Ravenscroft
Banned
Communication is not easy to learn; actually, we've all been taught a LOT of stuff about how to avoid deep communication.
Most people aren't motivated to seek actual communication, because sailing through life on a placid lake has none of the risks of diving in, or even mere swimming. Not a whole lot of adventure, either.
Once someone begins to learn how to communicate, it's a continuing series of rude shocks to be confronted with all the half-truths, subterfuge, avoidance, outright lies that previously passed for "communication."
Welcome to my brain. Please dim lights.
________________
I'm a big fan of Robert Anton Wilson. His fiction was kinda trippy (starting with the Illuminatus! trilogy written with Robert Shea), but when I started finding his essays, I was blown away. He could intermingle utter hilarity with insights that made our eyes spin. In the early 1980s, these early essays had substantial effect upon our part of the Minneapolis Wiccan community & our formulation of ethical nonmonogamy.
Arguably, his best essays were collected in The Illuminati Papers (1980). One was originally published as by Simon Moon (a character in some of Wilson's fiction), Stupidynamics. (The coined term is only used as the title.)
(Elsewhere, I've seen rare reference to "Laws of Stupidynamics," but no proof these have anything to do with Wilson aside from the term.)
The article is made of 38 brief paragraphs. IMNSHO, they're MUCH easier to handle if read randomly, & over an extended time period (a couple weeks, say).
For starters:
Most people aren't motivated to seek actual communication, because sailing through life on a placid lake has none of the risks of diving in, or even mere swimming. Not a whole lot of adventure, either.
Once someone begins to learn how to communicate, it's a continuing series of rude shocks to be confronted with all the half-truths, subterfuge, avoidance, outright lies that previously passed for "communication."
Welcome to my brain. Please dim lights.
________________
I'm a big fan of Robert Anton Wilson. His fiction was kinda trippy (starting with the Illuminatus! trilogy written with Robert Shea), but when I started finding his essays, I was blown away. He could intermingle utter hilarity with insights that made our eyes spin. In the early 1980s, these early essays had substantial effect upon our part of the Minneapolis Wiccan community & our formulation of ethical nonmonogamy.
Arguably, his best essays were collected in The Illuminati Papers (1980). One was originally published as by Simon Moon (a character in some of Wilson's fiction), Stupidynamics. (The coined term is only used as the title.)
(Elsewhere, I've seen rare reference to "Laws of Stupidynamics," but no proof these have anything to do with Wilson aside from the term.)
The article is made of 38 brief paragraphs. IMNSHO, they're MUCH easier to handle if read randomly, & over an extended time period (a couple weeks, say).
For starters:
21. Stupidity, being partly genetic, partly acquired by enculturation, and partly the result of mimicry of emotional status games, is highly contagious. The stupidest party in any situation drags all the others down to his or her level. Trying to reason with an emotional person is frustrating, because useless; the only way to “deal” with them, except by escaping the scene, is to challenge their emotional game with a strong counter-game.