The period, of course. Signifying, as the French would say, la fin, and pointing us to the truth: the transitory nature of all things. Could there be a more profoundly final statement? I think not.


Ps: I’m a little stoned

Puts the lie to those who sneer at people who voted for Donald Trump. — T Clark

Because the Trump administration will benefit this demographic? Deregulation will effect their health and well-being negativity, and will probably provide marginal job growth. There’s more potential growth in renewable energy than there is in coal, for instance. Health care will most likely become more out of reach. The new tax cuts may effect social security negativity.

Trump isn’t reviving the American Dream, he never had any intention to. His kind only seeks wealth and power.

I recall a recent study about middle age white men that may have relevance.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/boomers-deaths-pnas/413971/

Is EQ emotional intelligence? I talking men and women, not general social difficulties. I don't think women are more "developed" than men or vise versa. — T Clark

I guess that I didn't understand your phrasing. Fear is an emotion, so it's redundant to say "emotionally afraid." That being the case, I though you were saying something to the effect that men were afraid of emotions in relation to women. Anyway, difficulties between men and women is social and rather general.

People in general care what other people think of them. They want to be regarded with respect and affection. More specifically, more strongly, I think men care very much what women think of them. It's tied in with longing. Men want women to love them and take care of them. That gives women a lot of power over them. They have the power to hurt them with their scorn and that is frightening. — T Clark

Fear of appearing worthless is basically insecurity. You appear to be making the general claim that men are insecure.

I think the same is true for women, maybe less strongly. I'm not sure about that.

A two minute search shows that in Western industrialized countries, according to research published by the American Psychological Association, men generally have higher levels of self-esteem than women.
Self esteem and gender - apa.org

Hard to describe. It definitely feels very vulnerable, childish. It's not a willful, adult feeling. You give yourself, surrender your will and desires to the other person in the hopes, expectations they will be close and intimate with you. That they will love you, hold you, protect you. I sure hope someone else will come along who can be more articulate about this than I am. — T Clark

I don't claim to be particularly mature now, but I do recall this sort of feeling when I was younger. Having said that, I should admit that in the relationship with my wife, she is far stronger and more capable than I. She's smarter, better looking, more willful and social, better educated, and she makes more money than I do. So maybe I've secured my childish yearning (to be loved and taken care of) and therefore no longer feel its influence? I know that I'm more dependent than I should be, and not entirely in a romantic or in a subsistence kind of way. Maybe that's what you're referring to.

Ah, the noble comma. Let us not take its great worth for granted.

Or perhaps you are signaling the structure of our words, and by extension the structure of our thoughts and minds, without which we might confuse the very meaning of ourselves and our lives.

Masterful minimalism.

Even if you're right, that this only applies to people like me, it's social consequence is probably a lot broader. — T Clark

Because people like you are socially consequential?

men are emotionally afraid of women — T Clark

Men who are emotionally... let's say underdeveloped, must have problems when dealing with all emotional situation that exceed their development and not just situations involving women, right? If this is the case, then we might conclude that people with low EQ are emotionally afraid of people with high EQ. On the other hand, people with high EQ, if they actually do have high EQ, should be able to succesfully put an emotionally underdeveloped individual at ease.

I guess that I don't know what you mean when you say that men are emotionally afraid of women. Can you explain?

Our desire for sex and mature human intimacy is all mixed up with a childish yearning for surrender. For someone to find us and give us back what we’ve lost. Take care of us. The fact that the people we relate to can’t, shouldn’t, don’t want to, don’t know they should, don’t know how to give us what we want leads to incredible resentment, again, most strongly in our intimate relationships, but also more generally. — T Clark

There's more than one kind of 'surrender' and it isn't exactly clear which you mean, although you do mention being 'taken care of' and a 'childish yearning'. I can relate to the desire for the carefree days of boyhood and having no responsibilities, if that's what you mean. I know a couple of adults who seem to want to be taken care of in this way, as though they were children. It's pretty uncommon, in my experience.

Another sort of surrender is transcendent. You can kind of lose yourself in sexual intimacy with someone you love. I wouldn't call that a childish yearning. I do believe it's a deep yearning that we all share though.

These observations are based on my own experiences, although I think they have more general validity. — T Clark

They may be valid for others that are like you.

I’m bringing this out here because I want to examine it. — T Clark

It's great that you're working things out for yourself.

I’ve shown I have insults and bitter vituperation ready and I’m willing to use them if I feel that I’m being mistreated. — T Clark

Assuming you're not joking, do you think this is an adult position to take?

It may be fair to say that women generally tend to be more nurturing and cooperative, most likely due to their biological role in childbearing, but I don't think anyone knows if this is culturally based or an evolutionary psychological adaptation.

Women can compete or cooperate in common goals for mutual benefit, obviously. Men can compete or cooperate in common goals for mutual benefit, obviously. Men can't give birth to or nurse children, but they can do everything else. Women can give birth, nurse their children, and do everything else.

Men are not inherently competitive.

"Gastro-psychologists" (just invented new specialty) think that bacteria may have quite a bit of effect on our emotions. Hasn't been proven, but... again, I wouldn't be surprised. — Bitter Crank

Funny you should mention that, just this week I started a regiment of probiotics as a treatment for social anxiety. I’ve planned to try it for at least 30 days before assessing. I have noticed a general increase in energy so far, which may not be coincidental.

Of course! Good diet, reasonable exercise, and practical stress reduction are good things and help people. So does getting 8 hours of quality sleep. So does having supportive friends. It isn't reasonable to expect good habits to cure everything (and you weren't saying it would). — Bitter Crank

Is it getting 'good habits' or is it discontinuing the bad habits (sugar, caffeine, processed food, sedentary and stressful lifestyle, etc.) that were directly causal in the condition to begin with? I've come to understand recently that our emotional life is intimately linked to our body. That probably sounds obvious. What I mean is more like that our emotions exist to help regulate our metabolism appropriately for the environment. We didn't evolve to consume the amount of sugar, fat, etc. that people normally do today, or to be as sedentary. It's a wonder that we aren't crazier than they are.

I'm no psychologist but OCD is apparently classified as an anxiety disorder, and indeed CBT for OCD utilizes exposure therapy.

Being anxiety based, in my opinion the first step of treatment should be diet, exercise, and stress reduction. But I suppose that's too much work and people would rather take a pill, and big pharma would rather like to make a lot of money selling drugs. :sad:

I'm just saying I have confidence that, if I express what's in my heart, others will understand me. — T Clark

And you believe that's what the Emerson essay is about?

OCD is based in fear, I understand, the compulsions designed to basically control life which is really all but out of our control, and reason such as CBT can help but may not be a total solution. Actually, the same approach to treating and possibly curing type 2 diabetes (controlled diet, exercise, and stress reduction) could be effective in treating OCD.

Applying the Emerson quote, you’re essentially claiming that your list expresses self-reliance. How does it do this?

There is nothing unconventional about showing your favorite food or whatever. Social media is replete with stuff like this. There's nothing the least bit against the grain about it. I can hear the hooves as they march down the well trodden path in perfect sonance.

I have to trust that the connections I see will be understandable to others whether they are rational or intuitive. — T Clark

I've envisioned your list as a field of dots on a canvas (cuz you've framed it as art). I can connect the dots with lines and make a shape. Will the connection you see form the same shape? No. Do the connection you see comprise a form of something that I've sensed but haven't cognized yet? No. Is it possible that I might have this sense in the future? No. I don't believe the Emerson essay applies to personal meaning.

These connections you speak of is the narrative that connects the items on your list.

An artwork may or may not say anything of importance. A Thomas Kinkade painting may appeal to norms of beauty and generally be perceived as pretty but it may not really show much. The subject matter of a Kinkade painting, the little cottage in the woods or whatever, may have special meaning for the artist, and he may therefore feel that the subject matter says volumes about him. He is privy to a narrative that the audience lacks.
— praxis

I don't buy that, but thanks for giving me a chance to bring out one of my favorite quotes from Emerson. I seem to use it in some post every week or so
— T Clark

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment."
— Emerson — T Clark

Bored at work and distraction seeking, I've come back to this, TClark. Incidentally, I noticed your participation in the 'games people play' topic so I know the notion of adult to adult interaction is top of mind.

So I looked up the Emerson quote. It's essentially about self-reliance. Indeed the essay is titled "Self-Reliance." A foolish consistency... blah blah blah. How is this a foundation for your objection?

In the example that I provided, the little cottage in the woods doesn't reflect a TRUTH that others have sensed but for some reason haven't cognized or voiced themselves. It has meaning to the artist because that's where his child was born, or whatever. It has personal meaning to the artist and doesn't signify any kind of universal truth, much less a truth that is contrary to the prevailing meta-narrative of the culture.

To sum, you don't appear to have an objection, and this was not an opportunity to trot out your Emerson quote. But I suspect that you know this and that's why you refused to explain yourself.

Shame on you for intellectual dishonesty. [said the parent]

I saw it and considered including it somehow in my cautionary note, which was intended for a general audience.

It has struck me that what Sloterdijk is talking about in the text that's been quoted is not too different from what I'm saying, is it?
— T Clark

Right. You and I and he all seem to understand the value of a kind of 'nobodiness.' — syntax

We should probably bear in mind what Sloterdijk said about how deeply embedded our identity is.

The mania for "identity" seems to be the deepest of the unconscious programmings,
so deeply buried that it evades even attentive reflection for a long time. A formal somebody, as bearer of our social identifications, is, so to speak, programmed into us.

It's one thing to conceptualize this nobodiness, it's quite another to embody or realize it. Nobodiness can easily be written into the fabric of our personal narrative.

secular culture by definition has no aim beyond - well, what exactly? — Wayfarer

You may not be a Pinker fan, don’t know if I am yet as I only just started this book, but enlightenment values are explored in this work.

You didn't really try, right? That's fine, your choice. I have suspicions but I don't know why that is. I'm actually sorry for bothering you.

Rather, for whatever reason some don't try. I don't know what that reason is and it's not important. Sorry to bother you.

Did I get that chain of events right? — T Clark

Okay, forget it.

I don't think my life has a story or a meaning. — T Clark

We may not know the meaning till it's over.

An artwork may or may not say anything of importance. A Thomas Kinkade painting may appeal to norms of beauty and generally be perceived as pretty but it may not really show much. The subject matter of a Kinkade painting, the little cottage in the woods or whatever, may have special meaning to the artist, and he may therefore feel that the subject matter says volumes about him. He is privy to a narrative that the audience lacks.
— praxis

I don't buy that, — T Clark

What exactly don't you buy? I'm afraid the Emerson quote doesn't help me understand your frugality. I would like to understand.

I have to believe that what I write means something. — T Clark

An aesthetic expression, assuming that's essentially what you're talking about, may cause a range of feelings and have a range of meanings depending on the individual experiencing it, and also depending on the skill and intentions of the writer. It also depends of how well the writer knows their audience and what might resonate with them.

In terms of expressing meaning, narrative is a powerful tool.

It comes back to differences between your and my understanding. I wouldn't exactly call my list poetry, but it said what it said in a kind of impressionistic, poetic way. At least it was intended to. To me, that's the only way to understand someone - paint a picture. Show, don't tell. — T Clark

As I mentioned, I liked your list. I can easily appreciate it aesthetically. In fact it wasn't explicitly clear why I liked it until now. This doesn't change the fact that it conveys little important information about you in fact or feeling to me. I suppose this could be because it simply doesn't resonate, despite my being able to appreciate the portrait aesthetically. We are very different people.

An artwork may or may not say anything of importance. A Thomas Kinkade painting may appeal to norms of beauty and generally be perceived as pretty but it may not really show much. The subject matter of a Kinkade painting, the little cottage in the woods or whatever, may have special meaning to the artist, and he may therefore feel that the subject matter says volumes about him. He is privy to a narrative that the audience lacks.

What do you believe the fundamental difference is between showing and telling?

What I mean by seeing is to perceive them without interpretation or concepts, just as they are. That certainly takes imagination. To me, empathy is 80% imagination. — T Clark

I believe the current theory is that empathy is based on mirror neurons. When witnessing someone getting injured, for instance, the same sensation is simulated in our mind, though the actual pain is suppressed, as when we imagine or visualize a painful experience. This is involuntary, though I think empathy may be clouded for various reasons.

I think it's misleading to say 'perceive without interpretation or concepts' when what you mean is attempting to see from someone else's perspective. That is imagining, of course.

I acknowledged my initial response to praxis was unnecessarily snotty. That's why I followed up with the other one. I wonder, what would constitute necessary snottiness? On the other hand, I think the primary tools in understanding people and their ideas are empathy and compassion. Intellectual empathy is indispensable for philosophy. — T Clark

Share the feeling of other peoples concepts and ideas?

Anyway, I wanted to say that I've felt a little disturbed by your response yesterday and that I regret offending you. That was not my intention at all and had I even suspected that it might offend I would have said it differently, or not at all. To be honest I still do not understand your reaction. Is it actually rude to describe your list as superfluous details? In hindsight, I can appreciate that you may have put some degree of mental/emotional investment in the list.

I found your list and the point you were attempting to make with it interesting, which is why I read the entire thing. It's just that I found little that spoke of your values and goals. But then I suspect that you deliberately avoided those kinds of details, in attempting to support your point, I suppose.

I think that just shows a lack of imagination, vision, on your part. Seeing people as they are is a skill not everyone has. — T Clark

Getting back to your reaction, it appears emotional to me because it doesn't quite make sense. The use of imagination and seeing something as it is are very different things, right? A more cogent critique may have been to suggest a lack of good inductive reasoning on my part and failing to put all the pieces together to form an accurate or true picture of you.

This response tells me much more about you than all those details. Some details are more significant than others, I think you might agree.

On the contrary, I read the entire list and don’t feel that I know you any better. Mostly superfluous details.

@TranscendedRealms

Perhaps instead of completely reinventing the wheel from scratch you could take something like Epicureanism and add a dash of transcendentalism. After all, transcendence feels good, I imagine.

All I'm getting is positive emotions are healthy. True, but this is not a philosophy, much less a religion.

I would describe positive emotions as being divine, holy, magnificent, and transcending states. — TranscendedRealms

A transcendent state is defined as beyond or above the range of normal or merely physical human experience. Positive emotions are normal, and I guess based in corporeal experience.

Ha, I live on ground-zero.

I used ''heart'' as a matter of convention. For my purposes ''heart'' means anything non-brain and capable of thought. — TheMadFool

How about 'subconscious'. Intuition, for instance, may be an example of subconscious thinking.

Why can't the heart (the actual biological organ) think?

I know most think that the heart organ lacks the neural network to be capable of thought but the mind-heart connection is hard to ignore. Thoughts give rise to emotions and vice versa. Most think this connection is unidirectional brain-->heart but what if it goes both ways like brain<-->heart?

That would be interesting right? — TheMadFool

From what I understand it does go both ways, in a way. If, for example, you were given a drug that instantly sped up your heart rate whenever you smelled a rose, eventually you'd be conditioned to where you no longer needed the drug for your heart rate to increase with the same stimulus. You may have heard of Pavlov's dog. The basic interoception of an increased heart rate is high arousal, so if you like the smell of roses you might experience a generally stimulating and pleasant affect. How you interpret this feeling is determined by past experience and your cultural upbringing, but there's probably some room for free association as well. Anyway, in this scenario the emotion originated from an artificially stimulated heart.

if indoctrinated into the materialist paradigm, it then becomes a meta-narrative of cultural materialism, and thus the ‘addictive’ need to attain more and more materiality, and carnal satisfaction, in order to feed and fulfill that corporeal identity and its cravings. — snowleopard

I don't believe it's that simple. Generally speaking, we all have corporeal needs and a desire for meaning. Materialistic behavior or wanton production/consumption may be more an expression of rationalistic values overshadowing or obscuring our empathy, compassion, and creative spontaneity. Love is fundamentally irrational.

Do you agree or disagree that identity is tangled with worldview? — syntax

Most def. Meta-narratives mostly serve to bind groups in common values/purposes. It is important to identify with such groups in order to be bound to them.

Do you reflect on this in your own case? — syntax

Sure. For whatever reason I tend to be a loner and not a joiner, so meta-narratives tend to not hold much weight for me. I'm naturally drawn to those that express my values and goals, however.

Or does life beat us into a certain shape? — syntax

It certainly does, probably to more of a degree than we care to realize. We can at least have the appearance of beating ourselves into particular shapes. Meta-narratives may help us do so.

A lot of women relate to each other based solely on gender, this is less of a thing for men. The reason is because of how we're designed biologically and mentally. Women are caregivers and nurturers. They form the core of the 'home and hearth' sphere of our lives and this will often draw women together and promote cooperation.

Men on the other hand have historically been competitive with one another, be it for food, land, resources, and even women. It's not to say that men can't come together because they can. However, for them this tends to be the result of sharing a common goal or objective, rather than being based on gender. — Antaus

This isn’t making much sense as written. You claim that women relate to each other based solely on gender and men come together based on sharing a common goal, yet say that women “form the core of the 'home and hearth' sphere of our lives and this will often draw women together and promote cooperation.” You appear to be saying here that women come together or relate to each other based on sharing the common goal of homemaking, in which case they’re fundamentally no different than the way you claim that men relate to each other, the only difference being the specific common goal or the type of goal.

Are you suggesting that women don’t have the potential range of shared goals that men have? Or perhaps that homemaking, or any sort of stereotypically feminine goals, don’t qualify as real or meaningful goals?

So which examples of identity politics do you think of as irredeemable rubbish and why, then?
— fdrake

Anything modeled on the Marxist type of societal analysis (of oppressor/oppressed groups, with the groups marked by their closeness to, or distance from, "power", arbitrarily defined). — gurugeorge

How about the so-called 'silent majority' in the US, who've had their freedom of speech oppressed by the politically correct dictates of the wicked and evil postmodern neo-Marxists?

I was basically saying that in the final analysis both Having and Being owe their strength to the same thing: survival or gene propagation. At least that's one way of looking at it. I don't see any reason why a person of the 'authentic' persuasion would object to this interpretation, being that they are interested in knowing themselves. We can realize and accept that we may be driven to cooperative behavior because it's an evolutionarily successful strategy to pass on our genes. This doesn't diminish the value of sharing, giving, or sacrifice. Knowing all the science behind a rose doesn't diminish its beauty and in fact may deepen our appreciation of it.

If, on the other hand, you are saying that our survival is dependent on this blind conformism... — TimeLine

I tend to think that blind conformism will lead to our extinction. Blind conformists are easily manipulated by people with selfish and shortsighted goals, like wealth and power.

These considerations seem to indicate that both tendencies are present in human beings; the one, to have - to possess - that owes its strength in the last analysis to the biological factor of the desire for survival; the other, to be - to share, to give, to sacrifice - that owes its strength to the specific conditions of human existence and the inherent need to overcome one's isolation by oneness with others. —

In the final analysis I believe the need to overcome one’s isolation by oneness with others is also biological and owes its strength to the desire for survival, or rather the drive for gene propagation. In the vast majority of human evolution long term isolation severely decreased the odds for survival, and obviously gene propagation.

Your contention is that these two colleges are representative of the modern left? :ok:

He was able to unify the Republican vote into a victory. — Hanover

Maybe more realistically, the party passed legislation that they’ve wanted for years, despite Trump’s obnoxiousness. Perhaps they could have accomplished more of their agenda with a competent leader, having both house and senate majority.

Why is Trump's brand of other party exclusion worse than Obama's? — Hanover

Obama wasn’t a populist who intentionally divided the nation in order to gain power. He was an inspirational leader, though of course he didn’t lead in a direction everyone could follow.