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
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
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.
I'm
reading this exchange now: http://www.richardwebster.net/freudandthejudaeochristiantradition.html
September 8 17)
- - - - -
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:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/12/opinions/how-bannon-turned-the-tables-on-liberals-bauerlein/index.html
I'm
a Hillary supporter, by the way.
(September 13 17)
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
- - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
-
- - - -
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)
-
- - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
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.
Link: The New Yorker
(October 7 17)
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
- - - -
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)
- - - - -
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)
- - - - -
Missed
this earlier. Thank you very much Michael.
(October 31 17)
- - - - -
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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