unCHARTed territory

dream log II: another dream about getting kicked out of places

Last July, I moved out of an apartment that had been mine for three years.

Since I was breaking my lease a month early, it was I (not the landlord) who was responsible for finding a new tenant.

The person I ended up renting the place to was a college senior named Max.

I never gave my keys back, so a few months ago I had a dream about hanging out in my old apartment while Max was away.

On Tuesday, I dreamed that I broke into my Fairmount ave. apartment again with my keys (for the third time) and had gotten very comfortable. To my (foolish) surprise, Max comes in and asks me “Uh, you’re not staying again tonight, are you?” At which point I realize I apparently kicked him out of his room to sleep in his bed the last two times.

Appropriately embarrassed, I quickly assure him that I won’t. “In fact, I’ll get out of your way right now,” I tell him. But it takes me a while to get my things together, and in the meantime Max grows homicidal. I flee from the apartment just in time, out into the snow without shoes on.

I Have No Name and I Have No Faith in Reason

http://www.dead-philosophers.com/?p=605

the shit that makes it to the front page of etsy

includes this:
http://www.etsy.com/listing/82106985/the-separation-13-x-19-fine-art-print?ref=fp_treasury_11

nothing blatantly ridiculous enough about it for me to submit to Regretsy (unfortunately), but christ, can you believe the SHIT that makes it to the front page of etsy? “the separation”. ooohh powerful. girl who looks like zooey deschanel being contemplative in profile. ooohh powerful.

i mean, i don’t know what’s worse, how profound and deep the artist obviously thinks s/he is being, or the fact that the subject is distinctly hip-looking. it’s like listening to a song that you think is kind of decent, until the vocals come in and it turns out the singer has a sickeningly poppy voice.

I’m sick of all these poets and artists and humanities people speculating naively in the dark about questions they think are strictly hypothetical. A lot of them are answerable if you’re inquisitive enough to dig a little deeper (or in the right direction, like AWAY from literature and art, which may well be valuable but do NOT with any adequacy serve the purpose of inquiry).

being inquisitive is the scientist’s domain.

The purpose

of my going into social psychology is that would allow me to integrate my intellectual, personal, and professional lives (for some of us, intellectual and personal are more or less indivisible). Now that I’ve done away with two of the three, all I have to be concerned about is attaining a gratifying professional life. Which is why I’m taking up programming. Programming is good for that.

The dilemma goes like this:
I get frustrated with things and people. I make sense of them within the framework of the bigger issues. Then I post the shit on fucking TUMBLR for nobody to understand or remotely appreciate, because no one who is on the same wavelength as me wants anything to do with me, either within or outside of the ivory towers. I obviously get frustrated with this, and around it goes again. It’s a circular fucking dilemma.

If you expect social psychology (an empirical discipline) to be theoretically complex you are missing the point. It is not exceptionally complex or theoretically rigorous but it is PROFOUND. It answers the questions that naive liberal arts douchebags think there are no answers to and can only be pontificated on hypothetically. The timeless questions.

But why design experiments to answer the profound and exciting questions when there is no one to get excited over them with you?

It’s sort of like this: you meet your mirror image and they slam the door on you. (So has everyone else you’ve known in your life, but they had legitimate reasons to.) You, reeling in shock, lash out at your own image in the mirror in hate and unwarranted blame. You shut a part of yourself in a closet. She dies a slow death (obviously).

But while she’s dying, the rest of you becomes extremely withdrawn and more misanthropic than usual. Meanwhile your mirror image, the other rational misanthrope, has run off happily with someone less well-suited for him than you, but as is the case when romance is involved, their differences are smoothed over by his idealization of her on the grounds that she’s pretty. (In precisely the same way as you.) That’s the folly of your life.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR MEETS JEAN-PAUL SARTRE AND THEY WALK AWAY FROM EACH OTHER

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre meet, notice an uncanny connection, and then walk away from each other.

Meanwhile, she can’t get any of her professors to write her recommendation letters for graduate school (actually that’s Einstein if we’re being factually correct) because she wasn’t enough of an ass-kisser as an undergrad.

Having no one to discuss the big issues with and relate to genuinely anyway, she gladly abandons her intellectual life and takes up computer programming so she can move into the east village and live a life of frivolity and hedonism. She mainly interacts with people she meets at shows and has meaningless conversations with about music. Oh yeah, you’re into Sonic Youth too? No kidding, just like the million or so other people in New York who love Sonic Youth? No kidding!

When your life is like a George Costanza punchline, might be appropriate to live it like a joke.

I know that the real life Simone and Jean-Paul met and fell in love, but for the sake of the story, Simone wanted this to be a story of Simone de Beauvoir meets Jean-Paul Sartre and they quickly become best friends. She has never had one of these. They both for the most part avoid interpersonal relationships because neither of them can relate to most people, but they relate to each other.

Oftentimes you have friends who’ve known you for years and still don’t have the faintest idea who you are, because they are incapable of understanding anything about you. Other times you meet people you might as well have known your entire life, and they DON’T want to be friends with you.

Because there’s no congruity in the world. And because you’re not a real person, or at least that’s what most of the people around you would have you believe.

That’s when you start furiously drawing diagrams and writing about alienation. And get very trapped in your introverted thinking processes, which examine things in unnecessary excruciating detail.

(Simone de Beauvoir meets Jean-Paul Sartre, Johnny Marr meets Morrissey, Marx meets Engels, you get the idea.)

dream log:

I went to a depressing building looking for film professors. I am completely confused and acutely aware that I have no place here. Film isn’t even my department.

I run into a professor, and he asked me if I was lost, what I was looking for. I didn’t know who I was looking for, but this guy was so hostile in his desire to help that it felt like an interrogation. Sensing a need to respond, I picked out a name from a bulletin board. “Andrews”, I replied anxiously, trying to get myself off the hook.

He directed me to Andrews, and I was of  course caught off guard because I neither knew who Andrews was nor had any business with him. (This is the part of the dream where you panic because your clothes have mysteriously gone missing.) I am suddenly faced with Andrews, while the other professor hovers nearby. Though at first more kindly than the other professor, Andrews eventually yells at me to get out after he becomes aware that I have no business with him. I feel suddenly very undone and am at a loss for my next course of action. The two professors take turns expressing outrage at my presence and demand that I leave. I meekly slink out.

Later that day, while I’m sitting in class (or something?) Andrews comes in to reassure me not to worry about it. It wasn’t a big deal, he says, that I wandered in earlier. He then inexplicably kisses me.

#textsfromlastnight

2:37 AM
There’s a great quote about how Nietzsche was never lonely like everyone thinks he was. I don’t think what he ever wanted was love, I think he just wanted respite from alienation.

2:38 AM
I said this. I might be wasted. Whoops.


said one rational misanthrope to another

I am not of this world,

I never belonged to it.

There are a million stories taking place around me, none of which I have any place in. Closest I’ve come is to have borne direct witness to some (one or two), which as you can imagine has a nasty way of intensifying alienation.

It’s like being the best friend of a main character within the nuclear cast of a sitcom: where, for the purpose of keeping the storyline focused and brief, the supporting character has no life of his or her own outside of their life as supporting character. It’s rare for real life to happen like this, however, because real people switch between being main character and supporting characters within the same life, usually several times within the same day.

I’m not real, though. Here, I am neither he nor she within the story, I’ve been shut out of it (again) even though this one is legitimately mine. I am IT. This is no self-deprecating sentiment. There is tremendous autonomy and power in being IT.

This is actually the beauty, and not the tragedy, of my life.

Expanded

To back-track to the beginning, the purpose of the first flow chart was to demonstrate the staggering importance of race in basic attraction, defined in terms of group membership. Without necessarily addressing how race fits into the factors-of-attraction framework.

Which, to recap, is the empirically substantiated knowledge from psychology that the primary determinants of attraction (platonic as well as romantic) are similarity, proximity, and physical attractiveness. 

So to look at the issue in terms of factors of attraction, we would think of it as a matter of racial similarity eclipsing all other dimensions of similarity, and also physical attractiveness.

To integrate the one theory into the other, we’d only have to recognize that “common group membership” is a dimension of similarity, and that race is obviously a type of group membership. That makes race a dimension of similarity.

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Getting personal

Installment number five: Outgroup hostility.

The thing about ingroup bias is that it contributes more to favorable thinking about your ingroup than active negative thinking about outgroups. Not even the most cohesive and homogenous group prefers to actively denigrate “others” in lieu of simply ignoring them and carrying about in their own insular circle-jerk land. Hostility toward outgroups rarely occurs independently; such hostility only arises in competition. It is defensive. It’s generated in response to a perceived threat, which can be as simple as the mere proximity (not physical proximity; I’ll explain later) of an other.

So if you live your life on the cusp a group you don’t belong to, you simply feel like you’re invisible.

You’ll walk like a ghost among them. You will be invited to half of their social activities but never hear about the others, simply because they habitually forget you exist and no one thinks to tell you. You may be invited to the party, but you’ll be deliberately excluded from the afterparty, once everyone gets drunk and starts confessing their shameful secrets or making out with each other. They do not want to meet up with you for lunch tomorrow. Though you frequently occupy the same physical spaces as them, no one speaks to you. They will not allow you to get emotionally close to them. They are apathetic to you.

It’s only when (by some miracle) you become visible to one of them, or find your way into one’s life, that you are treated like an interloper. They’ll feel at liberty to discreetly criticize you and pit themselves against you in competition unsolicited. You will perpetually experience the uneasy feeling of having trespassed somewhere. It’s only now that you start to feel some of the outward rejection and hostility, in place of the neutral exclusion you were feeling before.

But it’s only natural. It’s like a herd of bison assuming their defensive stance, even though you’re only dealing with one person. That’s the point, after all: group identity and personal identity are inalienable for those who belong to a cohesive social group.

So. Suppose that due to whatever circumstances (mutual friend, etc.), you end up spending an inordinate amount of time around one of them, and after a year or more of getting used to you, they figure out they’re in love with your “soul” or something. It’s a very last-man-on-earth type of situation. Very flattering for you. (Never mind that you don’t even like this arrangement, or this person particularly. You allow it to progress though, because for external reasons you happen to be suicidal and paralyzed in a state of profound dispassion.)

Even though they’re obviously attracted to you enough to harass you for your company more frequently than you’d like, and to have sex with you, they still think of you as an “other” and accordingly refuse to begrudge you any credit.

Compliments are always reluctant and indirect: you dress well, you have nice hair, you are appealing in presentation. (“You try too hard.”) That overhead light hits you in such flattering way.

But you are not attractive. Oh of course not, anything but that.*

His friend thinks you’re cute. “He’s just saying that to piss me off.” The clincher here is that he isn’t saying this to piss you off.

It’s all these subtle little cues that reveal a person’s latent attitudes.

*This is a simple attribution bias. When someone you don’t want to think highly of (an enemy or competitor in this case) appeals to you, you are wont to attribute it to the shirt, the haircut, the angle of the lighting. When someone you want to think highly of (an ingroup member) appeals to you, the credit goes to them — “they are attractive.” — whether or not it objectively should.

You make a comment in passing that the two of you have a similar skin tone.
“I’m paler than you,” he says defensively. And, you’re clearly proud of it.
“We’re pretty close,” you’ll say.
Since he won’t argue with something blatantly evident, he says “it’s probably this soft lighting.”

The thing is, I don’t see why being slightly darker or paler than anyone else is something that’s of any consequence. Much less something you should be proud of (or defensive about), unless you have some weird superiority complex about being white.

If you are centered and level-headed, being in a situation like this hasn’t the power to shift or alter your perception of yourself. But even though it doesn’t change what you know cognitively, it can change the way you feel. It will make you feel small. It will make you feel like nothing. Just in case you’d ever dared not to feel like nothing before. It’s a relationship that, despite not being abusive, is still quite toxic in its own right.

Love is warm and affirming, not competitive, critical and alienating — except for this kind of love. You and they will never be allies, you’ll be frienemies indefinitely. You will exist uneasily alongside each other. They will never give you a square compliment… or ease up on the back-handed ones.

And they may grow to love you (what I mean here is care about you), but their perception of you never changes.

He to this day text messages me to tell me about the new developments in his life. I to this day almost never feel compelled to respond. (What desire would a person have to maintain contact with someone who behaves like this toward them? Desperation for acceptance? That’s not my style.) He wonders why.

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what happens when Jane is in our ingroup

I forgot to explore one last possibility in my last post there.

What if Jane is not an other? What if she belongs to your ingroup? It’s not that you simply ask yourself whether you’re interested in associating with her and that’s the end of that.

So to explore this hypothetical question using the example from the previous installment, suppose we are still white. But now Jane is also white.

Believe it or not, it gets interesting. If ingroup identification is weak (only if ingroup identification is weak), we will evaluate her objectively. If ingroup identification is strong, we will be inclined to see this person favorably against all odds. We will flatter her and give her undue credit for any manner of different things. We will tell her that she wears short hair well. This may or may not be true, but Lana (who is either black or Asian) invariably wears it better and we invariably don’t care.

Wherever there is strong ingroup identification, people see group membership as an extension of their own personal identities. Understood in these terms, it becomes clear that ingroup favoritism is little more than a way to boost the self esteem of the individual. (A circle-jerk!) This is why we are inclined to give undue credit to members of our ingroup, and to an equivalent extent deny due credit to members of any outgroup.

Anything to see ourselves favorably.

Sometimes it gets out of hand. Group homogeny amplifies ingroup favoritism to nearly farcical proportions. This is why white people who only associate with other white people think Jenny Lewis is attractive. (Who the hell are we kidding here?) While most of us can agree that Raquel Welch is gorgeous or that Rihanna is gorgeous, only white people think Jenny Lewis is gorgeous.

Not exactly surprising. When anyone thinks Jenny Lewis is gorgeous, you know there must be something else going on. 

It’s the same reason certain people think Zooey Deschanel is attractive. Just like Jenny Lewis, she is an awkward-looking girl with a flattering haircut. But if your community is north brooklyn, you will be inclined to overlook this and give her the benefit of the doubt: “she’s cute.” Conversely, if someone who is legitimately attractive belongs to an outgroup, we’d likely tell ourselves “oh, it’s just the haircut.” Depending on who you are, you might also subsequently pick at their flaws, whether real or imagined.

One crucial thing to remember about ingroup/outgroup thinking, after all, is that it isn’t just about self-esteem. It also has some serious overtones of divisive competition.

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Expounding a bit more on colorblindness

So as I was starting to insinuate in my last post, there were two discrete types of colorblindness peddled by the pc-liberals of the ’90s; one that is quite reasonable and another that’s outright ludicrous in its conception. Let me go into this in further depth, hopefully in a way that brings some coherence and unity to this racket I’ve been making about race perception.

Racial bias originates at the stage of otherization. There need not be any negative evaluation for it to exist.

But take note that there’s a clear distinction between noticing someone’s race and otherizing the person.

Let me explain. There has to be identification for there to be otherization. After all, “other” is a relational word. The “other” only exists in relation to the self.

It’s like this: you may be presented with a new person. And you may notice their race; you may identify them as “black”. But nothing happens unless you then reference the “relational self”.

Which goes like this: you may be presented with a new person. The brain concludes, “she is black.” Then asks, “well, what am I?” Henceforth, the relational self is activated. And the stage is set for cognitive processing along ingroup/outgroup lines. Let’s say you’re white. So, she is an “other”.

Strength of ingroup-identification is a primary determinant of whether the relational self is activated. And, the level of homogeny in a group is what determines the strength of ingroup-identification among its members. In homogenous groups, group identification is strong: so, if you belong to a homogenously white community, you identify strongly as “white”. You may not carry a card, but the fact remains that you are acutely aware of being white.

If your identification with your ingroup is weak, your judgment of the person stops at the level of perception (Jane is black). It does not then ask “well, what am I?” It frankly doesn’t care. Okay, so Jane is black, duly noted; moving on.
What then happens is this.

If you are, however, strongly identified with your racial ingroup, you remain acutely aware of your identity in your everyday life and your assessment of Jane — so your focus shifts quickly from Jane is black to Jane is different. (Different than whom? Different than you, of course. “Different” is a relational word.)
Which is more in line with this.

Noticing someone’s race is immediate, but noticing whether they are different than you takes an additional cognitive jump. Not usually a grand one, but then again the distance leaped depends on how strongly-inclined you are to identify with your ingroup. Furthermore, noticing someone’s race is necessary, but noticing whether they are different than you is not.

So back to that ridiculous movie I was talking about, to which all this is pertinent. (The 1997 re-make of Cinderella, with Brandy.) Casting a white king and a black queen sends the message, “you aren’t supposed to care about race.” Casting an Asian guy as the son of a white king and a black queen sends the message, “you aren’t even supposed to notice race.” Which is really quite ludicrous (literally impossible), considering that race is the second thing people notice about each other, right after gender. (Cognitive-psychological research here, people. Can provide journal citations upon request.)

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a comparison: when no otherization takes place

Colorblind doesn’t mean bleeding-heartedly PC, it just means this. It’s simply that there is no otherization taking place.


When I talk of colorblindness I don’t mean colorblindness as a political message, or colorblindness exaggerated to absurdity to that end. I certainly don’t mean ’90s social propaganda colorblind, like the Disney re-make of Cinderella from 1997 that’s cast like a school play.

Speaking of which, let’s address their bewildering casting decisions point by point. Cinderella is black. Okay, I’ll accept that. Makes a fair amount of sense, doesn’t it? (What? The mistreated housekeeper is black? Preposterous.) Cinderella was always a bit of an underdog, the character unjustly denied credit and thanks. And there’s got to be SOME reason, if she’s really soooOoOo kind-hearted and beautiful, that she’s abused like she is. To make her black adds a lot of coherence and substance to the story, actually, and provides the believability that it’s always sort of cried out for.

Next: her prince is played by a Filipino guy. I see no reason to take issue with this either*. But why (here’s where it gets absurd), when the Prince is apparently a Pacific Islander or of some kind of Asian decent, are his parents black and white? Is he adopted or something? I mean, because otherwise it just makes no sense.

*Not to dismiss how utterly unrealistic it all still is, of course, because honestly, does it not make you wonder how many times in her life Brandy has dated an Asian guy? Or how many times the actor who plays the king has dated a black woman? ’90s pop-culture depictions of racial harmony are and will always be utterly unrealistic — not in the fantastical sense, but literally unrealistic. Unrepresentative of the way things are in the real world. Or, did people really behave like this in the ’90s? I was way too young to know. All I know is that the children raised on such propaganda are now in staunch rebellion against its message. And that it’s one of those unusual cases where there isn’t even backlash-against-the-backlash, so they must’ve done something wrong.

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