About self-proclamation

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Along with the topic of interaction between people, the question of self-identification is one of my favorites in sociology. As usual, in the course of research, situations in which everything is going well and correctly are NOT important to me: it works - do not touch, that is, rejoice and do not drip your joy onto anyone's brains, the only thing that may be interesting for me personally is the issue of preservation sustainability. I am more interested in situations in which everything is wrong and bad, that is, in which you need to make an effort to resolve them correctly, turn yourself around from the inside and vacuum everything there, and then fold it back correctly, while throwing out unnecessary trash. And now, again, one of my favorite situations is when a certain subject, instead of establishing such an internal order, decided to legitimize the mess by assigning himself a certain status (usually at the level of spiritual hierarchies), proclaimed himself to be one or another solid (in the eyes of the public) word. For example, a person with a number of complexes climbing outward says: "I am a brahmana!" I just want to ask: "Why the hell?". Why so rude? Because if you just ask "why?" the role of a brahmana - the Supreme Teacher of Humanity, and the ceremony took place on that very day, because the monks there knew that the Great Teacher would come today. It was written in a fucking book of prophecy that no one had ever seen, of course. Well, or he will tell how the dolmen spirits came and told them everything as it was for a glass of vodka, hung a medal around their neck, which no one else has, borrowed money and disappeared somewhere, leaving behind unwashed dishes. Let's talk about this briefly, not about dishes, of course, but about such self-proclamations.

It happens that a person cannot cope with his internal mental problems, and therefore tries to find justification for them, to give them importance and significance, and not only in his own eyes, but also in the eyes of other people, in order to somehow justify his behavior or their activities. The simplest example: a person is a loser in life, hasn't really done anything in half a century and has ended up in the grip of a "midway crisis" … here you can make a reservation and clarify that he may not be a failure completely of his own free will, but because his fate is so difficult, or raised him crookedly, but he did not immediately realize this, did not want to figure it out and lost half his life, after which he convinced himself that the train had left. After this self-hypnosis, we will consider him a "loser by conviction." And so, our loser by conviction embarks on a very dangerous path, starting with a seemingly harmless thought: "Maybe I'm just so special?"

If you think about it, then each person is special in their own way, because they have a number of unique abilities in their unique combination, their own destiny and life mission, their own system of ideas and outlook on the world. I think this is obvious, but the danger of thinking "Maybe I'm special?" lies precisely in the fact that a person does not accept the uniqueness of individuals as confidently as he accepts his own uniqueness. He either considers everyone else to be a herd, just in case, adding the salutary phrase "with rare exceptions", or coquettishly recognizes the uniqueness and importance of all people, implying in silence that he is personally especially important ("all people are equal, but some are smoother"), that is, it seems to be in a different plane. Most often here you can see a reference to belonging to a spiritual caste, that is, a caste of enlightened teachers and educators in the cradle of the Earth. In rare cases, such a person will refer himself to the caste of warriors or workers, because it is most convenient to engage in dependency and parasitism precisely from the standpoint of spirituality.

Following the first dangerous step, an avalanche-like process of fantasy begins, which is 100% based on attracting facts from one's life by the ears. A person suddenly remembers that in childhood he was treated somehow differently than other children, he was ahead of his peers in development, played on the sidelines of most children, before everyone else he began to ask adults difficult questions. This is a common thing: when a single particular fact is elevated into a pattern with a stable manifestation. Fantasy, false memories and a keen desire to be special spin a picture in my head that is hard not to believe - and a person sincerely believes in it. Having completed one test earlier than others, after 30 years he will remember this as “I always completed even the most difficult tasks at school before others,” being once offended by the guys in the yard, he will remember this as “I always played apart, in much more serious games than my peers, with whom I was no longer interested in stupidly driving the ball across the field. " Seeing once a "sign of fate" in the form of a warning life circumstance that saved him from a terrible tragedy, he will consider himself "the chosen one of heaven", whom "higher powers" prepare for something important, and therefore protect.

This begs a rough analogy:

the shepherd, generally speaking, also protects the sheep from wolves with the help of a gun, dogs or a fence with a gate, and also singles out and marks a ram, especially mature and juicy, for the next dinner. That is, it seems to me strange that people often perceive positive, on a superficial consideration, circumstances in favor of their chosenness in a good way, and not in a bad way. The tendency to interpret all events as positive for oneself is one of the defense mechanisms of the psyche crippled by resentments and failures, is a kind of propensity to confirm (in this case, a person needs to confirm his exclusivity).

End of analogy.

The imagination continues to work, and now the person begins to openly fantasize, and so fiercely and furiously that he himself believes in his fantasies. Someone left the body and flew to other planets, communicating with the local spiritual hierarchs (in fact, he slept under a high or just had a very vivid dream), someone talked to the spirits and received direct instructions from them (in fact, they stood on bank of the river with his head thrown back and was looking for "patterns" in the splashes of water, the cries of birds and the rustle of the wind, comparing them with the stream of his thoughts and arbitrarily assigning them a convenient meaning), someone perceived the ambiguous look of some fortune-teller in the market and her abrupt stop with a bow in front of him as a sign of “understanding of the fact that before her is the“High Priest of the Order of the Prophets Ukhtyzhjo”, which additionally excites imagination and creates a feeling of being chosen, although a fortune-teller, as an experienced psychologist, with such gestures can successfully hypnotize all sorts of“licks”, and this is far from the only way to get a person interested in your services. Additionally, the poor fellow can be brainwashed by those interested in his schizophrenia. For example, the same fortune-teller for money will tell him so many vague thoughts that they can be assembled into any suitable picture, interpreting them in a convenient way.

And so, having “finally realized” his uniqueness, a person chooses a new name for himself or the name of his state. Maybe he digs into some books on Hindu philosophy and chooses the word he likes (for example, "brahmana"), or maybe he chooses a name based on local legends of his people or some already existing club of losers based on some Vedas. For example, I learned about the castes of workers, merchants, warriors and magicians, defined myself, of course, to magicians, and then reads about them and their abilities in order to diligently portray the appearance of belonging to this caste, buys some cheap pendants on the neck, rivets on pants and on the collar … well, he pours some sacred swill behind the collar, prepared according to ancient recipes from herbs plucked at midnight on the eastern slope of the ancient mound, on the full moon, when a mysterious and mystical bloody fog rises.

It also happens that a person invents his own hierarchy and puts himself in the center of it, then distributes other people according to the degree of closeness to himself. Be that as it may, an important feature of such behavior is, ATTENTION!, A complete and deliberate refusal to see in other people the uniqueness that he sees in himself, as well as the deliberate ascription of other people to those shortcomings with which it is impossible to be like him. At the same time, a person ALWAYS has the same shortcomings in himself, but vehemently denies them. That is, such total schizophrenia turns out: a person denies his obvious shortcomings, passing them onto other people (it does not matter whether others have them or not), and considers himself infallible. In public, he can admit some of his mistakes, of course, when it is foolish to deny the obvious, but he does it in such a way that the mistakes seem insignificant, insignificant, irrelevant trifles, but the shortcomings of other people (essentially the same the flaws that the hierarch has, but manifested differently) are evidence of a terrible lag in development, confirmation of unreasonableness, proof of a deep viciousness of behavior and a fragmented worldview.

It happens that such people unite in formal or informal sects, within which artificial conditions are created for a more comfortable self-proclamation. Just imagine that it’s one thing when you yourself awarded the degree of “master of the noosphere academy”, and another when you were given an “official” diploma giving you this status. It turns out that here you get rid of the internal dissonance associated with the fact that it seems to be not good to somehow assign a status to yourself. But when the High Priest handed over such a diploma at the initiation ceremony, it seemed as if everything was already hurt at once. Maybe you even passed a test or an exam. For example, they stood in an open field with a foil hat on their heads, waved their hands and shouted a rhyme memorized three times, and then somewhere far away the pigeons, crazy from such an outrage, decided to dump away from this obscurantism, soaring upward with screams of horror, dropping their feathers - and in this the examining committee saw your "Earth Power". It was then that you have every reason to consider yourself an honest deserved owner of the status, because he has now been confirmed by the commission. In reality, the situation with the external assignment of status in this case is similar to a self-name, a person knows perfectly well that he is participating in a play, where some other self-appointed people have invented the rules of the game, and he dances his square dance according to these rules, for which he receives a neatly printed and laminated a piece of paper.

Somewhere in this place, when a person assigns himself a name, that is, performs an act of self-proclamation, and the most interesting thing happens, the riddle that interests me most of all: HOW does a person do this and at the same time does not experience dissonance? WHY does he choose such an inadequate and stupid solution to his problem, when there is a much simpler, obvious and guaranteed working? WHY does he need it at all? WHAT is actually happening in your head? AND TILL this kindergarten continue? Many times I tried to communicate with different people suffering from self-proclamation, even turned to the minions of my former sect to find out how they manage to call themselves intelligent, doing everything the same as the "unreasonable commoners." I could not find out anything from anyone. Ultimately it all boils down to "I am a brahmana, that's all, because I am a brahmana - ah! And in awesome pants!"

Guesses and Observations

It is very important here how a person confuses the form and the content, this is a very common mistake, about which I will try to write a separate article.

Only by calling himself a certain word, a person believes that he already possesses the qualities inherent in this word. This usually happens on the basis of a "clue" to one of the signs. As usual, I will explain the meaning, starting with an absurd artificial example, so that the essence of the error is visible.

So, a person sees that a certain athlete who runs 100 meters in 10 seconds (this is considered very cool, if someone does not know, this is the level of the Olympics), has two legs, two arms and a head. Our patient sees that he ALSO has two legs, two arms and a head … which means he ALSO can run 100 meters in 10 seconds. Now, on the basis of this "clue" in the form of a common feature with a tough athlete, he assigns to himself the status of a master of sports of international class! Nobody needs to confirm anything, because it is obvious that if there is one common feature, then everything else will be the same. So, it was absurd … although I have to surprise the reader, this example is based on real events, but it was not about running.

Now the real situation. A similar situation arises when a person, due to his complete incompetence in a certain area, believes that it is very, very easy to achieve some well-known result in it, and therefore, ATTENTION !, automatically believes that he ALREADY is the owner of this result. Let's take 100 meters again. Let's say our patient can run this distance in 11 seconds and a quarter, this is just the first adult category, that is, complete garbage for most of the guys with good health who have recently started training. It seems that to accelerate for just one second is very simple … and now, a person already tells everyone that he is running a distance for a master of sports of international class. Alas, this example is real, the person did not know that for this "second" it was necessary to do a volume of work one and a half hundred times greater than what he did in several years of training, and even then it is not a fact that his physiological characteristics are generally suitable for this type power load. Another such real example: a man ran 20 km, but tells everyone that he can easily run 60. Unfortunately, he does not know some of the features of this distance, which, if he knew, he would never have dared to lie so blatantly. In these examples, in addition to a whole series of mental distortions, a person falls under the Dunning-Kruger effect, that is, he is not aware of his own incompetence, which allows him to think about complex things in the style of “bullshit question” and under the guise of “small” lies (“think, exaggerated for a second, this is a trifle”) to impersonate someone who is not even a thousandth of a small part of a percent.

Now watch your hands, as they say, here's another real example. The patient read the biography of someone who considers himself special and has achieved a lot in life due to his peculiarity. In this biography, a person writes about himself some differences between himself and other people, accompanying his entire life. For example, poor / tolerable school performance and 100% excellent at university ("wow, just like mine!"), Isolation from peers and an early inclination to philosophy ("wow, just like I wrote from"), rapid rapid maturity (“Well, I was also the first in school to ask the teacher something about Socrates, whom we hadn’t even gone through yet”) and a number of difficult life trials (“the boys left me without sweets and ate everything themselves, and then they beat me with sticks and I also lost my bike early, which I loved very much”). There are common signs, and where they are not, the reader of the biography will conjecture coincidences, attracting his life drama to the author's and underestimating his drama so that everything roughly coincides. Well, the job is done, if there are a number of common signs, then the abilities will also be common, which means that the patient will consider himself no less great than this person. There is no need to prove anything, the act of self-proclamation is simply performed, and read the evidence in someone else's biography.

You think it's funny, but how many times during the teaching period I heard the phrase from students: "Einstein also studied for Cs!" and "Steve Jobs dropped out of his third year too"? This is all from the same opera, but not yet so much launched. But the revelations of some sectarians and especially their leaders are just a variant of the extreme neglect of such a rearrangement of form and content.

Another form of manifestation of the same defect is that a person is imbued with the thought of a famous person and believes that he is aware of its full depth, thereby identifying the level of his thinking with the level of the known. I have given similar examples in various articles, for example, in a very stupid (as I see now), but extremely popular among readers article about the "Dunning-Kruger Effect". In my former sect, a popular reference is to Socrates, who said: "I know that I know nothing, but others do not know this either," justifying the fact that Socrates' contemporaries called him the wisest of people. At the same time, the guys still think that a superficial understanding of this phrase already allows one to identify their level of thinking with the thinking of Socrates, but other people who are not in the sect, nifiga do not understand what Socrates had in mind, but follow some other logic … Of course, any of the sect's henchmen will deny what has been said here, but according to the form of their behavior, I personally think that I am still right. I repeat that you cannot judge by the form, but this is how I began my guesses by formulating questions, to which I have no answers. There is a problem, it manifests itself in the most striking way, and it seems that you can cling to something and see the reason, as is done when debugging a computer program. But in this problem everything happens somehow OP! - that's all. It is impossible to see the moment of transition from a person to a self-styled person. Moreover, when the transition itself is carried out, then there is a feeling that the person has ALWAYS been such, as if the word "brahmana" was written to him right away in the birth certificate. On the other hand, at the same time it seems that this is some kind of slob, and he always was, as if it was written in the testimony, accidentally admitting 9 annoying typos in the word "brahmana".

So, a person, by several formal coinciding signs, identifies himself with another person (real or fictional), ascribing to himself all those properties that he does not initially have. So, he may believe that you can become a magician simply by putting on a cap from a table lamp on your head, growing a beard and putting on some symbol on a chain, always on top of your grandfather's sweatshirt so that you can see it. In order to become rational, it is enough to see the unreasonableness and mistakes of other people, while you can commit them in the same or even more, accusing those who noticed this of impenetrable and unremitting stupidity. In order to become a brahmana, you can portray the semblance of detachment from worldly pleasures (by all means marrying a young girl 20-30 years younger than yourself, simply speaking to her teeth with all the sublime nonsense … I do not condemn, but just a curious pattern), pretend to care about the awakening of humanity from hibernation, but to sit from morning to evening in nature in a country house and think about the eternal, driving sake, herbal teas, or even local moonshine from Uncle Valera, in exchange for sublime conversations with him about his life. At the same time, one must not forget to drag into the house any mystical consumer goods from the "alchemist's shop" - the shop of the drunk Volodya, who found all this garbage in the trash heap of a local tourist camp.

Another important distinguishing feature of the self-proclaimed person, in connection with the above-described nature of the confusion of form and content, is the almost zero practical significance of his activities. People who really achieved something, first of all, did something and achieved results (here we will not say good or bad, this is not important). The status, characteristics and skills of these people came FROM the practical work that they did, their theorizing was CONFIRMED in practice in any form, correlated with life, and were not divorced from it, and they solved real problems, and any - that were needed for achieving the main goal. In the case of self-proclamation, the opposite is true: a person has artificially assigned himself a number of qualities and tries to fit into them in external form, while doing almost nothing in practice. Everything that he really tries to do, does not work out, or does not work at all. Naturally, he always finds a way to explain his failures by various reasons beyond his control, either to accuse others of being set up, or “he could not agree with the spirits and appease them, because expired food for the perfume in the store was slipped by the scoundrels . Usually an additional element in this behavior is a strategy to meet all YOUR needs without much inhibition. Their interests are put in the first place, and the remaining resources after their satisfaction are already spent on everything else. Well, there, to feed the spirits …

It is possible to distinguish a self-styled person from a real figure precisely by the practical result. The first does nothing, but only grinds his tongue, assigning himself a convenient status from INSIDE, the second basically does something and does not really boast of any statuses, different statuses are assigned to him FROM OUTSIDE according to the results of work. Of course, the assessment of such work is not carried out by amateurs and not by the crowd. A person is simply "accidentally" noticed by the right people or other forces, and they are taken to the "Institute" for a suitable position. These people absolutely do not care about statuses, they just work. Another way of differentiating: the amount of chatter. It happens that a person constantly says that he knows something, has achieved something, shares all sorts of stories in which he compares favorably with the "gray mass", boasts of his merits, sometimes speaks with hints of secret knowledge and dedication, likes to go into topics, according to him, "inaccessible to the plebs" and to strengthen their hints of involvement in certain insiders who influence the world (people working inside (inside) a high management structure, where the entrance to "just anyone" is closed), while such boasting is clearly not fits into the topic of the conversation and creates the feeling of an artificial insert for show off. Know that in front of you is not a brahmana by status, but the genital organ of a walrus. He may be a good person, but he indicated his formal status incorrectly, you can help him correct it with just three letters.

In life, a self-proclaimed person usually talks about some projects, plans, carries out grandiose constructions aimed at the future, but in fact he lives as if he ALREADY achieved his goals and can now rest and enjoy. A person goes on exciting hikes to "places of power", arranges picnics in nature, organizes various meetings to chat, lies in a hammock or sunbathes on the beach, always accompanying all this activity with conversations about how everything will be fine when his plans are realized. And sometimes he even says that his task is to start, but his followers will already achieve real goals in 200-300 years (very convenient!). However, as time goes on, conversations are becoming more and more fantastic, but in reality the matter stands still, because the walrus needs to swim in a pool with healing water, take mud baths, delight the sense of smell with various incense, and the body with a massage, and do a lot of other useful work. taking up all the time. This is natural, because a person looks at his ideas as a way to better satisfy his needs, and why then implement these ideas, if you can satisfy these needs in a well-fed and healthy life, just keeping the flock's interest in yourself through intimate conversations. After all, everything desired has already been achieved, and the young wife is always at hand, and even other concubines from the flock have appeared. Beauty. The main thing is to continue chatting about a bright future and shearing your sheep for this business (in a monetary or energy sense).

Conclusion

So, this is the internal reaction of my brain to various self-proclamations, which, of course, I never read out to the interlocutor, because I try to understand him first. It's still important for me to figure out at what moment and why this fucking shame is going on in his head. Here are examples of adequate, in my opinion, but still incorrect reactions.

- I am a brahmana.

- Why the hell?

- I have two spiritual initiations and the third level of access to the astral plane.

- Get off me into your astral plane.

- I was born on this planet to awaken people from hibernation.

“Fuck you in the eye if that's the case.

- The dolmen spirits told me some bullshit.

- Well then, hurt yourself now!

- We invite to the stage an honored academician of five academies, an honorary knight of the Light Brotherhood, a prominent scientist and author of one and a half thousand scientific articles, fifty monographs and the Gardener's Bible, a guide to the world of spirits, a medium and a psychic, an outstanding predictor of global historical processes and the only person who freely reads messages Unseen on the cold sand …

- Yo-mine! Can you imagine this deer somehow as soon as possible?

There is, however, another obstacle that does not allow me to understand the topic: if I start asking the right questions to such a self-styled person, then the person will be offended and stop answering, he may start to harm me or other people, he will simply behave inappropriately and it will be impossible to deal with him. interact even on issues that are not related to its self-designation (for example, digging a hole). In short, I want to start a conversation as given in the five dialogues above, and such a beginning can, in principle, reveal some of the interlocutor's cards at once (if you use the great Russian language correctly and with the right expression), but you can't do that!

Do you know what to do in this case? Write, I am interested in this topic.