The Oediple Complex

 The Oediple Complex

The Oediple Complex is simply the threefold relation between the infant, it’s mother and a third person which may be the father, or another person.  Reducing Sophocles play or Shakespeare’s Hamlet to actual biological relations and then adding onto that matrix the unconscious motivations related to the castration complex, phobias, sibling rivalry, and other disorders, especially hysteria, is what most psychoanalysts do.  

The development of the idea put Freud in different speculative positions from a seduction theory to a fantasy theory. Experimental social psychology and ethology have clarified what is in fact occurring: infants experience stranger anxiety and separation anxiety to which various attributions are associated. Also, infants seek comfort over food to which they form attachments. Most of the vissitudes of the so-called Oedipal Complex are unique and arbitrary. Infants, children and adults change their attachments or objects for a variety of reasons. The attachment to family roles is dogma even though incest between parents and offspring, and between siblings, is universally discouraged if not illegal. But, social and psychological relations between family members persist under a death drive where separation is denied leading to the excessive rates of domestic violence and interpersonal violence.

Between Kant and Hegel - Free will

One issue driving the free-will controversy is the distinction between historicism and anti-historicism. Historicism posits distinctively different circumstances for decision-making. Thus, the capabilities for free will change. 

Anti-historicism claims that the human capability for free will does not change regardless of circumstances. 

Hegel links freedom with reason in the context of historical change. For Hegel, as for Kant, blaming someone for something depends on how much he knows about the factors involved and how much he can be expected to know. State of mind or blame refers to what the actor knew about the case at a certain time. 

Kant demands compliance with principles and norms, eg categorical imperative, rules, etc. Hegel, however, does not simply link free will to responsibility, he also connects freedom to reason through expanding understanding. Conceptual truth is not a given framework as it is for Kant, concepts and the connections between concepts change and move just as history changes to higher and higher forms of freedom, so does reason.

A lacuna emerges here because Hegel is positing that freedom is a good for everyone, that everyone is seeking freedom, thus no one denies the claims of freedom. However, this is not the case and would place Hegel back on the anti-historicist side with Kant. Power and ambition dominate the present scene over against virtues, or Kant’s good will, which degenerates into the moral forms of false consciousness. 

False consciousness to Hegel are conceptual frameworks which both illuminate and misrepresent. The framework at issue is individualism. Where Kant represents the moral life in universal and necessary terms, the limitations of individualism are concealed. Hegel calls this situation the spiritual zoo where each individual finds himself assessed by others in terms of his role in their pursuit of freedom, and free will. Each person becomes the fate of another. To deny these impersonal forces and one’s own disillusionment (each of us however must be disillusioned or we would live our lives in an illusion), individuals turn back to virtue and take up arms against others and the world. In doing this, they claim they were just minding their own business and following the law as obedient citizens!

Hegel identifies this absoluteness in free will, duty, as excusing self-seeking, rivalry and ruthlessness which disguises the objective truth. The Kantian followers do not differentiate the commodities or entities involved in their deliberate acts, it is no concern of theirs whether the principles they obey affect things or other humans!

I’ll cut it off here with a notion from Thoreau. “Sometimes, we have a duty to disobey.”

Amoralism

Nietzsche chastised morality as untruth.

With the decay of religion and its palpable philosophical secularizations, restrictive prohibitions lost their inherent authority, their substantiality. It became ludicrous to pronounce prayers or commitment to a church with sincerity, especially as witnesses to 20th century horrors which were permitted by the major religions.

 In the 19th century, material production was still so undeveloped that it could be proclaimed with some reason that there was not enough to go round.  Anyone who did not criticize political economy as such, had to cling to the limiting principle which was then articulated as unrationalized appropriation at the expense of the weak.  The objective conditions have changed.  It is not only the social non-conformist or even the narrow-minded bourgeois who must see restriction as superfluous in face of the immediate abundance.  The implied meaning of the master-morality, that he who wants to live must fend for himself, has in the meantime become a still more miserable lie than it was when a nineteenth-century piece of pulpit-wisdom.  

If in Germany the common citizen proved himself a beast, this has nothing to do with national peculiarities, but with the fact that bestiality itself, necrophilia, has become in the face of manifest abundance the attitude of the backward, the deluded philistine, that same ‘hard-done-by’ mentality which the master-morality was invented to combat.  

If Cesare Borgia, late 15th, were resurrected today, he would look like David Friedrich Strauss and his name would be Adolf Hitler.  The cause of amorality has been espoused by the same Darwinists whom Nietzsche despised, since evolution meant racism, and who proclaim as their maxim the barbaric struggle for existence with such  vehemence, even though it is no longer needed.  True distinction has long ceased to consist in taking the best for oneself, and has become instead saturated with taking, the practices in reality of the virtue of giving, for Nietzsche occurs only in the mind.  

Ascetic ideals constitute today a more solid bulwark against the madness of the profit-economy then did the hedonistic life sixty years ago against liberal repression.  The amoralist may now at last permit himself to be a kind, gentle, unegoistic and open-hearted as Nietzsche already was then.  As a guarantee of his undiminished resistance, he is still as alone in this as in the days when he turned the mask of evil upon the normal world, to teach fear of its own perversity.

Marxism is not communism

 Marxism is not Communism

Marxism should be sharply distinguished from communism. The communist ideal as discussed by the early Marx is not the same as Lenin's (from Kautsky) notion of the vanguard party. Nowhere does Marx mention a vanguard party, instead he talks about a well-organized proletariat leadership which took the form of unions in the 1800's. What Chapman did was to present a version of Marxism by picking out certain phrases from the Communist Manifesto, a document from the young Marx. Chapman specifically stated that he was not going to address the mature Marx?!  

Anyway, the point is that Marx's works considered in his historical period, and events related to his works which occurred in the 20th century were hardly based on his ideas. The best example is the issue of the primacy of class struggle which most every Marxist from Lenin to Althusser acknowledges is the central issue in history, the wheel of Historical Materialism: Marx's key insight. Class struggle takes particular forms/appearances at different times in history. The class struggle in Russia circa 1905-1917 is different from the class struggle in the 1920's between the Communist Party and the two worker groups: farmers and industrial workers. The Cuban Revolution does not only involve the US puppet Batista but the international mafias as well which Castro kicked out. The Chinese Revolution pitted the Nationalists led by Chiang Kia-Shek - intermission fight against the Japs - continue the Revolution and the long change of the culture through Mao's reforms from agrarian to industrialization, and then from poverty to middle class diffusion and a capitalist-communist nation-state. The class struggle took the form of different social and economic classes, or fractions, conflicting within the leadership and within the population in each historical situation. But, the scientific socialist "law" of historical change via class struggle is different in each concrete particular moment and place. Marx could not possibly anticipate these particulars and although these "Marxist" leaders used Marx as a springboard, it is a leap (no pun) to infer that their policies were based on Marx's ideas. In sum, the communist parties of the 20th century hardly resemble Marx's ideas of dictatorship of the proletariat which implied Democracy: government by the people. Ironically, the only real instance of a proletarian dictator was Hitler.  

What is overlooked is that Marxism was cohered to refer to the USSR and Red China. However, Marxism took many different forms in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Southern Asia, and America - different forms of democracy and socialism. In these latter instances, Marxism was used against the totalitarian forms in Russia and China, and especially against the Nazi's. The only real resistance to patriarchy, capitalism and liberal political leadership has been Marxism in its emancipatory form. One of the best cases of this difference was between Trotsky and Stalin. Like Marx, Trotsky spelled out in detail the important moral issues in persuing liberation. Trotsky's was the only real voice against Stalinism in the 20's and 30's. The rest of the Marxists had their hands full with Nazism! US conservative extremists turned the word 'Marxism' to mean unions, even Democrats, and communists and socialists, after WWII because before and during WWII, they were allies! My main point is that Marxism must be understood as a complex of variants, some good and some bad, and not as a monolith, and certainly not as Marx's original theory of history, economics, or politics. Where Alvin Gouldner talks about two Marxisms, read.

Lastly, what is obscured with all of these historical happenings and theoretical asides, is the everyday changes in the lives of the peoples concerning their occupations, their families, their marriages and their social relations. When Marx talks about the topsy-turvy world of capitalism with its fetishism, commodification, social domination, mystification, expropriation, and alienation, he is not only referring to the social relations between workers under capitalism, but to the supposedly more rational and decent institutional arrangements under communism. Such a peaceful and utopian state of affairs never occurred. While the USSR mocked the US over its racism, it applied severe anti-semitic punishments and should be understood as having an equivalent genocidal effect as Nazi Germany. But, the maelstrom in social relations, e.g. sexual behavior, that occurred after these various revolutions is repulsive: Soviet families disintegrated, Cuba persecuted homosexuals with a vengeance, China underwent an abortion epidemic. All of the maladies that Marx specified as horrific under capitalism were doubly worse under these new regimes. It was only where the themes of emancipation and liberation were implemented by the left that a resistance to capitalist and communist institutional confusion restored a sense of order and fairness. The impetus for this orderliness were the unions, the social movements that threatened the political sphere, the educational system which improved literacy and above all publications in higher ed, and the civil sphere of journalism, TV and radio, that spread the news of corruption and brutality which embarrassed the political class and led to legal and financial changes.

Democracy

 Democracy

Socialism in my understanding is not necessarily a system, or not only a system. Socialism means to me that all decisions are social, mediated by the social and not from on high or through a set of norms and rules structured by the economic or political system. It is not that politics are unimportant and your schema is certainly worthy as a reform of our current democracies. From the system perspectives, we must always pursue more democracy and not believe in some sudden switch to more or pure democracy. The issue is that the system can only be held responsible if it is an obstacle to social mediation, rather the solution it was intended to be. For example, how does the system intervene and modify the tyranny around family relations: marriage, sex, family and neighbors (in the broad sense of everyone in the region). Crime and social control is a system imperative but does not include social mediations that are part of the character or personality of the people. The kind of change that socialism represents is not merely a new or better system. Socialism should develop better social relations! In this sense, democracy is supervenient to socialism unless socialism really means 'social.'

The Dispute between Deconstruction versus Structuralism

 The Dispute between Jacques Derrida and John Searle, or

Deconstruction versus Structuralism

Searle claimed that Derrida's style was obscure and dismissed. But, in doing this he used the fallacy of authority instead of dealing with the argument on the basis of its merits.

The issue was over John L. Austin's 1962 "How to do Things with Words" which basically claimed that every utterance, or message, consisted of both a proposition - a true or false judgment, called constatives, and a performative or an implication to do something. Performatives do not have any truth value but imply an action ought to be taken.

Austin was criticizing the view of language from logical positivism ala Wittgenstein that a statement either had a truth value or was meaningless. Austin described his view of language as Speech Act Theory which consisted of 3 levels of the performative: the Locutionary Act: a description of the meaning of the sign at issue, the Illocutionary Act: the influence the locution brings on those in certain social settings, and the Perlocutionary Act: how actions are taken, how people actually respond to the locution.

Austin also emphasized felicity conditions: how an act fits with social conventions, whether the situation is appropriate and how the speech act is expressed. A felicity condition is one that fits social conventions and acts towards societal norms.

Derrida addressed Austin's theory in 1988 "Signature, Event, Context" firstly by emphasizing the distinction between speech and writing, between talk and reading! Then, he pointed out that communication is limited by context - that communication is imperfect - there is an absence of absolute communication in both speech and writing. Derrida opposes Saussure's notion that wriitng merely represents speech, that speech is by far the most fundamental form of communication, albeit imperfect. Instead, Derrida describes good communication as a process of iteration, of repeating the comprehensibility so that correct and legible communicative gestures occur. The necessity of repeating is found in writing, and not much in speech.

Iterability occurs through writing and less in speech in that spoken communication is always attached to a speaker while in written communication there is a detachment from the author. The iterability of any form of communication extends to the separation of the iteration into another context, called citationality. Citations are independent of context but necessary for communication because they allow for the possibility of communication in another context.

Derrida claims that intentionality is not the foundation for meaning but has a place - intention does not ground meaning! For communication to work, meaning must work in different contexts and transcend any single intention. Hence, the relation of the intended meaning and the received or interpreted meaning. Language has a life of its own independent of individuals and intentionality!

Derrida now addresses Austin's Speech Act Theory over the issue of 'infelicitous utterances.' Austin admits they occur but he does not examine them. Infelicitous speech acts, for Austin, are pretend performatives, as in a play or writing a story. He labelled these parasitic speech acts and did not build his linguistic framework on them. For Derrida, citationality is more important than intentionality. By narrowing down language and excluding parasitic speech acts, Austin does not have an all encompassing view on language. Derrida claims that felicitous utterances need parasitic speech acts to fulfill itself - both use citationality to apply meaning into another context. The citationality of parasitic speech acts are just as valid as the citationality of felicitous utterances.

Searle 1977 "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida," asserts that Derrida misunderstood Austin and that he, Searle, may have misunderstood Derrida. Searle's first criticism is that there is no difference between speech and writing, both are iterable which denies that written communication is more permanent than spoken. Searle claims that Derrida confuses iterability with permanence but obviously a spoken utterance loses its existence, it is in the air, whereas written communication does not lose its existence as long as a copy remains.

The absence that Derrida attributes to communication, its imperfection, does not regard the physical absence, as with the speech after it is spoken, but with the inability to express one's thoughts. Searle critiques Derrida's speech/writing difference, and the idea of iterabiity, as a foundational error that undermines the practice of deconstruction.

Searle 1983 "The World Turned Upside Down" asserts that for the meaning of a writing to be considered permanent, it must have intention attached to it. This breaks from Derrida's intersubjective conceptionn of language. For Searle, meaning is tied to the subject. For Derrida, meaning in written text is found outside of any individual's intention and never perfectly expressed, thus the absence.

Searle defends Austin's difference between felicitous speech acts and parasitic speech acts. Derrida blurred the lines, he said; felicitous acts do not depend on parasitic discourse. Searle continues that Derrida blurs the distinction between citation and parasitic discourse. Citation, says Searle, is the mentioning of the cited source without using it whereas a parasitic speech act does not mention the cited source but the speech act uses it. Derrida claims however that parasitic discourse cites as it utters - they cannot be separated. Although, parasitic discourse does not make it explicit that the utterance is referring from somewhere, the utterance exists because it is referring to something; the utterance is a citation even though it is not a self-aware citation, the referral is the citation. Searle argues that even if the intention of the utterance were lost, the intentionality of the receiver creates the meaning. Searle says that in the absence of intention, meaning cannot be found.

The context for their disagreement is the difference between linguistic structuralism and deconstruction. Structuralism entails an all encompassing structure of the properties of language; these properties interrelate through binary oppositions that produce hierarchies and principles within language. Derrida's deconstruction critiques these binary oppositions. The absence, or imperfection of communication, is the metaphysics of presence. Derrida employs differance to demonstrate why writing does not depend on speech - the double meaning of a word cannot be differentiated in speech but it can be differentiated in writing. Deconstructive action is differance (to differ and to defer or postpone), it removes the rigidity of meaning and the structure: what plays against you. 

Derrida sees the meaning in language as separate from the communicator and separate from intention, thus meaning is subject to context.

ad hominem

 What is 'ad hominem' really?

The philosophical term 'ad hominem' refers not to arguments consisting in attacks on the character or competence of the opponent but rather arguments that assume a premise that the opponent will accept and then argue from that to a conclusion the opponent will have difficulty accepting. This sort of argument does not intend to show the truth of the conclusion but merely force the opponent to rethink his/her position. The Socrates of the Platonic dialogues uses this sort of argument frequently. I think philosophers should reclaim the traditional meaning of 'ad hominem' and restore the respectability of arguments so characterized.

The Problem with Aristotle and Plato

 The Problem with Aristotle and Plato

From Aristotle we get the difference between philosophy and science. Before Aristotle, philosophy is metaphysics, then philosophy becomes burdened with the problem of realization. Aristotle presents explanations of natural phenomena which are wrong but the beginning of epistemology.

Ludwig Wittgenstein excoriated philosophy for its metaphysical paradoxes and enumerated several purposes for philosophy: to clarify the meaning of expressions and propositions, to remove obstacles to understanding, and to induce the recognition of the real significance of someone's words and acts.

Why does Aristotle have so much credibility? Aristotle posited the aim of life is happiness to be acquired by practical reason. Practical reason supposedly gives coherence and reduces conflict by harmonizing the desires. Motivation to right action is given by practical reason when it applies the virtues of character to particular actions and desires.

The problem is however the relation of theoretical reason, correct thinking, to the activities of being a citizen (worker) which are regulated by practical reason’s virtues. Theoretical reason or doing science is considered by Aristotle to be the most excellent form of life. But Aristotle gives no coherent account of the relation between doing science and philosophy, and being a good citizen, father, worker!

The problem that emerged from Aristotle's aporia between practical reason and theoretical reason was that the creative genius or creativity did not blend with morality or conventional social relations.

Plato earlier saw this problem and solved it by banishing all art from the Republic. The Republic was a state designed as an institutionalization of morality. Plato saw that the creative artist, he famously singled out the poets for their lyrics (who today could disagree - oh no, there's smoke in my eyes! and school just let out!! that's Frank Sinatra and Alice Cooper), had effects on the public that resisted stability made by the fully moralized society!

Plato's aporia was between a society protected against moral and social change, and a society in which free creation and exploration through art is permitted. Plato did make the central activity of his ruling class, creative intellectual activity which Aristotle followed. But, Plato meant by creative activity the discovery of the apriori moral truths waiting to be discovered.

The main problem was between the institutionalized morality and the creative intellectual activity of natural science - how could the activity of science coexist with the degree of social restriction and illiberalism which characterized his moralized society?

One key distinction between Plato and Aristotle which needs to be mentioned was their diferent understanding of "Ideas." The ideas for Plato were the forms or patterns of thinking. Ideas for Aristotle were the concepts of the understanding which classified all phenomena which humans experienced. Aristotle asserted that the important issue about thinking or metaphysics was the appropriate classification of perceptions. Aristotle was closer to being an empirical realist like Aquinas and Kant, whereas Plato was an idealist whose ideas or forms were transcendental and never actually experienced.

Moral Judgment and Projection

 Moral Judgment and Projection

Skills learned in therapeutic analysis involve the ability to detect projections, including the ability to distinguish one’s own counter projections from those incoming. Another is to realize what your real desires or intentions are which may reveal one’s own self deception, e.g. false consciousness, false self, shadow, etc. Whether knowledge of your true desire permits you to change is a different story.

These skills involve very careful and subtle distinctions that are mostly below the threshold level of conscious awareness and must be sensed in altered states: dreams, sleep, reverie, etc.

Talking only works with people who can be asked questions, or “confronted,” and who respond genuinely.

Projection occurs following the splitting process of my good self and bad self, what is categorized as me and not me, and from assessments of others as good or bad.

This dimension of personality relates to earlier experiences, situations and social conditions. Attributing splitting and the projection of the negative qualities to a virtue deficiency is counter-projection.

There is no way of defending oneself in the moment unless the subject projects back especially if the other is a destructive narcissist, borderline or bipolar. However, during reflection or the 'analytic attitude,' which is not an altered state but is different from an attending and responding position, from “social” behavior, you can absorb and interpret the other’s behavior and mental/feeling state to understand what happened. This may help to secure a finer and stronger boundary. Ultimately, the other needs to question their feelings and thoughts, their object relations and realize what they are doing, eg intruding, overconforming or renouncing, not recognizing or demeaning others because prejudice is unconscious!

Intuition is a concept fleshed out by mentioning skills, techniques or even theoretical orientations.

Social interaction, behavior and talk but these are largely controlled by situation, structures, setting and power hierarchies or roles. Addressing the psychological situation over a period of time can define personality, object relations, and patterns.

There is a gap between thinking-feeling and moral judging. Kohlberg measured degrees of moral adequacy, Gilligan found gender differences and many researchers have explored nuances of morality; most people think it’s a given, they were born with their moral precepts and everyone knows what morals are! This nativist view is deeply mythical and full of error because values change historically. For example, in many fields morality is utterly irrelevant: wars, the street, family life, organizations where money and power arbitrarily determine thinking, feeling and judgments.

Projecting proceeds from splitting. Projecting in its functional and benign form involves signaling to communicate. Often projecting is attacking in some way - recognizing that one is being attacked may involve a subtle and careful reflection on one’s feelings and thoughts.

The most insidious form of projection is possessiveness. This is taken for granted however because most people are following myths unconsciously. Myths are beliefs about the way things were in the past, often the distant past. The family triangles, the similarity between peer and sibling roles, and the generalization of family roles and assumptions, i.e. that all people do is family, speaks to the relevance of notions like the universality of the Oedipal Complex, or the myth of the primal father of the horde, and to the religious myths each is born into.

Moral judgement and projection

 Moral Judgment and Projection

Skills learned in therapeutic analysis involve the ability to detect projections, including the ability to distinguish one’s own counter projections from those incoming. Another is to realize what your real desires or intentions are which may reveal one’s own self deception, e.g. false consciousness, false self, shadow, etc. Whether knowledge of your true desire permits you to change is a different story.

These skills involve very careful and subtle distinctions that are mostly below the threshold level of conscious awareness and must be sensed in altered states: dreams, sleep, reverie, etc.

Talking only works with people who can be asked questions, or “confronted,” and who respond genuinely.

Projection occurs following the splitting process of my good self and bad self, what is categorized as me and not me, and from assessments of others as good or bad.

This dimension of personality relates to earlier experiences, situations and social conditions. Attributing splitting and the projection of the negative qualities to a virtue deficiency is counter-projection.

There is no way of defending oneself in the moment unless the subject projects back especially if the other is a destructive narcissist, borderline or bipolar. However, during reflection or the 'analytic attitude,' which is not an altered state but is different from an attending and responding position, from “social” behavior, you can absorb and interpret the other’s behavior and mental/feeling state to understand what happened. This may help to secure a finer and stronger boundary. Ultimately, the other needs to question their feelings and thoughts, their object relations and realize what they are doing, eg intruding, overconforming or renouncing, not recognizing or demeaning others because prejudice is unconscious!

Intuition is a concept fleshed out by mentioning skills, techniques or even theoretical orientations.

Social interaction, behavior and talk but these are largely controlled by situation, structures, setting and power hierarchies or roles. Addressing the psychological situation over a period of time can define personality, object relations, and patterns.

There is a gap between thinking-feeling and moral judging. Kohlberg measured degrees of moral adequacy, Gilligan found gender differences and many researchers have explored nuances of morality; most people think it’s a given, they were born with their moral precepts and everyone knows what morals are! This nativist view is deeply mythical and full of error because values change historically. For example, in many fields morality is utterly irrelevant: wars, the street, family life, organizations where money and power arbitrarily determine thinking, feeling and judgments.

Projecting proceeds from splitting. Projecting in its functional and benign form involves signaling to communicate. Often projecting is attacking in some way - recognizing that one is being attacked may involve a subtle and careful reflection on one’s feelings and thoughts.

The most insidious form of projection is possessiveness. This is taken for granted however because most people are following myths unconsciously. Myths are beliefs about the way things were in the past, often the distant past. The family triangles, the similarity between peer and sibling roles, and the generalization of family roles and assumptions, i.e. that all people do is family, speaks to the relevance of notions like the universality of the Oedipal Complex, or the myth of the primal father of the horde, and to the religious myths each is born into.

Remarks on Philosophy

 Remarks on Philosophy

Many people say the same thing about Hegel, Husserl, and others: how difficult they are to understand. If you look at Husserl’s early work, Logical Investigations and Ideas, or even his late work, the Crisis and/or Experience and Judgment ( my favorite), Husserl’s writing is quite plain and lends itself to imagery and comprehension.

Perhaps the difficulty with Husserl is that he expects his reader to suspend their usual thinking processes and to think about consciousness, to bracket their natural attitudes, and opinions!

Both Heidegger and Sartre worked from the foundations that Husserl established.

It is important to read the secondary literature on Husserl, but few get at his key insights or his many, many pointers about what is going on in the mind, similar to Hegel who might be said to have noticed that the ideas in our minds fit a pattern and these notions might make sense but that their actual sequence is both random and thus structured by the entities of the state and Geist!!

Recommend reading Adorno’s critique of both. Although Adorno has also been said to be difficult to read, his constant criticism of Husserl’s use of the term ‘reduction’ sheds light on Husserl’s method!

When I consider particular passages as I read them, I think to myself whether it is good or difficult. But this is different from drawing a conclusion after a reading or after completing a text.

So, Sartre in B&N (Being and Nothingness, 1944) says quite a few questionable things, especially about the sexual relation, and in CDR (Critique of Dialectical Reason, 1960) does not really get at what is happening in consciousness during either the queue or events during the French Revolution. He surely makes us wonder but does not literally connect consciousnesses together, but this seems to be his intent!

Is there something practically relevant in these writers that clearly emerges from a reading, or are there obviously incoherent passages? I would say no to both but I do acquire a new and deeper awareness of existence and thought, especially in contrast to the emotional and reified tone of most social contexts and feelings!

I think it is important to give and interpret specific passages to make points on whether a philosopher is relevant. But, when we are discussing the majors, it should be taken for granted that they are! 

The Responsibilities of the Public Intellectuals

 The Responsibilities of the Public Intellectuals

If you are going to assert that there is some foundation to our moral sense, minimally defined as drawing a right-wrong distinction, you might want to assert that there is some foundation to the social judgments of ingroups and outgroups. Some criticisms of morality claim that moralisms are simply convenient categories for classifying your enemies as evil, and therefore have no validity. If morality is substance, what is it? 

Why is argument, the pen, superior to the sword, violence? The issue is normativity, or why we are supposed to act or not act in certain ways, that is, why we must perform certain obligations. Concealed in the normativity question that we must do certain things and not others is the problem of illegitimate norms. Illegitimate norms are the untrue myths as false stories which we learn in childhood and have an inscribing and imprinting effect during our life. What makes a norm legitimate? This question is rarely asked or answered but it is often at the heart of social confrontations. The practice of reaction, of taking action come what may in public as a protest to a perceived insult or wrong, is considered the only effective way to produce social change, or change in policy, since the authorities, or those with power in terms of authorized and designated powers, police force/legal representation or majority opinion, will not adjust their views unless outrageous action is taken against them. Even though this same strategy of reaction is all too common in our interpersonal lives, on the public stage, reaction and not argument is believed to be the only certain course. 

One should have a certain logical and reasonable attitude to argue which is absent in most persons since most are 'emotional.' The designated persons who construct and disseminate the 'arguments' are called public intellectuals - writers, journalists, think-tank analysts, professors and especially politicians. These persons, there are only around 6000 or so worldwide at any given time, have the responsibility of investigating and reporting what is going on. So, the question of whether the pen is mightier than the sword depends on whether these persons are responsibly doing their job!

Sarocchi’s thoroughly unsympathetic definition of the intellectual provides the frame for “Julian Benda, Portrait of the Intellectual,” (1968) “In these days when every twenty-year-old who has read Marcuse or Mao confers upon himself the title of intellectual, it is pleasant to read someone who has not been taken in and who recognizes the contemporary intellectual for what he too often is, a destructive and unappeasable critic of the whole current of human culture and modern Western society, usually to the benefit of some undefined form of totalitarianism.”

Social media pundits project into the public consciousness reactionary cherry picked socio-cultural binary issues that are for/against something. Their motifs are supported by an aggressive concoction of westernized cultural malaise and armchair activism. The public becomes a set of audiences accommodate gratuitous cultural biases. The true motivation of the pundit’s positions, I hesitate to call them intellectuals, is the financial interests in getting published or attention in the media.

The modern public intellectual utilizes contemporary issues to promote their own individual agenda; it is self-promotion and marketing of the pop public intellectual.

For example, darling of hard right American polemists, Ann coulter is a prolific public speaker and author that possesses an adept understanding of how to exploit the very sentiments which appeal to her target audience within the parameters of Republican America. Her readers range from confederate flag waving, gun-loving, rednecks to the educated blue-blooded nationalist. If she attempted to write literary fiction or romantic literature, she would not be as successful as an author. Her formula aligns with FOX, Breibart, etc. She has made statements such as "we should bomb Islamic countries and Christianize them," it is obviously meant to provoke her target audience. However, it would be more helpful for everyone’s understanding if she, or anyone, would address the Islamic-Christian conflicts in the Middle East, the Maghreb and Africa generally.

Slavoj Zizek claims that "911 is the political fantasy America has always wanted.” Zizek attacks neo-conservative capitalism. Jordan Peterson attacks political correctness and LGBTQ rights especially. Saad attacks the neo- Marxists academia. Coulter attacks immigration. They all share the penchant for presenting their personal viewpoint which is too often unrelated to any facts or evidence or statistics.

What are the steps the public are supposed to take after they have understood these pressing issues? Can these problems be resolved? There is no intention to proactively resolve any issues only to publicly address, as Zizek said in an interview regarding his thoughts on utopian revolution, “The second step never comes” - it is not their responsibility.

The public is lured into watching debates which will supposedly resolve the issue one way or the other, but these debates, like the Zizek-Peterson debate, or the many debates involving Christopher Hitchens, the weekly William Buckley show, are mere hype and entertainment, like a reality show or a sports event. Does the audience learn anything?

Instead of William Buckley and Noam Chomsky, or Taibbi on ‘Useful Idiots,’ or ’60 Minutes’ having an in depth, animated conversation for the world to see we now have Ben Shapiro, Gad Saad, Tucker Carlson spewing shameless politically motivated versions of public intellectualism for fanboys and subscribers.

Journalists who report on events and reconstruct the identities, positions and statements of leaders and movements around the world. There are a handful of magazines: The Atlantic, Harpers, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, The Republic, time, Newsweek, etc., that report on events along with the major newspapers: NYT, WSJ, WaPo, etc. There is also You Tube which provides a venue for pundits, professors, and politicians. In the Zizek-Peterson debate, Peterson does not impress. Zizek won his debate in the first few minutes. Others have slammed Peterson who does not respond. Peterson is too obscure in his writing: Rules and Meanings. Noam Chomsky is the best. Ann Coulter speaks merely to draw attention to identity issues - binary wedge issues. The entire field of right-wing talk show hosts lack explanation and self-criticism. These shows amplify identity, and identicide. The real issues are interest positions, social position or rank and status, and power relations-structures, all of which are analogues of capitalism.

Zizek and Chomsky have one thing in common, they have serious written work that supports their position, but they are on opposite sides of the coin: Chomsky addresses realpolitik and political -historical events, in detail. Zizek addresses psychological and phenomenological theories and tries to apply them to social structures, groups, and current events.

The controversy between Anna Freud and Melania Klein

 The Controversy between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein

Where Melanie Klein surveyed Freud’s concepts, Anna Freud calmed that Freud’s concepts were misunderstood and distorted by critics. Melanie Klein posited unconscious fantasy, which is spelled ‘phantasy,’ as the symptom to be uncovered by analytic techniques. Anna Freud posited the interplay of environment and innate competencies as one world, body and mind as a singularity. Mind in this case is the combination of perceptual consciousness, memory and internal sensations, not a distinction between consciousness and a social mind. 



Perhaps, the main difference was that Anna Freud emphasized the pleasure principle and instinctual gratification as the essence of the child whereas Melanie Klein emphasized aggression and mourning. Klein discusses the infant’s representation of the mother-infant interaction whereas Anna Freud discusses the mother’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the infant’s narcissism and autoeroticism.



Anna Freud represents the US psychotherapeutic community’s research focus as conventional: the analysts are reasoning scientists who consider their critics as power seekers and manipulators who think ‘deep analysis’ is a trojan horse, an ad to lure analysands. Klein represents the British psychoanalytic community’s aggressive attack and defense culture: the analysts are crusaders, the critics are authoritarians unwilling to offer challenging views.

Anna Freud brought the International Psychoanalytic Association to the US but the British Psychoanalytic Training Society declared Anna Freud to be an ideological extremist. This intergroup conflict between theoretical approaches to psychoanalysis reflects the anti-American and anti-Europeans biases.

Inspiring Raskolnikov

 Inspiring Raskolnikov

In chapter 6 of 'Crime and Punishment' Dostoyevsky stages the scene where Raskolnikov learns about his landlady Alyona Ivanovna from strangers in a tavern who discuss the women and exclaim about whether to kill her!  The novel opens with the interaction between Alyona and Raskolnikov where she is demanding the rent and he is offering his belongings in exchange, a watch, a ring from his father, etc. He leaves this interaction enraged. Chapters 2-5 set the scene by describing tavern life through one character, Marmeladov, who is an officer and a drunkard with three children and a wife.  The wife, Sonia, scolds him constantly but also takes the beatings from the landlord for rent! Marmeladov represents the impoverished people who crowd into the taverns and comment on each other's confessions and character - a sympathetic lot! In chapter 6, Raskolnikov observes two strangers meet each other and converse about none other than his landlady, Alyona Ivanovna.

The naming of the characters by Dostoyevsky is quite clever and comes through easily in translation: rascal, Al Ivan the land 'lady,' Marm the drunk, son, etc. There is certain resonance between the name and the character which is all but deniable in today's signification discourse where the name is not supposed to have any meaning but a designation!

""She is first‐rate," he said. "You can always get money from her. She is as rich as a Jew, she can give you five thousand roubles at a time and she is not above taking a pledge for a rouble. Lots of our fellows have had dealings with her. But she is an awful old harpy...."

And he began describing how spiteful and uncertain she was, how if you were only a day late with your interest the pledge was lost; how she gave a quarter of the value of an article and took five and even seven percent a month on it and so on. The student chattered on, saying that she had a sister Lizaveta, whom the wretched little creature was continually beating, and kept in complete bondage like a small child, though Lizaveta was at least six feet high.

"There's a phenomenon for you," cried the student and he laughed.

They began talking about Lizaveta. The student spoke about her with a peculiar relish and was continually laughing and the officer listened with great interest and asked him to send Lizaveta to do some mending for him. Raskolnikov did not miss a word and learned everything about her. Lizaveta was younger than the old woman and was her half‐sister, being the child of a different mother. She was thirty‐five. She worked day and night for her sister, and besides doing the cooking and the washing, she did sewing and worked as a charwoman and gave her sister all she earned. She did not dare to accept an order or job of any kind without her sister's permission. The old woman had already made her will, and Lizaveta knew of it, and by this will she would not get a farthing; nothing but the movables, chairs and so on; all the money was left to a monastery in the province of N——, that prayers might be said for her in perpetuity. Lizaveta was of lower rank than her sister, unmarried and awfully uncouth in appearance, remarkably tall with long feet that looked as if they were bent outwards. She always wore battered goatskin shoes, and was clean in her person. What the student expressed most surprise and amusement about was the fact that Lizaveta was continually with child.

"But you say she is hideous?" observed the officer.

"Yes, she is so dark‐skinned and looks like a soldier dressed up, but you know she is not at all hideous. She has such a good‐natured face and eyes. Strikingly so. And the proof of it is that lots of people are attracted by her. She is such a soft, gentle creature, ready to put up with anything, always willing, willing to do anything. And her smile is really very sweet."

"You seem to find her attractive yourself," laughed the officer.

"From her queerness. No, I'll tell you what. I could kill that damned old woman and make off with her money, I assure you, without the faintest conscience‐prick," the student added with warmth. The officer laughed again while Raskolnikov shuddered. How strange it was!

"Listen, I want to ask you a serious question," the student said hotly. "I was joking of course, but look here; on one side we have a stupid, senseless, worthless, spiteful, ailing, horrid old woman, not simply useless but doing actual mischief, who has not an idea what she is living for herself, and who will die in a day or two in any case. You understand? You understand?"

"Yes, yes, I understand," answered the officer, watching his excited companion attentively.

"Well, listen then. On the other side, fresh young lives thrown away for want of help and by thousands, on every side! A hundred thousand good deeds could be done and helped, on that old woman's money which will be buried in a monastery! Hundreds, thousands perhaps, might be set on the right path; dozens of families saved from destitution, from ruin, from vice, from the Lock hospitals—and all with her money. Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange—it's simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill‐natured old woman in the balance of existence! No more than the life of a louse, of a black‐beetle, less in fact because the old woman is doing harm. She is wearing out the lives of others; the other day

she bit Lizaveta's finger out of spite; it almost had to be amputated."

"Of course she does not deserve to live," remarked the officer, "but there it is, it's nature."

"Oh, well, brother, but we have to correct and direct nature, and, but for that, we should drown in an ocean of prejudice. But for that, there would never have been a single great man. They talk of duty, conscience—I don't want to say anything against duty and conscience;—but the point is, what do we mean by them. Stay, I have another question to ask you. Listen!"

"No, you stay, I'll ask you a question. Listen!"

"Well?"

"You are talking and speechifying away, but tell me,

would you kill the old woman yourself?"

"Of course not! I was only arguing the justice of it.... It's

nothing to do with me...."

"But I think, if you would not do it yourself, there's no

justice about it.... Let us have another game."

Raskolnikov was violently agitated. Of course, it was all

ordinary youthful talk and thought, such as he had often heard before in different forms and on different themes. But why had he happened to hear such a discussion and such ideas at the very moment when his own brain was just conceiving... the very same ideas? And why, just at the moment when he had brought away the embryo of his idea from the old woman had he dropped at once upon a conversation about her? This coincidence always seemed strange to him. This trivial talk in a tavern had an immense influence on him in his later action; as though there had really been in it something preordained, some guiding hint...."

Artificial Intelligence and Values

 Artificial Intelligence and Values

Values can refer to money, power and influence.

Influence is the most likely value related to the interface between human and machine - there must be coherent interaction. Imagine a stacked system where degrees of power increases interactive breadth and depth, and this kind of access is related to relevant exchanges of money. Power can refer to levels of authorization and access to system capabilities, but power can also refer to the resources of directing and the vice of threat.

Some think that there are no values operative in technological design and organizational systems but there never was a value free judgment. Even Weber who addressed value-free research in the social sciences specified that it referred to the exclusion of subjective interests, not to objective standards.

Anyway, positivism is largely eschewed today, even if few people understand the relation of facts to values or values to reality.

The values of AI must refer to the incentive value of money and the directional value of power, at least.

First of all, value free is a notion that has long been discarded - decisions are determined by interests which can be evaluated.

The question is whether the interests behind decisions are responsible, moral- ethical or legal. So assuming they are, the relation between values and facts reduces to something like this:

If A causes B and B is wrong or does not work, don’t do A.

If A causes B and B results is a worthy outcome, do A.

Here facts and values mirror each other; to reject this kind of pragmatism is the height of arrogance, ignorance and irrationality but it is still very common.

The values at issue today are money, power and influence. If 

A value causes B fact, then do that value.

Keep in mind that these values are limited in their structuring effect: money incentivizes but too much money may corrupt. Vice is evil. 

Power directs or threatens but inappropriate power claims are antagonisms and cause fighting. Murder all the way down to harassment is evil.

Influence means follow the law, follow the rules, but strict demands for conformity leads to the avoidance of normative or institutional behaviors. Pushing and nudging people around makes for avoidance, alienation, and anomie, just the reverse of the spirit of freedom and equality.

So values and facts must be seen in the light of each other. Designing AI systems does not mean foreseeing all of the effects of these structuring, coordinating systems but it does mean evaluating their effects and being open to change. Institutional practices, especially those determined by technological innovations are often very resistant to addressing their inappropriate effects.

A Tolerant Person

 A Tolerant Person

Tolerate does not mean liking. To tolerate someone means to endure them. To tolerate is merely a negative act of decency. A person who is on friendly terms with all sorts of people has a tolerant personality who makes no distinctions of race, creed, social class, sex orientation, or gender. Such a person not only endures but approves of other people! Not to mention, also follows the law! Regardless of the groups to which others belong, the tolerant person expresses a friendly and trustful attitude. The tolerant person is still critical but not in dread of racial or ethnic differences, or different sexual orientations, or differences in social power. The tolerant person is permissive and lacks the threat orientation found in prejudiced types, delinquents, bad neighbors and hotheaded siblings!

Marcuse 1969 ‘Repressive Tolerance,’

“Tolerance is an end in itself only when it is truly universal, practiced by the rulers as well as by the ruled.”

If the rulers enforce capital punishment and permit deadly force, what do you expect from the unsublimated?

Marcuse, “The idea of tolerance implies the necessity to become illegitimate if and when the established legitimacy prevents and counteracts the development of dissent.”

Marcuse advocated a great refusal of all modes of domination and repression, not all social norms. Marcuse recognized that new forms of social control produced one-dimensional people who preferred consumption for false needs and were conditioned by advertising - were uncritical of mass media.

Excerpt from Karl Mannheim 1940 “Man and Society,”

‘Tolerance does not mean tolerating the intolerant. Democracy ought to do away with substantial irrationality, retaining merely those customs which facilitate the smooth working of social relations.’

5 years before Popper’s Open Society.

THE PARADOX OF TOLERANCE:

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.” Karl Popper, 'The Open Society and Its Enemies' (note 4 to chapter 7).

Tolerance was supposed to be acceptance, but tolerance became repressive as it was practiced by separatism and shunning.

Who are you and why?

 Who are You and Why

How does each person become a kind or type of personality, identity, and subjectivity. Parental and cultural primary socialization is an ascribing and inscribing process based on the real social and economic circumstances of the family. Internalization is not merely the sensing of experiences and rudimentary understanding and judging resulting in externalized behaviors. There is a socio-economic structure in addition to parent/filiation techniques, disciplinary regimen/scheduling and learning during the early years which inscribes political orientations including political attitudes about gender, race and economic class. The parent’s fantasies and plans are not about their child’s purpose in life but about their own status and identity! Socio-economic circumstances apply financial pressures and specific types of social interactions which inform the expectations and skills learned during childhood. 

Schooling and culture inscribes upon our personality or self the stigmas, symptoms and anticipations of how and where we fit or do not fit with others. Although these are possibly values, they may operate as social norms and emotional patterns of response.

The ascribing and inscribing process upon our body and self - the requirements others force us to abide by or are resisted - at the bottom of all the fighting - leads to the ‘why’ each of us are who we are. What a person is in terms of abilities and expectations requires an extended description of their relationship to the social structures and social machines of sexuality, race and economic class position.

Was Marx a Hegelian?

 Firstly, there is a continuous underlying tone to Hegelian-Marxism - the Marxian disagreement with economism, with Engels vulgarization of Marx, with the authoritarianism attributed to Marx - is that Marx emerges with the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (of Right)” and other critiques. In that work, Marx’s asserts that the head of emancipation is theory, is philosophy, and the heart is the proletariat, the passive proletariat: the material basis which finds its material weapons in philosophy.

Examine Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ for his discussion of the ‘rabble’ which he was unable to rationalize! Is this rabble not the proletariat uplifted as peasants and skilled factory workers!?

Here, Hegel is important for Marx who describes the ideological problem as ‘the challenging of the institutions and conventions of society!’ For Hegel, the rabble challenges society while the bourgeois exploit and dominate this lower class. Hence, Marx posits “ideology-critique” as critique, as Critical Marxism, in contrast to economism which views ideology as a distorted reflection of the world - self interest inverts the world. 

The critical Marxist accepts that the mask of ideology conceals domination behind the elements of reason and reasonableness!

The Hegelian Marx emphasizes alienation. The older Marx breaks from Hegel and German Idealism by accentuating ‘structure,’ the base-superstructure relations, and science as distinct from ideology and criticism. 

The key difference between the Hegelian Marx and the later scientific Marx (Capital and the texts around it) regards historical change. Critical Marxism is grounded in Hegel where change involves the activity of the knowing subject and her knowledge. The scientific Marxist focuses on object-centered Darwinian change as the succession of a series of ‘natural’ forms.

Hegelian contradiction involves aufhebung: a process of synthesizing which produced a more encompassing whole that preserved the past and the objects while overcoming the ‘impossibility’ of a form of thinking or value orientation. Aufgehoben, however, produces a rupture: the object is dropped and forgotten along with the past. Here, the forces of production, science and technology, result in modernization: the modern world. Hegelian Marxism, critique or critical Marxism is humanistic but no less arrogant.

Critical Marxism has an Hegelian affinity which stresses sectarian internal conviction and authentic belief in contrast with reliance on the institutions, on conformity, on what is called today normativity or emotivism.

The relation of Marx to Hegel can be found throughout his oeuvre in different ways; perhaps the early emphasis on alienation, exploitation and domination serves as the motivation for Capital, Grundrisse, Theories of Surplus Value, and the historical commentaries ‘Class Struggles in France,’ ‘The 18th Brumaire,’ and ‘Notebook on the Paris Commune’ (when 6,667 people killed and counted while estimates ran as high as 20k), and on his journalism which described events in the American Civil War - over slavery, he noted!

I would not cut Marx in half as Hegelian or as economist, I would instead try to see these two “Marxisms” as sides of a dialectic.

Hegel posited work and labor as liberating, whereas Marx posited work as negative: the locus of alienation for Marx was the mode of production of work products and use values, commodities.

Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ explicates the authoritarian institutions as pushing contraception and promiscuity, marriage and family! Marx seems to miss this important aspect of (re)production but he comes around to Morgan’s analysis of kinship structures in his last work, “Ethnological Notebooks.” 

Hegel’s externalization and total alienation of man in Christianity is truncated into political economy where labor is the site of alienation. Marx accepts Hegel’s autonomous subject as the locus and agency of action. But, Marx moves the analysis of alienation from the anthropological level to the concrete societal level. 

Alienation for Marx refers to alienation from the products he produces and from the means of production which hinge on property relations. The ownership of the means of production sets up the difference between owners and workers and by extension between employers and employees. 

Marx relativized (watered down) and historicized (designated Hegel’s version to an earlier epoch) Hegel’s theory of alienation. The problem of alienation for Hegel was an insoluble tragic discourse, but for Marx there was a solution via politics, in the discourse of ideology!

"The Mess of Love" By D.H.Lawrence

 D.H. Lawrence “The Mess of Love”

We've made a great mess of love

Since we made an ideal of it.

The moment I swear to love a woman, a certain woman, all my life

That moment I begin to hate her.

The moment I even say to a woman: I love you! --- 

My love dies down considerably. 

The moment love is an understood thing between us, we are sure of it,

It's a cold egg, it isn't love any more.

Love is like a flower, it must flower and fade;

If it doesn't fade, it is not a flower,

It's either an artificial rag blossom, or an immortelle, for the cemetery.

The moment the mind interferes with love, or the will fixes on it,

Or the personality assumes it as an attribute, or the ego takes possession of it, 

It is not love any more, it's just a mess.

And we've made a great mess of love, mind-perverted, will-perverted, ego-perverted love.

I can’t say for sure but my intuition tells me that DH Lawrence polarizes thinking and sex. He does use the term ‘mistrust’ very often in his novels, the few I’ve read.  In this excerpt (lines 12-14), the mind interferes, the ego takes possession, and ruins it – note the impersonal here in his oft used ‘it.’ Therefore, I think that for DH Lawrence love equals sex. Lawrence presents the natural, materialist attitude over the metaphysical. He likes to wax poetic and perhaps supernatural rather than stoop to the explanatory or the historical. That is, for Lawrence, love is not metaphysical but entirely natural and if there are any higher order considerations, they are supernatural. Explanation, or sociality and politics, of sexuality is denounced by Lawrence. This notion is reflected in his term ‘mess.’ What could ‘mess’ refer to? Perhaps to sex itself as ‘dirty,’ or perhaps to his life experience where the social conditions of his existence contrasted with his ideal notion of sex, or possibly to the complexity of his writing and publishing output. To Lawrence, the reasoning mind opposes sex, to know the other is to hate the other. Nothing but impersonal physical union, the natural, is appreciated; to possess, conquer without companionship or any connection to reproduction is desired. Love is sometimes contrasted to celibacy and chastity which does not refer to a mess but reflects his earlier use of “ideal” (line 2). Other times, there is a group reference: ’we’ (line 1), ‘us’ (line 7) or ‘either-or’ (line 11) which might refer to two wives or lovers! Then, lastly, there is the threefold use of ‘perverted’ which implies a sort of injury or symptom – he is cut off from love, from sex. What could a perverted mess be but something disgusting?

Marcuse - clarifying the Notion of Repressive Tolerance

 Marcuse - Clarifying the Notion of Repressive Tolerance

For Marcuse, particular representations appear universal in mass communications because of their capitalist structure and “official” framing. There are few formal blocks on content since our society is not considered fascist. However, there is a lack of detail, of explanation, of credibility, and differences are absorbed under dominant interpretations, creating an illusion of freedom and truth. Contrasting ideas, oppositions, are cancelled in a ‘higher unification,’ which promotes a one-dimensional public language which unfortunately is full of insults. Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance explains how the logic of a neutral marketplace of ideas, like the fiction of a free market, puts minority perspec­tives at a disadvantage - although any oppositional group is formally ‘free to deliberate and discuss, to speak and to assemble,’ it is ‘left harmless and helpless in the face of the overwhelming majority, which militates against qualitative social change. Next to dominant ideas, non-conformist thought seems incomprehensible or becomes compromised as it is evaluated through one-dimensional ‘public language.’ Opposing ideas are incorporated into that which they oppose (for example, a demand for peace is countered by the idea that the war aims to create peace), and pluralist tolerance is nothing but this incorporation.’



The media today no longer follow a ‘balance’ value where destructive statements are ‘balanced’ by their criticism - the original meaning of repressive tolerance. Instead, media today are data-driven by aggregates of followers which are influenced by political parties and lobbyists: corporate news. Nonetheless, “tolerance” refers to cultural superiority that depicts opposition to right-wing populist positions that blame outsiders for social problems as an enemy narrative.  The actual domination and exploitation between the right-wing populists and the so-called outsiders is ignored.  This is a one-dimensional discourse pushed by media which barely represents the opposition, that is, fails to interpret and explain populist mentality, much less criticisms. Repressive tolerance permits extremist and prejudiced views under a veil of neutrality by failing to address militant mentalities and hate-groups.

Class frames our ideological background - work and sacrifice are not intrinsic to human experience, but depend on social circumstances. For Marcuse, the current reality principle ‘applies to the brute fact of scarcity which is caused by the organization of scarcity, and the specific existential attitude enforced by this organization.’ Taibbi denies scarcity and by extension, I presume, believes that prices are caused by supply and demand. The scarcity of non-service jobs (80% of jobs are service jobs), of affordable housing, affordable health care not to mention rational healthcare, nutritious food in contrast to ‘corporate food,’ and social networks where competition and domination are not prominent. The “reality” principle, says Marcuse, stops us from seeking greater fulfillment even though technologi­cal developments could enable it, and is thus an ideological construct serving particular class interests. 

The question is whether the existing social organi­zation can be repurposed towards the needs of the deprived and exploited, sometimes called pluralism or inclusion. The material needs of the subordinated reflects like a mirror the “necessity” of dominant social priorities. ‘Cultural or social revolution’ in the US demands individual rights and freedoms but fails to enact radical change. The lack of individual freedom and the violation of inalienable rights, the channeling and conditioning pushed by the social system and local social networks cause individuals to seek mostly negative freedom: freedom from.

John Rawls Theory of Justice

 John Rawls 1971 Theory of Justice, 1st paragraph

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.

Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore

in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater

injustice. Being first virtues of human activities, truth and justice are uncompromising.

Hebermas on Equality

 Juergen Habermas on Equality

In Virgil Nemoianu's construction of Habermas' dialogue with Benedict XVI, whose name is B. Ratzinger, Habermas is not portrayed unfairly, but it may seem that he has developed a flexibility which we may find difficult to understand. 

Since ‘Theory of Communicative Action,’ 1982, and perhaps even before, the universal idea of inclusion of all viewpoints was obvious in Habermas' work.  Habermas has stated repeatedly in most of his work in the past 20 or so years, that universal inclusion is a moral necessity, all voices must be heard and considered.  

Lately, Habermas has focussed on the term, ‘tolerance,’ to describe what an actualized inclusiveness and a real equality should live up to in ‘Natural Law andReligion, 2009. 

Tolerance is the best word here for an elaborate translation or interpretation. The work of Marcuse and Brienes and others in the 60's found the meaning of tolerance to include a superiority which contradicted equality.  Habermas explains especially in his “Equality of Cultures,” talk given at NYU on Oct 12, 2006, that certain policies impact on the religious identity of individuals differentially, for example, policies related to contraception, abortion, genetic engineering, limiting their freedom instead of expanding it as the policy or norm intended.  

Habermas explains the role of perspective-taking in communication and in the development of a rational understanding through communicative action or universal discourse - the emergence of an objective awareness occurs through the coordination of the 1st and 2nd person perspectives which involves a switching of perspectives. 

Habermas raises the point that secularists are required to take the perspectives of others in terms of their religious identity in order to understand the effect of laws, norms, policies, practices, and events on those other people. Similarly, Christians and Muslims are required to take the perspectives of other sects in their own religion as well as the perspectives of people from other religions. That is, a perspective on equality is not a leveling of perspectives but an inclusion of the differences.  

Historically, it must be recognized that the civil wars in the Middle East for the past 73 years are between different Muslim sects and between Muslims and Christians, and not only between Muslims andJews..

Propaganda is the sole substance of politics

 Propaganda is the Sole Substance of Politics -

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) on Propaganda and Journalism

Lippmann is best known for his 1922 “Public Opinion” which is considered the founding document of journalism and media studies. Lippmann wrote continuously about democracy and freedom.

Lippmann (Preface to Morals, 1929) defined propaganda as deception: half-truths, lies, ambiguities, evasions, calculated silence, red herrings, unresponsiveness, slogans, catchwords, showmanship, bathos, hokum and buncombe. “They are one and all,” he said, “methods of preventing a disinterested inquiry into the situation.”

Lippmann (1929, Preface to Morals) distinguishes the politicians from the statesmen. “Candor is a bitter pill when first it is tasted but it is full of health, and once a man becomes established in the public mind as a person who deals with habitually and successfully with real things, he acquires an eminence of a wholly different quality from that of even the most celebrated caterer to the popular favor. His hold on the people is enduring because he promises nothing which turns out to be a fake. Sooner or later the politician, because he deals in unrealities, is found out.”  Lippmann goes on, “The words of a statesman have value because they express not the desires of the moment but the conditions under which desires can actually be adjusted to reality.”

Lippmann called the ‘technic of propaganda pernicious,’ and ‘pure democracy a mistake.’ He felt strongly that democracy will work if it is accurately representative. “The propaganda, the pressure groups, the formulation of a law that is higher than the Constitution, and the breaking down of the checks and balances (on the people’s will) are evidences of a radical defect in the conception of democracy” (How Liberty is Lost, 1938). 

Resistance to mass propaganda depends on individualism, on the independence of individuals. Lippmann addresses education as insufficient to protect the people from the media: the propaganda, the journalism, the lobbyists and pressure groups, and the corporations – what is required is self-education.

In “Mr. Strachey’s Case and the Law,” 1938, Lippmann discusses how the democrats believed they could tolerate any form of agitation short of open incitement to violence. However, since WWI, democrats have come to believe that an active defense of democratic institutions, e.g. elections, is an absolute necessity. He points out that the European nations have enacted laws making it a criminal offense to conduct propaganda which incites extreme hatred and thus leads to violence as when the right to meet and parade incites trouble. The democracies of Europe have turned away from the tolerance of agitation and now restrict free speech and freedom of the press when they are used to defame public authorities and to destroy the dignity of democratic institutions. Some nations have specially trained political police. 

William F. Buckley in 1974 said that free speech should be limited when it becomes licentious. Lippmann states the problem of democracy is when others come saying, “I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you in the name of my principles.” He addresses the problem of free speech as license to say whatever you like!

In 1957, The Portent of the Moon,” Lippmann contrasted two options for dealing with the Russian technological advance, “One response could be to think of it in terms of propaganda, and to look around for some device for doing something spectacular to outmatch what the Russians have done. The other response would be to look inward upon ourselves and to concern ourselves primarily with our own failings, and to be determined not so much to beat the Russians as to cure ourselves.” 

He goes on to specify our failings as the underfunding of education, a primary democratic public institution, and the scandals of racial inequality, the segregation and separation that contradicts our democratic principle of equality.

Lippmann frequently uses the term ‘propaganda’ as Communist propaganda, war propaganda, unprofessional journalism and the problem of licentious free speech. In 1943, “The Fascination of Greatness,” Lippmann praised Winston Churchill as a great statesman. He contrasts Churchill’s eloquence and magnanimity with this state of affairs: “That is why our spirits languish when their daily food is only the military communiques (the credibility gap), press releases, and an absolutely intolerable flood of gossip journalism, pipe-line journalism, and intrigue journalism about who is in the doghouse now, and how the courtiers (advisors and appointees) at the palace (White House) are planning to cut one another’s throats, and how the misunderstood and underappreciated are those who hand out the dope (the fake news) to those who then lick their boots.”

“The air is foul and stale with it all.”

Cognitive Dissonance and psychoanalysis

 Cognitive Dissonance and Psychoanalysis

The theory of ‘cognitive dissonance’ arises from a common sense belief that, if someone holds two ideas or desires or opinions that conflict, this conflict should cause mental discomfort and that the holder of the opin- ions will do something to lessen the discomfort. 

He or she may abandon one idea, possibly, or gain new information or beliefs to lessen the dissonance; if there is commitment to an idea, the person may adapt their belief or behavior, by forgetting, by reducing the importance of one of the dissonant elements or—in particular—by seeking to convince others whose adherence will confirm the cherished belief.

The "convincing" or persuading occurs by force of attitude or inner state versus by words, or rhetoric.

When people with strongly held beliefs are confronted by evidence clearly at odds with their beliefs, they will seek to resolve the discomfort caused by the discrepancy by convincing others to support their views rather than abandoning their commitments. They will seek, for instance, some means of re-establishing cognitive consonance without sacrificing their religious convictions or metaphysical ideas.

The psychoanalyst Langs felt strongly about this problem and presented the methodology of interpreting the interactions with a patient - verbal, behavioral, psychological - by hypothesizing an interpretation based on given evidence, and then wait for validating evidence later in the therapeutic situation before offering the interpretation. This kind of double checking provided a way of self-refuting interpretations based on counter-transference and establishing convincing evidence for the interpretation.

What Langs does, and what Popper exclaimed about, is to seek to falsify or disconfirm hypotheses that are primarily growing within the inner-dialogue between analyst and analysand on the basis of interpretations of talk.

I suppose however that over the time of a psychoanalysis a long series of hypotheses are generated, some are remaining without being falsified, and the gambit is to consider these as true or false, or as meaningless. But, the main issue of dissonance - convincing others on the basis of your own commitments - is avoided.

Lacan and Language

 Lacan and Language

One important idea that Lacan, the Freudian, disseminated is that the unconscious is language. The unconscious, in both Freud’s notions and other notions like Jung’s, includes the forgotten and the repressed, the distorted and the repeated, the relations between symptoms and language, between affect and language, and the role of language in self analysis, in therapeutic interaction, and in self-understanding, is perhaps the most important notion that Freud discovered and that Lacan recognized and discussed throughout his work. Lacan penetrates language by introducing new ideas, e.g. lack and the phallus, signification and clarifying the meanings of signified and signifier, and by providing new ideas about the most serious psychological problems, i.e. paranoia.

Firstly, the unconscious is affect and language is intricately entwined with affective experiences. 

Secondly, as an individual with a specific social location, the person is ascribed a status by her social milieu from immediate family to lineage to geography to wider social relations: political, economic, demographic and medical, etc., which may be realized or not but qualifies as an aim, an expectation and a role.

Our earliest sensations as an organism, the inscriptions upon and into our subjectivity from the earliest moments of our existence through to a mature language user involves a movement from a very immature and totally determined process of perception to a process of self reflection: a process of examining feelings and images including all sensory data, qualia, through language. 

Language has a doubled edge: clarifies but distorts. The forgetting and repressing mechanisms, which are both physiological and social, comprise the unconscious which contains all qualia, all affects, and the ways that experience has been coded, encoded and decoded in the cultural contexts of our social-historical locations.

The ways that language has been inscribed upon us as a learning process; the way language is ascribed to form our personality and social relations as attributes, speech acts and effects including lies of all kinds, and the way that language as a cultural institution dominates our social behavior, decisions and actions involves our consciousness which is impinged by unconscious mechanisms: forgetting, condensation, metonymy and metaphor, displacements and defenses inhibiting recall of affects and linguistic phenomena we have experienced!

One controversy that Lacan was involved in was his changing of the required 50-minute session length for a psychoanalytic session. Lacan explains the variable length: he states that he cuts off the session when the analysand makes the critical remark so that s/he cannot spend the rest of the session denying it. He calls this technique 'scansion.' The analysand has to deal with the event of the interrupted session! Why? Reflection may lead to some answers, the next session now has a topic! The real work of analysis, the part when self-understanding occurs, is between sessions. At issue is an expectation of 50 minutes, earlier or later leads to a quandary. The analyst is trying to say something!

Mixed economy and Monopoly of market

 Joseph Stiglitz - Mixed Economy and Money Supply

"Before the East Asia miracle there were two dominant paradigms for development, one focused on markets, the other on government and planning. The first had its intellectual roots in Adam Smith's "invisible hand" - markets lead to efficient outcomes. All that government needs to do to promote growth is get out of the way. The basic slogan is "get the prices right." With the right prices, everyone will have an incentive to make the right resource allocations. Undermining this particular religion was the disturbing observation that countries that seemed to get the prices right—to follow all the advice of the visiting preachers of the free market—too often failed to grow. To be sure, like medieval medicine, there was always the allegation that the patient had not followed the doctor's orders precisely, and it was this that accounted for the failure of the remedy.

At the opposite side were those who had little faith in the market and who looked to government to ensure through the planning process that resources were deployed in a way that promoted economic growth. The lack of success of those countries that followed this paradigm has led to the virtual extinction of this school of thought. 

Ironically, almost none of the successful industrial countries followed either of these extreme strategies. They are mixed economies in which government plays an important role. The appropriate question to be asked is not whether government should play a role, but what role and how can it be performed most effectively." Stiglitz 1996 "Some Lessons from the East Asian Miracle"



Look at the homeless, the people in shelters, first they need to get a job, then save up for a few weeks to rent an apartment. But, homelessness keeps occurring! So are these folks voluntarily or involuntarily unemployed?


Some manufacturing jobs have left the US, there has also been a huge demand for service workers at all levels. The undocumented and many immigrants are willing to take the lowest service jobs: domestic servant and janitorial and food production jobs, although most legal immigrants are skilled or professionals. Most jobs available are service jobs - jobs related to marketing, not in production, because production requires skilled labor to be efficient which involves automated equipment, installation, operators and maintenance.


The issue of underemployment is relative since the issue is the relation between a worker and the employer and the coworkers and the clients/customers, not merely wages. Wages are low: one half of households - usually 2 workers - make less than 60k!


Increasing the minimum wage in several states means that entry level positions will be more likely to provide for basic subsistence: food, housing, clothing, transportation, etc.

The US has on average a high school educated work force where those with higher education - some college, BA, graduate degree or PhD/MD/JD account for 30% of the adult population, and all of them are not necessarily working: voluntary unemployed, retired, etc. The employment rate in the US is 60% of the population. Getting a professional job is for the majority impossible.

The workforce is not “highly” educated because the university system is still too small. In PA, there are 400 colleges and Universities, 200 of which are 4 year programs. The population of PA is 13M. To accommodate this many people in colleges would require that most of them expand to over 30k student population. Not likely as most can only take around 1000/year.


Higher education is too small and extremely variable, diverse, from college to college, department to department, courses and curricula. 2/3’s do not go to college at all!


When the Fed floats a bond to cover govt payments for wages and contracts because they are not covered completely by revenue, it is called a deficit and adds to the total debt. Quantitative easing is a method of reducing the government debt which equals the outstanding bonds and interest, buying back the bonds before maturity saves the government the interest and reduces the debt. 

When a bond is floated and bought by a private individual, money is created - there is a connexion between 'paper' and money. Some of the money can stay on the books, but some of it must be printed not because of a run on the bank but because some money will be withdrawn as cash. How much varies, but a shortage of actual cash will slow the rate of circulation of money, of exchanges, and slow the local economy down. So, either cash or credit cards are necessary for daily transactions and many people still live on a cash basis.

Population increases yearly, the number of workers increases, the number of people making financial/consumer transactions increases, so more cash money is needed.


When a loan is approved, the money supply increases by that amount, the total is printed in cash. The individual bank does not cover the loan amount, it approves the loan amount which is a part of an approval process totalized by the Fed. Each individual bank may make small temporary loans, business loans, but that is not how banks make money. Banks also invest their deposits in securities!

If I sell my house, I can immediately withdraw the money from the check of the sale. Where does this cash come from - it is printed on the basis of rules related to loans under approval as overseen by the Fed.

The money supply is related to the payments for all products, wages, resources, etc., to any activities related to the production of goods. This is called the transforming of money into capital. As money is needed, credit is generated and managed by the interest rate at several levels from the local banks up to the Fed and including - not bypassing - all of the financial organizations of states and corporations whose transactions are calculated by the Fed to ensure that all loans and checks are liquifiable!  On the other side, all capital goods must be transformed on the other side into money; sales. If the production is not covered by consumption, Capital would become stagnant - product would not move!

So, the income from production requires that the population consumes it and the population must be employed to earn the money to purchase the capital. Thus, employment is the GDP and not just a spurious correlation.

The reason for the Great Depression was unsupervised banks that extended their credit AND over invested in securities as detailed by Milton Friedman in his History of the Depression!

A misconception occurs over the use of the term socialist which today refers to ‘welfare economies’ in which the government actively intervene. The term 'communist' is pejorative and not the same as socialism. The dominant ideology of the US is 'anticommunist.' Russian communism collapsed in 1989 and has been turning capitalist, China also has been turning capitalist.

To understand this difference requires knowing how communist nations operated before this turn to provide their populations with the necessary subsistence goods. They appointed commissars who calculated the population's needs and the productivity of the population, and then traded with the West to make up the difference. This calculation and the resulting distribution was always wrong as Mises and Hayek proved in their works. The closed, state controlled market interacted with the open market. Today, there is only an open market which states regulate and supervise, not only through customs, tariffs and protectionist taxes, but also through quality control: inspections, accounting, traffic control, etc.

Socialism also gets derogatory attention, as does democracy! Socialism refers to the receiving of free money or goods from the government: subsidies, housing, food stamps, unemployment comp, Medicaid, etc., a myriad of government services! The social democratic states of Northern EU afford their government services with very high taxes. However, socialist-welfare policies benefit the capitalists, owners and executives of corporations far more than the impoverished millions.


Democracy gives married folk a tax break, and parents a tax break. The government intervenes into families financially and legally. However, where the federal government gives a tax break to the married and those with children, local jurisdictions increase property taxes. There is really no tax break at all.


The basis of conservative values is DUTY: the requirement that everyone works, over-relies on their personal self-reliance!

These meanings are changing: communism is changing into the ecological meaning of concern for the common land, socialism is changing into a concern for solidarity and common values, and democracy is changing into a recognition of diversity and a universal requirement to work! That job discrimination against women and minorities is illegal! And so is class, religious and regional discrimination.

Society means 'social order' where order is the name of the game, not ideology, ignorance, or hysterical anti-state populism.

China is not economically socialist, it is obviously capitalist.

In the US, there is an obvious division between the social conservatives and the fiscal conservatives. Conservatism suffers and lacks any credibility therefore. The same has happened to communism where socialism is like social conservatives - a set of supposedly dignified values which however belies their having to be instilled by torture and imprisonment, e.g. mass incarceration. But, the nature of capitalism varies from nation to nation.

This variability in capitalism is seen on several levels: whether the government permits, taxes or prohibits international investment! Whether the government expands social services or limits them to police! Whether exports are the remainder after providing for the populations needs, or before the population has been provided.

This latter problem is obvious in the present cataclysm in Venezuela where the oil exports keep the rich and the police in power while the population starved!

So, government plays a very important role in the economy by directing investment, employment and development, ie housing, education, etc.  The problem erupts when a nation is a client of other nations who invest in it and extract its products and profits!

US grew at over 4% in 2018 but at 1% in 2020. What exactly that means is in the shadows. To what extent does productivity, or unemployment, imply population control, incarceration, state terrorism?

Chinese GDP can grow, Chinese monetary controls can provide unlimited credit or low taxes or whatever, but the key issue is international investment.

As international capital investment - maquiladora and survival extraction - increases, the GDP increases also but at a very high risk. The stable economies around the world: South Korea, Germany, Norway, Iceland, etc., control, supervise and limit international capital investments, sometimes by taxation, by import duties even of intracorporate goods. Look at what just happened to Japan largest pension fund - caught between US-China trade war, it lost 1/4 of its international investments!

China is a nation within its borders, instead of an expanding corporate body of state-regulated corporations!

The real issue is the relation of productivity to population control.

When a govt floats a bond, they owe interest, not to mention the matured payout. Notwithstanding quantitative easing, who do you think collects the interest on these bonds?

The money supply is managed by the printing of money or the crediting of accounts on the basis of approved loans: credit. Improper procedures for regulating credit from the smallest bank to the hidden corporate financial services to the supervision of leverage in every bank leads to credit bottlenecks, loan rejections and the slowing of hiring thus the slowing of production and then the slowing of consumption. This business cycle is due to a government’s lackadaisical processing of the credit basis of the economy causing recession and stagnation, that is, the increase in unemployment.

There are many important works on this question from Schumpeter to Hayek to Keynes to Friedman.  

If during this year, 100B are generated in loan approvals, and those individuals with their loans withdraw even 10% in cash, the entire economy would then run out of actual cash and no one could get any more cash from the banks. It would be a total credit economy. If everyone could do this, no problem, but in the meantime, as loans are approved their cash basis must be realizable, the money supply must increase.