On crowds, pro and con

Sometimes I think I'm the last Freudian...except I'm not exactly a Freudian and if I was I probably wouldn't be the only one. Still, I'm part of the diminishing crowd that thinks he knew a thing or two about a thing or two.

(And, yes, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.)

An example of Freud hitting the mark are these comments on crowd and group behavior, which can be a two edged sword:

When individuals come together as a group all their individual inhibitions fall away and all the cruel, brutal, and destructive instincts, which lie dormant in individuals...are stirred up to find free gratification. But under the influence of suggestion, groups are also capable of high achievement in the shape of abnegation, unselfishness, and devotion to an ideal. While with isolated individuals, personal interest is almost the only motive force, with groups it is very rarely prominent....Whereas the intellectual capacity of a group is always far  below that of an individual, its ethical conduct may rise as high above it as sink below it.

I'd say he nailed it. 

The dream cure

Healing temple of Asclepius at Kos, by way of wikipedia

The ancient Greeks had some interesting ideas about healing illnesses. One of these was the custom of using dreams to find cures. It worked like this: the patient would visit  and sleep in an Asclepeion or temple dedicated to the semi-divine physician Asclepius, son of the Apollo. The dreams of the patient would be used as the basis of the treatment.

I've always been interested in dreams and tried to pay attention to them. Sometimes they're just static, sometimes funny or scary, sometimes transparent wish fulfillment a la Freud. But sometimes, as Freud's renegade disciple Carl Jung argued, they're very deep. They can represent the insights of our unconscious mind, the oldest and biggest part of our mental apparatus.

I had a pretty good one last night that speaks to our current situation. In it, I was working to repair the roof of a house pretty far from the ground, something I'd never be able to pull off in real life. The slope of the roof was steep and I was in danger of falling off.

It occurred to me that I needed some kind of supporting connection, like a rope tied to something secure to keep from going over the edge. There were images of different kinds of knots--bowlines, square knots, slipknots and others I've long since forgotten from my volunteer firefighting and scouting days. Obviously, the knots and connections represented relations with others.

I think that's a pretty good metaphor for the social connections we need during this outbreak to keep from going over the edge, even if they involve social distancing or occur over long distances. Even if they're just remembered.

I'll take that. Thanks, Asclepius!

Gazing into the abyss

It’s comforting to think that good and evil people are completely different, and that “our” side, whatever that is, is all good, while evil belongs exclusively to the other.

Too bad this is a dangerous illusion.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it in “The Gulag Archipelago,” his study of Soviet punishment camps:

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. ... During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish.

“One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood.”

He quotes a Russian proverb that, “From good to evil is one quaver,” noting it works the other way, too.

That’s a good summary of social science on how ordinarily good people sometimes do terrible things.

Someone who explored this field for decades is Philip Zimbardo, creator of the infamous Stanford Prison experiment and author of “The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil.”

He argues that we tend to attribute evil actions to the individual dispositions of people who do them but ignore the powerful forces situations exert on individuals. Further, powerful people create systems that put decent people in situations in which they do things they otherwise never would have.

He warns that we often have a dangerously inflated notion of our ability to resist evil influences.

“For many, that belief of personal power to resist powerful situational and systemic forces is little more than a reassuring illusion of invulnerability,” he wroted. “Paradoxically, maintaining that illusion only serves to make one more vulnerable to manipulation by failing to be sufficiently vigilant against attempts of undesired influence subtly practiced on them.”

Two powerful toxins that can unleash the beast in any of us are dehumanization and deindividuation.

Zimbardo: “Dehumanization is one of the central processes in the transformation of ordinary, normal people into indifferent or even wanton perpetrators of evil. Dehumanization is like a cortical cataract that clouds one’s thinking and fosters the perception that other people are less than human. It makes some people come to see those others as enemies deserving of torment, torture, and annihilation.”

Dehumanization happens at an individual level, but it is most dangerous when the powerful create systems that label and target some groups as being less than human.

When we dehumanize others, another process that kicks in is what social psychologist Albert Bandura called “moral disengagement,” when we convince ourselves that some people are unworthy of empathy and compassion.

Then it’s on.

Deindividuation happens when we identify so closely with a group that we lose our sense of individual responsibility. This happens in organized or informal ways. When countries send people off to war, the warriors are often deindividualized with shaved heads, uniforms and drills that emphasize following orders and acting as a unit. It can also happen in informal groups like mobs and gangs. Things like masks and hoods can add to the effect.

This is most dangerous at the systemic level, particularly when it goes hand in hand with dehumanizing some vulnerable group via ideology and propaganda. Throw in our tendency to conform and obey authority, and you have a pretty lethal brew. Signals from above give permission to abuse those below.

The scary side to group behavior has long been recognized. Sigmund Freud noted that, in groups, emotionalism rises while rationality falls (think political rallies, rock concerts, some sporting events).

He believed that when groups fall under the spell of a charismatic authority, the people in it regress to a more primitive mental state. He wrote, “It is not so remarkable that we should see an individual in a group doing or approving things which he would have avoided in the normal conditions of life.”

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr even titled one of his books “Moral Man and Immoral Society.” He didn’t have any delusions about the flaws of individuals, but rather noted that, “In every human group there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others and therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals, who compose the group, reveal in their personal relationships.”

After all, most individuals have consciences. But often the conscience of a group is a dissenting minority accused of disloyalty.

We live in are dangerous times. Polarization runs high. There are calls for dehumanization coming from high places around the world. America may be on its own dark journey, although it’s unclear how far it will go. I’m consoled by the thought that many other nations have gone through dark times and come out on the other side.

I hope we step back from the edge of the cliff and resist the temptation to see the other, whoever it may be, as some kind of monster.

As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

(This ran as an op-ed in the Gazette-Mail a day or so ago.)

The doors of the temple stand open

The theme here these day is the life and thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the focus at the moment is on his 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, which stirred up so much controversy that he wasn't invited back for 30 years.

It would be one thing to tick off a bunch of foaming fundamentalists with a little free ranging thought, but Ralph even managed to alienate relatively laid back Unitarians, who were more closely aligned with traditional Christianity then than now.

One thing that got him in trouble was his characteristic assertion that truth is not something once received and thereafter believed but rather something each soul must directly intuit. He believed that the same sources that inspired Jesus and other prophets and seers can inspire us today if we only let it.

If it sounds like he'd been hanging around with and reading about Quakers, he was. He was also learning or intuiting as much as he could about the religious traditions of Asia--so much so that the sounds Buddhist and even Zenlike in his insistence that every person must directly experience insight rather than merely accept some religious tradition:

...the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

That's kind of how a 19th century American might express the Buddha's advice to "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." It also is reminiscent of the teachings often attributed to the Zen patriarch Bodhidharma, who was believed to have spoken of

A special transmission outside the scriptures;
No dependence on words and letters;
Direct pointing to the mind of man;
Seeing into one's nature and attaining Buddhahood.

Such ideas are pretty commonplace now. You can find some reference to them in almost any bookstore and in popular culture. But they were a bit over the top back then. They'd still upset quite a few people today.

SPEAKING OF PEOPLE WHO WOULDN'T LIKE EMERSON, here's an article about the fortunes of fundamentalism in the US and around the world.

WHAT WOULD FREUD SAY? WV legislators have gone gun crazy lately. Would Sigmund say it was castration anxiety or are they just trying to compensate for something?

CAN I HAVE ONE? This NRP story about an Indonesian zoo breeding Komodo dragons has me all excited.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Civilization and all that

Long time visitors to this blog will recall that El Cabrero has a soft spot for ole Sigmund Freud. I don't buy the whole package, but he did have his moments. It occurs to me that one can reinterpret at least some of Freud's ideas in terms of evolutionary theory.

Here's one example: his classic little book Civilization and Its Discontents is pretty much what it sounds like. The main idea I remember after all these years is that living in modern, bureaucratic civilizations requires the repression of a lot of drives. He believed that since we can't get rid of the things that civilization provides without a lot of people dying AND since we can't get rid of our instinctual drives either, we're kinda out of luck.

I agree with the main idea any way. Our minds and bodies evolved under vastly different conditions that those we're living under now and this causes lots of stresses and strains and all kinds of problems. If we assume that humans have been around in their current form for 250,000 years (it could have been more or less), for all but the last 10,000 or so years they all lived by foraging in small groups. My my calculator, that amounts to 96 percent of our history.

In a hunter-gatherer society, there's may be a division of labor based on age and sex and some differences in status, but there's no permanent class system or built-in stratification (not to mention no alarm clocks). If we estimate that state societies first began to emerge 5,000 years ago, that's only two percent of human history. "Modern" societies with bureaucratic and capitalist features began to emerge 500 years ago, which is only .2 percent of human history (assuming I did the math right).

No wonder the shoe doesn't fit sometimes.

NEGLECTED. Paul Krugman's latest is about education.

SAVING CHIP. Here's a Gazette editorial on WV Senator Jay Rockefeller's proposal to preserve the Childrens Health Insuarance Program.

THIS IS STARTING TO GET GOOD. Rockefeller and WV Congressman Nick Rahall have joined with Senator Byrd in calling on Massey Energy to help fund the relocation of an elementary school near a huge coal silo and slurry impoundment.

MONKEY MOMS love their babies.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A little fudging

The posts this week were prepared in advance and don't have any links or comments about current events as El Cabrero is on furlough.

The theme is books, and specifically the top 10 that had the biggest impact on me growing up (i.e. not necessarily the ones I enjoyed the most or agreed with).

Recap: 1. Bible 2. Book of Common Prayer 3. Poe's stories and poems 4. Lord of the Rings 5. Tao Te Ching 6. Karate-Do Kyohan and...

7. A tie between Freud and Jung. Sometime late in high school and I discovered the ideas of Freud and Jung. And it stoned me. I think I first found Man and His Symbols by Jung and co. (although I don't think he really wrote much of it) and was totally engrossed. It had all kinds of cool illustrations and rambled over history, mythology, dreams, art and the kitchen sink. I outgrew Jung before too long but it was a nice stage.

My love for Freud was to be more enduring. I hit his books shortly after Jung's and was particularly blown away by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which covered slips of the tongue, mistaken actions and all the other ways the unconscious pops out at inconvenient moments. I'm not an orthodox Freudian, but have a permanent soft spot for the old man.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar...but sometimes it's not.

Dream weaver, Penelope, the bailout and more

Along with links and comments about current events, Goat Rope is winding down a long series on the Odyssey of Homer. Much of the series has focused on the misadventures of Odysseus' homecoming and how these shed light both on ordinary life and particularly on veterans coming home from war.

One character who has not received her due here has been the faithful wife Penelope, who in her own was was as crafty as her husband. Incidentally, Margaret Atwood wrote The Penelopiad to tell the whole story from her point of view.

With Odysseus gone and presumed dead, her status was unclear. There was little or now place in that society for an independent woman of child-bearing years. Now that her son Telemachus is coming of age, she is under enormous pressure to remarry. Over 100 suitors are basically camped out at her home and are devouring the family's estate. They even plot the murder of Telemachus.

To gain time, she says she must complete her duties by weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus' father Laertes, which she secretly unravels at night until her secret is revealed by a treacherous maid.

In the epic cycle, she is seen as the ideal wife, in direct contrast to Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon who murders her husband on his homecoming to revenge his sacrifice of her daughter Iphigenia (although there are many here among us who would say Agamemnon had it coming).

My favorite scene with Penelope in the Odyssey is her discussion of the nature of dreams. As you may have noticed, some dreams make sense and some don't. Here's her explanation:

"Ah my friend," seasoned Penelope dissented,
"dreams are hard to unravel, wayward, drifting things--
not all we glimpse in them will come to pass...
Two gates there are for our evanescent dreams,
one is made of ivory, the other made of horn.
Those that pass through the ivory cleanly carved
are will-o'-the-wisps, their message bears no fruit.
The dreams that pass through the gates of polished horn
are fraught with truth, for the dreamer who can see them..."

The problem is it's kind of hard to tell true dreams and false ones apart sometimes, whether we're awake or asleep.

WELFARE FOR WALL STREET UPDATE. The House is likely to vote today on the Wall Street bailout. Here's an action alert and analysis from the American Friends Service Committee.

SCAPEGOAT. Right wingers are trying to blame the Community Reinvestment Act (and minorities) for the Wall Street meltdown. That would be another dog that don't hunt.

URBAN PLOWBOY. Here's an interesting item on the future of urban farming.

SCORE ONE FOR SIGMUND. A new medical study finds that old school psychodynamic therapy works as well as other treatments for certain mental disorders.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: WHO KNOWS?

MYTHS OF THE PSYCHE

Antigone Leads Oedipus out of Thebes by Charles Francois Jalabert. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Mythology is a perennially fascinating subject. There have been any number of modern interpretations of the meaning of myths. Classical scholar Elizabeth Vandiver divides these into "what" and "why" theories.

"What" theories, which were discussed here last week, try to explain myth in terms of other things, such as expressions of rituals, social solidarity, explanations of natural and historical events, etc. "Why" theories of myths are broader in scope and tend to focus on the universal function of myths for the human mind.

The person who did the most to open that can of worms was none other than Sigmund Freud, who turned to myths in developing his theory of psychoanalysis, specifically the myth of Oedipus as recounted in the Greek tragedian Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus.

To recap that myth, an oracle foretells that Oedipus is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Laius, the father, orders the infant exposed, but unbeknownst to him, a shepherd takes pity and spares the infant, who is raised by another couple elsewhere he believes to be his parents. When he learns of the oracle, he flees his home and kills a belligerent person on the way. Reckon wonder who that guy was?

He becomes tyrant (nonhereditary ruler) of Thebes when he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, a monster terrifying the town. He also gets to marry the Jocasta, widow of the king. When a plague breaks out, Oedipus swears to get to the bottom of it. The blind seer Tiresias says the plague is due to a hidden crime, which turns out to be... When the truth is revealed, Jocasta kills herself and Oedipus blinds himself. (There's a bunch of stuff going on with seeing/not seeing.)

For Freud, the only possible reason why this myth is compelling to modern as well as ancient readers is that it reveals a universal conflict in the human psyche that begins in childhood and has ramifications throughout life. He believed the Oedipus complex was a universal human trait.

Most people today wouldn't go that far, although it seems to fit for some people. Scholars of mythology in particular point out that this kind of mythic theme is far from universal across cultures and the Oedipus myth itself occupied only a minor place in the Greek mythic cycle. For that matter, other myths are at least as compelling as that of Oedipus.

When El Cabrero first discovered Greek tragedy, I was much more impressed by Aeschylus' tragedies of Orestes, who killed his mother to avenge his father's death and had to deal with the wrath of the Furies in the wake of that primal transgression. He didn't even rate a complex. No fair!

Official Goat Rope verdict: myths, like any other kind of story, can convey deep psychological insights, but they are best understood as much as possible in their own terms and as part of the symbolic universe of which they are a part. And not every compelling story reflects a universal truth of human nature.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and even when it isn't it isn't always what Old Sig thought.

SAD MILESTONE. The AP reports that US military deaths in Iraq have reached 4000.

THIS IS NO SHOCK, but good jobs are getting harder for workers at lower education levels to find.

LONGEVITY GAP. As the gap between rich and poor widens, so does the gap in life expectancies across socio-economic lines.

YOU HAVE TO CLICK ON THIS LINK if only to see the freaky mantis shrimp.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SOMETIMES A TRAIN IS JUST A TRAIN

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The theme for this week's Goat Rope is dreams and what they may or may not mean. You will also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

No discussion of dreams would be complete without spending a little time with Old Man Sig. Freud's Interpretation of Dreams made a huge splash in 1900 and is still worth a look all these years later. He also wrote a shorter, more accessible book titled On Dreams in 1901.

Freud's basic idea here is that dreams are more or less disguised wish fulfillment's usually originating from unconscious desires. Sometimes this is all too obvious and the desires are too, as when hungry people dream of food or lonely people dream of company (take that any way you want it).

In other cases this isn't so obvious. Some dreams seem scary or just senseless. He believed that dreams have both a manifest and a latent content which together make up what he called the dream work. The manifest content of a dream might involve say a house. The latent or hidden idea behind this image could mean something else entirely, for example the body.

The process of interpreting dreams for him involved breaking down the manifest or obvious content into its component parts and analyzing the things the dreamer associates with them. Dreams are tricky critters and employ a number of ruses, including metaphors and similes, condensation, substitution and other ways of disguising their meaning:

The dream thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, images resembling those of poetic speech. (On Dreams, ch. 6.)

Why bother with all the imagery? For Freud, people have unconscious desires, often of a sexual nature, which are repressed most of the time. When we sleep, the repression eases up enough for the varmints to get out, but they pass through what he called a "dream censor" which disguises them so as not to disturb sleep or the sleeper. A nightmare is a really disguised wish in which one part of us wants something the other parts would be creeped out by.

For Freud, dreams aren't the only way the unconscious pokes out, if you'll pardon the expression. Slips of the tongue, mistaken actions, and symptoms are other ways.

Later in life, after studying the nightmares of many World War I veterans suffering from what we might now call post-traumatic stress disorder, he came to partially modify his theory in the book Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In that 1920 book, he developed his theory of the death instinct.

Even if we can't go all the way with Sig, he does deserve great credit for getting the study of dreams on the agenda of psychology. The problems with his theory is its reductionism. Some dreams really are Freudian, but others not so much.

I remember once waking up after a classic Freudian dream--flying, trains, tunnels, all that--and wanting to write a nasty letter to my unconscious saying "How trite! How cliched! Couldn't you come up with something a little more original?"

THE MISSING PIECE. Washington Post columnist Marie Cocco states the obvious about the need to expand unemployment benefits in a recession. Stating the obvious is necessary in these 2+2=5 days.

SMIRK OF THE UNION. More comments and links about the recession and the receding state of the union can be found here.

ANOTHER BAD IDEA would be extending the arms race into space.

YOUNG VOTERS, already saddled with debt and worried about health care and a declining middle class, are the subject of this Business Week article.

LEGISLATIVE PARADOX. Any time someone proposes that the WV legislature proposes some action benefiting working folks, they can expect to be asked "How are we going to pay for it?" Fair enough. But not too many of them seem to be saying the same thing about proposed cuts to corporate taxes.

WV INSPIRES GRISHAM. Popular courtroom novelist John Grisham's latest novel--about a rich businessman who buys a judge's election--was inspired in part by WV's 2004 Supreme Court election when Massey CEO Don Blankenship spent millions of his own dollars to elect the politically unknown Brent Benjamin.

On a similar front, Benjamin has consistently refused to recuse himself from cases involving Massey (he's usually on their side), including a pending lawsuit for $220 million. Chief justice Spike Maynard, who was photographed vacationing with Blankenship did recuse himself from the case in the wake of recent publicity.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED