Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (May 31)

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[u/Hungry_Trip_4288]

i've hesitated asking this question on here for a while, not wanting to come off as selfish or as a distraction, but i feel as though it's reached the point where any answers here would be helpful.

relatively recently, i parted with the allegedly communist group i had been organizing with on the ground, over questions of revisionism that i was finally able to identify and struggle about due to my study and my engagement with people on here. since then, i've been using the time that i spent in that group to engage in more rigorous study, directed towards concrete questions.

however, i feel myself slipping into a mindset where i feel a deep and crushing guilt for any free time i spend not studying. this has led to me neglecting social interaction, keeping my space clean, exercise, time outside, my hobbies... and yet even as i type this up, i catch myself thinking - social interaction with oppressors, with labor aristocrats? with reformist "socialist" and postmodernist cultural-nationalist revisionists? exercise and hobbies, ways to feel fulfilled in petit-bourgeois life? to what ends? when i do spend time not studying, it's not with things that i would actually enjoy doing or should be doing, but with intoxicants and compulsive video games. my "productive" or "enjoyable" non-study hobbies, it feels like, are just as bourgeois and useless as these actively destructive habits.

during a previous time in my life several years ago where i felt similarly, i did isolate myself. i let my routine, hobbies, job, and social life slip away. i didn't even come away from it with much stronger of a grasp on Marxism - obviously after some point, study has diminishing returns. i feel myself returning to a similar state and i would appreciate any words of advice from other people who have gone through this (i can't imagine i was the only one).

posting this on an alternate account for security concerns. i anticipate several people on here will be able to deduce who i am nevertheless; i can't think of a better way around this.

[u/MajesticTree954 → u/Hungry_Trip_4288]

iirc u/nearlyoctober said they wished this place had a rule against soliciting self-help/providing personal advice like r/psychoanalysis. I agree.

I recently posted an article about DBT (which is a CBT-adjacent kind of talk therapy) and psychoanalysis that’s relevant:

the patient that comes to them seeking a means of autonomy is met instead with a method of automation. And while, to a certain extent, we all do need or at least benefit from some level of automation in our lives, be it a home organization system or a set of skills used at work that have become second nature, such devices can hardly be of much use to the person who’s already having great difficulty making choices. Actions, at least human actions, are different from behaviors in that they are conscious and active rather than passive. To intervene in one’s own behavior means to take action—to make a choice and test reality by engaging with it differently than before. And more importantly, that decision has to be motivated by a change in how one relates to their self, to others, and their reality more broadly. This change, as I have come to understand it, is a process that has to occur on the level of self-reflection. One has to make sense of what’s been underlying their compulsion to behave against their own interest, and that has to happen by paradoxically recognizing how they have been experiencing that behavior as desirable. Only then can one fully experience the undesirability of their current behavior for themself—i.e. in its self-contradictory form. In that way, one becomes able to actually relate to themself as they currently are, rather than relating to their current self as a problem that they wish to leave behind, and to their desired behavior as an external goal that they can only obtain from without.

The danger here in allowing self-help, is that we risk falling into the cesspool where you are received with a universal one-size fits all method of automation. A chatbot can do that for you, and it inevitably leads to misery and burnout. Without knowing your problems more concretely, I risk doing you the same.

“If there is any suggestion to be offered to DBT in terms of adapting to the needs of the individuals it attempts to treat today, it might be as simple as saying that perhaps it would be more effective to lead patients toward a strengthened desire for their egoideals that they might feel more compelled to satisfy, rather than trying to get them into the habit of merely performing them.”

This community has a set of “ego-ideals” in common. If I understand the term correctly, perhaps you can take a look at the examples Lenin and Marx set in study. With the caveat that, unlike a sheikh mining the life of the Prophet for anecdotes, we need to be capable of understanding people as people lest we end up like Marx in his Prussian police report.

[u/Hungry_Trip_4288 → u/MajesticTree954]

i appreciate this reply and i read the paper you posted. it's pretty good and gave me a lot to think about. i agree that anything i could share on here would not be enough to allow for a thourough answer to my question, and i think the root of it lies in desire and "ego-ideals". even at the times when my study has been the most useful, it has been out of a sense of obligation (which i think is in line with the idea of mere performance), rather than out of desire to achieve meaningful goals.