Only the good die young.

The strange chemistry between attention-seeking behavior and jealousy

As with everything we feel strongly enough to write, this is partly a response and partly a personal seeking. When children or adults are accused of "wanting attention", the accusation carries with it the weight of shame, as if some sort of guilt were laid bare. It might be interesting to ask ourselves if this shame stems from what we are forced to acknowledge by such accusations--namely, our need for reaffirmation, for communion, for warmth-- or more from that feeling of being caught stealing. The former shows when the child or adult withdraws, often into some pretentious, affectatious stoicism, while the latter is revealed by the blush that creeps across the face of one's lover when caught desiring another person besides their partner.

For the sake of discussion, the latter might prove more interesting, as the caught lover feels shame at being discovered in a secret. I'll set the stage and give these abstractions names for a moment. During dinner at a restaurant with his girlfriend, Horace feels slightly annoyed by the handsome man sitting alone at the table next to them, reading. His girlfriend, Heather, listens to Horace with a smile as he expounds upon the weather and the whethers. When he notices Heather gazing at the man nearby, Horace feels his temperature rise. He rolls his eyes. Heather blushes and tries to begin an animated conversation about the failure of Esperanzo to go mainstream. But Horace is on the defensive now. He has admitted to himself that Heather desires other men. The fact that Horace also desires other women at times seems irrelevant. After all, he is the man, and men are supposed to desire other women, according to Maxim and the Bible. For Horace, opening his mind to the possibility that Heather's love and faithfulness to him pose a continual ethical struggle in her life is devastating. Rather than embrace her for their common plight, their shared journey, he repels her for being as mired by the tensions in modern human life as himself.

Let's leave Heather and Horace at their miserable little archetype for now, as it is clear that Horace's jealousy sets up a high wall against mutual sympathy and understanding. Could Horace's need for reaffirming attention at this point-- a need which, if unacknowledged, flowers into jealousy-- teach him anything? Can our moments of jealousy or attention-deficit inform us about our own needs in a constructive way? I think the answer to this depends on one's desire to actually learn from the experience of a particular emotion. Emotions are tricky in that they often convince us of a certain position without even bothering to set up an argument. To properly engage an emotion like jealousy, one must admit it as more than a fleeting symptom of a particular situation and then begin the ardorous task of examining it from the perspective of an insight that is as common as it is potentially informative.

Perhaps jealousy is not a facet of emotional insecurity or instability as much as it is an indication-- a bubbling to the surface, if you will-- of the continuing conflict between a sort of purist moralism and the reality of the human condition. Thomas Moore describes jealousy as "an archetypal tension-- a collision of two valid needs"-- the need for the security of the hearth and like-minded community versus the need for the kind of freedom which allows us to grow as individuals, to explore the uncharted territories of unattachment. For the introspective person, an ackowledgement of these tensions is natural and essential. Why gregarious people have a more difficult time with such acknowledgement is a question I leave open for discussion at another time. In order to be rid of the humiliation wrought in jealousy and attention-seeking, we must let jealousy have its way with us first. Rather than dismiss it as pure emotion and then claim that it has nothing to teach us, we should pick it up as a challenge to our self-conceptions, our ideals, and especially the comfort of our old familiar truths.

In this sense, one of the most useless ways to approach jealousy is with self-absorption, as reducing it to a personal problem disregards its complexity. Perhaps one of the most typical reactions to feeling jealousy is to convince one's self of the wrong done to you by another. By playing the role of an innocent victim, we frame this issue as one of wrong/right, thereby ignoring the relational aspect of this feeling, as well as our own role in the relationship. Moore describes it as follows:

"By playing the role of innocent, the young man didn't have to enter the complicated world of relationship. He could hide his own loose ways and blame his girlfriend for hers. [Remember Horace and Heather?] If he were to approach her as a complicated adult, he would have to face possible rejection from her, for her own reasons, or have had to deal with the complexity of her nature. Instead, he could retreat into the place of the child where, in an odd paradox, his protection is secured by his being hurt. The young man's feelings of rage show how split off he is from the power of his knowledge. Blinded by a cloud of innocence, he seems not to know his friend or himself or the complexity of relationships in general. He pleads for simple attention and care. When he doesn't get these things, he feels controlled and toyed with....The paranoid element in his jealousy both keeps the possibility of deeper knowledge within reach but also dissociates itself from will and intentionality."

Blame and self-victimization are extraordinarily popular ways of providing ourselves with a defensive substitute for an honest examination of our lives. Instead of asking the hard questions, we defer to the drama of hurling insults, often losing track of the very issue that proved so painful or divisive in the first place. Such behavior is a way to avoid consciousness of error. Rather than play avoidance games, we should engage in a little bit of soothing hermeneutics, and seek the poetic in our contigencies as opposed to the disaster and the melodrama. Jealousy is best apprehended as a baptism into fire, a personal encounter with the mythological Mars, or as the continuing tension between Hera and Zeus. If erotic creativity makes the world, then jealousy serves as a means of preserving the hearth and the drives which inspire creation in the first place.

Hera's famous jealousy, in such a case, nestled well with Zeus' philandering. The problem is not so much jealousy anymore, as it is the fluid role-playing which characterizes modernity. Instead of feeling our jealousy as a knife between what we want to possess and our ability to possess it, we should feel it as a bond, a mutual vulnerability that, if carefully examined, might even produce something as beautiful and subtle as understanding. For those of us who resent the idea of being possessed, this kind of reflection might disarm our defenses, thus forcing us to face our dark angels with our white ones. After all, harmony is a constantly-shifting balance when the externals are in constant flux. It is not static. It is not dull. It is the melted gold of a sunset, the moment before day turns to night, or good to bad.

Strange, a woman tries to save what a man will try to drown...

Ayn Rand on foreign policy

In The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand states the following:

"Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the nonexistent "rights" of gang rulers. It is not a free nation's duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses.

This right, however, is conditional. Just as the suppression of crimes does not give a policeman the right to engage in criminal activities, so the invasion and destruction of a dictatorship does not give the invader the right to establish another variant of a slave society in the conquered country.

A slave country has no national rights, but the individual rights of its citizens remain valid, even if unrecognized, and the conqueror has no right to violate them. Therefore, the invasion of an enslaved country is morally justified only when and if the conquerors establish a free social system, that is, a system based on the recognition of individual rights."

As a friend pointed out to me, her premise is collectivist: namely, that nations have collective minds and the citizens share an identical collective self-interest. "National interests" are state interests, not individual interests. Nations certainly don't have "rights." Poor Rand couldn't get beyond her own reactionary disgust of communism to make a principled application of objectivist theory to foreign policy. I do my best to guard against my own anti-communist reactionary tendencies for fear of making mistakes similar to those of Rand.

A thought upon watching a young couple begin their own cold war in the frozen foods section

He looked at the cover of her book before rising to the occasion of her glare. True to the moment-- and to his enduring empiricism-- his expression propped up by the circumspect, his eyebrows shoved her between parentheses.

The songs running through my head this week...

"My oh my" David Gray
"Damaged goods" Gang of Four
"Ever fallen in love" The Buzzcocks
"Nothing man" Bruce Springsteen
"Jesse's girl" Rick Springfield
"Belladonna" Stevie Nicks
"Watch me fall" Uncle Tupelo
"Hard-core troubadour" Steve Earle
"Alice" Tom Waits