Self-Criticism vs Self-Blame

"There is nothing wrong with you" is a helpful but false statement from within a frame that reifies personal wrongness. But we can just decompose personal wrongness into its components!

There's approval and disapproval. There's error and disease. There's a particular parasitic behavior complex that involves reifiying disapproval as something like a permanent blemish and conflating that with error.

Every criticism of error processed through that complex will implicitly posit personal wrongness, and will correspondingly imply a nonsensical causal pseudomodel. ("The Buck Stops Here" or "Original Sin.")

There is no good-faith way to try to correct one's errors by condemning oneself, but there are some very clever ways of harnessing bad-faith to produce a sufficiently faithful simulacrum of error-correction to yield actually good results. Judaism imagines reality as an infinitely dominant male who hates anti-epistemology more than anything else. Calvinism cultivates the self-fulfilling expectation of being helplessly drawn towards the attractor of mimicking good, productive behavior (irresistible grace) despite one's badness (total depravity).

Blaming yourself for a demonic infestation is like blaming yourself for having a cold. It harms you and those around you. You can act to reduce the harm it causes. Maybe your decisions made it more likely. You can investigate this and make better-informed decisions in the future. Self-rejection actually impedes your recovery.

When I learned to stop dissociating from symptoms like a sore throat & sleepiness, I went from weeks-long frequent intense colds to rare mild days-long colds. I suspect I was doing some combination of cutting off blood flow to the affected areas, restricting lymphatic circulation, and keeping myself in a state of SNS activation (and wakefulness) that suppresses immune function systemwide.

Similar dynamic for demons.

I definitely consider the cold virus a foreign entity. It's a little more complicated with demons since they seem to have hardware support. CPTSD / attachment trauma integrates too smoothly with CS Lewis's Inner Ring-ism for trauma to be a nonevolved accident.


Compiled from a Twitter thread.

4 thoughts on “Self-Criticism vs Self-Blame

  1. relate

    Some Christians teach the Old Testament first, which can blend those two demons for the self-fulfilling expectation of being helplessly drawn towards mimicking obedience to an infinitely dominant epistemology king. (aiee)

    These may be antidotes
    - Stuff is banal by default >> Total depravity
    - If stuff isn't fractal cancer its ancestors probably are >> Total depravity
    - Tails diverge >> Total depravity
    - Effortless effort >> Irresistible grace or vice versa if you have a different upbringing
    - It's funny that you can combine something actually good like epistemology with hell realm motivation

    Reply
      1. relate with Cook-Greuter

        What are you relating? The tenets and the abstract descriptions of the stages match exactly with another developmental theory I'm familiar with.

        I wonder if Cook-Greuter is trying to benevolently hypnotize their audience into venturing only where they have firm foundations. One of their earlier tenets explains that "Later stages are reached only by journeying through the earlier stages." and only in a later tenet they mention that "Derailment in development, pockets of lack of integration, trauma and psychopathology are seen at all levels." They don't relate these two by noting that such problems occur precisely when one 'stands on the shoulders of giants,' being carried along by one's culture's journey through the stage.

        > Each later stage includes and transcends the previous ones. That is, the earlier perspectives remain part of our current experience and knowledge (just as when a child learns to run, it doesn’t stop to be able to walk).

        This is an unfortunate example of a stage transcending a previous stage, since it's important that minds can run before they can walk.

        It seems to get more hypnotic and less benevolent from there.

        Reply
        1. Milan Griffes

          "This is an unfortunate example of a stage transcending a previous stage, since it's important that minds can run before they can walk.

          It seems to get more hypnotic and less benevolent from there."

          I don't understand what you mean by this. Are you saying that it is important for people to learn how to run before they learn how to walk?

          Reply

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