Thankful for my first full day in my new home in NYC. So far, having 2 friends as flatmates seems simply good. I seem to have purged some neuroses about how things Should Be In A Place & some Containment fragments that were causing introversion.
Itβs a furnished short term arrangement, and my bed is standing on its side so I have the square footage for floor sleeping, and kettlebell & asana practice.
Last night we bought a bunch of fruit from a local market & I ate a lot of it, so I worked off what might have been a sugar hangover with my daily kettlebell session.
Still had a light headache, which I think was caffeine withdrawal because I self-medicated with coffee for the move.
Cooked a 14 pound turkey we got as a gift from an activist in friend who gets too many gifts-in-kind for her to use or give away, and not enough actual help achieving her goals.
I cooked sliced "Korean sweet potatoesβ / βbatatasβ from the fruit market under the turkey. They look similar to the Japanese variety but tasted sweeter, custardey. Clearly best part of the meal. Similar to this preparation but without the "hanging":
A couple of friends came over with their toddler, and brought more food. I also made stuffing from a bag, and served homemade apple jack.
I also boiled some tejocotes we got from the market, in the hope that this would improve them over their mealy-sour-and-bitter raw state. The toddler liked them.
One flatmate made chai with whole spices and fresh ginger.
Tonight we watched the movie Ridicule, which is about the stage 4 simulacral nature of Versailles under Louis XVI (himself operating at stage 3) and a provincial engineer-aristocrat who just wanted to drain a literal swamp in his territory to save his peasants' lives.
Winning at court seems to be nothing but put-downs of other aristocrats in a contentless, zero-sum social game.
The stage 4 game is mind-destroying to the point where one major antagonist gets slapped down when he accidentally threatens the king to his face because he's so adapted to stage 4 games that he can't track the king's stage 3 interests.
Simulacra: benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-β¦
Ridicule clarified the narcissism strategy for me: expecting to be assigned a desired approval-role in a stage-3 game.
A narcissist can push this expectation into intersubjectivity by getting upset when their expectations are violated, making it everyone's path of least resistance to just let you occupy the role. Narcissistic supply = others playing along.
A Sun-King seems like an apex narcissist. Louis XVI gets enough narcissistic supply to "win" all social conflicts despite otherwise not being a very skillful player.
The major antagonist, a clergyman, shows off with a clever speech "proving" god's existence, but then offers to the king that he can "prove" the opposite just as easily.
Louis, while he comes across as not very smart in most scenes, immediately notices that this is a poisoned gift, nominally flattering the king by offering to put him above God.
The price for this gift is the replacement of the stage 3 simulacral norms that make the king uniquely special with stage 4 norms by which he's just another cult leader. Louis correctly identifies "blasphemy" as a mortal threat and reciprocates.
Stage 3 simulacra will usually shoot the messenger because all messages from outside the stage 3 ideology look like either competing loyalties or bids to proceed to stage 4 nihilism.
Stage 3 interprets Stage 1's verbal rigidity as a revealed competing loyalty, and Stage 2's lies as a concealed competing loyalty.
There's another narcissistic aristocrat in Ridiculed who doesn't have enough narcissistic supply to achieve his ambitions. His face is frozen into an anxious mask, his attempts at friendliness are obviously insincere and desperate, and from the first sight of him he looks doomed.
It's very clear to me now why the French Revolution initially tried to get rid of the aristocrats but give the king a golden parachute of constitutional monarchy, and also why it could have seemed plausible that literally all of these people needed to be killed.
French aristocratic "wit" is explicitly contrasted with English "humor". French wit is not very clever or funny, because it's stage 4, fully general irony, doesn't know about underlying reality. English humor is always about something real, has content, expresses it cleverly.
The Heaven's Gate cult website is a wonderfully articulate account of a stage 3 simulacral mindset: heavensgate.com
"Truth" means receiving commands from the good authorities, "Falsehood" and "Evil" mean receiving commands from competing authorities.
"Truth" means receiving commands from the good authorities, "Falsehood" and "Evil" mean receiving commands from competing authorities.
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