In his paper, Freud referred to the contagious and regressive nature of groups described by LeBon and McDougall, but he added the dimension of intrapsychic cathectic shifts that could occur in groups. Freud described the similarity of such groups as the Catholic Church and the army with the hypnotic situation. In all of these situations, there is a leader and one or more followers. The follower obeys the leader and gives up his own superego and ego ideal as he identifies with the leader's superego.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=fDp7pkEcJVQ
Puritans don't work things out with enemies like these because there is no negotiating with the irrational. The Puritan mind reasons: "Well of course the witch doesn't want to be saved from her own evil. That's why we must save her from herself by burning her at the stake." Sounds absurd, but that American major said after the destruction of the village of Ben Tre in Vietnam: "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." A true Puritan there. And now look what we're doing in Iraq. Think Fallujah. We're burning the country at the stake. It's a form of mental illness, but it's a sickness we all accept as normal.Terrorism is the latest encounter of the Puritan mind with the irrational, and the traditional Islamic culture that promotes it will just have to be destroyed to save it. World politics will be so much more hygienic once we exterminate the vermin. I wasn't all that surprized to learn that Tom Delay had been an exterminator before he entered politics. He's the poster child for this tragic illness. Would that Jerry Lewis have a telethon to raise money for its cure. A key element in understanding the Calvinist mentality is its need for control and its willingness to use whatever level of violence necessary to repress the "irrational" elements in human experience, and the premodern in the Puritan demonology is full of irrational images triggering fears in need of suppression—magic, witches, Catholic ritual, shifty Jews, hot-tempered Italians, voodoo practicing Africans, the savage Indian. J.K. Rowling's "muggles" and their fear of magic is a kind of sendup of this mentality. Theirs is a tight, priggish, white-bread, control-obsessed world, sterilized of anything that suggests mystery, transcendence, or the non-rational in general. The Puritans and their Calvinist cousins the Scotch Irish, of course, didn't invent priggishness, nor are they, obviously, the only ones in the history of humanity who have justified the violent repression of their enemies for religious reasons. But theirs is the peculiarly modern form for the religious persecution of the enemy, and it lingers in Anglo-American culture, and is so much in the cultural air we breathe that we cannot see it clearly. At the very heart of modern "religiosity," whether in its Calvinist or its more secular versions, is fear of the uncontrollable non-rational.The American right's fear of communism/socialism is more akin to the Islamic fear of modernity, which is the fear of an uncontrollable future. If fascism derives its mystique from a mythological past, communism derives it from a mytholgized future. Progressives look to the future. Conservatives look to the past. Progressives distrust the past and its premodern irrationality; Conservatives distrust those who look to the future with an irrational utopianism. Progressivism is experiencing hard times these days because during a culturally decadent period like the one we're currently suffering through, we don't know what to hope for. We have only the weakest sense of plausible future possibility. We are capable of seeing the future only as a variation on 'more of the same', and that is not a vision that inspires concerted action. That will change someday, but for now it's the conservatives' time because when our imagination of the future is weak, we fall back on the past for want of something better. And we find ourselves voting for mediocrities like George Bush rather than mediocrities like John Kerry for the same reason. The first represents the solidity of the past; the second a fuzzy future for which we can muster little hope.
In America the ideal of humiliating mental torture is much more entranched and frequent and revered. In summer camp, in high schools (read law schools as well), in Boot Camp, in the Skulls and Bones Club at Yale, in the Miss America contest, the spelling bee, Death Row or Oscar Night, in every Hollywood roast or any meeting of AA or any parade ground or football victory lap, ritualized humiliation is the American way.
Quote from: John Marshmallow on July 18, 2006, 05:40:25 AMNo wonder, then, why the production and traffic of forged bills is so actively repressed and so heavily punished -- to a far greater extent, for instance, than are theft or embezzlement. Well, the answer can only lie in this -- that is, the Symbolic, of which money is precisely a representative -- ought to circulate. The very durability of the social cultural system is at stake here, for this system could be overturned or even destroyed by the proliferation of false references that are necessarily excluded from any form of legal and symbolic guarantee. Forged currency is a parody: it apes, as it were, real currency, and renders this ridiculous in much the same way as an ape imitating a man makes fun of the latter. And as one cannot make fun of symbolic guarantees with impunity, the proliferation of forged currency is anything but neutral: not only economic values but equally ethical and juridical values, etc., soon appear as suspicious since currency is the expression of a global sovereignty. Such considerations give support to the idea that it is impossible to completely trust the Symbolic, however absolutely indispensable this may otherwise be to Man. It may well be the case that the true bears the false within itself, but, more generally, money is never able to pay for or replace those minute fetishes (trivia, memories, etc.) that are so dear to us and which testify, over the course of our lives, to the absence of the fundamental object of desire (the proof that one cannot buy everything).
No wonder, then, why the production and traffic of forged bills is so actively repressed and so heavily punished -- to a far greater extent, for instance, than are theft or embezzlement.
Quote from: français on October 04, 2006, 05:26:42 AMIn America the ideal of humiliating mental torture is much more entranched and frequent and revered. In summer camp, in high schools (read law schools as well), in Boot Camp, in the Skulls and Bones Club at Yale, in the Miss America contest, the spelling bee, Death Row or Oscar Night, in every Hollywood roast or any meeting of AA or any parade ground or football victory lap, ritualized humiliation is the American way. You bet! Here are some military training pics:
Quote from: bottleneck on August 25, 2006, 11:17:34 PMQuote from: John Marshmallow on July 18, 2006, 05:40:25 AMNo wonder, then, why the production and traffic of forged bills is so actively repressed and so heavily punished -- to a far greater extent, for instance, than are theft or embezzlement. Well, the answer can only lie in this -- that is, the Symbolic, of which money is precisely a representative -- ought to circulate. The very durability of the social cultural system is at stake here, for this system could be overturned or even destroyed by the proliferation of false references that are necessarily excluded from any form of legal and symbolic guarantee. Forged currency is a parody: it apes, as it were, real currency, and renders this ridiculous in much the same way as an ape imitating a man makes fun of the latter. And as one cannot make fun of symbolic guarantees with impunity, the proliferation of forged currency is anything but neutral: not only economic values but equally ethical and juridical values, etc., soon appear as suspicious since currency is the expression of a global sovereignty. Such considerations give support to the idea that it is impossible to completely trust the Symbolic, however absolutely indispensable this may otherwise be to Man. It may well be the case that the true bears the false within itself, but, more generally, money is never able to pay for or replace those minute fetishes (trivia, memories, etc.) that are so dear to us and which testify, over the course of our lives, to the absence of the fundamental object of desire (the proof that one cannot buy everything). Digital cash presents an additional problem. Although payment with forged electronic currency could be construed as an act of theft or fraud, the very act of forging the electronic cash -- for example cracking the computer protections and copying the bits in the wallet on the hard disk -- is prima facie not prohibited by criminal law. A revision of the law is therefore necessary in order to make it clear that forging digital currency is just the same as forging bank notes.
Quote from: ellaine on October 06, 2006, 05:19:45 AMQuote from: français on October 04, 2006, 05:26:42 AMIn America the ideal of humiliating mental torture is much more entranched and frequent and revered. In summer camp, in high schools (read law schools as well), in Boot Camp, in the Skulls and Bones Club at Yale, in the Miss America contest, the spelling bee, Death Row or Oscar Night, in every Hollywood roast or any meeting of AA or any parade ground or football victory lap, ritualized humiliation is the American way. You bet! Here are some military training pics:Sadomasochism in action!
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