Forever Becoming: Berne

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The Preoccupied Mind

Fast - Slow

Shallow - Deep

Emerson's “work and live” keeps us from scaling up; from indulging in the kind of “low curiosity” - the “culture of criticism” - that precipitates technological and cultural change.

There is a tendency, seen in Marx, to think of work as a drudgery that ultimately should be overcome, but this fails to differentiate between the alienated wage-slavery of large scale society and the more integrated and meaningful notion of work that prevailed in bygone, simpler cultures.

It is the mind which is tranquil and free from care which can roam through all the stages of its life: the minds of the preoccupied, as if harnessed in a yoke, cannot turn round and look behind them.

So their lives vanish into an abyss; and just as it is no use pouring any amount of liquid into a container without a bottom to catch and hold it, so it does not matter how much time we are given if there is nowhere for it to settle; it escapes through the cracks and holes of the mind.

And so the preoccupied are concerned only with the present, and it is so short that it cannot be grasped, and even this is stolen from them while they are involved in their many distractions.

[Seneca]
On the Shortness of Life, p.16

Action preserves a sense of self-identity that reflection dispels. When we are at work in the world we have a seeming solidity.

It is not the idle dreamer who escapes from reality. It is practical men and women, who turn to a life of action as a refuge from insignificance.

In thinking so highly of work we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so. For nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity.

... the work and prayer of medieval Christendom were interspersed with festivals. The ancient Greeks sought salvation in philosophy, the Indians in meditation, the Chinese in poetry and the love of nature.

[John Gray]
Straw Dogs, p.194, 195

[...] with the new tools of observation that psychoanalysis offers, we can recognize that so-called rational behaviour is largely determined by the character structure. In our discussion of the meaning of work for modern man we have dealt with an illustration of this point.

We saw that the intense desire for unceasing activity was rooted in aloneness and anxiety.

This compulsion to work differed from the attitude towards work in other cultures, where people worked as much as it was necessary but where they were not driven by additional forces within their own character structure.

Since all normal persons to-day have about the same impulse to work and, furthermore, since this intensity of work is necessary if they want to live at all, one easily overlooks the irrational component in this trait.

[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.242

As this is written, a sow bug crawls across a desk. If he is turned over on his back, one can observe the tremendous struggle that he goes through to get on his feet again.

During this interval he has a “purpose” in his life.

When he succeeds, one can almost see the look of victory on his face. Off he goes, and one can imagine him telling his tale at the next meeting of sow bugs, looked up to by the younger generation as an insect who has made it.

And yet mixed with his smugness is a little disappointment. Now that he has come out on top, life seems aimless.

[Eric Berne]
Games People Play, p.71

The East is grateful to the West for progress in medecine and increased life expectancy. These are things everyone appreciates. But on the other side, a civilization oriented almost exclusively toward that form of action on the world clearly lacks something essential that material progress can never bring - indeed, it's not what it's designed to do.

That lack appears clearly in the confusion so many minds are plunged into, in the violence that reigns in the inner cities, in the selfishness that governs so many human relationships, in the sad resignation of all those spending their last years in old people's homes, and in the despair of suicide.

If spiritual values stop being an inspiration for a society, material progress becomes a sort of facade that masks the pointlessness of life.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.158

Has it been observed to what extent a genuine religious life […] requires external leisure or semi-leisure, I mean leisure with a good conscience, inherited, by blood, which is not altogether unfamiliar with the aristocratic idea that work degrades - that is to say, makes soul and body common?

And that consequently modern, noisy, time-consuming, proud and stupidly proud industriousness educates and prepares precisely for ‘unbelief' more than anything else does?

Among those in Germany for example who nowadays live without religion, I find people whose 'free-thinking’ is of differing kinds and origins but above all a majority of those in whom industriousness from generation to generation has extinguished the religious instincts: so that they no longer bare any idea what religions are supposed to be for and as it were merely register their existence in the world with a kind of dumb amazement.

They feel they are already fully occupied, these worthy people, whether with their businesses or with their pleasures, not to speak of the 'fatherland and the newspapers and ‘family duties’: it seems that they have no time at all left for religion […]

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Beyond Good and Evil, 58

Tocqueville repeatedly points out how busy Americans are, and he stresses that Americans make themselves busy. They “feel pushed by an irresistible need for action.”

Their activity, he argues, has the character of a flight from something. That something seems to be the contemplation of their own demise.

In America, he remarks, “you feel existence less,” and “you arrive at the great abyss without having had the time to notice the road you followed.”

Leisure becomes viewed as a break from paid work, which is regarded as the serious business of life. With the downgrading of leisure comes the demotion or loss of respect for the intellectual and artistic pursuits that people once used leisure to pursue.

Americans thus tend to see leisure as a problem to be solved, as time to be filled.

[Dana Jalbert Stauffer]
‘“The Most Common Sickness of Our Time”: Tocqueville on Democratic Restlessness’, The Review of Politics 80 (2018), p.450, 458

Whereas in volume 1 [Tocqueville] emphasized the efficiency and productivity that resulted from democracy’s unleashing of man’s energies, in volume 2 he points to a different consequence of social and economic mobility: no one has the time or the inclination for “meditation,” the kind of sustained attention that allows for in-depth study of a difficult subject.

[…] when confronted with literary and artistic productions, democratic peoples find it hard even to pay attention. The thought that they ought to be doing something more practical and productive is a constant drain on their focus. Moreover, democratic peoples are always in a hurry. They can give but little time and attention to each thing they pursue. “Habitual inattention,” he reflects, “is the disease of the democratic mind.”

Democratic habits of mind thus discourage people from deriving meaningful experiences from the artistic creations with which they fill up their leisure time. And yet they want to find meaning in them.

Tocqueville notes that, for the most part, Americans live orderly, productive, one might say bourgeois lives. They are practical, prudent, and focused on their work. “It is impossible to imagine anything as insignificant, dull, or encumbered with petty interests - in a word, as antipoetic - as the life of an American.”

Like all people of democracies, when they turn to literature and theater, they want to be transported. They want “deep emotions of the heart”; they long to be moved. But they are ill-equipped to be transported, because they are “impatient in their desires.” They want every moment to be profitable.

“They insist on facile beauties that yield of their own accord and can be enjoyed immediately. ... They have need of intense and rapid emotions, sudden illuminations, and glaring truths or errors to wrench them out of their own lives and plunge them instantly and almost violently into the heart of the subject.”

Needless to say, a certain skepticism about the depth of such experiences is detectible in Tocqueville’s characterization of the democratic experience of art.

[Dana Jalbert Stauffer]
‘“The Most Common Sickness of Our Time”: Tocqueville on Democratic Restlessness’, The Review of Politics 80 (2018), p.458-9

Carlyle's Puritanism discloses itself in the reminder that labor is the human lot; that the age-old dream of paradise, “where the the brooks should run wine, and the trees bend with ready-baked viands,” is an "impossible dream"; that labor alone, necessarily the “interruption of that ease, which man foolishly enough fancies to be his happiness," provides him with such ease as he ever enjoys; and that “what we call Evil” - the “dark, disordered material out of which man's Freewill has to create an edifice of order and Good” - will exist as long as humanity exists.

Work is our lot; and our works, indeed, bring order out of chaos - as long as they are carried out in good faith, with the understanding that the creative power that makes them possible comes to us as a gift of the gods.

In works lovingly and loyally conceived and carried out, we triumph over necessity, though not by surrounding ourselves with technologies that eliminate the need for labor. (Here again, the ideology of progress reveals its kinship with the nostalgic dream of a lost Eden; modern abundance, according to the myth of progress, will eventually relieve us of the need to work.)

Our triumph lies in our ability to transform labor, a necessity, into an act of faith and free will.

The illusion of self-sufficiency […] stands in the way of genuine insight and the heroic actions that issue from it. In the modern world, this illusion finds its characteristic expression in the machines by means of which mankind seeks to liberate itself from toil - that is, from the inescapable constraints of human existence.

The power and majesty of the sovereign creator of life; the inescapability of evil in the form of natural limits on human freedom; the sinfulness of man's rebellion against those limits; the moral value of work, which at once signifies man's submission to necessity and enables him to transcend it - these insights represented the heart of Calvinist theology, along with its analysis of religious experience, the psychology of despair and conversion; and they represented the heart of Carlyle's work as well, or at least of the work that continues to matter.

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.238-40

"Work and live," Emerson exhorts his reader; but honest work is hard to come by. The more we need it, the more it eludes us.

An honorable calling, which Emerson regards, in effect, as the everyday form of heroism, helps to reconcile us not merely to everyday disappointments but to the metaphysical terror and pain of existence. We are oppressed by the disparity between our oceanic desires and our satisfactions, which are measured out in "drops"; between our longing for immortality and the certainty of death; between our need to know what will happen to us after death and the impossibility of finding out.

In a faithless age, Emerson seems to suggest, the religious spirit lingers on chiefly in the "low curiosity" that makes us demand definitive answers to everything, or again in the nagging speculation about the "origin of evil” that he compares to mumps, measles, and whooping cough - adolescent diseases to which the "simple mind" is immune.

"The only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses," Emerson says, "is to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature, work and live, work and live."

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.277

The compulsion of work erodes life's durability. The time of work is a time that passes, that runs out. If the time of life fully coincides with the time of work, as is the case today, then life itself becomes radically transient.

For Hölderlin, the festival is a 'bridal festival', an exalted time humans spend with the gods. During festivals, humans come close to the gods. A festival founds a community among humans and between humans and gods: it allows humans to participate in the divine. It brings forth intensities. The gods embody precisely the intensities of human life.

Life that exhausts itself in work and production is an absolutely atrophied life.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.41

The question of what the work does to the worker is hardly ever asked, not to mention the question of whether the real task might not be to adapt the work to the needs of the worker rather than to demand that the worker adapt himself to the needs of the work - which means, of course, primarily to the needs of the machine

[...] we may derive the three purposes of human work as follows:

First, to provide necessary and useful goods and services.

Second, to enable every one of us to use and thereby perfect our gifts like good stewards.

Third, to do so in service to, and in cooperation with, others, so as to liberate ourselves from our inborn egocentricity.

[E.F. Schumacher]
Good Work, p. 3-4

Spontaneous, Intimate and Aware!

The attainment of autonomy is manifested by the release or recovery of three capacities: awareness, spontaneity and intimacy.

Awareness

Awareness means the capacity to see a coffeepot and hear the birds sing in one's own way, and not the way one was taught.

It may be assumed on good grounds that seeing and hearing have a different quality for infants than for grownups, and that they are more aesthetic and less intellectual in the first years of life. A little boy sees and hears birds with delight. Then the 'good' father comes along and feels he should 'share' the experience and help his son 'develop'. He says: 'That's a jay, and this is a sparrow.' The moment the little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.

Father has good reasons on his side, since few people can afford to go through life listening to the birds sing, and the sooner the little boy starts his 'education' the better. Maybe he will be an ornithologist when he grows up.

A few people, however, can still see and hear in the old way. But most members of the human race have lost the capacity to be painters, poets or musicians, and are not left the option of seeing and hearing directly even if they can afford to; they must get it secondhand. The recovery of this ability is called here 'awareness'.

Awareness requires living in the here and now, and not in the elsewhere, the past or the future. A good illustration of possibilities in American life, is driving to work in the morning in a hurry. The decisive question is: 'Where is the mind when the body is here?' and there are three common cases.

1. The man whose chief preoccupation is being on time is the one who is furthest out. With his body at the wheel of his car, his mind is at the door of his office, and he is oblivious to his immediate surroundings except insofar as they are obstacles to the moment when his soma will catch up with his psyche.

While he is driving, he is almost completely lacking in autonomy, and as a human being he is in essence more dead than alive.

2. The Sulk, on the other hand, is not so much concerned with arriving on time as in collecting excuses for being late ... He, too, is oblivious to his surroundings except as they subscribe to his game, so that he is only half alive. His body is in his car, but his mind is out looking for blemishes and injustices.

3. Less common is the 'natural driver' , the man to whom driving a car is a congenial science and art.

He, too, is oblivious of his surroundings except as they offer scope for the craftmanship which is its own reward, but he is very much aware of himself and the machine which he controls so well, and to that extent he is alive.

4. The fourth case is the person who is aware, and who will not hurry because he is living in the present moment with the environment which is here: the sky and trees as well as the feeling of motion. To hurry is to neglect that environment and to be conscious only of something that is till out of sight down the road, or of mere obstacles, or solely of oneself.

A Chinese man started to get into a local subway train, when his Caucasian companion pointed out that they could save twenty minutes by taking an express, which they did. When they got off at Central Park, the Chinese man sat down on a bench, much to his friend's surprise. 'Well,' explained the former, 'since we saved twenty minutes, we can afford to sit here that long and enjoy our surroundings.'

The aware person is alive because he knows how he feels, where he is and when it is. He knows that after he dies the trees will still be there, but he will not be there to look at them again, so he wants to see them now with as much poignancy as possible.

Spontaneity

Spontaneity ... means liberation, liberation from the compulsion to play games and have only the feelings one was taught to have.

Intimacy

Intimacy means the spontaneous, game-free candidness of an aware person, the liberation of the eidetically perceptive, uncorrupted Child in all its naiveté living in the here and now.

Usually the adaption to Parental influences is what spoils it, and most unfortunately this is almost a universal occurrence. But before, unless and until they are corrupted, most infants seem to be loving, and that is the essential nature of intimacy, as shown experimentally.

--

For certain fortunate people there is something which transcends all classifications of behaviour, and that is awareness; something which rises above the programming of the past, and that is spontaneity; and something that is more rewarding than games, and that is intimacy.

But all three of these may be frightening and even perilous to the unprepared. Perhaps they are better off as they are, seeking their solutions in popular techniques of social action, such as 'togetherness'. This may mean that there is no hope for the human race, but there is hope for individual members of it.

[Eric Berne]
Games People Play, p.158, 159, 160, 162

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Another consequence of the nature of the intellect of animals, which we have discussed, is the exact agreement of their consciousness with their environment. Nothing stands between the animal and the external world; but between us and that world there are always our thoughts and ideas about it, and these often make us inaccessible to it, and it to us.

Only in the case of children and of very uneducated persons does this wall sometimes become so thin that to know what is going on within them we need only see what is going on around them.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.61

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Silent Violence
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Pre-rational & Trans-rational
The Real Thing
Leaving the Vessel

What's your position?

“But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” The face of God must not be looked upon. The curtain must not be drawn back to reveal the wizard.

If a tradition is to endure then its core assumptions must never be questioned. Every tradition contains such a set of truths, and they are always a matter of faith. Dig deep enough and instead of bedrock you will find an abyss. This is the terrifying realisation that postmodern turn faced us with.

Rational argument - analysis, or critique - is useful for stress-testing a position, but it can never establish the 'rational acceptability' of the position itself. When a range of equally compelling and rational positions are on the table, it can never say tell us how or why to choose between them.

In the absence of a rational basis for securing agreement we instead revert to emotional means. In the marketplace of ideas, rhetoric takes precedence over logic.

We’re constantly told to follow the science, that this or that political decision or mandate is not in fact political but is mandated by science.

At best this is the naive proposition of people who are unaware of their own frame, unaware of what motivates their actions.

At worst it is a new form of moralising, which wants to pretend that it’s moral stances are as self-evident and as provable as two plus two equals four.

[Jonathan Pageau]

‘The Blindness of "Following the Science”’

A position is a simple predictive statement which influences all of the individual's transactions; in the long run it determines his destiny and often that of his descendants as well. A position may be more or less absolute.

Positions are taken and become fixed surprisingly early, from the second or even the first year to the seventh year of life - in any case long before the individual is competent or experienced enough to make such a serious commitment.

It is not difficult to deduce from an individual's position the kind of childhood he must have had.

Unless something or somebody intervenes, he spends the rest of his life stabilizing his position and dealing with situations that threaten it: by avoiding them, warding off certain elements or manipulating them provocatively so that they are transformed from threats into justifications.

[Eric Berne]
Games People Play, p.42

[…] objectivity requires that all observers should stand at the same point of view and abstract from their individual differences.

But this kind of abstraction simply cannot be used when we are talking about human affairs. There is no way in which we can collect facts about any significant aspect of human life without looking at them from some particular angle. We have to guide our selection by means of some value-judgement about what matters in it and what does not.

And these judgements inevitably arise out of each enquirer's moral position. When such judgements raise difficulties, they need to be justified morally by explaining that position, not by ignoring it.

Social and psychological theorists who claim to be operating in a value-free vacuum outside morality are notoriously deceiving themselves. They simply haven't noticed their own biases.

The behaviourist idea that, in order to be scientific, psychologists should study people objectively in the sense of ignoring their subjective point of view and treating them solely as physical objects was not value-free. It was not just a proposal for a new scientific method.

It was a demand for a new and very peculiar moral attitude.

[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p. 205-6

MacIntyre says that the failure of dialogue is connected to a failure of the Enlightenment thinkers to achieve their ambition of arriving at consensus in truth via the use of reason.

The Encyclopaedists in 18th-century France, who were among the founders of the Enlightenment, cherished the belief that through the use of reason alone, human beings could agree on the truth about the way things really were by taking an objective viewpoint freed from tradition and prejudice.

Irreducibly differing frameworks, such as Nietzscheanism and Aristotelianism, may marginally share the same rationality and logical procedure, may be able to identify each other’s presuppositions and methods, may be able to point out that those presuppositions and methods are not very credible in their eyes, but they cannot touch them with reasoned arguments that the other will accept.

This is because their presuppositions and methods (just like those of Empiricists and Rationalists 300 years ago about the correct foundations for knowledge) are derived from extrarational sources, from what Wittgenstein called a ‘form of life’ and from what MacIntyre calls a ‘tradition’.

Although the arguments and views derived from your tradition might appear weird and confused from the viewpoint of my tradition, it does not at all follow that they will do so to you or that our minimal shared rationality is strong enough to shift either of us from our own position.

MacIntyre stresses that there is no philosophical position that is not bound up in a tradition. It is by belonging to a tradition, by participating in it, and being changed by it (as well perhaps as changing it) that a person forms a moral position. There is no other way, according to MacIntyre.

It is an illusion to think one can be a pure individual or possess a traditionless, timeless moral reason.

[Mike Fuller]
‘Alasdair MacIntyre’, Philosophy Now, Issue 13

The experiment asks a precise kind of question, one that assumes only a limited number of possible answers. In other words, the very context in which the experiment is devised presupposes to some extent the range of answers that will be given, each of these answers having meaning within the current scientific context.

[…] In other words, observations, experiments, and interpretations are always made from within the confines of a particular paradigm.

And while a crucial experiment may help science to decide between two rival theories within that particular paradigm, it will never be able, by itself, to overturn that paradigm. An experiment can never do this because the very motivation to do the experiment in the first place and the language in which its results will be discussed are all aspects of the paradigm itself.

[...]

This book has already questioned the dubious claim that Western science is involved in the dispassionate and objective search for "truth." A more realistic statement would be that much of what Western scientists do flows from their particular paradigms, worldviews, and belief systems.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.100, 247

What salient characteristics do these debates and disagreements share? They are of three kinds.

The first is what I shall call, adapting an expression from the philosophy of science, the conceptual incommensurability of the rival arguments in each of the three debates. Every one of the arguments is logically valid or can be easily expanded so as to be made so; the conclusions do indeed follow from the premises. But the rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one as against another.

For each premise employs some quite different normative or evaluative concept from the others, so that the claims made upon us are of quite different kinds. In the first argument, for example, premises which invoke justice and innocence are at odds with premises which invoke success and survival; in the second, premises which invoke rights are at odds with those which invoke universalizability; in the third it is the claim of equality that is matched against that of liberty.

It is precisely because there is in our society no established way of deciding between these claims that moral argument appears to be necessarily interminable.

From our rival conclusions we can argue back to our rival premises; but when we do arrive at our premises argument ceases and the invocation of one premise against another becomes a matter of pure assertion and counter-assertion. Hence perhaps the slightly shrill tone of so much moral debate.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.9

The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestors can never lose an argument either.

Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors' premises. The effects of incommensurability ensure that protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves.

This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and that its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.85

David Lewis has written: 'Philosophical theories are never refuted conclusively. (Or hardly ever, Godel and Gettier may have done it.) The theory survives its refutation - at a price .... Our “intuitions" are simply opinions; our philosophical theories are the same ... a reasonable task for the philosopher is to bring them into equilibrium. Our common task is to find out what equilibria there are that can withstand examination, but it remains for each of us to come to rest in one or another of them .... Once the menu of well-worked out theories is before us, philosophy is a matter of opinion ...' (Philosophical Papers, Volume I, Oxford, 1983, pp. x-xi).

Analytic philosophy, that is to say, can very occasionally produce practically conclusive results of a negative kind. It can show in a few cases that just too much incoherence and inconsistency is involved in some position for any reasonable person to continue to hold it.

But it can never establish the rational acceptability of any particular position in cases where each of the alternative rival positions available has sufficient range and scope and the adherents of each are willing to pay the price necessary to secure coherence and consistency.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.310-11

Perspectivism

Nested in Tradition

Deep Code
Opposition

Self-development

Left hemisphere - Right hemisphere
Separate - Connected
Centrifugal - Centripetal

Rights - Responsibilities

Morals - Rules

Inner - Outer

Individual - Collective

Masculine - Feminine

Father - Mother

Symbolic - Real

1. Revealed Self

The self is uncovered by emancipating it from givens, e.g. parents, tradition, psychopathology, etc. Relates to the Orthodox Christian notion of the self being essentially good, and made bad by earthly influences.

2. Developed Self

The self is moulded to a desired pattern by outside influences. Relates to the Heretical notion that the self is essentially bad and in need of guidance to be good.

Personality: the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being.

Personality can never develop unless the individual chooses his own way, consciously and with moral deliberation.

A man can make a moral decision to go his own way only if he holds that way to be the best. If any other way were held to be better, then he would live and develop that other personality instead of his own. The other ways are conventionalities of a moral, social, political, philosophical, or religious nature. The fact that the conventions always flourish in one form or another only proves that the vast majority of mankind do not choose their own way, but convention, and consequently develop not themselves but a method and a collective mode of life at the cost of their own wholeness.

The smaller the personality, the dimmer and more unconscious it becomes, until finally it merges indistinguishably with the surrounding society, thus surrendering its own wholeness and dissolving into the wholeness of the group. In the place of the inner voice there is the voice of the group with its conventions, and vocation [the path of the inner voice] is replaced by collective necessities.

Conventions are soulless mechanisms that can never understand more than the mere routine of life. Creative life always stands outside convention. That is why, when the mere routine of life predominates in the form of convention and tradition, there is bound to be a destructive outbreak of creative energy.

The mechanism of convention keeps people unconscious, for in that state they can follow their accustomed tracks like blind brutes, without the need for conscious decision. This unintended result of even the best conventions is unavoidable, but is no less a terrible danger for that.

[C.G. Jung]
The Essential Jung, p.195, 198, 202

'Has due recognition been given', Winnicott asks pointedly, 'to the need for everything to be discovered afresh by every individual analyst?'

It was a position reactive to a Society which had, in Winnicott's view, equated development within a tradition with an uncritical compliance to the tradition.

[Adam Phillips]
Winnicott, p.91

[...] we cannot expect him always to be the aristos. We are all sometimes of the Many. But he will avoid membership.

There can be no organization to which he fully belongs; no country, no class, no church, no political party. He needs no uniform, no symbols; his ideas are his uniform, his actions are his symbols, because above all he tries to be a free force in a world of tied forces.

[John Fowles]
The Aristos, p.212

[On 'modern-minded man']

His highest hope is to think first what is about to be thought, to say what is about to be said, and to feel what is about to be felt; he has no wish to think better thoughts than his neighbours, to say things showing more insight, or to have emotions which are not those of some fashionable group, but only to be slightly ahead of others in points of time.

Quite deliberately he suppresses what is individual in himself for the sake of the admiration of the herd.

To be pointed out, admired, mentioned constantly in the press, and offered easy ways of earning much money is highly agreeable; and when all this is open to a man, he finds it difficult to go on doing the work that he himself thinks best and is inclined to subordinate his judgement to general opinion.

[Bertrand Russell]
Unpopular Essays ('On Being Modern-minded'), p.78, 79

There is no such thing as an effective segment of a totality.

By that I mean that I personally do not believe in the word style.

Why? Because, unless there are human beings with three arms and four legs, unless we have another group of beings on earth that are structurally different from us, there can be no different style of fighting.

Why is that?

Because we have two hands and two legs. Now the unfortunate thing is that there's boxing, which uses hands, and judo which uses throwing.

I'm not putting them down, mind you - but because of styles, people are separated. They are not united together because styles become law.

The original founder of the style started out with a hypothesis. But now it has become the gospel truth, and people who go into that become the product of it.

It doesn't matter how you are, who you are, how you are structured, how you are built, or how you are made...it doesn't seem to matter. You just go in there and become that product. And that, to me, is not right.

So styles tend to not only separate man because they have their own doctrines, and the doctrines became the gospel internal truth, that you cannot change, you know?

But if you do not have style, if you just say, "Here i am, as a human being, how can i express myself totally and completely?" - that way, you won't create a style, because style is a crystallization, as opposed to a internal process of continuing growth.

Man, he is constantly growing and when he is bound by a set pattern of ideas or way of doing things, that's when he stops growing.

[Bruce Lee]

The YELLOW MEME thinks and acts from an inner-directed core. The individual gyroscopes that enable the person to keep balance in a paradoxical world spin within the principled, knowledgable self. Such people have strong ethical anchors of their own reasoned choosing, derived from many sources but are not entrapped by rigid rules based in external dogma or mandates of authority.

[...] one develops confidence in the self-generated messages and instructions that emanate from one's core beliefs.

[Don Edward Beck & Christopher C. Cowan]
Spiral Dynamics, p.278

So often in our lives, we act as though there were only one set of rules. For instance, in cooking we tend to follow recipes with dutiful precision. We add ingredients as though by official decree. If the recipe calls for a pinch of salt and four pinches fall in, panic strikes, as though the bowl might now explode.

Thinking of a recipe as a rule, we often do not consider how people's tastes vary, or what fun it might be to make up a new dish.

[Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.16

When you’re stuck with a set of absolutes when you’re a kid - you know, you go to this kind of church, you do that kind of thing, and you think this way - if you have any sense of imagination I think that you fall out fairly quickly with absolutes; and you want to see as many avenues as are possible in life.

And I think, for my part, I got to a place where […] I could pick bits and pieces of each of those avenues. Its not essential to take one avenue as the gospel. No one man is right about anything - or even one group of people - are not right about everything.

I would pick and choose little bits of everything; a little bit of Buddhism maybe, a little bit of this, a little bit of that … to kind of give me some basis, some kind of explanatory platform for my life. And that in itself is an enjoyment.

[David Bowie]

I looked back on the past and recalled my people's old ways, but they were not living that way any more. They were traveling the black road, everybody for himself and with little rules of his own [...]

[Black Elk]
Black Elk Speaks, p.215

I could look up creativity in The Oxford English Dictionary, and I could do research on all that has been written on the subject in philosophy and psychology, and then I could serve it all up on a dish. Even this would be garnished in such a way that you would exclaim: 'How original!' Personally, I am unable to follow this plan.

I have this need to talk as though no one had ever examined the subject before, and of course this can make my words ridiculous.

But I think you can see in this my own need to make sure I am not buried by my theme. It would kill me to work out the concordance of creativity references.

Evidently I must always be fighting to feel creative, and this has the disadvantage that if I am describing a simple word like 'love', I must start from scratch. (Perhaps that's the right place to start from.)

[D.W. Winnicott]
Home Is Where We Start From: Essays By A Psychoanalyst ('Living Creatively'), p.41

The decisive point is not what is thought but how it is thought.

The thought that is the result of active thinking is always new and original; original, not necessarily in the sense that others have not thought it before, but always in the sense that the person who thinks, has used thinking as a tool to discover something new in the world outside or inside himself.

[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.167

Since the "world of origins" is closed to us, we must accept the fact that we are dependent -- doomed, if you like, to being forever meta. There is no shame in this. We are all contingent, all referring to things which, themselves, refer to other things (parents descended from parents, phrases from phrases).

Humperson did, however, see the possibility of originality via errors, mishearings and misunderstandings. He enjoyed playing Chinese Whispers, especially in later life, when he grew rather deaf.

[Momus]
http://imomus.livejournal.com/468556.html

Parents, deliberately or unaware, teach their children from birth how to behave, think, feel and perceive.

Liberation from these influences is no easy matter, since they are deeply ingrained and are necessary during the first two or three decades for biological survival.

Indeed, such liberation is only possible at all because the individual starts off in an autonomous state, that is, capable of awareness, spontaneity and intimacy, and he has some discretion as to which of his parents' teachings he will accept.

At certain specific moments early in his life he decides how he is going to adapt to them. It is because his adaptation is in the nature of a series of decisions that it can be undone, since decisions are reversible under favourable circumstances.

First ... the weight of a whole tribal or family historical tradition has to be lifted ... then the influence of the individual parental, societal and cultural background has to be thrown off. The same must be done with the demands of contemporary society at large, and finally the advantages derived from one's immediate social circle have to be partly or wholly sacrificed.

In essence, this whole preparation consists of obtaining friendly divorce from one's parents (and from other Parental influences) so that they may be agreeably visited on occasion, but are no longer dominant.

[Eric Berne]
Games People Play, p.161

[...] even the individuals whose initiation into certain secrets has marked them out in some way are fundamentally obeying the laws of group identity, though in their case the group is a socially differentiated one.

The secret society is an intermediary stage on the way to individuation. The individual is still relying on a collective organisation to effect his differentiation for him; that is, he has not yet recognised that it is really the individual's task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet.

All collective identities, such as membership in organisations, support of "isms," and so on, interfere with the fulfilment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible; but they are equally shelters for the poor and weak, a home port for the shipwrecked, the bosom of a family for orphans, a land of promise for disillusioned vagrants and weary pilgrims, a herd and a safe fold for lost sheep, and a mother providing nourishment and growth.

[C.G. Jung]
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.375

[for] a lot of clinical psychologists [of a pronounced Western orientation] one of the fundamental presuppositions is that part of the hallmark of positive psychological development is the creation of an individual that’s capable of acting independently.

I would say that’s an implicit ideal that lurks at the bottom of the clinical presuppositions of […] classic psychologists […]

[Jordan B. Peterson]
'2017 Personality Lecture 01: Introduction to the Course' (30:55)

Kohlberg (1969), in his extension of the early work of Piaget, discovered six stages of moral judgment, which he claimed formed an invariant sequence, each successive stage representing a more adequate construction of the moral problem, which in turn provides the basis for its more just resolution.

The stages divide into three levels, each of which denotes a significant expansion of the moral point of view from an egocentric through a societal to a universal ethical conception.

With this expansion in perspective comes the capacity to free moral judgment from the individual needs and social conventions with which it had earlier been confused and anchor it instead in principles of justice that are universal in application. These principles provide criteria upon which both individual and societal claims can be impartially assessed.

In Kohlberg's view, at the highest stages of development morality is freed from both psychological and historical constraints, and the individual can judge independently of his own particular needs and of the values of those around him.

When […] the sole precursor to the intimacy of adult relationships is the trust established in infancy and all intervening experience is marked only as steps toward greater independence, then separation itself becomes the model and the measure of growth.

The infusion of feeling into their judgments keeps [women] from developing a more independent and abstract ethical conception in which concern for others derives from principles of justice rather than from compassion and care.

The observation that for women, identity has as much to do with connection as with separation led Erikson into trouble largely because of his failure to integrate this insight into the mainstream of his developmental theory.

[Carol Gilligan]

‘In a Different Voice’, Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 47, No. 4, p.483-4, 509

Dupré (1993) is […] correct in proposing that we think of free will as human ability to project meaningful distinctions into behavior. To act top-down from the intentional level in which meaning is embodied is thus to exercise free will […]

Because all self-organizing systems select the stimuli to which they respond, behavior constrained top-down is to that extent increasingly autonomous of forceful impacts from the environment. Self-organized systems act from their own point of view.

The more structured the entity, the more complex its organization and its behavior, and the more decoupled from and independent of its environment: the more autonomous and authentic, in short.

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, p. 249

But even […] lordship of the few is far removed from the ancient freedom — witness Frederick the Great's saying: “I am the first servant of my state.

Hence the desperate efforts of the 'exceptional’ man to keep himself inwardly free. Here, and only here, begins the individualism that is a reaction against the psychology of the mass. It is the last uprising of the carnivore soul against its captivity behind the bars of culture, the last attempt to shake off the spiritual and intellectual limitations that are produced by, and represented by, the fact of large numbers.

Hence arise the types of life typified by the conqueror, the adventurer, the hermit, and even certain types of criminals and bohemians. The wished-for escape from absorption by the masses takes various forms - lordship over it, flight from it, contempt for it.

The idea of personality, in its dark beginnings, is a protest against humanity in the mass, and the tension between these grows and grows to its tragic finale.

[Oswald Spengler]

Man and Technics, p. 59

Aristocracy, Tocqueville wrote, “links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain. Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link … Thus, not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries.

Each man is forever thrown back upon himself alone and there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”

Tocqueville perceived the way in which "fractured time" generates individualism, which in turn would have profound social, political, and economic consequences as the underlying logic of liberal democracy advances. He fretted especially about the inability of a liberal democratic people to see their own lives and actions as part of a continuum of time, and hence to consider long-term implications of their actions and deeds as part of a long-term human community.

[…] while cultures are many and varied, their common features almost always include a belief in the continuity between human nature and the natural world; the experience of the past and the future as embedded within the present; and assurance of the sacredness of one's place, along with depths of gratitude and responsibility to the care and preservation of one's places.

Liberalism was premised upon a rejection of each of these constitutive aspects of culture, since to recognize continuity with nature, the debts and obligations attending the flow of time and generations, or a strong identity with one's place was to limit one's experience and opportunity to become a self-making author.

[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.74-5, 90

For any individual, the social universe is divided into two categories: those who are "kin," "relations," or "family" (walytja), and those who are not kin, who are often described as "not men" or "different men" (munuwati).

The term walytja specifies a sense of belonging together or shared identity. It is used to refer to (1) possessions, (2) "kin," (3) "one's own" (my own), (4) a wider sense of belonging, and (5) "oneself," as in the phrases "he did it himself" or "she is sitting by herself."

This reflexive use of walytja as "self" suggests that the critical notion of relatedness is rooted in the givenness of the individual, extending outward from a spirit whose identity derives from The Dreaming.

The concept asserts a relationship between oneself and persons, objects, or places; it recognizes as fundamental in Pintupi life the identity extended to persons and things beyond the physical individual.

[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.109

The imaginary father empowers a new psychic space premised on the distinction between internal and external, self and other.

The breaking in of the signifier inaugurates individuation, the assumption of bodily form and corporeal unity, and thereby entails loss of the maternal body. In Kristeva's view, matricide, repression of the maternal body, is a necessary event on the way to subjectivity. The bodily exchange between mother and child can serve as a barrier to love, imprisoning the child in an overwhelming bond.

The loving mother provides the first approach to language and law by demonstrating love for an object who is not the child, a third outside this dyad who makes the dyadic relationship itself possible and releases the emotional pressure of it. The loving father proffers a kind of promise, even as he disrupts fusion with the mother, allowing and encouraging the child to represent itself.

Kristeva's thought here follows Lacan's idea that a mother whose only object of desire is her child will produce a child who cannot move beyond the psychosis of being the phallus for her.

The generation of the ego out of expulsion, the division of unity, is not simply a mournful moment, but also potentially a joyous one, in which the advent of language, the promise of the father, offers reparation and life with a world of others, so that words can provide the nourishment that the breast previously had. The father makes it possible to fill the void with language and the formation of signifying bonds.

[Emily Zakin]
‘Psychoanalytic Feminism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Psychotherapists of different persuasions appear to share at least one basic hypothesis: the notion that the individual human being is of value, and that it is important that each individual should be able to develop his own personality in as unrestricted and complete a way as possible.

[Anthony Storr]
The Integrity of the Personality, p.22

The creation of self, however, must not be self-centred; it has to take place against the backdrop of a social horizon of meaning that gives the act of self-creation a relevance that transcends the self […]

Contrary to Taylor's assumptions, however, authenticity is in fact the enemy of community. The narcissism of authenticity undermines community. In terms of its content, what is crucial is not its reference to a community or some other higher order but its market value, which effaces all other values.

Thus, the form and content of authenticity coincide: both concern the self. The cult of authenticity shifts the question of identity from society to the individual person. Within the cult of authenticity, the production of self becomes a permanent activity. Authenticity thus atomizes society.

Taylor's moral justification of authenticity ignores that subtle process, within the neoliberal regime, by which the ideas of freedom and self-realization are transformed into vehicles for more efficient exploitation. The neoliberal regime exploits morality. Once it is able to present itself as freedom, domination becomes complete.

Authenticity is a neoliberal form of production. You exploit yourself voluntarily in the belief that you are realizing yourself.

In the cult of authenticity, the neoliberal regime appropriates the person himself and turns him into a highly efficient site of production. The whole person is incorporated into the production process.

When some one person is judged to be authentic, or when society as a whole is described as creating problems of human authenticity, the language reveals one way in which social action is being devalued in the process of placing more weight on psychological matters.

The compulsion of authenticity leads to narcissistic introspection, a permanent occupation with one's own psychology.

Communication is also organized psychologically. The society of authenticity is a society of intimacy and exposure. The nudism of the soul into which we are encouraged lends society a pornographic character. Social relations are more genuine and authentic the more intimate they are, the more they reveal what was private.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.17-18

The empire of signs also dispenses with the moral signified. It is dominated not by law but by rules, by signifiers without the signified.

Ritual society is a society of rules. It is based not on virtues or conscience but on a passion for rules. Unlike the moral law, rules are not internalized. They are simply obeyed. Morality presupposes a soul, and a person who works on its perfection. The more a person advances on the path of morality, the more self-respect she is due. Such narcissistic inwardness is wholly absent from the ethics of politeness.

Rules rest on agreement. They are formed through immanent sequences of signs, and therefore do not possess deep truth or transcendence. Rules do not have a metaphysical or theological foundation. The law, by contrast, presupposes a transcendent authority, such as God, that compels and prohibits.

The pleasure derived from obeying a rule differs from the pleasure one takes in obeying or violating a law. The former is owed to a passion for play and for rules […]

There is no soul to infect the holy seriousness of ritual play. The place of psychology is taken by a passion for rules, a passion of form. This empire of signs is opposed to today's empire of souls who expose themselves and constantly produce themselves.

The ceremonial empire of signs makes it possible to conceive of another form of life, another society, which would be free of narcissism because, in it, the ego [das Ich] would immerse itself in the ritual play of signs. The passion for rules de-internalizes the self.

Contemporary society is characterized by constant and relentless moralizing. But at the same time society is becoming more and more brutal. Forms of politeness are disappearing, disregarded by the cult of authenticity. Beautiful forms of conduct are becoming ever rarer.

In this respect, too, we are becoming hostile towards form. Apparently, the ascendancy of morality is compatible with the barbarization of society. Morality is formless. Moral inwardness dispenses with form.

One might even say: the more moralizing a society, the more impolite it is. Against this formless morality, we must defend an ethics of beautiful forms.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.65-8

The adolescent tells his group what he did, and they usually agree that this is the way he is, however surprising it is. Their whole attitude is pragmatic, almost experimental: “This is what happened. This is the way things are. This is the way I am.”

They are engaged in a search for themselves as individuals, something they were called upon to do in the early grades of school, thanks to the misconceptions of John Dewey, and they are quite alien to any theory that the self is a creature of trained patterns and is not a creature of discovered secrets.

Now, in the 1960’s, this opinion of man’s nature is changing and, as a consequence of George Orwell, mishmash conceptions of brainwashing, and the revival of Pavlovian psychology through the work of men like Professor B. F. Skinner of Harvard, the idea of personality as something trained under discipline to a desired pattern is being revived.

With this revival of a basically Puritanical idea of human nature reappears the usual Puritan errors on the nature of evil and acceptance of the theory of the evil of human nature (as preached in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies).

[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.803

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