Crime and Punishment
Puppies are cute and everything. That puppy smell makes up for a lot of things, but they also chew up so much stuff. My alcoholic brother has introduced me to two of them. Not both at once.
Buddy, was the first dog. He’s a kind of border collie mix. A big dog, about sixty pounds, who wasn’t so big when he came to us. My downstairs neighbor has a couple of adult female dogs. I have video of when he was smaller than them. Now that he towers over them, he has these long legs, he doesn’t get into stuff so much anymore.
He’s been replaced by Woody. Woody is about six or seven months old. He’s some kind of shepherd mix. He’s got raccoon like rings around his eyes that automatically ask for forgiveness. Believe me, that’s a good thing, for him.
Both of them are terrible if they get out here in town. They have shock collars because of it. I take Buddy out for walks in the country, where it is just me and him. When there are no distractions, he comes easily to me. I do have to take a lead with me. I put it on him just before we get back to the truck.
It’s not like that when he gets out in town, though. One day I chased him all about for what might have been about two hours. My brother was drunk and he opened the front door in the way he does when he is.
He thought he was being fast about it. Seconds go by. The dog got out. This was before the collars.
He did it again a couple of days ago. I came home from the gym to discover that Woody had jumped the fence. I saw what I at first thought was my downstairs neighbor holding him by the collar. After a second, I realized it was a random woman walking down the street. I zipped into my parking space and hopped out of the truck, leaving my gym bag and everything behind. I needed to unburden her from Woody.
Turns out she was kind of cool. Not only was she actually beautiful, once I had a look at her, but she liked cats. I like cats too. I always think it’s cool when I meet somebody else who likes cats.
Well, my brother is kind of a womanizer. Meaning that he looks upon women as objects. When he saw that she was beautiful, he had to open the door and try to interject himself into our conversation. That meant he was standing there blurbbling with the door wide open.
He was completely distracted by her beauty. Buddy got out. Only this time he could grab the remote. He doesn’t have any problem pushing the shock button.
At first, I thought Buddy came back on his own. I thought my work with him might have paid off. I give him all kinds of treats. This last time I had used the absence of them after an episode to hopefully teach him something. I made it last, but I didn’t drag it out.
It wasn’t until after the spell was broken and I said a quick hello and goodbye to Katie, who it turns out lives around the corner, that I found out that my brother was shocking him the whole time. He made a small loop around the front of the house and dashed back in.
You can tell there is more to this story than what is going on with the dogs. The dogs just make a great introduction because I have had to be in charge of them. So does my alcoholic brother, but for a different reason. He bears in a slightly different way toward the subject I want to talk about. I want to know how much reward matters. This punishment thing, do I have to admit it is necessary?
What does punishment teach? Oscar Wilde said that the only way to beat temptation was to give into it, or something like that. Punishment seems like it can only ever enter you into a relationship with life that is like that. You know, where you are supposed to deal with temptation by using self-control.
This thing can take up an extraordinary part of your psychic space, but you are just supposed to ignore it. It can beat at your temples like a migraine, but you are supposed to understand that lack is just fine. I think alcohol is just an easy replacement for structure. The structure I mean is the one that loving parents give to their kids.
My mom used to take naps all day. She would set us loose upon the world. We might come back in a cop car for all she knew. We did once. Mostly, we went out into some field. We established the importance of including nature when you are trying to deal with neglect. You can use nature to fill the space that neglect has created in you. It can make you whole.
If it doesn’t, though, you might find yourself trying to fill that void with something like alcohol. Alcohol does about as good a job as punishment, but it also does something to your ability to remember it’s not working. You aren’t pushed away by its inability to actually speak to the lack. Instead, you are continually enthralled by the promise it always has at the beginning, before you cycle into the forgetfulness.
So, it does about the same thing as when you grab hold of the world and make it do what you want. It is about as effective as punishment because punishment can only ever bring you back to square one. It doesn’t contain any teaching beyond telling you when to stop. You need more than that to tell you what to pursue, who to become.
You have to develop the ability to think strategically. That becomes much more complex, the more that you begin to think of others as also being whole human beings. The more life doesn’t allow you to take shortcuts, like how misogyny is really just how men use a shortcut to not have to think about women as whole human beings who deserve the respect of giving them standing in arguments, the more you get stuck, or don’t get stuck, at that place.
A person could see the swath of harm their way of dealing with the world was creating, if only they could be bothered to see others that way. You include that forgetfulness, and you wonder how anybody ever gets out? Alcoholism becomes this huge well of gravity that sucks away all of the caring that other people have for the alcoholic.
It eventually leaves the alcoholic all alone out by the dumpster. But don’t worry, their behavior has taught everybody they can teach to become just like them. To use shortcuts in the same manner. To grip life like they had paws rather than hands.
Alcoholism isn’t very precise. Most people get pretty busy when they are trying to recover. It takes work to become precise. But, then, work can be work. It has to come with some sort of idea communicated to you about where you are going for it not to simply appear as only work.
The mind bent on forgetfulness, addicted to that also, will have a harder time understanding that, even if it is being communicated. My brother hasn’t read a book in years. He’s all but given up on his nature including hobbies. Three out of four times when the dogs have gotten out, I have eventually found out that he wasn’t looking for them at all, but, instead, had met some attractive neighbor and started chatting her up. While I was looking, he was chatting. It was too easy for him to forget what he was supposed to be doing.
In fact, it isn’t possible for him to meet a new woman without, later, evaluating her out loud as to the level of her attractiveness. I think the comment is shooting out of the same place that is always thinking about taking the next drink. The one that can’t help but go to the stash in the morning. The one that is pressed right up against temptation and only knows one way to make it go away.
You can’t build the alternative to that with punishment, nor can you with toughness. You can’t just expect to overcome neglect by letting time pass and doing nothing to replace the good influence that love might have given you, so that you had a self-reinforcing consciousness that believed in itself in a healthy way that didn’t involve objectifying others.
That consciousness could see itself as one among the whole of society. It could achieve a level of intimacy with life, therefore, being able to fulfill desire without binding others. Not having to constantly punish everything, nor be punished itself. Leaving punishment to the one offs. Using your ability to think strategically to see the shape, not punishment because punishment can only ever see more punishment. That really distorts the shape.
Accepting the correction and going on without making a huge point of it because it isn’t all about you, Not having to do this over and over again. Putting punishment into the context where it belongs.
Addendum of 12/17/23:
I’ve been thinking more about this. I don’t want to confuse punishment with failed experiment. We shouldn’t look upon the chances we take in life, the one’s that are basically experiments, that way.
If our experiments teach us something, we should adopt it. But we shouldn’t cleave to the idea that we have to keep running the experiment. Because the lessons are going to have to do with some form of efficiency, or they aren’t really lessons that pertain. They might be just entertaining you rather than prompting you to change.
If you thought more like a businessman, you would see that. Meaning that you expose yourself to those sort of evaluators. Running the experiment over and over again can also be very expensive. That cost alone could add up.
We aren’t just talking about alcoholism when we think about this. With alcoholism there is a commensurate mental fog that wants easy answers. It thinks it is being creative when it is really being destructive. We could be talking about other things in life that we didn’t realize we could apply some lesson to and therefore achieve some new level of efficiency.
It might even have to do with how we think. It could be a change as vast as allowing ourselves to categorize groups in a manner for the first time that causes us to question some of our old stereotypes. There is a way we can do that wherein which our capacity to judge is somehow more satisfied than it might otherwise be, and we can see a bigger world than the one we used to see when it was just us.
When we see others as others, there is this big change that allows us to see change through empathy. It’s enough so that we don’t, usually, need to feel actual pain to hold back. All we have to do is imagine what effect our actions might have upon another. We achieve the capacity to ask what that would be like to go through ourselves, and whether we care enough that someone else is going through it that our point of view is changed because of it.
My big knock on the crippled childhood thing is that it doesn’t produce people who can see other people that way. While a loving environment that is always providing the right sort of verbal lessons along with the lessons gained from failed experiments tends to produce a whole person who realizes there are others and has no predisposition to see them in any manner other than like itself, an environment of neglect forces the child to find what will provide for it, or it will have to win in competition with whatever others there are. It tends to produce people who only see other people as a means to get what they want. For them, everything is transactional.
Those of us who seem to overcome fall to a different obstacle. We usually become anxious. We doubt everything about ourselves, in the same way, by the way, that Adam and Eve hid from God because they were naked. We do that when we hide from our lessons.
That was the state they faced when the Spirit left them. That’s what it meant to die on that day. It meant to lose all of your life’s lessons. It meant to lose all wisdom. It meant to lose all efficiency.
In business, it is probably equal to losing all competitive advantage. That can just as easily come from making bad marketing decisions as deciding to ignore the beast that is marketing altogether.
You know, your business is more like a crap shoot. It’s not like the military. The military knows it’s going to win before it goes in. It knows that for reasons that it’s very hard to replace, with a fig leaf, at the very last moment. It’s a lot easier to hide.
For those who don’t overcome, metaphorically, it is like the one rat in the cage who has managed to get the scrap. Now, he needs to keep it. There is only sharing once my level of self-protection is met. Even then, it will come on my terms.
That is, of course, how we can stare at a homelessness crisis all day, every day, and do nothing. I don’t just mean the usual level that you get with the usual number of people whose condition means they are just going to give up. I mean people who have sort of displaced those people at the best begging locations because by nature they are more industrious.
People who are used to applying lessons and learning how to be more efficient at a thing are learning how to be more efficient at being homeless. I guess they learn how to add layers to what it means to be that way? Those layers likely insulate them from the reality of their failed experiments. They probably drink more? I wonder if they talk about the same things the other drunks do on the traffic islands all day? I wonder if that sort of life imposes a way of life that flattens everybody out, making them all, more or less, equal, you know, in, at least, a Vonnegut sort of way?
It reminds me of the conveyor belt at my job. The endlessness of it is so grinding. If we didn’t have each other to get through it, we would have to do it alone. It’s not as easy alone. Trust me. I’ve been there, too many times. It’s a transient worker’s sort of job. I just got an email from the company congratulating me on my four year anniversary.
I get to enjoy the shit sandwich of knowing it takes five years to attain a pension. I need to last at least that long, There is a chance I may have to build the reality of a whole new set of people around me at least one more time. There may be that much time left.
I’m going to turn sixty at the end of this month. I can’t get Social Security, not to my recommended level, until I’m 67. The work pension will probably only amount to a supplement, not something I should count on to get me through a month.
It won’t fill in for Social Security while I wait. Well, it might when I get closer? My savings needs to remain my savings. I do think I have learned a thing or two about the markets. I have to admit, though, that the most important single element that has helped my investing has been the elimination of transaction fees. It has given me the advantage of building positions a little at a time versus having to save up and buy a greater number of shares at once, so as to average the cost of the transaction fee over more rather than fewer shares. Now, I can pounce on low prices. I also get to learn that not everything that shines is gold. I could still stand to learn a few lessons about when to get in. Damn!
growsomeart 