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The Analog Sea Review: Number Two

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Fenton Johnson

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“When examining the history of any human network, it is therefore advisable to stop from time to time and look at things from the perspective of some real entity. How do you know if an entity is real? Very simple – just ask yourself, ‘Can it suffer?’ When people burn down the temple of Zeus, Zeus doesn’t suffer. When the euro loses its value, the euro doesn’t suffer. When a bank goes bankrupt, the bank doesn’t suffer. When a country suffers a defeat in war, the country doesn’t really suffer. It’s just a metaphor. In contrast, when a soldier is wounded in battle, he really does suffer. When a famished peasant has nothing to eat, she suffers. When a cow is separated from her newborn calf, she suffers. This is reality. Of course suffering might well be caused by our belief in fictions. For example, belief in national and religious myths might cause the outbreak of war, in which millions lose their homes, their limbs and even their lives. The cause of war is fictional, but the suffering is 100 per cent real. This is exactly why we should strive to distinguish fiction from reality. Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function. We can’t play football unless everyone believes in the same made-up rules, and we can’t enjoy the benefits of markets and courts without similar make-believe stories. But the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality. Then we begin entire wars ‘to make a lot of money for the corporation’ or ‘to protect the national interest’. Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; how come we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service?”

Suffering
Book:Homo Deus A Brief History of Tomorrow By Yuval Noah Harari & How We Got to Now Six Innovations that Made the Modern World By Steven Johnson 2 Books Collection Set
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“Suffering holds within it a hidden, transformative treasure, an unrecognized gem. Jesus demonstrates how to suffer in how He walks from Gethsemane to Golgotha. Then, in the Word of the Cross, He raises Suffering to a Redemptive superpower. Only if we give assent to uniting our imperfect suffering to Jesus’ perfect offering can we open to the superpower Redemptive Suffering contains and alter the eternal destiny of those towards whom we unleash love, by offering our suffering for them. Dr. Sue Ellen Nolan, MTS, Ed.D”

SufferingGriefLoss Of A Child
Author:Dr. Sue Ellen Nolan
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“The schizoid repression of feeling, and retreat from emotional relationships, may, however, go much further and produce a serious breakdown of constructive effort. Then the unhappy sufferer from incapacitating conflicts will succumb to real futility: nothing seems worth doing, interest dies, the world seems unreal, the ego feels depersonalized. Suicide may be attempted in a cold, calculated way to the accompaniment of such thoughts as 'I am useless, bad for everybody, I'll be best out of the way.' One patient who had never reached that point, said: 'I feel I love people in an impersonal way; it seems a false position, hypocritical. Perhaps I don't do any loving. I'm terrified when I see young people go off and being successful and I'm at a dead bottom, absolute dereliction, excommunicate.”

SufferingSuicideBreakdownFutilityDepersonalizationSchizoid
Book:Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self
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