Selected Highlights from Sadly, Porn

[Following an analysis of Oedipus Tyrannos] 

Be given the crown, be given the throne, be given the queen-- not a crown, a throne, a queen--  the exact same throne, the exact same queen, this is the limit of his imagination, the imagination of a 5 year old, an imagination which was never forced=allowed to want something different.  Always: who am I?  And never: what do I do?  “I want to be King.”  You want to rule?  “Easy does it, let's not get ahead of ourselves.”  It can't be birthright because birthright isn't you; and anyway it means you are no longer an individual but have inherited all of the responsibility of action.  “I’m not so shallow to want to be the main character in my own story, what I'm really looking for is to be the main character in a play written and directed by someone else.”  Well, I got this short one, there's not much action in it, it's more of a character piece.  “That sounds perfect.”  It ends tragically.  “Even better, at least then people will be talking about me for years.”

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (p. 144). Kindle Edition. 

A dreamer in analysis assumes the analyst knows what the dream will mean.  Of course, the analyst might not know.  But by allowing-- encouraging-- the belief that he, the analyst, is the person who absolutely would know but doesn't tell it, the dreamer can act on it.  The dreamer might never know what it meant, but something changes.  You may find yourself tonight having a dream and thinking, I wonder what the author of this odd book on pornography  would think of my dream?  He would know what it means.  And by knowing that I know what it means, you could begin to suspect some of what it means because its meaning is knowable-- and you will act.  And the reason you think I would know what it meant is that you dreamt it with me in mind.  But if I told you what it meant, even on the outside chance I was dead on, you would hear it whatever perverted way you needed to but attribute that meaning to me, you would use my authority to defend against the true interpretation.  You would be much more satisfied, consider me a genius, and everyone else would be miserable.  The analysis failed, but the therapy was a big success.  That'll be $500, please.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (pp. 180-181). Kindle Edition. 

Women fall for the same trap.  “Men are threatened by successful women,” they say, glaring at the naked airbrushed airhead in the men’s magazine, forgetting that same airhead was airbrushed into women's media, with slightly more clothes and a caption that read, “Even her brains are too big for her shirt!”  Maybe what he's threatened by is the kind of women who think that's what men are threatened by.  Those women are lunatics.  Why would a man want her because she's successful?  Why would you want a man to want you because you're successful?  Why do you want him to want-- how you want?  Why would you want the kind of guy who wants the kind of woman that wants to be wanted for being successful?  And if you get him, what then?  You'll share a house, but you're going to need a second TV, and a fifth.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (pp. 252-253). Kindle Edition. 

Wanting is a defense against enjoyment.  “But isn't spending so much time looking for love, let alone pornography, a little-- self-indulgent?”  Yes, which is why you felt compelled to say this.  Interesting how self-indulgence is never the critique of the media you’re personally invested in.  “I spend a lot of time studying the news, there's so much going on in politics right now.”  I'm sure your family appreciates the effort.  “But I have to stay informed.”  I repeat.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (p. 254). Kindle Edition. 

[On A Christmas Carol]

Whatever Dickens intended the book to do has failed, it even failed in its primary intention, which was to make Dickens rich.  The more useful thing to do is understand why his story is so deeply misinterpreted as, e.g., a greedy capitalist who doesn’t want to die forgotten and learns that there are more important things than money.  Certainly this story has been safely packaged as a children’s story with “a relatively simplistic message, but still good for them to hear”, but it has given adults a multi-level maneuver for hating those who have more.  “I’m not greedy, if I had Scrooge’s money, I would definitely buy a crippled kid a turkey.”  I believe you, because you said Scrooge’s money.  Your problem is envy, not greed, and when you claim to care about others you should check to see if it’s not in order to deprive someone else.  Because it is.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (pp. 354-355). Kindle Edition. 

I have no idea who Satan is, but I know from the primary source what he does, isn’t the very idea of Satan as the ultimate evil related not to his acts of adultery, murder, apple picking and Sabbath violations, of which I count zero, but in tempting others?  No, no, I’m fully Earth based, I don’t mean tempting as “seducing”, I mean it as “behavioral economics.”  Someone will read religious predestination into this, but that’s only because your brain is lazy and want to push out into theology the much harder  practical question: should you forgive others for their sins against you, or should you ask them to forgive you for causing them to sin?  It’s a question every parent should ask themselves.  You won’t.  “I don’t want to be a hypocrite.”  God forbid.  There’s no greater sin than that.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (pp. 356-357). Kindle Edition. 

If you don't have what you want, there are three possible reasons.  1. Since it's what you want,  you can't act to get it. 2.  It's not what you want, but you feel obligated to pursue it.  3. What you want is a defense against satisfaction.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (p. 383). Kindle Edition. 

The desire to display gigawatt devotion with zero responsibility is the standard maneuver of our times, note the trend of celebrity soundbite social justice, or children’s fascination with doing the extra credit more than the regular credit, and as a personal observation this is exactly what’s wrong with the worst medical students and nurses.  They’ll spend hours talking with a patient about their lives and feelings while fluffing their pillow to cause it to be true that they are devoted-- they chose to act, chose to love-- while acts solely out of ordinary duty are devalued if not completely avoided.  “Well I believe the patient’s spirituality is very important.”  It will be if you don’t get this NG tube in.  You may think you have very valid personal reasons for not wanting to assume responsibility, like apathy or minimum wages, but the overwhelming motivator for devotion by choice is the rewarding reward of giving gifts of oneself, seemingly selflessly, because these publicly “count” more than discharging duty.  The retort to this is that often times the selfless acts are done outside of everyone else’s sight, so what possible reward could there be?  But one doesn’t need to be seen by individual people, it's enough to imagine being seen by a hypothetical audience.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (p. 420). Kindle Edition. 

[Regarding Hitchcock's Rear Window]

And say Grace Kelly asks him to castrate himself and his giant camera and snap a 35mm of her in the dress, and he does.  Now what?  She has a picture of herself.  If she can’t enjoy being in the dress, she sure as hell isn’t going to enjoy being by herself without the dress looking at a picture of herself wearing the dress.  Maybe she’d hang it in her house to show some other people, but the ideal would be to post it somewhere public and have other people admire/hate it, e.g. a magazine.  Now it’s real.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (p. 438). Kindle Edition. 

This is the need that online pornography satisfies that we have collectively agreed to pretend doesn't exist.  As long as the porn is on the internet and digital, it isn't your desire, it isn’t yours-- it isn't you.  Which is ironically correct.  Your spouse will tolerate any depravity in the browser history, but try and print out a single semi-nude photo and hide it in a drawer and you won't even get partial custody.  “What do you plan to do with this-- fantasize?”  This is the true explanation for the explosion of online pornography.  “No, the explanation is nowadays it's so easy to make and get it.”  You, sir, are a socialist, you don't trust capitalism.  Do you really believe that the Invisible Hand that replaced cigarettes with smartphones didn't know in the 1970s to print more magazines if you really wanted them?  Democracy may stumble along but capitalism is magnificently hyperefficient, it's not your mommy and it's not your slave, it doesn't give you what you need or even what you want, it will give you only what you'll pay for, nothing more, unless it's less.  Maybe you should re-learn how to want. The problem with porn isn't availability: it is deniability, not just to others but to oneself: “no, no, this isn't me.”

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (pp. 439-440). Kindle Edition. 

When you post a photo of a chocolate cake, you are sharing the experience of that cake; when you post a comment about a news event or someone else's photo of a cake, you are sharing your experience of those comments and photos.  It's tempting to see a bikini picture or a carefully carefully revised 9 word zinger about someone’s metaphysics as something different than a cake picture, but if it uses the same media, it has to follow the same logic.  And, sadly, it does. It's an obvious cliché that the whole point is to share experiences, but what the experiences have in common is that they are inner experiences: enjoyable in themselves.  Publicizing these experiences suggests-- in fact, what it has defended against-- the inability to enjoy the experience.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (pp. 461-462). Kindle Edition. 

The problem today isn't that nothing is held in private, the problem is that there is nothing to hold in private.  What do you want, that you're not allowed to want?  You've never read Freud, but you know about repression; and you know about it so you can be sure you haven't done it.  “Nope, all my “secret” desires are fully conscious.”  And unfulfilled, that's strange.  Knowledge without action.  Omniscient and impotent.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (p. 467). Kindle Edition. 

In the old days you taught kids the Holocaust separately from WWII because of the enormity of its reality, but now that the survivors are all dead and the Holocaust less real, it still has to be separated because it doesn't fit with what we now want to teach about WWII and wars in general: that they are ultimately over economic issues.  Troublingly, the actual Holocaust, and modern genocides that regularly recur despite the promise of increased connectedness in our global village, can't really be explained by economics, so these exceptions are carved off and explained as having religious or racial “root” causes.  I put “root” in quotes because while it gets us out of having to explain why a particular genocide isn't economics like everything else is supposed to be, we all “know” that religious/racial conflicts in general are-- surprise-- “really” about economics.  And so on down the line, you get to class struggle without ever having to identify or justify whether it is class struggle.  The idea of class struggle replacing fear/honor/interest as history’s universal motivator didn't take off until the 19th century, and so either you believe someone figured out something truly novel about human nature, or someone discovered a much needed defense against human nature.  “Yes, yes, it's really about exploitation of labor!”  You can imagine how bad the alternatives were. Anyway, here's why The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas is child pornography...

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (pp. 479-480). Kindle Edition. 

“We have structural problems that require political solutions, we don't need heroes anymore, there are no ‘bad guys’.”  Except for Nazis, of course,  and anyone who fought for or against the Nazis, or was alive in the 40s, or can count to 40, or likes numbers.  So you’re telling me that except for the half of the US that you’re sure are SS, in three generations you've managed to eradicate all human evil, using nothing more than consumer technology and secondary sources?  “We need to work together to overcome the real problems of society.”  We??  I’m sorry, could you take your hand out of your pants, it’s hard to take you seriously-- we????

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (p. 484). Kindle Edition. 

You think propaganda is about getting you to think something, and that's because you think your thoughts are valuable.  They're not, no one cares.  “It’s so important to stay informed, to fact check!”  The more informed the opinion is (notice I said “more,” not better”), the more susceptible it is to propaganda.  The greater a person's knowledge about political and economic facts, the more vulnerable-- particularly if the propaganda employs ambiguity.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (p. 493). Kindle Edition. 

Let's accept without prejudice you want to become famous, fine: what are you doing to get that?  What are you, today, doing to enhance your reputation?  Dreaming big and doing nothing, sounds like someone is planning to fail, on purpose.  How you want has lead you to want something that you.... don't want.  One would be tempted-- well, your Dad would be tempted-- to call you lazy.  But he's wrong, you're not lazy, you’d work harder than anyone, you just need to get chosen first.  And who can blame you?  Everything you've ever seen with your eyes says greatness is thrust upon the unsuspecting hero; while everyone who works hard becomes.... a worker.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (p. 510). Kindle Edition. 

But the pathologically jealous man didn't choose a woman who could act on her desires, did he?  He chose the kind of woman who would like.... a pathologically jealous husband, sorry folks, that's how it works.  Love is not real and lust is highly contingent, so she'll settle for any kind of affect as long as the volume is set to 11.  “It’s one louder.”  His rage means... he wants me.  His rage is an accounting of how many other people he thinks want me, even if I've become convinced no one wants me because the ones who do don't count.  Having no practice with her own desires, she settles on the one reliably endorsed by her husband and TV: the desire to be desired.  He worries that she is, and convinces her she's not, by making sure he doesn’t.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (pp. 545-546). Kindle Edition. 

[Following a hypothetical where an adulterer comes to a friend for advice and judgement] 

“It isn't really my place to judge.” And so we come to it, the ostrich defense amidst the shards of broken mirrors.  He wouldn't solicit your judgment unless you were a judge.  “But I'm not a judgmental person.” But that's exactly what he thinks everyone thinks you are.  For this to work, it isn't enough that he pick someone he knows won't judge him.  He has to pick someone everyone else sees as judgmental.  And he thinks he can fool you.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (p. 577). Kindle Edition. 

[Following the parable of the woman caught in adultery] 

What would be evident to anyone actually there, and Jesus, and anyone writing this story, is that it neither matters if she is really an adulteress, what Mosaic Law commands, or what anyone wants because no one is ALLOWED to stone her: they live under Roman Law, and only it has the power to bring charges and dispense punishment.  Only the Roman Law is “without sin,” you have no recourse outside that structure; going outside that structure is the crime.  This is the non-bluff of Jesus:  “ok, let’s say God commanded you to stone her, I agree you want to, for various reasons, most of them bananas.  So...?  Which one of you God fearing men dares overrule Roman legal procedure and do God's bidding or what you want?  Anybody?  Here's a rock.  Anybody?” This is the math: “convicted by their conscience” equals the limit of the “courage of their convictions” divided by “fear of the Romans.”  It doesn’t just approach zero.  It is zero. 

However the New Testament was cobbled together, however much it appears to be about the Father, the Son, and The Holy Spirit, the single character ubiquitously present is Rome; The New Testament is premised on the existence of that civil-- imperial-- society, a world where some other omnipotent entity has inserted itself between humans and God.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (pp. 585-586). Kindle Edition. 

The word “rightly” appears rarely in the Bible except in Luke, who uses it ironically.  This is because Luke was a doctor and a Greek at a time when Greeks and doctors learned medicine from Plato, who wasn't actually a doctor but an ironist, or at least an esotericist.  The word is a pointer: it is Socrates's verbal crutch, he says it to know-it-alls when they think the answer they gave should be obvious. Of course you've been told that by the end of a dialogue Socrates has exposed the emptiness of the other person's knowledge, through the dialogue we perceive the interlocutor’s prejudices or appeals to authority.  But what you don't get from the secondary sources is what the interlocutor perceived: that Socrates is retarded.  The interlocutor doesn't stumble out of the supermarket with half a melon and his worldview shaken by the koans of Socrates, he strolls out of there more certain of his knowledge, more confident, more arrogant, because what he perceived from the dialogue is that Socrates is a dunce, all he does is ask questions with obvious answers that apparently never occurred to him, and then says “huh, you have judged rightly.”

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (pp. 598-599). Kindle Edition. 

[Following the Biblical parable of the sower]

The seed is the parable, but the sower is not God.  The sower is you.  The sower doesn't have the luxury of only planting in fertile soil; his obligation is to work the soil over and over, season after season, to make it become fertile so that the seed will eventually grow, so that what is produced from nature after much effort is finally stronger than nature itself.  But that sounds like hard work, no thanks, God can do the sowing and I’ll take my information in passively like the fertile ground I think I am.  “My mind’s a sponge.”  So you can throw it out the moment it gets seeded.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (p. 618). Kindle Edition. 

If you're wondering why your stellar post-secondary sources education has failed to result in commensurate power, it's because you're asking the question backwards.  You have no power, therefore you assume you are educated.  “I know how the world really works.”  Let me guess: incompetently, frivolously, or exploitatively, and there are no other choices.  “I actually do like science.”  You like science videos, produced and shot like music videos, of the same duration and impact.  What's the result?  The Gospel of Information, the Gospel of Mark. Completely consistent with the psychology of you, the only characters in the Gospel Of Mark who know who Jesus is-- not believe, but know-- are demons.  They know exactly who he is, but they have no power.  Believe it. 

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (p. 620). Kindle Edition. 

“Love doesn't exist, it's a trick of evolutionary biology to get us to mate.” Seriously?  You need to be tricked into mating?  “No, into staying, love improves the offspring's chances of survival.”  I love that your wife had to trick you into staying.  “No, stupid, love is the trick, your feeling of deep undying love is the biological trick to make you stay.”  I'm confused: I thought you said love doesn't exist.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (pp. 622-623). Kindle Edition. 

As a child you were offered the appearance of novelty as an escape from boredom, but quite quickly you discovered it is an excellent defense against dependency, against change.  “I’m kind of a news junkie, there’s so much happening right now it’s hard to keep up with it.”  Yet no one depends on you keeping up with it, they’d benefit much more if you didn’t.  Devotion to something with the appearance of importance, of velocity, of kinetic energy; that you don't really need, that you can always claim in an emergency doesn't “actually” define you. “This stuff doesn't really matter,” you say as you watch the xth hour or push the nth button, “but right now, I'm satisfied.”  Look around you to see who you’ve deprived.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (p. 796). Kindle Edition. 

“How did this become my fault?!”  Fault is a powerful word that is used to assert that what matters is the cause-- because of course it's very important to spend all the time learning about the cause because that's time not spent on what to do about it.  God, Oedipus, or DNA, now it's your responsibility, and even you can't look me in the eyes and say, “how did this become my responsibility?”

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (p. 798). Kindle Edition. 

“Open the lines of communication!” say the therapists, who should know better: the lines of communication are WIDE OPEN already. He let you see him addicted to porn, and you responded that while it hurt you you would remain nonjudgmental, to which his reply was to keep doing it.  I got the message instantaneously, and it wasn’t even addressed to me, how’s that for spooky.  Or did you think he'd communicate by talking, because that's how you think unconscious fantasies and conscious anxieties are communicated, through nominative/present active/accusative?  “Use your words, honey.” What the hell did you just call me?  Well, you want this to be true, because you're better at talking than he is, you have the upper hand, and the result will be his acting out can be taken by both of you as you're right, he's inappropriate: you win, he should feel ashamed.  Nothing will change.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (pp. 799-800). Kindle Edition. 

Imposing no judgments is impossible, so by refraining from imposing personal judgments, you end up imposing society's judgments, which is why everyone is told not to impose their personal judgments.  “I think it's bad”, becomes “it is inappropriate.”  It all seems so progressive,  simply use a value-free judgment that only circumscribes… appropriateness.  It allows for total freedom of behavior and thought, except in certain contexts where people have to get along.  So you can do whatever you want in your personal life, but here at work-- that behavior is inappropriate.

Teach, Edward. Sadly, Porn (pp. 803-804). Kindle Edition.