mokhtar@ubc-vision.CDN (Farzin Mokhtarian) (06/13/84)
+-------------------------------------------+ | | | To be nobody but yourself in a world | | which is doing its best night and day | | to make you like everybody else | | means to fight the hardest battle | | any human being can fight and | | never stop fighting. | | | | E. E. Cummings | | | +-------------------------------------------+ In case you ever wondered why everyone seems to stick so religeously to their male/female roles, I think you can find the answer in this poem. What if "being socialized" reguires me not to be myself? It certainly is easier to be socialized sometimes than to keep `fighting' it, and never stopping. The "hardest battle" certainly doesn't sound easy, specially if it never stops. But easy is no fun, is it? That's why we are always searching for harder problems to solve. Why fight the "hardest battle"? To preserve the `self'. To survive mentally and spiritually. It's worth every second of it. Anti-social? No. I am just being myself. Farzin Mokhtarian
edhall@rand-unix.UUCP (06/18/84)
| To be nobody but yourself in a world | | which is doing its best night and day | | to make you like everybody else | | means to fight the hardest battle | | any human being can fight and | | never stop fighting. | | | | E. E. Cummings | [submitted by Farzin Mokhtarian] As much as I like e.e. cummings' poetry, and as fascinating as I find the New England Transcendentalist tradition of which he is a part, I find myself in disagreement with this quotation, as I find it proposes both an obsession with self and an attitude of individual-vs-society. A lot of the alienation, loneliness, and unhappiness that many people experience in our culture comes from our cultural obsession with our selves. We deny the deep emotional need for knowing where we fit in, and instead approach life in terms of what we can obtain to enhance our self-image. Peer pressure, fads, and such all work in terms of our inflamed desire for enhancing our self-concept, and *not*, as is commonly asserted, because of any desire for conformity. Conformity is merely the statistical result of a collection of self-obsessed individuals. I think this trend became starkly apparant in the `me decade' of the 1970's, though I think that it has continued into the 1980's almost unabated. The result of the denial of our innately social natures (where we have made connections between people a matter of self-willed ``relationships'' rather than social manifestations of our inter- dependence) often shows as feelings of purposelessness or alienation. The fabric of society seems thin and increasingly hostile. All sorts of ill-fitting attempts are made to establish a feeling of connection, though achieving true intimacy seems more and more difficult on an individual-to-individual basis, while striving for the feeling of belonging to a group is frustrated by the sense that the group itself is isolated and powerless. It's easy to attack the idea of roles when the evils of current roles have been so well illuminated. But the need isn't to abolish roles, it is to reshape them. Roles are not incompatible with freedom; at least they don't need to be. The anxiety and lack of trust produced by social anarchy are as limiting as any role. But a role of any kind is a prison when coupled with our cultural tendency towards self- obsession, as it becomes a standard of self-measure. I believe that is is such a concern with self-image, and not social role, that forms the prison that e.e. cummings sought to escape. -Ed Hall decvax!randvax!edhall P.S. Obviously, this is all opinion and is brimming with generalizations. Sprinkling my words with caveats to that effect would have weakened them and made this long submission much longer--so no flames pointing out what I already know, please.
rlr@pyuxn.UUCP (Rich Rosen) (06/23/84)
> | To be nobody but yourself in a world | > | which is doing its best night and day | > | to make you like everybody else | > | means to fight the hardest battle | > | any human being can fight and | > | never stop fighting. | > | | > | e. e. cummings | > [submitted by Farzin Mokhtarian] > > As much as I like e.e. cummings' poetry, and as fascinating as I find the > New England Transcendentalist tradition of which he is a part, I find > myself in disagreement with this quotation, as I find it proposes both > an obsession with self and an attitude of individual-vs-society. I find it, on the contrary, to propose a concern for one's self and one's own needs as opposed to the "needs" that society has proscribed *for* you. A society is supposed to be a means to accommodate the needs of all the individuals in it, rather than having individuals exist to serve a society as some would have it. > A lot of the alienation, loneliness, and unhappiness that many people > experience in our culture comes from our cultural obsession with our > selves. We deny the deep emotional need for knowing where we fit in, > and instead approach life in terms of what we can obtain to enhance > our self-image. Peer pressure, fads, and such all work in terms of > our inflamed desire for enhancing our self-concept, and *not*, as is > commonly asserted, because of any desire for conformity. Conformity > is merely the statistical result of a collection of self-obsessed > individuals. The peer pressure and fads that you speak of are, in fact, the means by which the society enforces its "norms". Since it is known that people will succumb to such things, it provides a means to keep the society molded in the way that is desired by those who benefit from keeping it that way. > All sorts of ill-fitting attempts are made to establish a feeling of > connection, though achieving true intimacy seems more and more > difficult on an individual-to-individual basis, while striving > for the feeling of belonging to a group is frustrated by the sense > that the group itself is isolated and powerless. The notion that one NEEDS to belong to a group seems kind of opaque to me. When I hear that people are somehow obligated to groups that they had no choice in joining ("Support your family/nationality!"), I grimace. When people believe in such group identification to the exclusion of their personal lives (like terrorists who would give their lives for their nationalist cause), I grimace harder. (Harder?) > It's easy to attack the idea of roles when the evils of current roles > have been so well illuminated. But the need isn't to abolish roles, > it is to reshape them. Roles are not incompatible with freedom; > at least they don't need to be. The anxiety and lack of trust produced > by social anarchy are as limiting as any role. But a role of any kind > is a prison when coupled with our cultural tendency towards self- > obsession, as it becomes a standard of self-measure. I believe that > is is such a concern with self-image, and not social role, that forms > the prison that e.e. cummings sought to escape. On the contrary, the notion that my (or anybody's) life should be based on any externally proscribed role seems rather ridiculous. As you say, the need isn't to abolish roles, but rather to abolish the NEED to fit into them. What you call "social anarchy" I think of as a society that accommodates its individuals instead of vice versa. -- "Now, Benson, I'm going to have to turn you into a dog for a while." "Ohhhh, thank you, Master!!" Rich Rosen pyuxn!rlr
colonel@gloria.UUCP (George Sicherman) (06/25/84)
[the most who flame the more we net] Cummings's poetry got rather political and asthmatic as he aged. One can be LIKE everybody else and still be oneself, no? I don't agree about the Me Generation, though. From what I've seen of them they're rather friendly and outgoing. (A typical Laoist paradox, no doubt.) It was the preceding generations that were obsessed with their selves, trying to define their "identities", and alienating. Can anybody else confirm this? -- Col. G. L. Sicherman ...seismo!rochester!rocksanne!rocksvax!sunybcs!gloria!colonel
mokhtar@ubc-vision.CDN (Farzin Mokhtarian) (06/26/84)
------------------------ +---------------------------------------+ | To be nobody but yourself in a world | | which is doing its best night and day | | to make you like everybody else | | means to fight the hardest battle | | any human being can fight and | | never stop fighting. | | | | e.e. cummings | +---------------------------------------+ I think what e.e. cummings sought to escape was "being someone but himself". I don't see this poem as "self-obsessed" or "having an attitude of individual-vs-society". A role becomes a prison when it is incompatible with what the individual is. If the society/group of which that individual is a member can not tolerate free expression of the self (which is *not* equivalent to social anarchy), then the individual suffers. If one can only express him/her self through a role, something is lost because roles don't allow for great differences that exist between individuals. Perhaps the widespread feeling of "alienation, loneliness and unhappiness" that exist in our culture comes from the failure of roles to recognize individual differences between people. The fabric of society will become stronger, in my view, if those differences are recognized and tolerated. My anxiety and lack of trust would be produced if I suspected rejection when being myself. If I didn't have to worry about that, I would have no need to "fit in" anywhere. Freedom to express self without roles can be very responsible and is not equivalent to social anarchy. If there are any harms done by removing roles, I would very much like to know about them. Farzin Mokhtarian, UBC, Vancouver, BC