Thanks for sharing an interesting session!
(Andromeda) Words of wisdom?
A: At this point you should better understand "enjoy the show." So do it. Goodbye.
END OF SESSION
(Joe) There's not much to enjoy. It's painful.
(Chu) The problem is that shows are short. You watch for an hour or two, turn the TV off, and it's over. This show is going to go on for YEARS!
(Pierre) And there are Dukes and Duchesses in those shows. More entertaining. The real show doesn’t seem to have any Dukes…
(L) The only thing I can say about it is that we learn from it. At a certain point, you get to where... I dunno, you get more detached because you can only endure so much pain. It's like physical pain: at a certain point, something shuts down when you're having physical pain, and it stops. Either you stop feeling it because your brain stops carrying the signals, or you pass out, or SOMETHING happens. [laughter]
(Joe) It's like watching a slow train wreck. For a long time, you might think you'll sound the alarm and prevent the worst that's going to happen. But at some point you realize nobody's listening and it'll happen anyway. At that point, you have to realize it's simply out of your hands. And you see it happening over a long period of time, so you do get a bit anesthetized against it in a certain sense. You can't keep being stressed about it and survive.
(Andromeda) Or even shocked about it.
I had a few thoughts to share about "enjoying the show". The first thing that came to mind, and what often does when I see "enjoy the show" is this quote from Political Ponerology:
As a youth, I read a book about a naturalist wandering through the Amazon-basin wilderness. At some moment a small animal fell from a tree onto the nape of his neck, clawing his skin painfully and sucking his blood. The biologist cautiously removed it -- without anger, since that was its form of feeding -- and proceeded to study it carefully. This story stubbornly stuck in my mind during those very difficult times when a vampire fell onto our necks, sucking the blood of an unhappy nation.
Maintaining the attitude of a naturalist, while attempting to track the nature of macrosocial phenomenon in spite of all adversity, insures a certain intellectual distance and better psychological hygiene in the face of horrors that might otherwise be difficult to contemplate. Such an attitude also slightly increases the feeling of safety and furnishes an insight that this very method may help find a certain creative solution. This requires strict control of the natural, moralizing reflexes of revulsion, and other painful emotions that the phenomenon provokes in any normal person when it deprives him of his joy of life and personal safety, ruining his own future and that of his nation. Scientific curiosity therefore becomes a loyal ally during such times.
This quote has stood out in my mind since the first time I read PP. One of the reasons I like it is that it puts things in perspective. In L's mind the vampire is "a small animal" engaging it "its for of feeding". Compared to the vast majority of human beings there are a small number of psychopaths and they are engaging in their natural behavior. We need to understand them and learn how to avoid having them drop onto our necks.
L advocates "strict control of the natural, moralizing reflexes of revulsion, and other painful emotions that the phenomenon provokes in any normal person" and as I understand it this is at least partly to protect oneself from the many emotional hooks that are used in the "narratives" that pull normal people into the pseudo-realities that the psychopaths create. We must pay attention to reality and watch carefully for the places where we are being emotionally manipulated.
It also conveys a feeling that we are visiting a jungle, but we're not from the jungle and when we're done with our research we're going to go home.
Of course no one can maintain the attitude of a naturalist 100% of the time, but its something worth cultivating IMO.
The other thing I'd like to bring up is that, while the situation is bad and likely to get much worse here on the BBM, its not
that bad yet and we don't know for sure how things will play out! When I look back into what I've read about history there are
many time periods that were
much worse than the time we're living in now, OSIT. The Black Death in Europe, the spread of small pox and other diseases across the Americas after the conquistadors arrived, Gengis Khan and the Mongol horde raping and pillaging across Asia, the Inquisition, just to name a few. It could be that we (I?) just have it easy in this life, but I can be grateful to live where I live and have the opportunity to "enjoy the show" from a relatively comfortable position, at least so far.
That's my two cents, FWIW!