Century of the Self

[Tinker]

[YMix]

I'm... ahem... getting my hands on the series as we speak. Since we're discussing this, I can also recommend a book that touches on the topic: , by Romanian professor Ioan Petru Culianu. Culianu explains what magic was supposed to be in the Renaissance and traces in passing its connection to advertising, PR and manipulation. Giordano Bruno had written a long time ago ("De vinculis in genere") about appealing to a person's innermost desires in order to obtain whatever it is you want from that person. He called that magic.

[Tinker]

I have read a great deal on that. Two of my favorite books on the topic are:





I'm trying right now to detach from my old mode of argumentation, and take a longer view. As such I am trying to dive back into this study. Rather than participate in the picayune partisan foibles, I want to examine the much larger notions of how the mind is manipulated. I see political partisan affiliation as being little more than a product, subliminally created, political theater to get people animated against one another in order to filter opinion so that people are presented with some mainstream choices that are false choices. As far as I can tell passive consumption of political opinion is the primary mode of political discourse. It is the reframing of this that I am most interested in. How to make the individual an active agent in their own life and in society.

The beginning of the first episode is poignant where it talks about the move from a needs based economy to a desires based economy. In the second episode it talks about the Freudian notion that humanity is ruled by savage desires that must be externally controlled, and the Marcusian notion that an individual has these savage desires, but also the innate control mechanisms, that it is the societal control that distorts and amplifies the savage impulse. I lean toward the Marcusian notion, though I am not completely and totally opposed to social control as there is ultimately a balance between society and the individual.

All four episodes are on Google Video. That's where I'm watching. I just linked the first episode only because I wanted to go step by step through the discussion.

[Tinker]

Part 3 is about self-indulgence and talks about how the move toward self-indulgence was supposed to liberate us, but instead made it even easier to manipulate us by indulging us.

I can't help but think there is a third way, something beyond both repression and indulgence. A place where we control our most violent extremes, not be ignorance and repression but through conscious awareness. Not because we indulge ourselves but because we seek to understand ourselves, and then control ourselves.

The twentieth century seems to be characterized by false dichotomies. Things are either one thing or the other. You're either Liberal or Conservative, either hedonistic or chaste. Real life isn't that uniform. There really must be something beyond.

This is what drives me and has for my whole life. It is the one area in which I am not lazy whatsoever. In fact I am pretty brutal to myself in my constant dissection. I am driven, but unproductive in a way, but there just seems like there must be something. There must be a better way.

I cannot believe that the door that was opened to the self is a bad thing. The self-indulgent 'me generation' following the chaste 'greatest generation' can't be the end all be all of this journey to the self.

I call it the 'fully integrated self'. There must be a way to go toward this, and outside of the mystical psycho-jargon of religion or psycho-analytic theory, but some way to make it accessible to the entire populace as a whole.

I disagree with both Reich and Freud. The primitive animal impulses are neither good, nor bad, but properties of the self that can be cultivated just like intellect.

[YMix]

[Tinker]

What is that from?

I must confess, I was listening to the Weathermen in episode 3 talk about wanting a non-Consumerist society and I couldn't help but agree with them. The notion that they were evil people is ludicrous since all they ever did was attack property. Which is certainly criminal, but the nature of our society has become so consumerist that people can't even comprehend why they were doing what they were doing. "Communism", becomes a catch-all for 'Any sort of idea I don't understand.' The idea that the Weathermen wanted Stalinism or Maoism is patently absurd.

[YMix]

[Tinker]

Right. This documentary outright states that the marriage of consumption and Democracy was a planned goal of Edward Bernays.

[YMix]

"It meant that irrelevant objects could become powerful emotional symbols of how you wanted to be seen by others." (yes, I'm still at Episode 1)

And this is how we got hooked. I think that we were blindsided by mass production. In the pre-industrialized and early industrial eras, working hard (or stealing) to acquire lots of goods was a goal for many people. But we didn't understand that, in the age of mass production, it's more important to say "no". Sadly, advertising is there to make you say "yes". Advertising is one of the reasons I no longer watch TV.

[Tinker]

Yes, advertising is quite insidious. That guy Bageant is so on point.

[Tinker]

[noddy]

[Tinker]

noddy you are dead on. But did you stop to think these people got to the schools as well?

[noddy]

[Tinker]

[noddy]

[Tinker]

Well, here's the way I see it. Society at the time psycho-analysis emerged was rather dull for the most part. People were not that slick or savvy, so TeeVee comes along and all the slicksters get a portal directly into the minds of the unassuming and credulous. At the same time, school works on a system of rote learning rather than critical learning. This cannot be said to be unintentional as pedagogy throughout history always had a current of critical thought, rather than credulous acceptance of rote information. They could have chosen the path of Socrates for pedagogy, but they didn't. They chose the path of 'every anal retentive fuck who thought he was brilliant because he could recite a litany of facts.' Why is that?

[noddy]

[noddy]

as for why, I kind of agree with some of the spengler analysis in the sense WW1,WW2 sucked the life out of the west, leaving it a hollow shell of itself.

[Tinker]

[Tinker]

[Rhapsody]

[noddy]

[Rhapsody]

Didn't watch the Docu yet, promise will do.

[Ibrahim]

Speaking strictly historically, I find it hard to imagine than any era was less self-absorbed than we are today. We simply have more technological opportunities to record and distribute everything.

Once upon a time self-obsessed people would have to just sit and think about themselves, without blogging about it.