Method and Madness

On politeness

Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash

I’m not a drug addict, nor am I a “druggie,” but I was drug-dependent for thirty years. In a word, I was “drugged.”

The reasons for this should be apparent to regular readers of this newsletter, but to sum up, I am on the spectrum, and I was sexually abused by a neighbor for two years, and I was subject to bullying, intense neglect, and physical, emotional, and psychological abuse as a child. Those experiences add up to a young soul adrift, who acts out and who is not always all there when they are not acting out. The first-line solution to the behavioral and emotional problems that were a natural consequence of the first thirteen years of my life, was, for the next thirty years, to drug me and warehouse me.

I write knowledgeably about the problems with psychotropic drugs because I have been on most of them. That’s not an exaggeration; I have very likely been fed at one point or another a good sixty-five percent of the psychopharmaceuticals on the market, as well as some that are no longer used.

The way I have dealt with this day to day is by following the example of Freddie deBoer, who has written extensively about his relationship with psychiatric drugs. Freddie and I differ on this subject, both in our biology (I do not share his diagnosis) and our relationship to psychiatry. I don’t take drugs anymore, and I will never willingly submit to medication again. But I understand exactly where he’s coming from, because I have been crazy too. His approach to madness is to be polite and ethical, perhaps to a fault, and it is one I have also adopted, both as a lifestyle choice and a survival strategy; following situationally appropriate etiquette makes your internal weather largely irrelevant to your behavior. Your presentation may be strange, but no one will be able to say you don’t do your duty.

This leads me to why I write The Wonderland Rules.

One reason is that as Hunter S. Thompson said, all writing is therapy. This is how I organize my thoughts and declare my intentions; if it’s down on paper, I have to stick to it. I do the best I can.

Another is that I am very, very good at rules. I understand their bases intuitively, and I can thus communicate the flaws in ill-conceived rules and misapplications of good ones, and I know when people aren’t following their own rules (or the rules they say they’re following). That’s both a marketable skill in a world in which people are uncertain of their duty and an opportunity for catharsis in the form of tearing bad behavior to shreds.

But the most important reason has to do with The Wolf.

The job of wolves, in nature, is to be wolves. The job of Wolf, the mythological figure, varies between cultures. Egregores exist in all cultures, but the interpretation of them varies. In Norse mythology, Fenrir was the child of Loki, and the brother of Hel and Jörmungandr. In one Pawnee creation story, Wolf was the first creature to die; Navajo healers prayed to him to cure the sick. Raijū, the Japanese thunder spirit, takes on the form of a wolf wrapped in lightning. Turkic people believe they are descended from wolves.

All Wolves are one Wolf. Conceptually, he is a kind of Rosetta Stone by which you can compare languages and concepts between societies. I am, among other things, a teacher of rhetoric, and as such, I understand the utility of conceptual tools. Rosetta Stones are among the most treasured conceptual tools, because they facilitate understanding between cultures.

My passion, The Dance, could be summed up as the distillation of how humans communicate on a physical level. It is social method; politeness, courtesy, etiquette. And it has been devalued and deliberately mistaught. Our cultural mandarins, who know the rules better than anyone, declare sometimes that there are no rules, and other times that the rules their supposed inferiors follow are based on malice and hatred. It suits them to do so. After all, methodologically speaking, abusing people requires first that the abuser make them uncertain of their duty.

But The Wolf is remarkably consistent, though there are cosmetic differences between cultural interpretations. He is a guidepost, a fixed point by which we can navigate. And by understanding our relationship to him, we can understand our duty.

There are other fixed points. They are remarkably clear when one begins to notice them, though considerable effort has been expended to obscure them. All egregores, all gods, are fixed points. I do not insist anyone follow mine. But that is the purpose of The Wolf, and of egregores, and of gods in general. Fixed points do not fundamentally change, only the particular face we see at any given time.