Comm, Friends, and Others

Back in my sophomore year of college, I took an Intro to Communications course as a gen ed requirement.

The professor (technically still a graduate student) was a blonde with a thlight lithp who loved to take her teaching examples from Friends. One of the unfortunate effects of taking this course was that for about a year afterward I could tell which one was Chandler, Ross… Jennifer Aniston… and I think one of them was named Phoebe? 🤔

Blondie also loved talking about how she was engaged, and I seem to remember she had a pony back home she liked to ride on the weekends.

I was fairly prejudiced against the course because it was a graduation requirement that had nothing to do with my oh so serious Philosophy studies, and you know how much I hate doing anything that's required of me.

And there were other reasons I didn't like it, too, such as:

• The sheer nerve of the University to imply that I, of all people, could be anything less than a brilliant communicator.

• The fact that the course involved a hefty amount of group work, meaning my Genius would be diluted by having to associate with a lot of middling intellects.

• Friends.

• Having to do all my citations in APA format, when everybody knows that any self-respecting academic discipline only uses MLA. (Or maybe it was the other way around? Either way, it was a change from what I was used to, and therefore contemptible.)

• The fact that the textbooks were written after 1900.

But the main reason, of course, was that probably a good 75 percent of the students in the class were female. And even worse, a solid half of the females in the class were attractive.

How's a man meant to keep his composure under such intolerable conditions?

Get them away from me. They'll see how disgusting I am.

Listen, I'm a modern man. I know our civilization has failed in its most basic task of keeping women out of the workplace, government, and academia. I've accepted it. Resigned myself to the death-spiral of the West, just like the rest of us.

I'm all for progress, in other words.

(And, who knows? Maybe Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk will save us in the end.)

And don't get me wrong, women were technically allowed in philosophy courses. There was a beautiful brunette who sat behind me in History of Modern Philosophy. Tanned, smiling, dark eyes, thin figure but round in all the right places. The kind of woman where no sooner do you see her than you want to have her burned at the stake. The kind of woman who makes you appreciate Islam's wisdom in curbing the feminine tendency to distract.

(That happened to be the semester where the History of Philosophy professor–who was a real professor in that he was a white-haired man who looked kind of like a wizard–recommended we read a recent book of philosophical popularization called Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love.)

I can hardly tell you how disturbing it was to have her sitting behind me. Trying to listen to the philosophy wizard explain Kant's argument for why the pure intuitions of space and time condition any possible experience–and all the while there's that part of the back of your mind thinking about how a beautiful woman bends the fabric of spacetime all around her…

Talk to her!

… no. Girls like her don't want anything to do with guys like me.

…

I won't pretend I've entirely moved on from the way of thinking I had at that time. Sometimes it's easier to rage against half the human race than it is to look at yourself. And it's much easier to hate the opposite sex than it is to face the truth that you hate yourself.

In the Communications class, we did an activity called the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. You answer a set of multiple choice questions and it scores your self-esteem on a scale of 1 to 30. A score of 15 or less is taken as an indication that you have "problematically low" self-esteem. It was a homework assignment where you took the personality test and wrote a one-page reflection on your score.

I scored a 4.

And a score of 15 is problematically low.

When I wrote my reflection on the test, I spent the whole time criticizing the scientific validity of the question set.

Question number 6 is ambiguous because…

Question 19 doesn't mean what it looks like because…

Question 30 is just horribly written and really ought to be thrown out because…

Granted, on some level I knew the test was giving me an accurate reading of my opinion of myself. But I wasn't about to subject myself to the humiliation of letting Blondie know that. Of course, she wasn't an idiot, no matter how much I may have wanted to convince myself she was. No doubt she knew it was all cope and rationalization.

She didn't need to know I thought about killing myself every day. She didn't need to know I was drinking every night so I could numb the pain of my own consciousness. She didn't need to know how much contempt I had for my own existence.

And that little number 4 felt like she was taking an intrusive peek into my everyday reality. The insinuating bitch. Is it any wonder I tried arguing that the test was meaningless?

Around the same time I took another philosophy course, this one focused on German Idealism. (Not idealism in the everyday sense, no, but Idealism in a very technical and philosophical sense that's really very complicated and you probably wouldn't understand anyway.) Naturally, I loved Schopenhauer most out of all the German Idealists–first of all because he wrote with style, and second of all because he argued that life was basically a lot of senseless suffering.

(We didn't read his delicious essay On Women in that class, of course, but I devoured it with relish on my own time.)

But this isn't an essay about love, it's about hate: like dear sweet Arthur Shope before me, I hated Hegel. His sentences were nonsense, his thinking was fuzzy, and his ideas were both optimistic and self-serving. Thoroughly contemptible.

But the worst part of Hegel was where he claimed that self-conscious beings could only attain self-consciousness by being conscious of an other. That is, you can only become aware of yourself as a self by on some level reflecting on the other's experience of you. You can be perfectly happy to exist without the tiniest shred of self-awareness, but as soon as those damned others show up you have to worry about silly things like their judgments of you, your relative position in the social hierarchy, and how you need to act in order to compel those others to obey your every whim without question.

(All the world's a stage, to put it more poetically.)

Anyway, this concept from Hegel maddened me. How dare you suggest that I'm anything but an absolutely independent entity? Fuck you, Hegel. I'll be as self-conscious as I want, all by myself!

Granted, Hegel was right. And the fact that I found the idea so infuriating only goes to show you how wrapped up I was in trying to appear a certain way. Or to put it another way, I was so painfully aware of my dependence on others that I hid it away from myself and my blood ran hot when I was reminded of it.

We have to convince ourselves of our significance somehow.

And what's a Communications class but a semester-long reminder that we live in a world where we inevitably get caught up in the lives of others? We have to relate to others in one way or another. Hostility, love, communicating, not communicating (which is its own kind of communication), plotting, scheming, dominating, etc.

We're always getting caught up in the other. And if you have a weak sense of self you might become hostile to the other simply in order to keep a clear line between the two. We've all gone through the hell of being absorbed by the other.

(Unless we have the good fortune to be psychologically healthy individuals!)

…

Blondie loved framing questions about communication in terms of relationships. I'm not saying that's a typically feminine characteristic, but it was one of her characteristics.

The final assignment for the Intro to Communications class was to write a letter as if we were in a relationship with ourselves. You either explain why it's a good relationship and you want it to go on, or why it's a bad relationship and you want to break up.

That was an incredibly easy assignment. I broke up with myself because I was so boring.