I’m going to be complaining a bunch in this post, so if you don’t want to hear the moaning of a labor aristocrat who should really not be complaining about his situation, feel free to skip this post.

I don’t feel like a human being. I’m unable to feel empathy. I’m unable to feel any sort of human bond, even with friends and family I’ve known my whole life. I’ve been in therapy and on meds for years but they don’t help. This leads to a life of no joy or meaning. I’m also not moved by the suffering of others when I know I should be. I’ve watched videos of some of the Ukranian war crimes and read a post another user made that went into graphic detail about the Thai sex trade and felt… nothing. As far as I’m concerned, I’m an evil psychopath. But I don’t want to be this way. But I don’t know how to change. Because of this, the only emotions I know are anger and self loathing. I genuinely despise myself.

Because I’m a fucking monster, I lash out at people sometimes and say terrible things. Hell, there was a post a few weeks ago here highlighting some evil unhinged shit that got my lemmy account banned. In fact, if the mods are worried I’m going to say some unhinged shit that’s basically fed bait, I would fully understand if you banned me. I’m not even sure people like me should be allowed near communities.

Because I have, I can’t think of another way to put this, no soul, I barely do anything in life. The only reason I’m able to keep up with my job is that it’s a barely monitored remote code monkey gig. I barely move and don’t monitor what I eat. I spend an unhealthy amount of time on the internet, and often I’ll go days at a time without sleeping. I don’t have the guts to put a bullet in my brain, but I’m basically already doing a slow motion suicide.

I’m posting this here because this community seems to understand what’s going on in the world, is full of compassionate people, and has users who are experienced with dealing with mental illness.

How the fuck do I become a human being? How do I stop being a psychopath?

  • ⚧️TheConquestOfBed♀️
    8•2 years ago

    Everyone else has more heartfelt answers so ima quotemine some theory:

    The central problem is this: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be “hosts” of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization.

    Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one. The man or woman who emerges is a new person, viable only as the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is superseded by the humanization of all people. Or to put it another way, the solution of this contradiction is born in the labor which brings into the world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom.

    This solution cannot be achieved in idealistic terms. In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform. This perception is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for liberation; it must become the motivating force for liberating action. Nor does the discovery by the oppressed that they exist in dialectical relationship to the oppressor, as his antithesis—that without them the oppressor could not exist—in itself constitute liberation. The oppressed can overcome the contradiction in which they are caught only when this perception enlists them in the struggle to free themselves.

    The same is true with respect to the individual oppressor as a person. Discovering himself to be an oppressor may cause considerable anguish, but it does not necessarily lead to solidarity with the oppressed. Rationalizing his guilt through paternalistic treatment of the oppressed, all the while holding them fast in a position of dependence, will not do. Solidarity requires that one enter into the situation of those with whom one is solidary; it is a radical posture. If what characterizes the oppressed is their subordination to the consciousness of the master, as Hegel affirms, true solidarity with the oppressed means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them these ”beings for another.” The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor—when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, in its existentiality, in its praxis. To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.

    Since it is a concrete situation that the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is established, the resolution of this contradiction must be objectively verifiable. Hence, the radical requirement—both for the individual who discovers himself or herself to be an oppressor and for the oppressed—that the concrete situation which begets oppression must be transformed.

    From Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Friere