An answer to a couple of questions I've been reflecting on as part of a program that I'm in.
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I'm not sure I see ruthless dismissal as my only option, but it does often appear as my best option, particularly when dealing with people who appear determined to engage in activities that harm me or my interests. There are a great many people like this out there, many of them have good intentions, and I'm not at all interested in contributing my time or resources to their efforts, because these efforts make the world worse for me.
This dismissive part of me is a useful protector, helping to keep my time and money safe in a culture dominated by predators and parasites. At the same time, it challenges my self image, because I like to think of myself as open and accepting. Meditating on this, it seems like a couple of things are in play. There's an appropriate dispassionate dismissal of things that simply aren't for me. But there's also something murkier going on.
Sometimes this useful protector is doing its job and it activates big anger and frustration in me. These are familiar feelings. They rise to the surface whenever I'm reminded that I'm trapped in a dystopia. When these feelings come up, I generally attribute them to my chronic illness and other challenging life circumstances. And these things may indeed be their proximate cause. But recently I've been inspired to dig deeper.
Anger and frustration aren't primary emotions. They come from somewhere. Something else comes first. In my case, when I turned over the soil from which these feelings sprang, I found two powerful, intertwined senses that have been with me for a very long time. The first was a profound sense of purpose, like a visceral and absolute knowing that I'm here for a reason and I'm right where I'm supposed to be. The second was utter despair, because I absolutely hated it here.
Exploring these feelings, I traced their origin to a specific moment in my life. I was 14 and had just come to realize how different I was from other people. On a basic level, I perceived and processed information in a way that others did not. Part of this was intellectual, part of it involved having a high degree of what psychologist Michael Thalborne termed transliminality, which means consciously perceiving psychological material that others only interact with unconsciously.
At that time, I didn't yet fully understand the specifics of my alienation. All I knew was that everyone around me either grossly misinterpreted or ignored just about everything I said. And everywhere I looked, from family to school to larger community, I saw terrible systems imposing a broken status quo on all of us. I was continually targeted for harassment and violence by instruments of this status quo, purely because I didn't fit in. Bullies. School officials. Local police.
So I was 14 and processing all of this, sitting in my unfinished basement bedroom. Four of my friends had recently died in three unrelated incidents. Two were suicides. One boy had killed himself in a self immolation at age 15. Zero of the adults I'd tried talking with about this mentioned the idea of responding to the tragedies by improving the world so kids didn't see death as a better option than life. This, more than the deaths, opened up a pit of despair in me.
What was this hell I was trapped in, where dimwits controlled everything and literally no one could fathom responding to tragedy by improving the human ecology that produced the tragedy? I couldn't handle it. I lost myself in despair and lamentation, but then something unexpected happened. I found myself flooded with an overwhelming sense of what can only be described as raw purpose.
I just sat on my bed and cried while wave after wave of this feeling washed over me. Somehow, I knew in my whole being that this was where I was supposed to be. Whatever else was true, I just knew that I was there for a reason. That my life was important to forces beyond my understanding. Divine forces perhaps. So even though I didn't want to be there at all, I had no choice in the matter.
My life didn't get better after that. In fact, a bunch of horrible stuff happened and I ended up with one of the most painful conditions known to medical science. At the same time, I did learn to make better sense of my alienation. This partly involved quantifying its intellectual dimension.
The WAIS-III test I took in 2003 was administered by an actively hostile doctor while I was heavily drugged and running on just a couple of hours of sleep. According to this test, I had a full scale IQ in the 99th percentile, with a performance IQ in the 90th percentile and a verbal IQ in the 99.99 percentile or higher. Later, in my thirties, a mentor who had worked with exceptional people throughout his career became convinced that I was a savant level genius. I've never felt totally comfortable with that label. When people have asked me if I'm some kind of genius, my standard reply has been "haha not quite," which is technically accurate because a test placed my IQ under 160, and it usually gets a laugh.
Mensa never appealed to me because its puzzles seemed pointless, so I joined a high IQ group called the Top One Percent Society. I sent copies of my test results to a guy in Florida, he added me to a Yahoo discussion group, no one was talking about anything that interested me, and I decided that high IQ societies weren't for me. Ultimately I learned to greatly simplify my vocabulary and avoid drawing attention to my actual way of thinking when dealing with most people. While this doesn't reduce my sense of alienation, it does reduce the hostility and other nonsense I attract.
Ever since I was 14, my default state has been alienation. I typically feel like I'm trapped in a prison made from the programming in other people's minds. I love the natural world but nearly every aspect of society feels terrible because my choices are dramatically constrained by people who unconsciously avoid any information that conflicts with the incomplete or incorrect stories they've internalized about how the world does and should work.
I have no interest in contributing my energy to their efforts to maintain a status quo that I experience as hellish. So my ruthless dismissal of these people feels appropriate, but the emotional content of such dismissal isn't necessarily desirable. Yes, they are making the world worse for me, but they're rarely doing so out of malice, or even consciously. Meditating on this, the word that keeps coming up is civility.
There have throughout history been situations where people who are very different from each other have had to interact with each other, and civility emerged as a strategy to make those interactions peaceful. I may be, in this culture, surrounded by people who can't see the world as I do, and I may dislike that they continually endeavor to make the world a worse place for a person like me to live in, but maybe I can dismiss their nonsense and try to insulate myself from its harmful impacts in a more civil way.
My alienation isn't going anywhere anytime soon. I've always been different and I've always been okay with that. But if I am stuck here on Earth with all of these clowns and their terrible systems, I may as well be more intentionally civil about it. This can't possibly hurt, and it might even make some things better.
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