. He seemed to relish what is not healthy in human relations (although not in a very overt way).

I spent a large part of my adult life reading fiction literature as something of "positive dissociation" (and have meant to post in the thread on that topic). I consider Dickens and Conrad not only among the very best writers in English literature (heck, ALL literature), with a wholesome love of what is best in humans while depicting in detail what can be worst, but also the most impressive in terms of astonishing achievement in the face of some overwhelming challenges in their lives.

Dickens dropped out of school around the age of 12 or so as his family was sent to a debtors' prison and he was sent to a "work house/blacking factory" -- a shoe polish factory. So he had not much of a formal education to speak of. They say he had a vocabulary at his command of about 40,000 words. Many low quality modern dictionaries have less entries than that. He lived only to age 57 and left not only work of the highest quality but of astounding quantity. I have probably read The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend about 4 or 5 times each. They're among my favorite novels of all time.

Joseph Conrad (born Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski in Russian occupied Poland, now Ukraine) was another of my favorite authors with a remarkable life and amazing achievements. He was orphaned at age 12 and starting around age 16 traveled the world after working on French ships a few years and then entering the British Merchant Marines service. He wrote in English, his third language after Polish and French, and became among the greatest modern English authors of not only novels but short stories. Strangely enough I've never read "Victory" mentioned by Cleckley.

For me, they represent the opposite of Dostoevsky -- the hugely talented "genius" without that dark, unhealthy mindset lurking in the work with a heavy impression of it BELONGING to the author.

As for the examples given by Cleckey of the really pathological outlooks / values writers, from the ones I've read, most are hopelessly talentless as well as being pathological. Swift and Hemingway may be exceptions, but they IMHO are nowhere near the level of talent of Dickens, Conrad, or even Dostoevsky.

After discovering the Cass material, I stopped almost entirely reading fiction as there's barely enough time to read all the non-fiction that I'm still behind on. But my own experiences in a couple of professions and my formal "education" and reading experiences strongly resonate with Cleckley's main points in Caricature of Love.

Have a great New Year, everyone. I'm going to try to relieve my heavy heart if I can.

 

[Chu]

Dickens dropped out of school around the age of 12 or so as his family was sent to a debtors' prison and he was sent to a "work house/blacking factory" -- a shoe polish factory. So he had not much of a formal education to speak of. They say he had a vocabulary at his command of about 40,000 words. Many low quality modern dictionaries have less entries than that. He lived only to age 57 and left not only work of the highest quality but of astounding quantity. I have probably read The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend about 4 or 5 times each. They're among my favorite novels of all time.

Thanks for those details. It seems that in Oliver Twist, our Mutual Friend and David Copperfield he was writing a bit about his own childhood... Heck, in all the stories for that matter.

I haven't finished reading The Caricature of Love yet, but I'm finding it quite hard. The underlying points behind some of the things he writes are quite shocking put that way. Not only because of his examples about normalization of things that should never be normalized, but also for how many beliefs get embedded in every culture, even if one has never read Freud, for example. The whole image of men and women is so distorted that one has to wonder how humanity keeps existing. And he's only talking about some aspects of our ponerized world!

 

[Voyageur]

Seeking Truth, you really wrote somethings that probably many of us feel in terms of, for instance what you said here;

Reading this, the updates to the Dec. 12, 2010 C's session transcript thread about the close call with Atreides' health deteriorating in the last week or so, and everything going on in the world -- impending ice age / really disturbing likelihood of mass insanity/food riots/mindless mayhem-every-man-for-himself scenarios, fascist/totalitarian pathology ever more on the march, etc. -- has really knocked me for a loop. I'm really seeing the depth and breadth of what we face, what we're fighting and must prevail against -- internally AND externally -- has taken my breath away.

Everyone around me/in close physical proximity is either totally oblivious or actually doing the kind of mental contortions to try to NOT see what's happening in this world or spin it to make it seem as nothing to worry about. On this New Year's Eve, what's foremost in my mind is that this coming year is very likely to be the year where everyone will be "accosted" by the Terror of the Situation, and will have to make their choice of how to respond.

I wrote to address a posts the other night and in the end, could not post because of a sense of heavy futility, the topsy-turvy-ness of our global events felt like i would just be making more noise, when what was needed was a little more balance and objectivity; this is not easy based on the vastness of conflicting information, and the anger emanating from some sides against the pure disinterest from others.

Anyway, as for the other things your wrote, your respect for the fictional literature by Dickens/Conrad described, with elements of their lives, was wonderful.

As for Caricatures of Love, it is a difficult read, and you have helped give reason, along with others, to keep at it. Initially, tried to take notes and then stopped and just continued reading trough some of the many more case studies, and the impressions from them. Cleckley’s descriptions are of a vintage era and i fell into a trap of trying to rationalize and juxtapose them to our modern age, which for me was a mistake, because although the typewriter has changed, as well as some of the human social dance moves, so to speak of our time now, it seems so very much the same. People, programs, pathologies, these seem so timeless within the different time cycles of our human nature.

Ailén said of note;

The whole image of men and women is so distorted that one has to wonder how humanity keeps existing. Shocked And he's only talking about some aspects of our ponerized world!

Yes certainly probably more so in the western conditioned mind, and any who have understood balance necessary of mind, male/female, and have been able to see and resist the other ponerized aspects, must be rare indeed.


Of note about Checkley, was how he seemed to approach this book, from what has been discerned thus far, was his networking with family, friends and colleagues, how they helped him in many ways work through some of his thoughts, some ideas he was testing, especially given the nature of the subject in those times, seemed very astute and considerate. Subjects being address like this, in that time, would not have been an easy thing to do; guess not unlike subjects that LKJ and others have written about in our time, these things people are not comfortable with and do not want to hear, osit.

 

[SeekinTruth]

Dickens dropped out of school around the age of 12 or so as his family was sent to a debtors' prison and he was sent to a "work house/blacking factory" -- a shoe polish factory. So he had not much of a formal education to speak of. They say he had a vocabulary at his command of about 40,000 words. Many low quality modern dictionaries have less entries than that. He lived only to age 57 and left not only work of the highest quality but of astounding quantity. I have probably read The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend about 4 or 5 times each. They're among my favorite novels of all time.

Thanks for those details. It seems that in Oliver Twist, our Mutual Friend and David Copperfield he was writing a bit about his own childhood... Heck, in all the stories for that matter.

I haven't finished reading The Caricature of Love yet, but I'm finding it quite hard. The underlying points behind some of the things he writes are quite shocking put that way. Not only because of his examples about normalization of things that should never be normalized, but also for how many beliefs get embedded in every culture, even if one has never read Freud, for example. The whole image of men and women is so distorted that one has to wonder how humanity keeps existing. And he's only talking about some aspects of our ponerized world!

The part I bolded was particularly impressed upon me strongly. The whole image of men and women being so distorted that one has to wonder how humanity keeps existing is one of those wonders of life. Life... so fragile, but also so resilient.

Something else I didn't mention in my last post is the particular perspective Cleckley shows the ponerized and disfigured pseudo-intellectualism in academia, among the "intelligentsia" etc. This strongly reminded me of what Gurdjieff said about the "obyvatel" and the Work. How many "high brow"/"intellectuals" despise the obyvatel -- the healthy kernel in ordinary life. This seems so similar to how Cleckey shows these self-proclaimed intellectual "high priests" in our societies despise everything "normal" -- that healthy kernel -- in "ordinary" people, among them the authentic obyvatel G was talking about. I've had some personal experience with this haughty, imbalanced "intellectual" world and their "aesthetic tastes" in all things. My gut told me it was all more sick than healthy as I had to decide to go deeper into their world or retreat from it. Cleckley shows the amount of pathological influence that floods our ordinary, every day lives from these "cultured," / "sophisticated" circles.


I've moved the rest of my thoughts to a new thread http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=21174.0.

Have a great New Year, everyone. I'm going to try to relieve my heavy heart if I can.

Beautifully written essay - deserves expanding into a book review. Thank you.

Hi Laura. I really think the book is important, but I'm not even sure if someone who hasn't read Political Ponerology, and probably the other recommended psychology/narcissism books, if they'd understand what's so important about soldiering on to finish the book. And I'm still trying to put together what reading it has meant to me. I had some questionable sexual attitudes develop throughout that 7 year relationship, and some other issues I've struggled with and have overcome that I'll get into in my continuation. I'll post this and continue at a later time, before I lose nerve and forget about the whole thing/delete it.

I really would like to put some of my issues out here and also show other members how inspiration and HEALTHY examples of all sorts are in such short supply in our world, and the roles these can play in our struggles. I've had a pretty shaky day and night yesterday, and I actually had very gentle crying finally starting last night. So I need some rest. And thank you for reading.

New post here http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=21174.0

 

[Windmill knight]

Something else I didn't mention in my last post is the particular perspective Cleckley shows the ponerized and disfigured pseudo-intellectualism in academia, among the "intelligentsia" etc. This strongly reminded me of what Gurdjieff said about the "obyvatel" and the Work. How many "high brow"/"intellectuals" despise the obyvatel -- the healthy kernel in ordinary life. This seems so similar to how Cleckey shows these self-proclaimed intellectual "high priests" in our societies despise everything "normal" -- that healthy kernel -- in "ordinary" people, among them the authentic obyvatel G was talking about. I've had some personal experience with this haughty, imbalanced "intellectual" world and their "aesthetic tastes" in all things. My gut told me it was all more sick than healthy as I had to decide to go deeper into their world or retreat from it. Cleckley shows the amount of pathological influence that floods our ordinary, every day lives from these "cultured," / "sophisticated" circles.

I was just reading a chapter from the book that discusses this. He is so right, and it is so frustrating. When I was at university sometimes I had to laugh at some of the texts I read for my thesis because they were so obscure they were closer to tongue-twisters than science. It took me months to understand all the 'subtleties' of the author (and I had to in order to build an argument), and when I finally did, I wondered why he hadn't simply stated it as it was, without the word salad? Some of them feel the need to invent new terms or give new meaning to old ones, such as 'governmentality', 'deterritorialization', 'deconstruction' and 'biopolitics'. And sometimes they don't even bother to define them properly. Yes, there were some valuable ideas hidden in there, but they weren't that great, I thought. Specially the 'postmodern' implications that 'all is relative' and 'there is no truth', which is so fashionable. Maybe these intellectuals were trying to hide those obvious contradictions because they loved so much to be worshiped as 'very smart people'?

A fragment from Cleckley, quoting J. Donald Adams, which I found very relevant for the above:

Who, and what, is an intellectual? The word is one of the fuzziest in current use. It resists definition, and is bandied about with an appalling breadth of latitude. I shall offer two: one with tongue slightly in cheek; the other a more serious effort. First, a person of any one of the several sexes whose thinking is both muddied and muddled; second, a person who places great faith in, and derives his values from, man's rational capacity, at the same time underestimating his intuitive promptings, and the urges of what for lack of a better term, we refer to as the human heart.

Having thus attempted to define him, let us examine some of his more obvious characteristics. First of all, the intellectual seems frequently incapable of clear exposition of his thoughts. His words are too often shrouded in mist - a mist that they rarely penetrate. He is, in addition, likely to be a literary snob.

Irresistibly, he is attracted by the esoteric and obscure. Whatever he can readily understand he views with condescension and, frequently, with contempt.

From reading the book I was also very annoyed at Freud (among others). When I took psychology modules at school I was left with a not-too-bad impression of him, because I thought that he had contributed some valuable insights, even if he was over-focused on sex. But some of the ideas and texts quoted by Cleckley make me feel that Freud was not just sex-obsessed, he was also a sex-obsessed idiot.

Similarly, I've found some of the literary figures mentioned in the book not just annoying but quite disturbing. That they hid their crimes and wrongdoings in their intellectual and bohemian air is very infuriating. I had a lecturer in my first degree at uni who was a big fan of Baudelaire and he played the role too. At first I admired him but then I couldn't stand him when I heard how he used his image to cheat on his wife and take to bed any girl students that would allow it. He also made up fantastic stories about himself in sporting or deer-hunting feats, and he had a massive ego. Yet he thought he was sort of 'enlightened' by that particular brand of (pathological) literature. And now he has achieved global success as a film script writer.

This attitude of excusing oneself with literary or intellectual achievements also infuriates me because my father was a bit like that (on a lesser scale, though). And myself, even if I never did any of the horrific things described in the book, have excused or overlooked sins with my 'smart guy' mask. Which is a bunch of useless nothingness. Honestly, in recent years my appreciation of what makes a human being valuable has changed a lot.

Edit: completed quote as post got posted prematurely by accident!

 

[Approaching Infinity]

I did some research and discovered that Caricature of Love is in the public domain. It was published before 1963 and the copyright was not renewed. So there shouldn't be any problem with posting links to the pdf in the main forum.

 

[obyvatel]

[quote author=WK]
From reading the book I was also very annoyed at Freud (among others). When I took psychology modules at school I was left with a not-too-bad impression of him, because I thought that he had contributed some valuable insights, even if he was over-focused on sex. But some of the ideas and texts quoted by Cleckley make me feel that Freud was not just sex-obsessed, he was also a sex-obsessed idiot.

Similarly, I've found some of the literary figures mentioned in the book not just annoying but quite disturbing. That they hid their crimes and wrongdoings in their intellectual and bohemian air is very infuriating.
[/quote]
Indeed. Reading Cleckley's examples, it becomes apparent how the process of ponerization actually operates. "Political Ponerology" gave the theoretical framework while Cleckley (perhaps unknowingly) enriched the framework with examples from the literary and art worlds. I find it infuriating since it seems so pernicious. Pathological authors/artists describe something that is fundamentally flawed (anti-life) and common people with their still functioning common senses struggle to make sense of it and in the process get infected themselves. I think that people who are dissatisfied with so-called normal life as a natural function of their inner being and are looking for something different (trying to move out of what Dabrowski called the level of primary integration) are quite susceptible to such influences . They can fall prey to the pathological life-hating material while trying to find a way to a higher level of being.

 

[StrangeCaptain]

Indeed. Reading Cleckley's examples, it becomes apparent how the process of ponerization actually operates. "Political Ponerology" gave the theoretical framework while Cleckley (perhaps unknowingly) enriched the framework with examples from the literary and art worlds.

I had a similar impression; that, consciously or unconsciously, Cleckley was arriving at some of the ideas of ponerology in this book.

 

[Laura]

I did some research and discovered that Caricature of Love is in the public domain. It was published before 1963 and the copyright was not renewed. So there shouldn't be any problem with posting links to the pdf in the main forum.

And no reason we can't print them either...

 

[Laura]

Indeed. Reading Cleckley's examples, it becomes apparent how the process of ponerization actually operates. "Political Ponerology" gave the theoretical framework while Cleckley (perhaps unknowingly) enriched the framework with examples from the literary and art worlds.

I had a similar impression; that, consciously or unconsciously, Cleckley was arriving at some of the ideas of ponerology in this book.

Yes, indeed. There's a major element of social ponerization revealed there. He didn't quite make the connection, though.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

I did some research and discovered that Caricature of Love is in the public domain. It was published before 1963 and the copyright was not renewed. So there shouldn't be any problem with posting links to the pdf in the main forum.

And no reason we can't print them either...

Yup!