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March 3 | What To Do: Let's Stop Playing it Cool I KNOW that in writing this series, I'm contacting a lot of people who care. So I don't mean to get too preachy with those of you who are already willing to stick out your neck, and risk pissing off spouses, friends and bosses, to get a little movement going. I also try to put out useful arguments in the hope that they will get cloned or adopted and put to good use. And quite honestly I make these daily contributions partly out of social conscience, and partly so I don't go insane. My notebook has a lot of great ideas for what we can do: skills we can develop (I have a blog planned on learning flexibility; another on developing leadership skills; and another on communication skills); one on learning to take on one another's problems as our own, so we can get them solved; another on learning basic civics -- and teaching one another basic civics -- so that we know (to give one example) that the First Amendment covers things other than the right to have a pet. When I'm ready for a really good one, I'm going to get going on the ideas of Dr. Wilhelm Reich. Reich dedicated his medical practice, writing and study to understanding and healing the effects of suppressed orgasm in particular, and erotic feeling in general. He proved, to the extent that this can be done, that fascist methods of governing society are directly linked to shutting people down sexually. We need to draw a rather critical connection between "Abstinence Only Sex Education" widely taught in the United States, initiated under Ronald Reagan, lobbied into law in 1981 by the Heritage Foundation; and the tendency of the "free world" to become a little less free every hour or two. Reich, often said to be Freud's brightest student, wrote a book called The Function of the Orgasm. In it, he outlines in clear terms the ways in which politics is made ever more neurotic and reactionary as people lose the ability to touch one another, or to be touched, or to feel and share pleasure. I say lose, but in truth, I mean have taken from them, as faux moral dictate bashed into our consciousness and DNA. As we witnessed during the Clinton years, making sex into a huge dramatic morality play leads the way to something a lot darker. The connection is not merely coincidental. I would bet it all that Karl Rove cooked up that whole impeachment plot, which played into how ghastly so many people think that any form of sex is. One might think they are somehow outside the system, that these crazy politics don't affect them, and that they are free from all this. "They can make all the laws and rules they want, but I'm still going to do what I want." That is good as far as it goes (assuming you don't get caught doing whatever is now banned). When an atmosphere of fear and intolerance spreads widely through the media and the population, when nearly everybody is freaked out and worried, that tends to consume a lot of energy, and reduce the number of people who are willing to play with us. There is only so much fun one can have in the throes of moral crisis, and only so much fun the people around them can have. But that's now what I'm here to talk about today. Today I am here to complain about cool. By cool, I really mean playing it cool. I don't mean actually being cool-headed in the face of a crisis, or cool as in not being an asshole. I don't mean cool as in novel and interesting, like a really cool bug. I mean cool, as in acting like nothing is bothering you, whether it is nor not. And I don't mean you. I mean whoever you notice around you who is acting really cool about the world now, and what we need to do; and I do mean 'you' if that includes you, which I doubt. Cool is something we are taught by fashion and media. It's the attitude that nothing matters except how cool you are and to a lesser extent, how cool other people are. This creates the ebb and flow of fashion that keeps sales moving. It is a form of glamour, that is, an exterior gloss applied to the personality that covers up something (a lot) inside. A perfect idiot who knows nothing and cares even less can put on some cool and we can like him because he is...cool. You can be anything else you want, as long as you're cool. In psychological terms, I am speaking of an affect -- that is, an attitude taken on the surface. It has nothing to do with reality. Mood is something different; that is the inside. But sometimes affect can go so deep that it becomes a mood, a way of being, a psychological habit that tricks even oneself. Part of cool is not expressing one's feelings, particularly of love, sexual attraction or anger; never revealing a vulnerability; refusing to share a concern. Part of cool is not doing something because it's not cool. Cool is defined from generation to generation; it used to be that cool meant caring and being involved; now, as in many other times, cool means not caring, and not being involved, simply because it is not cool. It has many subtle forms. In our era, spirituality and religion are often involved, in the more educated people; they can become an excuse to act a certain way, like you know, we yoga people don't get worked up about injustice, we just work it all out on the inside. But you see, for what it's worth, I don't believe that line. There is a lot more to life than working it all out on the inside, and that, anyway, is something that very few people do alone, and in any event, it's a lot easier with help and encouragement. When life comes down to living, we're all in it together, and a big part of the cool problem is the illusion that everybody has it all taken care of on their own. We are all taught to be so cool, on our own little psychic islands, with each unique iPod doing its own unique shuffle. My old therapist Joe once quoted Paul McCartney to me, from the song "Hey Jude": It's only a fool who plays it cool Cool has two opposites that I can think of: caring, and passionate. That would be warm, and hot. Trust me, I totally realize these are just not cool. --- Wikipedia on Cool http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool Here is an introduction to Wilhelm Reich http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich The Heritage Foundation http://www.heritage.org/ | ||||||
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