Category Archives: Psychology

Marrying robots, killing with drones, and making empty selfies

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by Edward Curtin

Source: Intrepid Report

Today everything has become a spectacle, including writing. My title probably caught your eye, as it was intended. But now I would like to tell you a personal story about a man whose brilliant work foreshadowed and dissected the issues of my title before it existed. In this he was prophetic, and it is why his work is so important. He always insisted that true artists were able to uncover society’s conflicts before they emerged consciously. Though a psychologist by profession, he was in this sense an artist as well.

His name, Rollo May, has disappeared from public discourse in this era of biological psychology and psychiatry. This great American thinker and writer was the man who introduced existential psychology to the United States. And though he died twenty-one years ago, his prescient voice begs to be heard in our current conditions.

From his first important book in 1950—The Meaning of Anxiety—he examined key underlying issues that have plagued this country ever since: the worship of technology as a death cult; the loss of a genuine sense of self; sex obsessions leading to lovelessness and impotence; and violence yoked to a lack of compassion.

In book after book, he reiterated one of his central themes: that full passionate life is only possible when one refuses to block off from consciousness the frightful emotions of anxiety, guilt, and despair. In this, his life’s work ran against the grain of the emerging zeitgeist of happy pills, mood stabilizers, and the happiness industry. “After despair,” he wrote, “the one thing left is possibility.” For possibility (Latin, posse, to be able) means power, and true power only comes to those who dare to be weak and freely embrace their personal destinies and the truth of their political and cultural conditions. I think it is not an exaggeration to say that we are presently living in an era of despair, and to embrace that reality is a hard but necessary pill to swallow. May is a wonderful guide.

While topical, in many ways his message is timeless as well. But I would like to tell you about some things I learned from him years ago that speak to our current condition. And it seems fitting that I should begin these thoughts on a day when a prominent, mainstream website has published an article arguing that humans should be able to marry robots and the day of those blissful conjugal ties is in our not too distant future. So I will proceed with those lovely words ringing in my mind: “I now pronounce you robot and wife.”

It was during the closing years of the Cold War when he and I sat down for a long conversation about his thought. Cold War rhetoric and nuclear saber rattling dominated the news and a strong anti-nuclear movement was astir. I had been deeply impressed with May’s paradoxical thinking ever since I had read his award-winning Love and Will in 1969, a year in which I had been forced out of a college teaching position for “heretical” thinking and opposition to the Vietnam war. In his work, which was not openly political, I nevertheless found a voice of deep wisdom and prophetic power. He seemed to be unearthing hidden springs of the madness sweeping the country, and in so doing also addressing the future, and, of course, me. I was feeling particularly vulnerable, yet paradoxically intensely strong, as I had recently declared myself a conscientious objector from war and the Marine Corps. It was a time like today when death and destruction were in the air, and, as Yeats puts it: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

The first thing I noticed about May the day we met was that he seemed painfully vulnerable, as though he had so opened himself to existence that the slightest breeze could blow him away. Yet when he began talking I sensed a fierceness, as well, as I recalled a favorite quote of his from Beethoven: “I will seize fate by the throat.”

So I asked him, “In reading your works one of the things that strikes me is the vitality you draw from an awareness of death. Most people would call this morbid and depressing, and yet it seems to bring you joy. I wonder how this began for you?”

“Well,” he answered without hesitation but in his ruminative way, “I’ve had some long bouts with killing illnesses. I had tuberculosis for five or six years. I had malaria fever when I was in Greece. And I’ve had several other bouts with death. If most people would call the consciousness of death depressive, I think they are the ones who have the—what I would call—masochistic or neurotic viewpoint. All through human history mortality has been faced directly and out of it, and this especially true for the ancient Greeks, they got the sense of the value of life from the fact that we are mortal. Now our age is afraid of death and we repress it and we think the only wise thing is to think about living, which strikes me as itself very sick. It’s because we’ve wedded ourselves to technology, and technology is really a study of death. You say ‘vitality.’ You can’t speak of technology as having vitality. Vitality is the human beings contribution and he ought to use technology to make his life richer. But we have become identified with it.”

Presto! Back to the present/future! As if on cue, a refutation of May’s dismissal of machines having life walks in my door. I see the mailman deliver our mail, so I get up and fetch it. An invitation has arrived for a public lecture at the college where I teach—a lecture by the futurist Ray Kurzweil, the man of “Singularity” fame, the prognosticator of the day he says is coming when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence and human biology will disappear into the machine. Ray has a plan to never die, so he takes 130 plus supplements a day to keep himself alive until he is able to upload his consciousness onto a hard drive and become one with the machine for a happy immortality as bits of information. Sounds like a great hereafter. And Ray has a backup plan in case the pills don’t do the trick and keep him going until he impregnates the machine; he’ll be fresh frozen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation where he expects to be defrosted like a frozen burrito in no more than fifty years.

May said to me, “I’m very much against the quantitative views of human life. You could live exceptionally as Pascal did and die in your middle forties. As Kierkegaard did also. The length of life I don’t think is relevant. The idea that we are going to prolong life for two hundred years seems to me to be the most misplaced goal in the whole technological, crazy scheme.”

It looks like Rollo had a point: the worship of technology as a death cult. He could see it then, and today it is carrying us to our doom unless we change course. “More and more,” he wrote, “the question is being asked whether society as a whole is psychotic, and the pause after the question is a sign that the answer could be yes as well as no.” There was, he then felt, a fear of psychosis on a very broad scale, and at the heart of this fear is a loss of faith in the reality of the self, as well as a widespread feeling that one can never be sure anything is real. This sense of unreality has increased exponentially since then, and the issue of self-identity has become a hall of mirrors in our reality-media funhouse. “As in a Kafka novel, everything is waiting for us, but we ourselves do not appear.” But what does appear today, as then, but in a slightly different guise, and grows larger and larger as people’s faith in themselves grows smaller and smaller and their sense of impotence increases, is the possibility of nuclear warfare and world destruction—a new cold war started by the United States by encircling Russia and setting Ukraine ablaze. The ultimate technological death cult is, of course, nuclear weapons .

May made the connections. Like the great sociologist C. Wright Mills, he knew that our destinies are personal and social, and to deny one is to deny the other. By being existential he meant understanding the individual, not as an atomized self, but as a person-in-the world. Mills called it the sociological imagination; May preferred the term paradoxical. But they were on the same page. One’s sense of self—self-identity—is rooted social and historical conditions.

Starting with Man’s Search for Himself in the 1950s and continuing until his death in 1994, May repeatedly explored the reasons why there was an increasing loss of a genuine sense of self resulting in widespread identity confusion and a growing apathy linked to a lack of compassion. He clearly described the anxiety and loneliness that ate at so many people who “not only do not know what they want; they often do not have any clear idea of what they feel.” Feeling only empty and bored and lacking a real sense of self, they conform to hollow cultural values and mores while consuming the goods and services that a consumer culture offers to fill them up. Consuming, they are consumed. This powerless dependency, rooted in a lack of self-identity and the need to be liked, leads to painful anxiety, despair, and powerlessness resulting in acquiescence to social ills. This is today’s selfie/media culture in a nutshell, what Christopher Lasch once called the culture of narcissism.

I obviously couldn’t ask him when we talked, but I can imagine his response to today’s trends of people marrying robots, selfie photos, Facebook, avatars and second lives in cyberspace, the growth of pornography, sex with machines, the sexual saturation of culture, electronic warfare, drone killings, etc.—a bemused laugh and a comment suggesting the tragedy of it all. In Love and Will he wrote that “the contemporary paradoxes in sex and love have one thing in common, namely the banalization of sex and love. By anesthetizing feeling in order to perform better, by employing sex as a tool to prove prowess and identity, by using sensuality to hide sensitivity, we have emasculated sex and left it vapid and empty. The banalization of sex is well-aided and abetted by our mass communication. . . . They oversimplify love and sex, treating the topic like a combination and learning to play tennis and buying life insurance. In this process, we have robbed sex of its power by sidestepping eros (the creative life force); and we have ended by dehumanizing both.” He predicted that this technical approach to sex would lead to sex obsessions, lovelessness, and increased sexual impotence. And here we are—Viagra, big butts, enhanced this and enhanced that—all in the service of sexual satisfaction produced by the cult of technique and devoid of passion.

“Shooting” yourself with a phone camera, sex with a robot or a machine, and killing with drones—this is life today. We have become separated from our humanity by our machines. We worship our images and in so doing can’t grasp the death and destruction caused by our drones and foreign wars. Others don’t exist in this solipsistic culture. May saw it coming and explained why. He saw that violence was yoked to a lack of compassion and that this lack of compassion (to suffer with others) was connected to our flight from death and emotions we consider negative. He saw this form of thinking as an effort to control life that was self-defeating and could only lead to more violence.

“Paradoxical thinking,” he told me, “seems to me to be the only kind that gets to the root of human existence. I don’t think analytical thinking does. It leaves out too much. You remember Heraclitus. I think he’s quite right that we always think in terms of positive/negative. We think like electricity, thus both the negative and positive pole and the oscillation back and forth, and human thinking is a play with opposites.”

Since he has written so much about the breakdown of our traditional myths and symbols, I asked him if there was any one word or symbol that he thought encompassed the body of his work.

After a long pause, he said, “No, I think that’s impossible for any person who writes to say. I think you could say it much better than I could because we’re so much in it. All I know is that I think paradoxically.” And without pause or any word from me, he continued. “Well, if you wanted to push me, I would say that what I think is the basic, well, the basic symbol of my life, I would say that it is compassion. That’s what matters most to me. I grew up in a rather difficult family, quite difficult. I did not have a good childhood. I was quite lonely as a child. And I did suffer a good deal.”

Out of this childhood pain, he learned early to be a therapist for his family, and felt that these experiences gave him an acute sensitivity to others’ feelings. In his memoir Paulus, about his friend, Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian, he wrote words that could equally apply to himself: “Someone has to mediate, to make a connection through his own life between opposites.” For out of his wounds, May has created a powerful body of writings, and out of a torn self, a paradox of wholeness.

For us today, in the era of apathy, depression, and indifference to the suffering and deaths of “others” everywhere, May’s work begs to be resurrected. He urges us to care again, and to let our care and compassion lead us to act to stop the violence that we are taught to ignore. Don’t look away, I can hear him say, face fully all dimensions of the human experience, the negative and positive; remember that despair and joy are linked to the possibility of freedom; reject the cult of death that hides within technological obsessiveness; and remember that love brings the intimation of our mortality but also our greatest joys and passions.

And if he were still sitting across from me—and you—today, he’d probably also say with a grin, “Above all, don’t marry a robot.”

Edward Curtin is a sociologist and writer who teaches at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and has published widely.

Co-Creation and the Greater Reality

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By Rahkyt

Source: Sacred Space in Time

Life is a continuous process of creation and destruction. With every action and reaction, something new is birthed into being and something old undergoes the processes of destruction. From the thought processes we engage in during the course of the day, to the actions we take and reactions we make, we are creating and destroying our perception of reality. As a result, in each instance, we are truly remaking ourselves anew, in the only way that matters: the construction of our own, personal rendition of reality.

Memory serves the function of maintaining consistency. Without it, we become a new person in each instance. Memories ties us to the past and creates a stream of impressions which guide our present and future actions. We define ourselves by our memories and through them, we present a facade to the world comprised of impressions that may be factual or not, based upon our own emotional ties to events that have passed. The past itself, being dependent upon perception, is more illusory than real. Outside of mechanical means of perception, video and audio recordings, pictures, etcetera, our memories of the past are not at all reliable. Our emotional state of being at the moment of experience often determines how we perceive them and the mind fills in gaps with re-created scenes, making memory often more fantastical than reality-based.

When we hold on to stories of the past and use them to define our present we limit our options and outcomes. By stating to ourselves and others that we are this and that because we have experienced this or that we bind ourselves to the potentialities inherent in the probabilistic options arising from the present manifestation of effects caused by our experience of this and/or that. Logical determinism is the result. We see no other options available because our synaptic patterns of reality-formation dictate outcomes bounded by the past, when, in reality, there are no such boundaries truly in place. Only those we have placed upon ourselves.

We are thereby bound into preconditioned repetitions of past patterns from which there is seemingly no escape. Despair and depression result, limiting the outcomes of a life to a downward-spiraling reoccurrence pattern. Fear acts as the conditioning factor, pulling up past scenes of loathing that trap thought into conditioned pathways of expression. Again and again we dance the same dance, although the tune itself has changed. The ability to cognate at higher levels is a divine gift that allows us to shift those patterns out and to achieve a higher state of expression if we so choose to do so. We can change, no matter the thickness of our synaptic connections, the density of our neural nets, the pervasivity of fear-based patterns of call and response.

Removing these boundaries and experiencing the full gamut of experience is the challenge of a lifetime. Becoming open to the infinite expression of creative union with the ultimate requires the death of the past and the embrace of the present, thereby delimiting the possibilities of the future. It entails the conscious processing of future experience by the release of past experience resulting in the embrace of the Now experience. Each moment recreates itself anew, requiring new output in order to take full advantage of new input. While reality does seemingly proceed in cycles and we undergo certain types of experience again and again it is really a spiral and each new experience while appearing similar is a new iteration at a higher level of occurrence. Therefore, the same reaction is not always the best action.

Determining the difference between action and reaction takes a depth of understanding that must be based upon recognition of fundamental patterns inherent within our lived realities. A thorough recapitulation of our life experiences, whee every memory we can access has been ruminated upon and its lessons internalized and made accessible to conscious thought. Where our reactions become instead new actions based upon the present input which may be slightly different from past input in important and fundamental ways.

Life is purposeful and there are no accidents. Each perception, each interaction is meaningful and is connected to external realities in fundamental ways. Together, we co-create the Greater Reality and, despite the hype, we are all integrally connected at the base level of existence, beneath conscious perception and experience.  This web of continuous co-creation is beyond the conscious ability of most to perceive and yet, to be able to do so is not necessary. Trust in God, in the willful and deliberate manifestation of reality is required alongside the desire to act in harmonious resonation with the dictations of the Multiverse. This can be done by simply existing in the flow of creation and destruction, maintaining a perceptive ambivalence to societally-determined conceptions of value yet adhering to the internal sense of beingness within the continuous flow of change and evolution.

No matter how things seem, whether they are determined to be good or bad, all has purpose, all has reason. Accepting this truth of existence and working within one’s own flow of interaction at the personal and subjective level sends emanations of causality out into the greater creation, combining with the output of other souls to morph into stupendously complex manifestations that form the holographic context of the combined, material co-creation that we call the world.

 

The Internet Doesn’t Exist

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By Jacob Silverman

Source: The Baffler

The Internet has been very busy. In just the last week, Caitlyn Jenner broke the Internet, but she also united it. The FCC made war on the Internet. The Internet shamed a couple. The Internet had a dark side, Nikki Finke was barred from the Internet, the Supreme Court made the Internet less safe for women, the Internet named a famous fetus, the Internet did stuff with a superhero movie, and the Internet changed. A girl also won the Internet, Jack White had a difficult history with the Internet, and the Internet “shafted” a Canadian journalist.

“The Internet” is the universal straw man, a hero or villain for every occasion. The Internet, the Internet, the Internet—this decentralized communications network has long been granted a proper noun and practically a degree of sentience. Yet few people talk about “the Telephone” as if it were some person or place, though perhaps they once did. This eagerness to grant the Internet some degree of autonomy—to make it into an actor, an entity—stems in part from its apparent abstraction. Where does all this information come from? As Ray Bradbury famously said, “To hell with you and to hell with the Internet. It’s distracting. It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

Bradbury wasn’t just slipping into kneejerk techno-fear. He was also guilty of the same fallacy that crops up again and again in digital journalism: the assumption that the Internet is some monolithic mass, a discrete population or interest group. “It’s distracting,” Bradbury said, without specifying what “it” was.

But in another, more important way, Bradbury was absolutely right: the Internet doesn’t exist.

A couple years ago, Rachel Law, a grad student at Parsons at the time, had this to say: “The ‘Internet’ does not exist. Instead, it is many overlapping filter bubbles which selectively curate us into data objects to be consumed and purchased by advertisers.” As she also said, a bit less academically, “Browsing is now determined by your consumer profile and what you see, hear and the feeds you receive are tailored from your friends’ lists, emails, online purchases, etc.”

What we call the Internet—and what web writers so lazily draw on for their work—is less a hive mind or a throng or a gathering place and more a personalized set of online maneuvers guided by algorithmic recommendations. When we look at our browser windows, we see our own particular interests, social networks, and purchasing histories scrambled up to stare back at us. But because we haven’t found a shared discourse to talk about this complex arrangement of competing influences and relationships, we reach for a term to contain it all. Enter “the Internet.”

The Internet is a linguistic trope but also an ideology and even a business plan. If your job is to create content out of (mostly) nothing, then you can always turn to something/someone that “the Internet” is mad or excited about. And you don’t have to worry about alienating readers because “the Internet” is so general, so vast and all-encompassing, that it always has room. This form of writing is widely adaptable. Now it’s common to see stories where “Facebook” or “Twitter” stands in for the Internet, offering approval or judgment on the latest viral schlock. Choose your (anec)data carefully, and Twitter can tell any story you want.

We fall back on “the Internet” because it gives us a rhetorical life raft to hang onto amidst an overwhelming tide of information or a piece of sardonic shorthand to utter with a wink and a grimace, much like “never read the comments.” It also reflects a strange irony about today’s culture: despite being highly distributed, and despite offering an outlet for every subculture and niche interest and political quirk, what we think of the Internet often does feel rather uniform and monolithic.

This impression is partly based in fact; the tech and media industries are currently undergoing a kind of recentralization, exemplified by the rise of massive platforms like Facebook and recent mega-deals, such as Verizon buying AOL or Charter Communications (who?) snapping up Time Warner Cable. Attention is increasingly being manipulated and auctioned off by a handful of big conglomerates. The relegation of Twitter to also-ran in the social media sweepstakes—the loser to Facebook in the rush to industry monopoly—also reflects this centralization. That a company with hundreds of millions of users can seem like a failure only shows how bad the market is at apportioning value. (But there I go falling into abstractions again—as if there is anything called “the market.”)

“The Internet” is easy, a convenient reference point and an essential concept for web journalists tasked with surfacing monetizable content from this great informational morass. Digital culture, or writing about “what people are talking about on the Internet,” is considered its own beat now. But in the same way that someone born in the 1980s might not think of himself as a millennial—an arbitrary distinction crafted by demographers and marketers—a user of an online service is not necessarily from, or part of, the Internet. Even some of the subcultures often held up as part of the Internet are mostly notional. Is “Black Twitter” a specific, homogenous entity, as it’s so often described in news coverage? Or is it more something that people do, a set of social relations acted out by varying groups of mostly black Twitter users?

The more we write about what takes place online as if it occurred in some other world, the more we fail to relate this communication system, and everything that happens through it, to the society around us. To understand the Internet, we have to destroy it as an idea.

Jacob Silverman’s book, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection, is out now.

Politics as therapy: they want us to be just sick enough not to fight back

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By Michael Richmond

Source: Transformation

On 10 October it is World Mental Health Day. I used to be outgoing, but a descent into crushing depression left me housebound. After Occupy I started asking: how does social environment shape our psychology?

I used to buy the Sun newspaper. Not just to fit in with mates at secondary school but right into my first year at university. I knew there was something to be ashamed of in this filthy habit, armed as I was with my oft-deployed excuse: “I only buy it for the crossword and the football transfers.”

This was true. I never read the news. In general, I lived a remarkably apolitical existence. This was some feat considering I have a Jewish communist great grandfather, socialist grandparents, a union lawyer dad and an older brother who went through his Che Guevara phase at around fifteen.

I dropped out of university in early 2007, five months before Northern Rock bank hit the skids. Who knows whether the student experience would have politicised me? Perhaps the process would have been helped along by the backdrop of the approaching financial crisis?

But something else politicised me instead: a crushing, rapid descent into depression, social wilderness and personal crisis.

I experienced anxiety and depression as a hostile takeover of my life and sense of self. I went from being outgoing and sociable to being unable to talk to people or leave the house. This was within the space of a few days. There was no discernible cause.

It was quickly clear that I couldn’t continue at university and so I moved back into my parents’ house, where I have lived ever since.

Several years of isolation, suicidal thoughts and internal struggle followed. I remained unable to escape the confines of my bullying psyche, let alone my house.

Unable to work or study, have friendships, or experience joy, reading became my true love, my source of meaning, my attempt to make sense of what had happened to me. I obsessively read classic literature, history, philosophy, political economy – I had felt a profound sense of loss at not being able to finish university. I became determined that I would instead educate myself.

But an impenetrable sense of terror and despair continued to accompany me through my every waking and sleeping hour. I began to work my way through an impressive list of psychotropic medications and psychotherapies and eventually attended an NHS psychiatric day hospital for six months.

A “service user” within the psychiatric system gains a unique insight and practical education in state discipline as well as the lengths gone to in enforcing normativity. Having grown up white, straight, male and middle class, I was privileged to rarely, if ever, be told that I had to be something other than what I was.

I seldom encountered gross injustice or violence, blatant discrimination or the kind of treatment faced from the earliest ages if you happen to be a person of colour, don’t fit a gender binary or adhere to accepted ideals of sexual behaviour.

Apart from being a non-religious Jew and encountering minimal levels of playground anti-Semitism, this was the first time I found myself in a situation of social and political ostracism (as well as a self-ostracism that proved just as powerful). I discovered for myself that the experience of the personal deeply informs the political.

Leaving the psychiatric day hospital to instead attend the asylum of Occupy the London Stock Exchange at St Paul’s Cathedral was in many ways a descent into further madness. Many “occupiers” were well acquainted with psychiatric services and medications – as well as using drugs not sanctioned by the state, but often taken for similar reasons.

Chaotic, naïve, and ultimately politically problematic and ineffectual, the initial occupied space did nevertheless open up the possibility for social and political interaction that is elsewhere absent from society.

I felt that I was in crisis, but also that the crisis was much bigger than just me. Getting involved in political praxis seemed to be the best way to channel what I was experiencing.

There is a lot to be said for the practice of “politics as therapy.”

The personal account or “journey” format often proves insufficient when attempting to understand what we do and why we do it. An analysis of political subjectivity is crucial. Shifts in capitalist expansion, social environment and class composition, technological development and the onset of crises tend to precipitate political transformation on an individual and collective basis.

The advent of the printing press or the collapse of the automotive industry in mid-west America, for example, are not external factors to people’s lives or isolated moments in history. Indeed, any such upheaval is bound to lead to transformative changes in the lives and political ideation of those experiencing it.

Our social environment shapes our psychology. We must consider how the policy, ideology and debate that surrounds “mental health” or madness is framed.

The individualisation of suffering is key to the prevailing ideology and discourse surrounding mental illness. This will often focus on a supposed misfiring of brain chemicals, a “cure” to which can be found in the form of pharmaceuticals – often prescribed by your GP before any contact with mental health services.

Attention may also turn to an individual’s lack of positive attitude, but this problem can be “fixed” by a six-week course of cognitive behavioural therapy. So much human suffering is pathologised and medicated when it is either “natural” (i.e grief or the general variety of mental experience) or is directly or indirectly linked to social, political and economic factors that remain absent from debate, let alone actively contested on this terrain.

Psychologist and author Bruce E Levine suggests that much of today’s intervention under the auspices of “mental health” is all too political.

“What better way to maintain the status quo,” Levine asks, “than to view inattention, anger, anxiety, and depression as biochemical problems of those who are mentally ill rather than normal reactions to an increasingly authoritarian society?”

He also argues that many potential activists and “natural anti-authoritarians” are prevented from opposing power: “Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the US. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologised and medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most oppressive authorities.”

The historical origins of madness within western culture and how it became increasingly medicalised should not be forgotten. Michel Foucault exposed how the origins of “confinement” of the “insane” in asylums and workhouses were an integral part of the violent replacement of the feudal commons way of life with capitalist work discipline during the 16th and 17th centuries.

This process is in keeping with continual “primitive accumulation” akin to and contemporary with the conquest of the “New World” and the persecution of heretics and witches. Their land and means of reproduction were stolen and appropriated, while authorities continually oppressed and attempted to proletarianise them.

Initially, the “Great Confinement” saw the imprisonment of the old, the unemployed, the “criminal”, the “insane.”

As Foucault explains: “Before having the medical meaning we give it, or that at least we like to suppose it has, confinement was required by something quite different from any concern with curing the sick. What made it necessary was an imperative of labour. Our philanthropy prefers to recognise the signs of a benevolence toward sickness where there is only a condemnation of idleness.”

The conflation of pejoratives like lazy, sick, unemployed, idle are more than familiar to us in today’s discourse surrounding welfare benefits and the imperatives of labour. And it is not just the DWP and Atos who pressure people back into work, NHS psychiatric services also seem to believe that it is work that sets you free.

The capitalist class would like us to be just sick enough not to fight back, but not so sick that we cannot work. The challenge for us is to find ways of organising and helping each other so that we can find adequate levels of social reproduction, care and support to give us a platform to engage in the therapy of class struggle.

 

Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is Wrong: Smashing the Drug War Paradigm

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By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

“Overwhelming evidence points to not just the failure of the drug control regime to attain its stated goals but also the horrific unintended consequences of punitive and prohibitionist laws and policies,” states a study, published by the Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP).

“A new and improved global drug control regime is needed that better protects the health and safety of individuals and communities around the world,” the report says. “Harsh measures grounded in repressive ideologies must be replaced by more humane and effective policies shaped by scientific evidence, public health principles and human rights standards.”

This sudden onset of logic by political bodies across the globe is likely due to the realization of the cruel and inhumane way governments deal with addiction. Arbitrary substances are deemed “illegal” and then anyone caught in possession of those substances is then kidnapped and locked in a cage, or even killed.

The fact that this barbaric and downright immoral practice has been going on for so long speaks to the sheer ignorance of the state and its dependence upon violence to solve society’s ills.

The good news is that the drug war’s days are numbered, especially seeing that it’s reached the White House, and they are taking action, even if it is symbolic. Evidence of this is everywhere. States are defying the federal government and refusing to lock people in cages for marijuana. Colorado and Washington served as a catalyst in a seemingly exponential awakening to the government’s immoral war.

Following suit were Oregon, D.C., and Alaska. Medical marijuana initiatives are becoming a constant part of legislative debates nationwide. We’ve even seen bills that would not only completely legalize marijuana but deregulate it entirely, like corn.

As more and more states refuse to kidnap and cage marijuana users, the drug war will continue to implode.

Knowledge is a key role in this battle against addiction tyranny and investigative journalist Johann Hari, has some vital information to share. In a recent TEDx talk, Hari smashes the paradigm of the war on drugs.

What really causes addiction — to everything from cocaine to smart-phones? And how can we overcome it? Johann Hari has seen our current methods fail firsthand, as he has watched loved ones struggle to manage their addictions. He started to wonder why we treat addicts the way we do — and if there might be a better way. As he shares in this deeply personal talk, his questions took him around the world, and unearthed some surprising and hopeful ways of thinking about an age-old problem.

Why Empathy Matters

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By Zen Gardner

Source: ZenGardner.com

It’s not easy to stay sensitive in such a cruel, desensitized world but it’s imperative we do. That’s the beauty of empathic souls; they have open and loving hearts, even if it hurts, which is why each of us needs to generate and receive so much love and encouragement.

Loving empathy is its own reward, even if we’re not showered directly with supporting human love as much as we’d prefer. The spiritual is supreme. Connection to Source is our unfailing infinite supply line of everything we need. But I agree, it’s sure nice when that consciousness is manifest in another human being and can be shared between us.

That’s the nature of true interpersonal love, and we need to shower it upon each other.

Empathize or Cauterize

I feel strongly that if we don’t allow ourselves to have broken hearts for the lost and suffering we’re virtually useless consciousness and a betrayal to Source. True heartfelt empathy heals and strengthens ourselves and those around us as we go through this voyage. Letting these sincere emotions course through us, whether it be sharing the pain of battered and betrayed victims of all sorts, including animals, or the sadness of the passing of a dear friend, they’re good for us and are a wonderful opportunity to draw closer to Source.

Using these deep experiences as an energy carrier signal to piggy back other issues on our hearts and minds into the great bosom of Love is a real key. When channeled consciously from the heart, these experiences lead to much greater intuitive understandings, strength of spirit, and that deep, deep peace that passes understanding.

Those who cannot move with these fully awake empathic spiritual impulses in effect have become cauterized. The media works hard at this, bashing the collective head with desensitizing, violent images and mind crushing propaganda constantly. That’s why they do it. Not just to promote their programs, but to shut down our conscious awareness, the all-empowering Source of love and light.

That’s what they fear the most. That we will awaken and tap into our magnificence.

Counteracting the War Against Love

This is fundamentally what this current hijack attempt is all about. Extinguishing love. Love is soft, love is kind. But it is also extremely powerful. Love is a form of creation at work. It contradicts everything we’re witnessing in today’s media driven control structure.

Express your love every chance you get. Others are starved for it just as you are. Give and it will return, but don’t do it with that motive. It just happens naturally, because that is the co-creative nature of love. So many are starved for a word of encouragement, a kind gesture, a thank you or word of appreciation. The downdraft of ugliness is so strong right now we need to support each other in any way we can.

Make yourself vulnerable. It’s the most protected space there is. Put a little love in your heart – and let it out!

Our Warfare Is Spiritual

The forces of darkness cannot overcome the Light, as hard as they may try. Any success they may seem to have at harnessing humanity for their own ends is so very temporary. While we are infinite spiritual beings, they are temporal, parasitic forces.

Keep that in mind, no matter how things may appear at times.

Let’s fully manifest and get this era done away with by letting Universe work fully through us. It happens one heart at a time, but each of us has to keep doing what we’re each meant to do and be.

Stay soft and loving, yet strong and resolved. Our weapons are spiritual – don’t let them entice you into their arena of mind games and ignorant lower vibrational reactionism. Stay where you are strong, yet engage them nonetheless. On your terms.

Thank all of you who give so much. Please know how loved and appreciated you are by so, so many.

Let it flow – we’re just getting started!

Love always, Zen

The Tyranny of Time

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time-travel_2

By Mark Rockeymoore

Source: Sacred Space in Time

The days compound, vivid and expansive, experience manifesting as desire frustrated or fulfilled. Memories build personality, the “I” that is a minuscule component of the Self projected into the illusory 3-D world takes on a solidity that further materializes error, identification with the world the causative factor in the inevitable descent into purgatory. The past “I Was” informs the future “I Will Be” and the present “I Am” is lost in a miasma of regrets and worries, projecting backwards and forwards in time to the detriment of the Now.

What is this remorseless construct that both fulfills and detracts from existence, creating imaginary realities that encompass the entirety of the individuated existence? Perception is linear, the future seems to follow the past in successive streams of memory, which builds upon itself, solidifying pathways of thought which become the “I” that experiences the world. Faint memories of the near and distant past arise in the fathomless ocean of consciousness, informing the present moment and constricting choice along pathways of potentiality determined by previous experience. We will be what we were is the seemingly logical rationalization that results in the false determination that we cannot change and that the path we have always followed is the only path available now and in the future.

What is lost in this seemingly simplistic logical formulation is that reality encompasses all possibilities and that who we were is not necessarily who we must become. The physical manifestation of thought include words and actions that proceed from non-material reality to material reality. Thoughts as sub-vocal verbalizations and imagery can originate both internally and externally. Thoughts can free the mind or imprison it. The weight we apply to our thoughts determines our ability to manifest our realities, with ingrained and repetitive thought processes taking precedence over new and original thought processes.

As human biology provides the physical hard-drive for non-physical, energetic interactions with the manifest and unmanifest reality, the brain’s synapses form the wires we thicken or thin with repetitive use. Energy easiest and most efficiently through well-defined pathways.  Habits and patterns of thought, vocalization and behavior follow. Time acts as a structure that encompasses the unknown infinite and eternal within the finite capacity of materiality. Its dictates reinforce holographic immaterialities and further reduce clarity of mind and intention.

Timelessness, as a function of higher perception, can be considered to be the casting off of illusory linearity as the primary mode of interpreting existence. Even while immersed within the moment to moment flow of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and years, it is possible to transcend the limitations time places upon potentiality by recasting thought. By realizing that perception is not bound by the past or constrained by the future. That there are no limits to manifestation. That there are no limits to each of us being, fully, who and what we are.

To release one’s self from the Tyranny of Time is to realize that the Now moment is our access to communion with the infinite and eternal. That within each second lies a gateway to unlimited potentiality that is accessible to those who make the choice to court freedom and to banish the past and future as determinative factors in their decision-making processes. No path is set in stone unless we cast it thusly ourselves. Unlimited potentiality is our birthright. Claim yours.

Five Studies: The Psychology of the Ultra-Rich, According to the Research

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OLIGARCHY

Bernie Sanders says that billionaires have “psychiatric issues.” He’s not entirely incorrect.

By Livia Gershon

Source: Pacific Standard

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

Bernie Sanders’ unexpectedly popular presidential campaign features a lot of rhetoric that we don’t usually hear in mainstream politics. One striking example is the Vermont senator’s contention that the ultra-rich suffer from “psychiatric issues” that manifest in an addiction to money and a worldview divorced from reality.

When we talk about inequality, we often spend lot of time considering poor people’s attitudes and behaviors, from whether they get married to how they talk to their kids. We’re less likely to stop and look at how the rich are different. But extremely wealthy people play a huge role in increasing inequality. With their heavy political clout, they help shape government economic policies, supporting very different positions from those of average Americans. From their perches on corporate boards and compensation committees they also give direct raises to their fellow oligarchs.

As inequality grows, in the United States and in the world, the shape of the wealthiest classes is also changing. The significance of inherited wealth fell rapidly in the mid-20th century, making way for the “self-made” rich. Now, though, there’s growing evidence that, as Thomas Piketty has famously argued, dynasties are making a comeback.

So there’s good reason to pay at least as much attention to the behaviors and beliefs of the rich as we do to those of the poor. But what does research tell us about the nature of wealth? How does it affect those who have it? Studies suggest the wealthy really do have significant psychological differences from the middle class in how they view money, and how they look at their relationship with society.

1. MONEY BUYS HAPPINESS—KIND OF

Richer people tend to be happier, but not by all that much. And it’s not really right to say money makes them happy. Wealth only makes affluent people more satisfied to the extent that it gives them more control over their own lives, making them feel richer. (Anyone who feels financially and personally stable because they’ve got a steady job, enough money to get them through an emergency, and a nicer house than their neighbor is likely to be happier than the poorest multi-millionaire in a hyper-rich enclave they can’t really afford.) Still, holding everything else equal, people who have more money have more stability. Of course, they also usually know they’re well off. And those two factors make them happier.

—”How Money Buys Happiness: Genetic and Environmental Processes Linking Finances and Life Satisfaction,” Wendy Johnson and Robert F. Krueger, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 90(4), Apr 2006

 2. BUT RICH PEOPLE HAVE DIFFERENT CRITERIA FOR HAPPINESS

Asked about what makes people happy, extremely rich Americans, just like average Americans, typically put love first. But the ultra-wealthy are more likely than everyone else to say happiness depends on winning the appreciation and respect of others. They’re also more likely to cite the realization of personal potential as a key to happiness. But they’re much less likely than non-wealthy people to say that physical health is most important. (Perhaps because they’ve never been uninsured?) Rich people are also a bit more likely than the rest of us to say having a lot of money can occasionally present an obstacle to happiness.

—”Happiness of the Very Wealthy,” Ed Diener, Jeff Horwitz, and Robert A. Emmons, Social Indicators Research, April 1985

3. THE WEALTHY ARE MORE AND MORE LIKELY TO IDENTIFY WITH AN INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ELITE

Board members of the world’s largest corporations—a significant and influential segment of the ultra-rich—are increasingly likely to serve on the boards of foreign and multinational companies. Even directors who don’t serve on the boards of foreign companies usually interact with others who do. In other words, modern corporate elites are likely to be part of cosmopolitan, global social networks, whereas most poor and middle-class people are more likely to identify with their home populations.

—”Transnationalists and National Networkers in the Global Corporate Elite,” William K. Carroll, Global Networks, June 2009

4. AS A RESULT, THEY’RE NOT GREAT AT EMPATHY

People from higher socioeconomic classes do worse on a test where they’re asked to identify emotions in photographs of human faces. They’re also less accurate at perceiving the emotional states of others in real-life interactions. In fact, researchers can reduce people’s empathy just by prompting them to think of themselves as relatively high-status. Test subjects who are asked to imagine an interaction with someone from a lower social rung get worse at understanding other people’s emotions. The trouble higher-status people have recognizing emotions is tied to the fact that they tend to think about themselves and others in terms of fixed traits (“She’s a nervous person.”) In contrast, people from lower social classes are more likely to use contextual explanations for people’s behavior (“This interview is making her uncomfortable.”)

—”Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy,” Michael W. Kraus, Stéphane Côté, and Dacher Keltner, Psychological Science, October 25, 2010

5. AND THEY THINK DOMESTIC INEQUALITY REPRESENTS JUST DESSERTS

Americans are known for our trust in an ideal of meritocracy. When you ask the general public to assess statements like “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to work hard,” well over 70 percent of us agree. But what happens when people see high levels of income inequality in their daily lives? It turns out that low-income Americans are less likely to believe in meritocracy if they live in counties with extreme economic inequality—places where they’re likely to run into much richer people a lot. For high-income people, the effect is exactly the opposite. The study’s authors suggest that rich people could be using a defense mechanism to stave off guilt and justify their relatively privileged position within a visibly unequal system. But, for whatever reason, the more inequality rich people see in their home county, they more likely they are to believe that meritocracy is working.

—”False Consciousness or Class Awareness? Local Income Inequality, Personal Economic Position, and Belief in American Meritocracy,” Benjamin J. Newman, Christopher D. Johnston, and Patrick L. Lown, American Journal of Political Science, April 2015