Posts Tagged ‘ Mass man ’

Separation Anxiety

This is one of our basic problems, since our society demands conformity. Separation anxiety, as Wikipedia correctly points out, is a normal part of childhood. But dysfunction families make it clear (unconsciously) that the child cannot exist separate from its parents. In my opinion, the inability to be affects many of us, and can even result in death.

I speak as an expert because of my personal experience. The last time I saw my mother, she was dying from cancer, but she was a domineering as ever. I was almost forty, but as helpless as a small child when I was around her. This was summer in Illinois, when the heat and humidity are awesome. But I was freezing. She made it clear that as far as she was concerned, I did not exist.

My ex-wife had even more severe emotional problems, because she came from an even more dysfunctional family. She had a severe psychotic episode, and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. To me, it was simply a matter of not being able to be a common-sense diagnosis that made perfect sense. To make a long story short, she left me and a few years later killed herself.

Even more recently I had a man friend here in Orosi. I could tell he was having a serious emotional conflict with his wife, and he seemed to be on the losing side. I tried to support him emotionally, but could not. He developed strange, serious health problems that could not be solved.I told some of the other Americans here, that also knew the family well, that he was dying – and boy did they tear into me! I was not allowed to say that, and they practically killed me as well. When he did die, a few days later, not a world was said about it, and he was buried before I even knew he was gone.

What do all these stories have in common? Serious conflicts of various kinds, which probably include separation anxiety –  both from parents and from society itself – and the two overlap. It is very common to find spouses where one dominates the other. And often this results in the serious health problems, or death, for the weaker one.

It seems like the weaker one actually wants to be destroyed. Why? Because he is bad for trying to be himself, and be independent of the other – where the other can be the mass to which he belongs. This is the normal situation in most companies, or other organizations. Any individuality is destroyed.

Good psychotherapists should be aware of this and help their clients with this problem. Instead, they ignore it and take care of their need to be respectable instead. I speak from experience here too.

One final point – when anyone or any group feels it must behave a certain way, that it has no choice in the matter – it is as good as dead. And this is the way most feel – they are in the grips of something bigger than them – progress, perhaps – that they cannot oppose.

They cannot separate themselves from it.

2012
01/07
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
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Why are People Getting Stupider?

At the risk of coming across as a frightful snob, it seems clear to me that most people (say 80% of the American population) are just plain stupid – and are determined to stay that way. Just look at the Republican presidential hopefuls – where do they find those guys and gals?

Our networked society finds them, automatically. I just wrote a book review about this on Amazon. The author of this book points out, correctly, that the Internet functions as a filter (explicitly so, in the case of Google), bringing things forward in accordance with our group ethos. He does not mention (naturally) that it enhances the stupidity of mass man, which has been with us ever since the Industrial Revolution.

But that is not all, by a long shot. It enhances their desire to destroy themselves – something that is so unbelievable, we cannot bear to think about it. If they cannot think, they reason unconsciously, this means they do not exist – which is exactly what they want.

I cannot blame you for thinking I am crazy, I sometimes think that myself. I can only ask you: is the whole world crazy? Perhaps you should not answer this question, but keep it to yourself.

2012
01/03
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Technology
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Five Centuries of History

I keep noticing this – five centuries of history, from the 15th through the 19th Centuries, the most important centuries in history, the era of the Modern world, have been carefully ignored as though they never happened.

I got a new book today, hot off the press – Too Big to Know: rethinking knowledge now that the facts aren’t the facts, experts are everywhere, and the smartest person in the room is the room. This is a brilliant analysis of our information/networked world. To my way of thinking it has one fault – it is five centuries too late; or at the very least, two centuries too late, if we reset our clocks to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

The author, David Weinberger, does not ask himself why most of the people in the room will not read his book. He just assumes we don’t want to talk about how the masses do not matter.

I must be smarter than everyone, or dumber than everyone – or both, to insist on going back and looking at how technology flooded our consciousness, and created mass man.

I may be smarter or dumber, or both, but that doesn’t matter. I am being ignored just as five centuries of history have been.

2011
12/29
CATEGORY
History
Technology
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty

I was going to call this posting The Pleasures of the Mind, and perhaps I should have. But as I sat down to have my morning coffee with my rice and beans  (not a bad combination, bye the way) I added another pleasure – reading philosophy. Today I was introduced to Merleau-Ponty, who I had never heard of before. Everybody knows of Sartre, who has been forcibly shoved into our collective consciousness. He knew how to manipulate the media, and did so instinctively all his life.

Merleau-Ponty was not interested in publicity and has been forgotten. In that way, he was like most of us – in that we will quickly be forgotten.

From the introduction (Existentialism, second edition, page, 271):

Merleau-Ponty holds that essentially human existence it not knowing and thinking, but living, valuing…it is not consciousness, but the human body that is intentional, through “motility” Our bodies are not simply objects in the world (to which each of us has privileged but yet contingent access). The body is our Being-in-the-world, the perspective from which we perceive, judge, value…Freedom is never, as Sartre insists, absolute or total. It is “progressive”, a reorientation of our demands on the basis of “pre-evaluated meanings” and motivation.

This will strike most as unimportant; nothing but common sense expressed in big words.

I should not be surprised; I should remember that the mass understands little. Which is only natural, because the intellectuals do not understand them either.

2011
12/29
CATEGORY
Philosophy
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Memes and Mass Man

TED – Genes, memes, and temes

Susan Blackmore - Dangerous Memes; or, What the Pandorans let loose

The History Guide – Ortega y Gassett’s Revolt of the Masses

Blackmore has become a preacher of memes – and an excellent one. As something of a preacher myself, I can only admire her passion. From her article:

Cultural evolution is a dangerous child for any species to let loose on its world. And the parent species, whatever it is like and wherever it arises, will have no insight into what it has done until its offspring is already grown and making its way in the world. By then it is too late to take it back. So I shall call this motherly species ‘Pandoran’, after the mythical first Greek woman whose box released all the evils of mankind.

And at the same time, it is easy to see how much resistance there is to this idea. People do not want to face the fact that they are replicators.  A fact that is obvious to me. Indeed, I would take it further, and make the connection between memes and mass man. And insist that her new idea, of temes, has been in operation for a long time. And is the force that created mass man. The proper title of this posting should be Temes and Mass Man.

There are no such passionate defenders of Ortega’s idea of mass man. But the History Guide is an excellent online source. It begins:

We do not know what is happening to us, and this is precisely what is happening to us, not to know what is happening to us: the man of today is beginning to be disoriented with respect to himself, he is outside of his country, thrown into a new circumstance that is like a terra incognita. (1926)

And later:

The command over the public life exercised today by the intellectually vulgar is perhaps the factor of the present situation which is most novel, least assimilable to anything in the past. At least in European history up to the present, the vulgar had never believed itself to have “ideas” on things. It had beliefs, traditions, experiences, proverbs, mental habits, but it never imagine itself in possession of theoretical opinions on what things are or ought to be. To-day, on the other hand, the average man has the most mathematical “ideas” on all that happens or ought to happen in the universe. Hence he has lost the use of his hearing. Why should he listen if he has within him all that is necessary? There is no reason now for listening, but rather for judging, pronouncing, deciding. There is no question concerning public life, in which he does not intervene, blind and deaf as he is, imposing his “opinions.”

I have two books about Ortega by the philosopher Pedro Blas Gonzales, who teaches at a Catholic university in Miami. He does his best to show that Ortega was not talking about a real class of people, but was only philosophizing – as he does. He could not be more wrong. These people are very real, and they have taken over the world.

Blackmore shows how this has happened: man has become obsessed with a technology that produces large numbers of identical objects – and has become such an object himself. To put this another way: mass man has become a mass replicator of himself. A conclusion that Blackmore herself seems to avoid.

2011
12/24
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Technology
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Anti-Humans

Physics has discovered antimatter, it’s time we also discovered our anti-humans as well. They are not hard to find; they are all around us.

I’m not trying to be cute here; I am not talking about a figure of speech. I am talking about beings that are human in every way – except they are the direct opposite of the positive kind. They are negative humans, and their basic instinct is not creating more being but less of it.  As such, they are the first known example of anti-life.

I am not trying to complicate matters by introducing another useless idea. Quite to the contrary, I want to simplify things by introducing an idea that makes it much easier to understand what is going on. This idea is extremely shocking at first – it flies in the face of some of our most cherished beliefs (beliefs about who we are) – but these beliefs are only illusions, and have served us badly.

It is easiest to see this in operation in humanity in the mass – in what anthropologists call large-scale society – which, since the small-scale varieties are almost gone – means nearly all of us.

What has been observed, over and over, about civilizations is their instability. The are either getting stronger or getting weaker. No satisfactory theory has been advanced for this. My theory makes it simple – the ratio of humans to anti-humans change change as civilizations mature. At first, there is more of the positive kind – and then there is more of the negative kind. Something about mass man changes them – and high-technology seems to make them worse, not better.

This also operates at a personal level – where it is just as common, but due to our faulty observational skills is not noticed as much. But we are being forced to recognize this as mental illness has become an epidemic. In each person, positive and negative personalities can be easily observed. It is the easiest thing in the world to observe craziness in operation in different people. And one can also observe how strongly these same people deny their craziness – which is obvious to anyone else with half an eye.

To put this in another way – the conflict between our positive personality and our negative personality is what insanity amounts to. No doubt this is an oversimplification, but a useful one. No doubt this has been thought of before – if so, please inform me about it.

One can even observe how one person’s craziness infects others. At my last job in Silicon Valley my boss used to complain about the craziness of the founding CIO. At the next board meeting they strongly recommended that he be replaced. And believe it or not – this happened! He made a feeble speech at a gathering of the employees, explaining his action – when it wasn’t his action at all, he was getting the boot!

No one made the slightest effort to understand what was going on – like good nobodies, they made it their business to know nothing. This is one characteristic of the anti-human – it doesn’t think for itself, but only obeys, and thinks like everyone else.

I have an excellent book Freethinkers by Susan Jacoby – who describes this trend in 19th Century America. Americans went from thinkers to non-thinkers. The parallel to Nazism in Germany is unmistakable. They went from the most advanced to the most depraved in the same time period – the late 19th Century and the early 20th Centuries. When the Modern world collapsed.

Lest I seem to be acting superior, I can point my finger in my direction here also – I have been as crazy as anyone, but by pure luck have survived, and am writing to tell of it.

2011
11/29
CATEGORY
History
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
2 comments

Helplessness and Fury

What we should be doing is fixing our world, and making it work right. But we cannot do this, because it is just too much. As a result, we have decided to destroy it – out of frustration. We are not consciously aware of any of this – and are determined to not become aware of it.

The whole scene is too much, and we have decided to deal with it in our own way – by eliminating it. Why don’t we want to be aware of this? Because we are a proud race, and don’t want to admit that we have blown it completely. We have been overwhelmed by the results of our own creativity, of our own technologies. If we are one of Nature’s experiments, she will have to try better next time – because this experiment is just not working.

Actually, the situation is worse than my clever summary indicates – as anyone can easily find out for themselves, but no one wants to do. No one likes to look death in the face, but that is just what we have to do. Because the death of our overdeveloped world is upon us.

The first stage of this death was the most insidious, and the most difficult to understand – really, impossible to understand. It was the arrival of mass man, which coincided with the Industrial Revolution. Mass production produced mass man also – while no one was looking. This is understandable, because nothing like it had ever happened before. It was incomprehensible, and still is.

Mankind was in the process of falling into its own black hole – from which it would never emerge. Simply because it lost its ability to understand itself – that is, the ability to be human.

Haven’t some of our great thinkers understood this? Yes they have – kind of. But the possibility that the human race was destroying itself was just too shocking, and too extraordinary, for them to take seriously. One possible exception was Nietzsche – but no one could be sure just what he was saying. Ortega y Gasset was the first to speak of mass man (a most important discovery!) – but he has been ignored.

I continue to read Sartre, the section Patterns of Bad Faith in Being and Nothingness. This is hard reading, and I can only manage a small part at a time – mainly because what he is saying is so substantial. Our superficial era, of people who can only concentrate for 6.5 seconds at a time, is not even going to try to read it. They have decided, as I have already said, on an easier solution – destroy everything!

There is no sense in urging them to reconsider this decision, because it was unconscious – and unconscious it remains. They cannot construct their world, but they can still destruct it – and are busy doing just that.

Instead of thinking, they want to be entertained. And they insist that what I am saying is utter nonsense – something no one is paying any attention to – and therefore they will not either.

The image is familiar – a vast herd of sheep in the stockyards, being lead to their death by one domineering old goat.

In our case, what is the goat? Everything – the whole mess we cannot resist.

2011
11/26
CATEGORY
Technology
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Stupidity

We have acquired a reversal of values – we no longer want to make the world better, we want to make it worse. We do not want to become more intelligent, but more stupid. As a result, the world is a complete mess – and we cannot understand why.

To me it is simple – since our values have become negative ones, we are headed in the wrong direction and cannot turn back – without another reversal of values, which is exceedingly unlikely. We have no idea what caused the first reversal, but it was clearly the result of powerful unconscious forces. Trying to reverse the process consciously is impossible.

Everyone agrees that the situation has become impossible, and this exasperates them – but unconsciously, this is exactly what they want – except they want to make it even worse.

2011
11/24
CATEGORY
History
Literature
Morality
1 comment

How We Were All Misled

NY Review

Like all of you, I have far too much to read – and I have spent too much time already reading about our economic mess. But this is really worth reading – and reading this review is much faster than reading the whole book. If you can’t read that, here are the final paragraphs:

I think, though, that the failure of responsibility was linked to a failure of agency—the individual’s ability to affect the course of events. An enormous number of people today feel as if they have very little economic agency in their own lives: often, they are right to feel that. The decisions that affect their fates are taken far above their heads, and often aren’t conscious decisions at all, so much as they are the operation of large economic forces over which they have no control—impersonal forces whose effects are felt in directly personal ways.

It is difficult to feel responsible when you have no agency. Many of the people who did stupid things—who did things on that 0–10 scale—did so because everyone around them was doing them too, and because loud voices were telling them to carry on. The Icelanders who bought cars with foreign currency loans were sold them by financiers who promised that it was a good idea; the Irish who bought now-unsellable houses on empty estates were told, by builders and bankers and the state, that this was a once-in-a-generation opportunity; the Greeks who are, at the time of writing, furiously rebelling against austerity measures were falsely told that the state could afford to look after them, and arranged their lives accordingly.

The collective momentum of a culture is, for more or less everybody more or less all of the time, overwhelming. This is especially true for anything to do with economics. The evidence is clear: it is easy to mislead people about money, and easy to lead members of the public astray both individually and en masse, because when it comes to money, most of us, most of the time, don’t know what we’re doing. The corollary is also clear: the whole Western world misled itself over debt, and the road back from where we are goes only uphill.

Will these words of wisdom make any difference? As I said in my other posting this morning The Decision Not To Be, you can’t explain much to a mass mentality.

2011
11/22
CATEGORY
Economy
Morality
2 comments

The Decision Not To Be

People can decide to not be. The most drastic form of this decision is suicide, which is relatively uncommon, but the decision to be less than fully alive in difficult social situations is not only common, but normal.

We have decided not to be is the right way of being, if that makes any sense – which I believe it does. Ideally, everyone should be able to become their own person, and one can see any small child actively engaged in doing this.

Usually by age three our basic personalities have developed, and it is very difficult to change this later – but not impossible. When a person marries, for example, they change as a result. Two people this close will naturally change each other – and quite often they will decide they do not like what happens and they terminate the marriage, one way or the other.

Literature is full of stories of how people change or refuse to change, it is one of our permanent fascinations – as any gossip knows. At the mundane level we make decisions all the time – what we are going to have for breakfast, for example. But these do no usually change our personalities or our way of life. Conversion experiences, on the other hand, such as a religious conversion, do change our way of life.

These are dramatic and easily observed. The kind of change I am concerned with now is more subtle – but no less important. It is a decision by an individual or a culture to live an extremely reduced form of life (sometimes referred to as a mass mentality). To have a drastically reduced existence where nothing important is allowed to go on.

One can easily see this during any rush hour – millions of bored people who have temporarily put their lives on hold. One can also observe that they do not instantly recover from this when the arrive at work, but this deadness carries over into the rest of their working life. They know what they are doing is a waste of their lives, and they cannot get enthusiastic about it.

Companies have to devise all kinds of strategies to overcome this – or they may simply let it alone, and expect only a minimum performance of routine work. Either way, the results are not desirable, and result in a deadening in many ways.

Individuals devise all kind of ways of coping with this (or fighting it) as councilors of every kind know. But quite often they just give up. They will still function as bodies, but not as minds. They lose any ability, or any desire, to understand themselves or question their situation. And they get the instant feedback that this is the right thing to do. Everyone is on the same boat, and everyone is telling everyone else that everything is OK – when death is staring them right in the face.

It is painful to see this happening to other people, or even whole families, or even groups of countries – such as America and the EU. The cannot recover because they do not have what they need to recover – their Selves. But they are firmly convinced they are doing the right thing. Which perhaps they are – any species that destroys itself does not deserve to live.

2011
11/22
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
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