Guest Post: Homo Contradictus - Postmodern Psychological Questions

As you know, The Hankster seldom covers psychology, education, or anything other than grassroots politics and how the media reports on grassroots politics. However, it's all political!

So, back by popular demand, this satirical post by Evan Hanks, one of The Hankster's favorite occasional contributors. I highly recommend visiting his site at OutlawPsych. Additionally, I have asked him to weigh in on the controversy over DSM-5. Hopefully we will hear more from OutlawPsych soon!

Cheers!
NH

Homo Contradictus

Posted on May 30, 2012

 

The proposal before congress to change the taxonomic designation of Homo Sapiens to Homo Contradictus that resulted in a firestorm of controversy three years ago — once again finding our lawmakers deadlocked in indecision — has been reviewed by the Super Committee appointed to resolve it. It, too, has reached a stalemate. The next step in the process will be the selection of a Really Super Committee which will review the procedures employed by the Super Committee to determine the reasons for its failure. It will consist of eight Dimocrats and eight Redoublicans in strict contradistinction to the six appointees from the respective parties comprising the Super Committee.

The proposal was first introduced by Dimocratic senator, Sheeza Throbak, and was originally intended as a personal response to legislation penned by her sister and Redoublican counterpart, I. Emma Throbak, which proposed changing the designation to Homo Digitalis. While the latter raised some eyebrows in their home state, most of the electorate there assumed it referred to the new digital media age. When informed that Digitalis actually designated the opposable digit, or thumb, as the main distinguishing characteristic that separates humans from animals, it was tabled amid the confusion. 

The former, however, rapidly went viral and soon swelled into a national call for action. An overwhelming swarm of petitions generated by internet advocates, Constant and Unremitting Causes, in alliance with Ms.Throbak, prompted the consideration of it by the nation’s decision-makers, though it has since bogged down and stalled in the political process.

I asked Stooges For Democracy spokesperson, Ella Fyno, of the effort to upgrade the scientific classification and make it more reflective of actual human behavior. “I’m undecided.” she stated flatly. “It seems a bit ambiguous, though I will say that I half considered signing the petition myself by the time I’d received the seventeenth e-mail.” She scratched her head. It must be a cheap, generic medicated shampoo she is using, I thought to myself, as I watched the unsightly flakes of deceased epidermis fall onto the shoulders of her Italian wool, custom-tailored black sweater. It looked as if her hair had died as well. I was fascinated with the depth and implications of her response, however, and I ignored her disconcerting hygiene, determined to comb her mind for a more precise and discursive amplification of her widely spaced views.

“Our political system seems to have gone awry.” she observed solemnly, “The ideologies of the two parties have grown so far apart that each seems engaged only in gainsaying the other. What was designed to give dissent and argument a proper hearing, a willingness to compromise in the exercise of our constitutional freedom for the benefit of the greater good of society seems to have been lost.” She considered further and then declared with certainty, “I don’t know whether or not we can maintain any direction at all in the face of such extremes.” I pictured a human head with two faces on it, and I knew intuitively what she was referring to... Read more here...

Trayvon Martin and Staff Sgt. Bales: Can't America Even Just Say We Were Wrong?

I was dreaming/thinking the other day that the President spoke out about Trayvon Martin

The right question is "how could this happen, why, who really did what? etc.

The wrong question might be WTF? Can't we do better than this in America in 2012? This is a terrible thing. Can't we even just say that?

Pew Research: Partisan Ideology (A Philosophical Shell Game)

Moderate. Liberal. Conservative. Republican. Democrat. Independent.  With choices like these, who's to say what the Pew Research poll means! What does it mean to say you are a liberal or a conservative? What does it mean to say you are a Republican, Democrat or independent? And what does it mean to derive meaning from polls?

THE PARTIES
More Now See GOP as Very Conservative - Views of Parties' Ideologies (Pew Research) Nearly half of independents (47%) say their political views are moderate, about the same as last year. The remainder tilt conservative, with 33% saying they are either conservative (29%) or very conservative (4%); 17% say their views are either liberal (14%) or very liberal (3%).

Recommended chaser:
Whereas modernist conversation required a grounding in epistemological claims about why we think and feel the way we do when we try to influence each other, Newman and Holzman see that view of language as a kind of "aboutness" and as limiting. In contrast, they propose a view of language as something we perform in relationships, and they take readers beyond John Shotter's position that all meaning-making conversation occurs in a context of justification and argumentation. They suggest, instead, that new meaning is best created in a shared performance of meaning, and they discourage recitations or negotiation of meanings that we bring from our prior forms of "knowing". --  A Review of Fred Newman and Lois Holzman's The End of Knowing, By Tom Strong, Division of Applied Psychology at the University of Calgary

Hankster Summer Friday: Live-blogging Friday Afternoon, September 3, 2010 -- Let's Get Philosophical!

Last Early Friday of the season.... sorry to see it go.

Here's some of what I'm thinking about this afternoon:

Was the Sixties a more giving time? [SEE BELOW FOR THE VID] Maybe. But more urgent -- how can we develop given the times and conditions and culture we live in? Thinking of taking my own advice... which is that if we are to move forward as a nation, as a people, as a species (and we are ever closer to extinction according the the experts as well as the common sensibility of every day life here on earth....) we need to develop.

Can the Age of Philosophy give way to the Age of Life as Lived or more accurately living?

What are you thinking about on this Friday afternoon before Labor Day holiday (in the US circa 2010...)

4:18pm: This just in from the Upper East Side of Manhattan -- a common NYC scene (thanks Marian)

4:47pm: and now this from Celeste Katz at the NY Daily News -- Big endorsement day for Gustavo Rivera, the man who hopes to unseat incumbent state Sen. Pedro Espada, Jr. in the Sept. 14 primary: He got The Daily News, The Rev. Al Sharpton and Assemblyman Chuck Lavine.


6:28 pm -- ok this just in from twitter  #followfriday #FF: @keder @PragmaticCenter@CentristZealot @riseofthecenter @NancyHanks @erikkain@poliblogger @PoliticalMath
about 3 hours ago via web from  The Pajama Pundit which has just garnered the latest Now THAT's Good Bloggin' award succeeding TheIndyExpress, an important new and becoming independent voice in the independent political blogosphere. 




Ok last word -- NY has a brand new bag for voting.... Check in for information on how this new fangled thang works!


G'nite!
NH

Hankster Summer Friday: Live-blogging Friday the 13th, Inception of a Chosen Nightmare

Ahhh, happy to again be home early from work on Summer Early Friday -- only 4 more of these left! Even the temperature is dropping -- a little...

Here's what I was thinking about this afternoon:

I take a class at the East Side Institute taught by Dr. Fred Newman called Developmental Philosophy Group. Like most of the work that Newman does, it's ongoing to the extent that people want to do it or feel a need for it or it doesn't get interrupted by some more pressing work that can get done that might have more impact in a world faced with some very serious questions.

I recently sent out an article by David Sirota to my philosophy group-class called The Deception of Real-World Inception. I noticed this article when I was scanning my emails (I subscribe by email to a fair number of online publications, both left and right and this one was in In These Times, a Chicago-based liberal-left publication.) This one caught my eye because it raises a lot of philosophical concepts that our philosophy group has been discussing: logic, "the brain", partisanship, propaganda, ideas, individuals, credibility, reflexivity, characters, cognition, dreams, nightmares... "something profoundly relevant to this epoch of confusion"... "ancient ruminations about reality's authenticity"... "real-world application".... " laws of cognition"....

Sirota uses the real-world summer block-buster Inception as a take-off point to his article, and posits:

In the movie's tale of corporate espionage, we are asked to ponder this moment's most disturbing epistemological questions: Namely, how are ideas deposited in people's minds, and how incurable are those ideas when they are wrong?

I thought this article was insightful. Sirota seems to reference a change in popular (Hollywood?), cultural, relative, self-conscious awareness of propaganda techniques from A Clockwork Orange in the 70s to the present, where so many "fantasies’ artificial inceptions" are "now so deftly obscured..."

It seems pretty much fact now that the US military, and the entire western world's military-industrial operations, have been involved in mind control experimentation for a long time and although I have never read much about it, I do know from personal experience that propaganda was a big issue during the Vietnam era, on both sides.

Sirota's article "The Deception of Real-World Inception" evokes for me something like, well in the 60s and 70s things were simple, there was right and wrong, there was the enemy, there was the state, there were sides. People made decisions about what was right and wrong. The war was right or the war was wrong.

Now, Sirota says in my reading, not so clear-cut -- not that he's unclear in his position (he is against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, if not war in general), but he's reached a limit in how he sees the left  being able to win over the "hearts and minds" of American war-mongers, or indeed any Americans who have not already made up their minds about what is right and wrong when it comes to political issues of democracy.

To me this has everything to do with the pursuit of truth and verifiability.  It seems to me that Sirota is asking how to get out of this "conundrum" in a more honest way than many leftists. I think he's lamenting the fact that our "minds" aren't so easily changed and genuinely asking what do we do about that.

I didn't see the movie, (definitely next on my list after watching the trailer and reading an interesting interview with Leo DiCaprio in Rolling Stone) but I certainly identify with the last line of Sirota's article:

 "And because those fantasies’ artificial inception is now so deftly obscured, we can no longer wake up, even if facts tell us we’re in a dream—and even when the dream becomes a nightmare."

Have we -- Americans, westerners -- lost a public self-consciousness about the people's ability to stop war, poverty, injustice, corruption -- the nightmare? Is self-consciousness even a necessary or desirable element? Indeed, What is the circuit breaker in this deceptively delusive cycle?

I wouldn't pretend to have the answer, but I think this is a necessary and desirable dialogue and I'm glad David Sirota brought it up.

Thanks to my friend Joan I. for asking!

Have a good Friday the 13th -- and please -- choose your nightmares carelfully!

NH

Party Politics from a Psychological Perspective

by Evan 

Among human concerns, politics is a vital one – it governs the way we approach our lives in a most personal way; not only the way we relate to ourselves, but the group we most relate to. How we conceive these relations is part of the foundation upon which our realities are based. It should be a vital concern to inspect these foundations closely; for these relations just happen – and not until they are consciously considered can they be changed....

“Hence the god, when he began to put together the body of the universe, set about making it of fire and earth. But two things alone cannot be satisfactorily united without a third; for there must be some bond between them drawing them together.” 

So wrote Plato in his Timaeus in the fourth century B.C. – an intuitive illustration of the way people have long perceived the dynamic forces of life. 

To see how such ideas apply to party politics, read with me as the noted Swiss analyst, C.G. Jung, reflects upon this philosophical notion: “The number one claims an exceptional position, which we meet again in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages. According to this, one is not a number at all; the first number is two. Two is the first number because, with it, separation and multiplication begin, which alone make counting possible. With the appearance of the number two, another appears alongside the one...” 

As Jung goes on to explain, this results in opposition and conflict: “Also associated with the number two is the idea of right and left, and remarkably enough, of favorable and unfavorable, good and bad.” But as Plato observed, there is a “bond drawing them together.” Jung continues: “The One will not let go of the Other because, if it did, it would lose its character; and the Other pushes itself away from the One in order to exist at all. Thus there arises a tension of opposites between the One and the Other. But every tension of opposites culminates in a release, out of which comes the “third.” In the third, the tension of opposites is resolved and the lost unity is restored.”

***********

Similarly, if we look round to see where the two-party system has landed us, an analogy begins to emerge. The close presidential elections of 1960 (49.7% to 48.6%), 1968 (43.4% to 42.7%), 1976 (50.1% to 48%), 2000 (48.38% to 47.87%), and 2004 (50.7% to 48.3%) appear to express a division which may be seen in terms of energy. Frequent attempts by the two-party system to keep a third party off the ballot in many states, the stagnation Congress represents as a result of such division, and the ineffectiveness of government in providing the individual with basic protections all conform to a general trend. 

Of course, no analogy can make it to first base in the mind of a modern reader without scientific validation, and the laws of energy point in this direction. The principle of equivalence states that for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. The law of entropy states that, in an energic system, differences in intensity are gradually reduced to an even temperature, whereby any further change is prohibited. This is how energy works and it is as applicable to social dynamics as it is to quantum physics – or even political processes, for as Jung writes, “The psyche, too, can be regarded as such a relatively closed system, in which transformations of energy lead to an equalization of differences.”

These transformations have been described by Jung in his eighth volume, and one more quote from it (the last – I promise!) pushes the analogy further: “These functions are based on the principle of the exclusion of the inappropriate, or unsuitable, which might bring about a deviation from the chosen path. The elements that “belong” are left to a process of mutual equalization, and meanwhile are protected from disturbing influences from outside. Thus after some time they reach their “probable” state, which shows its stability in, say, a “lasting” conviction or a “deeply ingrained” point of view, etc. How firmly such structures are rooted can be tested by anyone who has attempted to dissolve such a structure, for instance to uproot a prejudice or change a habit of thought.”

You can see now where the analogy is headed: for this tension of opposites to be  resolved and for change to occur, a third viewpoint is required.

Webster's dictionary defines democracy as: “Government exercised either directly by the people or through elected representatives.” The popular vote was invalidated by the 2000 election, and our representatives are elected – but not unless they are first approved by the two parties. Our representatives are elected by the parties, and that is who they represent. Who is representing us? I think we will have to find an independent party for that.

Evan is an artist, poet, and long-time student of Carl Jung. He is the author of "A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations with the Unconscious," an epic poem of psychic development in the second half of life inspired by Goethe's Faust. He makes a living as a contractor in the Richmond, Virginia.  The illustrations above are his.

More News Headlines for Philsophical Independent Voters

Ok ok I admit it there is more news for independents than Bloomberg and the NYC Independence Party....

INDEPENDENT VOTERS

• From 'Post-Partisanship' To Polarization - The Partisan Divide In Obama's Approval Ratings Has Widened Considerably, But Does It Matter? (by Amy Walter, National Journal)
  
• Inside Politics - Despite calls for a “post-partisan” presidency, a recent Pew Research Center study found that President Obama has the most polarized job-approval ratings for a new president in 40 years. (By Sean Lengell, Washington Times)
  
• Watch The Independents - With Partisanship Still Strong On The Hill, Obama Will Need To Keep Up His Clout Among Non-Aligned Voters (by Charlie Cook, National Journal)
  
• CBS News/NY Times Poll: Obama’s Approval Rating Hits New High (By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief, The Moderate Voice)
  

LAST WORD

The End of Philosophy (By DAVID BROOKS, NY Times)

 NOTE: Thanks to Baylah Wolfe for this who wrote this on Brooks' post:

I appreciate what you have been grappling with, as you reach for the critical inclusion of emotionality, cooperation and communal life activity in our contemporary historical world. I urge you to read Dr. Lois Holzman’s new book, "Vygotsky at Work and Play". Dr .Holzman is a developmental psychologist and activist, who is challenging, in theory and practice, the cognitive-emotional divide; Holzman and sees philosophical dualism as holding back human growth and development. Lev Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist who conducted ground-breaking research with children and in particular with disabled children, after the Soviet revolution in 1917. Vygotsky engages dualistic understandings of thinking and speech, learning and development, etc. and his discoveries have come into prominence in recent decades in the fields of developmental psychology and education Building on a 25 year intellectual partnership with philosopher/psychotherapist Dr. Fred Newman, Holzman shows a performatory practice of the unity of theory-practice, cognition-emotion, being-becoming, etc. in projects they have built on-the-ground (in the US and internationally) in the arenas of therapy, education, youth development, medicine and corporate training. Philosophy is dead but philosophy with a small p is alive and growing.

Thanks, Baylah!

If you're an independent, you need to know who Fred Newman is!

... And now there's a website so you can...!

"Fred Newman is the public philosopher who for 30 years has translated the mostprogressive ideals of the 1960s into effective instruments of social and personal transformation. The centerpiece of Newman’s work in culture, psychology and politics is our capacity to create the conditions for our own development.... "

Fred Newman Ph.D. is highly recommended by The Hankster! (now on The Hankster sidebar)