the human condition – Page 61

Writing Generalised Anxiety Disorder

Everyone knows what it feels like to be anxious. The clammy hands, the tightness in the gut, the dizziness, the sudden need to urinate. Where anxiety becomes a psychiatric problem is when this anxiety gets out of control, causing suffering and an inability to get through everyday life. This article looks at how to write engaging and believable characters who suffer from Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD).

One cluster of problems that people with GAD tend to have relates to restlessness and irritability. They think too much about what might go wrong. A number of small problems can then have the tendency to build up and to provoke an outburst over something small. Often a person with GAD will hit their limit and explode, to the astonishment of others around them who didn’t appreciate the underlying anxiety.

Other characters might see the usual signs of anxiety, only writ large. They might notice the signs of despair in the face – tight lips or a pallid look. The character with GAD might tap their feet a lot, fidget or stammer. Other characters might be able to detect and increase in the tension level of the room when someone with GAD is present.

The author might prefer to be more subtle, however. A character with GAD might to prone to explosive anger or hysteria, but the other characters might not be able to perceive the anxiety that underlies the fractiousness. They might also be prone to mind blanks from the anxiety. The other characters might only perceive the surface expression of the GAD, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusion.

For instance, people with GAD tend to smoke a lot of tobacco. If the protagonist of your story has GAD, it might be that they’re reaching for the cigarette packet every time the telephone rings. If the protagonist of your story encounters someone with GAD, it may be that the constant presence of tobacco smoke or smell causes them them to realise that that character has an anxiety disorder.

Insomnia is another common sign. If the protagonist of your story is an insomniac because of GAD, this might be something close to a living hell; a nightly torment that they are forced to endure. Other characters will be able to pick it in their face as well – they will look tired, with puffy eyes and a downcast look. They will look every bit like someone for who life is difficult.

People with GAD, like many people with mental disorders, have a tendency to suffer low self-esteem. As with many other conditions, it’s not easy to tell where the border between the mental disorder and personal weakness is. A character with GAD might frequently be asking themselves if they’re a coward, or if they’re really cut out for the challenges of life. Naturally such an attitude will eat away at their self-confidence.

Intertwined with this is the reality that people with GAD will often not be treated too well by other people. For one thing, anxiety tends to be contagious. If another person is anxious it’s hard to properly relax around them because of the chance that they might blow their top any moment. For another thing, anxiety tends to make people selfish, because the focus is on the desires of the self and not the needs of others. This selfishness tends to be reciprocated.

GAD can cause some of the same thought-loops and obsessional thinking as other psychiatric conditions. With generalised anxiety it’s easy to become anxious about being anxious, especially once one has become conditioned by unpleasant physical side-effects of worry. A character with the condition might feel highly anxious every time they feel a slight gut disturbance or chest pain, fearing that death has finally come.

Although there’s a shared component of extreme anxiety, GAD is distinct from phobias. Phobias (as discussed at length here) are fears of specific things that are hard to escape. GAD is also distinct from social anxiety. People with social anxiety tend to only feel anxious in anticipation of the risk of social judgment, whereas people with GAD tend to be anxious all the time.

GAD is also distinct from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, but several patterns of thinking overlap between the two. In particular, people with GAD are prone to worrying about things like whether or not they left the stove on when they left the house. Because anxiety is always present in such people, and because the risk of burning down one’s house is (reasonably) something that many people are cautious of, people with GAD are frequently triggered into panic by such common concerns.

The best thing about GAD from an author’s point of view is that virtually all of the readership will be able to identify with it. Almost everyone knows what it’s like to feel unpleasantly high levels of anxiety, so GAD will also be reasonably easy to identify with. Probably they also are aware of how unpleasant it is to be around highly anxious people, so they can identify with that also.

This article is an excerpt from Writing With The DSM (Writing With Psychology Book 5), edited by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

The Ways in Which White People Are Stupid

There is a lot of talk nowadays about how intelligent different races are. Some say that white people are smarter than the others, some say that this is impossible. In the vein of our previous essay about the complimentary dimensions of intelligence and stupidity, this essay – while happily conceding that white people are capable of feats of great intelligence – looks at the unique ways they are stupid.

There are basically two categories of ways that white people are stupid. The first category relates to their inherent nature, and the second relates to the environment they have created.

When children are born, they don’t naturally understand lying and cheating. The human infant is born in a highly immature state when compared to the infants of other mammals. As a consequence it comes into the world primed to rely on learning, not on instinct. It adapts to its environment primarily by mimicry.

This makes the human infant exceptionally trusting. In most cases, an infant that grows up around people who are honest and upstanding will come to learn that other people are like this. The heuristic becomes established that other people are trustworthy. They can naturally come to assume that everyone in the whole world must be like this, because if they are not exposed to the horrors of other people while young they might never get it.

This is the reasoning behind Sweden’s insane and suicidal decision to open their borders to mass Muslim immigration. The banks who control the media decided that they wanted cheap labour and upwards pressure on house and mortgage prices, and mass immigration from the Middle East and Africa appeared the best way to achieve those objectives.

So all the banks had to do was instruct their media pets to declare that mass immigration of cheap labour was good, and those opposing it were evil, and the white people of Sweden believed it all without question.

Another way that white people are stupid is a low social IQ, which relates to autism. White people are widely acknowledged at being good at abstract thought such as science, philosophy, computer programming and finance. Part of the reason for this is that the white brain has evolved to solve the problems of a cold climate, which means that evolution has selected for white people who can solve problems of physics, mathematics, logic and architecture.

But part of the problem with this evolution is that white people were not selected for solving social problems. There wasn’t a selective advantage for those who were skilled at this, owing to the low population density of Europe (and the population density gets lower, and the people more autistic, the further North you go). White people tend to assume that anyone smiling at them is their friend – which is why they are so readily suckered by democracy and television advertising. White people are more gullible than any other racial group, by far – and that’s a kind of stupidity.

The second category of ways that white people are stupid relate to the environment that they have created. This is not an inherent stupidity, but a secondary stupidity that arises as a consequence of the damage done by the inherent form.

White people, for all of their vaunted ability to see far into the future to overcome the cold winters of Europe, have utterly failed to anticipate and plan for the long-term environmental effects of the capitalist industrial system that they created. This capitalist machine rumbles ever on, free of any bonds, restraints or true oversight, consuming ever more of the natural world.

There is growing evidence that this capitalist-industrial system is unsustainable, such as disappearing Arctic ice, disappearing rainforest cover and disappearing insect populations. In fact, it’s already clear to most intelligent people that we’re headed for a mass collapse, like a train going over a broken bridge. Certainly a group of people who invented a system that caused the biosphere to collapse can justly be said to be stupid, because they will inevitably go down with it.

For whatever reason, white people are not intelligent enough to see this trainwreck about to happen, and so they continue to stoke the coals.

Perhaps worst of all, this insane and inhumane system causes an appalling amount of psychiatric disease in the people that it rules over. Western nations consume baffling amounts of anti-depressant, anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic medication, reasoning that the terrible side-effects are easier to deal with the effort of trying to live in a way that makes sense.

But the major reason why white people are stupid, over and above all the others, is that they have no spirituality. White people might have a low social IQ, but if there was such a thing as a spiritual intelligence quotient, white people would be to that what Australian Aborigines are to a standard intelligence test.

Instead of following a spiritual tradition that links white people to anything meaningful (i.e. either God or the natural world), most of them follow the dead traditions of a Middle Eastern tribe that almost none of them are descended from. They are even stupid enough to get tricked into persecuting their own, true spiritual traditions, in particular those based around meditation, cannabis and psychedelic drug use.

This lack of spirituality underlies all the other stupidities of white people, as well as their others. Because materialism is the widespread belief, most white people don’t believe that consciousness survives the death of the physical body. This makes them disinclined to consider the truly long-term effects of anything, whether it be financial, environmental or demographic.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

VJMP Reads: Julius Evola’s Ride the Tiger X

This reading continues on from here.

The 27th essay in Ride the Tiger is called ‘Relations Between the Sexes’ and seeks to cover a different range to the essay about marriage. When the order of the world is dissolving, men and women are naturally separated. Our sexual prejudices have contaminated our ethics. Nowhere is this more evident that in the idea of sexual revolution.

Processes have worked towards a freeing of sex, but not a freeing from sex. The sexual revolution has not liberated us from the suffering caused by sexual desire; to the contrary, we are now intoxicated by it. This is contributing to the collapse of society, but we can use the space afforded by the chaos to assert higher values. Bourgeoisie values, being materialistic, cannot conceive of woman in anything more than her anatomical capacity as instrument of reproduction – in reality, she has a spiritual value.

Sexual liberty therefore leads to materialism, and thereby away from spirituality. Incredibly for the 1960s, Evola is already able to anticipate how widespread pornography has affected the “polarity” between men and women. Nowadays a naked woman doesn’t stir much more interest than the sight of a cat. This is a tragedy because the sexual union is capable of acting as a bridge to higher consciousness via “an existential rupture of planes”. Making love can be Dionysian.

Part Eight of Ride the Tiger is where Evola finally gets to the spiritual side of things. This final section is titled ‘The Spiritual Problem’, and consists of two essays. The first of these is called ‘The “Second Religiosity”‘.

In this essay Evola decries what he calls “neospiritualism”, which he describes as an attempt to lead people beyond the material without giving any credence to the old, dogmatic religious movements. He has no time for the “movements, cults, sects, lodges, and conventicles” of the modern day, and considers them also a phenomenon of dissolution. In fact, things have gone so far that we are now in the rigor mortis stage, and all that awaits is the decomposition of the corpse.

When man closed himself off to the higher, transcendent world in the 19th century, this did not liberate him from superstition but merely opened him up to the lower, primitive emotional world in the 20th. We are now in the “soulless, collectivistic and materialistic phase corresponding to the closing of a cycle of civilisation”. All of these neospiritual movements thus represent an excess of the feminine. Evola is highly cynical and dismissive of these movements.

It’s difficult to correctly discriminate between all the garbage thrown up by neospirituality and the wisdom of genuine value. The emphasis ought to go on the deconditioning of the spirit. Here, Evola is at pains to emphasise that a person cannot achieve initiation by themselves, in contrast to the belief espoused by many. One is either born initiated, or one achieves initiation by way of spiritual emergency or ordeal, or one is initiated deliberately by someone who is part of a tradition and who knows what they’re doing. This is hard to achieve because the organisations that do so hardly exist any more.

The 30th and final essay is titled ‘Death – The Right Over Life’. Evola begins here by talking about the common belief, held by Heidegger (as well as by Socrates) that life is in some way a preparation for death. Death appears to be the end of the “person”, and atheism and materialism have made this simpler to deal with. Contemplation of death is a noble endeavour, as it can lead to a heightened state of appreciation of one’s life.

The traditional doctrines had the correct approach to death. The truly differentiated man cannot believe that his being began with the beginning of his physical body. He must solve the problem of nihilism by “displacing the I towards the centre of ‘being'”. Here Evola is talking about consciousness: “the human condition οf earthly existence is only a restricted section in a continuum, in a current that traverses many other states.” This eternal truth is not easy to grasp in an age of dissolution like ours, but it is much better than the lies of theistic creation myths.

A truly differentiated man, much like the Stoics and the Pythagoreans, could never take his own life, no matter how poor his conditions. This is because to do so would acknowledge that he was not strong enough to overcome the irrational part of his being. However, one always has the moral right to exit the world, should one decide that remaining ordeals are not meaningful. The differentiated man would be extremely disinclined to take this option in any case, right or otherwise. This is because of the possibility that one has chosen and said yes to – whether before or beyond this life – all of the ordeals in it.

In the final analysis, one can say that, no matter how degenerate and dissolute the world, it can still have value. It might be that, in order to achieve the highest state of being, consciousness must challenge itself as intensely as possible. To that end, there’s little more challenging than existing in a world where everything is contrary to one’s nature.

The Bad Guys Are Neither Left Nor Right But Whoever Denies Reality the Most

Everyone is trying to place the blame on the other side of the politico-retard spectrum. Left-wingers blame the cruelty and ruthlessness of the right wing for the widespread poverty and inequality of the world, and right-wingers blame the lack of conscientiousness and industriousness among leftists for that same poverty. This essay steps back and declares that whoever denies reality the most are the bad guys.

For hundreds of years, scientific progress was made impossible by religious conservatives of the right. Institutions such as the Catholic Church persecuted and executed freethinkers such as Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno, going as far as burning the latter at the stake for heresy. Their fear was that freethinking, and the practice of freethinking, would dissolve the web of lies that they had thrown over the West in order to dominate and control us.

Not only did they spend centuries fighting the idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun, but these conservatives still resist the teaching of evolution in public schools. The doctrine of evolution suggests that the various species of the world evolved over many millions of years to fit the various ecological niches that exist on this planet, and this goes against the idea that God created everything deliberately according to some grand plan that kicked off around 6,000 years ago.

The reason why all this was resisted is because it went against the religious dogma of Abrahamism, which is an extremely aggressive mechanism of total control. The Abrahamic tradition glorifies submission to religious authorities and demonises those who strike out on their own to find their own answers. For centuries, this attitude led to the widespread suppression of science and philosophy, which gave us the Dark Ages: nearly a millennium of total stagnation.

This association between religious conservatism and suppression of science is the reason why the Enlightenment has always been associated with left-wing values. In order to advance science and knowledge, people had to break the shackles of religion and the monarchy, because these sclerotic institutions sought to oppress them at every turn. This is why speculative freethinking societies swore to destroy them.

Few have realised, but the pendulum has now shifted. In 2018, science is being made impossible, not by the religious fanatics of the right but by the political fanatics of the left. It’s no longer the Church that’s denying science: Pope Francis is happy to tell you all about how climate change is bad and how evolution is true and perfectly compatible with their theocratic dogma.

In 2018 the deniers of science are primarily the leftists who dream to create a global socialist state.

They deny science for the same reason that the religious conservatives did: because it goes against their dogma and because it makes it harder for them to bring their ideology of control into being. The particular science that they deny is different, but similar in that it is also denied because of political reasons, not scientific ones.

For instance, those who want a global socialist state have a strong incentive to deny any science that suggests that there are inherent biological differences between populations, because such inherent differences imply that people might be better off kept apart. What the socialists want is a world where people are merely replaceable parts, where any group of 1,000 workers is the same as any other.

To this end, all identifications with race or gender have to be destroyed so that only identification with the state remains. Only when nothing but identification with the one world global state remains can we be free of the divisions that cause conflict between populations – or so the dogma goes.

Consequently, we can observe that those leftists do not like discussing the science of genetic influence on racial differences in intelligence. Their entire political construct would fall apart if it was widely conceded that certain races are not intellectually capable of contributing meaningfully to an advanced industrial society or to a post-industrial service-based one.

Neither do those leftists like discussing the science of genetic influence on gender differences in behaviour. If it was widely conceded that men and women thought and approached the world in fundamentally different ways, then it would be impossible for men and women to be treated as interchangable parts. One would need to have separate institutions for men and for women, and this would contradict the goal of a supreme one world government, and make the desired control system harder to implement.

This denial of reality has and will continue to cause an immense amount of suffering in the world, because it will induce people to accept political solutions that don’t reflect Nature and which will therefore always be in conflict with it. This doesn’t mean that the right-wing are the good guys though, as their denial of the psychological damage caused by poverty and economic hardship causes just as much suffering as the denial of science by the left.

It must now be accepted that the received wisdom of the right-wing being evil, which has been held true for centuries by freethinkers, scientists and scholars all around the world, no longer holds as a general rule. The bad guys are now all over the politico-retard spectrum, denying science on account of all manner of moronic political doctrines.