Wisdom of the Idiots; Part 22

Wisdom of the Idiots; Part 22 – The Five Estates of Man, The Three Great Imperatives & The Ego

Birth; Initiation; Consummation; Repose; Death. These are the five estates of man.
Curiously, they are also the five estates of empire. Like a man, an empire is born, grows, runs satisfactorily for a while, starts to decay then eventually comes to an end. Look at history. While you're there, look at social behaviours during that end of empire period. Every empire! Then take a close look around you. Very Fin de Siecle hedonistic self indulgence with the meaningless, the shallow, sensual and gaudy, transient novelty of the endlessly banal and utterly pointless. The Cult of Personality thrives in such times and people become hard and uncaring. A bit like Europe and Britain these days. Which is why a new, more energetic people are taking us over.

The three great imperatives are Survive; Eat; Procreate.
The rest is just filling in the time in pleasant ways – if we can. “We pass our time doing things so we don't notice time passing.” Someone who isn't me said that.
Anyway, if our fun times threaten any of the imperatives we'll give up the fun. If sex threatens the eating and surviving we'll give up sex, and if eating threatens surviving then we'll just not eat for a while. The organism is programmed to survive and the code is buried deep.

The Ego is a Freudian construct along with the Id and the Superego. I prefer the Parent, Adult, Child model of the mind you get with Transactional Analysis. But then, I'm like Cat in Red Dwarf. I don't want to hear that a stasis leak is a trans-temporal fissure in the fabric of the space-time continuum with a duration value of Nt2 3acdc +/- ФΩ and an inverse K factor variation dependent on stochastic prediction of random factors in a quantum field of infinite improbability. Just tell me it's a magic door.

The Ego is a very powerful individual. That's where the survival instinct is located. Like our friend the Amygdala, however, he can get a bit off the rails and, when his determination to survive is hooked into defending an emotional attachment to some idea or programmed belief, he can go too far. Happens all the time. It is, in fact, one of the greatest dangers known to be associated with Political Correctness. Some Political Correctness victims have even been known to argue themselves right out of existence.
In Transactional Analysis terms it's the Angry Child wielding its Punishing Parent; an expression of intolerance and hatred masquerading as a social justice crusade; rancid old fascism justifying sadism with florid prose and the unreasoning rhetoric of violent emotion which is, in fact, psychogenic in origin and never reactive. It's one of the few forms of madness that I find personally offensive. Some other forms are quite cute.
Musashi.

In Wisdom of the Idiots; Part 23, “I Was Groped by a Disneyland Attitude Inspector” – we ask victims what it felt like. We interview an ageing homosexual who claims to be one of the Seventy Two Virgins in Paradise – “It's all a bloody Con!” he says. We speak to the first Newcastle man to be busted for being incredible under the new Northern Intolerance Laws, and we look at the Saudi Arabian State Television Service's brand new smash hit comedy shows -
“You've Been Shamed!” and “The Most Hilarious Failed Executions Caught on Camera.”