Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: - III - The Fear of Thinking
The Dialectics of Liberation: Anarchism, Existentialism, and Decentralism.
Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: - III - The Fear of Thinking
"I think, therefore I'm abnormal" - charlie777pt
1 - Introduction
Once again I will interrupt the line of reasoning planned for this part of the series on existentialism because it reminded me of some personal ideas that came to me during my intensive readings by the authors around this philosophy, about the unconditional liberation of each individual.
This is a pertinent subject matter, because nowadays people are much more afraid to think and act, living in permanent stress and anxiety that are an obstacle to empathy and sympathy in relation to others - today people are "talking" to each other, intermediated by devices, like using the phone to escape the feeling of a true face-to-face encounter.
We are invisible objects to ourselves, avoiding all the mirrors that can reflect our Self.
"There must be better in me than I" - Fernando Pessoa in Poetry of Álvaro Campos
One of the main fears today, is the agonizing escape from our own dark side, using all kind of screen, food, and substances abuse to maintain a permanent curtain about the real stream of our thoughts, and people are scared of facing the mirror of their own Selves.
In my post-adolescence, I dived in the sea of existentialism, made me adapt to breathe under the water in the strong river current of my thoughts and I lost the fear of drowning in the ambivalence of my ways of thinking and the societies' inherited invisible ghosts, that block our way to self-liberation.
This means that freedom starts when we lose our inner terror to search for our own way of thinking and the socially imposed straitjackets on our thoughts.
By reading the authours that played a major influence on Existentialism, and on me, I got to the conclusion that people fear free thinking like they are afraid of freedom, that I'm going to put on writing for the first time these old thoughts of many decades, because I feel it is still a great philosophical approach to re-think the way we were told how to think.
2 - The Fear of Thinking as Transgression
"Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad." - Georges Orwell
Civilization works as a tendency to reduce our conscience and ways of thinking, as well as our solidarity with our fellow human beings, by attacking social bonds and creating a wall of misconception about its dominant unconscious imprinted patterns in our way to think, act and experience, as a misfit of our selves and to the others.
"Societies are held together by a web of social bonds and it's solidarity that gives individuals a sense of being part of a collective and engaged in a project larger than the self.
The shattering of these bonds plunges individuals into deep psychological distress that leads ultimately to acts of self-annihilation" - Chris Hedges
Is Big Brother watching you, or is it inside your head imprisoning the spontaneity of the Self, with the instilled fears of it, to avoid feeling our inner being and find out what is real in the actual fake reality?
Our fear of thinking and knowing ourselves creates an existential vacuum as a mask, which does not allow us to feel others and ourselves, as a consequence.
"It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it." - Georges Orwell
Every time we dare to think out of the box of common beliefs and social norms, is like a sensation of the abyss, that can be felt like a crime, a sin, wrong-doing or an illegality, as a subconscious latent interdiction felt like a transgression in the same way of the incest in Freud's theory.
"You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself." - Georges Orwell
If a person dares to think, is breaking the fragility of his/her beliefs about reality, and feel aware of the conscious of yourself, you are risking to become an outcast, opening breaches in the Walls of Power and in the authorized ways of thinking because when you decide to ignore the wheels of machine, you start living in a danger zone, but in a twilight maximum self-security.
"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." - Georges Orwell
Free thinking, like free speech and free journalism, has become an interdiction, a territory where stalkers are eliminated, that as always been the cause for social stagnation and human evolution in the name of the social order of the dominant classes, in which we are living today. Phronemophobia is a concept built from the Greek phron (thinking) joined to phobia meaning the fear of thinking, while Mnemophobia is the irrational permanent scare of the traumatic memories or its loss, and Eleutherophobia is an extreme form of the fright of freedom.
We are all neurotic beings, with some traces of phobic behaviors, as a result of educational and social traumas ( and I mention these phobias as a kind of exaggeration of extremes to help us clarify the idea), so I'm going to nominate some of the almost invisible deep fears that limit our Existence, This situation deserves an attentive inner look, for the deconditioning our archetypical cultural inheritance and social imprinting of being a "normal" crippled human being.
The most recent history of thought has been to create epistemological rupture to break with the Fronofophobia imposed by the religious vision, that has dominated our Judeo-Christian western civilization since the Middle Ages, embedded in its present form of pattern imposed by the bourgeois society. To learn how to think is Taboo, is like starting a war against the of Totemism of social order, that will bring back social rejection, and our own ambivalence of thought will have effects on the reality's perceptions of the others (with anxiety) and modern society will shoot back with the denial projections of people towards us, possibly with hate to avoid the fear of truth brought by the "weirdo people" that have the courage to question themselves and reality.
"Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country" - Georges Orwell
Our fears of the world outside are just a reflection of our inner uncertainty, and we must not be afraid of it if we put human tolerance and empathy, as a way to enlarge the comprehension of ourselves and of the interrelationship with the Other(s).
Tolerance is about Love and Intolerance is War.
We can see the actual demented reality state, as the measure of our deep incomprehension and unawareness, and our capability to think, like a nauseating pain and panic of being drowned in a flood of anxiety.
As I already quoted in an old post of Steemit we must understand what is the meaning of being "normal".
"What we call "normal " is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience." Laing, Ronald D. in "The politics of experience and the bird-of-paradise"
Our deep suffering and anxiety is the incapacity to accept the ignorance of our deep selves, and that we still don't know how to think, in a drifting world where the truth is shut down.
Our civilization was build based in the interdiction to think, as a transgression that threatens the pillars of social stability and order.
If you decide to learn how to think, you are a social threat and a violation of morality, and the system reacts by punitive actions or it can change itself as an adjustment.
The best revolutionary way of life, has already been nominated by Socrates in the quote of "know thyself" that the "civilized man" avoids like a plague, because he has been taught how "not to think", "not to see", and "not to feel".
Fear is implemented on us, eliminating our critical reflection and is our primary defense to face reality, felt as a threat to our personal security and at the same time works as a barrier to view the world, to feel the others and understand ourselves.
Self-comprehension, that consequently creates a better understanding of the others, is the best self-healing of our spiritual life and to fix our existence, but it demands a lot of courage.
When I look at myself, I do not understand me" - Fernando Pessoa
Arts should push the boundaries of critical thinking, but today it is almost centered on money and financial speculation, just to feed capitalist eternal consumerism growth as a villain that we have to be aware of.
Art and communication have mostly strangled to prevent new ideas and generate dialog, as the real measure of the truth, but some avantgarde niches are trying to find ways to show the social disequilibrium of our cartoon's reality, as a possible cathartic liberator by the politics of the Self, and start revolutions that are the mothers of all evolution.
The dream of personal freedom against the state sovereignty, began with the free speech movement, started by the cypherpunks, is a great myth but a forbidden social utopia in our current society, that you can make realizable, if you want to start it inside of you.
"Prison of Being, is there no liberation from you?
"Prison of Thought, is there no liberation from you?" - Fernando Pessoa in Poetry of Álvaro Campos
The Dialectics of Liberation: Anarchism, Existentialism, and Decentralism.
Published Posts:
- Introduction to the Dialectics of Liberation: Anarchism, Existentialism and Decentralism
I - Anarchism
- What is Anarchism?
- The History of Anarchism
- Part 1 - Pre-Anarchy - Social Revolution
- Anarchy: Revolution Against The State
- Part 2 - Anarcho-Federalism
- Part 3 - Libertarian Anarchism
- Part 4 - Anarcho-Syndicalism
- Anarchy Today
- Index and Conclusions of part 1 - Anarchy
- Part 1 - Pre-Anarchy - Social Revolution
- Anarchy: Revolution Against The State
- Part 2 - Anarcho-Federalism
- Part 3 - Libertarian Anarchism
- Part 4 - Anarcho-Syndicalism
II - Existentialism
- What is Existentialism ?
- Part 1 - Unplugged Introduction to Existentialism
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: I - Early Pre-existentialism
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: II - Pre-Existentialists
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: III - Phenomenology - Brentano to Husserl
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: III - Phenomenology - Jaspers to Sheller
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: IV - Humanistic Existentialists - Buber, Arendt, and Tillich
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: V - Humanistic Existentialists - Rollo May
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: V - Humanistic Existentialists - Abraham Maslow
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: VI - Post -Structuralism - Jacques Lacan
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: VI - Post -Structuralism - Michel Foucault
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: VI - Post -Structuralism - Emmanuel Levinas
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: VI - Post -Structuralism - Jacques Derrida
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: VI - Post -Structuralism - Paul Ricouer
- Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: I - Existentialism Today
- Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: II - Fascism and Existentialism
- Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: III - The Fear of Tthinking - This post
Next posts on the Series:
II - Existentialism(Cont.)
- What is Existentialism ? (Cont.)
- Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: IV - The Meaning of Nonsense
- Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: V - The Players and the Times
- The "Existentialists"
- Part 1 - Gabriel Marcel - The Neo-Socratic
- Part 2 - Jean-Paul Sartre - The Man of The 20th Century
- Part 3 - Simone de Beauvoir - The Castor
- Part 4 - Albert Camus - The Absurdist
- Part 5 - Merleau-Ponty - The Humanist Existentialist
- Humanism and Existentialism
- Part 1 - The Fear of Freedom of Erich Fromm
- Existentialism and Anarchism
- The Future : Posthumanism, transhumanism and inhumanism
III - Decentralism
- What is Decentralism?
- The Philosophy of Decentralism
- Blockchain and Decentralization
- Anarchism, Existentialism, and Decentralism
IV - Dialectic for Self-Liberation
- The Dialectics of Liberation Congress
- Psychedelics, Libertarian and artistical movements
- The Zen Buddism of Alan Watts
- Psychoanalysis and Existentialism
- The Anti-psychiatry movement
- Anarchism, Existentialism, Decentralism and Self-Liberation
V - Conclusions and Epilogue
- Part 1 - Unplugged Introduction to Existentialism
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: I - Early Pre-existentialism
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: II - Pre-Existentialists
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: III - Phenomenology - Brentano to Husserl
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: III - Phenomenology - Jaspers to Sheller
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: IV - Humanistic Existentialists - Buber, Arendt, and Tillich
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: V - Humanistic Existentialists - Rollo May
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: V - Humanistic Existentialists - Abraham Maslow
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: VI - Post -Structuralism - Jacques Lacan
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: VI - Post -Structuralism - Michel Foucault
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: VI - Post -Structuralism - Emmanuel Levinas
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: VI - Post -Structuralism - Jacques Derrida
- Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: VI - Post -Structuralism - Paul Ricouer
- Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: I - Existentialism Today
- Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: II - Fascism and Existentialism
- Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: III - The Fear of Tthinking - This post
- Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: IV - The Meaning of Nonsense
- Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: V - The Players and the Times
- Part 1 - Gabriel Marcel - The Neo-Socratic
- Part 2 - Jean-Paul Sartre - The Man of The 20th Century
- Part 3 - Simone de Beauvoir - The Castor
- Part 4 - Albert Camus - The Absurdist
- Part 5 - Merleau-Ponty - The Humanist Existentialist
- Part 1 - The Fear of Freedom of Erich Fromm
References:
- charlie777pt on Steemit:
Social Reality: Index of the series about Social Reality: Power, Violence and change
Collectivism vs. Individualism
Index of Chapter 1 - Anarchism of this series Part 1 This Series:
Books:
Oizerman, Teodor.O Existencialismo e a Sociedade. Em: Oizerman, Teodor; Sève, Lucien; Gedoe, Andreas, Problemas Filosóficos.2a edição, Lisboa, Prelo, 1974.
Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Others
Levy, Bernard-Henry , O Século de Sartre,Quetzal Editores (2000)
Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity - Existentialism From Kierkegaard to Camus (1995)
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism, Insanity in the light of modern art, literature, and thought (revised edition)
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (2006)
Charles Eisenstein, Ascent of Humanity
Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre(1956)
Herbert Read, Existentialism, Marxism and Anarchism (1949 )
Martin Heidegger, Letter on "Humanism"(1947)
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1968)
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism And Human Emotions
Jean-Paul Sartre, O Existencialismo é um Humanismo
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense
Michel Foucault, Power Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977
Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom. New York: Henry Holt, (1941)
Erich Fromm, Man for Himself. 1986
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: an existentialist diary
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and The Invisible
Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation
Brigite Cardoso e Cunha, Psicanálise e estruturalismo (1979)
G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
Robert C. Solomon, Existentialism
Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Others
Levy, Bernard-Henry , O Século de Sartre,Quetzal Editores (2000)
Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity - Existentialism From Kierkegaard to Camus (1995)
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism, Insanity in the light of modern art, literature, and thought (revised edition)
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (2006)
Charles Eisenstein, Ascent of Humanity
Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre(1956)
Herbert Read, Existentialism, Marxism and Anarchism (1949 )
Martin Heidegger, Letter on "Humanism"(1947)
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1968)
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism And Human Emotions
Jean-Paul Sartre, O Existencialismo é um Humanismo
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense
Michel Foucault, Power Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977
Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom. New York: Henry Holt, (1941)
Erich Fromm, Man for Himself. 1986
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: an existentialist diary
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and The Invisible
Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation
Brigite Cardoso e Cunha, Psicanálise e estruturalismo (1979)
G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
Robert C. Solomon, Existentialism
You are right,now people communicate more with phones,always plagued by the thought of accidentally harm a close, people are thinking emotionally, constantly being told about some things, but like the people in the stories of Freud, they do not tend actually to address the issues about which they are talking, hiding, and breaking the most incredible way their original motives, they replace these urges with symbolic actions that have no meaning. Self-deception and substitution of expedient decisions and searches by nonsense is a norm for these people
Hi dear Sergey, thanks a lot for the great comment.
People are escaping human encounters with the digital meaningless for life.
Or we can get "Very High" to escape the reality garbage, instead of focusing on what is really important in life, because people think freedom is a big supermarket with all the brands, and being eaten by media screens that build the reality for them.
Norms are nonsense that gives people a feeling of false security, because they make sense of the beliefs of society, but not with them and living a false self-house.
Cheers
thank
Thanks for this one!
I can only highlight once again how important it is to dare to introspect.
The "work-life balance" scheme being cultivated these days by the majority of people is all tailored to the work. We don't relax to go inward but we relax to be fit again for work. We are all free to choose, so there is no judgement.
Personally, there was a time when I really needed to go inward without any schedules set. To me, there wouldn't have been a real introspection process otherwise. Go inward without any need to comply with a certain frame that would require me to follow others' will.
Personally, in the interval of several years I find myself confronted with "cornerstone choices". These choices had always been between choosing something I had been crazily working toward within the frame of 3D thinking or letting go of that due to my intuition bringing striking clarity as to the repercussion my 3D choice would have, leaving me there rather "planless".
The first great choicepoint I found myself at was 2015, when I was required to choose between my 3D career pathway I had been immensely working toward, or my family. During this period I had my first deeper spiritual awakening, and since this was so deep, within a few weeks I had so much clarity that I let go of that 3D pathway despite all the "hard work". I choose my family. The second big choicepoint was two weeks ago, when I finally needed to choose between my Twin Flame, a 3D relationship I had been immensely working toward achieving for 2 years, or again my family. Again I had intense clarity that made me let go of that Twin Flame relationship within weeks with all responsibility.
I say this because the 3D choice was always the one that would have been within the frame of dependent thinking, while even reinforcing very same. Choosing my family always left me with uncertainty as to what would come up instead, leaving me "planless", but it was this sudden planlessness that increased my independent thinking in the long run. Truth is, choosing against the 3D career and relationship was also a choice against dependent thought patterns. They might give some illusory safety, but that is all. Choosing the other pathway has been a choice for independent thinking and new, more healthy thought patterns. It can be scary to let go an entire thought-made plan, especially of such dimension as I had it, but at the same time slowely but surely an intense feeling of freedom emerges from within that the former plan had prevented from being unleashed. I don't regret my choices! ;)
Thanks for your great thinking ;)
One more time a great comment with inner deep feelings, calling the experiences impressed by the reading.
I 'm an extremist about independence, so I always did the right choices resulting in big confrontations with family and all kinds of authoritarianism I've faced in my life.
Truth is the construction of a building that we never finish or our earthly life.
Independent thinking can lead to a social crash, but the longer we exercise it, the more people respect us because, we and them, feel more the self-security about our beliefs for the path of life.
It's hard in the beginning but it pays a lot later.:)
The social negative feedback is stronger if we are young with a lot of energy, or when we are not yet self-assured of our actions or thoughts, want is very normal when we start the journey of self-knowledge.
We should never regret our choices, (there are no" ifs" in life) but never forget that we can change past negative decisions.
Like I always say, the Past is a consequence of the Future always judges the decisions we made before.:)
Thanks a lot and let's keep dialog and free debate as the mirror and food for our changes in Essence and Existence.
Constructive dialogue must be tempered with Love and the Imaginary. hehe
Antagonist dialogue without tolerance leads to war, hate, and sorrow.
Cheers my friend
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