douglass carmichael: psychological

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 19:59:05 GMT

The psychology of the president and the voters is increasingly interesting. If both are into denail and projection, and doing so because there is no obvious path to a more nuanced reality, then we are in trouble. In a schoolyard fight, the one winning usually gets the approval of the onlookers. In a complex world, being the bully is probaably not a good response. I say "probably" because sometimes "winning" is essential. Is the current situation of the west, the US, the ME and Islam such a situation? Much on my mond. So, pieces....

The political scientist David Barber (Strong Democracy) has died. Unfortunate. Too young.

James D. Barber Remembered

Margalit Fox writes James D. Barber's obituary in the New York Times today.

"Dr. Barber's best-known book, 'The Presidential Character,' published in 1972, argued that a president's psychological makeup, established early in life, could predict his performance in office.

" 'The lives of presidents past and of the one still with us show, I think, how a start from character makes possible a realistic estimate of what will endure into a man's White House years,' Dr. Barber wrote. . . .

"Analyzing presidential character, Dr. Barber focused on two criteria: whether a president was active or passive, and whether he viewed his job in positive or negative terms.

"In combination, the criteria formed four distinct personality types. Active-positive presidents, who brought energy and enjoyment to their work, included Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, Dr. Barber wrote. Passive-positives, like William Howard Taft, were compliant and superficially cheerful. Passive-negatives, like Calvin Coolidge and Dwight D. Eisenhower, were sullen and withdrawn, viewing the office as a burden.

"The most dangerous type, Dr. Barber wrote, was the active-negative. Though energetic, such men were also joyless, inflexible, compulsive and domineering, with 'a strong bent for digging their own graves.' In this category he listed Lyndon B. Johnson and [Richard] Nixon."

from http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/15/politics/15barber.html

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 01:08:31 GMT

For some releif, try to imagine living in such a sesory world. Zen like..

Life without numbers in a unique Amazon tribe

Piraha apparently can't learn to count and have no distinct words for colours

By STEPHEN STRAUSS
Friday, August 20, 2004 - Page A3

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1+1=2. Mathematics doesn't get any more basic than this, but even 1+1 would stump the brightest minds among the Piraha tribe of the Amazon.

A study appearing today in the journal Science reports that the hunter-gatherers seem to be the only group of humans known to have no concept of numbering and counting.

Not only that, but adult Piraha apparently can't learn to count or understand the concept of numbers or numerals, even when they asked anthropologists to teach them and have been given basic math lessons for months at a time.

Their lack of enumeration skills is just one of the mental and cultural traits that has led scientists who have visited the 300 members of the tribe to describe the Piraha as "something from Mars."

Daniel Everett, an American linguistic anthropologist, has been studying and living with Piraha for 27 years.

Besides living a numberless life, he reports in a separate study prepared for publication, the Piraha are the only people known to have no distinct words for colours.

They have no written language, and no collective memory going back more than two generations. They don't sleep for more than two hours at a time during the night or day.

Even when food is available, they frequently starve themselves and their children, Prof. Everett reports.

They communicate almost as much by singing, whistling and humming as by normal speech.

Tue, 18 May 2004 23:52:24 GMT

How can children grow up to be organized entities, growing little persons, in an entropic age?

Fri, 14 May 2004 00:10:02 GMT

Increasing the range here.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-05/10/content_1460726.htm

Erich Fromm on reason

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 22:49:57 GMT

Erich Fromm in Beyond the Cains of Illusion.

I believe that the only force that can save us from self destruction is reason; the capacity to recognize the unreality of most of the ideas that man holds, and to penetrate to the reality veiled by the layers and layers of deception and ideologies; reason, not as a body of knowledge, but as a "kind of energy, a force which is fully comprehensible only in its agency and effects a force whose "most important function consists in its power to bind and to dissolve." (fn 1) Violence and arms will not save us; sanity and reason may. .... (footnote 1 from Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 13.)

Coetzee on the lives of animals

Thu, 27 Nov 2003 03:52:33 GMT

and

When I first began working with baboons, my main problem was learning to keep up with them while remaining alert to poisonous snakes, irascible buffalo, aggressive bees, and leg-breaking pig-holes. Fortunately, these challenges eased over time, mainly because I was traveling in the company of expert guides—baboons who could spot a predator a mile away and seemed to possess a sixth sense for the proximity of snakes. Abandoning myself to their far superior knowledge, I moved as a humble disciple, learning from masters about being an African anthropoid.

from a review in the Nation of a bio of Winnicott

Wed, 22 Oct 2003 22:14:45 GMT

Dr. True Self
by Martha C. Nussbaum

Post date 10.16.03 | Issue date 10.27.03

Unlike Freud, Donald Winnicott is not a cultural icon, read in Great Books courses, revered and reviled. Unlike Jacques Lacan, he is not an intellectual cult figure, with a band of zealous disciples and an impenetrable jargon. There is no school of Winnicott; there are no courses in his methods. All this is as he wished it. Nobody was more skeptical of cults and the rigidities that they induced. All his life Winnicott was obsessed with the freedom of the individual self to exist defiantly, resisting parental and cultural demands, to be there without saying a word if silence was its choice. In his own writings he spoke with a voice that was determinedly his own, surprisingly personal, idiosyncratic, playful, and at the same time ordinary. One could not extract a jargon from it if one tried, and one cannot talk about his theoretical ideas without confronting live, complex human beings. That, perhaps, is why he has never had a secure home in the academy, which is so enamored of beautiful scientific or pseudo-scientific structures, and so often fearful of real people and the demands that their complexity imposes. And for these same reasons Winnicott has had an enormous influence on the practice of psychoanalysis, particularly in America....

The american psyche

Wed, 15 Oct 2003 23:11:34 GMT

overheard

"The real symbolic question today is the nature of the two symbols of freedom and equality in the American psyche. For the moment we need to assume that we canít "have our cake and eat it too." In other words, the two visions of America ? the vision of freedom and the vision of equality - are paradoxical visions. Each has a truth but its truth cannot exist at the same time as the other truth."

Note on individualism.

Wed, 15 Oct 2003 21:26:01 GMT

Given that human beings are characteristically projectors of deeper human qualities either on to gods or heros, we can see that idividualism is not a nutural stance: it tends to empower individuals with god pojected powers, and to de-divinize the surrounding natural envirnment and its forces. Thus theories of projection tend to support the indivdualist view (projections come from the psyche, rather than being intuitive perceptions of nature). Individualism is not objective: it is a belief system with consequences.