The experience of the obsessive compulsive style is that of tormenting restraint. The executive functions work in overdrive, setting vast byzantine networks of rules, regulations, and restraints over a bucking emotional engine that is growing restless. The more powerful and unstable the emotional movements, the more desperately the region vaguely referred to as the superego drives in its tendrils to reassert control. The result is an electric state of tension in which the body and the lower brain clash against an evolved rational navigation system, which increasingly becomes a prison - an agonizing conundrum.
One's first instinct is to attempt to suppress the executive through various means. Intoxication, meditation, exercise, etc. These things work temporarily, but as I've written before, the environmental inputs can snap oneself right back into neurosis. One's attention shifts then to the environment and the greater system that one is a part of. But then there is another trap here as well; this trap forms the basis of a major mistake I committed a couple of months ago that was very costly (but not without its educational benefits): if you focus too intensely on the outer system, without paying attention to or even willfully ignoring your own inner system and how it relates to the outer, you run into serious problems.
There is another dimension to consider as well. There is a paradox in the escape from the perils of overcomplexity: to learn how to properly escape, which is actually an exceptionally difficult thing to do, you must temporarily increase complexity when trial and error produces failures, which necessitates a richer understanding for going about things. For some people, simply letting go is the clearest and best way out. However for others, me included, it isn't so easy. So I cast myself into the unknown while giving my superego the proverbial finger and found that it wasn't ready to let go.
Alas, the superego can be construed as a living system itself, whose constituents seek to assert themselves just as much as the emotional engine in you. The superego can't be amputated any more than a sector of society that is perceived to be troublesome can be amputated from the greater social body. Everything is connected, and what is more, everything is seeking to assert itself and sustain itself with the help of the surrounding connective tissue. For each system that grows in power, a connecting system that is deprived of power will eventually require repayment.
The superego is useful merely because it exists, and it is used to navigate a world whose structure mirrors its own.
A chicken or egg question arises when you try to think about what came first: this executive brain system or the increasing complexity in social systems that necessitates its existence. The answer is usually that everything grows together and reinforces each other.
Again, for some people, simply letting oneself go and letting oneself be washed down some great spiritual river is the way out. For others, unfortunately, escape lies in committing acts of violence. Another unfortunate group wishes to subsume itself in some amorphous totalitarian family. And yet another seeks to reason out. There is a different path for each personality. Some paths lead to the good, some to the evil, but none can be forced. We could only hope that the good is identified, amplified, and encouraged.
But then I think my central point is becoming unwound; I am losing focus. Every personality contains all of the cerebral and emotional structures of the other, but each personality emphasizes certain structures over others, which gives that person their central thrust. No disparate structure is entirely useless, nor is any entirely emancipatory.
Above all, the greater overarching objective lies in achieving balance, a balance that is necessary both within and without. One's own stability depends on the stability of others, so both outcomes should be pursued simultaneously. Needless to say, this idea of balance sounds familiar because it is an ideal pursued by countless cultures across time. Infuriatingly, to make things even more complicated, pursuing balance often requires thrust, when one is going in the wrong direction.
Imbalance then, could very well make up part of the cradle which gives rise to pathology. Whence comes this imbalance? And how to achieve balance? Such topics we can explore next.
