Be angry, be very angry, because a celebrity tells you not to. Be angry because they have a public voice but you have no voice in answer.
Stephen Hawking's interview in the Radio Times (not a mag I've actually bought for a generation): oh no don't be angry because then how will you have any hope in your life, just laugh at yourself instead. The media select in favour of messages like that, to give to audiences whose own lives have been less fortuitous so are less easy to just shrug off with levity. By definition, any celebrity's life has turned out well and they are in no place to give throwaway advice to the rest of us to be accepting. That's what self-deprecating and laughing at your own misfortunes is - accepting, a choice of docility.
Yes this can be said even when the celebrity has had a serious disease for a long time and we as yet have not. Hawking establishes that, if you think about it. He has been wronged by biological chance - big time, besides being lucky still to live so long with it. But he has not been wronged by personal agency, by people choosing to do stupid things to his life and prospects, which they could have chosen not to do. Instead he has had a very successful life despite his physical condition, so he is in a position to be reflective on that and to choose to take life lightly. Not so any of the aspies who have been messed with by school or other youth social services. Not so anyone who has had a life opportunity stolen from us wrongly by the consciously choosing wrong action of jerks.
However physically healthy we are as yet, we have lived in a world where that is chancy and is a shadow over anyone's coping with any loss. If you laugh off a wrong you accept it. If you accept a wrong you do yourself further wrong and give the evil a victory, because you live the life it wrongly gave you instead of the life you justly should have had. Where the hell is your HOPE if you do that?
Folks who have lost careers to achieve struggle against an injustice, if they succeeded in their objective then the anger that defined their lives was clearly a good and a right choice: a right choice for themselves not just for others. Meaning and rebuilding in their life: which is hope. Sometimes though it's not a choice. Sometimes the angry path is also your only survival course of action. Sometimes the folks around you can't yet see that or are fighting against wanting to believe it, making it all harder. I did not lose any career by choosing the survival path of bringing down my teachers. Only such as who still believed the teachers' impractical fantasies thought I did.
Besides, after all the pressuring weight to succeed put on me from quite small childhood by fantasists with irresponsible imaginations, I could never have coped with having a science career like Hawking's: there was too much predecided success in it, when all the sceptical scrutiny by scientists of each other's work goes out of its way to set you up to fail. You can see the tensions and fears of that in The Big Bang Theory, including the episode Hawking himself appeared in, devastating Sheldon by telling him his mathematical theory forged in hard sweat was wrong. The bad way Hawking's ex-wife Jane experienced the peer pressure for atheism and closed minded anti-paranormalism, also shows there is no light hearted dream life in a science career. There could well be moral challenges against toeing institutional lines. There is a dishonest rot at the physics scene's core, which explains why it has been stuck in a rigid rut unable to progress its ideas much for the whole lifetime since quantum physics was discovered.
Does Hawking as a lifelong Labour supporter disagree with the anger of early socialists at unjust life conditions? That was hope in anger. Even properly peaceful civil rights movements were still angry. We owe anger most morally of all to anyone affected by murder: how sick for anyone to take life light heartedly in a world where we know it exists. How dare any of us not live morally serious low mood angry lives just for that reason? Aren't we all safer because angry journalists have gone after major miscarriages of justice? Humour sometimes has a use in getting serious messages across, but it must never replace seriousness. Because ripped-off consumers are angry and share their stories, we can keep trading standards needing to show an effort, and avoid buying beds with wooden dowel joints in the corners that can snap?
It was by anger that I discovered being aspie at all. By retaining my libertarian passion against school, by following all the new awarenesses of causes of school problems. By hating and not following any of pop-psychology's transparently evil propaganda for accepting hurts passively and letting go: that way offered hopeless loss. The aspie scene, all its writing outlets, recognition of my sensory issue and its cause, employment support taking account of it, ELAS, ANS: I got all these much needed good things, condition of life made much more just, THANKS TO STAYING ANGRY.
If I was right to continue the anger against my school that helped to discredit and close it, so was the schoolmate who wrote online here "I left that school an angry person".
Stephen Hawking's interview in the Radio Times (not a mag I've actually bought for a generation): oh no don't be angry because then how will you have any hope in your life, just laugh at yourself instead. The media select in favour of messages like that, to give to audiences whose own lives have been less fortuitous so are less easy to just shrug off with levity. By definition, any celebrity's life has turned out well and they are in no place to give throwaway advice to the rest of us to be accepting. That's what self-deprecating and laughing at your own misfortunes is - accepting, a choice of docility.
Yes this can be said even when the celebrity has had a serious disease for a long time and we as yet have not. Hawking establishes that, if you think about it. He has been wronged by biological chance - big time, besides being lucky still to live so long with it. But he has not been wronged by personal agency, by people choosing to do stupid things to his life and prospects, which they could have chosen not to do. Instead he has had a very successful life despite his physical condition, so he is in a position to be reflective on that and to choose to take life lightly. Not so any of the aspies who have been messed with by school or other youth social services. Not so anyone who has had a life opportunity stolen from us wrongly by the consciously choosing wrong action of jerks.
However physically healthy we are as yet, we have lived in a world where that is chancy and is a shadow over anyone's coping with any loss. If you laugh off a wrong you accept it. If you accept a wrong you do yourself further wrong and give the evil a victory, because you live the life it wrongly gave you instead of the life you justly should have had. Where the hell is your HOPE if you do that?
Folks who have lost careers to achieve struggle against an injustice, if they succeeded in their objective then the anger that defined their lives was clearly a good and a right choice: a right choice for themselves not just for others. Meaning and rebuilding in their life: which is hope. Sometimes though it's not a choice. Sometimes the angry path is also your only survival course of action. Sometimes the folks around you can't yet see that or are fighting against wanting to believe it, making it all harder. I did not lose any career by choosing the survival path of bringing down my teachers. Only such as who still believed the teachers' impractical fantasies thought I did.
Besides, after all the pressuring weight to succeed put on me from quite small childhood by fantasists with irresponsible imaginations, I could never have coped with having a science career like Hawking's: there was too much predecided success in it, when all the sceptical scrutiny by scientists of each other's work goes out of its way to set you up to fail. You can see the tensions and fears of that in The Big Bang Theory, including the episode Hawking himself appeared in, devastating Sheldon by telling him his mathematical theory forged in hard sweat was wrong. The bad way Hawking's ex-wife Jane experienced the peer pressure for atheism and closed minded anti-paranormalism, also shows there is no light hearted dream life in a science career. There could well be moral challenges against toeing institutional lines. There is a dishonest rot at the physics scene's core, which explains why it has been stuck in a rigid rut unable to progress its ideas much for the whole lifetime since quantum physics was discovered.
Does Hawking as a lifelong Labour supporter disagree with the anger of early socialists at unjust life conditions? That was hope in anger. Even properly peaceful civil rights movements were still angry. We owe anger most morally of all to anyone affected by murder: how sick for anyone to take life light heartedly in a world where we know it exists. How dare any of us not live morally serious low mood angry lives just for that reason? Aren't we all safer because angry journalists have gone after major miscarriages of justice? Humour sometimes has a use in getting serious messages across, but it must never replace seriousness. Because ripped-off consumers are angry and share their stories, we can keep trading standards needing to show an effort, and avoid buying beds with wooden dowel joints in the corners that can snap?
It was by anger that I discovered being aspie at all. By retaining my libertarian passion against school, by following all the new awarenesses of causes of school problems. By hating and not following any of pop-psychology's transparently evil propaganda for accepting hurts passively and letting go: that way offered hopeless loss. The aspie scene, all its writing outlets, recognition of my sensory issue and its cause, employment support taking account of it, ELAS, ANS: I got all these much needed good things, condition of life made much more just, THANKS TO STAYING ANGRY.
If I was right to continue the anger against my school that helped to discredit and close it, so was the schoolmate who wrote online here "I left that school an angry person".
Maurice Frank
