rigorousintuition.ca

AhabsOtherLeg wrote:Imagine Huxley, channeling Orwell, as laureate of the First World - "Picture a cock, wanking in a woman's face - forever!"

That is a very apt image!

Listen to the wind blow...
Down comes the night.

Run in the shadows...
Damn your love, damn your lies!

Break the silence,
Damn the dark, damn the light!

And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again;
I can still hear you saying
We would never break the chain....

Orwell wrote:"Picture a boot, stamping on a human face - forever!"

Huxley wrote:"Picture a cock, wanking in a woman's face - forever!"

IanEye wrote:"Picture a human, wanking on his own face - forever!"

[url=http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/518/lensbuster21pk6.jpg]Perhaps it is time to break the chain.
Perhaps one can pull an ouroboros on that big ole' Fascist cock...[/url]

epi wrote:

AhabsOtherLeg wrote:Imagine Huxley, channeling Orwell, as laureate of the First World - "Picture a cock, wanking in a woman's face - forever!"

That is a very apt image!

A couple of friends of mine were editors at the paper at Sydney Uni or NSW uni, can't remember which. At least 10 years ago.

Thats actually the last image they had on the back cover of the last issue they ever published.

IanEye wrote:"Picture a human, wanking on his own face - forever!"

I've stopped that now! My acne cleared after a couple of applications.

Also, in fairness to Huxley, it was me that wote the bit about wanking. I know I have to tell you that, because it really was identical to his best work both in form and content. But it was only me.

Folk know what I meant, though, I hope? I'm not saying it's a good thing. I'm saying it's our culture - or a summation of it - and it's how our culture is percieved by those whose culture I percieve as being a succession of boots in the face - which they would strenuously disagree with too.

So they're wrong, I'm wrong, and nobody's happy. But we're all in the same boat.

Thanks for Wifey, though. She's an indisputably good thing. Not many of those left,

How many video cameras does she destroy a week, though? The money doesn't bear thinking about. And it's not what I should be thinking about, anyway.

Time for bed.

AhabsOtherLeg wrote:

IanEye wrote:"Picture a human, wanking on his own face - forever!"

< snip>

Folk know what I meant, though, I hope? I'm not saying it's a good thing. I'm saying it's our culture - or a summation of it - and it's how our culture is percieved by those whose culture I percieve as being a succession of boots in the face - which they would strenuously disagree with too.

Got it. And in the remote end of a tangent it connected to a recent discussion about money, an integral part of the disease, in terms described by Bernard Lieater.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=886

Now let's apply this framework to a well-documented phenomenon - the repression of the Great Mother archetype. The Great Mother archetype was very important in the Western world from the dawn of prehistory throughout the pre-Indo-European time periods, as it still is in many traditional cultures today. But this archetype has been violently repressed in the West for at least 5,000 years starting with the Indo-European invasions - reinforced by the anti-Goddess view of Judeo-Christianity, culminating with three centuries of witch hunts - all the way to the Victorian era.

If there is a repression of an archetype on this scale and for this length of time, the shadows manifest in a powerful way in society. After 5,000 years, people will consider the corresponding shadow behaviors as "normal."

The question I have been asking is very simple: What are the shadows of the Great Mother archetype? I'm proposing that these shadows are greed and fear of scarcity. So it should come as no surprise that in Victorian times - at the apex of the repression of the Great Mother - a Scottish schoolmaster named Adam Smith noticed a lot of greed and scarcity around him and assumed that was how all "civilized" societies worked. Smith, as you know, created modern economics, which can be defined as a way of allocating scarce resources through the mechanism of individual, personal greed.

In my mind IanEye completed the sequence by pointing to a narcissistic postmodern era where "the other" is redundant.

If Neil Postman were still kicking I wonder if this (rather entertaining) thread wouldn't tempt him to write anther title called:

Abusing Ourselves to Death

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epi wrote:
Got it...

...In my mind IanEye completed the sequence by pointing to a narcissistic postmodern era where "the other" is redundant.

Damn, you're right. I kind of got it, but not fully. The "solutions" to the free human will pointed out by Orwell, Huxley and Zamyatin are not really enough - they can never result in absolute control over the all of everybody. There was still the possibility of the rebellious hero or heroine, however compromised and brutalised.

A society of unending torture isn't enough to dull every individual mind - we have real-world examples where it was attempted, and the result, in the end, was fearless and unbendable uber-individuals like Solzhenytsin, Mandela, and countless lesser-known others.

Pleasure and plenty doesn't fool everybody either - or we wouldn't've had Sartre, Marcuse and the rest (however dubious some of them may be).

So what can be relied on to fool everybody, all of the time?

Themselves. Or, at least, their own self-image.

How much more effective would the thought-police have been if they'd just let Winston sit in his house, writing his diary, thinking it was a revolutionary act?

epi wrote: And in the remote end of a tangent it connected to a recent discussion about money, an integral part of the disease, in terms described by Bernard Lieater.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=886

Now let's apply this framework to a well-documented phenomenon - the repression of the Great Mother archetype. The Great Mother archetype was very important in the Western world from the dawn of prehistory throughout the pre-Indo-European time periods, as it still is in many traditional cultures today. But this archetype has been violently repressed in the West for at least 5,000 years starting with the Indo-European invasions - reinforced by the anti-Goddess view of Judeo-Christianity, culminating with three centuries of witch hunts - all the way to the Victorian era.

If there is a repression of an archetype on this scale and for this length of time, the shadows manifest in a powerful way in society. After 5,000 years, people will consider the corresponding shadow behaviors as "normal."

The question I have been asking is very simple: What are the shadows of the Great Mother archetype? I'm proposing that these shadows are greed and fear of scarcity. So it should come as no surprise that in Victorian times - at the apex of the repression of the Great Mother - a Scottish schoolmaster named Adam Smith noticed a lot of greed and scarcity around him and assumed that was how all "civilized" societies worked. Smith, as you know, created modern economics, which can be defined as a way of allocating scarce resources through the mechanism of individual, personal greed.

[On Edit: Just saw the Black Madonna phenomenon was already discussed in the link you gave - on second edit, re-adding that I was praying to the Virgin Mary earlier, and that there are still a lot of Churches in Europe with black madonna statues and pictures, and whatever the priest might think people are praying to, the people know better]

Adam Smith, as I see it, was not such a bad or misguided guy. He described modern telecoms, energy, and banking businesses after their "deregulation" down to a tee, and also warned us against them.

The "nationalised" monopolies he was opposed to at the time were monarchical imperial colonialist devices - opposed to the free market - just as they are now, and always have been. I could probably argue that free market capitalism is still as untried in modern society as genuine communism, but I won't, because it's boring. Adam Smith wasn't, though.

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary."

Adam Smith - Conspiracy Theorist!

I don't think he was wrong about human nature, either - there may well be a Great Mother, but the litter still fight to get their mouth on one of her teats, as all animals do.

esotericmetal wrote:
Whoa... does the "Enjoy Relax Dream" have anything at all to do with the plot of the show?

When you point that this Summer Glau person plays essentially the same role, do you think this is relevant in a synchromystic way, or do you think there's something else to this?

Nope. It can be seen at least in couple of episodes, posed similarly in the background, in short shots only, and like in this shot, the action directs your focus away from the Enjoy Relax Dream - in this shot, the characters walk in hurriedly examining a gadget in Johns hand. It is purposefully shown in a way that makes most people conscioulsy miss it. I noticed it only the second time it glimpsed, and only because I look for stuff like this.

As to Summer Glau, I couldnt say. I merely posit there is a connection of a sort.

United States of Tara sounds like Sarah Palin's and GW Bush's pronunciation of "terror." Terrism..ya know...no matter how bad things get, always remember she coulda been President!

Diablo Cody And Spielberg Can't Save 'Tara'



http://www.here-now.org/shows/2009/01/20090116_17.asp

AhabsOtherLeg wrote:How much more effective would the thought-police have been if they'd just let Winston sit in his house, writing his diary, thinking it was a revolutionary act?

Ha! like us.

AhabsOtherLeg wrote:Adam Smith, as I see it, was not such a bad or misguided guy. He described modern telecoms, energy, and banking businesses after their "deregulation" down to a tee, and also warned us against them.

I don't think Adam Smith is a bad guy or that Lietaer means that either. We are all champions among the millions of dead brother and sister sperms that didn't make it first to the egg, we see the malthusian growth in yeast and otherwise and the boom and bust cycles of rabbit proliferation. It's easy to find metaphors in nature. On the other hand elephants only have one kid growing up with a choice of two teats and lots of species survive by symbiosis rather than competition. So I think our view of nature, influenced by our shadow culture, often is a selective one that can be used to construct all sorts of perversions. Like social Darwinism, using the simple and quite neutral mechanics of (natural) selection from a (naturally) suggested set of choices (thats why i think the intellegent design debate is a red herring, why would God choose to create the world with a lesser tool than Darwinism? All he had to do was to influence the set of choices and manipulate the selection as we have seen in some recent US elections.)

What Lietaer points to in the rest of that article pertain to economics and specifically monetary system (not a natural but a cultural device) is that scaricity is artificial.

While economic textbooks claim that people and corporations are competing for markets and resources, I claim that in reality they are competing for money - using markets and resources to do so.

Remember, this is ten yrs old, and on the surface the the situation is perhaps a bit different today. It is the interest, a single non-essential component of money that turns it into a game of musical chairs. That single factor (+ fractional banking as an accelerator) creates the exponential debt that requires exponential growth that depletes our resources.

Money is created when banks lend it into existence (see article by Thomas Greco on page 19). When a bank provides you with a $100,000 mortgage, it creates only the principal, which you spend and which then circulates in the economy. The bank expects you to pay back $200,000 over the next 20 years, but it doesn't create the second $100,000 - the interest. Instead, the bank sends you out into the tough world to battle against everybody else to bring back the second $100,000.

And we think it is good, even if we know it is not sustainable and will lead to disaster, because we can earn a buck and it is how its always been and how it always will be according to the "law" of nature and economics. But it is in fact not a given, Lietaers message is that it is an artifact that we can do something about with quite simple means.

Man creates himself not in the image of God, but in the image of his enemy and ultimately in the image of his own shadow. That shadow shapes our language into a warped hotch-potch of hijacked concepts and keywords and its amazing that we still can think. Self-interest as the pinnacle of human motivation? The "selfish gene"? Someting stinks here. Where is the self-interest of the suicide-bomber, the patriotic soldier, the anonymous donation to wikipedia and the 40% of people who do not maximize their outcome according to game-theoretical concepts of "rationality"? The hijack I think occurs in the word "self", in this context generally synonymous with the ego. I'd propose sacrifice (etymol:sacer=holy+ficium=deed) as a better pinnacle of human motivation (highlighted Hugh style, to reveal the secret message).

Slowly returning to the thread topic:
Come to think of the brilliant BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis film, the century of the self, about Freuds nephew, marketing guru Edward Bernais and how he, using Freuds ideas about the subconscious as a wild beast that must be tamed, shaped post ww2 America into a consumer society where all human desires where to be fulfilled by products and by that achieving two goals, soaring buisness and a people with a tamed subconsious. In the film AFAIR, Curtis compare Freuds theories about the 'subconsious beast' with the other more integral views of Reich and Jung, viewing the unconsious as a resource.

I watched Serenity and would like to compare it to the film Hidden dragon crouching tiger.
The common theme is a young slender girl growing up in an authoritarian society where she becomes a fierce fighter. The difference is that this girl break out of the cage herself becoming an unhappy and lonely villain under the spell of a witch. She then meets a master warrior that selflessly has given up his most precious thing, his sword that the girl subsequently steals. After a chase the master catches up with the girl but instead of punishing her he makes her his student and eventually sets her free killing the witch. There is no victim in this film and no dissociation. There is (perhaps) mind control but of a different kind embodied in the relation to the witch, it is resolved by her master/student relation to the warrior typical of martial arts.

Just watched the premier episode of "The United States of Tara" here and noticed Dr. Colin Ross's name in the credits. So they've made an effort to get expert advice to make their presentation of DID/MPD realistic. But the dramatization of alter switching was kind of "off" to me in a disturbing way, especially when the teen alter "T" was ordered (by Tara's husband) to a shed in the back yard to switch back to "Tara" again. That seriously creeped me out. But maybe that's just me. I don't alter switch on command, so perhaps I'm just ignorant and other multiples do. The most sympathetic character in the cast--the son--then puts on loud music so that neighbors won't hear "T" smashing things

And perhaps the show's producers intend to go into how Tara got to be the way she is later on, but in the pilot, no mention of severe early childhood abuse is made at all.

LilyPat

epi wrote:

AhabsOtherLeg wrote:How much more effective would the thought-police have been if they'd just let Winston sit in his house, writing his diary, thinking it was a revolutionary act?

Ha! like us.

Ow! is that a slap of reality that stings and smarts!

From http://ritualabuse.us

The vast majority of people who exhibit symptoms of DID are not faking. In fact, most persons with DID minimize and try to hide their symptoms.

In January of 2009, Showtime Networks Inc., a CBS Company, launched a new television series - the United States of Tara. Toni Colette, an Oscar nominatee, plays Tara, a woman who suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)....United States of Tara is the first television series ever produced with Dissociative Identity Disorder as its focus. Given this, ISSTD is presented with a unique opportunity to provide education to the public about a misunderstood psychiatric illness. Our mission as an organization is to provide education regarding the dissociative disorders and to promote the effective treatment of clients with these disorders. In response to the United States of Tara, ISSTD will be providing answers to questions about DID, as well as a professional commentary regarding each episode of the show based on our research and clinical experience. In their development of the series, the producers and script writers of United States of Tara have consulted extensively with experts in the dissociative disorders field. We hope that the show, along with our educational efforts, will ultimately facilitate understanding of DID and the struggles and challenges that individuals with DID face in their daily lives. http://www.isst-d.org/education/united_ ... mation.htm

Frequently asked questions about Dissociative Disorders - The vast majority of people who exhibit symptoms of DID are not faking. In fact, most persons with DID minimize and try to hide their symptoms. http://www.isst-d.org/education/US-Tara ... orders.htm

United States of Tara - Learn More About D.I.D. - Showtime supports the awareness for Dissociative Identity Disorder with Richard P. Kluft MD http://www.sho.com/site/video/brightcov ... 6803420001