These Are The Dreams That Scars Are Made Of

I’m putting together a paper this week comparing folk psychology to uses and gratifications theory. What fun. The thing about both F.P. and U&G is that they both assume that we, as individuals, have beliefs and desires, and that those two buttons are the reasons behind our actions.

See, F.P. is based upon the principle [L] (Why “L”? Arbitrary? Perhaps.) which holds that if any agent x (That’s a person, in case you were wondering... all you biochem kids remember people, right? We’re the big watery bags of chemicals you all might eventually help.) wants d (It can be any desire, let’s say a wants to kill a drifter) and x believes that a (How about asphyxiation?) is a means to attain d under the present circumstances, then x does a. Simple, right? Well, we’ve spent the entire semester in a 6000 level course discussing it, so no, apparently it isn’t that simple after all.

U&G, on the other hand, is an attempt to explain the way in which individuals use communications, among other resources in their environment, to satisfy their needs and to achieve their goals. Now that is simple. Concise, even. See? You don’t have to be long-winded in the social sciences, unless you’ve got a hard-on for hard sciences and feel some sort of inferiority complex when confronted with electrons and chemicals. I don’t know.

The key here, is that we are in charge of our actions. I’ve believed that since forever. Only, we’re not always that smart, and we do things that have results we don’t want. Like listening to an ex’s favorite band over and over after a breakup, or masochistically reliving a car accident every time you drive. That’s only gonna make a person sad, but sometimes we think we want to be sad, because in some weird way being sad will make us happy. There’s probably some psychiatric reason, but I’m not privy to it just now. I don’t know. I’m saying that a lot lately. It’s kind of liberating, and people expect less from me.

Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch introduced masochism, and Aristotle wrote about catharsis. The former held that we do things to hurt ourselves because it brings us pleasure, while the latter described a need to purge feelings of pity and fear to bring about fulfillment and pleasure. It all gets back to pleasure, I guess. Maybe there is no action not motivated by some kind of desire for gratification. Even the guy who jumps on a grenade to save his friends is doing that because he wants to save his friends.

So the point is, that sometimes we do things that make us hurt, for whatever reason, and that’s too bad.

And I’m sorry for what, if any, pain I’ve added to the world.

[we’re bringing the pain at biblebeltbabylon.blogspot.com, xanga.com/moontos, and blog.myspace.com/moontos]