Chapter 15
Fragmentation
But enough of these generalities or objectified vitiation of emotions, which Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments argues is done to successfully foist a perspective onto a solipsistic listener who, living in the insular bubble of the human mind with its daily preoccupations to survive and thrive, either is reluctant or has a feckless capacity to empathize with a given speaker. To get a nominal degree of sympathy and understanding, says Smith, an individual has to mollify his emotions so that they are acceptable to the listener. This arguably, is a natural social contract that calms roiled, effusive emotion, at least among friends, or to qualify it further, friends who seek empathy from other friends,73 not that the great majority readily do this when superficiality and facades are a conduit toward most pleasure and profit alliances;74but if, since the inception of this species, this were a predominate mechanism in all relationships, there would never have been all this antagonism in family, city, and nation in civil strife or wars through so many millennia of this species as well as the ten or more earlier versions of man, and this planet would never have been such a sullied sphere.
If this theory of needing empathy with those unwilling to empathize, and so mollifying emotions as a result, is the cohesive black matter, or the visibility of the “invisible hand,75” congealing into a given society all of its discrete, frenzied, and disparate individuals banging into each other in the mad celerity to obtain money, the fulfillment of biological urges, and personal psychological nexus, it is hardly visible here. The Supreme Court of Thailand has just decided to dismiss Prime Minister Yingluck, or rather Caretaker Prime Minister Yingluck as earlier she had dissolved parliament and with it her own position so that new elections could re-legitimize her standing unequivocally and disperse the protestors, a redemption that was never allowed to occur with yellow shirts blocking voting booths, television parodies of her further undermining trust, and in underground organizations, gamblers, it is said, betting on dates that Suthep’s mob would kidnap Yingluck, the chances of the North seceding from the rest of Thailand, and the location and number of casualties that would occur with the next exploding bombs.
Whether or not prostitutes were at times made up, donned, and shod to look like the prime minister so as to be gang raped in these sessions, as rumors propound, one cannot escape the fact that the vicissitudes of precarious life and its violent nature are acted out in play with fantasy fueling violence, violence fueling fantasy, and pleasures on this decadent plane of existence, in an environment not of one’s own choice, are made to a large degree by whatever reality one is living in. Moles gain pleasures in being underground, birds of the sky, prehistoric man in the hunt, Romans of gladiator games, a microcosm symbolic of the macrocosm, and those in violent ghettos today in the same manly early displays of survival (Genghis Khan purportedly saying, “The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms76”). In lieu of being lugubrious and miserable, one is simply compelled to enjoy that which exists no matter how repugnant it is. Examples of this go beyond casinos and betting houses. They are in all things to which, as of yet, there is no inquiry: enjoyments (the few there are) of possessing a spouse in the legal rape of marriage, of the organs that facilitate urination and reproduction, this odd combination, as much for the violence of the thrusts, and the wish to sully, and to be sullied, than the intricate sensation of frenzy, both chemical and neurological, that collude in manipulating man to reproduce as though he would not have any sense to do it otherwise.
The court rendered its unanimous decision to remove her from office as a compromise between the two sides to avert more negative repercussions, although it seems to have only exacerbated tensions as here, like anywhere, people have a proclivity, if they are in great numbers, for demanding total compliance to their perspectives and eschewing the evil of alternate concerns, especially when coming from individuals who are strangers, issues of money are involved, or there is the possibility of altering long held and cherished values—and the values here are monolithic: wealth and power indicate an individual of divine statue; and so politicians who are affluent and thus corrupt with a seemingly vigorous populist stance, or at least not entirely banning the Roman grain dole, so to speak, are predominately the Pheu Thai or UDD reds (United Democracy Front against Dictators), and politicians who are affluent and corrupt with a larger emphasis on exploiting the poor to spur the economy are predominately the Democrats or PDRC yellows (People’s Democratic Reform Committee). At the same time there is a belief in major minority rule, if not majority rule, and yellows and reds tout that they are the will of the people, able to commandeer streets, buildings, and parks to establish their protest sites.
Man’s whole essence is a composite of self-delusions: his ability to conceptualize enough of the dangers of future scenarios stifles appreciation of the present moment with most thoughts set in futuristic hopes enhanced all the more by pleasure inducements of endorphins and dopamine that cause him to live mostly in this imaginary realm; he, like a pederast making contributions to a boys school to have greater access to human flesh, needs to think of himself as a good being, a benefactor if only of his own pocket (the impecunious and indigent he sees around him deserving the fates that they have been allotted); as a gentleman, he treats his female friends to expensive dinners, his ideas latently fixated on future intercourse the whole time (the male bringing to the female the worm and the harmony of his song to ease her stress at being subject to predation for the purpose of securing mating rights for himself77).There is pleasure in the profane of this less than optimal world, this squalid existence. With such a practical construct that manipulates even the autonomous human host, how could existence be otherwise?
No, not in the Land of Smiles, nor anywhere else--other societies and their institutions of camouflaged savagery, for that matter-- do humans want to know what they really are: the material aspirations and the fear of not having anything out of a life that make two people cling to each other for better and not for worse and have children, if they can have children, if the man in slapping his wife does not cause a miscarriage that maims her from ever having them in the future (in developing countries like this one, the poorer they are the more venal the motivation as children exist for the purpose of taking care of the elderly parents, and the wealthier they are the more those children are a status symbol and an ongoing extension of themselves); the fear of loneliness, especially in advancing years and diminishing physical attractiveness that causes a man to stay with his loud harridan, his ugly lizard; the scurrying around to make money, some more, some less, but scurrying to ground a life that will eventually blow away like dust nonetheless (inane abstractions in unwieldy written symbols of language his only means of possibly transferring some minute aspect of himself into the future, and of course his bequest more times than not rejected); those smiles and that warm congeniality that he projects onto others, especially those in his line of business in the prospect of gain, with the more extroverted more eagerly complaisant, calling everyone a friend as there might be some point in which those scarcely known friends might be of some use to him; a nondescript life used up as a social function of diminutive, even miniscule, unmeasurable significance that in consort assists contemporary, temporary man, and nothing more, paid, if he is lucky enough, money to sustain a comfortable existence, but when declared effete at sixty five and retired, knowing unequivocally, that beyond his ejaculate, he has contributed nothing of permanence into the world (even the Roman emperor Claudius no longer having presence and his histories no longer extant in the world78never was, Tacitus’ Annals of Imperial Rome79having lost sections or gained redactions, is merely a half reality in human existence, and after human existence he will be nothing, and King Ramkamhaeng with his supposed likeness on a grassy mound
in the center of the university accredited as having formed the written language of Thai although this is completely erroneous, so the image that is revered is not really Ramkamheang himself); and all denying impermanence, so as to pursue roles and personal functions that will make them feel solid and omnipotent, and happy for a time.