Blogging is peculiar delusion based on the strange expectation that there are more people in the virtual world who understand you compared to the real world. It’s hard to find a more prefect mental distortion.
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psychology
This is a bit of an eye opener because I have to admit I struggled with this very concept, for example when I wrote about the theme in How did the present get erased from our existential psyche? In this TED presentation Danny Kahneman clearly delineates the two fundamental modes on how we measure happiness. ►►►read more
A clip of Slavoj Zizek talking about the classic musical The Sound of Music. I need to see the film again but let me think about this for a moment. The film was a Broadway remake, I wonder if there was an evolution of the imagery. A classic carnival persona is Mikhail Bakhtin’s cultural mirror image. Here Zizek claims that the mirror image itself is just a metaphor, it’s a bit of a cheap shot. Because in reality Nazis were impersonating the Jews all along. Look, here is the basic Nazi idea – the Jews want to dominate the world, the are in control of the European politics, music, art, banking, culture, etc. So instead of denouncing the very idea of the cross border domination, the Nazis said that’s exactly what we Germans want to do. We want to forcibly cross-dress as the Jews and dominate all aspects of the European culture and there could not be two nations playing this role at the same time. You see how it becomes easy to reverse engineer Nazis into Jews even in the film. Except Zizek is not telling you that this was always the Nazi ethos to become the Jews and the bucolic agricultural nationalism versus the cosmopolitan industrial, rootless domination was the central stage of the horrible conflicts. And of course Hitler himself being an Austrian from a small beautiful village makes the role reversal complete. Check it out: ►►►read more
I have been thinking about Jaron Lanier’s “mob switch” concept. The fundamental component of any big or small clan always includes a designated group or an individual to hate inside and outside of the clan. So any group requires the internalize hate as part of the membership package. This is a big dilemma for me because I believe that the human need to be part of a group is our prime evolutionary instinct. Can you be part of any group without the negative component, without the hate? Perhaps hate and mobs are inseparable. I can’t think of an example that goes against this theory and I am saddened by this. Here is the original quote:
“Humans, like many other species, Lanier says, have a cognitive switch that permits us to be individuals or members of a mob. Once we enter the confines of what Lanier calls a clan, even a virtual clan, it possesses dynamics that appeal to the basest instincts within us. Technology evolves but human nature remains constant. The 20th century was the bloodiest in human history because human beings married the newly minted tools of efficient state bureaucracies and industrial slaughter with the dark impulses that have existed since the dawn of the human species
“You become hypersensitive to the pecking order and to your sense of social status,” Lanier said of these virtual clans. “There is almost always the designated loser in your own group and the designated external enemy. There is the enemy below and the enemy afar. There become two classes of disenfranchised people. You enter into a constant obligation to defend your status which is always being contested. It is time-consuming to become a member of one of these things. I see a lot of designs on line that bring this out. There is a recognizable sequence, whether it is pianos, poodles or jihad; you see people forming into these clans. It is playing with fire. There are plenty of examples of evil in human history that did not involve this effect, such as Jack the Ripper, who worked alone. But most of the really bad examples of human behavior in history involve invoking this clan dynamic. No particular sort of person is immune to it. Geeks are no more immune to it than Germans or Russians or Japanese or Mongolians. It is part of our nature. It can be woken up without any leadership structure or politics. It happens. It is part of us. There is a switch inside of us waiting to be turned. And people can learn to manipulate the switch in others.”
Jaron speaks about this in the video interview by Guardian.
Last month I went to a Boston Skeptics event featuring psychologist turned stand up comedian Richard Wiseman here in Cambridge. There is an old archived and worthy of attention article by Richard in the Telegraph – Be lucky – it’s an easy skill to learn. As I suspected luck is “tinkering”. Lucky people routinely increase their chances for the chance encounters.
“And so it is with luck – unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.
My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.”
I am going to think about Richard’s emphasis on the social aspect of luck.
Why the textification (made-up this word) of our culture? I routinely meet people who don’t mind texting, emailing or IMing for hours yet they are terrified of speaking in person or even picking up the telephone. And it looks there is a strong cultural push in this direction with all the gadgets specifically designed for the purpose and a telephone call now strongly considered a borderline impolite intrusion of privacy.
There is a particular variant of this that I encountered many times. When you speak to a person whatever you say the person considers a signal or a trigger for emptying his “database” about the subject. The specific side effect is that you end up listening to the identical stories numerous times from the same people. There is a post by Philip Guo on this subject – Geek behaviors present during conversations (Struggling with turn-taking):
“It’s a cliche that geeks are known to be bad at maintaining rapport in conversations with non-geeks, so I will begin with this topic. Non-geeks often report having awkward silences when talking with geeks. I think that one root cause of such awkwardness is the geek’s inability to fluently perform turn-taking during conversations.
Normal turn-taking behavior occurs when both participants in a conversation transition smoothly from listening to talking, and then back again. When a socially-adept person talks, he is constantly monitoring the other person’s facial gestures and body language, and when he senses that the other person wants to chime in, he dials down his own talking and allows the other person to begin speaking.
When a non-geek is talking to a geek, awkward silences often arise because the geek doesn’t pay enough attention to his partner’s attention level and doesn’t know the appropriate way and time to naturally pause. This frequently occurs when the geek is ‘in the zone’ proudly explaining some technical concept without realizing that his audience might be growing bored. Worse still, when there is already a silence, the geek doesn’t know how to properly break it in order to continue the conversation.
(On a related note, geeks are more afraid of making telephone calls than non-geeks are, since the visual cues that facilitate turn-taking aren’t available when talking over the phone. Instead, they prefer to use IM, email, or text messaging.)
So the texting or IMs have clear turn talking signals, next IM – your turn to talk. There is no need to expose the awkward inability to interpret the tonality of a voice or a facial expression. There is no need to betray the helplessness in decoding of a pregnant silence or the fear of riding a magnetic high of a semi-hypnotic facial stretch. Marshal McLuhan described in detail how the print culture altered human interactions and thinking, atrophied and removed the vast perceptional range; it seems that electronics are finishing off this process. It’s an aspergers world out there.
P.S. I also think that this has something to do with a generation growing up in a suburban or a semi-suburban setting, with little chance to develop the turn talking fluency. In America there are also Waspy cultural undertones to this phenomenon.
I have written on Google as a psychological indicator in Learning the Truths of Life from Google. And this cold morning, Dan Ariely reminded me about it in What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google (although I am unable to replicate his results completely). Anyway, I though I might give the”Google suggest machine” some obvious tests.
This should finally put to rest the myth about the so called “wisdom of the crowds”. The vast majority of people, the millions that trigger the “suggested” lists are morons, plus some of the descriptions found in the searches in no participial order. The only question about the differences between Bush and Obama – are they an “antichrist” first and an “idiot” second or visa-versa? And there is a total agreement about both American presidents being “hitlers”.
I am starting to think that people don’t actually search on Google, but they go to Google to vent, treat it is as confessional, a private psychiatrist. So what about Comrade Putin? ►►►read more
I don’t know a single person, from the heretics to the messianists and all the in-betweens, who think that the Judaic State is functional today. People with different degrees of attachments or detachments, the geeks absorbed in the Talmudic abstractions, the utopian dreamers living in the projected past, the rebels and the swindlers, no one can stare at the present without averting his or her eyes.
How would one define a contemporary post-Judaism or post-Orthodoxy? The two most significant ideologies of the last centuries – Marxism and Freudism represent a post-Judaic eruption, except they don’t brand themselves as Judaism anymore. Similarly Christianity and Islam are the plagiarized branches of Judaism, even after they severed their ties with the trunk. The Jewish history itself is replete with what I call the source code hacks, indeed Chassidism itself was a post-orthodox eruption, so was Kabbalah, etc. Is the evolution possible today?
Speaking about the future is futile; you never know when a “black swan” will glide in unexpectedly. We are constructed to see the world in a rear view mirror. Sometimes we can master the heroism to glimpse the present, but never the future.
Contemporaneously I observe two main groups of people in various stages of the Judaic rejection. First are the tiny minority who managed to escape relatively unscathed. You can literally count them on one hand. The second group is the vast majority. I call it nominally the Chulent Brigade, these are the people who reject or more likely were rejected by the religious communities. They feel that the secular world doesn’t understand them, the religious world doesn’t accept them, so they live in the in-between, the intergalactic void. A friend compared them to the Eastern European dissidents – “the commies are evil but the West doesn’t get us”.
Psychologically people who were subjected to the various flavors of orthodox indoctrination can be compared to the victims of a sexual abuse. The survivors of the abuse are forever torn between the hate towards the abusers and the longing, even love. This very confusion is the lethal and unrelenting legacy of a sexual abuse, and blasphemously speaking, the confusion of is the staple of a ideological or religious indoctrination. I just don’t meet many people who can break from this.
In America this predicament is only worse. There is the unprecedented chasm with the secular society. And then there is the cruelty of the mass produced indoctrination. What was traditionally, by and large, a private religious instruction, turned into the factory-like school system, where an ego and dissent are crushed by the debilitating group-think. The proud graduates are measured, rewarded and awarded a Stockholm syndrome degree. Is a post-abuse, a post-Stockholm syndrome possible for a post-human? Not even God can ask that much from a mere mortal.
Illustrations by Hugh MacLeod
Psychiatrist Dr. Arthur Perace (L), talking with a schizophrenic patient depressed & withdrawn sitting beside his ward bed, at Wayne County Hosp. Detroit, MI. May 1956. Photo Al Fenn
Adam Curtis describes this history in the first and second episodes of The Trap. In 1973 David Rosenhan staged what was later known as the Rosenhan experiment. Rosenhan and his friends went to 12 psychiatric hospitals in five states. They all were instructed to report “hearing noises” but otherwise act absolutely normal. Every single one was admitted, diagnosed with disorders and given drugs. What’s worse, they were not allowed to discharge from the hospitals till all agreed with the diagnoses. Rosenhan described this scandal to the press. After this story was reported in the press Psychiatric hospitals challenged David Rosenhan to send them more fakes. David agreed and the hospitals promptly discovered a large number of the mental imposters. David Rosenhan then announced that he actually never send anyone. So the hospital were turning away the “real psychiatric patients”. This experiment cast a shadow on the entire discipline. The human factor was questioned.
At the end of the 70s, as a response to the professional challenge and especially with the advent of computers, questionnaires and surveys were sent to hundreds of thousands of people, to determine the mental state of the nation, any human judgment was removed. New disorders are invented at that time, including ADHD, OCD, PDS (various personality disorders), panic disorders, etc. To the astonishment of everyone involved in the surveys, over 50% could be classified as suffering from some of the disorders.
The recognition and the discovered massive scale of problem required drugs. The pharmaceutical companies spent the 80s developing drugs such as Prozac, etc. The ideal model of the “human touch” personalized Psychiatric profession was no longer possible on the scale of the epidemic and the Psychiatry stripped off the “human factor” switched to medicating, on the scale unheard in history. While in the CCCP hundreds of dissidents where forcibly incarcerated into the Psychiatric prisons, in America millions of people were processed through the medication machines with the efficiency of the Auschwitz.
The human despair and sadness became depression. A child’s isolation and loneliness in the sterile suburbia, the anxiety in the face of divorce, the boredom and indoctrination in school, all of it reclassified as ADHD and the gateway to Ritalin. The thrust and the goal was to distribute the blame away from the dysfunctional civilization and onto the people, to confuse the cause and the effect, to reward the docile emotional numbness and induce the emotional numbness on people who refuse to submit to the machine of sameness. This approach and the drugs quickly spread globally. Welcome to the new brave world.
Hmmm, this is a pretty crazy post…
Psychiatrist with an emotionally disturbed student, in front of paintings by emotionally disturbed students at special school. November 1957. NY, NY. Photo by Fritz Goro
Photos licensed for personal non-commercial use only by LIFE
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Christ on the Mount of Olives, 1819. Escuelas Pías de San Antón, Madrid
On of the most paradoxical realities about the religious community is how promiscuous and unrestrained is that culture. The recent scandals with both Catholic and Jewish clergy is the realization that sin is not only subject to redemption but is in fact sanctified, a mysterious divine will. Conversely the atheist culture is incredibly restrained and hyper repressed, the self-discipline requires more effort. This is precisely the paradox that the contrarian Zizek takes on in his chapter How to Read Lacan - “God is Dead, but He Doesn’t Know It”:
“The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors intimate doubts about his belief and engages in transgressive fantasies; today, we have, on the contrary, a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, and whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions: what is repressed are not illicit desires or pleasures, but prohibitions themselves. “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is prohibited” means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment. (One should not forget to supplement this thesis with its opposite: if God exists, then everything is permitted – is this not the most succinct definition of the religious fundamentalist’s predicament? For him, God fully exists, he perceives himself as His instrument, which is why he can do whatever he wants, his acts are in advance redeemed, since they express the divine will…)”
And you can follow this trajectory in America (and Israel). As the religious prohibitions receded and the multicultural and inclusive society advanced, so did the parallel movement of the vigilance against sexual harassment and the voluntarily suppression of free speech AKA the politically correct codex. The discipline, the prohibitions are internalized and the rules are to be followed instead of to be broken.
“Instead of bringing freedom, the fall of the oppressive authority thus gives rise to new and more severe prohibitions. How are we to account for this paradox? Think of the situation known to most of us from our youth: the unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother instead of being allowed to play with friends. The old-fashioned authoritarian father’s message to the reluctant boy would have been: “I don’t care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to grandmother and behave there properly!” In this case, the child’s predicament is not bad at all: although forced to do something he clearly doesn’t want to, he will retain his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against the paternal authority. Much more tricky would have been the message of a “postmodern” non-authoritarian father: “You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her – go there only if you really want to!” Every child who is not stupid (and as a rule they are definitely not stupid) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of a free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit the grandmother, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s own free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, ordering him not only what to do, but what to want to do.”
And so the redeemer Jesus came to the world to let the children of Irael and the children of God sin and truly be free.
Prof. Robert Sapolsky grew up orthodox in Brooklyn; he rebelled against the religion when he was 14-15 and went on to become a Professor of Biology, Neurology and Neurosurgery at the Stanford University. He received the MacArthur Fellowship genius grant in 1987. This is the long lecture on religion by Robert Sapolsky delivered at Stanford. Especially interesting is the definition of the Schizotypal personality, the latent variant Schizophrenia and the analogy with Tay-Sachs. The fascinating definition of the Metamagical Thinking. ►►►read more
