Beth McCord

N.B: I wrote kinda the “intro” for this knowing that this would be another Christian book for me eventually, and it was like…. I mean, I knew that I didn’t want to give up the study of the Enneagram, since it comes so naturally to me—and it is rather Christian, you know; I mean, there were other relatives there to birth it collectively together, the Sufis and everybody: but as subversive as it is to the kinda King’s Christianity where my hypocrisies, biases, and neuroses are the Absolute Truth, and you don’t really exist; only I exist, me and God, right…. I mean, I hate to use the word relativism, because to the person suffering from monomania, it’s like: the suggestion that more than one person exists in the world, is like a shot from a rifle, you know—but yeah, as subversive-Christian as the Enneagram can be, it’s not “pagan” or whatever; it’s not astrology; it bears the face of its very Christian (or Christanesque or whatever) parentage, and no matter how witchy you are, when you’re dealing with the Enneagram, you’re being witchy in a actually pretty Christian way, I feel like…. And yeah, some of it is new-age-Christic rather than subversive-Christian, but I didn’t even want to give up reading this series, because I wanted to read the whole thing, right.

But I didn’t feel good about that, on a certain level. I’m not foolish (Fool-Reversed: like, ~~actually stupid~~) enough to discard my good just because it is handed to me by my…. I mean, “enemy” is a “drama” word; it’s like a “Gossip Girl” word, right….

But you understand the sentiment, maybe. I didn’t have to feel good about it…. It’s wasn’t so much Beth, you know…. But Beth, like all of us, doesn’t start and end with herself, right; Beth is just one infinitesimal point in a vast web…. And sometimes, it’s a web of (gansta dialect) bull-shit….

So yeah, that’s the context.

…….

(intro)

ONLY A CHRISTIAN could make not taking risks seem Brave…. lol. (I realize that might not be literally true: but it feels true.)

—I want a regular gas car. I’m brave: I’m taking on “the world”. I’m not going to change until it’s easier, or maybe until it’s impossible not to. I’m not going to get hurt. I’m brave. When people get hurt, it’s because they took risks. They weren’t brave. They did the wrong thing. They were bad.
—Or maybe, taking risks just leads to additional losses, as a perfectly natural thing, even though it can be worth it in the end?
—No. People aren’t supposed to get hurt. If you’re brave, and good, and don’t take risks, you won’t get hurt. Consider the Life of Christ. When he died in 1870, he was 58. That was pretty good for back then—he didn’t get hurt.
—Surely you’re not referring to…. Charles Dickens?….

And the average liberal Christian takes that whole “Christian dysfunction isn’t like Jesus” thing as a slam dunk that there’s hope for them: but show me a Christian church, especially for pale-skins, although ironically pale-skins are the model even in some churches where there are none, that’s more like some fucking wonder-worker than Charles effing Dickens, right…. You know, it’s like: you’d have to be playing with heresy, basically, in a religion that values loyalty above all else…. Even some of the ‘wild’ churches are just highly emotive conformists, you know, very American…. Usually, we just stick with the old British Imperial model, right, not least the “liberals”….

And it is kinda funny, you know, because I like Beth McCord, but she’s very middle of the road—which is itself funny because the church can be so skewed right that you find somebody middle of the road trying not to, it’s funny, “not to take risks”, which is good: but you’re also supposed to be brave, albeit while not having original thoughts, right…. So wild…. But yeah, and the Fours are the artists, right…. Ah, the Christians and the artists…. “If we could just convince these people to hate and reject themselves and their work, we could make a killing with this group, bro….”

(pic of guy smoking)

(/intro)

…..

(introducer’s preface) But yeah: as lacking in ~~aggressive~~ neurosis as Beth’s books are, it can be a lot how much she and her people kinda go: Welcome to Folk Christian Village, a 1959 Experience for the Whole Family! In our quaint-yet-modern village, to be a follower of Christ is to support the tourist industry stereotypes perpetrated by people who have a lot of money but who want to be equally unfree to the very poor, just in their own way! If you come this way, you can see the….

~Like, it’s almost not even worth analyzing, but it’s like: there’s always a woman who gives herself a face palm and cries out, I just should have conformed! Stupid, stupid, stupid!!!

~Right?

(shrugs) But some things we do for completeness’s sake, right. And it really ~can~ be interesting to see what great truths are made into when they are stated plainly, even by those grasping onto them with great effort, even to get that far, right. Christianity probably was what began the theory of “stages of development” and of the obsolescence of the “primitive” and all the rest of it, as necessities for its colonial projects and intellectual elites, right. (And the colonization did start in kinda their backyard, you know.) But it isn’t true that the “cool kids” are always better, you know. A lot of anger can go into that intellectual finery, either that, or a simple inability to fucking speak clearly, right.

…. I have to say, a lot of the generic loyal-Christian crap is like…. Well, it’s filler: and, it’s psycho.

(Agent Smith) Mr. Andersen, you were not born with any inherent worth. Luckily for you, Christ died for you: now, because he lived his life, you have his meaningful life, and not your own crappy life. Sign on the dotted line? Dip your pen in his blood….
(Neo) That sounds like a really good deal…. However, I have a better one: I am Christ and the prophet—but no Christian.
(Agent Smith) Mr. Andersen, have you not heard this saying: “He who preacheth another gospel than mine, let him be accursed….”
(special effects curses)

…. But yeah, she understands the Four a little bit, right…. It’s funny how the Four has to feel things; she doesn’t want to numb experiences because some of them are bad: she really wants to feel the depths of the lake, the hurt of the rose, and it doesn’t have to be negative attachment and it doesn’t have to be illness…. We think very much in terms of Two vs Five, I think: like the Four seems Five-y to some, like it’s not as “weak”-seeming and un-mental as the Two, and is much closer to Five than the Two is, right—but really, the Four is much more like Two than like Five; she doesn’t think that she should be alone and calm or even “reasonable” if that doesn’t seem appropriate to her…. Like I just got done listening to a video by a Taurus; it seemed very Four-y; I don’t know, there are things that don’t come naturally to me that aren’t wrong…. And yeah, Olivia Rodrigo can think, but she doesn’t make thoughts her aim, you know. She doesn’t care if it’s not like the dictionary definition of sanity, what she does: she knows she never wrote a dictionary, right….

…. The details are always interesting, right. It’s easy to overlook that, out of the two other numbers you’re connected to, and the four results, one positive and one negative with each—the Stress, Blind Spot, Growth, and Converging Paths—one of the numbers in particular always always comes easier as a negative thing than a positive thing, compared to the other one, right….

But yeah, if this was a Kindle book it would probably tell you you could read it in an hour, but I never believe that you could read almost any book in one single hour sitting or whatever, and this book is no different, than that pattern. If it’s that short, it tends to be very economical. It wouldn’t have been worse if it were longer, maybe, but there are a number of very symbolic sayings put in these short books, right.… (mehr)

Once these commies or whatever posted this cartoon on Threads that compared capitalists to the warriors inside the Trojan Horse, or some stupid thing like that (it was this really elaborately delusional hostile thing; it’s almost funny to think about); when I tried critiquing their ‘analysis’, I got replies back basically saying that I was seeing the world as only two factions; it’s so complicated and you’re not seeing the complexity, etc. It’s like bro: you can’t be engaged in a mythological (albeit atheist) battle with capitalism…. While also being a fair-minded regulator. Throwing the moderates to the wolves…. Because YOU ARE the moderate! It’s like, Bro! 😹

I didn’t tell them that. Some people like their delusions.

Now, not all Eights are communists, but it is funny, that pattern of like, pummeling your enemies into submission, while half the time planning your battle strategy of why you’re actually a calm, cautious, reticent thinker or whatever. I guess it’s also our culture. Our culture tends to deny the female principle, so Eights have trouble drawing on healthy Two energy…. Or even trying, really. Instead they just pummel their enemies, without even asking themselves if they’re pummeling an alternate-ideology version of themselves, you know. (Sometimes Fives don’t get that, you know. “But everything is ideas, ideology….” 🤔). Although occasionally Trump and rad leftist people will say, Let’s burn down the moderate world together, so that we can fight each other without the pussies getting in the way! Let’s have the civil war that we both want and deserve! (A lot of people in France think like this, including, at least, in recent times.) It’s like, the Trumper is more culpable for falling into delusion, but….

But, bro. 😹

But Mordred (although I don’t know his number: this is just an example) would have been a great and good prince in the realm of faerie, you know. Delusional Eights are some of the most extravagantly crazy people we have—or at least that’s how it seems to this Six—but even crazy Eights are ultimately just losing a battle with an emotionally ill world, you know; for them, equally with everyone else, growth is possible.

I hope that this book, since I already have a pretty good idea what a crazy Eight is like, gives me an idea of what a healthy, loving Eight would be like.

…. Eights who don’t like capitalism are funny.

—Capitalism isn’t the answer. Punching is the answer. Let’s do punching. Cmon: it’s not Trader Joe’s: it’s Trading Blows.
—Not that I get off on your pain, but you seem to be punishing yourself fine without me. What’s my role in the conversation.
—Your role in the conversation is to be the worthless person on the internet who’s not me. (runs off to post something else)

I try not to have those, although realistically they happen in my mind, with various degrees of attachment. I know it goes up and down but I feel like I’m almost to not wasting my energy anymore, right. (“Plan for paradise. Step one: Kill all happy people.” But it doesn’t say how? Let’s see…. ~It is funny lol.) At least I’m not angry at Hitler anymore. It’s worse being angry with the bad man who did the worst things, than with these half-right teenager types who are merely immature and childish and masculine, you know. It’s like being angry at your father vs being angry at the dirty mob who hate their loser parents. Math is no help—you’ll be angrier and more shitty if you hate your own loser parent. There is no honest arch-conservative, you know; they’re all upset at some, one-person basically…. Life’s not math class….

Although realistically I think it’s a safe bet the average anti-capitalist takes the majority of their rage out on co-workers and people who use cheap/free things, you know. The best way to be safe from anti-capitalists is still to make money. It’s not like they have a plan, just punches, you know…. If they want to hurt you they don’t; if they say they love you, they hurt you: classic human fuck-up, you know….

It’s hard not to think of some boxer from 1880, you know. I’m a Fenian man! I come here to this country to fight for Ireland! I come to beat down the Saxon pig! Trading blows! Trading blows! Why do you want to do that, creepy old man. Because I love Erin, little girl. I don’t care if your girlfriend’s name is Erin. (he leaves the boxing ring to go fight the teenage girl)

I’m a Fenian man! (He’s the Fenian man.) You’re macho! Sexist! I don’t know what those words mean, but if you know someone who wants to box for the Sasanach devil, I’ll teach him to run away from the IRA!

(camera pans away to sign: TRADING BLOWS: Where philosophers come to eat!; and then several of the neon letters flicker and go dead….)

…. I’m surprisingly attached to Beth’s writing for someone so Nine and forgettable, but I’m starting to think she did a bad job going into this one. It IS hard to remember, sometimes, what with Eights always wanting to trade blows like working-class men, you know, but Eights HAVE been one of the MOST wronged numbers by the church and the society, you know. Their sin is sex/chaos. Which you know— they just blow up. But then the church people act like sex or chaos or whatever IS sin; there’s no other sin! Like if you hide it it’s ok, but if you embarrass me, you’re the devil, basically. (And 8s can be freaky, and embarrassing if you’re with them, right.) But I mean, and to give me none of that, and then to throw me a FEMALE Eight, and NOT to have her talk about what it’s like having people put shit on you about what you’re supposed to be, and to go into the old folk Christian story where ‘the woman should learn to be good’, and ‘we’ve got to cage these lions—especially the female ones’, I mean, it’s like…. Really?

Really, Christian? That’s what your comprehensive study of Christian psychology gave you? Folk beliefs about gender and shaming women, and sometimes shaming men through shamed women? 🙄

😮‍💨

This is why I don’t go to church anymore. Community is one thing; I’m looking for community. But I’m not looking for the community of uptight Christian prisoners, you know.

…. (the 9 types) Really Five’s sin or whatever is isolation. It really has nothing to do with greed, ‘wanting too much’, you know; it has to do with wanting nothing to do with other people: thinking other people aren’t good enough to ever, ever justify spending time with them, you know. Why isn’t THAT a sin—isolation? It really has nothing to do with greed. It’s not, dun dun dun, wanting too much: it’s rejecting people, rejecting life. Maybe greed isn’t a sin, or at least not one of the 7-9 Great Sins, you know. Ironically, a lot of theologians were Fives, and they thought that “wanting too much out of life”—greed—was one of the Great Sins, but isolation—yeah, that’s good stuff. Keep it off the list.

…. I mean “greed”—“wanting too much out of life”, IS, “gluttony”: feeding face at all costs. It’s repetitive. You know: that’s their bias. “God is your father…. And daddy is working right now! He’s gonna be working for eight hundred thousand years! I’m cooking dinner—I’ll be doing that for eighty thousand years! Don’t ask for too much, kid! That’s sin, asking for shit, you greedy little (picks up by lapels, then shoves at wall). Be content!”

You know: so they can ignore the sin of isolationism yourself. You know, you get into mental health problems, you end up in the psych ward, that’s the first thing you’re supposed to put at the top of your list of ‘Brainstorming How This Happened’ worksheets, you know. And there’s truth to it. And then the Christians, who I guess want you to be a Six, a loyalist, come in and say, All the good ideas were originally mine! (big belly laugh) Say, have you tried going to church?

But the rules don’t apply to the Thomas Aquinas guy, the Five, you know. Isolation? Well, that’s just for the little people…. Remind them not to be greedy, Thomas! I love you! My husband is very busy; he doesn’t even talk to me; I just bring him things, you know….

And at least THAT is not sinful, right. Not asking for any life, basically.

…. But it is helpful to characterize Eights as ‘bighearted’. They do have disordered feelings, but they also feel deeply and unfeignedly. Part of the reason why Eights are so fucked up in our society—I mean, all the numbers are, but the Eight’s thing is he doesn’t hide it—is when we see someone with a wildfire and we throw a blanket over his brain, tell him to suppress himself, to totally turn off his feelings ~completely~, to go from asking life for Everything to ask life for Nothing, right, to be a ~robot~…. Instead of just to take that craziness feeling and let it coast to a slightly less disordered feeling ~~just a little bit~~, right. That’s actually a good thing to do to help people, but it doesn’t make the lords of religion and their heirs the lords of gossip feel good, you know. Especially ones raised on colonialism. “Sir, yesterday I noticed a red man and he was drunk, at noon, sir.” “Burn the red man’s village to the ground—spare no one. Do not leave a single soul alive.” Right?

…. I mean, Eights, ~are~ influenced by the Two thing, the Mother thing, but usually (unless you’re like, Starhawk, for example), in a very denied, suppressed, neurotic, almost dishonest sort of way.

—I want to help the children! That’s right: I came here to help the children buddy!…. Although, mostly, I just want to kill people. (turns into a dragon) (torches that fucking village, right) (the children run away screaming)

…. I hate to focus on what separates me from Beth, but I guess I’ve just come to understand my security as my inherent worth, as well as my inherent immortality through the endless cycle of birth and death: and not the whole “Christ’s finished work on my behalf” line of thought. I don’t know if I ever experienced Christ as having finished something for me, in all those years that I was…. Granted that Christians don’t claim that their journey is finished on this side of the grave, but they do claim to be able to rest in Jesus’ work on their behalf, but I don’t know that I ever met a Christian who seemed to rest at a really high level because of Jesus, you know. Occasionally you meet the Christian that’s a Nine that’s just always resting, if things aren’t unusually bad, just because they’re a Nine and enjoy resting. But most people who really present themselves as pushing all their chips into the middle of the cosmic poker table for Jesus seem unusually restless, you know.

Anyway, about Eights: yeah, it does seem kinda relatable, once you state it abstractly rather than see it in the form of a wounded normie, to see life almost as a quest for the protection of themselves and their circle of friends, you know. It always seems so obvious and natural in video games and popular media, and so freaky in real life, you know. But I guess in the end, all it inherently is, is another way of relating, basically.

…. There are nine Enneagram numbers and twelve signs of the zodiac, so obviously there’s no one to one correspondence, but a lot of what Beth says about Eights reminds me of what one astrologer says is bad advice given to Scorpios. (Again: my father, a Scorpio, is a One.) We all know that Scorpios are a lot; so are 8s. But just to glibly tell someone to “turn down their intensity” as though they were a fucking robot that can go into sleep mode, right…. I mean, granted I don’t want intense people to put a spear in my belly. But sometimes what shamans/indigenous people refer to disparagingly as the domestication of humans—it’s just repression, you know. And you’re not a robot. You can’t just turn a knob and go into sleep mode. I know some of what I’ve told 8s or intense people has probably been or at least appeared or come across along those lines: but baldly stated, it’s kind of inhumane, right.

You need to have fun; you need to cultivate a little gentleness. You need to ask if your behavior, and even your stance, is appropriate. But you don’t need to go into sleep mode, right.

…. (Beth’s general comments/framework) I don’t look askance at “my own strength”, although I think the image of the “orphan” is a very good metaphor for the unhealthy person.

…. But yeah, a lot of Christians act like they’re in a competition with Jesus, and they’ve got to throw the game, right. At least that’s their talk. A few of them are really consistently crazy, you know, like Therese Martin, the saint: dead at twenty-four. “You win! You’re way too tough for me, Jesus! I’m just the little wilted flower!” (shrugs) But yeah: the average Eight, whether entertainer, socialist, or sailor, is a lot right. A lot.

But, again: (sniff) We can’t have the food we really like, children. It wouldn’t be right. We used to be able to, when Jesus walked the earth. But now we must fast…. (sigh) The Good Days are over; JESUS is gone…. (cracks into a salted cracker).

(shrugs)

…. I guess I do always kinda find it funny when Marine becomes like, for politicians addressing middle class folks and babies and kindergarten teachers, right, the MOST respectable profession: WAY better than doctor, right. Because when they’re not raining death down upon the cattle enclosures of our enemies…. (Woman shouting, Yeah! Fuck yeah, baby!)…. They do it even better than the doctors.

Although it is also entertaining when the Christian nationalists/folk custom league shun/smash/starve the pagan state, you know. “When you’re in the Christian national folk custom league, you shun and smash the pagan state. It’s what you do.”

Either way it’s like, In this corner! We have Jesus only wise, the only true persecutor…. Jesus…. Christ! (Jesus smacks his fists together) And in the other corner, we have the chairman of the board, too drunk to fight at all…. Frank…. Sinatra!

(Jesus doesn’t wait for the refs to start the fight; he just walks up to Frank and knocks his lights out, and he keels over.)

Jesus…. Wins!

~ You know, you carve the mark on the savior on everybody’s brow when they’re born, maybe you get a little variety despite yourself, but a lot of the Christian life, “when you’re really a Christian”, seems to be, live a charmed, fey life when you’re on earth and shun the practical people, who have to be tormented for a million years for making sure they had a paycheck coming at the end of the week, right. Or a million other things, maybe your garbage man or your waitress isn’t a Christian, right: more Jesus points left for me; I’m important!

Anyway, I hate to smear shit all over Beth, you know: but she is very formulaic and correct; I felt like somebody had to say something real, you know.

“…. Bad! Bad! Leroy Brown: badder than old King Kong; and meaner than a junkyard dog….”

…. Again: I hate to smear shit in her face, right. (I told this joke on Threads about Germans/the philosopher I. Kant, in reply to a meme about the German language, and I said that my reaction to reading Immanuel was, “Fuck German people 😝”, and Threads is like, Woh, the bots think this could be a prelude to violence!, and I added that said, you know, Paleface is gonna be ok. Relax, paleface. I got you. 😉)

And it’s funny, because for many Christians, perhaps most or at least the dominant faction, they have this trinity of fears, you know: 1. People will reject me. 2. People will ignore me. 3. People will accept some of what I say, BUT THEY WON’T BE ME. ~These three fears—often the third, especially, funnily enough—is the fear of being ~~persecuted by the world~~, you know. And, pushed to the wall, Beth might agree with some or all of that, like a lot of Christian moderates pushed to the wall, you know. But less so than others: and indeed, she’s one of the sorts of people who ‘accept some of what I say, but aren’t me, and therefore represent the persecution of the world’, you know. (To prevent this persecution, we need to pass a law to stop the children from talking back to their parents, or eating too little (I guess it used to be too much, lol) white bread….).

(shrugs) So it is what it is. Beth’s books are okay; I love the Enneagram; I’ll finish her series eventually for completeness’ sake, you know.

…. The line from near the beginning “the heart of the problem is the problem of our heart” in all the books has kinda grown on me, you know. It wasn’t always like that….

…. I guess it does suck to get betrayed, you know. Fuckers don’t wanna get betrayed! 🐝🏟️🧌🤷‍♂️

😄… (mehr)

I could never actually write down all the thoughts I’ve had about the Enneagram. It’s very systematic, so everything fits in, and is never exhausted, you know.

I sometimes want to idealize Nines because I’m a Six so I want that Nine energy to be like the rope ladder that’s thrown to me, the love that gets you out of fear. This is slightly fascistic or whatever, but sometimes I wonder if the values that the different numbers have Are ‘equal’ after all, even if none are either useless or bad, you know. Society could probably do without Fives before they could do without, say, Nines, though—if we but knew; and some numbers better epitomize current social sickness than others, you know. Numbers & classification is the curse of this generation, or whatever it is that Willow said.

But you can’t get too naive about the people to whom the antidote emotion comes easily, you know. Some of them are rather lethargic and easily overlooked, you know. More bothersome to me, really, is that—I mean, well of course, nobody is ever JUST love in a simple sense, you know. Nines can rest on a sort of Eight real man chauvieness, or a One standards of the real, thing, at times. At times they even go straight to Six and descend into the pit of fear. They throw me the rope, and then, instead of staying up too while I climb out, they step down themselves, maybe even pull the ladder down after them, and ask me how things are going in the Land of Fear, you know.

Love is more than 1/9th of humanity’s patrimony in a way, even if you understand the word in a simplistic way. But you also can’t be too naive about people to whom rest comes easily, you know.

But, I don’t know. I do tend to like Nines. I can’t put everything I’ve learned from observation or even all the thoughts I’ve thought here. There is a kind of body-centeredness in most Nines I often find rather relaxing. A Nine is often like a boxer, very strong and physical, but they don’t like to get in the ring. They just kinda chill. They’re cool, you know.

N.B. Lol I’m learning it all from life and not from Beth, but I just talked to my mom, who I always thought of as a Two, but she actually knows the Enneagram and thinks of herself as a Nine, and as surprised as I am to see my mom display self-knowledge, I think that fits better; I was always puzzled—I mean, she is a Gemini, but still: she can be like both a Two and Five, you know, and it doesn’t make sense; but it makes more sense as a Nine-to-Six thing, you know.

So, there’s that.

…. You never actually become the other number…. You just become neighbors, or something.

…. I idealize Nines, and Threes; however, they can team up and create something very superficial, you know. That’s always a possibility.… (mehr)

I wrote something in another review about the whole Two/Eight thing on the Enneagram that I think could be misinterpreted. It can indeed be irritating when a Two person—a ‘woman’, if you will—throws a hissy fit and transforms herself from a codependent mother into a dragon-like dictator. But I’m not saying that a Two (or whatever) can never be powerful, or never should be, that a witch can never under any circumstances marry a king and become influential, respected and accepted for once, right. It’s just that most Twos—or ‘women’—are so sold on their own powerlessness and so inevitably throw power-grabbing hissy fits anyway, such that they can literally be sitting there soaking in the gore of babies and faeries, crying—crying!—that they’re just helpless people doing good, you know.

That can indeed be irritating.

…. It’s strange or whatever, it’s true, that the Two and the male Three often butt heads despite being rather similar in some ways. That’s how it is with my mother and brother.

…. Although Twos are often undervalued, and it’s certainly hard to generalize from one Two to all Twos, I think communication is very important here, and lack of good communication can be very unsettling, since Twos don’t have to be any better at it, but probably think that they are, you know. “Wait, let’s talk about our relationship—MY relationship with you; the job of figuring out this relationship is MINE—you don’t get a say. But I’ll always be here for you.” Passive-aggressive doesn’t even begin to cover it, just a flat phrase like that. 🫠

…. —Who’s the Two in your life? (Cf Who’s the mom in your life?)… (mehr)