My Inner Propagandist

While reading “Politics And The English Language”, an essay by George Orwell, I stumbled across a few interesting ideas that can be applied to my maladapted mind, which likely is the same for many others. In the essay Orwell talks about the decline of the English Language, and what I think is the innate nature of the human mind that leans on “convenient” ways of writing and thinking. He highlights our tendency to use archaic phrases and metaphor to express meaning in writing and everyday speech. He criticizes the works of unoriginal writers who use preconceived metaphors to express ideals which result in a skewed inaccurate expression of their intended point. This is often used deliberately in propaganda as well, in order to paint something bad as all good or something neutral or seemingly harmless as all bad.

I then looked at the way my brain has formed these maladapted neuropathways as a mechanism of evaluating my surroundings. Because of this aggressive, emotionally evocative adaptation I evaluate the people around me as if there is some diabolical force persuading them to think negatively towards me. I get emotional; I become full of hate with this habitual, conclusive thought process. It’s as if I have become lazy at social interaction, and my brain resorts to this unoriginal repetitive assumption that people are malicious in nature and share a mutual hatred towards me. Once the neuropathway is aflame my surroundings become an accelerate and I filter everything with a distorted and charred understanding. It’s as if my brain is running .exe file that is programmed with flawed “if/then” statements, such as, “If someone is laughing then they are laughing at your expense.”, which my brain processes faster than I can think.

I think this sentence really illuminates the struggle of this maladapted thinking. “..an effect has become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.” It’s similar to a performance anxiety of sorts, when the thought of performing evokes anxiety, and anxiety makes it all the more difficult to perform. I suppose the question is, how do your stop this self-perpetuating thought program once it’s executed?

This is literally one of many phobic reactions I have to stimuli in my life, I feel like I take neurotic-ism and cynicism and amplify it until it intervenes with every thought process replacing it anxiety and exhaustion.

I suppose I need some friggen therapy… frick ricky..