Hello {{first_name | Reader}},
I’ve just posted a new Low Visibility Ahead entry, “A Billion for Your Soul.”
“Great wealth insulates the human psyche against empathy, even when it’s confronted with photos of dying five-year-olds in refugee camps or the sad life stories of geriatric adjunct instructors still struggling to pay off college loans.”
Read the full entry on my website at johnrember.com/blog/a-billion-for-your-soul.
Oral History in Stanley
The oral history I recorded for the Sawtooth Interpretive and Historical Association will be shown for the first time at the Stanley Library next Wednesday, July 29, at 5:30 p.m. Mountain. Julie and I will be there. The program will also be livestreamed, and the oral history will be available later on SIHA’s YouTube channel.
Recommended Reading
R.D. Laing, the late Scottish anti-psychiatrist, wrote The Politics of Experience and The Politics of the Family. Both are difficult reads, and contain dangerous ideas that will make you crazy if it’s true that ideas can make you crazy. If you’re already crazy, these two books will convince you that you’re sane and your culture is not, that you’re living life better and more authentically than the poor saps who refuse to see through the veil of consensus reality.
As I said, these are dangerous ideas, but they changed my life for the better. They’ve caused a lot of harm to people who were already paranoid and then read R.D. Laing. Don’t read either of these books if you’re convinced that the world is a stage set, that all the people around you are really paid actors or golems or robots and you’re the only one who doesn’t know the script.
Still, we live in a world where the dominant culture has been trying to kill itself since 1914 or so, so it’s possible that Laing could see something most of us can’t. In The Politics of the Family, he makes a good case for your family members reenacting the patterns and personalities of great-great-grandparents, and being constrained by imperatives and taboos that were laid down by your Stone Age ancestors. In The Politics of Experience, he floats the mostly harmless idea that other human beings are funhouse mirrors, and any time we think we know another human, we’re 100% projecting.
If you don’t take Laing as gospel, you can use his works to create a proper distance between you and a crazed culture, bring forgiveness to intimate relationships, and, with luck, live a conscious life in a world that is mostly propaganda and constructed illusion. He can help you avoid psychic pitfalls and protect yourself from believing in the false selves that the culture demands you create. In the end, he won’t guarantee you an authentic life, but at least you’ll be able to detect inauthenticity in others and in yourself.
You’ll also compulsively identify what’s really going on when you’re sitting at the Thanksgiving dinner table with your extended family, which means you won’t be invited next year. You’ll be able to identify that as good news.
We’ve been hiking in a hoodooed valley still recovering from a 2004 wildfire. Its forests have turned into savannah, which makes the hike sunnier and bigger. We are reminded that things don’t grow back the same after a burn, but are still capable of an austere beauty. It’s a useful metaphor for aging human beings and dogs.
Monsoon season is upon us, and we’ve had enough rain that we’ve dared think we’ll get through fire season without a big fire in the valley. We’re still glading our trees and cutting firebreaks, but for now everything is green, warm, and as of this morning, wet. The sunsets haven’t been bad, either.
