fun criterion

September 28th, 2020

• Wrote something in relation to coercion & David Deutsch's fun criterion (originally in a chat to a friend)
  • I've gone through many layers & loops around type stuff, disagreeing with my past self, agreeing again, and coming to a loosely held larger picture at this point I think.
  • a few perspectives:
    • 1. discomfort (of any magnitude) is not intrinsically a threat, although our belief that it is a threat makes it a genuine threat because it causes us to undermine ourselves to make it go away, which means that we naturally fear encountering such discomfort in the future because we know it will tend to result in us undermining ourselves - this is a huge part of how coercive memes are maintained, and unlearning this is vital to shifting into collaborative / Game B
    • 2. forcing someone else to face their discomfort doesn't generally work - even when well-intentioned, it's usually a common mode of the coercive dynamic
      • 2b. same with forcing yourself to face your own discomfort
    • 3. however: attempting to avoid discomfort also doesn't generally work
      • 3b. for instance: the only method I'm aware of to unlearn anxiety or panic attacks, is to welcome them. anything that tries to make them go away reinforces the basic root cause - even if it works in the moment! because they're caused by being afraid of ones' own fear, which causes a runaway feedback loop. welcoming the fear breaks that cycle.
    • 4. sadness, anger, fear, etc, are natural feelings, both in the course of sensible everyday life and especially in working with internalized coercive schemas, trauma etc. rejecting them when they arise (in oneself or others) is not the answer
    • 5. no feeling is incompatible with the thing that I think is the generator of what David Deutsch is calling fun:
      • I can be feeling sad and also welcoming & enjoying that sadness.
      • I could be feeling terrified on a rollercoaster and also having a peak experience of ecstasy.
    • 6. processing trauma can be a ton of fun (I tasted this a bit at the Bio-Emotive retreat last summer, then a bit more this summer and I am extremely fuckyeah about it, and have done some unlearning about the idea that it is (or should be) necessarily sucky/scary/isolating/etc)
      • 6b. however, one doesn't have to avoid processing trauma if one wants to, just because one doesn't know how to "make it fun" yet.
  • "this ought to be fun" has an ought in it, which is basically a should.
    • there _is_ a non-shouldy way of holding something like this but anyone in the Game A→Game B transition process is not going to start by knowing what it is, and attempting to embody "this ought to be fun" will likely result in them blaming themselves or others for it not being fun, one way or another, or feeling entitled to things being fun (entitlement being part of Game A)
    • If I were to try to come up with a better phrase to use for the learning process, here's a first attempt:
      • "can I make this fun? [without trying to make it go away]"
        • it doesn't assume you already know how ("can I make this fun?")
        • it assumes agency ("can I make this fun?")
        • it assumes a transformation, not that it should already be fun ("make")
        • it attends to what is so ("this")
        • it doesn't try to reject reality ("[without trying to make it go away]")