Most of the US media is owned by just a few corporate conglomerates, the same corporate interests who have lobbyists in Washington at a point in history when there are more lobbyists than ever before and more lobbyist money than ever before, the same corporate interests that are involved in the military-industrial complex at a point in history when the US military has been privatized more than ever before. Is anyone surprised that the mainstream media is unwilling to criticize the US government they collude with? Is anyone surprised that the corporatist US media attacks, dismisses, or downplays any criticism or critic of the corporatist US government?
Monthly Archives: October 2010
Violence vs Empathy, Indifference vs Unhappiness
“But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. … be the thrill of victory,the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”
~ George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Below is the list of just recent events:
Attack on MoveOn worker is just the latest example of right-wing violence
Which, of course, is directly related to recent rhetoric:
Conservative media figures have history of violent rhetoric
If you think this is just biased reporting, just consider the research showing the psychological basis of ideological differences:
Brains of liberals, conservatives may work differently, study finds
The differences between liberals and conservatives may run deeper than how they feel about welfare reform or the progress of the Iraq war: Researchers reported Sunday that their brains may actually work differently.
In a study likely to raise the hackles of some conservatives, scientists at New York University and the University of California, Los Angeles, found that a specific region of the brain’s cortex is more sensitive in people who consider themselves liberals than in self-declared conservatives.
The brain region in question helps people shift gears when their usual response would be inappropriate, supporting the notion that liberals are more flexible in their thinking.
“Say you drive home from work the same way every day, but one day there’s a detour and you need to override your autopilot,” said NYU psychologist David Amodio. “Most people function just fine. But there’s a little variability in how sensitive people are to the cue that they need to change their current course.”
The work, to be reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, grew out of decades of previous research suggesting that political orientation is linked to certain personality traits or styles of thinking. A review of that research published in 2003 found that conservatives tend to be more rigid and closed-minded, less tolerant of ambiguity and less open to new experiences. Some of the traits associated with conservatives in that review were decidedly unflattering, including fear, aggression and tolerance of inequality. That evoked outrage from conservative pundits.
The latest study showed “there are two cognitive styles — a liberal style and a conservative style,” said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected with the latest research.
Linda Skitka, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said it’s possible the liberals in the recent study appeared more flexible than the conservatives because the population was skewed.
“We’re more likely to find extreme conservatives in the U.S. than extreme liberals,” she said.
Study: calm people are liberal, skittish are conservative
Calm people tend to be liberals, while those who react strongly to sudden noises and threatening images tend to be political conservatives, says a study in the U.S. journal Science today.
“Individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control,” said the study conducted by U.S. researchers from Rice University in Texas, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the University of Illinois, and the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioural Genetics.
Strong beliefs
“Individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favour defence spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq war,” the authors write.
Study: Liberals are smarter and Conservatives are bullies
The jury may be out on whether conservatives are less intelligent than liberals, but there’s evidence that they may be physically stronger. Last year, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencespublished a fascinating paper by Aaron Sell, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The authors measured the strength of 343 students using weight-lifting machines at a gym. The participating students completed questionnaires designed to measure, among other things, their proneness to anger, their history of fighting and their fondness for aggression as a way to solve both individual and geopolitical problems.
Sell, Tooby and Cosmides found that men (but not women) with the most physical strength were the most likely to feel entitled to good treatment, anger easily, view themselves as successful in winning conflicts and believe in physical force as a tool for resolving interpersonal and international conflicts. Women who thought of themselves as pretty showed the same pattern of greater aggression. All of which means that if you are a liberal who believes you’re smarter than conservatives, you probably shouldn’t bring that up around them. You might not like them when they’re angry.
I wanted to make one last correlation.
Conservatives are less accepting of those who are different and more prone to aggressive behavior. The opposite side of this is that research has also found that social conflict (such as during wars) causes people (including liberals) to become more conservative. So, it is in the interest of conservatives in power to increase social stress (Cold War, culture war, war on drugs, war on terrorism, etc) which will ensure they’re staying in power and ensure the increase of power they already have. This is why the American public and even Democratic politicians were more accepting after 9/11 of allowing the Bush administration to start wars based on deceptive propaganda and to create unconstitutional laws such as the Patriot Act. Fear makes people conformist and xenophobic.
The decades of culture war has also been a part of the general conflict including race war and class war. In some ways, liberals have won in that Americans are more accepting of differences than they used to be. However, conservatives are winning in that they’ve maintained an atmosphere of conflict, polarization and fear. The working class used to be more liberal, but they’ve become increasingly conservative. This is interesting because conservative economic policies have increased wealth disparity. Conservatives are more accepting of wealth disparity and so it doesn’t bother them that the poor are becoming poorer as the rich are becoming richer. Liberals, on the other hand, are very bothered by this. The sadly ironic part is that conservative policies that create polarization also cause people to become more conservative which leads to further polarization. It’s a vicious cycle.
This also can be seen in terms of social problems. As wealth disparity grows, so do social problems increase (including violence, teen pregnancies, obesity, and psychiatric illness). And, as the social problems increase, people become more afraid and more conservative.
The most sad part is that, in the face of all this, compassionate liberals naturally respond by being less happy. Liberals feel more more empathetically. It bothers liberals to see others suffer, but conservatives just don’t notice. Conservatives feel happy even while society falls into conflict.
Napier and Tost conducted a series of surveys on political attitudes of Americans and citizens of 8 Western countries, using previously collected data. Their results affirmed the “conservatives are happy, liberals are mad” findings of previous polls, but income, education, religion and other demographic variables couldn’t explain the happiness gap.
However, when the authors instead grouped people by their “rationalisation of inequality,” the differences between conservatives and liberals dissolved. Republican or Democrat, people not bothered by social or economic disparities tend to be happy.
This trend held for non-Americans, as well. Right-wingers in the Czech Republic, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland were all happier than liberals, on average. And the poorer – and presumably more unequal – a country, the greater the happiness divide.
One may quibble with their methods. Respondents rated their political beliefs on a 1 to 10 scale, liberal to conservative, and I suspect the political beliefs of even the most doctrinaire Scandinavian conservatives would give Rush Limbaugh the willies. But the authors’ comparisons were within countries, where relative differences still stand.
Napier and Post attempt to seal their case with one final point: the happiness divide has grown as income inequality in the US has surged. Between 1974 and 2006, the so-called Gini coefficient has document a growing divide between haves and have-nots.
The number varies between 0 and 1, with zero representing total income parity and 1 representing a total inequality. The lowest (.24) belong to Denmark, while the highest (.71) to Namibia.
Let me explain one last point.
I’m not just attacking conservatives. I’m of the opinion that a functioning democracy requires a diversity of views. I agree with some conservatives. My motivation in posting this kind of thing is that the conservative movement that is in power right now doesn’t represent all conservatives, much less all Americans (when Palin speaks of ‘Real Americans’, she isn’t speaking about the majority). I’ve noticed that a number of critics of the Republican party are former Republicans who left the party as the party left them. Some moderate conservatives are fighting to get their movement back and some liberty Republicans are fighting to get their party back. I support them.
I’ve heard various theories about why the conservative movement became radicalized. The reasons aren’t what I’m focused on here. I’m just pointing out that radicalization has happened. Conservative traits aren’t inherently bad, but any psychological trait when taken to the extreme can be problematic. Liberal traits are just as problematic when radicalized, but for various reasons radical liberals presently have very little power in American politics and aren’t represented to any significant degree in the mainstream media. The Democratic party isn’t a liberal party. It’s a big tent party that includes a spectrum, but overall it’s moderate and centrist. If you look at the mainstream politicians and pundits who are fear-mongering, the most obvious thing is that they’re mostly conservatives. For the most part, there are few if any people on the left equivalent to the Tea Party candidates or Fox News pundits (although, the polarization from the right does seem to be causing a polarized backlash on the left which will just lead to further polarization on the right… liberals can’t win no matter what they do).
Anyway, the problem isn’t polarization in the public. It seems that the data shows the public is mostly in the middle of the spectrum even as the spectrum itself is pushed to the extremes. Where we see polarization is with those who are the leaders of the conservative movement and in with those in power in general. The problem is that those in power don’t represent the public. As for the general public, they’ve become increasingly liberal, but you wouldn’t know that by watching the mainstream media.
By the way, I just noticed some videos about a gene discovered that predisposes people to become liberals especially when they had many friends in high school… nature plus nurture:
Some other interesting links:
http://neuropolitics.org/defaultoct05.asp
http://mentalhealth.about.com/cs/academicpsychology/a/conservative.htm
http://www.workplacebullying.org/2010/09/05/politics_2010_wbi/
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/fearmongering-h/
http://www.polipsych.com/2010/11/23/civility-politics-liberals-conservatives/
Kill and Eat the Rich
The End of Libertarianism – Jacob Weisberg
The End of Libertarianism
By Jacob Weisberg
“A source of mild entertainment amid the financial carnage has been watching libertarians scurrying to explain how the global financial crisis is the result of too much government intervention rather than too little. One line of argument casts as villain the Community Reinvestment Act, which prevents banks from “redlining” minority neighborhoods as not creditworthy.Another theory blames Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for causing the trouble by subsidizing and securitizing mortgages with an implicit government guarantee. An alternative thesis is that past bailouts encouraged investors to behave recklessly in anticipation of a taxpayer rescue.
“There are rebuttals to these claims and rejoinders to the rebuttals. But to summarize, the libertarian apologetics fall wildly short of providing any convincing explanation for what went wrong. The argument as a whole is reminiscent of wearying dorm-room debates that took place circa 1989 about whether the fall of the Soviet bloc demonstrated the failure of communism. Academic Marxists were never going to be convinced that anything that happened in the real world could invalidate their belief system. Utopians of the right, libertarians are just as convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along.
“To which the rest of us can only respond, Haven’t you people done enough harm already?We have narrowly avoided a global depression and are mercifully pointed toward merely the worst recession in a long while. This is thanks to a global economic meltdown made possible by libertarian ideas. I don’t have much patience with the notion that trying to figure out how we got into this mess is somehow unacceptably vicious and pointless—Sarah Palin’s view of global warming. As with any failure, inquest is central to improvement. And any competent forensic work has to put the libertarian theory of self-regulating financial markets at the scene of the crime.”
Balancing the Budget: Honest Questions vs Political Bullshit
I just wanted to post a relatively simple thought along with some questions.
I’ve noticed that whenever balancing the budget and decreasing the deficit comes up what always gets pointed at are social services (so-called entitlement programs) and domestic spending in general. I just don’t understand why spending that actually helps average Americans gets attacked while spending on the military-industrial complex is skyrocketing and while banks that helped cause our present economic problems get massive bailouts. Politicians and pundits obsess over such things as social security even though it pays for itself since money we get from social security comes directly from money we put into social security.
Domestic spending isn’t just so-called entitlement programs (and, fuck yeah, I’m entitled to the social security I paid into). Domestic spending is education. Domestic spending created the internet. Domestic spending creates and maintains the infrastructure. Domestic spending funds scientific research. Domestic spending provides emergency services. Domestic spending ensures clean water and safe food.
Everything that makes our country great either was created by or supported with domestic spending. Why do we spend so much money on destroying infrastructure in foreign countries rather than fixing the crumbling infrastructure in our own country? Why do we spend so much money killing innocent people in foreign countries rather than providing education and health services for people here at home?
What about all the spending that doesn’t help the average American and which often hurts the average American?
What about defense spending including deficit spending on wars, the military contracts, the military imperialism with bases all over the world, the whole military-industrial complex, and the medical costs of injured and traumatized soldiers? What about the CIA, the FBI, and the vast array of alphabet soup agencies and intelligence operations? What about the War on Drugs, the Tough on Crime policies, and the immense prison system with the highest rate of imprisonment in the world? What about all the spending on favorite programs of politicians and the high salaries of politicians? What about the black budget which is so large that no one publicly knows or admits exactly how large it is?
How much does all that spending add up to? Isn’t all of that spending greater than all the so-called entitlement programs combined?
Most importantly, why aren’t politicians and the mainstream media asking these questions?
Zoom Quilt
Right Vs Left: Personality Differences
Here is a video on one of my favorite subjects or rather my favorite intersection of subjects. It’s an interview with Jonathan Weiler who recently wrote a book about the sociological study of authoritarianism in terms of US politics (I just bought his book and so I probably will be writing more about it). This is the same area of study that Bob Altemeyer has written about (Altemeyer’s research having been referenced in John W. Dean’s writing about contemporary conservatism).
Here is an article Jonathan Weiler wrote about all of this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-weiler/from-soup-to-nuts-the-aut_b_762558.html
“It is not that all Republicans are authoritarians; nor that all Democrats are non-authoritarian. Far from it. And people adopt party affiliations for a variety of reasons. But whereas those with the authoritarian cognitive style used to be more evenly split between the parties, decades of appeals for “states rights”, “law and order”, and against ERA, gay rights and immigration reform have concentrated this particular personality type in the GOP. And the consequence of that decades-long process has been the emergence of a Republican party that is, to a remarkable degree, built on viscera — on appeals to anger and resentment, and a deeply-felt conviction that America is breaking down irretrievably and that the way to stop that process is to demonize and marginalize outgroups deemed responsible for that breakdown. And this is no longer a geographically confined phenomenon, but a fully national one.”
“The fact that the more and less authoritarian now find homes in opposite political parties has made our politics almost impossibly acrimonious. When Democrats raise what they view as legitimate concerns about tolerating those who are different, the base of the Republican Party does not understand. And when Republicans bring up what they view as legitimate views about safety, security and threats to our way of life, the base of the Democratic party does not understand. Party loyalists are no longer wrangling over policy differences. Instead, they represent fundamentally opposed personalities, which prioritize, in many ways, incommensurate, values.”
If you find this as intriguing as I find it, then you might enjoy some of my other posts (which reference research about personality besides just authoritarianism):
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/moral-righteousness-intent-vs-results/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/responsibility-choice-vs-obligation/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/divide-and-conquer/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/conservative-moral-order-the-lazy-unemployed/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2009/12/27/psychology-of-politics-development-of-society/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/morality-politics-and-psychology/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2009/02/03/political-party-morality-personality-gender/
Change in the Air: Rants
When I see rants like these in mainstream media, I get the feeling that change is in the air.
Stories: Personal & Collective
I came across various things this past month that taken together created a thought-web in my mind. For anyone who cares, let me explicate (or, if you prefer, skip to the end for my summarization).
– – –
The first thing was an interview on The Diane Rehm Show from a few weeks ago. The guest was Meredith Maran and she was talking about her book, My Lie. When she was younger, she got caught up in the repressed memory obsession of decades past. Therapists at the time were taught to look for signs of childhood molestation and trauma in adults. Her therapists convinced her that her psychological issues were caused by repression and she came to believe her father had done something to her as a child.
Years later after much conflict, she started questioning that there was any repressed memory there at all. She realized she had no clear memories and that she had made false allegations. The response of many callers (and commenters on the internet) was to scapegoat the author similar to how the author had scapegoated her own father.
I was too young at the time to remember that time of our culture. I did, however, get a taste of it having been a child during that time. When I went to college in the mid 90s, my parents warned me about cults which seems a bit silly in retrospect. Through study I’ve come to understand better why my parents and many people had such fears. The 80s was when the Cold War era was coming to an end. Decades of fear-mongering were coming home to roost. Before that time, people were paranoid of commies among us. The commies were gone as a serious threat but the culture of fear remained. The religious element that fueled much of the fear against the Godless commies now fueled fear about child molesters and satanic cults.
There was mass hysteria as our culture shifted into a new era. Mass hysteria is hard to understand from the outside and it’s easy to criticize with 20/20 hindsight. We can look back at people such as the author and wonder how she could’ve been so naive, so easily misled by others. But this mass hysteria included not just people like the author. It included the entire mainstream media and the entire community of psychotherapists and psychiatrists. It’s not called mass hysteria for nothing.
Fears always feel real because they are real even when what they get projected upon is innocent. In the future, people will look back upon our present terrorist fear-mongering in the same way we look back at other eras. Also, what makes fears real is that there usually is a kernel of truth. People do sometimes repress memories, but it’s very hard to know the truth about what is repressed especially when it happened in childhood. I have no doubt that child abuse is more common than it should be. The Catholic priest molestation issue is just the tip of the iceberg. As a society, we are only beginning to come to terms with this uncomfortable problem. The repressed memory hysteria was simply a part of this process of society dealing with what it would rather ignore. When something has been denied and dismissed for so long, it tends to manifest in rather negative ways.
The story of Meredith Maran reminded me of Derrick Jensen. He many books dealing with his personal experiences of childhood abuse and with victimization cycle in our society. I have no reason to think that Jensen’s memories of childhood are false. Unlike Maran, he has clear memories of specific events. It really doesn’t matter to me. The larger truth of victimization in our society is true whether or not any given case is true.
– – –
My thoughts temporarily stopped there. I meant to think more about the connection to Derrick Jensen and write a post about it, but I got distracted with other things. Last night, two things brought my mind back to the subject. I was sitting at work listening to the radio while playing around with my new Kindle.
On Coast to Coast AM, the guest was Daniel Pinchbeck who is an author I’m somewhat familiar with. Near the beginning of the interview, Pinchbeck briefly mentioned Terrence McKenna which made me happy. McKenna used to be a regular guest on C2CAM. Like Philip K. Dick, McKenna had a way of expressing wonder about the world.
On the Kindle, I was looking at books I might want to purchase. Out of curiosity, I looked at the reviews of some of Derrick Jensen’s newer books. I wasn’t thinking about Jensen because of my previous thoughts from some weeks past. Jensen just often comes up in my thoughts because his views have strongly influenced my own views. I’ve been wondering for a long time whether or not I wanted to buy Jensen’s two volume Endgame. I felt uncertain because I have the sense that Jensen’s views changed somewhat from his earliest books. Part of what made me become a fan was how he combined a sense of wonder with a sense of compassionate understanding of suffering (which is also the same combination in different form that made me a fan of Philip K. Dick), but it seemed that his later writings had lost some of the wonder that made A Language Older Than Words so beautiful and moving.
This is where the web of my thinking becomes a bit convoluted. One of the connections is that I had in mind is that of nature. Pinchbeck and McKenna discuss nature in terms of wonder. Jensen also shows his sense of wonder when he writes about nature. The difference is that Pinchbeck and McKenna seem to have an endless sense of wonder (McKenna’s enthusiasm was always contagious), whereas Jensen’s sense of wonder too often becomes eclipsed by the suffering of the world. A favorite middle position between these two attitudes is Philip K. Dick who expressed wonder and suffering as inseparable facets of the same reality.
As I was looking at the reviews of Jensen’s books, my inkling about Jensen was strengthened by two reviews I read. The first reviewer (of Endgame, volume 1) wrote about his mixed response to the book and to the author with whom he claims to have had an e-mail exchange. The reviewer’s personal experience was that Jensen was defensive about his personal trauma which made him question the author’s work:
Now I need to question the entire thesis of the book, since I find I now question the mental and emotional stability of the author. Now I look at the long screeds (rants), the repetition, the extreme focus on abuse and victimhood at every turn, the utter lack of humor, it all starts to add up to something that I frankly have second thoughts about putting much stock in. Yes, the world is in trouble, no doubt about it. Should I look at it all through a lens of abuse, violence, slavery and victimhood just because Derrick Jensen has personal issues which he projects onto everything he sees or comes into contact with? Maybe not. It’s been interesting, but the search for a sane approach to our problems continues, I’m afraid.
A commenter who claimed to know Jensen gave a defense of the author:
I will say that despite my immense gratitude to Derrick for his great work and despite my friendship with him, I sympathized with your post… up to a certain point. I do think Derrick can be harsh, often harsher than I would be in a similar circumstance. Of course, that hardly makes me right… he has experienced abuse on a level I cannot imagine.
Anyhow, the point at which I started to lose sympathy with your situation was when you actually quoted from your email to Derrick. I feel confident that I know what offended him, and I think he’s right. It may have been poor word choice on your part, I do not know. One thing you wrote is, “It strikes me that this trauma seems to be a primary “personal issue” that you are projecting onto the rest of the world.” Now, this is something Derrick has heard a lot, as have most activists who openly acknowledge that they have suffered from abuse, and he has responded to this kind of critique in his work. Derrick’s father, who raped and beat him and his siblings and mother, was an unusually extreme manifestation of the broader culture of objectification, exploitation, control, nihilism, and abuse which is civilization itself. Derrick is not “projecting” his abusive father onto the dominant institutions of the culture when he sees them obliterating life on Earth. 1% annual species extinction is real. 90%+ extirpation of large fish is real. Global deforestation is real. The BP spill and the endless spills in the Niger Delta are real. Global toxification is real. Resource wars and genocide and patriarchy and systematic rape are real. And so on, as infinitum, or as Derrick says, ad omnicidium, which is more to the point. This is not “projection.” Projection is when a battered child acts out toward neutral or compassionate elders because that child has learned to hate and fear all adults, or all men, or all men with beards, or something like that. It is not when a battered child learns the nature of batterers and fights to stop them. Projection is manifesting one’s hatred and fear of a particular abuser irrationally onto others who bear no actual relation to the abuser. This is profoundly different from Derrick’s analysis and activism, and I agree with Derrick that it is offensive to call we he does “projection.”
My own response was halfway between these two. I understand both views, but I think the commenter is incorrect in simply dismissing the power of projection. Any self-aware person knows that everyone projects their personal issues… well, everyone except maybe those who are enlightened. The reviewer probably was lacking a bit of tact and so was Jensen in his response. Both were probably feeling defensive.
Ignoring the issue of tact, I’ve often felt that Jensen has made a mythology out of his personal trauma… which I don’t mean as a criticism per se. Mythologizing of this sort is powerful and can be an effective way of creating a transformative vision of reality (e.g., Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis), but there are obvious dangers. In Jensen’s earliest work, there was a profound sense of wonder that blew me away and awoke me to the suffering in the world like few other authors. However, in Jensen’s later work, my perception is that the rage and frustration has tarnished some of that wonder.
To be fair, I don’t doubt that I’m projecting as well. It’s easy for everyone to get weighed down by life’s frustrations and lose our sense of wonder. Jensen has written about the attempt to regain that sense of wonder after having lost it and that inspired me. For that reason, it would sadden me if the ideology of anarcho-primitivism began to trump that regained wonder. I somehow doubt that any action taken without that sense of wonder will lead to positive results.
This reminds me of another reviewer who was reviewing another of Jensen’s books, What We Leave Behind:
While Jensen is clearly passionate and energizes people towards activism, I agree with Bill McKibben who is quoted on the back cover of Jensen’s book that he is “…occasionally unfair….” I know McKibben’s judgment is accurate because of what Jensen writes about Buckminster Fuller, in which he completely misinterprets Fuller. Fuller was not a “technotopian.” Fuller considered a tree or a dragonfly as the most exquisite technology, so when he uses the word technology he is not suggesting some future machine world; he’s talking about our entire physical environment. Fuller simply shows that by reforming our physical world we can bring out the best in every individual. That’s why Fuller embraced the ideas of Maria Montessori, for example. Fuller’s ideas begin and end with a reverence and awe of nature. Fuller’s roots go back to the transcendentalists of Emerson and his great aunt Margaret Fuller who celebrated enlightenment ideas not divorced from their spiritual underpinnings. When Jensen writes, “If the ultimate Fullerian future did exist, it wouldn’t include humans.” Or, “In short, technotopians are insane: out of touch with physical reality,” he is so wrong about Fuller that it calls everything else he writes into question.
I don’t recall Jensen’s opinions on Fuller. I’m assuming the reviewer is correctly quoting Jensen. Going by the reviewer’s commentary, I find myself in agreement with criticizing Jensen on seemingly misunderstanding Fuller. However, I don’t agree with the conclusion of calling “everything else he writes into question.” I understand Jensen’s biases and I share them to a large degree. I’m wary of technophilia that often is disconnected from the larger world, but I’m also wary of technophobia in that it can imply a lack or constraint of open-minded wonder.
Yes, I see all the destruction of civilization. I hate it. And I can feel that hate in the marrow of my bones. Civilization is unbelievably cruel. There is something fundamentally sick about our society, but I don’t know that it’s inevitable as Jensen believes. I don’t see as clear of a distinction between nature and technology. I find myself resonating with both the views of Jensen and of Fuller. I want to feel the rage at all that is wrong , but I don’t want to lose my sense of wonder in the process. As I wrote in a post once:
Yes, Jensen is correct about how humans victimize one another, is correct about how civilization is destroying all life on earth. And, yes, Ligotti is correct about how humans are paralyzed by suffering, is correct that all of human culture arose as a distraction from this primal horror. Yes, yes, yes. Even so, there is something beyond all of that.
– – –
What all of these authors (Maran, Jensen, Pinchbeck, McKenna, and PKD) share is some understanding of how humans create (collectively and individually) the world we live in.
Maran’s story is a morality tale about what can happen when someone gets lost in their own confused experience of suffering and fear. When Maran tried to make sense (give a story to) her experience, she accepted the story that society offered her. It took her a long time to question this culturally approved story and to explore again her own direct experience.
Jensen’s story of childhood trauma may be true, but that isn’t what matters. The significant aspect is that it has been made into a story, a story writ large creating a cultural mythology of all of civilization. Jensen started off questioning the story society gave him by exploring his own direct experience, but his retelling of childhood experiences made his past into something greater than mere memory.
I find this fascinating. Philip K. Dick did something similar with a bit more imaginative flair. He took his twin sister who died in infancy and his experience of Nixon era California and through his Exegesis and stories he created a sprawling Gnostic narrative of suffering and salvation sought.
So, I’m far from being entirely critical of this kind of mythologizing, but not all mythologizing is equal. Despite Jensen’s profound insights, I prefer PKD’s vision of the world. There is the imagination, but also even with all the suffering expressed PKD seems to take himself less seriously than Jensen. PKD never became a True Believer even of his own mythology. Although he wanted to believe, questions compelled him more than any answer. I’m more like PKD in this regard. However, I do have a bit of Jensen in me. I tend to take myself too seriously. I wish I had an ounce of PKD’s imagination.
I was just now reminded of a previous post of mine (The Elephant That Wasn’t There) where I covered similar territory. The first point I made was about the unreliability of memory:
None of us really knows how much of our memories are correct. Few of us are ever motivated or capable of fact-checking most of our memories. Stories we’ve encountered over our lifetimes (especially when young) can become incorporated into our own personal story… Science has proven that we literally re-member every time we recall something. The more often we recall something the less reliable the memory becomes. We don’t remember the thing itself. We remember our own retellings.
My concluding point was about the significance of this on the collective level:
In enacting our social rituals and retelling our social myths, what kind of reality are we collectively creating? When I look upon a structure like an ugly parking ramp, what kind of world am I looking upon? Why are we creating such a world? What is the motivation? If we stopped enacting these social rituals and stopped retelling these social myths, what would happen to this consensus reality of civilization we’ve created and what would replace it? Or what would be revealed?
If we aren’t careful, we can end up creating self-enclosed stories that become self-fulfilling prophecies.
– – –
Okay… now for the last strand of my thought web.
I saw two videos that used the same phrase: epistemic closure. The first video surprised me because it’s not the type of phrase I usually come across when watching the mainstream media. The clip is from a CNN discussion and the person who used the phrase is Andrew Sullivan (in the last part of the video):
“The only answer is empiricism. You ask what the facts are and you do your best to find out what the truth is. And sometimes the truth is truly weird. It really is. And sometimes the truth is the truth. So, I think that is all you can do. I think the other thing I think you can do is constantly ask yourself whether you are trapped in your own, what they call, epistemic closure.”
Andrew Sullivan is talking about the media bubbles that can form, but he points out that we can always choose to step outside of any particular bubble. I think this relates to why people don’t trust institutions (especially media institutions) as much as they used to. It’s not that media is necessarily less trustworthy than it used to be. It’s just that people can more easily escape media bubbles than they used to be able to back when a few networks controlled nearly all of collective reality in this country. Epistemic closure used to be the normal mode of functioning, but new generations are growing up in a permanent state of epistemic openness and some of the older generations feel their world(-view) is threatened.
The second video is about epistemic closure in terms of philosophy versus science… with philosophy being idealized as the opposite of epistemic closure and science in the form of scientism being criticized.
The latter video is a bit dry compared to the first, but the two caught my attention as I randomly happened to watch them around the same time. I don’t normally come across ‘epistemic closure’ being mentioned in YouTube videos. This serendipity caused me to consider ‘epistemic closure’ in terms of the thought web that my mind has been tangled in.
Science in it’s most extreme form (as scientism) and in it’s manifestation as respected institution is an example of epistemic closure… or, in other terms, the bureaucratization that creates Max Weber’s Iron Cage… which, of course, always reminds me of PKD’s gnostic description of this world as the Black Iron Prison – Wonder vs the Wonder-Killers: two related thought experiments:
Our idealizing and rewarding sociopathic behavior has created modern bureaucratic civilization. Maybe this alters our very experience of reality. In terms of Robert Anton Wilson’s reality tunnels, maybe we get trapped in a specific worldview. It could be the world isn’t as we think it is or rather that the world becomes as we think it is. The Iron Cage not only destroys the ancient societies of superstition but also destroys the very experience of the supernatural. Research shows that thin boundary types claim to have more supernatural experiences. Research also shows that most people in general have supernatural experiences. The Iron Cage not only disconnects us from a larger context of the supernatural. It disconnects our personal experience from society and often disconnects the individual from their own experience. Maybe there is some truth to the supernatural worldview, but we simply can’t see it because we are trapped in a reality tunnel, trapped in the Iron Cage, in the Black Iron Prison.
This subject is discussed in immense detail in Hansen’s book (The Trickster and the Paranormal). Hansen explains why science has such difficulty grappling with the fundamental issues of our experience of reality. I should point out that neither Hansen nor PKD perceives science as the enemy. However, science is just one viewpoint and when we hold too tightly to one model of reality we become blind to other perspectives, other experiences.
I want to add that I’m wary about criticizing science. Between scientism and anti-intellectualism, I suspect the latter is the greater problem. Besides, I doubt most scientists subscribe to scientism. There is an important distinction between scientific method and scientism. Also, there is an important distinction between scientific research and scientific application. Technology, of course, has many problems which someone like Jensen is correct in criticizing… but I generally think of technology in and of itself as being value neutral (although I understand Jensen would argue the opposite). I don’t think Jensen’s luddite anarcho-primitivism is any more helpful than the anti-intellectualism of certain types of right-wingers.
There is some similarity between anti-technology and anti-intellectualism. Both show a suspicion of modernism, of modern civilization… but, in Jensen’s case, one aspect saves him from complete epistemic closure – Playing for Keeps:
“PEOPLE WHO READ MY WORK often say, “Okay, so it’s clear you don’t like this culture, but what do you want to replace it?” The answer is that I don’t want any one culture to replace this culture. I want ten thousand cultures to replace this culture, each one arising organically from its own place. That’s how humans inhabited the planet (or, more precisely, their landbases, since each group inhabited a place, and not the whole world, which is precisely the point), before this culture set about reducing all cultures to one.”
Which is basically what Noam Chomsky says:
Political anarchism is only ever respectable when it includes some element of self-questioning epistemological anarchism. There are no easy answers. And any easy answer that is given by society is probably wrong and possibly dangerous. That also goes along with any narrative offered by any authority, whether a media pundit or a therapist. Answers must come from within one’s experience rather than be forced onto one’s experience. This attitude needs to be taught at a young age. Unfortunately, our education system teaches the opposite which destroys the natural joy of learning, the natural curiosity and wonder about the world. It’s easier to teach kids to be obedient and rote memorize factoids.
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So, that’s that. I just had all of that jumbling around in my head and needed to express it.
The basic point is this:
1) People want an explanation for the world and for their personal experiences.
2) The most powerful form of explanation is that which is told as a story.
3) Stories can induce wonder, but they can also stunt it.
4) Stories become most dangerous when we forget they are stories.
5) We should respect the power of stories even as we question them.
Death of Millions is a Statistic
“The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/scope-severity-paradox/#ixzz12ks2Geww
An examination of jury verdicts over the past decade involving people charged for exposing others to toxic substances, has revealed that the more victims are involved in a case, the less harshly the perpetrator of the crime is penalized.
The study, which also included two experiments in the lab, is the first to show that the bias toward feeling empathy for a single individual versus many — known as the identifiable victim bias — causes people to make judgments based on emotion that are disproportionate to the severity of a crime.
“The inspiration for the study was the observation that we tend to focus an extraordinary amount of attention and resources to crimes that have a really small number of victims, and have a harder time remaining engaged to larger scale kinds of crime,” said psychologist Loran Nordgren of Northwestern University, lead author of the paper Aug. 25 in Social Psychological and Personality Science (.pdf).
The bias, which the researchers named the scope-severity paradox, has implications for a wide variety of fields, including the politics and media coverage of large-scale issues such as climate change or mass genocide.
“It fits well with a line of research that shows that as the number of people who are victims of some problem — whether it’s a crime or a famine — the responsiveness to it, and the likelihood of taking action to reduce the problem, decreases,” said psychologist Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon, who was not involved in the study.
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This reminds me of two things.
First, classism and racism go hand in hand. Most of the people committing large-scale crimes are disproportionately white. And yet blacks, even when the same crime has been committed as whites, are disproportionately incarcerated.
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/institutional-racism-voting-rights/
Second, this study explains perfectly why anarchism, especially anarcho-capitalism, fails in a globalized world. Human nature evolved in small communities and so humans have little capacity for moral accountability on the large-scale. Those in power understand this and use it to control the population. Those in power understand they can get away with almost anything just as long as they do it on the large-scale.
Marmalade 
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