power is the inside, which is an outside

Most of what I write at this blog revolves around power and the way humans exercise it over other humans. Often this amounts to describing and analyzing the way power uses narrative in the noosphere (in other words, apologetics and propaganda, the latter as a subcategory of the former though perhaps deserving of its own category) to make its job easier in the other spheres. Properly understood, power is always trying to fuck people in the ass. To understand power is to hate it. Or to love it while wallowing in awareness of your own hypocrisy. But the understanding comes first. Most people don't understand it at all, and love it, simply. 

The apologist, on the other hand, will focus on the apparent anger of power's critic, claiming that hate is the source and cause of the critic's anger. The hate the critic is assumed to have is irrational, like the hate you find in cartoon villains. You never learn (insert cartoon villain's name -- I'm going with Skeletor)'s motives. It hates because it hates. It's evil because that's what evil is. 

This is understandable. This is projection. Incomprehensible hate is a child's first encounter with its outside. The parent, who makes demands for apparently no reason at all. This is rejection, and it's every human's first experience of noosphere pain, which translates as felt-hate-for-no-reason. See also, the birth of the ego.

Here's a good way to learn about oneself. Watch an MMA fight. Analyze your rooting behavior. Notice how the moment you start rooting for the one, you necessarily black out the existence of the other as a consciousness. Us-them can only be that. Sport can only be that. You can toggle back and forth between me/us/insides like a commentator trying to remain neutral, but if you start seeing them both as me/us/inside at the same time, or without an inside/outside dynamic at all, you're not watching a sport. If you're going to vicariously enjoy attempted murder, your potential victim should not have a consciousness like your own. Your victim is the adult who rejected you for no apparent reason, who you then tried to hate before eventually turning the hate inward because, as Alice Miller pointed out, hating a helpless self is less terrible than hating the one you rely on for survival. Not only that, the parent is the person who was you. We all start off as world before we're pushed outside of it. And what appears to us as an inside is actually the parent's outside. 

When inside-outside structures collide, power wins, which is also to say its inside wins, though its inside was, again, born of someone else's outside. Gaijins, for example, have an inside-outside structure too, but it's framed and delimited by the nihonjin's inside. An American hetero raised-Catholic raised-Yankee fan white dude in Japan is a gaijin, and if he hasn't noticed, he hasn't been here very long, or is an apologist. And no, for fucksake, his plight should not be of great concern to radicals. The analysis is mostly the same though. 

The apologist wants power. The apologist chases insideness. Insideness is a fantasy. Your parents never had it either. OK, well, they had it and they didn't. They have what you have -- a constantly evolving mishmash born of someone else's outside that imagines itself to be much more, i.e., an inside.

Back to the point I had in mind when I started, before the tangent and the next one and so on, the gap between descriptive and normative disappears when you describe an event in everyday language because everyday language mixes the two without noticing. If I say "Obama murders children in the 'stans, at weddings, funerals, as a matter of course," I'm using a perfectly descriptive tone. Murder is the word you use when a human kills another human intentionally. And maybe I have no problem with murdering children for no reason. Maybe I don't. You don't know. But even the most perfectly descriptive statement will be taken as proceeding from hate. The apologist sees the descriptive as normative, as judgment. Rightly so. Murder is a judgmental word, because we all see it as an inside being killed, which is necessarily bad, because it's the very definition of bad, that without which bad does not exist. So, yes, murder IS bad, but if you describe it accurately, you're judging. The debate over whether Obama is a murderer or not, and whether American soldiers are "troops" or "terrorists" is not an argument about facts, it's an argument about us and them, inside and outside. To say Obama is a murderer is to say that "we" are "murderers" and that "they" are just like us.

If I say nihonjin is a racist term, I'm being perfectly decriptive as well. It's a term that refers to an imagined genetic basis for an imagined Japanese race. Racism means believing that races exist. What the apologist hears is "Japanese people are racist, which is bad, which is them (not us), so fuck you, and here are the prescribed anti-them pejoratives I learned from other apologists, which have proven somewhat effective in shutting critics up." But maybe I love racism. They don't know. I'm just describing. Or, in this case, more accurately, maybe I think all humans cause harm to other humans to various extents, nihonjins not particularly so. Yes, most people raised in Japan are racist, but this is true everywhere that calls itself modern. Nihonjinism just fuses racism extremely effectively with its other tribalisms and keeps it close to the surface. Unlike early 21st century Americanism, which condemns racist speech while condemning invented races to prison. Nihonjinism is not unique tribalist dickheadishness, but it is that.