Victims come in two forms: real and fake. The actual victims of abuse, public humiliation, assault and marginalisation are easy to spot with a particular look and manner, and responses which are not conducive to self care. Fake victims, and Western culture is full of them, are easy to spot with their hyper vigilance directed at potential sources of umbrage, and their focus on ‘feeling ok’, and obsession with self-care.
Victims are focussed on… not much… as the level of trauma they’ve experienced is directly related to how detached they are from reality and their own feelings and thoughts or, horribly, possessed by their experiences. Fakes obsess with ensuring everyone around them complies with their mode of comfort, ensuring any difference in others is exterminated.
Waaaaaaaay back in the 90s, I began to notice a direct correlation between personality disorders and selfishness. I then began to cast my mind about for sources of such. In the 00s, the Japanese culture gave me continuous visceral experiences of how a non-selfish society functions. Their culture and ours are starkly different. I then began to formulate hypotheses and research them.
Believing oneself to be ‘chosen’ is exactly the type of selfishness that socially disconnected people can invest in, regaining self-worth and a spiritual purpose. Capitalism simultaneously cajoles and bullies us into manifesting our ‘true individuality’, creating an eternal supply of items to manifest our identities. Newsertainment provides the Eternal War filled with screaming death, keeping our minds in shock and manner in avoidance.
So that is the structure of Western culture and how its people contextualise their place in society.
With this steep skew toward self-aggrandisement, it is no surprise that enlarging upon that which makes us feel comfortable is the basis for our motivations, unhinging our perceptions of reality.
Transactional Analysis with Eric Berne identified a collection of games people play, and which provide payoffs in one way or another. What I’ve noticed with Australian culture is that total incompetence is the name of the game.
The payoff: it makes life easy.
Here’s how to play: Oh I’m too tired and this and that has happened and I need more coffee; Men are powerful and arrogant and I’m never gonna let them get the better of me; Colonisers committed genocide so everyone who is remotely similar to them is the enemy and must be destroyed; I was offended by some arseholes years ago so don’t question me.
It’s called being a victim. Being a victim means never taking responsibility for how you treat others because your pain is and always will be so much worse than others. All it costs is your soul because this path leads you into a particular self-delusion where your own mind creates the things you most fear: you end up a shell of skin and defences.
Rejecting the courage to allow others to have their own lives, you forgo the ability to interact socially. Homo sapiens is a social species.
And worst of all, the comfort you seek shall always elude you as it is your mind which provokes your feelings and, disconnected from reality, cannot be addressed.
This is the Comfort Game, a game played by both men and women, and one which defines Australian culture.
Total Incompetence
A D R A N 