Subconscious communication

Open to scientific research, or not?

By Victor L. Midyett

Subconscious communication seems to be something that just happens, out of the blue. It’s a difficult event to document. Perhaps it’s a mystical force woven through words and thoughts that can’t be (or hasn’t yet been) measured scientifically. It seems unlikely to me that it could be measured by science. I like to consider it a transcending energy that, like space, has no boundaries or limits to its reach.

Ten Years Ago Today

By Lucas van Valckenborch –
Grandes énigmes de l'humanité -
éditions Larousse, Public Domain

Our own Tower of….

By Moristotle

[Originally published on May 25, 2007, not one word different.]

The original world envisioned in Genesis Chapter 11 “had one language and one speech” [Verse 1] and “the people [were] one” [Verse 6]. The Tower of Babel, far from being a tower of babble, was built as a monument to that unity – as a bulwark, somehow, to protect it:

The astonishing appeal of candidate Trump

Personal factors reflected in many mirrors

By Moristotle

It appears certain now that Donald Trump wouldn’t have been elected President without help from Vladimir Putin of Russia and James B. Comey of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But even without winning in the Electoral College, Trump would still have gotten many millions of votes. How was that possible?

Beatings will continue

Beatings will continue
until morale improves

I heard a good one yesterday: The theology of the Old Testament, like a cartoon, can be accurately captioned as the corporate dictum: "Beatings will continue until morale improves."
    I "heard" this from Bart D. Ehrman's 2008 book, which I'm currently reading, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer. He's surveying the so-called "major" and "minor" prophets of the Old Testament (the designations mean nothing more than the relative word counts of their prophetic books) to show how they tried to explain why the God of the ancient Israelites was treating them so horribly. That is, it was the prophets' answer to that "most important question."
    By the way, it's because the Bible fails to answer the question to Ehrman's satisfaction that he recanted his devout Christian faith and became an agnostic. He went to Moody Bible College in his teens, then to evangelical Wheaton College, and on to Princeton Theological Seminary, where he decided to become a Biblical scholar. He's now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
    Ehrman points out that those "prophecies" applied only to the times in which they were written, and to the people to whom they were written, so the jehovahs (as I familiarly term Jehovah's Witnesses), and everyone else, for that matter, have no basis for claiming that the Bible foretells what is happening today.
    Nevertheless, "the beatings will continue" made me think of the Holocaust. The Jews took quite a beating from the Nazis (and from many hypocrites around the world who silently approved the Nazis' attitude and actions to kill Jews). Is the Jews' God still trying to improve their morale by helping Muslim jihadists to wipe Israel off the map?

Of course not. But this does raise the question in my mind whether there might be something else going on to explain why the Jews have been persecuted continually down through the ages (besides their having been tagged Christ-killers, which I don't think explains why the Muslims hate them so much).
    It occurred to me to wonder whether it might be the fact that they invented monotheism? (Some credit Moses with the invention.)
    Sure, orthodox Christians and Muslims are proud to believe in the "one, true God," but consider that they might be proud only in the part of their mind that they're conscious of. A twentieth-century Jew by the name of Sigmund Freud taught us that our unconscious can be quite out of step with our conscious.
    The unconscious of a devout believer can have as many misgivings about a God who allows us to suffer (and may even cause us to suffer, to punish us or try to get us to shape up) as the conscious mind of Bart D. Ehrman can.
    What if even devout believers, in their unconscious, are sick at heart that they even believe in God in the first place? Might they not seek a scapegoat on whom to unleash their anger and otherwise self-disgust (all the while preserving their conscious belief, in which they're too invested to join Ehrman in recanting)?

An amusing conjecture, at any rate.

...while you're busy making other plans

Was John Lennon quoting Schopenhauer when he said:

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans¹.

According to the character Philip, a "philosophical therapist" in Irvin D. Yalom's novel, The Schopenhauer Cure, quite a few others have "quoted" Schopenhauer:

And not only Thomas Mann but many other great minds acknowledged their debt to Arthur Schopenhauer. Tolstoy called Schopenhauer the "genius par excellence among men." To Richard Wagner he was a "gift from Heaven." Nietzsche said his life was never the same after purchasing a tattered volume of Schopenhauer in a used-book store in Leipzig and, as he put it, "letting the dynamic, dismal genius work on my mind." Schopenhauer forever changed the intellectual map of the Western World, and without him we would have had a very different and weaker Freud, Nietzsche, Hardy, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Ibsen, Conrad. [p. 50]

The Schopenhauer quotation [on p. 91 of The Schopenhauer Cure] that reminded me of John Lennon's famous statement was:

When, at the end of their lives, most men look back they will find that they have lived throughout ad interim [for the intervening time, temporarily]. They will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip by unappreciated and unenjoyed was just their life. And so a man, having been duped by hope, dances into the arms of death.

    Lennon's is easier to take and more memorable, isn't it? Without that final sentence.

But we need that sentence, to be reminded not to let our lives just slip by unappreciated while we're busy making other plans.
_______________

1. He might have said this in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine about 1970. At any rate, a citation in a Google hit list included both the part of the quotation I searched on and a reference to Rolling Stone.

Our own Tower of...

The original world envisioned in Genesis Chapter 11 "had one language and one speech" [Verse 1] and "the people [were] one" [Verse 6]. The Tower of Babel, far from being a tower of babble, was built as a monument to that unity—as a bulwark, somehow, to protect it:

Then they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar.
      And they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth." [Verses 3-4]

It isn't clear why the people thought that building a tower into the heavens or making a name for themselves could prevent them from being scattered abroad. In fact, according to the story, they were scattered as a direct consequence of the construction—but apparently not as a punishment, because the scattering (or dis-uniting) is characterized as a calculated move on God's part to restrain mankind from achieving whatever "they have imagined to do." The author seemed to sense as perhaps some dreamers do today that if only everyone on earth could agree on some basic things, then we could end war and create a just world society.

We who construct into the blogosphere, are we building a monument out of the brick and asphalt of dialogue to affirm and celebrate our common understanding, or are we standing on our own soapboxes proclaiming our divergent wishes-to-believe and judgments of value? That is, are we constructing a Tower of Babel or a Tower of Babble?

It seems patently obvious to be the latter. In the blogosphere you're going to find various coteries. Among the more divergent (too weak a word in this case) are the Bush haters and the Bush supporters, two groups who speak such radically divergent languages that virtually no overall agreement on Bush will ever be reached. The languages of religion are not nearly so shrilly opposed, but each seems to have some particular understandings (or beliefs, whether or not "dogmatic") that cannot be shared, such as the nature of Jesus, whether Christ or not, whether son of God or not, whether divine or not. (And even people who call themselves Christians don't agree on the nature of Christ.) And you'll find "free"-thinkers (of whom I style myself). But who are they but people who tend to doubt everything (or, perhaps equivalently, to "believe all things")?

Nevertheless, people of courtesy, generosity, and good will can discuss their differences with respect and the hope of occasionally shaping their total understanding to a nearer accord one with another—even if there should never be again on earth a single people, a single language. For whatever reason (by an act of God or by the unfolding of neuronal complexity), there are many wishes-to-believe and judgments of value on this planet. And it looks to me as though there always will be, if they don't clash in a final cataclysm.

One thing Freud knew for certain

Over the years I've seen so much evidence, not only in others but also in myself^*, of people's tendency to believe what they want to believe that I now consider it virtually an axiom of what we might call the psychology of belief that people generally do believe what they want to believe—and selectively seek out reasons to support their beliefs.

So with some pleasure I discovered this morning, in reading George Prochnik's May 6 New York Times essay, "Hail to the Analysand," that Sigmund Freud knew this too—knew it for certain, he said. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he wrote:

One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness—that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments.

I say "Freud knew it too," but of course he knew it first and, because I read his book many years ago, his statement may have lodged in my mind waiting for me to corroborate it in my own experience.

If Freud's "certain knowledge" is a veritable straitjacket always and ever constraining people's beliefs (or their "judgments of value," as he says), how can people with different "wishes for happiness" ever come together in accord? That may be one of the central questions mankind must answer if world peace—or, at least, concord among bloggers—is to be possible.

But I wish to believe that there are ways to escape the straightjacket, that my "axiom of the psychology of belief" doesn't condemn us to wear it. In order to escape it—or at least to free oneself from a particular belief—certain conditions must obtain. It's time for me to start investigating what the conditions might be.

One happy thought is that there may be a seminal contradiction in Freud's understanding. For what if one's wish is that man's judgments of value need not always follow directly his wishes for happiness? What conditions must obtain for us not to believe something simply because we wish to believe it?
____________________
* Ironically appropriate to the theme of selectively seeking out reasons to support our beliefs, I read Prochnik's article because I expected to find yet more material condemning George W. Bush. The title of his article implies that the "analysand" (or person being psychoanalyzed) is someone we officially address with a "hail to" (as he swaggers awkwardly into the East Room or the Rose Garden accompanied by music supplied by the Marine Corps band or somebody). Prochnik takes off from the fact that another president had been a sort of analysand to Freud, who wrote a chapter titled "Thomas Woodrow Wilson" for a book by diplomat William C. Bullitt about the peace negotiations in Versailles following World War I.

Self-Portrait in a Fun House Mirror

The psychopathology of George W.
Bush should disturb and everyday trouble you;
    Believe him a leader a while,
    Credit the office and his guile,
But believe it now and still and...gu'bble^* you. [* gullible]

The Baker-Hamilton Iraq study group found that the lead Iraqi Army units

lack leadership...lack equipment...[and] lack logistics and support...Soldiers are given leave liberally and face no penalties for absence without leave...They lack the ability to sustain their operations, the capability to transport supplies and troops, and the capacity to provide their own indirect fire support, close-air support, technical intelligence, and medical evacuation.

"Other than that," writes Bob Herbert in today's New York Times, "they're fine."

What is needed now are leaders with the courage to insist, perhaps at the risk of their reputations and careers, that it is wrong to continue sending fresh bodies after those already lost, to continue asking young, healthy American troops to head into the combat zone, perhaps for their third or fourth tour, to fight in a way the public no longer supports. ["The Time Is Now"]

Why, then, can't George W. Bush so insist?

In lieu of our having a Sigmund Freud to answer that by writing up a psychoanalytic report on Bush, I'll hazard a few guesses myself as to Bush's psychology.

First, remember, he's obviously a "true believer." He even seems to relish being "faith-based" rather than "reality-based." He has a strong drive to continue believing in things purely on faith that they are so, despite any contrary "fact-based" evidence—like the people Leon Festinger wrote about in the fifties, who, after the failure of their leader's prediction that the world was coming to an end, redoubled their belief that it would...but not just yet. Bush's own true belief is manifested preeminently in his persistent predictions of our future victory in Iraq. That is, when something you really, really believe seems not to be so, believe it all the harder. ("Absolutely, we're winning," Bush recently said about Iraq.)

Second, Bush seems to have a compulsion to lie to himself (which, of course, comes in very handy in lying to everyone else). For example, according to Paul Krugman in today's New York Times (reporting what he'd read in U.S. News & World Report),

President Bush has told aides that he won't respond in detail to the Iraq Study Group's report because he doesn't want to "outsource" the role of commander in chief.

That's pretty ironic. You see, outsourcing of the government's responsibilities—not to panels of supposed wise men, but to private companies with the right connections—has been one of the hallmarks of his administration. And privatization through outsourcing is one reason the administration has failed on so many fronts. ["Outsourcer in Chief"]

This example is about as good as it gets for illustrating either Bush's gargantuan ability to fool himself or the level of his conscious duplicity. But the latter alternative isn't credible because, if he were that conscious and intelligent, he'd have to realize that his deceit is no longer working and should be abandoned. It is more reasonable to conclude that he just doesn't know how far out in la-la land he is.

Third, his self-image seems to be grandiose on a historic scale, ranking right up there with the Roman emperor Caligula, who nominated a horse for the Senate. Bush has pronounced himself "the Decider." Walter Kerr said of someone, "He had delusions of adequacy." Bush's delusions go way past adequacy. How many times has he said "I understand" this, that, and the other thing? He has called himself "the War President," "the Commander in Chief," "the Education President." He hailed himself the glorious "Mission Accomplisher," landing on an aircraft carrier in a scenario worthy of a Leni Riefenstahl extravaganza. And who else could give a trusted adviser the nickname "Turd Blossom"? Bush even seems to fancy himself some sort of reincarnation of Harry S. Truman, believing that history will ultimately prove him right about Iraq. And wasn't Truman the president who had the sign on his desk, "The buck stops here"? As already mentioned, Bush is "the Decider." And, oh yes, he talks to God.

The self-image thing may be the kicker. I suspect that Bush's personality, for all his look of affable self-assurance in public, is quite fragile. After all, he's the perennial C student, the failed baseball club owner and oilman, the son less expected by his parents (than Jeb, "the smart one") to amount to anything. To paraphrase what Winston Churchill said about Clement Attlee, Bush is an immodest little person, with much to be modest about. At his core he may be perilously vulnerable, his self-portrait a desperate device constructed of exaggeration upon exaggeration to fortify and protect him—an instance of the classic Freudian "mechanism of ego defense," the reaction formation: adopting an untrue, opposite belief to avoid the anxiety of seeing the true one.

The result is that Bush uses his true belief and his self-deceit as indispensable tools for maintaining his fictional self-portrait.

If he starts to crack, we may be in for a spectacle not seen since the year 41 in Rome (or at least since Masterpiece Theater produced a dramatization of Robert Graves's classic novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, which featured John Hurt's inspired performance as the title character's nephew.