Angle Of Attack

I like the word ‘cope.’ I like its brevity and scope. I like the palatalized ‘c,’ the long ‘o’ and the bilabial ‘p.’ I like the palpable quality of that sound. Its certainty. Its affirmation.

I like the idea of ‘cope,’ of coping with a situation. It’s not an acceptance. It’s not an indulgence. It’s not a concession or an acquiescence. It’s a way – a tool, a tactic, a mechanism - to deal with something unpleasant, something onerous and toxic. It doesn’t mean you’re “coming around” to a contrary behavior or situation; it doesn’t mean you’ve decided, for the sake of the so-called “team” to be pleasant and conciliatory. It just means you’re doing your best to put up with something without going crazy or shooting anyone.

In aviation it’s called an Angle of Attack. This is the angle between the body's reference line (on an airplane this would be the angle between the chord line of the wing and the vector representing the relative motion between the aircraft and the atmosphere) and the oncoming flow of air that gives the aircraft lift. Stretching this somewhat into the vector of the metaphor, it means that whatever angle, slant, bearing, outlook or perspective I bring to a given situation will affect my ability to rise above it.

I’m always coping. Trying to cope. I’m rarely successful at coping. I’m much better at ranting. Flipping people off. Avoiding people. Fantasizing a life lived in a cave in the Himalayan Mountains.

I don’t cope, I mope. I brood. I stew. I ruminate and hatch. I chafe and mull and issue declarations and f bombs. It used to be jobs. My employment history is less than sterling. I’ve endured jobs long enough to feed myself and keep off the street. Afford a six-pack of beer. Benzodiazepines. Marijuana. These are drugs that help you to cope. Cope with the jobs that helped me acquire the drugs that helped me cope. This isn’t a successful coping mechanism so much as a jacked-up squirrel running a hamster wheel. 

My latest conflicts are with western culture in general, particularly in its bloated, kleptocratic phase of free-market capitalism and postliterate hooliganism.

There are philosophies that can help you cope, most notably the Stoics of Hellenistic Greece. Philosophy – like theoretical physics - is intrinsically abstract, an intellectual exercise that may not translate well into real situations, but the stimulation that thinking philosophically provides is essentially empowering and beneficial. The right philosophy can, at the very least, buoy you up a little. It doesn’t need to resolve everything; just providing a course of action is in itself of value.

Coping with life’s unpleasantries was a special focus of the Stoics. There was no shortage of opprobrium and vexation in Hellenistic Greece, nor – it would appear - in the golden age of Classical Greece that preceded it. That’s the age that brought us democracy, theatre, the Olympic Games, geometric axioms and lighthouses. A lot of good stuff. But it wasn’t all men saying important things while wrapped in bedsheets. Politics in Classical Greece did not always engage in ontological and ethical problems. It had its measure of dogma, armed conflict and targeted repressions. If you don’t believe me, ask Socrates. 

Epictetus, a leading Greek Stoic philosopher who was born a slave who – thanks to his wealthy owner, Epaphroditos, a secretary to the Roman emperor Nero – was able to study philosophy under Gaius Musonius Rufus and rose to respectability. When, about 93 AD Emperor Domitian banned all philosophers from Rome, Epictetus founded a philosophical school in Nicopolis in western Greece. One of his main tenets is that all external events are beyond our control. Therefore, we should accept them calmly and dispassionately.

Ok. Sounds sensible. But it’s not easy. It takes discipline. A lot of discipline.

I find the use of the word ‘accept’ troubling. I take the meaning of this word in its broader sense, not tacitly endorsing something but simply not reacting against something. If it begins to rain during a spring picnic, you can shake your fist at the heavens and curse like Shakespeare’s King Lear, or quietly and calmly put everything away and run back to the car and wait for the rain to dissipate. And if the rain keeps raining, enjoy a conversation in the car. Or go elsewhere.

“People are disturbed,” he observed, “not by events but by their opinion about events.”

I like that. Nothing could be simpler.

Or more difficult.

Emotions are often the result of assumptions we make about the world and the people in it that are so visceral and automatic that they lead a life of their own. Presumably, our beliefs and emotions are things that we have control over. I have to think about this a little. I try to remember the last time I had control over an emotion, especially a negative emotion. I can’t. I can’t remember a time in which I thought “feeling this way isn’t doing me any good, so I think I’ll just stop feeling this way, and feel another way, a better way.” That dog don’t hunt.

I have – to my credit – managed to go this far into life without strangling, stabbing, shooting, or assaulting anyone. This hasn’t been easy.

The CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) community have latched onto this strategy as a coping mechanism. It seems to work for a lot of people. I, however, find troublesome aspects about it. It’s designed, mainly, to help people continue working at jobs with people with whom they may despise, or with whom they have such marked differences of value that they feel a deep, inconsolable alienation, resulting in a lot of social anxiety. U.S. culture is particularly hard on sensitive, intellectual types, the Blanche Dubois’s and Ichabod Cranes of the world. Historian and social critic Morris Berman warns against engaging in conversation with Americans. Five minutes in, you’ll want to go shoot yourself.

If one’s attitude toward a society or a culture in general is negative, there may be good reason for this. I happen to believe that most societies are inherently toxic.

I find myself in much more agreement with Erich Fromm. The values of the western world are despicable. They’re centered around greed, power, sexual bullying and toxic masculinity. Militarism, imperialism, capitalism and the destructive, an-hedonic bullshit of the Protestant work ethic which helps feed these toxic ideologies.

No, I don’t have control over any of this, but willfully assuming a passive and agreeable stance in their midst doesn’t boost my self-esteem, it obliterates it.

“It is naively assumed,” observed Fromm, “that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing whatsoever on reason or mental health. Just as there is a folie à deux there is a folie à millions. The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same mental pathology does not make these people sane.”

Here are some more words I like: ‘malaise,’ ‘rebel,’ ‘flawed,’ ‘defective,’ ‘perverse,’ ‘eccentric,’ ‘insurgent,’ ‘seditious,’ ‘malcontent,’ ‘incendiary,’ ‘firebrand,’ ‘mutineer,’ ‘renegade.’

In the words of Beck Hansen, “I’m a loser baby so why don’t you kill me.”

Here’s another person I really feel an affinity for: Henry Miller. Who – in his opus of cultural mutiny, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, observed:

I had the misfortune to be nourished by the dreams and visions of great Americans -- the poets and seers. Some other breed of man has won out. This world which is in the making fills me with dread. I have seen it germinate; I can read it like a blueprint. It is not a world I want to live in. It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress -- but a false progress, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful. The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal. 

I prefer the word ‘outlaw’ to the word ‘criminal.’ Politicians are quite generally criminals. I don’t want the faintest whiff of association with that bunch. But when it comes to coping, I like think of coping as the grim determination to get through a day incurring a minimal amount of damage, to myself or anyone else. And when I finally get that spaceship built, I’m out of here, baby.