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garoteOn a whim today I watched some South Park, including the show "All About Mormons". The episode came with a commentary track, talking about the Mormon friends the producers had while growing up.
It reminded me of my ex, and how hilarious and quotable she thought the episode was. She's ex-mormon, and her family is ex-mormon, and I think it's a nice validation of the episode that someone who was directly involved in the church would find it so entertaining. The episode also showed a lot of the positive aspects of Mormon domestic life, which I'd forgotten about in the nearly two decades since I'd last seen it. That domestic life and the church are inextricably bonded, and my ex knew the dark side of that domestic life all too well: The savage rejection of anything that isn't sanctioned by the church.
When she told me about her experience, I was amazed to find parallels in my memory from a friendship I'd started in high-school. My friend had struggled almost the same way, especially with the gravitational effect that his large family unit exerted on him -- except unlike my ex's family, his never could break free from the church. In fact a few years after I last saw them, they packed up and left California specifically to return to the supportive arms of the Mormon community. For years my friend fought to establish his own identity and domestic space independent of that, but found himself reeled back in. With the gift of hindsight I can say now that the intensity of his struggle was born partly of deliberate sabotage: When your parents train you to relate only to other church members and subconsciously portray everyone beyond as inscrutable heathens, you don't exactly leave home with a well-developed social toolbox for building - or even joining - a different community. Even if you find one, you are very likely to be forced into a choice between your family and your community: Any friend or romantic interest you bring to meet the family will be eternally judged by the Mormon standard and found wanting. The emotional hassle of leaving the church also fulfills its own prophecy: People outside it won't understand how hard you had to work to leave. (I suspect this is why ex-mormons so often seek the romantic comfort of other ex-mormons. There are even online dating sites built for this market.)
My friend's younger brother ended up committing suicide, because try as he might, he could not reconcile his real identity with what his family told him it should be. I suspected he was in the closet when I knew him - if not for homosexuality then for something - but I never put the pieces together and realized how miserable he truly was. I never got close enough. I could have been a lifeline, but in my defense, I wasn't yet aware of how deeply irredeemable his family's religion made him feel. I had been raised outside that abattoir, and whenever I walked into it for a social visit, the walls were always hosed clean.
Excruciating doubt, married to compulsory joy. A strange kind of clamoring for the bright side to any event. I suppose the difference between my family and theirs was a fundamentally different approach to bad feelings: Accepting them as natural companions to the good. The few times I overheard my friend talking with his own parents about deep depressing matters, I felt angry on his behalf. "If you're feeling sad, you're feeling wrong," was the essence of what they told him. "It's just a great big abyss out there, and by looking into it, you're dragging everyone else down. Stop looking. Put those feelings to sleep and conjure up a smile. It's better for us all."
Religious standards of emotional conduct, and the pharmaceutical industry: A match made in heaven.
Terror grows in the hiding from it. Constantly running to keep their demons from getting too close, a devout family can cover a lot of ground -- raise a lot of children, till a lot of soil, bake a lot of pies. (I was always impressed by the amount of baking that went on in that house.) Trouble is, with all philosophical roads leading back to the church, nothing stops a family from going in a massive loop. But to them that's fine, because like the runners of the Caucus Race from Alice In Wonderland, nothing makes sense anyway. The point is to keep those demons below the horizon, and your reward for keeping your head down and running hard does not need physical evidence: Your paradise is beyond the veil of death. (Which, bizarrely, in the Mormon scripture is described as a repeat of that Caucus Race, just on a larger scale.)
My ex spoke very frankly about the hell that the church put her mother, and then her, through. Her mother had five children, starting early, and dove headfirst into everything the church glorified for women. She worked brutally hard to make ends meet but was extremely unhappy, and over the years that manifested as abuse, growing in severity until after the family split up and they all got plenty of distance from each other. I don't blame all of that outcome on the Mormon church, but I do definitely blame the church for the completely avoidable pressure it dropped squarely on my ex's mother, for her entire youth, to have children as quickly and thoroughly as possible, despite deep misgivings about it. I've heard that particular story over and over.
I think of the cassette tape that she gave to me to copy - "I'm a Mormon" - full of songs that glorify motherhood and family*, pitched straight at prepubescent girls. Hearing it as an adult, it gives me a terrible chill. I can imagine myself listening to it as a small child, feeling an odd combination of yearning and deep confusion, wondering why the vision for my future that it laid out seemed like a blissfully comfortable armchair that I desperately wanted to relax into -- and knowing instinctively that it was just a bit too small, and if I wanted to fit into it, I would have to amputate something -- something I couldn't quite describe yet. And perhaps that choice would plague me as I got older. I would feel like a failure for selfishly choosing to keep my soul intact, when I should have just sawed part of it away and sat down in the damn chair like everyone expected. Maybe true happiness had been there, like the cassette promised. Those other women sure present as happy...
The prophets and the church found a great way to perpetuate their genes, didn't they? Tie reproduction deeply into spirituality. All it takes is a few rounds: Recruit a group of young, gullible women to move far away from their wiser, more skeptical female elders, and convince them that the highest calling in their life is to spit out offspring. Then enlist their help in convincing their offspring to do the same. Like a tumor, life itself is hijacked and made to serve growth for its own sake. Two generations, maybe three, with the young massively outnumbering the old, and the skeptics driven quickly and quietly away, and you've got yourself a self-perpetuating Caucus Race; the women pounding the earth even as they nurse infants; mothers lining up their daughters to be run into the ground; all the rebellion chased or frightened out of them.
Not a pretty vision from the outside. My family had game nights, camping trips, dances, big holidays, art projects, and a sense of peace and order. No religious overlords required. Moving across the world I am increasingly dismayed at how rare that kind of family life is. Abrahamic religion, in all its variations, has been ordering us to run this race for over a thousand years -- and it's a central feature of the Mormon church since the first day and all the way through to right now.
If I think of the cult-like mixing of religion and reproduction as a tumor, then the metaphor suggests an interesting way to combat it when it's grown too large to ignore: Cultural chemotherapy. Insist on a secular educational system. Insist on sending all children to it. Then insist on a secular media that encourages skepticism of religion but is still humanist, that shows other ways to organize your life, that portrays people outside the church as human, and real, and having the real shot at happiness that they do -- and then find ways to deliver that message, that can pass over even the high walls of the church and its family units. All cults rely on restricting and censoring access to outside information to protect their false promises, so litter the landscape with devices and wires and antenna and software that make it hard for people to covertly censor each other. The more democratized the media infrastructure, the more resistant the individuals are to cult influence.
I'm getting way off track from my original thoughts here, but I want to mention at this point that I have deep misgivings about the way social media works on the internet, because it does in fact provide plenty of means for groups and agencies to covertly censor people. In fact, the selective editing built into a "feed" that is the core concept of all large-scale social media, from Facebook on down, is the very essence of this censorship. So the future is not necessarily a bright one: In pursuit of market share, companies like Facebook actively cater to groups that desire covert censorship - and tracking - of their members. (Pursuit of growth over all else -- hmm, wasn't I just talking about that?)
"All About Mormons" brought up a lot of interesting thoughts. South Park's satire often veers into a nihilistic "both sides suck" territory that doesn't age well, but in this case, they held their worst impulses at bay and fashioned a story that just presents a couple of major aspects of being Mormon as-is, in all their weirdness. Watching it now, I reacted about the same as I did two decades ago ... Except I wish I'd known earlier in life how deeply it was affecting my friends, and what I might say to help them feel confident enough to leave the Caucus Race.
* "The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful." -Father Merrin, "The Exorcist", 1973.
It reminded me of my ex, and how hilarious and quotable she thought the episode was. She's ex-mormon, and her family is ex-mormon, and I think it's a nice validation of the episode that someone who was directly involved in the church would find it so entertaining. The episode also showed a lot of the positive aspects of Mormon domestic life, which I'd forgotten about in the nearly two decades since I'd last seen it. That domestic life and the church are inextricably bonded, and my ex knew the dark side of that domestic life all too well: The savage rejection of anything that isn't sanctioned by the church.
When she told me about her experience, I was amazed to find parallels in my memory from a friendship I'd started in high-school. My friend had struggled almost the same way, especially with the gravitational effect that his large family unit exerted on him -- except unlike my ex's family, his never could break free from the church. In fact a few years after I last saw them, they packed up and left California specifically to return to the supportive arms of the Mormon community. For years my friend fought to establish his own identity and domestic space independent of that, but found himself reeled back in. With the gift of hindsight I can say now that the intensity of his struggle was born partly of deliberate sabotage: When your parents train you to relate only to other church members and subconsciously portray everyone beyond as inscrutable heathens, you don't exactly leave home with a well-developed social toolbox for building - or even joining - a different community. Even if you find one, you are very likely to be forced into a choice between your family and your community: Any friend or romantic interest you bring to meet the family will be eternally judged by the Mormon standard and found wanting. The emotional hassle of leaving the church also fulfills its own prophecy: People outside it won't understand how hard you had to work to leave. (I suspect this is why ex-mormons so often seek the romantic comfort of other ex-mormons. There are even online dating sites built for this market.)My friend's younger brother ended up committing suicide, because try as he might, he could not reconcile his real identity with what his family told him it should be. I suspected he was in the closet when I knew him - if not for homosexuality then for something - but I never put the pieces together and realized how miserable he truly was. I never got close enough. I could have been a lifeline, but in my defense, I wasn't yet aware of how deeply irredeemable his family's religion made him feel. I had been raised outside that abattoir, and whenever I walked into it for a social visit, the walls were always hosed clean.
Excruciating doubt, married to compulsory joy. A strange kind of clamoring for the bright side to any event. I suppose the difference between my family and theirs was a fundamentally different approach to bad feelings: Accepting them as natural companions to the good. The few times I overheard my friend talking with his own parents about deep depressing matters, I felt angry on his behalf. "If you're feeling sad, you're feeling wrong," was the essence of what they told him. "It's just a great big abyss out there, and by looking into it, you're dragging everyone else down. Stop looking. Put those feelings to sleep and conjure up a smile. It's better for us all."
Religious standards of emotional conduct, and the pharmaceutical industry: A match made in heaven.
Terror grows in the hiding from it. Constantly running to keep their demons from getting too close, a devout family can cover a lot of ground -- raise a lot of children, till a lot of soil, bake a lot of pies. (I was always impressed by the amount of baking that went on in that house.) Trouble is, with all philosophical roads leading back to the church, nothing stops a family from going in a massive loop. But to them that's fine, because like the runners of the Caucus Race from Alice In Wonderland, nothing makes sense anyway. The point is to keep those demons below the horizon, and your reward for keeping your head down and running hard does not need physical evidence: Your paradise is beyond the veil of death. (Which, bizarrely, in the Mormon scripture is described as a repeat of that Caucus Race, just on a larger scale.)
My ex spoke very frankly about the hell that the church put her mother, and then her, through. Her mother had five children, starting early, and dove headfirst into everything the church glorified for women. She worked brutally hard to make ends meet but was extremely unhappy, and over the years that manifested as abuse, growing in severity until after the family split up and they all got plenty of distance from each other. I don't blame all of that outcome on the Mormon church, but I do definitely blame the church for the completely avoidable pressure it dropped squarely on my ex's mother, for her entire youth, to have children as quickly and thoroughly as possible, despite deep misgivings about it. I've heard that particular story over and over.
I think of the cassette tape that she gave to me to copy - "I'm a Mormon" - full of songs that glorify motherhood and family*, pitched straight at prepubescent girls. Hearing it as an adult, it gives me a terrible chill. I can imagine myself listening to it as a small child, feeling an odd combination of yearning and deep confusion, wondering why the vision for my future that it laid out seemed like a blissfully comfortable armchair that I desperately wanted to relax into -- and knowing instinctively that it was just a bit too small, and if I wanted to fit into it, I would have to amputate something -- something I couldn't quite describe yet. And perhaps that choice would plague me as I got older. I would feel like a failure for selfishly choosing to keep my soul intact, when I should have just sawed part of it away and sat down in the damn chair like everyone expected. Maybe true happiness had been there, like the cassette promised. Those other women sure present as happy...
The prophets and the church found a great way to perpetuate their genes, didn't they? Tie reproduction deeply into spirituality. All it takes is a few rounds: Recruit a group of young, gullible women to move far away from their wiser, more skeptical female elders, and convince them that the highest calling in their life is to spit out offspring. Then enlist their help in convincing their offspring to do the same. Like a tumor, life itself is hijacked and made to serve growth for its own sake. Two generations, maybe three, with the young massively outnumbering the old, and the skeptics driven quickly and quietly away, and you've got yourself a self-perpetuating Caucus Race; the women pounding the earth even as they nurse infants; mothers lining up their daughters to be run into the ground; all the rebellion chased or frightened out of them.
Not a pretty vision from the outside. My family had game nights, camping trips, dances, big holidays, art projects, and a sense of peace and order. No religious overlords required. Moving across the world I am increasingly dismayed at how rare that kind of family life is. Abrahamic religion, in all its variations, has been ordering us to run this race for over a thousand years -- and it's a central feature of the Mormon church since the first day and all the way through to right now.
If I think of the cult-like mixing of religion and reproduction as a tumor, then the metaphor suggests an interesting way to combat it when it's grown too large to ignore: Cultural chemotherapy. Insist on a secular educational system. Insist on sending all children to it. Then insist on a secular media that encourages skepticism of religion but is still humanist, that shows other ways to organize your life, that portrays people outside the church as human, and real, and having the real shot at happiness that they do -- and then find ways to deliver that message, that can pass over even the high walls of the church and its family units. All cults rely on restricting and censoring access to outside information to protect their false promises, so litter the landscape with devices and wires and antenna and software that make it hard for people to covertly censor each other. The more democratized the media infrastructure, the more resistant the individuals are to cult influence.
I'm getting way off track from my original thoughts here, but I want to mention at this point that I have deep misgivings about the way social media works on the internet, because it does in fact provide plenty of means for groups and agencies to covertly censor people. In fact, the selective editing built into a "feed" that is the core concept of all large-scale social media, from Facebook on down, is the very essence of this censorship. So the future is not necessarily a bright one: In pursuit of market share, companies like Facebook actively cater to groups that desire covert censorship - and tracking - of their members. (Pursuit of growth over all else -- hmm, wasn't I just talking about that?)
"All About Mormons" brought up a lot of interesting thoughts. South Park's satire often veers into a nihilistic "both sides suck" territory that doesn't age well, but in this case, they held their worst impulses at bay and fashioned a story that just presents a couple of major aspects of being Mormon as-is, in all their weirdness. Watching it now, I reacted about the same as I did two decades ago ... Except I wish I'd known earlier in life how deeply it was affecting my friends, and what I might say to help them feel confident enough to leave the Caucus Race.
* "The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful." -Father Merrin, "The Exorcist", 1973.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-14 04:40 pm (UTC)Right. Listening to Joyce's "Portrait", I'm coming to a conclusion that the very notion of sin was invented by criminals to control the young and gullible ones and to hide their actual crimes. Which religion, does not matter at all. Same with the communist ideology. Sacrificing humans to hide their own crimes against humanity.
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Date: 2021-09-14 06:54 pm (UTC)Lately I've been reading a book about budgeting called You Need A Budget, which is clearly written by a Mormon even though he never says as much -- there are clues throughout. (Utah, offensive number of offspring, etc.) It seems like a powerful, sensible system and I'm putting it into service in my own life right away. I can use it in my own way for my own purposes. But I found myself really cringing through whole long stretches of the audiobook and wondering to what degree his family is, secretly, completely fucked-up. Based solely on my own experiences, some of which overlaps with yours, of knowing Mormon families and ex-Mormons up close. A huge premium on self-censorship and denial, which will exact its price.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-14 07:16 pm (UTC)Yes. I've learned a lot from that sermon. Imagine being a priest like this. They carry in their hearts special skills of spoiling children, diverting them from their natural views of life to such a horrible perversion...
no subject
Date: 2021-09-14 07:20 pm (UTC)Of course people have been spawning people forever, and if it didn't contain plenty of its own kind of fulfillment it wouldn't be so popular. But I have to admit, I too am kind of disappointed.
On the other hand, he and I had been drifting away ever since before college. There was basically a point in our social life when I never got him alone again -- it was always him and his wife, no matter what the setting. And that was fine for socializing and having fun, but it took a lot of deeper conversational topics right off the table. If I'd realized what that was doing to our friendship I might have acted to work around it. Living together during college also strained things in a way that none of us really knew how to address...
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Date: 2021-09-14 09:27 pm (UTC)God what a dark side it has though. I still vividly remember my older sister's ex-husband, coming home from an exhausting train commute across the valley and a job he loathed but that paid well, finding my sister in the living room struggling to make her son put clothes on after a bath, and watching him go through the grocery bag on the counter and then take her to task for buying an "indulgent" package of fruit snacks because money was tight. She pointed out that she'd clipped a handful of coupons and the snacks were effectively free. He said they were both trying to eat healthy and the snacks were sabotage. She broke down in tears.
Sure it probably wasn't really an argument about fruit snacks: They were both driven and ambitious people struggling hard with their newfound mundanity as parents, misdirecting that angst in their own ways. His way was to pick someone nearby and accuse them of failing to respect him or live up to his standards. My sister's way was to hate herself internally and then drink to flush the emotional toilet. (Shazam; what a combo!) Joining their finances completely was an easy conduit for that dysfunction, because it pointlessly robbed my sister of even that little measure of independence from his judgement...
... But what other family budget style was on the table for them, with my sister a 100% stay-at-home Mom? It's easy for me to judge, since every person I've dated past 2010 has had their own career set in place long before I showed up. But on the other hand, my mother gave my sister a no-interest loan of 100 grand when they bought their first home. At the time, my sister dutifully put that into the joint pool when they negotiated the mortgage. But what if she'd declared instead that it was her money entirely? Then she could have bought all the god damn fruit snacks she wanted.
We'll never know. I guess it probably wouldn't have made enough difference. I've thought about that example from her past and what she's done differently since, and how it could inform my own approach if I entered a situation where I was supporting someone as a full-time parent. I think what might trip me up the most, would be marrying someone, having a kid, and then having my partner tell me that I just wasn't making enough money to pay for all the things she wanted for the kid, like a larger house, or expensive activities and clubs, or visits and vacations with family and other parents. I certainly could be making more money than I am now - possibly a lot more - by going back into that labyrinth of Silicon Valley over-work. I shudder to think what would happen to me if I did.
Sheeeit, what was I talking about??
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Date: 2021-09-14 09:46 pm (UTC)There was a similar semi-tongue-in-cheek treatment of King's Quest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest_(2015_video_game) It's worth playing, even if I'm going to spoil one surprising bit for you right here: At the beginning of one of the chapters, King Graham is walking around confidently narrating to the viewer, and he suddenly trips and falls off a cliff. Then for no apparent reason you are launched into a mini-game where you have to maneuver him left and right as he tumbles down a long hillside, avoiding rocks. I couldn't finish it on the first few tries just because I was laughing so hard at how well it skewers the whole concept of mini-games.
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Date: 2021-09-14 09:51 pm (UTC)I highly recommend the approach of a third checking and savings account to which both parties contribute agreed amounts. At the moment we're matching amounts but we've acknowledged the fact that at some point it may make sense for one to contribute more or less than the other. We're going to have to agree to forget about the disparity if that day comes, I think. I feel like that should be possible since it's like contributing to any community -- everybody gives what they can and everybody involved reaps the same benefits. I suspect it would help this that neither of us would be doing so at the price of financial autonomy, and neither would be contributing more for the purpose of augmenting trivial personal expenses -- it would be for saving for a home, or some such thing like that which would clearly be for both of us and all but impossible to do alone.
But so far that is not a bridge that has been crossed, so we'll see. If it ever comes up at all.
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Date: 2021-09-14 09:52 pm (UTC)1. Mute the soundtrack and put together my own playlist of ambient music
2. Hack the savegames so I'm exempt from grinding
3. Play with the lights off in the creepiest setting I can find
If I'm really lucky I'll be able to sneak a folding chair into some tiny stone church on one of the Faroe Islands, and play in there.
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