John Merritt decides to reduce the stress in his life:
Later on, I decided that I really had to make some major changes when I got back to the US, and one of those was avoiding those whose life revolve around politics -- feral primate behavior, as Robert Anton Wilson once called it. Almost all of these are my approximately my age, and don't seem to have anything else to occupy their minds with. Me, I'm reading Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow -- and hope to read the other tree novels in the series -- and have just finished Jonathan Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein (more on that later). I've pretty much quit reading any blog that deals primarily with polyticks, and this has seemed to have helped my mental health considerably. Man may be a political animal -- as Aristotle once quipped -- but if the troop is headed for the cliff I see no reason to be equally stupid.
More interesting stuff at The Hamon's Patttern, including the dwarf planet named Eris.
1 comment:
The topic Merritt brings up here is a favorite trope among my friends: it's as if there's some default mode mechanism that gets us sucked into the domesticated primate game of politics - and it's almost ALWAYS a set-up for angst or frustration - so why do we do it? Because we're still on board the same ship. By ignoring it, it most decidedly does not go away...
The trick of exercising choice - what I've called "mental hygiene" - that Merritt talks about here seems to allow me much more of an openness to what RAW and Leary called the 5th circuit. And as I hope anyone reading this knows, once you've truly tapped this "circuit" you want to return as much as possible.
2nd circuit primate politics will always be there, but no need to martyr yourself to that Very Dark Carnival. I agree with Merritt here and wish I wrote as well as he does.
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