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The Nation's Pulse
Declaring a Sense of Independence
Has Chicken Soup for the Soul replaced Common Sense? Why has thinking gone to pasture? Have we lost our minds entirely?
(Page 3 of 3)
And let’s not forget the labeling of human behavior and traits as mental conditions with biological bases in the DSM, the medical profession’s diagnostic manual of mental disorders. This, says Dr. Christopher Lane in his book Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, paved the way to positioning the pharmaceutical industry to provide a pill for “every alleged chemical imbalance or biological problem.” To wit, the next edition of the DSM, he says, to be completed in 2012, “is likely to establish new categories for apathy, compulsive buying, Internet addiction, binge-eating and compulsive sexual behavior.” Even road rage is already labeled under “intermittent explosive disorder.”
Some necessary Paine here: “The wise, and the worthy, need not the triumph of a pamphlet.”
IS THE AMERICAN populace so lame as to inspire Stanford University School of Medicine researchers to devise computer-generated phone calls to couch potatoes as an “effective, low-cost way to encourage sedentary adults to exercise”? I kid you not, this is an actual scientific study.
Have we lost our minds entirely? We have surrendered thinking in exchange for the path of least resistance that led to instant fixes, from diet pills to “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books and products providing life-improvement fixes for “fill in the blank.” And in so doing we’ve become pawns on profit & loss statements, aligning ourselves with the bottom lines of companies.
Reminds me of another book. Coincidentally, one that happened to co-celebrate Common Sense and America’s bicentennial in 1976. That would be George Orwell’s 1984 which eerily described a world in which an oppressive ruling party — the proverbial Big Brother — controls everything from language to behavior and watches people everywhere they go via telescreens. And of course independent thinking and individuality were simply forbidden.
1984 might as well be 2011. With Big Brother Google capturing the details of each and every mouse-click of our online searches and the white lab-coats of neuroscience running PET Scans on research subjects to help the suits of marketing and advertising gain deep entry into our subconscious brain.
Ads today are now more insidious productions with abstract messages serving as external cues that head straight for our limbic system subsuming the brain’s use of its internal cognitive cues. You know, those mental cues that naturally surface when it’s time to make a decision.
Indeed, a Cornell University study showed that Americans tend to use external cues to stop eating (running out of beer, the TV show has ended) while the French use internal cues (like no longer feeling hungry). They postulate that over-reliance on external cues to stop eating a meal may partly explain why one out of three Americans is obese.
Makes common sense to me.
Like the bookshelves at Barnes & Nobles and Border’s, the best-seller list is heavy with these books. If you are still tempted to reach for one, just remember that the likes of Dummies Guides or the Complete Idiot’s Guides are calling you an idiot not because you don’t know the subject therein but because you’re buying these very books.
There’s even a book about self-help books! Its jacket extols the book’s premise that self-help books are “like fairy tales recasting stories and ideas into essays that people happily read and then set aside when the new embodiment of the genre comes along.”
My point exactly.
Sadly, our society has developed a co-dependency with self-help. And as the original purveyor of common sense so wisely noted:
It is an “invisible ‘government’ we need to declare independence from.” A Paineful observation.
But here’s a paineless way of putting it. A short-cut, if I may:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCsM35H9TFA
Letter to the Editor View all comments (57) | Leave a comment
More Articles by Marilia Duffles
More Articles From The Nation's Pulse
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Shamus| 2.11.11 @ 6:13AM
Thinking is now done by machines.
Simon Templar| 2.11.11 @ 11:07AM
Spot on, observation. As I grow older, I am becoming increasingly aware of the lack of not only comon sense but any real critical thinking in most of the population. Yes, there are many bright and intelligent people. Even in these people, however, I see an inability to really focus and think through problems and issues. Is is 50 years of passive TV watching? Is it our educational system or media dominance..too much information...too little time. Every once in a while I will read an argument on a subject or social issue of our times that is so original, clear, and crisp thinking that I am stunned afterwards that I did not see the obvious of this particular writers insight or perspective. Are we using our brains or have we become so lazy that we can not even recognize our own laziness of mind. Think about it...
Bill A | 2.11.11 @ 11:39AM
You are correct about the laziness of the mind.
When I hear the innanities espoused by some, I have learned it is better to ask questions rather than put forth a differing viewpoint.
Usually, something like" Well did you consider .......(fill in the blank)". At this point you can actually see their mind spinning as they actually have to consider a different point of view.
I suspect this behavior, lack of critical thinking, is a reflection of the prevelance of multi-tasking, whose primary goal is to do as many things as possible with the least amount of effort. The quality of the outcome seems to be unimportant to such an individual. Fortunately, we here will continue to think !
Appleby| 2.11.11 @ 6:25AM
I just saw an advertiement -- I dont know for what -- in which a smug-faced teenaged girl congratulated herself for sitting on a party bus with TWO, count them TWO binkies: a smartphone AND an iPad -- which, she said smugly, made her MUCH better than the dolts around her who were snickering at a stupid movie being broadcast to the bus.
My own instant response was, *Yep, binkies are MUCH to be preferred to interacting, much less TALKING, with the people sitting around you!*
The reason people have become helpless dolts is that they never talk to anybody face to face (in words longer than 4 letters, about anything but what was on TeeVee last night) -- and even worse, they have nothing to talk about. Nobody reads anything but magazines or Oprah Books; nobody knows anything but what happened on *reality* TeeVee; and even worse, nobody REMEMBERS anything! Try to remind people about what happened when the Shah was kicked out of Iran by Jimmy Carter and you get total blankness. Iran has ALWAYS been just the way it is today!
George Orwell thought they would have to hire people to erase the past. Instead we have invented the Langoliers, who EAT the past. Nobody knows anything because there is no longer anything thing to know...or even worse, anybody to ask.
Mark| 2.11.11 @ 8:57AM
Appleby writes: "My own instant response was, *Yep, binkies are MUCH to be preferred to interacting, much less TALKING, with the people"
So says the guy who is responding to an article on the Internet.
Brian Mc| 2.11.11 @ 9:35AM
Mark,
I must disagree. There is a difference between having a cup of joe while waiting to go to work and interracting with others...and getting to work and having a customer shove a "Don't interrupt" finger in my face as they click away...after all, they'd have me believe the fate of the world is at stake.
Pelligrino| 2.11.11 @ 10:56AM
I must also vigorously disagree, Mark.
There can be lots of situations in life, particulary for the ill, the infirm, or just no longer that mobile in life. Goodness, right now we again have communities where the 'smart move' is to stay inside because roads are impassible and public transport not working due to excessive snowfall.
But a teen on a bus should find plenty of interaction -- normally.
However, like that teen, perhaps sometimes you and I long for a decent, deeper, truly thoughtful conversation and CANNOT find it. No one around us wants to "engage" because they just cannot be bothered.
So what can we do? We turn to a book, perhaps now a Kindle, or an iPad.
This is how, for example, most of us know that the tenets of the Tea Party Movement have staying power. MANY have 'met' anonymously on the internet initially because PC-speak did not permit it in our classrooms, schools, libraries, office spaces, even churches, etc.
Plus, if you look at what Appleby writes, is not this line facetious?
Stammon| 2.11.11 @ 10:06AM
My 15 year old son is "Lord of the X-Box" to his mother's worry. But I have listened and asked who he talks to while playing. He has friends all over the world who band together and play. Groups within groups. Some he knows, like friends from school, some not like the soldier overseas who takes a break from military life to play X-Box with other kids.
I think it's a new world, and we have been left on the shore of the old one.
idalily| 2.11.11 @ 3:21PM
I think the point to be made to young people these days is that people who you interact with on line but have never met and never will meet are not your "friends." We have diluted this term beyond any recognition (thank you Facebook). There is no such thing as an online friend. Pen pal, maybe, but kids need to make real friends. I find most young people today awful at any sort of face-to-face interaction.
Mike W| 2.11.11 @ 10:54AM
You had a good post until the part about Carter kicking the Shah of Iran out of his country. Didn't really happen that way but still a good post.
Appleby| 2.11.11 @ 11:20AM
Carter brought him to America (or gave him the opportunity to come to America and hide out) which amounted to the same thing, I think.
Simon Templar| 2.11.11 @ 11:13AM
That was an awesome observation. You know that almost sounds like that could be an excellent sci-fi story..Langoliers, who EAT the past.....Nobody knows anything because there is no longer anything thing to know...or even worse, anybody to ask. Yes and a small, strugling underground resistance movement that trys to remember.
Appleby| 2.11.11 @ 11:22AM
Somebody made a movie about the Lamgoliers, which was a confused and stupid mess otherwise; I have always wanted to re-write that story as I think it explains a lot about today's world.
Of course "Logan's Run" and "Farenheit 451" and the father of them both, "Brave New World" have each contributed part of the story.....
stu| 2.11.11 @ 6:43AM
I can proudly say that I never read a 'self' help book of my own volition, however over the years in my profession it became de rigeur to conduct seminars to read and discuss such tomes as "Who Moved My Cheese?" and so forth. In my experience this track produced the same empty results we see in modern education, everyone feels really good about themselves and their interactions but still can't do the math...
Herb| 2.11.11 @ 7:15AM
My self is beyond help. Life is simple.
michigander_sandusky| 2.11.11 @ 7:45AM
"Common sense is a very uncommon commodity." J. W. McGarvey
beebop| 2.11.11 @ 10:13AM
"Common sense is its own oxymoron .... " me.
Louis Jenkins| 2.11.11 @ 8:14AM
Many years ago I read "Men are from Mars, and Women are from Venus." A self help book for the romantically lost. Then I realized that self help books only bring society closer to a single "norm." Far better to be your own individual, even if it is far from the self help books. Variety, afterall, is the spice of life.
Lullabys, Legends and Lies| 2.11.11 @ 8:54AM
There's probably a good reason why we don't come with owners manuals, or parent manuals, we're supposed to figure this all out on our own.
Melvin| 2.11.11 @ 9:22AM
It all boils down to the, "R" word. It is much easier to cleanse ones conscience of any wrongdoing by declaring, "It was not my fault, it was the author of the self-help book, who is at fault. I was merely following the author's instructions."
Much the same reason that politicians hire consultants. Blame everything that goes wrong on them.
Maybe people like to be coddled. A number of years ago. I saw two families come into an eatery. It appeared to be a mommies lunch with the kiddies, but some of these offspring were not kiddies but more like around 12-13.
I had to do a dbl. take on this picture because one of the mothers got up and cut up her son's food. Up to this point this kid looked and acted like any other normal kid at that age.
The kid didn't even make an attempt to relay to his mother that he was perfectly capable of cutting up his own food.
I dunno, maybe it was because that there was a butter knife involved and this marching mommy had a zero tolerance of weapons that could be used for mass destruction.
Pelligrino| 2.11.11 @ 11:26AM
Melvin, someone needs to slap that mom and 12-year old pronto. (Wasn't that subchapter in the 'Real Men are Supposed to be Like John Wayne' self help book?)
This same mom will be filling out all his online college applications and financial aid requests just 6 short years from now. (And obtaining his work-study internship between his undergrad sophomore and junior year)
Doctor Right| 2.11.11 @ 10:21AM
Ever tried to satiate your thirst after running 10 miles in 90+ degree heat with a banana?
'Nuff said...
Petronius| 2.11.11 @ 11:05AM
The more important issue is who is behind all of this. The people who write and market this crap aren't selling any solutions to incompetence. They are pushing their versions of what should be socially acceptable. And they know that being accepted is precisely what every clueless weenie wants.
Pelligrino| 2.11.11 @ 11:12AM
I am fully with the author, Ms. Duffles, so long as we make distinctions on self-help literature.
I am a proponent of self-help for household maintenance, automobiles, gardening, personal financial practices (to an extent), and things like bicycle repair. And....not to forget helpful recipes in the kitchen for the culinary-challenged.
But if we are talking books on how to be a better person, behave as a responsible adult, acceptable in the office, be a manager! and on and on, NO. As a Christian I find it often a bit nauseating to see the 23rd successive "helpful" book from the same Christian author on a Christian bookstore's shelves. That many books authored by you? (Condense it, man, please)
Technical help for do-it-yourselfers is worthwhile; the drivel like Dr. Phil spews, no.
I am suprised that Dr. Laura did not make it into this article. While often agreeing with what she replied to her callers, I found it very troubling that people would have to ask her those basic life questions.
I actually looked up to see if "Helpful Hints from Heloise" is still around. Yes actually. This I'll take when it comes to stubborn stain removals, tricks for 'speed! ironing,' back-up uses for detergent, the cleaning properties of toothpaste....
Appleby| 2.11.11 @ 11:25AM
You can take water marks off your furniture with a mix of Crisco and salt. Rub it in thoroughly and leave it overnight, and tomorrow wax and polish the furniture and the mark will be gone. This is especially helpful if you have the guys over to watch NA$CAR while your wife is gone for the weekend.
Pelligrino| 2.11.11 @ 11:35AM
Yes indeed! Thank you very much. Now, that's what I'm talkin' about. The helpful tricks of the trade that you'd want to learn from grandma or grandpa if they were still around. (Or they told you but you were too busy not listenin')
Thank you, good lady from K-stan!
Um, well, I'll ask: Any ideas with what might be good, practical uses for excessive kitty litter?
beebop| 2.11.11 @ 12:06PM
too late! I would recommend against having a cat.
Tooth paste with a mild abrasive works well on that water spot and also removing the paint left on your bumper by the errant driver .... cheaper than body work to boot.
Appleby| 2.12.11 @ 7:44AM
Up here we use it instead of salt to de-slip the driveway; its also good to carry some in the trunk of your car in case you need traction or something to soak up oil or spilled fluids after an accident. You can mix it in with garden soil that needs aereation too, I think.
By the way, if you have expired medications, you can mix them in with your USED cat litter instead of flushing them into the water table (pour water in the bottle, shake well, and dump into the cat litter)-- and cut up your old credit cards and dump them into the used cat litter too. Nobody is going to dig through THAT looking for useful stuff.
Lord Karth| 2.11.11 @ 11:21AM
No one ever said modern Americans qualified as intelligent life.
JimH| 2.11.11 @ 11:47AM
Self help books are nothing new. They've been around as long as the printing press; probably longer.
ncatty| 2.11.11 @ 11:50AM
You all need a good "life coach"!
missbosslady| 2.11.11 @ 12:31PM
Life coach!!!!
My new favorite! Incredible!
My neighbor, a very nice lady, but a person with a totally chaotic life, messy house, 40 cats, internet boyfriends and general crazy wierdness has recently designated herself a 'life coach'. I could hardly keep a straight face when she told me.
Only Republican at Woodstock| 2.11.11 @ 5:54PM
Those who can do, those who can't, coach.
mjfin| 2.11.11 @ 12:00PM
Good Lord, Marilia, you read too much of this stuff! But I sympathize . . .
fundamentalist| 2.11.11 @ 1:17PM
Actually, the first self-help book was Solomon's "Proverbs" written about 1,000 BC.
Public relations research reveals that there are two types of people: one makes decisions for himself and the other appeals to authority. Most of us use a combination, emphasizing one sometimes and the other at different times.
We all appeal to authority on subjects we don't feel expert in. For example, I rely on authorities to tell me about brain surgery and sub-atomic particles. This is the rational division of labor. I don't have the time or the interest to investigate these things for myself.
Human nature has always been this way, so why has the self-help literature grown so rapidly in the last 50 years? Because we are wealthier and can afford to buy more of them.
Conservative School Counselor| 2.11.11 @ 2:02PM
I highly recommend Walker Percy's mock self-help book, "Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book." It is absolutely brilliant. It is like C. S. Lewis' "The Abolition of Man" in a comedic and satirical format.
Paul Revere| 2.11.11 @ 1:24PM
I have one self-help book on my coffee table. It is titled "Holy Bible".
Pat| 2.11.11 @ 1:38PM
Before Starbucks there was Joe’s Bar and there stood Joe smiling behind his bar, serving beer to guys who had just ended their shift. Before self-help books, there was wise old Joe who knew his patrons didn’t come for his advice or to buy instruction guides or to receive a boost to their self-esteem – what they really came for was the companionship, simple as that. And the more our modern life isolates us, the more desperately we search out human interaction.
There was a time when we lived in small towns, a time when folks who knew each other went all the way back to those playground days - as the theme song on the television series “Cheers” advised, we should seek a place “where everyone knows your name”.
When we lost the comfort of close community, we didn’t realize we had lost something we vitally need. Ironically, no one actually knows precisely why we need it. And a visiting ET viewing human beings for the first time would immediately observe what humans enjoy most is frequent meetings in order to make noise together. We like to voluntarily pack 80,000 of us into a large stadium and enjoy hours of group yelling – all alone we could go into the woods and yell for days, but, somehow, it isn’t the same as being surrounded by friendly strangers shouting right along with us.
Folks don’t really need “Running for Dummies” to teach us how to run, we already know how – what we want from the book is to feel part of a group, to feel connected to our fellowman , something modern life increasingly denies us. And folks aren’t reading this author’s essay to critique the foibles of self-help books, we’re actually reading this essay to experience a sense of connection.
glenda bayless| 2.11.11 @ 1:38PM
A brave beacon of lighted intelligence and warmth is Ms. Duffles, much needed in our culture of fearfully following the wrong leader.
Richard Baker| 2.11.11 @ 2:09PM
My Nurse wife and her friends wanted me to read a gazillion books about how to raise our kids. I refused and used common sense instead. It seems the Boomers don't have a clue how to DO anything without an adviser/author. Look at the results of the Boomer ideas in our society and ask yourself: Were our parents ideas really that bad? I think not. Paine requires one to think deeply and my generation can't be bothered.
John II| 2.12.11 @ 4:02PM
Actually--no. Paine himself was a clever wordsmith, but, as well, a shallow rationalist--which is to say, a child of the Enlightenment.
Several responses seem to me at least to imply what I was going to say in response to Duffles's chirpy post. The self-help obsession (when, as already mentioned, applied to the self rather than to a particular how-to task in a very complex techie world) is a consequence of weak faith. Put aside attachment to an abiding and traditional religious sensibility, and the heart starts to feel a vacuum in need of stuffing. Whence the pathetic grasping at some kind of substitute for genuine moral authority.
Paine's "Common Sense" was itself a precursor to the genre. For a more extensive comment along lines that I wouldn't completely accept but nonetheless find aptly thought-provoking, see Renaissance Nerd below.
And now back to "Babette's Feast" (1987), proof that the motion picture, premier form of modern literary and philosophical reflection, is capable of getting it right.
Renaissance Nerd | 2.11.11 @ 2:30PM
I was liking this article until I got to the part about eat nothing 'Lucy' wouldn't eat. Come ON! NOTHING exists today that any of these ancestors ate. The only difference between 'natural' vegetables and a chemical is that in the vegetables the process was trial-and-error, and poisoned lots of people while they tried 'cause they were hungry. The animals have changed dramatically too. Very little resemblance between an ancient aurochs and a Holstein cow. The idea that there's any 'natural' anything is preposterous, unless you accept the fact that a chemical synthesized in a lab is every bit as natural as one created by pollens floating around randomly and creating blood oranges.
Common sense in the philosophical sense means those things that we can universally sense. It's a starting point that leaves aside the airier fancies of Prussian and French philosophy about the illusory nature of life. It has indeed been lost, because today feelings are more important than senses. Feelings are worthless as guides, and senses only go so far, but at least if we rely on the senses as a basis we have some common ground, hence the term 'common sense.' Of course it carries a little of the meaning it often is given today, but the idea that sense means wisdom has very little basis in the Scottish Enlightenment or anywhere else. Paine misused the word in many instances, because if you replace 'common sense' with 'common wisdom' the difference is obvious. He argued that his beliefs OUGHT to be one of the common senses, but it doesn't follow that he was right.
This is not to say I like self help books. I actually wouldn't know; I've read exactly one, and it was a gift. At risk of sound fundamentalist I believe that rather than returning to a mythical common wisdom it would be best to simply go to the sources, the fundament, if you like. The Scottish Enlightenment is an excellent distillation of many earlier beliefs, and has proven excellent in itself, but there's nothing wrong with getting as much of a classical education as possible, which is what makes 'common wisdom' more than exceedingly rare. Taking advantage of human nature to produce better human beings is the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment and its earlier sources, but it rests on the foundation of a belief that common senses are rooted in a common (ie universal) human heritage. That is what has been demolished by the Romanticist movement of which Paine was a part; see some of his other work if you doubt me. I particularly enjoyed his supposed refutation of the Bible. Today many people believe that their unique experiences mean that they cannot be understood at all by anyone else. We constantly hear this in person and in the media, to the point where somebody who has not had an identical experience is prohibited from comment, because understanding is so impossible. This is solipsism in practice, the antithesis of common sense. Attacking the branches, as you have done, is pointless. Hit the root if you want the poisonous tree to fall. Otherwise you're in the same boat as self-help authors, who promise magic formulas without ever addressing the roots of the problems they pretend to solve.
The core belief of the Romanticist movement is the efficacy of magic formulas. Whether Jacobin, Communist, Nazi or 'progressive,' that is at the center of all, this idea that any human being can be wise enough to 'fix' everything about every other human being. This outrageous conceit is found everywhere, and the basis of any common wisdom ought to be a rejection of this idea. There is not now, there never was, and there will never be a magic formula that will fix everything and make the world a paradise. Once that truth is swallowed self help books can go back to teaching about the mechanical arts.
Help your SELF?| 2.11.11 @ 3:14PM
What SELF needs help, anyway?
Life is a smorgasbord, and every self ALWAYS
helps him or her self.
Also, before the Walmart-ization of the economy,
there were always many people who’s job was to
HELP other selves---witness those old gas stations
with attendants who checked your oil and did your
windows.
Nowadays, one is on one’s own!
Just like in the flung words in this article, we are ALWAYS helping our SELF to “food” for thought and/or body, and especially feelings.
As the Upanishads truthfully say, wherever there is a self VERSES an other, fear arises.
So, I’m afraid the book on self help is always open.
Nick| 2.11.11 @ 4:01PM
Very provocative article. While I agree that people who would abdicate their own judgment to "experts" like Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, Dr. Laura, et al. are making a huge mistake, and may be impairing their own ability to function as independent actors, I do admire people who are constantly seeking to improve by availing themselves of the knowledge and experience of others. As Daniel Gilbert illustrates so well in his book, "Stumbling on Happiness," most people are incapable of accurately estimating how happy or unhappy they will be as the result of changes in the cirrcumstances of their lives and often a more reliable gauge of this is the experience of others because, much as we like to believe that we are unique, we are all pretty much the same.
Only Republican at Woodstock| 2.11.11 @ 5:58PM
I have a great idea for two self help books. Chicken Soup for Dummies and Microsoft Windows for the Soul.
jolizoom| 2.11.11 @ 8:00PM
1) Lucy was a hoax.
2) Red dye is evil. I just discovered a sensitivity to it... that is, IT STINKS! It really does smell nasty. Try eating real food for awhile, and you will notice the chemical taste in fake food.
3) My kids don't eat Chef Boyardee. Mom tried to serve it once, and they all turned up their noses. I guess I have corrupted them with real food--although they're happy to have candy any time they can wrap their greedy little fists around it.
4) Phone calls to get sedentary people off the couch? Seriously? Just bring the phone with you. It's CORDLESS!
nachtwachter| 2.11.11 @ 9:06PM
An interesting read - just curious, Marilia, did your research tell you how many years older generations have been lamenting the "good old days" and whining about younger generations?
(/pedantic mode on - 700BC + 1000 years = 300 AD - a little before Mr. Franklin's time ;) /pedantic mode off)
Yosemeti Sam| 2.11.11 @ 9:50PM
To Ms. Marilia Duffles who wrote:
" ... I don't even need to go back 3.2 million
years ago when our ancient Australopethicene
ancestor Lucy roamed the Kenyan savannah ...."
OUR?
Yo, she be YOUR ancestor - NOT mine!
I don't have a genealogical tree that stretchs to the moon.
zinka milanov| 2.12.11 @ 12:08AM
"I wouldn't eat anything Lucy did not eat." But Lucy got herself blasted on one spoonful of Vitameatavegamine which was a takeoff on Geritol and Hadacol, two wondergoops of the early 50s. And Tom Paine in England trained as a corset maker, and doctors even back then were telling women to quit squeezing their guts into those d...mn things."
Stan REdmond| 2.12.11 @ 10:58AM
Nothing has changed. Only the delivery method.
The good old days sucked! Disease, toil, misery... Why hunt for food and toil in a farm only to get sick from a bad prawn and die from dysentary when an entire system has been built to deliver me safely and cheaply.
The mindless endless toil of farm work and factory jobs distracted our minds with physical pain and boredom that rendered "self help" unnecessary. When I hear people lament "No one reads anymore" I have to wonder, was the butcher who worked 12 hours pick up Plato after work?
Now our minds are free (some might say trapped) by thoughts because our physical jobs are gone. The luxurious lifestyle of even our most poor in the USA has no hardships so we invent them and the Oprahs and Michelle Obamas of the world cash in on it.
Dependency exempts us from responsibility and that's an easy way to live and people have lived that way throughout history.
Open Minded Sceptic| 2.12.11 @ 4:31PM
I quote G.K. Chesterton (loosely):
"If you get too open-minded, your brains will fall out."
bee free| 2.13.11 @ 12:54AM
"Understand, first radio, and then television
were made mandatory in Britain begining in the
1920's with the aim of first standardizing, collectivizing and then humiliating and degrading
the MASS audience."
-ALAN WATT
RED Ice interviews
(online)
In 2011, in Britain and everywhere else
we must admit ---it worked, like a dream...
zinka milanov| 2.13.11 @ 12:46PM
There was a govt survey one time listing the things that constituted "poverty" in the US; one aspect of being "poor" was No computer in the house. On a country music talk show one time the singers in a roundtable were going on about how hard up their families had been: Vince Gill said "We didn't get cable till I was twelve."
Steven Earl Salmony | 2.14.11 @ 10:10AM
Why does democracy prevail? What is the source of democracy’s lasting value?
To psychologists like myself the terms superego, ego and id are commonplace and refer to the remarkable institutions of an individual’s mind. In a similar way the words judiciary, executive and legislature are ever so familiar signifiers for political scientists and many others of the national institutions which organize our country into a democracy. That these great systems of “mind” and “state” may emanate from a common, all- too-human nature has been discussed many times heretofore.
These brief comments attempt to extend that discussion and are a condensed presentation of a way in which the recognizable institutions composing the mind and the state might be objectively correlated. I present it now here because it seems somehow right, and possibly useful, for human beings to communicate their perceptions about basic aspects of our shared reality. As an example, consider how the judicial branch of government possesses certain essential features of the mind’s superego; that the executive branch functions much like the ego; and of course the ways the legislature most directly represents the wishes and needs of human beings everywhere and reflects the id.
The nature and significance of the relationship between mind and state has been commented upon since the early days of Western civilization. This commentary begins with Pythagoras’ effort to answer the questions: What is the nature of human nature, and how might this nature express itself in the organization of human society? To put these questions another way: May the structure and dynamics of the mind have significance for the manner in which the social world is ordered and functions? Pythagoras and later Plato perceived that the organization of two levels — the psychological/individual and the governmental/societal — could be governed by the same principles. While Pythagoras is most likely the first to record this relationship, one of the truly impressive portrayals of these symmetrical psychological and governmental formations is to be found in the Dialogues of Plato, wherein he presented three governance mechanisms of the city-state mirroring three psychic agencies perceived ubiquitously within the human beings who belong to that city-state. It appears that the three governing elements of a state are derived from individuals who themselves possess these same elements in a terminal system he called psyche, others have called soul, and we call mind.
By fixing his analysis on the conflict among certain institutions of government, Plato posited that the social order is a replica of a person’s conflict-ridden mind, but on a much larger scale. Indeed, it has appeared to some people throughout the course of Western civilization that governance mechanisms of a state originate in, and are congruent with, the agencies which compose the mind. That is to say, the origin of a social order is not bestowed by a higher authority or based upon a conscious ’social contract’ , but given in what is uniquely human in the nature of the individuals themselves.
From this perspective, a state also is not the product of an historical process as many since Cicero have believed, but rather is derived from something plain and fundamental in the minds of its membership. It is possible to consider individual minds as microcosms in which the governing features of a macrocosmic social order can be apprehended and, in a most rudimentary way, understood.
It may be fruitful to consider this fundamental relationship in which the human being gives objectivity to his/her terminal system in the formation of a state, yet does not often acknowledge the independence and validity of the governing institutions in this ‘object’ as being reflections of her/his own nature. This does not mean that the individual is equal to, or stands above, this necessary object. On the contrary, the state is above the individual and governs her/him. The point here is merely this: a plurality of individuals projects its commonly-held psychic elements into governance mechanisms of the state and then makes itself subordinate to this external organization. Human beings, it appears, are by nature constituted for social living, and most people become engaged in the outward events of the social and material world as a way of meeting basic needs determined by the practical requirements of reality.
Ancient thinkers as well as contemporary scholars have postulated that there can be no meaningful human existence absent a social order. Perhaps it can be said that certain aspects of mentation are knowable because the mind presents itself both in three distinguishable parts to itself and in three governance mechanisms of the state. This mind / state relationship can be thought of as an example of the state having been generalized from, or having taken on the structure of, animating principles of unity in the mind of the individual. Individual members of a state unconsciously consent to be governed, as it were, by a state which typifies their nature. It is then plausible that the state comes closest to ensuring the expression of naturally determined human potential and relational capabilities of its members, as their ‘lights’ accord them a view of just what potential and capacity for relations they possess. Institutions of government begin to exist where individuals in sufficient numbers recognize that they are incapable of providing for their well being through personal thought and initiative alone. By adequately organizing governance mechanisms, government deals at once with inner conflict and outer challenges to the social order in much the same way the psychological agencies in the mind of the individual respond to the needs of the self. The state has ultimate concern for the needs of the individual by ensuring the opportunity for the fulfillment of those purposes for which individuals are created. Those governments which are most successful in accomplishing this goal are founded upon an understanding of the capacities of human beings, with particular attention to the goals toward which human beings
tend. Then the state becomes a structure common to individual minds; conversely, their common psychic structure serves as a model that is employed to organize, authorize and empower governance mechanisms which direct society toward a remote, unreachable goal: the good of all.
Here we identify a dynamic terminal system in its individual and its societal form. In the latter, human beings shape, amplify and adapt governance mechanisms according to their make-up in the formation and maintenance of a personality writ large, called a state. Since the dawn of Western civilization notice has been taken regarding how governance mechanisms of a state may spring from and ‘mirror’ the interplay of structured, psychodynamic distinctions of personality. Thanks to certain eminent psychological findings by S. Freud and to the constitutional inventions of T. Jefferson, we can see with more clarity how the structure, the dynamics and the overall momentum of the mind furnish the model for the structuring and functioning of a democracy.
Reebok | 8.11.11 @ 3:51AM
is good
العاب | 4.11.12 @ 4:28PM
is nic