Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Aug 11, 2023 3:24 pm
Well, good on you for realizing it at all. Far too many people would just bury it, or insist on justifying themselves. Pretty impressive humility, actually.
Hey, who knows what I'm missing that I've done. It wasn't my intention to make a big claim.
Well, a couple of problems I see potentially with that would be these. First, that one's first reaction is clearly not always the right reaction.
I we are talking about I screamed at a guy during his wedding, then 'wrong reaction' might apply.
That would seem to argue that we'd all be better to hold onto that first reaction and wait until sober consideration and additional information can modify that reaction.
I'm not advocating for holding onto one's first reactions. An emotion comes and often other emotions come, even without mulling it over.
(It's what you weem to be doing by filling out your understanding of why person X seems to hate you.) Secondly, that morality is about NOT following our immediate inclinations but rather about responding to a higher set of values.
I don't know how you are thinking of 'immediate inclinations'. I haven't for example hit anyone since I was 15 and a guy threw me to the ground from behind. But feeling my feelings and not judging them bad is more or less a cardinal rule for me. I may realize later that I misunderstood what happened: this can come purely through the process of emotions developing or it may come as an insight or someone may tell me something or I may feel an unease with what I felt and so I mull.
I hear you. The narcissist is the hardest kind of person not to hate, because they are not ever even one bit sorry for anything they do. Their motives are always simply their own interests. It's not easy to find extenuating explanations for people like that.
I think the only thing we can do is pity them for what they are becoming.
I have had moments of empathy for narcissists - unfortunately I'm known three well. Not my boss, but here I only knew them via the job. I only saw one side of their personality. In the abstract I can 'feel sorry' for them, but that's more like 'think sorry'. It's not really a feeling. I realize they are very damaged and likely will never know loving intimacy. But I don't feel anyting remotely like love for them. And I will not in anyway pressure myself to. Should such a feeling arise I won't immediatley judge that one either.
...try to sort out what is going on. Is this the past? Did they really mean that? Am I sure they actually did that? Was the rumor true?
That sort of second-insight is why I think we're wise to suppress our immediate reactions. We don't always know what's going on when people do things that offend us.
But that's ok. I don't have to have everything fit right away. I get to sort it out, just as we are told to let others sort things out. If I am to forgive someone for hating me and love them while they hate me what could posssibly be wrong with loving myself and my emotions. And these emotions can go through a process. I don't declare them right or wrong. I try to love them - my emotions in the sense of accepting them and letting them express as much as is safe. And it often isn't particularly safe for full expression of any emotions, even joy, when in public or in a professional setting.
I have my doubts about that.
How can you possibily accept and love others (which includes when they are expressing their emotions) if you cannot allow your own emotions to express. And if we are being told to love others, even if they are expressing unpleasant emotions to us, then we should be able to love ourselves as we express ours, and by expressing them.
I mean, I realize that sometimes we use our own emotions to estimate what the emotions of other people are,
Well, not just emotions, but yes also. And if we are sitting on our emotions, we are cut off from part of our own intuition. And it's a process. Given all the judgment of emotion, we are sure going to misunderstand situations, and we will have back up from past situations where we did not express our emotions and so on. It is unloving to expect perfection. We will make mistakes. But to start off view out emotions as the problem and...just who is this other part of the self that is so perfect, the one who judges them and suppresses them. What makes us think that part is so loving.
The moment we do that we expect others to supress themselves also. And it's just mental gymnastics when we say we love them even when they don't suppress their emotions. I think people often fool themselves into think they feel empathy when actually they just think empathy.
I don't think most people can differentiate between guilt and love.
and we call that "empathy": but sometimes, that goes so horribly wrong. For instance, somebody does something to me, and I think, "If I did that to somebody, it would only because I have complete contempt for him," and I get mad.
So, you get mad.
Then I find out that the reason that person said or did that offensive thing was not hatred, but fear.
And your emotions change. And you can tell them what you realized if that fits the situation. We get to be a process.
I had inadvertently touched a nerve in him, and he overreacted. He didn't hate me; he was terrified and responded badly.
So you pressure yourself to not make mistakes and overreact like he does and to love him when he does that and....much simpler, at least for me, to learn to love the emotions and go through the process.
That sort of thing happens a lot: when I project my own feelings about a situation onto another person, I risk completely misunderstanding his real motives -- because people are not all the same, and don't do everything they do for the same reasons I would.
I don't find a risk. Yes, life gets choppy sometimes, but all the people I know who advocate for suppressing...their lives look just as choppy as mine and they seem much less comfortable with a large portion of themselves, and in the end other people who aren't suppressing as much that they think those other people should be.
Empathy's a little blind sometimes, and, if I can use the word, even narcissistic: sometimes it refuses to see another person as different from me, and what I'm empathizing with is actually not them, but only my own feelings.
Well, that seems like an argument on my side of the fence and not yours.
Yes, that's the sort of reflection I'm suggesting we should do. The instant reaction we have, though, is likely not to be that.
It's a process.
It's likely to be mercurial and less-informed.
Oh, I don't know about that. It certainly can be. What I've noticed after three decades is that because I decided to go in the other direction there is much more integration between mind and heart. But further, so many people explain away their own emotional responses. And not just battered women.
So I just think we need to hold onto that first reaction until we really find out whether it's warranted or not.
Well, not me. I don't believe that. Have my first reaction. Have my next. See where it goes. And I find likeminded people who understand that it's a process. There are cultural differences. Like we could put upper class Brits on one end and Italians on another in Europe.
I actually think that recently, we've gone to far to the opposite side. We've substituted "self-acceptance" for the ultimate value. And by "self-acceptance," we've been taught it means that I never have any bad feelings about who I am or what I want to do.
That's only a part of feelings. And to allow people to grow up with that impression means that parents held back their emotions. The people who act like that do not accept all their emotions.
I never feel guilt.
Guilt is a waste. Regret however can be wonderful. Guilt is precisely not an emotion. It's a cognition that judges the self and self does not express the fear and rage and whatever else the guilt tries to freeze in place. Feeling regret is something else entirely.
I never feel shame. I never begin to feel I'm not a good person, even when I'm behaving like a wretch or a fool. That's "self-acceptance."
That's only feeling some emotions. That a mental model of reality. And it's one that hides emotions, though different ones than other models.
I think that's not just wrong, but actually immoral. Our society is poisoning us with a sugar pill there. A person who feels no guilt or shame, and never has doubts about who he is being or what he's doing is not the kind of person one can ever trust. That's a narcissist.
Narcissist do not feel a lot of their emotions. The project them. The deny them. These are not people accepting their emotions. Which is why they pop into narcissistic rage when anyone gets near triggering their old traumas or fears about themselves.
And I'm not the only one to point this out. Christopher Lasch, who is very different from my value system, has astutely pointed out that we are in "The Culture of Narcissism" (he's written a whole book on it, and that's the title). Our problem is not finding "self-acceptance": it's being far too approving of everything that comes out of us, and undiscerning about what of it is good and what of it is genuinely evil.
But I haven't advocated for this.
I can understand how it might seem that way, but it's only a reflection of what you think you would be like if you accepted your emotions in the ways I mean. Those people are denying their fears. And it's a very cognitive acceptance of self (a false one). It's about rights and entitlement and often presenting themselves as victims.
I am talking about accepting all emotions, which includes fear and grief and longing for intimacy from others and empathy and so on. Accepting the whole batch.
Narcissists are at the opposite end of that spectrum. Any longer, scholarly article on narcissists will talk about how much denial and projection they use to just barely keep their sense of self together.
Gotta go. If I can I'll come back for the rest soon.
Back again...
Yes, both sides of the political aisle have done it, and still do it. But you're also right that the danger today is largely on the Left, where the sanctimony is by far the highest and the intolerance the greatest.
I think our media have been fairly successful in dragging the culture in the more liberal and then Leftist direction over the last three decades particularly. Whereas, perhaps back in the '50s, conservatives had a more powerful voice, the '60s and '70s pretty much finished that off.
We had the Reagan Bush 80s and early 90s. Economic reforms continued to be conservative and even Clinton did a number of favors for Wall St./corporations that were in line with the changes Reagan/Bush were doing.
Our society slid precipitously toward the more liberal side, and conservatives were increasingly marginalized in the culture generally. I don't mean that they disappeared, or that their voices were entirely unheard; but increasingly, how ordinary people lived their lives was more and more self-indulgent, and less committed to any particular principles.
Again, conservatives, I think fail to see their contribution to current. The 80s were all about self-interest that came out of the neo-cons. And we cannot put industry's affects on culture just in leftist hands. Conservatives have fought against controls of industry and Wall St., often managing to get the working class, for example, to think that they are somehow aligned with the corporatists. Industry has bombarded children and adults with a radically individualist 'I am my surface' type of morality.
As the '70s mantra went, "I'm okay, you're okay," became the watchword. And at first, the claim was that we all have a right to our own private habits; then it became, "I have a right to wave those habits in public, and have them celebrated and subsidized." And then it became, "You're evil and a bigot if you even raise a concern about my habits and choices: and my habits and choices get all the political backing, and yours get suppressed and eliminated from public discourse." And that's where we are now.
Which gets focused on gays, for example, and now trans, but never seems to be associated with Wall St. and the fraternity robber barron and even middle management abuse and conspicuous consumption of the people wildly supported by Reagan and Bush.
If we go back to the fifties corporate culture was very different. Corporating invested in long term relationships with workers and also R&D. This has shifted, thanks the Reagan/Bush with contributions by Clinton also, to takeovers, stockholders being the true clients, union busting - the 50s had extremely high participation in unions - extreme conspicuous consumption suck the profits out now short term culture. Conservatives didn't seem to manage to see this as problematic or even that the Hollywood films and also TV shows promoting this were problematic. Their focus in on sexual issues often.
The privitizing of the military got ignored by conservatives.
The big business exploitation of military interventions for their purposes.
The elimination of government controls of the financial institutions.
And for a long time the increased powers, weaponry and legal ability to intervene by law enforcement. The last couple of decades I see more conservatives getting the problem with this last and are starting to see corporations as problematic in a systemic way. Ideas that were primarily left for a long time, despite the founders having huge concerns about the huge corporations of their day.
All of this power and increased money at the top has led to cultural breakdown. And let's remember that the corporations are the primary globalists. This often gets put on the Left, but actually they have fought things like Nafta and other global trade agreements that reduce democracy and citizen control of their own countries.
They've got a great scam going. It's tag team, good cop, bad cop. With conservatives liking what they think is good cop and liberals liking what they think is good cop, when the cops are happily working together.
I think some conservatives have learned from the past. After all, it's the conservatives who, by definition, want to conserve the past as a resource for the present; so they can hardly avoid that.
And they tend to focus on social changes, not economic ones. For example, I rarely hear of a conservative saying that originally corporate charters were rescindable. If your corporation broke the law, the founders put in place measure to dissolve the corporation. If you want to be conservative about this issue, there should be a call for a return to founder intentions there and there are many companies that have be caught violating human rights laws, lying to government oversight, lying to consumers, at the level of felony crimes. And the corporations go on. The founders were worried about governmental excesses and abuse of power and also corporate abuse. But this somehow never makes it into critiques of change even those this has enormous effects on everything from advertising to children to corporate influence over politicians and the undermining of democracy in a variety of ways. If you think this doesn't affect how people think about community, morals, society, individualism, you're missing something huge.
The neocons have been using conservatives for decades.
There is much less concern on the right, or at least through most of my life, about the effects of technology. Yes, the contents of media get criticized by the right, but generally not the changes by the medium in general, the mere fact of its addictive, manipulative presence.
It's mainly been leftists who have been critical of the sudden widespread use of a new way of living.
And it was leftists who caught on first that social media coupled with cellphones was a Stasi wetdream
Conservatives for most of my life saw any restrictions on industry and corporations as something like the government disbanding freedom of speech.
And so conservatives couldn't manage to see that the left might be on to something when they objected to Monsanto's radical, experimental changes in the food everyone in the country got to eat, either directly though vegetables and beans, or indirectly through their experimentation with cattle feed. There was a near overnight change in what feed farm animals got. Goverment oversight of industry, something only the left was concerned about for a long time, has been a joke for decades.
How is that affecting human behavior and morals from the ground up?
You can't even get criticism of corporations on media. I know the mainstream media are corrupt and I know that these days on social issues, they are leftist. But try to get a program on Monsanto of Pfizer and show what the science actually is with these companies - companies whose corporate charters would have been revoked long ago with their long lists of crimes - and you'll find that the mainstream media aren't really leftist. They carry agendas, whether right or left, and yes, left these days on social issue, to suit their own purposes. But they are corporatist to the bone.
But I also see just as egregious and even more egregious tactics than the conservatives every used being used by the postmodern Left. And unlike the conservatives, the Left sees the past as just a trash-bin of "oppressive practices," and not a resource for learning about the present, so they never ever seem to learn from their mistakes. It's not by accident that it's the Left that's always campaigning for the cessation of the teaching of things like the literary tradition, or civics, or history itself (except, of course, for the revisionist history which hunts out "oppression" endlessly and never seems to find anything more, about which they are at least somewhat enthused).
I see both sides utterly ignorant of the past. The Left was conservative for example around the ideas of the commons. This was a part of US and European life going back a couple thousand years. Reagan Bush destroyed the commons.
That's just one example. NAFTA is another. Conservatives somehow bought the lie that this was about freedom (for corporations) when in fact it was globalism and a reduction in citizen rights.
Both sides are getting played. YOu really think the mainstream media and the corporations behind them care about trans people?
They love the cultural divide. It's a cosmic level distraction. Get people with relatively little power to think their primary enemy is other people with relatively little power.
Well, if I can speak as an outsider, I see this as one of the worst and most dangerous features of current American politics, particularly: the polarization.
And that polarization is being promoted by powerful corporations, corporations whose power and influence was primarily challenged by the left.
Americans, more than anybody else I know, identify with their political parties. And whatever their party does and says, that's what they vote for. Their entire concentration seems to be on how wicked the other side is. And consequently, they never judge anything about the sins on their own side of the house. They grant a complete pass to politicians and advocates of their own side, and spend all their energy grinding their teeth against the boogeyman on the other side.
Agreed.
This will end democracy in America, if it continues.
It's not a democracy. It's an oligarchy that pretends to be a democracy and it's barely pretending these days.
Because the whole idea of holding politicians accountable -- on both sides -- is so essential to the democratic process. So if Bush wasn't very bright, Republicans need to be able to recognize it and not vote for him; if Clinton was a philandering sexual predator, the Democrats needed to be able to consider whether they can trust his promises to them. And if either side is being wicked, stupid or self-serving, the entire populace of voters needs to be able to see that and to arrange their voting habits accordingly. Without that, democracy dies. The vote becomes predictable, then manipulable; and either party can get far too free a hand.
We only get to choose between candidates that a either in the elite power class and/or approved of by Wall St. That's not democratic.
Thats like an arranged marriage. You can marry Edith or Sarwan, those are your approved choices. You have to marry, because if you don't choose on of those two as you wife, we will choose one.
