The worst thing you can give an exceptional child is a sense of shame. Exceptional people should not have any shame. Exceptional people must not have any shame.

Any parent who thinks at any point that their child should be embarrassed of themselves for anything… ought to be shot.

Hell, shoot everybody!

Remember when the Berlin wall came down and the Scorpions had a hit song about it? Were ‘we’ really as much more innocent then as it seems now, in retrospect? At the time, ‘we’ though we were jaded, post-Reaganite ‘computer-age’ people who had seen and understood all the movies the Brat Pack made. I was in high school. I thought I was very jaded.

It is just me, or is mass culture on some kind of an always-toward-more-cynicism trajectory? Really it is, and I think it’s the nature of capital that takes us there. Capital has no nationality and doesn’t give a damn about status quo. It’s all about the calculations, the maxima and the minima — both the micromaxima and the macromaxima and the microminima and the macrominima — of single columns of numbers. Capital has no culture and no history, no preference and no taste. It seeks to give us exactly what it helps us think we want — which usually roughly coincides with what it is maximally able to match to the limits of functional tastemaking at minimal investment with minimal risk.

And yet somehow, because of human fallibility, it never wins. Instead, we are always running from capital, trying to be ever more anti-consumerist, ever more sincere, more radical, less bought-and-paid-for. We are always trying to make sure that we haven’t yet sold out. I don’t think this is a political calculation, I think it’s human nature. I think it’s what simple people call ‘freedom.’ And yet, because capital is constantly performing the calculations, constantly engaged with the calculus, the base topology of ‘sold out’ continues to expand, to digest heretofore untouched regions of practice on its way.

So we get more extreme.

And because it depends on us for its existence, it gets more extreme.

Deep down, somewhere, we will always know that given the current state of things, for everyone to stop selling out en masse is tantamount to cultural and perhaps even physical genocide. So instead, we just continue to run, to hop half the distance to the boundary, which increases exponentially but is still within sight. But some day it won’t be.

I don’t know which is the correct answer. Is it a false dichotomy? Is there some third direction which renders the topology obsolete without at the same time destroying those of its inhabitants that lie at the margins?

Blah.

We get more and more cynical.

That’s all. Our parents thought they were cynical during Carter. But then they saw Reagan. We thought we were cynical during Bush I. But now look at us. What’s next?

I wanna hear that Scorpions song again.

It’s a uniquely Mormon perspective to believe that one has a “right” to live in a world devoid of sensory input that conflicts with one’s own personal value system. I think it comes from the Mormon doctrinal assertion that thought is reality; e.g. that if you think about killing your teacher, even if you don’t do it, then in the afterlife you will be judged as having murdered your teacher. Similarly, if you think about having had had sex with the first lady, then in the afterlife, fornication with the first lady will be counted among your sins.

Hey, people can believe what they want. If these crazy Mormons believe that watching a documentary on Jeffrey Dahmer will create culpability for cannibalistic acts in the afterlife, fine. But it’s that extra step that’s problematic: since Mormons believe that their salvation isn’t just tied up in what they do but in what they think and in what they see and hear as well, they develop the sense that they have a right to a clean, pure field of vision. They do things like argue for the “right to be free from free speech,” explain how a beer can on a billboard is equivalent to drunkenness, or things like this.

And of course to have doubts about your faith, even if you don’t ever voice them out loud or share them with anyone, makes you a heretic. To doubt is to have joined the army of Satan, and that is how you will be judged. But more importantly, to doubt and then spend time with others — even if they don’t know that you doubt — is to damn them as well, since (whether they know it or not) it is also by and as your associations that you will be judged. And so if you doubt, you endanger not only yourself, but everyone around you as well. If you imagine sex, you not only condemn yourself as a fornicator, but everyone around you as well.

Within the context of a group, it’s a particular kind of mind control that I don’t think exists in other “mainstream” religions. And it’s the sort of conditioning that makes dialog about faith impossible.