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Recent comments of mine at Clio's Psyche Discussion Group

Some of you may be familiar with some of the criticisms of the left, coming from within the left, that are referencing Freud in a big way. There's the recent article, "The Blathering Superego at the End of History," by Emmett Rensin in the LA TIMES, where he says the left, without knowing it, has found themselves hiding within a super-ego role that doesn't so much direct as resist everyone else's impulses... he makes the left look alice-in-wonderland crazy, like energizer bunnies on endless smackdown mode. And there's the book published this year by Jessa Crispin, whom you couldn't tell by the title of her book, "Why I'm not a feminist," but who actually is a feminist, and one respected enough within feminist circles that her book was lauded by NewYork Magazine and Jezebel. She accused the left of needing "shit containers"... people who could be denied empathy and into which can placed everything about themselves they felt an urgent need to disown, and the one and only container used -- voila!: white men. She made the left look like everything right-wingers accuse them of. "Quite right," she argues, "we are very much taking a dump on you."

Where you don't find criticism like this, in my judgment, is in the only article I've seen in forever on DeMause's "growth panic," where a conclusion was made that we've reached the stage we're we can no longer use the like of poison containers to remove guilt... because it's past that now, past time for small measures, as we're all so obviously bad we're all with Trump on a highway to hell. What you find in, specifically, Kenneth Alan Adams and Audrey Crosby's article, "The 2016 Election, Authoritarian Childrearing, and our Suicidal Trajectory," is a lament about THEM... about the white working class and their inability to any longer keep up, owing to the misfortune of their "authoritarian" childrearing, where growth was a bad, bad thing. Liberals, the professional class, the educated elite... however we want to call them, don't look ridiculous, as they do in the two accounts of them just listed, but exempt... pillars of earnest responsibility in a time of madness. Or at least that's my call. 

So I wrote a response, about how if we're representing ourselves this way, it's probably a good sign that we too are suffering from growth panic, and I wanted to link you to it. 


Please note, I really recommend reading Adams and Crosby's article first, to learn from them, and of course to judge how fair I am being... to see if I'm just talking sh*t (I probably do do a couple sketchy things -- like I just did there... for higher purpose, of course). 

Cheers and respect,
Patrick McEvoy-Halston 

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What's mainstreaming the radical right would occur outside of any particular thing Trump might do. He could be locked away, all his advisors sent to Pluto, and the "radio" could play nothing but Rachel Maddow, and it wouldn't matter, because what's unfolding now was determined by the particular childhoods of each American. This is the DeMause's interpretation of the events, that what we're seeing here is a reckoning of just how loved or unloved Americans were, just how much they were rejected by (sorry) their mothers when they began to individuate in their adolescence and how much this individuation was instead encouraged. What the left needs to do is try and manage an honest assessment of the likely nature of the childhoods of all Americans, even of peoples they assume will always be firmly left. Black Americans in the South still for example almost universally spank their children (with belts, I believe) and that tells us, if we can admit to ourselves, that they have a very precarious appreciation for further unfolding of liberal freedoms as well. Don't assume they won't themselves turn nativist, eager to cling to the formidable mother country, and eager to distance themselves from... well, spoiled children like us. Don't even assume that they won't in the end come to Trump. It's possible. It's boring our being perennially surprised by events. Our assumption each week, that THIS TIME Trump is on his way out. We're going to lose a lot of friends as society moves further and further beyond what our childhoods allowed for us. We have to become sinless, good children again, by attacking those who represent our ostensible worst selves, who individuated even in face of our mother's disavowal and disapproval. Of course not you and me, but some even of our personal friends--yes. 
 (August 19 17)
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It strikes me that the advantage Crews has is that one imagines that if contemporary psychoanalysts did find that there was truth to, say, penis envy, or his explorations of perversions, that their own brains wouldn't allow them to accept it, whereas Crews does give one -- or me at least -- the sense that if he somehow came to find himself in agreement with 1950s psychoanalysis, if he did a full turn-around, he could keep faith with it, even as part of his brain would surely be chastising him as a bigot, and even as the world would disown him. There's integrity to him... that's what one senses (and perhaps mostly why Zaretsky says there's been no effective rebuttal of him as of yet?). The trouble is that it is likely that this older sort of psychoanalytic truth, the part that gets disowned as everyone makes clear how "post" it they are, is beginning to come back into view... the rightwing are uncovering it, bringing back, for instance, Socarides, and his take on homosexuality, transsexuality, etc., spared the genuine love and concern. If there was actually truth in '50s psychoanalysis, and it's truth that a regressing American population that mostly wants justification to begin a war on homosexuality seizes upon to discredit contemporary social scientists / "regressive liberals" as those wilfully ignorant of truth, the most effective rebuttal of Crews is going to emerge some time in the future, and from out of our worst.  
(September 7 17)
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They're of a political faction that has less access to truth, but their brains will allow them to orient on it when it means... well, essentially, the furthering of evil. It's becoming increasingly common for even members of the left to suggest that maybe all social science done since a liberal, caring culture came into being, has been activist first, truth, second. It hasn't mattered before (whether it was true or not) because society, even as it had split into the rich and the poor, hadn't yet begun a downward spiral of total regression, where people who had it them to vote for and believe in Obama have completely lost themselves to Trump madness. Now it matters -- an increasing majority sees liberalism as the fundamental evil -- and unless what we may have been doing was tactical only, active self-censorship (so something that can in a pinch be rerouted), not repression -- which it wasn't -- we may have pinned ourselves. Breitbart certainly thinks we have... that we're an evolutionary extension that became so over-evolved in favouring circumstances, it was left helpless when circumstances changed. 
(September 7 17)
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Zaretsky argues that during the '30s, psychoanalysis regressed... and eventually was taken over by the British school where, like what was happening in Britain and Germany and ostensibly all other nations, the mother-son relationship became paramount -- nations as mothers, adults as good sons. (Crews refers to exactly this to ostensibly demonstrate that psychoanalysis doesn't learn anything new upon the uncovering of greater truths; it just adapts so it suits the times.) If we're doing another '30s -- and the emerging left, which de-emphasizes feminism and identity politics while emphasizing us as a collective,  does look like old left '30s school, doesn't it? -- it might be a sort of Kleinism that keeps psychoanalysis afloat. Crews has killed Freud as the naughty, misbehaving father, but this is all part of a narrative that'll have everything drift over to the resurgent mother again, perhaps. He may have over-leveraged himself in making himself a Van Helsing who puts stakes through all vampires, for one, it seems vainglorious, which is not in step with our demure times, and two, we may be in mood to recover some of these vampires as "heritage" components of, in a sense, making our nation great again -- the primal, mystical mother. The collective laughter at the forgotten memory movement may have played to a time when people wanted to keep their own childhoods out of mind, and think of themselves only as adult professionals, participating in an adult, cosmopolitan world. If we're in mind to bring them back, albeit in a very selective and essentially self-duplicitous manner, then even his reputation in helping ridicule the relevance in emphasizing its importance in our lives, could make him seem traitorous. 
(September 7 17)
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Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Crews and more Crews
If I remember correctly, the way Crews effectively squashes consideration of Freud's initial belief that childhood abuse was widespread and the root of mental disorders, was mostly in how his reaction resembled a gentleman's... he was appalled at what Freud was saying about all the mothers and fathers out there. (This was Freud as almost, well, a snake, spitting lies). Myself, I knew this was one of the things that seemed very unconsidered of Crews, and which simply didn't coincide with what I had learned over and over again: that no society that can be as comparatively foul to our own as the 19th-century was wasn't built out of more abuse, less love, in people's childhoods. It was also one of the few things which disappointed me about Crews, about his possible reach, for he should have demanded of himself awareness of how his arguments might be suited to a contemporary audience which would insist scholars react similarly (and thus make testing of some things absolutely untenable... make particular conclusions that could come out of testing, absolutely untenable)... even if for everybody but him it was but mawkish alarm, and thus would unfairly seem eminently reasonable to him, and also readily due for their own easy ride. 

September 8 17)
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Liberals are having to actually make their case again. It's not something they're used to having to do, and they're bad it. Enemies are noticing: 



I'm a Hillary supporter, by the way. 
(September 13 17)
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I've seen attempts lately to lend support to the idea of the importance of childrearing but also to, in my judgment, isolate its influence away from "the outside world"... almost a Victorian conception of things. The moment someone brings up economics one has a sense that the rambling world of emotions one readily ascribes to childrearing meets a macro of common sense motivations... making a living, making a profit, and suddenly it seems as if counter-balancing factors to childrearing aren't really counter-balancing but more whale-inhale-krill annihilating. You mention economics, not to delineate complexity, but to intentionally isolate the like of maternal engulfment experienced in childhood as anything "the Economist" should rightly ever have to deal with... and this maintained, even by psychohistorians. 

I hope for a time when this collectively-agreed-upon premise has to make a case for itself again, and for deMause's conception of what economics is -- more the large stage where fantasy needs predominate than a sober reality where childhood problems have to be put off until Sunday -- to seem easily as reasonable. This is deMause making the case that childhood, or, as he will come to believe, early childhood experiences with one's mother, determine absolutely, economics. Historical Group Fantasies, Foundations of Psychohistory: 

The psychogenic theory of historical group-fantasies exactly reverses the direction of the casual arrow assumed in other theories of history with respect to the relationship between private love and hate and social institutions. Rather than private emotions “reflecting” the economic or social “base” of the period, the psychogenic theory states they determine the economic and social forms of each age. For instance, social commentators from Friedrich Engels to Steven Marcus have said that the ownership of women by husbands was a reflection of the economic ownership of goods, and that sexual attitudes toward women which use capitalistic terms such as “saving” and “spending” were derived from the economic sphere. This seems to me to state the case precisely backward. What actually happens is that families teach growing children attitudes toward their bodies which make them fear their own sexuality so much that they construct a sexual code which teaches them to ”save up” their desires (and secondarily their goods) until marriage. Later, as adults, they project these sexual attitudes onto the economic sphere and construct a group-fantasy of erotic materialism to help them master their individual sexual anxieties. Notions of “saving” and “spending” of a man’s sperm can be found in the history of sexuality all the way back to Aristotle, and are thus hardly new to capitalism. What is modern is the group-fantasy that money is infused with sexual fantasy, and that schemes for the redistribution of money are used to relieve castration anxieties. In the real world, it is only in the sexual sphere where great numbers of people actually fight off a desire to “spend,” real capitalists in fact rarely “save” to build up their capital as the capitalistic group-fantasy imagines them doing. Thus the casual arrow in fact runs from the psychosexual to the economic sphere, not the reverse.
. . .
It should be emphasized at this point that I in no way mean to imply that human history is “nothing but” projections of individual anxieties, or that history is determined solely by historical group-fantasies. Like all groups, historical groups have real work to do, aside from fantasy work, and this real work is determined very much by the material reality as well as the psychological reality of the moment. When a group has a plague or a volcanic eruption or a Mongol horde sweeping down upon it, these material events certainly effect the history of the group, and the sciences of epidemiology, vulcanology and demography will be consulted to provide the explanations for the causes of these events. What psychohistory can provide as an independent science of historical motivation through the theory of historical group-fantasies is the explanation of what level of response to different situations is possible by groups made up of different psychosexual levels, with different personalities, and different strengths, anxieties and solutions available to them. Whether psychological or material reality is “more important” at any one time in history depends on whether the eruption of Vesuvius or of the group’s own group-fantasies is more imminent.

(September 13 17)
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I've read other people other than deMause, but it would probably make me ill to have to make that clear so that people would take me seriously. Anyway, when people provide this sense of a great multitudinous flower of influences upon us, determining what we think, I always think of chapter 5 of deMause's Emotional Life of Nations. I think too on the fact that social science during our own time is under heavy attack for possibly having emphasized activist goals over truth, that we've had scientists, a whole generation or two of them, who won't allow themselves to see truths that provide cognitive dissonance in regards to the social outcomes they're trying to effect, so their updates, might in a sense be regressions. If the people who've been doing that also are the ones who tend to argue against people's lack of contextualization and are always shaming people for being insufficiently considerate of complexity and also of being ignorant of their own intrinsic self-limitedness, then people who bring them up in arguments don't win as easily for just showing themselves on "their" side.

And I'm certainly for that, because I think deMause is right about single-cause, and about everyone else arguing against it, as not more sophisticated, but those who've scattered off from the only place that counts, and who confuse this essential reality by pointing at the quantity of their acquisition of lesser charms: 

Social scientists have rarely been interested in psychology. Using the model of Newtonian physics, they have usually depicted individuals as opaque billiard balls bouncing off each other. That individuals might have their own complex internal motivations for the way they act in society-that they have emotions that affect their social behavior-has rarely been acknowledged. The most interesting question about any group, one which we asked even as children-“Why are they doing that?”-is rarely asked in academia. Durkheim, in fact, founded sociology with studies of suicide and incest that claimed these very private acts were wholly without individual psychological causes, claiming that understanding individual motivations is irrelevant to understanding society.1 By eliminating psychology from the social sciences, Durkheim laid down the principle followed by most social theorists today: “The determining cause of a social fact should be sought among the social facts preceding it and not among the states of individual consciousness.”2

THE DENIAL OF PSYCHOLOGY IN THE STUDY OF SOCIETY

Sociologists still echo Durkheim’s bias against psychology. Most agree with the sociologist C. Wright Mills, who advised me when I was his research assistant at Columbia University, “Study enough psychology to make sure you can answer the bastards when they attack you.” Sociologist Thomas Scheff agrees: “There is a strong tradition in modern scholarship in the human sciences of ignoring emotions as causes.”
3 Political scientists follow the same assumptions: “Political attitudes are generally assumed to be the result of a rational, reflective process.”4 Most anthropologists concur; as Murdock summed up their view, “The science of culture is independent of the laws of biology and psychology.”5 Those anthropologists, from Roheim, Deveraux and LaBarre to Whiting, Munroe and Spiro,6 who began studying the effects of childhood on culture have been grossly ignored by other anthropological theorists. In fact, most anthropologists today are so opposed to psychological analysis of cultures the distinguished series The Psychoanalytic Study of Society has recently been terminated for lack of interest, the number of psychoanalytic anthropologists having dwindled in recent years. Anthropology, says Clifford Geertz, isn’t even a “hard science;”7 it’s more like literature it’s telling stories. Even those few anthropologists who belong to the Society for Psychological Anthropology have managed to avoid emotional life so completely that their journal, Ethos, which does contain psychological articles, recently had to remind anthropologists that “culture consists of ideas in people, not meanings in tokens.”8

Unfortunately, the anthropologist’s central concept that “culture determines social behavior” is simply a tautology. Since “culture” only means “the total pattern of human behavior” (Webster), to say “culture is what makes a group do such and such” is merely stating that a group’s behavior causes its behavior. Even if culture is restricted to “shared beliefs,” it is purely tautological to then speak of “cultural causation,” since all this could mean is “a group of individuals believe something because they all believe it.” Culture is explanandum, not explanans. Ever since Kroeber launched cultural determinism as the central anthropological theory early in the century,9 tautological explanations have dominated the social sciences as is apparent in Lowie’s claim that culture is “a thing sui generis, the formula being omnia cultura ex cultura.”10 That this tautological circularity has made anthropological evolutionary theory sterile is slowly becoming evident. In fact, according to Tooby and Cosmides, the Standard Social Science Model of cultural determinism has recently collapsed. This model, they say, states that “the cultural and social elements that mold the individual precede the individual and are external to the individual. The mind did not create them; they created the mind,”11 a theory that turns out, they say, to explain nothing:

A large and rapidly growing body of research from a diversity of disciplines has shown that…the Standard Social Science Model is…impossible…It could not have evolved; it requires an incoherent developmental biology; it cannot account for the observed problem-solving abilities of humans or the functional dimension of human behavior…it has repeatedly been empirically falsified; and it cannot even explain how humans learn their culture or their language.12 Most historians, too, have assiduously avoided psychology, going along with Paul Veyne in believing that history “consists in saying what happened,” little more13 or trying to explain history by “impersonal structural forces,” as though such a passionate human enterprise as history could be “impersonal.” The result is that I have at least a hundred books on war on my shelf, and I don’t recall seeing the word “anger” in any of them. Nor does the word “love” appear very often in any of the hundreds of books of history, sociology or political science on my shelves, though most of history has origins in problems of insufficient human love and all of its derivatives. Most historians are a priori relativists, avoiding any attempt to see personal meaning in historical events, agreeing with Hayden White, history’s leading theoretician, in claiming “there are no grounds to be found in the historical record itself for preferring one way of construing its meaning over another.”14 Only the recent disciplines of political psychology and psychohistory have begun to consider inner meanings and motivations as the focus of causation in social theory.15

This passionate denial of the influence of individual developmental psychology on society has been at the center of the social sciences since their beginnings. The actions of individuals in society have a priori been assumed by social philosophers from Hobbes to Marx to be determined by pure self-interest, “a war of every man against every man,” based on an assumed selfish nature of humanity.16 The same is true of economics. As one economist puts it, “Economic man must be both rational and greedy.”17 In fact, Hobbesian models have been accepted by John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Edmund Burke, Karl Marx and all their contemporary followers-their theories differ only in the arrangements of social institutions suggested by the authors to handle this basic rational selfishness.

Social behavior, using these models, cannot therefore be (a) irrational (because all men use only reason to achieve their goals), (b) empathic (because empathy for others would not be totally self-interested), (c) self-destructive (because no one can rationally ever want to hurt themselves), nor (d) sadistic (because people don’t waste their resources just to harm others). At most, people might be shortsighted or uninformed in their social behavior, but not unreasonable, benevolent, suicidal or vicious-i.e., not human.
The exclusion of the most powerful human feelings other than greed from social and political theory plus the elimination of irrationality and self-destructiveness from models of society explains why the social sciences have such a dismal record in providing any historical theories worth studying. As long as “social structure” and “culture” are deemed to lie outside human psyches, motivations are bound to be considered secondary, reactive solely to outside conditions rather than themselves being determinative for social behavior.

Nor have the few attempts by social and political theorists to use psychoanalytic theory to explain history been very successful. This is true whether the theorists have been sociologists, like Marcuse or Parsons, or psychoanalysts, like Freud or Róheim.18 Outside of a handful of psychoanalytic anthropologists, most rely on the same basic Hobbesian model of society, with selfish individuals remorselessly fighting each other for utilitarian goals, rather than analyzing how individuals actually relate in groups in history. The reason for this failure of social and political theory bears some scrutiny, as it will allow us to move away from an ahistorical, drive-based psychology to a historical, trauma-based psychology that can be used in understanding historical change. But first we will have to know something about the effects of childrearing on adult personality. 

(September 11 17)
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But whenever we articulate a time period as beholden to certain frameworks, they end up seeming, all in all, fundamentally limited, and probably overall, primitive. Proof of this is found in how usually we don't really believe it applies to our own selves.... if we try and come with some, some framework that we're operating within and which limits us, it's really only an effort to be consistent. Probably no one would accept what you said in regards to the physical sciences, that older has something over the new, and the only way it can be made to seem true for the social sciences is the way in which I attempted it... to say that perhaps it progressed to a point, but then got waylaid (mind you, if I had to make a defence for the activism before truth that HAS occurred, I could and would make it), which is something Crews has been thought to be doing too, but in his case, for the empiricism proudly there before Freud. Personally I think this "what is most workable" means what will help me manage the particular nature of how I was raised so that I can function mostly sanely in everyday life. The aggregate average childrearing determines the nature of the cultural sphere around us, all constructed specifically so to best address aspects of our childhoods which unaddressed, would prevent us from living constructive adult lives at all. If one grows up in a family that is healthier than others, your thoughts aren't determined by the cultural sphere that'll surround you. You'll abstract it out and use it as building blocks in which to articulate entirely different sentiment. This is your start, but if you've got any momentum you'll eventually find building blocks that suit your own thoughts better, and a new framework of thinking comes into being. 

I'm glad to hear you do notable psychohistory, Joel. I admit I'm starved for people to out themselves as fascinated by deMause's work though, for it's surely impossible for this silence around work which Elovitz has said is novel and deeply fascinating to keep up much longer... there's got to be some break where intelligent people, starved for the radically different, just can't help themselves from partaking in his thinking again. Maybe if more Brians come out to encourage our reading Paul Kennedy or Fukuyama again it'll prompt us to flee to deMause, with ascribed stigmatism for doing so better than the hell of seeing done-over books presented as the salve for the world disintegrating at our feet. We've been using scholarship as lubricant for a sophisticated world that's been pleasant to live in. We at some level know it. Now that we sense its inevitable destruction, we've got to sort through for truth again. The best news for those who think Freud still powerfully useful and even his controversial views, on the mark, is that brilliant Crews had an audience that wanted to know it was okay if they never gave much thought to anything of their childhoods that gave them the chills. Increasingly stripped of a social sphere of their own making, which handled all their undealt with childhood issues for them -- all their own "badness" deposited into Hillbilly nation, then revenged upon, for example -- we'll watch them start seeming unable to function, their seeming insane, and this'll be our prompt to start working over psychoanalysis again. And this time we won't be looking for what is most amenable for our desired activist outcomes, but for what will help us function sanely in an era where the only collective thinking we'll be able to bind to, will have nationalist, even fascist, overtones. Within that, we're just going to have to be deeply smart and infinitely resourceful. 

(September 11 17)
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Ken, if someone was a through and through deMausian, would they be in compliance with all that you would expect of someone to be listened to, or wouldn't they? I'm not sure, but it does seem that s/he would only be interested in the nature of the childrearing someone had undergone, and wouldn't really recognize the world outside the mother-child dyad as being so much a cultural environment, or a historical environment... that is, something that requires a different expertise, a different sort of expert, and who's calling in to have their say would provide a wonderful sense of evolved reaching out, but just the exoskeleton produced by the aggregate of everyone else's childhoods.... it's all contained by the expert in early childhood. My concern is, are we in an intellectual environment where someone could be almost entirely right, have in their own focused research come up with most essential of research, but be overlooked because he unlike others doesn't entwine himself within the larger scholarly community, doesn't acknowledge the intrinsic limitation of only one area of knowledge/expertise? Your way of assessing how truth is uncovered sounds very evolved, it sounds like the kind of lubricant of manners that made our Obama era seem so inspiringly cosmopolitan, professional, peaceful, inspiring, evolved. But I am worried that it's become a useful weapon to vaporize people who in their own focussed research might be digging at truths... we don't actually want touched, because secretly its been in occluding them that we've been able to function so well, so we say to them, how can what you say be so useful when you've spend so much time in your burrow that you've missed the multidisciplinary splendour produced by worldwide collection of ....?

I know you must have deep respect for deMause, but boy you sound the opposite of him. 

(September 12 17)
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My apologies Ken. I thought you were the editor of Journal of Psychohistory for some reason. My mistake. I wish we would acknowledge that going wide is also the way to be taken seriously right now, that it's part of our socio-cultural environment--the way to, not guarantee, but certainly to begin being accepted and lauded. For some of us this "socio-cultural" context collapses almost absolutely to the aggregate nature of the childrearing... to, specifically, the emotional health of the mothers within a society. We see even economics as having a lot to do with addressing that that was within our early relationship with our mothers that, unaddressed by our subsequent efforts of societal structuring, of recompensing for it, could make it difficult to live somewhat independent lives as adults at all. To us this seems obvious, and we get dismayed that someone who might provide very little that is challenging but who agrees with you to find cooperative findings amongst various disciplines, is due to be lauded to the hills. We're beginning to suspect that there are people out there whose real expertise is in keeping their findings within what a scholarly community can psychologically accept... are becoming aces at, really, posturing, keeping things within safe limits, all to keep a very intelligent community that has lived very enjoyably over the last few decades at ease. 

Here's a challenging thing for us to contemplate. Have we been projecting aspects of ourselves we need to reject into hillbilly nation, into white working class men, for several decades, and this gross mass depositing has somehow helped us stabilize for discussions that are so wickedly agile, dextrous, circumventing, and confidently calm? What members of the group of scholars that you favour have suggested that that is something we have been doing, deliberately making one group of people seem sort of shit-filled and horrible perhaps so that our explorations of cultures can seem so exclusively respectful and civilized, that is? All our aggression gets shipped into one, and all our benightedness, applied everywhere else? If no one has, then perhaps this community is a shared.... um, psychotic state... somehow disassociated? One enters this community of scholars, and by agreeing to de facto imply all sorts of violence towards misogynistic, racist Americans, one continues to enable a community that can't see a flaw amongst themselves for they all truly display every manner of open consideration and politeness--they're perfect, only flawed in a way which keeps them human, i.e., part of the flattery. If you couldn't agree to do the former, then you couldn't be counted on to not reflect some of the disorderedness that comes from trying to contain the violence within oneself, that the rest of the group depends on feeling exempt from for their being self-evidently humanity at its highest evolved state--the only ones to be listened to, for they keep decorum. I think what I'm getting at is that someone like me is probably hoping that people like yourself, who seem in the way, are going to have to start showing flaws in how composed they seem for our own say to gain some ground. And that this is going to come through the vile agents, people who are not emotionally your equal, not at all, that are popping up everywhere that are arguing that respectable scholarship has for some time been been covering up a lot of fundamentally sick societies/communities. As this view gains ground, even within (especially within?) the left, and you can't mention "socio-cultural" without drawing suspicions from your audience rather than rapt, respectful full attendance, then I believe we may get to a point where whose view is correct will count on truth rather than having one's having all societal weight behind them.       

(September 12 17)
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I didn't insult you Trevor. Who did I insult? Brian? He said you hero-worshipped Freud, he (has) said I hero-worshipped deMause... very specifically, hero-worshipped. This is not an innocuous comment, it's means to position your opponent so he barely has to be listened to. You knew it, because thereafter you made clear that you have read other people... and your response cooperated in making you seem as if there was enough genuine legitimacy in Brian's stance that you knew you had to work your way back into being taken seriously. This is what an onlooker sees. What an onlooker sees is that Brian is uncontested legitimacy, and that you have the appearance of being suspect, and even as you allay this impression momentarily by making clear you have read Hegel and Nietzsche, you may or may not succeed in vanquishing this aroused doubt about you. He's attached stigma to you. I noticed it and fought back. 

(September 13 17)
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There's an interesting article by Mel Goldstein on "Forrest Gump" in one of the first issues of Clio's Psyche (Dec. 1994). This bit in particular is especially good: 

I am already confused, since Forrest as agent for inter­racial harmony would likely have gotten these liberal notions from his mother. But would this perfect mommy of infinite humanistic view name her son after Nathan Bedford Forrest who founded the KKK? Not unless she was ill­informed or simple. And is it necessary for this perfect mommy to explain complex matters simply, to blatantly lie to Forrest? How are we to respond to the snippet of The Birth of a Nation? Why are all of the friends but one of Forrest's black? Mommy tells Forrest, "You're no different from anybody else." When asked by Forrest, "Where is my Father?" Mommy answers, "On vacation,... That means when you go away and never come back." Worse yet, she brings home the principal of the school she wants Forrest admitted to, and Forrest hears the man's grunts and groans, which he imitates as the principal leaves. Forrest may be simple but his response to being in on "the primal scene," and his sense that his "mother sure wants to get you into school,", that is, whored herself for him, stunts Forrest's sexual development. His first view of Jenny's breasts has him gagging and about to vomit during her first attempt to seduce him. It is only mommy's "my time has come, Forrest," and she dies that Forrest becomes amenable to Jenny's seduction, and unknowingly impregnates her. Now as he lies in bed he does not have to say, "I sure miss mommy and Jenny." He can forget about mommy. 

In early issues, there are also interesting discussions on Schindler's List, and the JOP, as I remember, had quite a few interesting ones (Lloyd deMause's are interesting as hell: total disregard of plot, very phenomenological). There is sort of a depository which is becoming default for people to store their movie reviews -- letterboxd.com. (Almost all of Pauline Kael's reviews are there, for instance.) I would suggest that someone consider pasting reviews from both Clio and JOP onto the letterboxd.com site, naming it under Psychohistory Film Reviews, or Clio's Psyche and JOP's film reviews, or some such, and then crediting particular reviews to particular contributor. I think people need larger access to these reviews. They're exciting. 

I've posted my reviews at letterboxd.com. If you'd like to see what they read like, and what the site is like, they're here: Patrick McEvoy-Halston's Movie Reviews

(September 17 17)
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Trump's a disaster. I think I'm more interested in knowing if these studies will be applied to the working class base that supported him, because while everyone other than those who voted for him will endorse studies which show how mentally compromised Trump is, large sections of the left will have problems if these studies work to prove the working class are mental discombobulates as well. That is, Sanders, Chomsky, The Green Party, The Nation... want to see the working class as voting for Trump only because they were desperate, not because they were mentally ill / brain-diseased. Liberals are pulling back from openly castigating the white working class and are focusing now more simply on Trump and overt Nazis... which worries me. Politically, it might be smart, but in terms of truth it is closer to truth to argue that they went Trump because they are deplorable (with the closest truth being that they are suffering from growth panic, owing to having had immature mothers who grossly abandoned them when they made efforts to individuate as children, as Audrey Abrams and Kenneth Adams point out in their recent JOP article). 

On the topic of neuroscience, while we're doing more aligning ourselves with it, strengthening it, it's again worth noting a huge countermovement emerging now which is working to sink it, sink it as a trustworthy science, for ostensibly being inclined to obfuscate results that work against socially desired activist outcomes. Steven Pinker's always pointing this movement out, with approval, on his twitter feed. Here's an example: http://quillette.com/2017/09/06/genetics-fear-slippery-slope-moral-authoritarianism/   

(September 16 17)
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Is there anyone out there actually against neuroscience these days? I suppose history... but not even, is my bet: given the esteem neuroscience currently has, to be against including its data is to mark one as cro magnon. I couldn't agree more that it is enormously useful, of course, only that it has become more interesting to me how even neuroscience (not just the social sciences, that is) is finding itself caught caught in a situation where it might not be allowed to find out anything that would support politically incorrect opinions. They guy who just got fired at Google was citing science to prove there are key differences in the brains between men and women, citing science that reinforced stereotypes that ran against emerging agreement on the essential equivalence between genders. Some new technology that purportedly can scan a face and determine if someone is homosexual just got canned, because there are not supposed to be telling markers, so science and tech that suggests there is, is bigoted, period. 

And I've mentioned before that one of the problems we should be aware of as we find make our own discipline more scientific, conduct more and more studies, and as we reach out in plenty to other fields, and as we include other countries, including China, as leading participants in our field... is that we've just made psychohistory seem so evolved that it becomes that much more resistant to people like deMause who'd undermine the whole enterprise by saying, since about 1980, there has been massive regression away from calling genuine perversions, perversions, and by a willingness to face up to the enormous influence of the psychological state of the mother in determining our adult fates, out of fear of doing "mother hate," out of fear of the judging terrifying mother embedded in our own right hemispheres, and as such our whole current enterprise might be becoming less nourished without our being able to see it. More satisfying, more rewarding, not really owing to discoveries, but because its displaying all the markers of having evolved, and because the most profound anxiety-producing stuff has been clipped off, by mutual agreement. That was Lloyd's response to Clio's assessment of his "Emotional Life of Nations"... it's not about whether I've got the data or not, it's not about whether I've sufficiently gone multidisciplinary or included sufficient neuroscience, I'll be accepted or rejected because:

Behind all these denials I see (as you might predict I would see) a denial of each of the critics’ own childhood abuse and neglect. The clue came when I gave a speech recently and someone in the audience got up and shouted, “Don’t listen to him! He’s a mother-basher!” By tracing wars and social violence to early childhood, I am “just blaming our mothers.” But a part of us still needs them so much --in the right hemispheres of our brain, the storage place for our early fears -- that it is better to say our social violence is our own fault (“it’s our in- stinctual aggression,” “it’s because we’re greedy”) than to try to remember that we were really afraid mommy meant it when she said, “I wish I never had you!” 

(September 17 17)
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I'll add, by the way, that in the current environment I wouldn't go anywhere near brain science and studies of perversion, or even, brain study and biological differences. The reason for this is that I feel that that any science that can be used to justify persecution... will in the short future be used to justify persecution. I think we're in a time where people want to project their compromised, "feminine" feelings into homosexuals and get rid of them -- homosexuals, that is -- in order to feel better. I think people are so anxious of powerful women reminding them of their own overwhelming mothers, they're looking for scientific justification to keep them away from empowered positions. So publicly, at least, I'd join the Gender Studies crowd, and disavow the Steven Pinker crowd. This said, I wouldn't lie to myself about what science proves (note: it doesn't prove that men are more adept at leadership than women are), only wait ten to fifteen years when we're out of this period of apocalyptic punishment for collective accrued self-actualization, out of this current period of growth panic, when I don't have to worry about truth serving to make miserable and even kill, very good people. Sometimes the best people alive, the most emotionally evolved, do in some regards have to convince themselves of false truths because they've checked with their brains, and they're not yet at the state where they could, for example, both defend and not romanticize people, not increase rights for everyone, while not still selecting out one group (the white working class deplorables) where they can project their own still existing fears of weakness and hate into. This said, the other side, is in the larger sense, far, far, far more awry from truth than they are.

(September 17 17)
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I mentioned about a month ago here that Frederick Crews has benefited from the fact that he has made his arguments in an environment where collectively people have decided to keep some topics, as they say, away from view. He's argued that sexual abuse against children is not some massive phenomena that has lead to mass collective repression, and society decided to weigh in with him: abuse exists but is not everywhere; and is not so crushing it demands repression. What we're seeing now with the twitter and Facebook #metoo movement is a massive show of just how many women have suffered sexual abuse, and I think we're all beginning to realize that any attempt to successfully label this a witchhunt will fail: something about our times has changed, and now collectively were ready to see the abuse we needed for a long while to keep out of view. With all the disclosures we're going to see in next upcoming years, it will be this that clears away the impact Crews has had to put psychoanalysis on the defence, while society went about its daily routine, with all its ills projected onto forlorn groups designated to hold all of our suffering onto themselves.  
(October 16 17)
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Hi Trevor. 

Weinstein had his whole career yet to follow when the Lewinsky incident occurred. Clinton's "getting off," his escaping their plans for him, despite being loaded up with guilt, may have enabled empowered youngish democrats to feel they had avenue to, in a sense, be just like him. He was sacrificed, yet rose again... time for liberal professional class to really stretch its legs, now that inner persecutors in the mind, the worst guards at the gate -- angry old naysayers, representing parental fury at the child's bad behaviours -- had been confronted and defeated. Subsequent high-power democrats might have been empowered as predators after Clinton, because his sacrificing himself for them felt like it brought forward a long period where accusers would find themselves absent all power. Sauron had been destroyed, so green pastures of permission, once again. 

I don't think this story could have come about until today because I think collectively we were all too invested in keeping stories like it from view. It would unbalance us to much, as we would be faced with re-experiencing our own trauma, and our own traumatizing. These predators functioned to ensure that in a time when many professionals would be experiencing enormous life gains that an underclass working undignified jobs, who had to put themselves in literal casting couches or just, in mass, on display for public humiliation at low-paying jobs, would know the humiliation and trauma we felt someone had to experience so that it didn't sit with us. 

This is a deMausian idea; that when we acquire nice things for ourselves in life we are reminded of how our parents, belonging to a lower psychoclass, reacted to our self-growth, how it lead to us feeling abandoned, punished and alone, rejected, and unless its projected elsewhere we have to feel all of this blowback too. The casting couch, with the Weinsteins as the rapist/humiliators, were part of what kept the liberal professional class sane, as they themselves superseded all their own life expectations. This is a perspective psychohistory, or the history of psychohistory, can offer, that will be found nowhere else. 

(October 17 17)
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But "the process" seemed to give life to predators over a long interim. A huge grant of permission where it felt like no one would oppose them, so long as they were Clintonesque, democrat and powerful, as Harvey Weinstein is. They were free to serve their function as those who grossly oppress the vulnerable, so a rising class would feel absent the consequences of growth panic for it having been projected out. 
(October 17 17)
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In Ishiguro's "The Buried Giant," collective memory that has been suppressed, suddenly comes back full bloom. All memory of victimization, is suddenly remembered by all. Ishiguro presents it as, in one sense, quite necessary, but also as fully regrettable, as it gives incontrovertible righteous fodder for the war-intending.

With what's coming out of Hollywood and Washington now, his novel really resonates. For while it seems only good that we are now becoming knowledgeable of the sheer number of predators in both places, and that victims who had felt kowtowed and shamed for years are now feeling some sense of resolve and self-pride again, it is also true that both of these places are seeming more the cesspools of the corrupt of rightwing populist lore.

It is possible that as we see these many reveals and long-delayed takedowns occur and realize, as it makes the previous tendency of both of these high-density, democrat-voting locals to attack "everyday Americans" as the seat of everything that is foul in the world an actual aversion of truth, that it is the rightwing rather than feminism that is best taking advantage of it, we may find ourselves regretting that we are now duty-bound (absolute fidelity with the victimized) to follow this to the end.

Lloyd deMause once talked about social institutions as delegate groups that "act out ambivalent feelings common to all members of the larger group but which the rest of the group wish to deny."  He referred to "the Church as a group-fantasy of dependency, the Army as a group-fantasy of birth, the Government as a group-fantasy of nurturance, Capitalism as a group-fantasy of control, Revolution as a group-fantasy of counterdependency, the Class System as a group-fantasy of obeisance, The School as a group-fantasy of humiliation." DeMause thus provides liberals with a means of understanding why these locations of such absolute resolved faith in voting Democratic, in supporting governments that are progressive and improve the lot of wo/mankind, can also be places where predatory behaviours run rampant. Powerful people working there are cued by the public at large to act out specific group fantasy needs -- to make unknowns suddenly famous, but also the inverse: to act out punishments upon them for their egoistic desire to have it all, to live out the American dream.

Without deMause's help, where will be left, but to agree that these places that were such leaders in keeping democracy afloat have been revealed to be, in fact, the very cesspools the rightwing have always declared them to be, and are in deep need of supervision and reform... lead by those currently becoming the recognized holders of virtue, those loyal to "the forgotten American man and woman," namely, nativists, nationalists, whether on the right or the left.

(October 30 17)
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If one agrees with deMause's work, or Steven Pinker's account of historical progression, it would seem that you should be in favour of people wearing ethnic costumes for them representing "pasts" we should all at some level be inclined to lampoon, if we can't simply dismiss them: all of our ancestors were appalling victimizers; there were no simple innocents. This includes Western, as much as any. Yet you look at the professors advocating against ethnic costumes, and the youth advocating against them, and it's the most emotionally evolved -- in deMause's terminology, where the higher psychoclasses presently "are". So there is no question that even as you'd think every one of us should find ourselves more repelled by our pasts than trying to sustain them, find dignity in them, you always align yourself with the movement where these people are currently locating themselves, knowing that each peak of overall awareness, even to this date, is still somewhat dipped of the ideal that will one day be reached. It is with this movement that people are locating the concept, the truth, that victimization -- maybe victimization, period -- is broad and can't be covered up. It's important their movement wins. 

Patrick
(October 28 17)
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Re: [cliospsyche] Re: halloween costumes

What I was trying to get at was that I myself would be guilty of being a purist -- and therefore, someone actually venturing against my own goals -- if I didn't appreciate that the kinds of people who are actually most close to being psychologically healthy enough to appreciate what I think is the true course of history, note, IN THE SPIRIT I WOULD WISH, at this point don't believe what I believe; don't see history at all like I do. In fact, those who come closest to believing what I believe -- people like Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins -- are actually in my judgment a bit recessed in terms of emotional health than many of those who see history in a manner which doesn't match up with my own. So I support those whom I believe will be the ones who'll be parents to progressives who'll eventually recognize the truth of the deMausian sense of history, accomplished in a manner which isn't about hoisting the validity of one culture over another, isn't about setting up an opponent to vanquish them, isn't about staging grounds so that the most progressive people out there, the ones most interested in protecting the vulnerable, are at a time of rightwing populist ascension suddenly made to seem completely invalidated for being so at odds with facts.

These people -- yes, many of them did vote Bernie, but certainly not all: many of them realized that there was an element in the Bernie movement which felt anti-feminist, and so stuck with Hillary and her absolute faith in professional women. Being a purist, for them, meant keeping faith with the idea of women as fully individuated human beings, reaching soaring heights within the professions. And they looked at Bernie and saw people in a sense being reduced into indistinct members of a folk working class, and so in a sense saw Hillary as a purer representative of what they looking for, not simply as a compromised but realistic choice. 

About not shaming others: Well, you're right. So I don't do so. But there is no movement out there right now which has completely absented its need to displace some part of themselves into others, for purposes of humiliation, in order to make themselves feel less compromised, so we're not going to get the ideal... and so it doesn't stop me from aligning with them. I made a link in an earlier post to a feminist who's approved by the likes of Jezebel, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, who argued that all of the left are using white working class men as these sorts of, in deMausian terms, "poison containers" (I think she uses the term, "shit containers"): convenient containers for properties in themselves that make them very uneasy. Jessa Crispin is her name. I read her argument. Agreed with it... and it did nothing to turn me against contemporary feminists, owing to my appreciation that I haven't seen any group prove capable of avoiding doing the same (all of them do it heavier, and worse). 

In deMause's way of looking at things, eventually you reach a time in a historical stage which has found every way to keep itself from experiencing a massive regressive turn, where pretty much everyone is showing signs of having to deal with a sense that they are guilty for continuing to push for yet further progress. Poison containers become absolute necessities, as, in a sense, no one can avoid being pill-poppers of some kind to keep themselves at equilibrium. Growth that should be making everyone happy, is now succeeding in making absolutely everyone, also miserable.

This way of seeing things makes it so that you never forget, regardless of what comes out about Hollywood and Washington, that these are places which almost in unison vote Democratic -- vote to alleviate pain, and encourage self-empowerment. They may be infiltrated with people that are as compromised as the Catholic Church, and you realize it was only going to be thus as they functioned to help, even liberals, make sure that in any place which promised the absolute realization of dreams, there would also be the absolute, thorough, ruination of them, as people are made degraded discombobulates, broken forever in spirit and self-pride. This had to be Hollywood's function, Washington's function, people there were "encouraged" -- by the broad public, including educated liberals -- to produce the victims as much as the successes, because we at some level understood that we were doing emergency measures to keep a growing, liberal society afloat, when all of us were feeling that we were soon to a time when almost all of us would be turning against what remained for optimism in ourselves in favour of regressive, punishing, mother-country-loyal, rightwing/leftwing populism. 

(October 29 17)
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Quote from text:   As professionals, these psychiatrists have a kind of optics that may allow them to pick out signs of danger in Trump’s behavior or statements, but, at the same time, they are analyzing what we all see: the President’s persistent, blatant lies (there is some disagreement among contributors on whether he knows he is lying or is, in fact, delusional); his contradictory statements; his inability to hold a thought; his aggression; his lack of empathy. None of this is secret, special knowledge—it is all known to the people who voted for him. We might ask what’s wrong with them rather than what’s wrong with him.


(October 7 17)
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We do our own mental gerrymandering and we've already got democracy: there's plenty of places where democracy's grasp is firm. If deMause is right that we're in a period of growth panic where regressing people fuse with a maternal entity -- the mother nation -- and attack those they see as mother-abandoners in their having clearly individuated themselves, what follows this disaster is a period where progressives take the lead again, and where everyone else -- after so much collective sacrifice and ruin -- feels entitled to try and keep up with them, even as it means becoming differentiated from their own forlorn mothers' intentions for them. If we're at 1933, then that will occur in 12 to 15 years from now. We hit hard then, knowing we've got about another 40 year run in which to go for broke, we might forever manage a great contrivance against a subsequent return of societal regression, a subsequent return of societal growth panic. 

(October 8 17)
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They didn't experience these cutbacks -- they willed them in. Voting in Reagan et al. was a sure way to curb the growth of the 1970s. They knew he'd bring some relief from the threat of growth, and he delivered. Democrats delivered too, in developing an absolute distaste for the working class: this ongoing humiliation they were going to have to suffer from where everyone in power ignored them, helped guarantee for themselves they sure weren't prospering. Still, what also has happened in the meantime. For one, it had become socially harder to stigmatize the very groups the working class had been comfortable projecting their own vices on, so slowly but surely one of the "poison containers" they depended on for their emotional stability was being taken away from them. For another, what is being created by progressives in society is the beginnings of the Scandinavianation of American society... an expectation of a very high standard of living which was sure to envelope all of America. We were on the threshold of increasing minimum wage again to make them near living wage, increasing worker rights, expanding to national health care, to becoming egalitarian in a way which would ensure that more access to an enriched and full life was actually available to all, not just to children of the professional class. This is what Hillary Clinton would have furthered for us. This is what she represented. So... once again, growth panic, amongst our least loved people, to break apart something that was setting up for something good.  

I thought you said the only deMause you've read was his first book, Brian. He doesn't discuss the switch from depressed phase to war phase until his latter two books. 

Those you accuse of living high on the hog, those you encourage us to see as demons, are the grossly rich, sure, but probably also liberals who favour a quasi-socialist society and read the New Yorker. They're people of some quietude whom I'm not sure it would be healthy of us to want to see ravaged. We should hope we're not projecting on our "spoiled" selves onto them, and gaining maternal approval by lining up to war against them. And to some extent they were panicking. If they weren't, if growth didn't make them feel uncomfortable, make them feel as if they deserved punishment, they wouldn't have required that much of the rest of America serve as their poison containers, and instead would have reacted to the white working class with some exasperation -- why is it these people don't actually WANT to be helped! -- but would always have kept in mind the nature of their childhoods, and maintained an understanding and empathic stance. How exactly the professional class has been dealing with their own sense that they deserve punishment for their growth, with their own arising growth panic, is something I dealt with in my article, "Reply to Kenneth Alan Adams...", located here

(October 8 17)
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This is the other thing I mentioned last time we discussed this, that what liberals have been doing in university has not just been about creating great careers for the educated but none for those of less fortuitous backgrounding, but redeeming the sense that no matter your colour, your gender identification, your religion, your looks, your ADHD or your Aspergers, you deserve a proud and enabled life. People like Chris Hedges say this was just a means of providing moral cover for neo-liberal economic dis-equities, but I think that America-wide people sensed the truth: with the spread of this "enablism" it would prove harder and harder for regressive parents to instruct their children that they are sinful beasts who don't deserve to live a rich life... children would have picked up on the prevalent atmosphere, the spreading norms, parents would have found themselves cowed by their authority, and children would have taken advantage of the external therapeutic support and begun to grow past their parents again. Hence, growth panic. 

(October 9 17)
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And I have another sort of astray theory on how those living "high on the hog," that is, not the professional class but the more grossly rich, are actually evidencing growth panic as well. I think at some level they might realize they're playing out the part of a social drama where they're serving as those who've abandoned everyone else only to focus entirely on their own insatiable needs, where they're serving as the bad, abandoning parents, so everyone else can be children who acquire love, or failing that, respite from worse harm, in not confronting them too much about it -- a form of childhood re-staging. That is, I sense that they realize that in playing out a social role they've actually limited their own individuation. This will allay some of the claims made upon them that incur with grown panic. 

I believe I sense something of this happening with the professional class as well. I think they are serving, in narrowing their acceptance of what is legitimate thought, of what behaviour, manners, are to be taken seriously, to mostly those their fellow Ivy League friends possess, but to no others, to stifle a lot of what they know at some level to be very legitimate potential out there, stuff that would have enhanced their own lives if they were allowed to be grounded as something to be fully welcomed, and so are limiting their own individuation by serving as horrible social agents of an age of frustration, waste and sacrifice as well. Most of us are trying to in some way show to a monitor we know can read us with infallible, brilliant insight, that we've taken measures to ensure we don't sprout out as proudly and as independently as we might.  

(October 9 17)
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Missed this earlier. Thank you very much Michael. 

(October 31 17)
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n regards to (1): if most Americans had wanted a "true populist alternative," they would have gotten one. The people allow parties to be begotten to corporate interests. Where we don't see this happening as much, is where the childrearing is better -- they don't need the government to seem consisted of "averse parents"; they don't themselves feel as much the need to be, if not "good children," then at least children whose dissent is within bounds, in while recognizing that their parents can be hypocritical and completely self-interested they don't venture any further than that. By other countries you might be referencing Scandinavian ones, perhaps. Yes, their childrearing is better so they're more bourgeois: they take active political participation seriously, and do their part. These people would vote regardless if multi-parties or socialist alternatives; it feels self-actualizing, in that their activity is moved by the kind of motive that in mass can create a responsible society. 

In regards to (2): FDR offered a populist alternative in the 1930s. So did Hitler and Mussolini. (I remember it being said that people didn't go hungry under Hitler.) I bring this up because what FDR brought with him was also a depressing reduction of people into the American folk, that is, an almost instituted demand that people forgo adult individuation to become good sons and daughters to their Motherland. Voting Democratic has for some while been about voting which only marginally empowers the working class over what Republicans would provide (Thomas Frank's "What's wrong with Kansas?"). Working class Americans have not shown they wanted their economic conditions dramatically improved by their voting Democratic. Only marginally improved. This fact works well with idea of growth panic. 

This is now changing, but unfortunately it is changing because at some level the working class sense that we've entered a historical period where growth will not find some clever way to contrive its way through, as has happened these last several decades with neoliberal growth-but-also-mass-disregard, but rather where the THREAT of further growth has ended. We've entered in a sense the deMausian war phase where there will be good children pit against the bad, and the American working class feel they will be empowered -- for, in part, their several decades of suffering elites' debasement of them -- to be the good children, loyal to a mother country and its values that others have been ignoring, while certain select groups -- university professors, students, Hollywood, Washington D.C. New York City... sanctuary cities, immigrants -- will be the bad. 

They no longer need to suffer because liberalism will no longer serve as it has to communicate that everyone deserves to live a self-realized life, but rather only to argue that there should be jobs and more food on everyone's table. No voice with any social credit will exist to instruct people that life is about abandoning what your parents told you to become an individual even more individuated and self-realized than they were. Instead, every voice in society will be instructing them that their fore-bearers knew better. So they now can insist on the jobs etc. and can demonstrate what happens to politicians when they work against a populace that actually wants what they say they want, for the same reason working class Germans in the '30s felt empowered to do so. The get to "out" themselves as those who have always been mother-loyal at a time when the value of the Mother Country is being "remembered "again... and "mom," they know that everyone knows, wants her best children dressed to a proud shine. 

In regards to (3), Americans wanted this to happen, and that's why it occurred. I can get into this if necessary, but I believe I've already addressed it. Those of poorer childrearing wanted to demonstrate in their being forlorn that they had not been spoiling themselves. Those of a bit better childrearing who still wanted growth, who could help enshrine our last few decades as those which empowered a cultural "atmosphere" which told you that no matter your colour, creed, etc., you deserved a fully realized life, had to make sure this growth came along with massive negative counters, otherwise, too guilty. Those of pretty good childrearing still needed poison containers to contain the sense of powerless and helplessness -- as one remembers the rejection that occurred when your first movement towards self-activation was met by your immature mother's disapproval/apprehension, her rejection -- that comes along with self-growth, and so purposely ignored most of the rest of the country. 

By all this I think I've once again made evident how constrained I believe corporations really are.

Sorry for the late response to this, but sometimes I have to situate myself before I can take a full respectful look at what you write, or as close as I can manage to it. 

(October 31 17)


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Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The "Almost Famous'" gang-rape scene? Isn't this the film that features the deflowering of a virgin -- out of boredom -- by a pack of predator-vixons, who otherwise thought so little of him they were quite willing to pee in his near vicinity? Maybe we'll come to conclude that "[t]he scene only works because people were stupid about [boy by girl] [. . .] rape at the time" (Amy Benfer). Sawmonkey: Lucky boy Pull that stick a few more inches out of your chute, Patrick. This was one of the best flicks of the decade. (sawmonkey, response to post, “Films of the decade: ‘Amost Famous’, R.J. Culter, Salon, 13 Dec. 2009) Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey It made an impression on me too. Great charm. Great friends. But it is one of the things you (or at least I) notice on the review, there is the SUGGESTION, with him being so (rightly) upset with the girls feeling so free to pee right before him, that sex with him is just further presump

When Rose McGowan appears in Asgard: a review of "Thor: Ragnarok"

The best part of this film was when Rose McGowan appeared in Asgard and accosted Odin and his sons for covering up, with a prettified, corporate, outward appearance that's all gay-friendly, feminist, multicultural, absolutely for the rights of the indigenous, etc., centuries of past abuse, where they predated mercilessly upon countless unsuspecting peoples. And the PR department came in and said, okay Weinstein... I mean Odin and Odin' sons, here's what we suggest you do. First, you, Odin, are going to have to die. No extensive therapy; when it comes to predators who are male, especially white and male, this age doesn't believe in therapy. You did what you did because you are, or at least strongly WERE, evil, so that's what we have to work with. Now death doesn't seem like "working with it," I know, but the genius is that we'll do the rehab with your sons, and when they're resurrected as somehow more apart from your regime,