"Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us..." Heb. 12 1-2
“What does your conscience say? You should become who you are.” Friedrich Nietzsche
There seems to be only one road to success nowadays: go to university, major in STEM, finance, or some other four-year vocational degree, then work your ass off with your spouse, their job, and maybe some kids, as well as a home (property!) and a nice little nest egg you can enjoy at the ass-end of your life.
(Roads also set out a field of play for a game)
Of course, it wouldn't be called "success" if failure were impossible; if this road were level or broad, or without its twists; all of which are intentionally placed so as to ensure the wrong kind of people -- i.e., those who can't or refuse to follow the rules -- are easily kicked off into the Ravine of Loserdom. (Jeff Schmidt's Disciplined Minds describes this road well, tho' it is a bit dated.)
The Ravine of Loserdom houses more than the merely poor; in it are all those who use their money inappropriately, who are too open with their oddness, who live in weird patterns or rhythms; the homeless, some of its most obvious residents, and at the centre those poor souls who are so far gone they cannot help themselves: the addicted and the flagrantly mentally ill.
Some people accept their position in the Ravine of Loserdom, believing in a just world; others attempt to claw their way out of it by any means necessary, up to and including amputation; often to slide back into the darkness and damp. And the Ravine of Loserdom is a very real place; one that many people occupy, regardless of whether they seem to "deserve" it or not. Some of those who seem to be most successful have vacation homes, even mansions in it, with all the mire and muck of the rest sticking to them. They have made it in some way, but they still cannot help but find themselves covered with baked on dirt and stains showing where they've come from.Of course, the Way of Success and the Ravine of Loserdom are places that exist nowhere else other than the heads of humanity. Our heads can hold considerably more pleasant places to live -- if only we completely annihilate the ones in which we currently live first. (Nechayev: The Revolutionary is a consecrated man.)
In our age of Economic Axiology, everything is accounted for in economic terms -- in accounting speak, in dollars and cents; in what is considered to be an objetive measure of value (but rather is the sum of desires in a certain market). People and things are judged solely on their ability to play to the market, to what is imagined to be desired; and to do this successfully, care, quality and -- vivacity -- must be excised. Economic Axiology is the once-future, now present from which nothing human escapes. Unless.
Unless someone like you, fellow weirdo, refuses to walk the Way of Success, refuses to even step toward the course with the steep drop-offs and hair-pin turns and tolled short cuts, to not even step towards the path which promises -- Success! For success is a hollow master and a fickle mistress. Worse, it's a goal: something fixed, something which you can pass over and through, and either way, feeling hungry for yet another when it's past. And worse, when Fortune's favour turns away, when the years catch up, when your entire life has been defined by success after success, by striving to hit goals others put out for you -- what will remain of you?
As a weirdo you cannot afford -- in every sense of the word -- to pursue the path everyone else is running; to do things the normal way is sooner or later spiritually fatal, and often physically as well. If you are reading this you are likely someone who has been diagnosed as or perhaps just bullied for being "weird as fuck" throughout your life. You are well aware of your inability to deal with the world made by normative -- not merely "normal" in the sense of being statistically average (the best term to use is "modal" (the mode being the number or interval that appears most often in a specific sample (assuming the Gaussian -- or normal (actually modal) distribution, the bell curve: the statistical average, the mode, and the median (the number that divides the sample in half) are the same in a sample distributed like such) but dedicated to ensuring such an average prevails. (Do you really want a future of fluorescent lights and TPS reports?) So you must walk the weird road before you, the one set up for you by the great lover of oddballs, freak shows, eccentrics, undiagnosed ADHD enjoyers and lepers Himself: G-d Almighty (or whatever equivalent you may believe in). But the darned thing about running this road, however lucky or not you may be, whether your path leads to any kind of earthly glory or merely a pauper's grave, is that unlike the nightmare Hotwheels track of Success, you have to make it up as you go along. It is up to you to divine through whatever means you have how you shall become what you are, what you are meant to be, what position the tile that is you has in the great mosaic of the universe. And you must race this road seeking not success (tho' if it comes in some form (preferably financial; fame is notoriously inedible) enjoy it) nor pleasure but solely to do your duty as well as you possibly can. Some call this achieving a proper understanding of virtue; some call this keeping your personal Jiminy Cricket/Guardian Angel/Bunny-suited Vengeful Spirit happy (eudaimonia -- eu, good; daimon, spirit, -ia being a suffix indicating relating to or being an activity of something); I call it "pulling one over on the Man (in the colloquial English sense as well as the Heideggerian sense).
More tips later, weirdo-sinners. --NooSkipper
1 August 2024A a life-long weirdo who has survived and thrived despite being highly unusual, I see young weirdlings today struggling with becoming fully weird. Stunted by a society that is coming to see any deviance whatsoever as something to be treated or cured via drugs, some sort of alternative medicine, therapeutic games, mom/dad's ripped paddling arm, or worst, good ol' fashioned peer pressure, many young weirdos will go through life ashamed and hidden, toiling away at jobs someone else said they had to have so they could accomplish goals that, upon serious reflection, make absolutely no sense to any ever at all.
This is a great tragedy, for we oddballs are pioneers of the human imagination, of the mind, of the soul. We live in an era of passivity and quietude that makes that vaunted decade of suburbanization and post-war conformity -- the 1950s -- seem splendiferous with eccentricity and creativity (as it indeed was -- this was not only the era of Elvis but also of intense creative and intellectual ferment, the yeast that would rise the culture into the absolute riot of the 1960s).
Sure, we may have weird countercultural movements, memes, and the occasional failed coup, but in general, culture has stagnated. Our novels, tv shows, hit albums and politics have become a greyish pablum of repetitive tedium; we're all regurgitating the same shit that has been said before, the same tropes and themes that the media oligarchs have decreed will be available. The mind and spirit have been re-enclosed.
And now Earth itself is straining under more of the same, our bodies themselves bearing the plastic patrimony of cultural enclosure. One world, one people, under copyright, forever.
Which is where we weirdos - self-proclaimed shamans on DXM - autistic shitposters - psychiatric refuseniks - abductees - lifelong tumblrinas, of the far left and far right persuasion - the people with a devotion to an eccentric craft - and the often forgotten, but definitely not by me, transgender start-up girl gun nerds - and the rest, of course - come in. Marcuse spoke of the attempt of the Man to attempt to generate some organic negativity - in plain language, naturally arising creativity, weirdness, resistance -- to sustain itself, intellectually, culturally, and spiritually. But that was the crude method of the discipline society, and not the one we now live in -- not exactly an "achievement society" (as Byung-Chul Han calls it) but a Normalizing Society -- one in which achievement is seen as product of minimizing deviance from the norm; one does not intensely self-manage to achieve; rather, achievement is seen as the product of intense self-management, the reduction of deviance. The spirit of Calvinism and Plymouth Rock lives on in TikToks, Instagram posts and Tweets about "normalization" and whether it is normal to do something. The norm is seen as something that must be conformed to for survival.
But it is possible to ignore the norm and survive. Millions of people around the world are thriving as oddballs, eccentrics, proudly nomadic (in an actual, hand-to-mouth way, and not with a fancy visa and all); all in some way pioneers of the human mind-body-spirit. It is my hope that with the pieces following this one I may be able to impart some wisdom for running the weird race to its end. Tomorrow I shall drop the first tip: follow the path that is yours, not The Nomral Path for Normal people. Take care, sinners and weirdos. -- Nooskipper 26 July 2024: THE NOOSCAPHE SAILS AGAIN! WATCH THIS SPACE FOR NUCLEAR HOT TAKES AND MIGRAINE INDUCED TALES OF MADNESS!