It seems that he couldn't respect the decisions and judgements of Jamal.
And so, the sword falls...justly or otherwise... — Amity

Or the rest of the mod team from what I've gathered. And it is just imo that those invited here do so under the condition that they follow moderation. At the same time, I do, of course, respect your right to defend him and bemoan his banning.

@Olivier5 was ultimately banned for refusing moderation. He only has himself to blame. This has nothing to do with @Isaac or any one else.

Going to leave that to @Jamal. There were some fairly amusing moments there among the chaos but I expect yes, most have had their say.

Not to give @Benkei free popcorn? Yes, he doesn't deserve it. He'd spit in your face and tell you it's raining, that fella.

I feel nothing except that it was the right decision. As far back as 3 years ago he was warned and that wasn't the last time either.

For your viewing pleasure:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7115/banning-bartricks-for-breaking-site-guidelines/p1

He deserved to be banned and he was banned. That's it.

That'll be three fiddy.

*munch, munch*

You are in the majority here in terms of your thinking. I only know of three writers other than Kelly who deconstruct concepts of cultural sedimentation to reveal a more intricate process of meaning-making( Derrida, Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin). — Joshs

Oops, suddenly I feel like I’m on the wrong side of the argument. Here I am defending the status quo while you oppose it. I thought it was supposed to be the other way around. :lol:

Anyhow, I could go as far as conceiving the body as a route to intercultural commonalities of experience in the realm of nature and art, for example. But all experiences are ultimately conceptualised and interpreted socio-linguistically (which seems to be acknowledged in your post). Maybe this is only to point to the fragility of the mystical but not to deny it. I wonder though what the practical consequences of such a view are? Where can we locate its traces in our contemporary context? It seems very Zen, but of course my idea of Zen is polluted by self-help industry conceptions I’ve criticized above, so what would I know?

Yes indeed. the statistical complexity lends a comforting air of scientism to what is a fundamentally philosophical, social-democratic, and conceptual approach. — unenlightened

Or is it??? Here's an amusing anecdote from Kelly complaining about various interpretations of his theory (from the same source I quoted above):

“I have been so puzzled over the early labeling of personal construct theory as “cognitive” that sev- eral years ago I set out to write another short book to make it clear that I wanted no part of cogni- tive theory. The manuscript was about a third completed when I gave a lecture at Harvard Univer- sity with the title, “Personal Construct Theory as a Line of Inference.” Following the lecture, Pro- fessor Gordon Allport explained to the students that my theory was not a “cognitive” theory but an “emotional” theory. Later the same afternoon, Dr. Henry Murray called me aside and said, “You know, don't you, that you are really an existentialist.” Since that time I stepped into almost all the open manholes that psychological theorists can possibly fall into. For example, in Warsaw, where I thought my lecture on personal construct theory would be an open challenge to dialectical materialism, the Poles, who had been conducting some seminars on personal construct theory be- fore my arrival, explained to me that “personal construct theory was just exactly what dialectical materialism stood for.” Along the way also I have found myself classified in a volume on personal- ity theories as one of the “learning theorists,” a classification that seems to me so patently ridicu- lous that I have gotten no end of amusement out of it.
A few years ago an orthodox psychoanalyst insisted, after hearing me talk about psychotherapy, that, regardless of what I might say about Freud, and regardless even of my failure to fall in the apostolic succession to which a personal psychoanalysis entitled one, I was really “a psychoana- lyst.” This charge was repeated by a couple of psychoanalytically sophisticated psychiatrists in Lon- don last fall, and nothing I could say would shake their conviction. I have, of course, been called a Zen Buddhist, and last fall one of our former students, now a distinguished psychologist, who was invited back to give a lecture, spent an hour and a half in a seminar corrupting my students with the idea that I was really a “behaviorist.”

Note here how it’s commonalities of discourses that defined the orientation under which the theory was interpreted and integrated into personal contructs. The directionality of travel had already been established by the prevailing (sub)cultural context in a way the various groups of intellectuals were clearly not aware of; otherwise, they would have had the means to challenge their assumptions!

Social 1: Individual 0

*Grabs popcorn*

We do live in different individual worlds. Yet we tend to be very similar to each other within our respective discursive worlds (intraculturally), considering the potential for intercultural variation. We both know this is not coincidence. Try behaving like an 18th century Comanche Indian in modern day America and you won't last long. So, you emphasize above individual differences that I don't necessarily deny. I emphasize a power of discourse that is obvious the moment we separate ourselves conceptually from our own culture. And I also point to a life-long process of cultural sedimentation that delimits the terms under which we interact and understand each other. This allows for an enormous amount of variation in how we relate to each other and to the social in general, but it also allows for social trends and mechanisms that may be positive or negative viewed from the perspective of how they utilize human resources.

Let's not forget that the self-help movement has made self-improvement into another commodity, yet another thing to consume. And the ease and flexibility with which matters of self and identity are approached in the self-help movement suggest that old ways of thinking about them just don't apply anymore. At least not in discourse with the proponents of self-improvement. — baker

I think you highlight here how the process of commodification neutralises the effectiveness of self-development by appropriating it under its rubric, fostering an instrumental attitude towards it that tends to undermine its proper logic, almost as if partaking in the commercial aspect of the process (buying a book, paying for a course) is the solution and partaking in whatever therapy offered just more work to get through to get our money's worth.

Yes, I read this today, which gets as far as the repertory grid concept and then substanitally ends as a useful resource, being followed by a bunch of references and indices.

f you want to try it, https://openrepgrid.org will save you hours of calculations. — unenlightened

Dare I? Probably, yes.

@Caldwell

Just a quick note because your point re metaphysics remains interesting, especially in light of some recent reading I've been doing: To some degree my attitude towards metaphysics is a symptom of the issue I’m describing which subsists in an ever widening gap between science and art from which we draw our contemporary form of reason and that places these orientations towards truth on opposite poles of an irrational world from which each necessarily denigrates the other by virtue of this placement, with philosophy mediating uneasily from the inner latitudes. In another sense, a certain distance towards metaphysics in so far as it is contemporaneously understood is facilitative of attempts towards bridging such a gap. But either way, there's no denying the transcendent resonances of what I'm arguing.

It should come as no surprise that your position (here on a philosophy forum) is philosophical-centric, even positing the users here as separated from the vacuous masses. — Hanover

Sure, and that may be characterized as an elitist attitude, but as long as we maintain any notion of objective values (as you clearly do) such that we consider, e.g. intelligence to be better than stupidity, knowledge better than ignorance, reflection better than mere reaction, and think in terms of potentiality, we can conceive of the danger of a dominant discourse that seeks to monopolize social capital such that stupidity, ignorance and superficiality have real social rewards (both from a short term physiological perspective and through loger term networking of relationships etc) where these social rewards are themselves directed by the profit motive of a technologized social universe for which our potentialities and the values they represent are irrelevant except insofar as they are monetarily exploitable.

The consequences of this attempted monopolization of culture by its lowest common denominator may range from the relatively harmless, e.g. social capital gained from knowing what the Kardashians are wearing this month, to the clearly harmful, e.g. social capital gained from Tik Tok challenges that get people killed. The salient point though is that, from the point of view of social discourses or ideologies, we are only means to ends, i.e. the reproduction of such contexts, rather than ends in ourselves. Insofar, then, as we perceive ourselves as the latter, it makes sense to render explicit the functioning of these forces and critically analyse our relationship to them, not only in the simple guise of Kelly's naive scientists who react bidirectionally on the basis of already internalized dispositions which are inevitably themselves a result of a process of cultural negotiation (but which process, as I've contended above, is not necessarily conscious or self-directed), but also as culturally educated "self-builders" whose orientation to social capital is mediated by an awareness that the accrual of such is not an ideologically neutral enterprise but one suffused in social forces for which self-obscurity may be an interest.

but what do you offer as a solution? — Hanover

Education, particularly early education. The practicalities of that are difficult. An education that undermines the society it functions in, even if only to improve it, is an almost paradoxical notion.

Edit: Contemporary early education is obsessed with validating students' immersion in dominant discourses and their personal psychologies as circumscribed by these under the guise of sensitivity, understanding, and kindness. But while the "It's fine to be this..." "It's fine to be that..." liberal philosophy of education may build a certain social confidence, it's a confidence that's not directed to true diversity as I see it. True diversity can only be achieved by an encouragement to look for things that are not fine, but that are still presented as such, i.e. in a critical engagement with the social that fosters a desire to change it rather than fit in or be seen to be fitting in to it.

Not too many today are willing to deny that we can be swayed in one direction or another through influences we are not conscious of. — Joshs

I don't see anything in Kelly's theory to suggest this type of influence doesn't obtain at least to some degree (and I don't think any major theorist post WWII suggests this). I understand Kelly as proposing that personal construct systems are formed over time in a manner whereby the integration of new constructs is expected to occur proportionately to their compatibility with the modalities inherent in the system already developed. But this is not fully determinative of their directionality. What determines their directionality is circumscribed by available stimuli. We can easily imagine starting points for construct systems that become self-propelling according to dominant discourses which present themselves as validatory tools. And the fact that the self is negotiated with the social in different ways according to its particular make-up does not preclude it being swayed by social influences in a way it's not conscious of, not least because our interpetative mechanisms naturally confabulate reasons for our behaviour compatible with self-understandings that are by their nature subjective methods of social coping rather than objective truths.

So, conceptualising individuals as naive scientists or more malleable social units does not prescribe results but processes, processes which are dependent on social contexts for their functioning. Social heterogeneity is crucial here and not just in the superficial sense of the proliferation of ideological goods for sale but also in the diversity of available ideological standpoints concerning both individual self-relations and social-self relations. A self that contextualizes itself according to dominant discourses of self and social relations tends to set for itself a direction that reinforces such discourses regardless of whether the process is self-negotiated because the construct system gradually fulfils the logic of the context in which it is constructed.

A nice way to end the thread. If you don't like it, sue us.

Though I will strenuously deny cartesianism if ever accused of it, I will gladly join forces with the cartesians in common ideological combat against social forces that I consider destructive. (This type of thing happens in comic books a lot and they always win, so it's gotta work). :wink:

Actually, I’m pretty similar. I have a tv but only use it to watch old
movies, and completely avoid social media and news except for top headlines. But that’s consistentn with what I was saying. I welcome attempts by the world to knock on my door and offer me their wares, and I selectively pick and choose what works within my life and what doesn’t. — Joshs

Absolutely. I am marketing, packaging and advertising my brand of philosophy to you. Will it get under your skin or will it be deemed inconsistent with the identity of your sense-making system? — Joshs

Not at all. Judge them by what they do, not what they say! It seems your behaviour towards the types of media I've criticized is almost exaxtly the same as my own. You largely reject it and don't engage with it. So, you have a well developed enough personal immune system not to be taken in by aspects of media that may be damaging or undesirable. If this were the case with everyone, such media would no longer exist and a large part of the problem I identified would be solved! :party:

We certainly differ in terms of theoretical stance and attitude; yours is more ironical and playful than mine. E.g. you frame even philosophical debate in our current context in consumerist terms, which makes a kind of a Frankfurt School type point re cultural degradation: debate reduced to marketing, art reduced to entertainment etc. not because of any inherent deficit but due to the context in which it occurs. But I don't really know where to locate you there.

Anyhow, I like Kelly and intend to read more of him. I'm also reading a book called "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam, which examines, using the concept of social capital, patterns of community breakdown in the U.S. up until the period I'm focusing on. I might try to work some of that in here too as it seems relevant.

The rate of rate of increase of Shoutbox 2 posting vs Shoutbox 1 posting is now exponential such that Shoutbox 2 will overtake Shoutbox 1 in number of posts 23 minutes ago at 21:25 on Jan 08 2023 (though my calculations might be slightly off). Enjoy this success while you can as Shoutbox 2 may potentially become a victim of its own success such that in order that the number of posts doesn't soon exceed the number of atoms in the known universe, it may have to be closed.

In order for our self-identity to evolve we need to encourage ever more sophisticated forms of social
influence from all quarters , including entreaties to buy, buy, buy from profit-making interests as their pitches evolve along with the rest of culture. I want them to try and convince , cajole , seduce, condition and manipulate me in every way they can think of. To the extent they are successful, it will be for the same reasons that a piece of music or philosophy convinces me to embrace it, because it is assimilated into a meaningful pattern for me and therefore enhances the health of my identity. — Joshs

Hmm, I'm not so sure about that. Are you in marketing and advertising yourself by any chance? :lol:

”We have insisted that the term role be reserved for a course of activity which is played out in the light of one’s construction of one or more other persons’ construct systems. When one plays a role, one behaves according to what one believes another person thinks, not merely according to what the other person appears to approve or disapprove. One plays a role when one views another person as a construer. This, of course, is a restricted definition of the term. It is the definition specifically used in the psychology of personal constructs. The term is used much more broadly elsewhere. The concept of individual suggestibility need not be considered, as it once was, the sole basis for a social psychology.

For Kelly, the difference between identity and role is that persona identity , the ‘self' , is the more or less stable sense of one’s own values, how one understands oneself in relation to and apart from all those who play a part in one’s life. Personality is hierarchically organized. At the subordinate end are peripheral constructs involved in interpreting everyday events. At the superordinate level of the self are core constructs concerning our central beliefs and values. — Joshs

There is a difference of nomenclature and of emphasis, but is there necessarily an unresolvable clash? Kelly seems to conceive of roles similarly to how I conceive of identities. I think this is reinforced by a comment about him here:

“some of Kelly's inspiration for the theory of personal constructs came from a close friend of his. Namely, this friend had been an actor in some drama in college, and for two or three weeks he really got into his character and lived it as it was the real him. Kelly, unlike many people who would see this only as a sheer affectation, thought this was the expression of his real self and the behavior was authentic”

This seems a good example of effortful cognitive engagement with an identity/role in a healthy way, in this case in the service of art.

And as @PhilosophyRunner pointed out, the description of the process of identity formation you put forward is apt for healthy interactions with society, but both PhilosophyRunner and I see these interactions as becoming increasingly unhealthy particularly as they are mediated through technologies that were not available for Kelly to analyse. Still, even in the absence of those technologies, his description of how social interaction may fail the individual sounds similar to how I would characterise some of the effects of the commodification of identity through e.g. social media.

Also, from the wiki page:

"The fragmentation corollary: "a person may successively employ a variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other."

“Disordered constructs are those in which the system of construction is not useful in predicting social events and fails to change to accommodate new information. In many ways, Kelly's theory of psychopathology (or mental disorders) is similar to the elements that define a poor theory. A disordered construct system does not accurately predict events or accommodate new data.”

This potenitally equates to me as an eroded self or a self in which the gap between the core and the peripheral has become too large and has destabilized the whole due to inner self conflicts/incompatible identities or roles.

“Core constructs are those which govern a person’s maintenance processes—that is, those by which he maintains his identity and existence. In general, a healthy person’s mental processes follow core structures which are comprehensive but not too permeable. Since they are comprehensive, a person can use them to see a wide variety of known events as consistent with his own personality.” — Joshs

Core constructs that are "comprehensible but not too permeable" are the mark of the healthy self analagous to the developed character I earlier discussed. When they become incomprehensible or too permeable, there’s a problem.

Emotional turmoil consists of those events ( guilt, anxiety, threat) which throw our core sense of identity into crisis. Not knowing who we are anymore, not knowing what we stand for, is a situation of profound psychologicalcrisis and dysfunction. We can play an indefinite number of roles with other people without destabilizing our core identity. On the contrary, that stable identity ( which is not a static thing or even a narrative but the ability to assimilate a wide range of events in a way that maintains our self-integrity) is what allows us to play so many roles.

Occasionally we have to undergo a major revision of our core identity, which is potentially profoundly traumatic. — Joshs

It’s probably true that we can theoretically play an indefinite number of roles without destabilizing our identity but what’s important practically in my conception is that these roles are compatible with our core selves and are developed more or less organically rather than arbitrarily and invasively, the latter which I've hypothesized can lead to the psychologically dysfunctional situation described above.

So, Kelly approaches the issue through a focus on autonomous individuals and their individual interpetative apparatus rather than on social units dominated by social forces. To me (unless I'm missing some further context that would indicate otherwise), you can look at things from either angle and still come out with similar results.

This is certainly one result of the process I'm describing (part of the immunization of society against internal opposition) which is that the commodification of identity proceeds through creating the need for a self by exploiting and widening the gap between self and identity/ies. This to me is the logical conclusion of the intersecion of invasive social media technologies, the profit motive, and consumerism.

Consumerism advances through the creation of new needs. If you want to sell deodorant, you must create a need for it. One way to do this is to make people feel unhappy with their natural odours, regardless of any reasonable justification for this. Marketers fill the gap here between reason and consumption. This is not particularly controversial or even always bad if looked at from certain perspectives (technological progress, economic growth etc).

But if you want to sell selves in the form of identities in order to promote engagement with social platforms, the process should facilitate making people unhappy with their selves in a more holistic sense. This does seem undesirable and it's not hard to see how keeping up with the Jones's might become destructive in an online environment where as you so well put it:

being "cool," ... means competing for the top spot amongst the property-laden, gadget-crazy, leisure time centered ruling class parading their egos across mass media via movies and music videos — ucarr

So, if we accept the need for a stable and strong self is more sustainably and organically met through effortful cognitive engagement with social forces--such that the result is more skewed towards character in its general sense--rather than through quick easy fixes facilitated by the endless roles/characters that media try to sell us then the curent situation is at best well short of what we should be aiming for and at worst a self-fulfilling process that may have very negative consequences for social cohesion.

Again, the extent of this being a problem is definitely debateable. But it's at the same time, imo, worth paying attention to.

Putting it all together, it doesn't matter whether you say that the self you're talking about is within the social context, not metaphysical. But the point is, you are talking about the self-conflictual selves -- a self defeating its self, or something. It means you are positing a self that is unique and apart from the other social selves. This is a foundational view of self, social or metaphysical. You are looking for a transcendental self. You want some stable self that transcends all other social changes and complexities.

Is this a correct reading of your thesis? — Caldwell

I think we’re on the same page. As you pointed out, I stick to the discourse of the social sciences; part of my self-identification places my thought in the realm of sociology and linguistics, so that when I talk about a self that has the ability to resolve and resist conflicts: that has integrated layers of past experiences into a stable structure of character; that is to a large degree immunized against social influences; whose dominant orientation (along the lines of Josh’s Kelly reference) is to mould the social interpretively in accordance with its own dispositions rather than be moulded by it in self-conflicting ways, I frame that perspective in terms of an idealized self that must by its nature be in some opposition to the social, but is nevertheless, being a self, still interpretable as a social unit and must be to function socially (to be sane).

I’m reminded here of Paul Newman’s quote “A man with no enemies is a man with no character”. We might say “A person for whom the social is not (in some sense) an enemy is a person without character”. This is a person swallowed up in the social, subject to its whims, whose ego confabulates narratives to obscure its situation, a person, who, though they may consider themselves a multiple role-player, even a skilful one, has no capacity for truly independent action to resist the social, and is not fooling the social through their masks but is being fooled into thinking they are in control of the masks they wear and their effects, i.e. a person who may perceive themselves as lying to the social but are helplessly transparent in the face of it. This dynamic may be interpreted in some philosophical discourses as a failure to acknowledge the existence of a metaphysical or transcendental self and thus close off avenues to its realisation, or in religious discourse as lack of belief in and/or separation from God.

So, while under my conception, we don't reach all the way through the context of the social to a truly metaphysical level of self, the general contextualisation of the self in the face of the social as a self facing both threats and opportunities re its healthy realization, and much of the practical consequences of this situation, remain the same. What would form a true contrast here could be e.g. postmodern notions of identity play whereby the self is flattened out into some kind of dopamine machine around which the pinball of discourse races and the game is to get as many little lights of experience to flash up before the ball drops back into its hole of underlying meaningless. And then do it all again and accept that as all there is.

At current rates of posting, Shoutbox 2 will overtake Shoutbox 1 in number of posts at 2:13 am on the 2nd of March 2031.

Shoutbox 2, the dark side, the Pandorabox!

Thanks for the Kelly reference. I'll look into this more and try to come up with a response, probably tomorrow.

Well, I wrote most of that while jogging and talking into my phone, so I hope it came out alright. I did edit it afterwards.

:grin: :up:

“The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want.”

Arthur Miller: Death of Salesman

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”

Shakespeare: Hamlet

Having had a creative burst, you adopted some crazy writing style that couldn't hold my attention, so I waited until you started talking normal before I engaged, and now you chastise me for my well laid plan. — Hanover

I appreciate your honesty :smile: . So, let me steer this back to what I was saying in the OP and maybe expand on it and (I hope) put it in a more easily digestible form. It might take more words and be less precise and risk labouring the point, but anyhow.

Let’s zoom in a little on the mechanisms of what I’ve referred to as social engineering technologies whose proliferation and development forms a large part of recent social change (and again the nomenclature is not what’s important, just that these are technologies that clearly have important social consequences in terms of how we relate to ourselves and others). I’d like to draw a line of reasoning from the economic logic of such platforms through their behavioural and psychological effects and tie this to the conception of identity and self I’m putting forward to demonstrate that the overall dynamic may be undesirable in important ways.

So, social media companies, for example, make money in proportion to the effectiveness by which they direct our attention and behaviours. This is not a conspiracy theory but simple economic logic applied to the nature of their business.

The economic model of such technologies centres around “engagement”. Engagement can be determined through social penetration (number of accounts as a proportion of potential accounts), individual breadth of attention (amount of time spent using the service as a proportion of potential time using the service), and individual depth of attention (amount of time spent engaging with specific economically focused aspects of the service (clicking on ads etc) as a proportion of time spent using the service). The model flows more or less linearly through these categories of engagement seeking to transform awareness of the service into penetration of the service into usage of the service and, ultimately, into engagement with the economically focused aspects of the service in order to achieve profit from such.

As the nature of the service is one whereby its users promote and engage with the identities of themselves and others, engagement is largely engagement with identity. That’s at least to say there is a process of identity creation and experimentation that accompanies engagement with such platforms. (I’m aware of Josh’s objections here in terms of his conception of roles, which I’ll try to deal with in more detail in a separate post).

One consequence of this is that there’s a tendency for everyone to become their own propagandist: social validation becomes a game of online identity formation that encourages a view of our identities as a means to attract positive social responses. But there’s an inherent problem here: Identities becomes tools to achieve “likes” or replies, but due to their sticky nature, our commodified identity masks, so flexible and convenient in our online world, run up against obstacles in real-life worlds they weren’t designed for or due to deeper sets of dispositions and orientations in the self they are not necessarily compatible with.

I don’t see this as simple role-playing because the impetus for taking on the role is a real psychological and physiological reward, and this reward, the hit we receive from being socially validated imprints on us the means whereby we achieved such social validation, i.e the actions in the form of engagement activities that caused it, in a self-reinforcing manner. Where behaviours are self-reinforcing, they form patterns, which are interpreted consciously through the lens of identity. We become what we are conditioned to do.

From such self-reinforcing commodification of identity, it’s a short step to postulating that this process also facilitates a generalised consumer sentiment that further benefits the social engineering system in terms of its potential for profit and therefore further empowers its technological refinement and effectiveness.

This is to present a critique of the notion of free-floating transferable disposable identities (commodified identities) that can become sticky identities formed purely on the basis of social validation that is mediated through technologies for which our personal selves, or makeups, attributes, and dispositions are seen exclusively through the lens of opportunities for processing as profit. And, insofar as they are not so processable, seen as obstacles to be overcome by ever more effective (invasive) refinements of the technology instead of, more appropriately, as resources that are recognized as positive ends in themselves. In other words, the instrumental force of a consumer orientation channelled through technological “progress” can (maybe) result in mass individual regression if the worth of the individual is measured from the perspective of their depth of self-development rather than simply their degree of participation or even material success in the social system they find themselves in.

But even from the point of view of material resources, can we not sense a problem here? A continuous reward for the proliferation or focus on socially-validated identities divorced from the self-provision of the material necessities of life is hardly conducive to settling the self into producing wealth for itself when such a process is based on short term validation in a free-floating environment divorced in the abstract from notions of real material need and so likely distractive from them.

So, the idea is that social validation in its physiological form conditions behavioural response such that that behavioural response leads towards action that further develops impersonal identities (in terms of their relationship to our unique abilities and dispositions) that may move us further from developing a sustainable level of stability, happiness, self-satisfaction, and even material wealth.

We may or may not agree on that but maybe we can agree at least on the possibility that certain social technological forms simply by their nature and not necessarily through any greater conspiratorial design result, in their most pervasive forms, in a flattening out of our relationships with identity such that identity becomes a means for quick physiological validations rather than something that should have a deeper relationship to the self mediated by the presence of our physical bodies, their particular forms, libidinal organisations, and histories?

As an aside, psychologically, it’s a fairly well established theory that the gap between an idealised image of the self and the actual reality of the self as experienced day to day is a cause of stress and anxiety proportional to the size of that gap. This may be translatable in terms of its propensity to cause anxiety into the gap between an everyday self and identities that form through social validation in a technological context such that those identities are set apart from the self, but at the same time are stickier than idealised identities of the past which had less potential for immediate social validation due to the absence of the technologically mediated means to do so.

Another issue to touch on is the development of socially validated political positioning that becomes entrenched to the point that any identified political opponent’s reasoning is rejected on the basis of their politics rather than on a critical analysis of the reasoning itself. It’s clear that, in general, politics has become more polarised in many advanced nations and we’re obliged to examine why this may be the case if we wish to slow or reverse this process. As one of the major changes in the recent past that correlates with such polarisation has been the rapid development of social technologies, there is room to theorise their involvement in such polarisation.

So, my concerns, you’ve stated you share in at least some sense, centre around making the most of our social/individual resources regardless of whether the arbitrary social organisation finds itself in alignment or in opposition to such a goal. And we can look at the situation both from the point of view of a generalised material progress and also from the point of view of an internal personal progress that are not necessarily in conflict with each other, but that social forces, particularly in the form of ever more pervasive and invasive media technologies, may put in conflict with each other. It’s that I would like to oppose, and the further political polarisation that results in the lack of mutual understanding and cooperation on issues of interest to anyone that believes selves can and should be developed in ways that are not always immediately recognizable and valued from a social perspective.

As a caveat, we can make a distinction between different types of social platforms and their methods of validation/identity reinforcement. Validation that requires effortful thought forces an engagement with the self in a more sustainable way than validation that results from merely propagandising ourselves, attaching ourselves to whatever ideas are popular among our social connections, or entertaining others through shitposting etc. I think TPF is an example of such a platform as people generally gain respect through their intellectual efforts. Of course, then there’s the Shoutbox. :scream:

Anyhow, effortful cognitive engagement with one’s circumstances as they apply towards the experience of the self is also a means by which valuable cultural artefacts are not only appreciated but produced. The recognition of a separation of the self and its social environment, of some inevitable social alienation, is productive in fostering the creation of culturally valuable relations defined in terms of their ability to encourage positive social change through transcending and challenging cultural norms. Insofar as this is facilitated and encouraged, not all implementations of social technology are bad and we needn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Go, TPF!

So, I hope this is enough that I not be misunderstood as a Luddite or Cassandra or whatever. Rather, I want to say that the intersection of technology, economics, and consumerism may be creating a mode of interaction with the self that is in its most pervasive form diseased and culturally destructive, not because of any one individual, firm, or type of technology but because we have certain vulnerabilities in our process of identity formation that allow us to be put in circular processes of reward that inhibit our ability to create sustainable stable selves, and as our values are socially defined, our particular potentialities may become further divorced from our awareness over time because it may be that is how society has come to function, i.e. as a means to inhibit authentic self-development in favour of instrumental self-relationships focused on the same type of reward mechanisms that make us want to buy Nike trainers or the latest iphone.

In short, relations that are inimical to the development of character, which is not the same thing as identity because it suggests a particular mode of instantiation of identity that is strong and stable. Character is what happens when identities work together in a coherent and sustainable way within selves. Character, if anything, allows for the resistance to identity structures that offer temporary physiological validation. It doesn’t have to be good or bad in itself but it is at least a way for us to immunise ourselves against social processes that themselves seek to immunise themselves from the types of social change only characters are strong enough to bring about.

Hope that clears things up a bit.

You are at the mercy of the subjective judgements of the mod team, both individually and collectively, re low quality. We don't require your individual approval or any set of external objective criteria to establish our right to pass judgement, we simply assert it as that is how moderated forums generally work. However, the community as a whole may certainly keep us in line because we do rely on good mutual relations and general acceptance of our competence in order to be a healthy and stimulating environment for discussion. If you can convince enough members here that standards are "abysmally low", we would likely seek to raise them through stricter modding. Your other option is to leave and post somewhere you think standards are higher.

"I demand a more significant place in the annals of history. It were me and Hanover who originally gave speeches to the thought-workers of Ostovstorosk Malfactory, the idea-workers of Mozeyevski Ship Yard, the party-workers of Groznenko's Bagel and Cheese Emorium, leading the first workers and peasants from capitalist mess to exile by the Lena river. Yee, we succeeded in getting the philosophy-and-sex workers united, and we marched into the town of Ozolvks, to establish a better future in which every philosopher gives all that they can, and takes away nothing by way of learned insight." — god must be atheist

:lol:

months — Hanover

Years.

Briefly, any manner of scientific approach is better than pure assertion but I wouldn't expect that to yield an uncontentious result in a general sense. It may though, help us challenge certain assumptions. The conversation I had with @Josh centred around me trying to get him to at least countenance the idea that social progress isn't a given either in theoretical or practical terms, to help justify to him even the need for a thesis like mine.

He's closed off that road completely, but my thesis doesn't rely on an acceptance that society must be moving backwards, particularly because of subjective factors that come into play in that judgement. I understand that dependent on our values, material or technological progress might e.g. be more or less justificatory of other problems it may cause. And I don't want to get bogged down in a debate with you over particulars that focus on a broader thesis of social progress that overcoats the more specific problem I'm trying to identify here.

I might be willing to pursue that with you somewhat though if you actually have read the OP by now and have any interest at all in what I'm saying rather than a simple urge just to inject your own brand of positivity into the conversation. I have a brand of positivity too. My brand says that there is a wealth of unlocked potential in people, particularly creative potential, and many of our confusions and anxieties aren't due to personal deficits or inevitabilities of social conditions but contingent factors that remain in place due to our inability to believe we can challenge them, due to how they obscure themselves from us. Not necessarily in any conscious or conspiratorial way but largely due to the mechanics of how social reality works and reinforces itself.

We had a Shoutbox dark age when all lounge discussions were removed from the front page. @SittinWSocratesTiff and @Shawn wee instrumental in convincing us to bring it back, which we eventually did by separating it from the other lounge threads through the creation of the Symposium category. Tiff's instincts were right on here whereas some of the rest of us, including me, were slow learners. Just an example of the value she's brought to the community. Hope she's well and will return to active posting soon.

My personal opinion is if we've started to go backwards, it's very recently. I don't hold any particularly romantic notions about the dark ages. At the same time technological advance isn't necessarily facilitative of social advance where social advance equates to the well-being (in a broad and inclusive sense) of the individuals in a society. I see it more as a tool of social reproduction with well-being being generally incidental, particularly where such advance involves the proliferation and penetration of media. Anyhow, more on this tomorrow.

No pigs were hurt in the making of Shoutbox 2.

Twisting the threads to suit your own aggrandisement. — Banno

If I don't, who will? :smirk:

I think there’s no such thing as ‘societal health’ — Joshs

We will just have to let that one go then.

As I said before, these are not identities , they are roles. — Joshs

This is part of the reason I think you are misunderstanding my position, I originally defined identities in terms of roles in the OP. You talk as if I have missed this aspect completely.

The limits of identity then are more like the limits of conceptual groups that fit under the broader concept of “role/character” or sets of roles/characters — Baden

What is your justification for making an absolute separation between the concepts of identity and role? i.e. How do you define each so that there is no overlap and what is your justification for such a definition? We better get that out of the way first. Then we can discuss the positives and negatives of taking on and discarding roles/identities, where there is definitely room for debate.

I demand a more significant place in the myth building. It were me and Hanover who originally battled against the evil Pharaoh Porat, leading the first sheep from Egypt PF into exile. Yeah a few goats followed later and Jamal built Jerusalem PF, whatever.