Living with Kryptonite: January 2021

2021-01-25

模倣子 Autoimmunomemetic Psychotherapy

I've been applying my new autoimmunomemetic therapy with my usual ikka-bozu fervor, as opposed to the proverbial mikka-bozu ("the three-day monk" as opposed to my usual "one-day monk"). This self-deprecation is no doubt rooted in some cruel autoimmunomeme to be rooted out. In fact, let's go for it. Behavior is I put myself down, which is some kind of parameterized autoimmunomeme (a self-stabbing knife that may be configured to multiple purposes, e.g., whatever it is I'm trying to feel good about myself...about). That particular autoimmunomemeplex was somehow installed while I was a child. I can perhaps even remember specific parental behavior. At some level it doesn't matter, since my behavior is there for all to see (autoimmunomememtic deployment, or self-sabotaging behavior). "Self-sabotaging behavior" doesn't really cut the muster (or the ketchup for that matter, nudge, nudge, wink, wink) since it's self-blaming, and doesn't really lead anywhere, is vague, even dismissive ("just knock that shit off"), it half-ass answers "what" but not the cherished in AA "how." Autoimmunomemetic theory to the rescue!

This just hit me: one property that autoimmunomemes may all share is that they are "extra" or "excessive" in the sense that Slavoj Zezek describes. They are a response to an experience that is not required, that "normal" people don't have and don't miss. They are an excessive enjoyment of disturbed pleasure (abuse, pain) or an excessive enjoyment of normal pleasure (inability to enjoy normal things, or perverse enjoyment of them, as in fetishes, self-abuse, or just negativity, disaffectedness).

I think this is a huge breakthrough. Does that make sense?

As I mentioned before, also in keeping with Zezek, the perversion of normal life is the adding of these "excesses", which take the form of self-sabotaging behaviors for the ACA. Simple pleasures become inaccessible to the ACA, normal enjoyment is replaced by something else. Deleting memes is not possible, but those that are installed before any others (since everything in the human animal is learned) by the dysfunctional family become the basis.

Is that the main thing? Bad memes are installed from early childhood on a tabula rasa? In that case there is no earlier set of healthy memes that were there primordially. Healthy internal memes, if they somehow get installed, may also be replaced later in the dysfunctional environment.

Anyway, on to the therapy!

I'm constantly arguing with people who are renting space in my head, for instance. This is probably an autoimmunomeme, i.e., some self-sabotaging, self-destructive behavior that I can't seem to stop. Luke 23:34 applies (a very memetic sentiment, by the way).

What underlies this meme? At this point we're venturing into terra incognita vis-à-vis macromemetic theory, so when I say:

"People are reasonable"

...do I mean that's a meme? Probably not. Is it a MIAO (Memetic Iconic Anchoring Object = a false god, I guess) -- maybe.

"When people aren't reasonable, it's my fault, and I need to try harder."

"Unreasonable people need to be persuaded to be reasonable."

"It's my job to convince them."

"My parents were reasonable." [they were/are people]

"My parents would listen to me and be kind and fair..."

"The fact that they weren't kind or fair was my fault and I needed to try harder."

NEW MEMES: "People can be unreasonable, it's not my fault, I need to pause."

"It's nice when people are reasonable, but it doesn't always happen."

"It's not my job to change people who are unreasonable."

Again, it's not possible to just cut out one meme and replace it with one you like better. As Zezek put it, "the excess is with us forever." But you can install new ones that get more "hits" than the old ones.

I may already be getting significant relief. I have mood swings all the time, though, so I can wake up one day a week later and find I'm back in the shit again. Or even two years later have things pop up again. I'm not sure if that's mood swings or dissociative identify disorder -- nobody is.

Anyway, that's where I am so far on applying the new application of theory. I'm optimistic about being able to extract a lot more useful stuff for my ACA fourth step. I'm going to try carrying a bit of paper and pen around all the time and write stuff down. Since my inner life is something of a roiling poopy-swamp all the time, I should be able to stock up a lot fairly quickly.

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Yeah, from childhood

built-up defeats = I tried to do something and it didn't work [residual memetc debt]

slights = I didn't get treated the way I deserved [residual memetic debt]

neglect = I didn't get any action at all [RMD, and also terror of alienation]

Otherwise there's so much of it, and I think I only remember a tiny bit of it, and the really important stuff is almost certainly submerged.

I didn't have idea what grief was until I read that article, and I still don't, but at least I have an idea and know that I don't and need to figure it out.

My grief is probably everything. Like in RC's "the wallpaper in the nursery" metaphor. It's always been there, there's no edge to it, we have no idea that there might be something underneath it or that it could even be changed -- it's always been there, and it's everywhere.

So I can't connect "grief" to anything in my life, because I don't know what it is. I know that certain songs make me sob uncontrollably, which gives me some idea, and maybe a few other things. I know something's there, but it's like a dark mass submerged beneath the ocean. It's related to how broken I know I am, but I don't understand the connection.

(Lulu (Louise) is the higher power / loving parent in this context.)

I don't have any grasp on what "joy" is, either. I may have gotten some inkling from some times making love with my ex-wife and my girlfriend before that. That's a long time ago.

If I have to know what "joy" is or what "grief" is in order to work the program, then I'm fucked, because I know that I have no choice but to work the program.

If I can apply scientific insights (like BKTS?) to help me write down my "searching and fearless moral inventory", then that seems it might help. What am I ashamed of? When did my parents abandon me? So many times, most of which I can't remember, or the one's I do remember either hurt so much because it had happened so many times before, or didn't hurt much because I was so used to it.

2021-01-22

Doodles and Drawings

Manga Index

2021-01-21

Doodles and Drawings

Manga Index

2021-01-20

Inauguration Day Doodle

Manga Index

Inauguration Day!!

I like this drawing of Lulu, and the one yesterday as well. I don't know what it is...I need to just draw her a lot, I guess, and maybe my other characters as well.

2021-01-19

Doodles and Drawings

Manga Index

2021-01-18

Doodles and Drawings

Manga Index

Again, with "Breela" I'm not sure where she was to fit in. A similar character, "Chris", a rabbit I'm also working on.

2021-01-17

Doodles and Drawings

Manga Index

"Breela?" A new "rabbit" character. Actually the rabbit is to be somebody else.

2021-01-11

模倣子 The Grief of Loss

I’ve never really understood what grief is. Does it feel like anger, sadness, something else?

Genuine emotions such as anger, sadness (tears), Fear (shaking), or laughter (can be amusement or embarrassment) — (the reëvaluation counseling pantheon, by the way) — are also (physiological) memetic deployments. It seems wrong to call genuine emotional expressions “memetic enactments” (Like speech, gestures, etc) since they are involuntary. This may be the distinction between these two terms, ie, an “enactment” involves a decision process as to whether to deploy.

By the way, this is why live Performances are more compelling than filmed, and why watching in a movie

house is more compelling than watching at home alone.

It’s also why funerals and other rituals are important. Emotions work more strongly around others, and performing where one may get others reaction is a rush.

But what is grief? Is it residual memetic debt? It’s the stored memetic pain, the feeling of not belonging, when we do things in expect some reasonable response and not getting it, being ignored. Alienation , the worst thing for a person, getting no response to one’s gestures, or emotions, and/or having no overtures made towards oneself when something could reasonably be expected. Or being attacked and having nothing to do in reply.

All of these things result in residual memetic Debt, the knocking of the tennis

balls over the net and not having them batted back, or having balls come over the net and not be able to knock them back.

The thing that drives us as memetic and emotional

creatures is this motive to “know we are heard” and that our gestures will be recognized and responded to. We eventually stop crying

if nobody cares. We create memetic debt in trusting that it will be payed back, eventually. This concept extends into economics, currency inflation, intergenerational abuse and dysfunction (even at the national level), and it may encompass grief.

I don’t have a feel for grief.

One thing that is very painful but is not the same as memetic debt, might be termed “memetic investment “ or the memes that a person has in her inventory, and those all become useless when a familiar person is lost. The reactions to their habits, inside jokes, shared activities, and so on, can no longer be used. My mind becomes an attic full of unwanted toys 🧸.

The grimly perky stereotypical stiff upper lip British person might say buck up, chuck all that rubbish, and get some new stuff.

How to do that? In memetics, you don’t chuck an old meme (because that’s impossible). As Slavoj Žežek put it, the libidinal excess enjoyment never goes away, it remains permanently attached to the object of our desire. So you create one or more new memes that eventually starve the old one out. You replace eggs

à la Joey with eggs 🥚 à la New Guy, complete with new jokes and comments and enjoyment, which plate you always use, and 90% of it could all be the same, which might be better.

But how to replace not having had a family? The ACA concept of creating a higher power in the form of a loving parent seems to be along these lines, a kind of self hypnosis where one creates a bunch of new memes that replace a bunch that were never really there in the first place.

In the spirit of terpa conjuring, one probably needs to create a parent that enacts all the memetic pathways that the old ones never did, or did wrong, that is, an LP that is as elaborate as all of the hurt

and grief.

You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your relatives.

The conjuring of a terpa to be my first living parent is driven by my grief. I’m not going back and editing my parents, I’m replacing them, I’m taking all the hurt they did to me, and using that to construct a kind of Frankensteinian creature. Why? Because if I create one based on other criteria, then I risk not addressing all of my hurts, my grief, of helping me to fight and win the lost battles of my childhood.

I may be less broken, but I will probably still be very broken, unless I start with what I know is wrong. And I need to build lots of memes around each thing, inside jokes, happy memories, special understandings I’ll have with my new higher power.

So how do I get at all this grief?

There’s the stored grief, residual memetic debt, probably, and disused memetic investment, which is the returning to the dry well, or going to the hardware store to buy milk 🥛. The DMI is addressed with memetic replacement.

By stopping blaming our parents, by seeing them as flawed individuals who were probably abused, too, and who will never be able to give us what we need, we can move the battle into the internal memetic net work (endomemeplex) of our own minds (ideomemeplexes). At that point we are no longer mourning the loss of, say, a former roommate, and trying to integrate a new one into our lives, which involves an actual real person out in the real world, now, but changing the memes inside, and realizing that the people we struggle with are really imaginary, if only inasmuch as they exist only in the past. That is where we do our memecraft, in our ideomemetic economy, realizing that many of our enemies are autoimmunomemes, memes that attack us from inside our minds, bullying opportunities seized upon not by others to use against us, but by ourselves.

The extirpation of these autoimmunomemes should be possible by employing the same memetic engineering tools 🧰 shown to work elsewhere, namely memetic hacking and meme replacement.

Residual memetic debt is a toughie, though. It doesn’t just get erased. Maybe it works differently in the ideomemetic environment. It is the seat of psychic breaks, ie, the mentally ill person forms a model of reality in her mind that allows her to connect her sick

brain 🧠 to the outside world. This is by the way, how superstition and religion work as well. The ideomemeplex acts as a kind of “transformer” (like in a car) or “memetic coupling” that allows the person to connect to the outside memetic fabric by adapting her own inner world

without being torn apart.

For some people this is more difficult than others. It is perhaps the practical embodiment of “the little lie.” Practical since it may actually be probed in detail by a memetic hacking process, or memetic self-hacking in terms of working a 12-step program.

Anyway, more thought and experiment required in themes of the original theme of how to deal with residual memetic debt. Maybe it’s a different ball

game in the ideomemetic realm, that is, maybe you can just talk yourself out of it with the aid of a higher power.

Normally residual memetic debt looks like losing all your money

due to theft or inflation. Or making a big effort to impress people and being ignored and/or somebody else taking the credit.

The A.A. adage that we don’t want to shut the door

on the past because our bad experience could help others has always been a solace for me. It must be applicable to ACA memories too, and maybe in the internal economy of the ideomemeplex it’s possible to turn residual ideomemetic lemons

into lemonade.