The art of compensation.
Today I’m writing about what I call the latent and the surface functions of interaction. This can also be referred to as the art of compensation. The reason it’s referred to as compensating is because we’re all insecure about things from our past experiences in life, so we live in denial of them. It’s the denial of pain that allows us to become consciously productive, or consciousness of what’s produced without seeing what’s driving it. We move this pain or feeling of powerlessness into the subconscious so we don’t have to deal with it. The fact is most people can’t deal with it or they’d kill themselves. Those who embrace it use it as a force to create art and music, but this allows the art and music to actually become the façade that conceals the interactions taking place around it. Just like religion has a sacred and a profane, the art and music becomes a sacred ritual that we revolve our lives around to compensate for the fact that in our lives outside of these activities we live painful lives where we feel powerless. This makes art and music the surface function and it’s driven by the latent function of the pain of everyday life. In everyday life however we act happy in our interactions with others even though we’re subconsciously insecure about our hidden pain and powerlessness in life. When away from people we use this pain to create outlets for it.
Another example is a girl I was talking to at school who said she wanted a child at twenty-one. The details of the debate that took place between her and I about why she should or shouldn’t want that at her age aren’t relevant. The reason is because the concepts in the debate were really a surface function. The latent function was the fact she could get me to argue with her. The latent function I would argue is the real function or purpose of why we do things. Surface functions are abstractions of ideas we use to cover the true functions driving our motives. Our entire lives are denial of the latent functions driving us in many cases. What I would say about this girl because I know her fairly well at this point is that she never had a close relationship with her father, who never taught her how to interact with men, and he never gave her guidelines about how to love or date a man. Without prior guidance she is left to figure it out on her own, and going to a Catholic all girls school before college didn’t help. Her true insecurity is that she desires a man in her life, but doesn’t understand what those who went to public schools would equate with certain cultural norms of what should be part of a relationship. What she has learned is that arguing for the sake of arguing without actually having a point to make allows men to pay attention to her, because men easily want to assert themselves when confronted. The reason there isn’t a point to make or logic that follows through in her arguments is because arguing is the point, because it gives her attention she doesn’t know how to get from the opposite sex otherwise.
When someone picks up an instrument because they want to get good at it, and they say it’s because playing makes them happy, it’s really their denial of the latent function driving them to play. Nobody performs an action in and of itself, but for the ability to get something else. Everything in life is overlapping, and in a constant stage of becoming, so anything done isn’t because it’s good in itself. The real reason for playing an instrument is to compensate for the fact we can’t communicate well, or aren’t popular places we’d like to be. Playing the instrument allows us to gain a skill we can use to make friends or become more popular. We want people to recognize us for something we can do well that they can’t, because the thing we were never able to do was be accepted for what we originally were upon confrontation. This causes a process that forces us to become something other than we already were. This process is happening through our entire lives, because we’re constantly living with the struggle of acceptance by others in each new phase we enter in life.
The reason there can’t be free will is because we can’t will something from nothing. We don’t create a will that desires freely to have an outcome. We have conscious desires, but the will driving them is subconscious. We have a will, but this will is forged by a world we’re thrown into that is already in motion and has a structure. Our only choice is to react to what already exists. What we choose is to embrace what is possible as a reaction to what we don’t see as possible. We compensate for what isn’t possible by living in denial of desiring it. What we desire that we can’t have is the pain powerlessness of life that causes us to run toward the productive thing that compensates for it. Nietzsche makes this point evident when speaking of the Jews living in slavery for so many years. They couldn’t have what their maters had, so they embraced a world and religion that revolved around righteousness by being without those things. Nobody is completely secure with themselves and it’s because of this everyone is compensating for all their past experiences of pain in an attempt to make up for them. All will is a reaction to prior experiences. The compilation of prior experiences in the subconscious cause us to act out options in our present based on whether they remind of something that felt good or bad.
If we trace back the phenomenology of desire we’d find that all present decisions came about because of people more than things. Things are just reflections of people from the past we use to represent them in our current lives. Things can be objects and/or activities we take part in. The reason we perform things in the present is to fuse the horizons of those we desire to accept us in the present with those we cared about in the past. To care can be in a positive or negative form. To love or hate someone are both forms of caring that drive us to action. The next reason we don’t have free will is because of our ability to care. We don’t have to the capability to stop caring about people, and for the same reason don’t have the ability to stop caring about things, which are reactions performed to gain acceptance by people, or get others to care who hadn’t prior in positive or negative manners. These actions of love and hate carry over into our current lives. When we perform an action in the present and say we’re doing so by our free will because this will feel good or be productive, it isn’t really by our free choosing, but because it compensates for all the people we used to care about in the past that aren’t in the present, in relation to those who are in the present. Actions aren’t actions in themselves for the sake of our willing them, but reactions shaped by experiences with people we cared about that reflect them in our present lives. An action ties experiences with person A from the past to Person B in the present. We are always holding person B in relation to person A without realizing it; because person A lives within us in the form of action and speech we perform by mimicking them. The actions look like things and actions, but they’re really all the people from our past inside us interacting with those in our present, which is constantly forging us into another person once again, because we’re always becoming new people through new people.
The ability to care about a thing like playing an instrument therefore isn’t to care about the instrument in and of itself, but because it reminds us subconsciously of someone we liked being around or admired, and compensates for those we can’t be like or accepted by. All interaction is our ability to do what we became good at to compensate for all our failures with others in life. If we embraced our failures we’d put our expectations in places that couldn’t be reached. That would cause us to feel insignificant in our own lives instead of living in denial about what we’re bad at in the eyes of others. The most we can do is realize what is driving good parts by seeing their opposites. If we can at least realize our pain we can admit why we’re doing the productive things we do consciously. The ability to trace back our motives in the subconscious can sometimes allow us the ability to forgive ourselves and change our current actions, but there will always be bitterness driving something we aren’t aware of.
Another example is a girl I was talking to at school who said she wanted a child at twenty-one. The details of the debate that took place between her and I about why she should or shouldn’t want that at her age aren’t relevant. The reason is because the concepts in the debate were really a surface function. The latent function was the fact she could get me to argue with her. The latent function I would argue is the real function or purpose of why we do things. Surface functions are abstractions of ideas we use to cover the true functions driving our motives. Our entire lives are denial of the latent functions driving us in many cases. What I would say about this girl because I know her fairly well at this point is that she never had a close relationship with her father, who never taught her how to interact with men, and he never gave her guidelines about how to love or date a man. Without prior guidance she is left to figure it out on her own, and going to a Catholic all girls school before college didn’t help. Her true insecurity is that she desires a man in her life, but doesn’t understand what those who went to public schools would equate with certain cultural norms of what should be part of a relationship. What she has learned is that arguing for the sake of arguing without actually having a point to make allows men to pay attention to her, because men easily want to assert themselves when confronted. The reason there isn’t a point to make or logic that follows through in her arguments is because arguing is the point, because it gives her attention she doesn’t know how to get from the opposite sex otherwise.
When someone picks up an instrument because they want to get good at it, and they say it’s because playing makes them happy, it’s really their denial of the latent function driving them to play. Nobody performs an action in and of itself, but for the ability to get something else. Everything in life is overlapping, and in a constant stage of becoming, so anything done isn’t because it’s good in itself. The real reason for playing an instrument is to compensate for the fact we can’t communicate well, or aren’t popular places we’d like to be. Playing the instrument allows us to gain a skill we can use to make friends or become more popular. We want people to recognize us for something we can do well that they can’t, because the thing we were never able to do was be accepted for what we originally were upon confrontation. This causes a process that forces us to become something other than we already were. This process is happening through our entire lives, because we’re constantly living with the struggle of acceptance by others in each new phase we enter in life.
The reason there can’t be free will is because we can’t will something from nothing. We don’t create a will that desires freely to have an outcome. We have conscious desires, but the will driving them is subconscious. We have a will, but this will is forged by a world we’re thrown into that is already in motion and has a structure. Our only choice is to react to what already exists. What we choose is to embrace what is possible as a reaction to what we don’t see as possible. We compensate for what isn’t possible by living in denial of desiring it. What we desire that we can’t have is the pain powerlessness of life that causes us to run toward the productive thing that compensates for it. Nietzsche makes this point evident when speaking of the Jews living in slavery for so many years. They couldn’t have what their maters had, so they embraced a world and religion that revolved around righteousness by being without those things. Nobody is completely secure with themselves and it’s because of this everyone is compensating for all their past experiences of pain in an attempt to make up for them. All will is a reaction to prior experiences. The compilation of prior experiences in the subconscious cause us to act out options in our present based on whether they remind of something that felt good or bad.
If we trace back the phenomenology of desire we’d find that all present decisions came about because of people more than things. Things are just reflections of people from the past we use to represent them in our current lives. Things can be objects and/or activities we take part in. The reason we perform things in the present is to fuse the horizons of those we desire to accept us in the present with those we cared about in the past. To care can be in a positive or negative form. To love or hate someone are both forms of caring that drive us to action. The next reason we don’t have free will is because of our ability to care. We don’t have to the capability to stop caring about people, and for the same reason don’t have the ability to stop caring about things, which are reactions performed to gain acceptance by people, or get others to care who hadn’t prior in positive or negative manners. These actions of love and hate carry over into our current lives. When we perform an action in the present and say we’re doing so by our free will because this will feel good or be productive, it isn’t really by our free choosing, but because it compensates for all the people we used to care about in the past that aren’t in the present, in relation to those who are in the present. Actions aren’t actions in themselves for the sake of our willing them, but reactions shaped by experiences with people we cared about that reflect them in our present lives. An action ties experiences with person A from the past to Person B in the present. We are always holding person B in relation to person A without realizing it; because person A lives within us in the form of action and speech we perform by mimicking them. The actions look like things and actions, but they’re really all the people from our past inside us interacting with those in our present, which is constantly forging us into another person once again, because we’re always becoming new people through new people.
The ability to care about a thing like playing an instrument therefore isn’t to care about the instrument in and of itself, but because it reminds us subconsciously of someone we liked being around or admired, and compensates for those we can’t be like or accepted by. All interaction is our ability to do what we became good at to compensate for all our failures with others in life. If we embraced our failures we’d put our expectations in places that couldn’t be reached. That would cause us to feel insignificant in our own lives instead of living in denial about what we’re bad at in the eyes of others. The most we can do is realize what is driving good parts by seeing their opposites. If we can at least realize our pain we can admit why we’re doing the productive things we do consciously. The ability to trace back our motives in the subconscious can sometimes allow us the ability to forgive ourselves and change our current actions, but there will always be bitterness driving something we aren’t aware of.
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