- Original Article: His dark materials: After that diabolical, masterful performance, Donald Trump could easily end up president
- FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2016 6:09 PM
Christine B. BrainDrain Yeah, your point is one Steven Pinker would corroborate with his "Better Angels of Our Nature."
- Original Article: His dark materials: After that diabolical, masterful performance, Donald Trump could easily end up president
- FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2016 3:51 PM
masaccio Again, DeMause:
Those who are able to remain outside the social trance are the rare individuals whose childrearing is less traumatic than that of the rest of their society or whose personal insights, through psychotherapy or other means, are beyond those of their neighbors. For instance, extensive interviews of people who were rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust in comparison to a control group of people who were either persecutors or just stood by and allowed the killing of Jews shows startling differences in childrearing. While all other dimensions of the lives of the rescuers were similar to the control group religion, education, even political opinions what distinguished the rescuers from others was their childhood: their parents used reasoning in bringing them up, rather than the customary use by European parents early in the century of beating and kicking children to force obedience. The rescuers’ parents were found to have invariably showed an unusual concern for equity, more love and respect for their children, more tolerance for their activities, and less emphasis on obedience, all allowing rescuers to remain in their empathic central personalities and not enter into social alters and dissociate their feelings for Jews as human beings. The rescuers risked their lives to save Jews not because they had some connection with Judaism or were politically radical, but because they remained in their compassionate personal selves rather than switching into the social trance constructed by the rest of their society.
- Original Article: His dark materials: After that diabolical, masterful performance, Donald Trump could easily end up president
- FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2016 3:28 PM
Jack Burroughs They do feel dislodged. And if somehow under Hillary Clinton they were given a living wage or guaranteed income -- all their financial insecurities totally dissipated -- and were no longer targeted as the lowest form of slime, as progressives (again, somehow) lost their need to use them as convenient poison containers, they'd still feel just as dislodged, alone and afraid as progressives continued moving the country along into what should objectively be called, a more evolved reality.
They weren't raised as permissively, as lovingly. They felt there was a limit to how much progress, how much change, is actually permitted. This is why they want the world to stop. This is the foremost issue. If not an immigrant had been allowed into the country over the last 50 yrs, they'd still be demanding for a Trump... their talk would still be of their being surrounded, as memories of childhood isolation come creeping back.
Personally I think the idea of having a homeland is sort of sick. Isn't what is blessed about the world today that we are increasingly likely to meet people across the world and discover something shared... that in fact if they had been your next-door neighbour you might actually have had a more fruitful relationship with them than you did with those of similar tribal heritage? Suddenly so many things about you've been told you are seem to slack off, and you can reformulate your self-understanding in a way that feels intrinsically more appropriate. The wonder of cosmopolitanism, I guess.
Thanks for your post. I enjoyed reading it.
- Original Article: His dark materials: After that diabolical, masterful performance, Donald Trump could easily end up president
- FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2016 2:57 PM
Your discussion of amniotic fluid, of being born into a frightening new world, as well as your reference to a leader as an "avatar," had me searching for this bit from the psychohistorian Lloyd DeMause's earlier work:
1. We begin to reexperience our early traumas when we feel too much freedom, prosperity and individuation-wars are usually fought after a period of peace, prosperity and social progress produced by a minority who have had better childrearing, producing challenges that are experienced as threatening by the majority whose childrearing is so traumatic that too much growth and independence produces an abandonment panic, fears of a persecutory mother-figure, a defensive merging with the engulfing mother and then fears by men of having been turned into women.
2. We deify a leader who is a poison container into whom we can pump our frightening feelings, our “bad blood” you can see this blood-transfer concretely when Nazis put up their arms like an umbilicus and throw their bad feelings their “bad blood” into Hitler for cleansing, while he catches their feelings with an open palm, standing under a swastika (the ancient symbol of the placenta) imprinted upon a blood-red flag, the hypermasculine leader becoming society’s protector by finding an enemy to persecute rather than individuals reliving their early tragedies alone and helpless.
- Original Article: An attack on all of us: The France horror has shaken the world — but terrorists will not destroy our humanity
- FRIDAY, JULY 15, 2016 5:32 PM
MrJoyboy Emporium Mostly only if it echoes disrespect you're already well familiar with. If there wasn't much of this in your originating... in your HOME environment, then an astonishing lot can be casually brushed off easily.
- Original Article: An attack on all of us: The France horror has shaken the world — but terrorists will not destroy our humanity
- FRIDAY, JULY 15, 2016 5:30 PM
Don't Quote Me Emporium and respond by ... writing an absolutely ferocious letter to the editor, while channeling Mencken, a la "Greenberg."
- Original Article: An attack on all of us: The France horror has shaken the world — but terrorists will not destroy our humanity
- FRIDAY, JULY 15, 2016 5:26 PM
MrJoyboy Somehow this doesn't seem to well describe the average Brooklynite reader of literature.. the average hipster. Maybe they just grew up with parents who treated them daily with respect rather than with constant denigration and abuse.
- Original Article: An attack on all of us: The France horror has shaken the world — but terrorists will not destroy our humanity
- FRIDAY, JULY 15, 2016 5:13 PM
CyclingFool CyclingFool
Weren't the first American settlers -- the Puritans -- actually fairly democratic for their time ... that time's left... those who rebelled against popish ways, against hierarchy and aristocracy? If they had somehow clamped down on immigration and kept their "country" tight in bounds, wouldn't their country essentially be Scandinavia (+) at this point -- a social welfare, a caring society, leader/model? Is it true that in their case, at least, they were swamped by those of more regressive orientations?... that their once dominant culture, kind of lost to yahoos?
Wouldn't the American North have been better off it had shorn itself of its Southern states? Hasn't it amounted to a weight on the degree of progress, progressives might establish at the national level?
I'm asking this even as I acknowledge that basically no one who right now talks about the "swamping" of countries by immigrants, actually means well. The kind people out there -- or almost all of them -- talk like you do. Your orientation... is basically the one to support until we're clear from danger from those who for psychic reasons, are warring to keep their country from unmooring them with further genuine humane progress.
I think if you let in people whose childrearing is worse than the aggregate of your own, it's only a good thing when it means that your own country is being administered by those who are open and not-bigoted -- the bigots are being kept at bay. Otherwise, it's best to have in immigrants whose level of childrearing is better than that of your aggregate's, which is surely the case of the professionals into our own country. These people shouldn't be so much encouraged to assimilate as to teach us an even better way.
- Original Article: An attack on all of us: The France horror has shaken the world — but terrorists will not destroy our humanity
- FRIDAY, JULY 15, 2016 4:27 PM
bluecollarpeep "We must end poverty in order to recruit people to the idea of world peace"
If you grew up with emotionally immature parents, you existed to satisfy their own unmet needs -- they didn't WANT you to become you're best YOU, but rather make up for their loneliness and absence of love from their parents. When you first started individuating at the early age of around two -- that first separation from mother -- she would have reacted instinctively by in some way abandoning you, removing her approval. This scared the absolute shit out of you; and so in your brain you installed the super-ego to watch over over the pleasure-seeking id which would eventually betray you.
The next years after that were fine enough because children at that age are naturally mostly drawn to their parents, but around the age of 13 -- adolescence; the dawning of adult departure -- this same sequence repeated itself. You saw the world as something which might substantiate yourself, become mostly about you and your chosen peers, your chosen life and "world," and you experienced this terrifying withdrawal of still-absolutely-needed parental love.
What wealth does, for "you," the child of emotionally immature parents, is actually make you feel incredibly anxious, like as if the horsemen will eventually arrive and smash bottles across your face, debase you in acid, rip you into bloody pieces, for your presumption. As a collection of people, you can only tolerate sustained increase of wealth and opportunity after periods of severe war and depression -- a price has been paid, and you sense some permitted avenue.
This is why, for awhile after WW2, all incomes increased. This is why, for awhile after WW2, there was a legitimate conversation between societal classes -- the working class -- home of many of the worst raised -- could allow themselves to keep up to some extent, with the progressives in their society's lead.
You can only have a Scandinavia, where everyone finds grotesque the idea that someone could be suffering, could be destitute, when the childrearing as an aggregate has improved dramatically. This doesn't mean an improvement in STYLE ... well, it does, but it is best understood as an accretion OF LOVE, slowly through generations, which manifests itself is such things as eliminating harsh parenting, eliminating spanking, eliminating discipline-focused schooling, etc. ... which manifests itself through style.
Wealth and opportunity is far more the actual source of the terrorism we're experiencing that destitution and ruin. We as Westerners could have been true saints across the world, absolutely respectful and beneficiary, and those of awful childhoods would still target us for representing the affluence and opportunity that just the sheer fact of life provides, that they cannot any longer abide in themselves.
The humiliations they will be revenging themselves upon are sourced from their own childhoods, those inflicted upon them by their own parents, even as it is a wonderful thing that many in the Western world's first thought is that its "obvious" source is their own governments', their own people's, grotesque and cruel expression of sadism outwards onto the world.
- Original Article: GOP war on porn: The same party that nominated a libertine for president is now calling your porn a “public health crisis”
- THURSDAY, JULY 14, 2016 3:31 PM
Tropez Emporium Jayne Cullen Algernon2
I wish porn was all about very well treated men and women enjoying their sexuality. I'm sorry it's not all about that. But the future I see ahead is more Hays morality code -- a restrictive binding-up of youth and youthful impulses. And so I think I'm more for humanization than you have surmised.