Monday, December 17, 2007
White American personality disorder
This is great. And pretty dang close to the truth.
--ER
" ... whatever you do, don't make fun of their religious superstitions.
"Oddly enough, (white Americans) have associated a lot of their wretchedness with having sex.
"That seems to have happened when those Old World Middle Eastern mystics convinced them that their earliest ancestors committed an 'original sin' when they first tried to have sex, and, in doing that, damned all of their descendents to a perpetual condition of congenital incurable wretchedness. ...
"They believe that their congenital incurable conditions damns them to a life of endless toil and drudgery and that if they are not feverishly working at a backbreaking pace from daylight to dark they are committing some kind of blasphemy.
"To make sure that they must work nearly all the time, and to make sure they will have as little lesure time as possible, they developed an economic system that discourages them from sharing hardly anything they acquire with anyone else and that rewards them for hoarding wealth from one another, which forces them to compete with each other for everything, even for food.
"To compound all of their other problems, they developed a theory of private ownership of land, so that they can live in caregfully guarded seclusion, in the most wastefully large house they can finance, presumably so that, when they do have sex, no one will know about it. ...
"In short they are a severely socially flawed race of people who have entered the modern world with deeply imbedded, culturally instilled personality disorders that extend to some of the most basic things about being human, or even simply to being alive, and they have created both economic and social systems that are virtually guaranteed to result in nothing but perpetual misery.
"One thing that was almost calculated to drive (them) straight up the wall was to come to North America and encounter a nearly naked people who were entirely free of Old World Middle Eastern mysticism, who didn't feel bad about being human, or being alive, or about much of anything else, who had lots of leisure time because they shared with one another, and who had lots of sex and didn't feel bad about doing that, either, considering it merely a natural biological function."
-- from D.L. Birchfield, How Choctaws Invented Civilization and Why Choctaws Will Conquer the World (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007): 146-147.
--ER
" ... whatever you do, don't make fun of their religious superstitions.
"Oddly enough, (white Americans) have associated a lot of their wretchedness with having sex.
"That seems to have happened when those Old World Middle Eastern mystics convinced them that their earliest ancestors committed an 'original sin' when they first tried to have sex, and, in doing that, damned all of their descendents to a perpetual condition of congenital incurable wretchedness. ...
"They believe that their congenital incurable conditions damns them to a life of endless toil and drudgery and that if they are not feverishly working at a backbreaking pace from daylight to dark they are committing some kind of blasphemy.
"To make sure that they must work nearly all the time, and to make sure they will have as little lesure time as possible, they developed an economic system that discourages them from sharing hardly anything they acquire with anyone else and that rewards them for hoarding wealth from one another, which forces them to compete with each other for everything, even for food.
"To compound all of their other problems, they developed a theory of private ownership of land, so that they can live in caregfully guarded seclusion, in the most wastefully large house they can finance, presumably so that, when they do have sex, no one will know about it. ...
"In short they are a severely socially flawed race of people who have entered the modern world with deeply imbedded, culturally instilled personality disorders that extend to some of the most basic things about being human, or even simply to being alive, and they have created both economic and social systems that are virtually guaranteed to result in nothing but perpetual misery.
"One thing that was almost calculated to drive (them) straight up the wall was to come to North America and encounter a nearly naked people who were entirely free of Old World Middle Eastern mysticism, who didn't feel bad about being human, or being alive, or about much of anything else, who had lots of leisure time because they shared with one another, and who had lots of sex and didn't feel bad about doing that, either, considering it merely a natural biological function."
-- from D.L. Birchfield, How Choctaws Invented Civilization and Why Choctaws Will Conquer the World (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007): 146-147.
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Heck, I had a Choctaw work for me (make that with me, no, make that around me, no, make that telling me what to do) for over a dozen years. She was an uptight straight laced evangelical church memember, just like the white guys. Indian B.S. ain't no less B.S. just cause it comes from one of the first people here.
Drlobojo's comment aside - I like this. I also like the title of the piece you took it from.
There are hundreds and hundreds of different cultures around the world. Obviously, none of them embrace all of what it means to be human in and of themselves. Yet, we are faced with the uneasy prospect of having difference foisted upon us in our encounters with others, and having to decide if these others are human in all their difference or not.
I come down on the side that says (a) my won choices, and my own cultural environment is what makes me me, but that in no way invalidates others' lifeways, folkways, mores, etc.; (b) others simply represent other ways of being human, not deviations from what is normal.
There are hundreds and hundreds of different cultures around the world. Obviously, none of them embrace all of what it means to be human in and of themselves. Yet, we are faced with the uneasy prospect of having difference foisted upon us in our encounters with others, and having to decide if these others are human in all their difference or not.
I come down on the side that says (a) my won choices, and my own cultural environment is what makes me me, but that in no way invalidates others' lifeways, folkways, mores, etc.; (b) others simply represent other ways of being human, not deviations from what is normal.
But Drolojo, yer Choctaw was totally assimilated into white culture, and Birchfield is talking about undiluted, pre-encounter cultures (somewhat tongue in cheek.)
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