Envy, Paranoia, Shame, and Temporal Distortion

Another cold opening:

From a purely logical point of view, the advantage of positive-sum interactions [is] so great that it's obvious any "reasonable" person would prefer them. Who would not choose cooperation, affection, intimacy, creativity, productivity over violence, coercion, and destructive behavior? Who would not want a world of mutual benefit and prosperity?

Oh, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Hurras al-Din, the Holy Land Foundation, Mehdi Hassan, Sunny Hostin, House Squad members, VP Harris, Hollywood, Harvard, Hitler.... and that's just some of the H's.   

We hear about a "two state solution," but no solution will come so long as there exist the two states of mind characterized by the positive- and zero-sum interactions described by Landes above. 

But there are deeper psychological reasons for these two states of mind, and Landes describes one of them: envy: "Zero-sum attitudes have a close relationship to envy." Moreover, "like shame and vengeance," envy "may be peculiarly human, and play a key role in our evolution."

Except there's no maybe about it: envy is peculiarly human, and deeply intertwined with psychological development (and arrest). 

In the past we've discussed Helmut Schoeck's foundational Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, and Landes does as well: "Envy is a pervasive element of the human psyche and of human societies," and

cultures that resist envy, even in small but significant amounts, become wealth producing nations. When envy dominates a culture, its members mobilize against success.

Like the Palestinians, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

If memory serves, Shoeck writes of the "envy barrier" that individuals, cultures, and nations must overcome in order to become successful, prosperous, and affluent. 

In particular, socialism -- now called "equity," among other deceptive euphemisms -- is atavistic to the core, resting on what psychoanalysts call "constitutional envy." But you needn't be a psychoanalyst to get the point, rather, just a sharp-penned Aphorist:

The left claims that the guilty party in a conflict is not the one who covets another's goods but the one who defends his own.

"Having promulgated the dogma of original innocence," progressives conclude "that the man guilty of the crime is not the envious murderer but the victim who aroused his envy" (Dávila).

Churchill also nailed it: "Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy." Except to say that gospel means "good news," and socialism always results in bad tidings.    

As we've said before, Social Justice is just envy with a Ph.D. 

I don't want to veer into a pedantic discussion of psychoanalytic theory, but suffice it to say that there is a hidden but robust relationship between envy, paranoia, dysregulated shame (or shame intolerance), ingratitude, and History -- for individuals sunk into what is called the "paranoid position" are prone to a very different experience of history. 

Permit me to yoink one of my old psychology books from the shelf, The Matrix of the Mind by Thomas Ogden. Better yet, let me just synthesize material from a few stale bobservations from the past:

One of Melanie Klein's most important contributions was the distinction between what she called the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. To achieve the depressive position is to have attained a degree of maturation, integration, and continuity of being that extends both spatially and temporally.

Another very bright fellow, Thomas Ogden, says that a better name for the depressive position would be the historical position, because of its profound effect on one's perception and appreciation of time....

For the person in the paranoid position -- and this is critical -- their current state of being determines their "truth." "History is instantaneously rewritten"....

If you've ever had the misfortune of having a borderline person in your life -- and most of us have -- then you know how this works: "the present is projected backward and forward, thus creating a static, eternal, nonreflective present." You are drawn into the momentary primitive emotional storm of the borderline person, who dismantles time and history. It is simply impossible to argue with such un- or dis-integrated persons, because they constantly throw out arguments from different planes, aggressively unaware of their contradictions.

In contrast, in the depressive position, the person "no longer has access to the kind of Orwellian rewriting of history that is possible in the paranoid-schizoid position."

How convenient: I see that I already wrote a post that asks the question, Are Islamic Terrorists Crazy, Evil, or Developmentally Arrested? Why, it even has 70 comments! I wonder what happened to all my readers?

Let's return to the present, where it is already 11:00. Which means we're out of time, irrespective of whether it is the depressive or paranoid kind. I'll pull it together tomorrow, I promise.

From History to Cosmos and From IT IS to I AM

A few more thoughts about Canto X before moving on to XI. Recall that "To see humanity as only earthly is to deny the human state" (Upton). In Hell, this denial manifests as the inability to see -- or be in -- the present moment. Or, let's just say BE, fool stop!

Again, as mentioned in yesterday's post, there are two "presents," one animal and one human (and therefore divine; or, if one prefers, vertically higher). "In life" the neo-barbaric Epicurean limits himself to the former, "to the empirical [animal-sensory] present, the present simply 'as is'"; he is therefore "denied the Eternal Present" (ibid.). As a result, in being denied the present, he lives only in the past and future, which are not real.

Now, what are the past and future from the human perspective, as opposed to their mere quantitative meaning? One could say hope and regret, or worry and nostalgia, or contrition and resolve.

I suppose one could even sum up the future as "anxiety" and the past as "depression." For if we are not anxious about what the future might bring, we're not really alive. And if we don't feel the absolute unrecoverability of past -- and of how things might have been -- we didn't really live it.

However, there is a way out -- or up, or in -- and that is the present in its divine-human mode. Really, it is our only sanctuary from the anxieties of the future and the loss of the past. And it is precisely this that the hellbound Epicurean is denied.

Be not therefore anxious for the morrow: for the morrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

For the Epicurean, this is inverted: be extremely anxious, even panicky, about the future, in the hope of escaping the evils of the present.

Nor can these souls "let the dead bury the dead," or put their hands to the plough without looking back (Luke 9:62).

There is a reason why Only the unexpected fully satisfies (Don Colacho). The unexpected delights because it escapes our attempts at control, which only end up strangling the present.

There is actually an analogue of all this in psychoanalytic developmental theory, something we have discussed in the past. I can't get into all the details, but one of Melanie Klein's most important contributions was the distinction between what she called the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. To achieve the depressive position is to have attained a degree of maturation, integration, and continuity of being that extends both spatially and temporally.

Another very bright fellow, Thomas Ogden, says that a better name for the depressive position would be the historical position, because of its profound effect on one's perception and appreciation of time.

First of all, note the similarity between the paranoid-schizoid position and the inability to transcend the empirical moment: in it, "sensory experience is unmediated by an interpreting subject," so that events simply "are what they are."

This state of being is analogous to a plane with "two faces and two faces only." The person is in one state or the other, with no higher vantage point "from which more than one emotional plane can be taken in."

For the person in this stage of development -- and this is critical -- their current state of being determines their "truth." "History is instantaneously rewritten" for the purpose of "maintaining discontinuities of loving and hating aspects of self and object." Here, truth is in the service of emotion.

If you have ever had a borderline person in your life -- and most of us have -- then you know how this works: "the present is projected backward and forward, thus creating a static, eternal, nonreflective present." You are drawn into the momentary primitive emotional storm of the borderline person, who dismantles time and history. It is simply impossible to argue with an un- or dis-integrated person, because they constantly throw out arguments from different planes, aggressively unaware of their contradictions.

If you're having difficulty picturing the process, then I suppose you didn't attend college, or else have a small family. Just imagine living with Keith Olbermann or Ed Schultz. In addition to the shear unpleasantness, one would be unable to escape from their psychotic attacks on time and history.

According to Ogden, the depressive position coincides with the true "birth of the historical subject." Note that the shift is not analogous to any linear process -- say, "piecing together a jigsaw puzzle" -- but is more like the sudden emergence of the three-dimensional image in those Magic Eye pictures.

Or, in the words of Don Colacho, Doubts do not fade one by one: they disappear in a flash of light.

Recall the image of a plane with two sides only; there is no "space" for the sense of I-ness to emerge, a stable mediator between experience and thought. Nor is this person aware of the other planes, for if he were, this would imply the third dimension from which they are declensions.

Thus, "in the depressive position," the person "no longer has access to the kind of Orwellian rewriting of history that is possible in the paranoid-schizoid position."

This is why progressive beliefs that absolutely shock our conscience don't do the same for them. Since the progressive has already preemptively rewritten history with himself as hero, he is able to slip through the nets of logic and evidence. He has a kind of freedom the mature person lacks, but this is a meaningless freedom; really, it is the illusion thereof, just as burying one's head in one's ass provides the illusion of tenure.

Now, back to Canto X. Note that the Epicureans are "ruled by Proserpine, Goddess of the Moon, queen of the underworld," which is another name for the nightworld of the unconscious.

In contrast to her is Beatrice, who symbolizes -- now, wait for it -- a "wisdom" and "wholeness of perception" that is specifically opposed to the "partial perception" symbolized by the loony moonbat goddess.

Another point: the depressive position is not only the historical position, but the threshold of the "transcendent position," which might be thought of as the "space of wisdom" (Bob) which "reveals the whole form and meaning of one's life sub specie aeternitatis" (Upton).

Thus, one might also call it the "meta-historical" or Cosmic Position. It is where one transcends the deuce in order be-a-trice.

Are Islamic Terrorists Crazy, Evil, or Developmentally Arrested?

I know. Why pick one?

But is there a specific psychological mode or mechanism that provokes a man to murder because the victim drew a picture that offended the murderer? Yes, but psychological causation is complex and systemic, rarely linear, one-way, or fully intentional. When I say "intentional," I mean we often (thankfully!) do things without really knowing why, nor do we (or could we) calculate each and every consequence.

Many people correctly observe that yesterday's terror has something to do with Islam. Certainly the terrorists think so. It is only liberals who deny the connection, in a way that varies with their ignorance of the subject. For example, Howard Dean has obviously never q'racked a Q'ran:

"I stopped calling these people Muslim terrorists. They’re about as Muslim as I am. I mean, they have no respect for anybody else’s life, that’s not what the Koran says.... I think ISIS is a cult. Not an Islamic cult. I think it’s a cult."

Or Ezra Klein: the murders "can only be explained by the madness of the perpetrators, who did something horrible and evil that almost no human beings anywhere ever do, and the condemnation doesn’t need to be any more complex than saying unprovoked mass slaughter is wrong." Could his ignorance of man's bloody history be more complete?

Perhaps you've noticed that leftists either make an issue more simple or more tendentiously convoluted than it actually is. In this case, they take the simplistic path: Islamic terror has nothing to do with Islam. These men are cultists, Donny.

I think we can agree that Islam is not a sufficient cause of the terror, but nor is it a necessary cause. That is, there are obviously Muslims who are not terrorists, and terrorists who are not Muslim. But most terrorists at this time do happen to be Muslim, and the Koran contains ample justification for their crimes. Does that make the Koran a cause, or just a pretext?

Here I think we need to widen our lens and take into consideration the sorts of cultures that have been shaped by Islam. There are what, 49 Muslim majority countries, each one a shithole to varying degrees. Starting with the As, there are Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, and Azerbaijan, followed by Bangladesh, Brunei, and Burkina Faso. Given the choice, no one would freely choose to live in these places unless they already have no idea what freedom is. In other words, in order to choose those cultures, one has to have already assimilated the repressive culture and its illiberal values.

This subject is very much relevant to our discussion of Inventing the Individual, because the whole point of the book is that something occurred in the Christian west that did not occur anywhere else in the world. We can argue whether it was a good or a bad thing, but we cannot argue that it is a Muslim or Buddhist or American Indian thing. Rather, that is the essence of the nub of the gist: a "clash of civilizations" with entirely different value systems.

But "civilization" is an abstraction that tells us little about the individuals of which it is constituted. And since human beings develop in time, some civilizations are more developed than others. This is an example of a simple truth that the left has attempted to convolute over the past century, to the point that they can no longer see the obvious (or are not permitted to see it).

Howard Dean and Ezra Klein are far from the only ones who are auto-blinded by ideology. Here is a tweet yesterday from a NY Times bureau chief: "Some call for an extreme use of force to respond to Paris attacks, but school shootings in US have killed more and US leaders do nothing." This guy equates the Paris attacks with Jerry Falwell suing Hustler magazine for libel. Yes, those two things would be exactly the same if the terrorists had sued the magazine and Falwell had murdered Larry Flynt.

I have seen some Charlie Hedbo material that has all the refined taste and sparkling wit of Hustler. There's nothing wrong with being offensive, so long as you are actually funny. Otherwise, it's just ignorant and boorish, like this sub-juvenile rendering:

However, it would never occur to anyone in the Christianized west that an absence of taste merits the death penalty. But the post-Christian west is indeed coming back around to the pre-Christian point of view. They don't necessarily murder, but political correctness has destroyed innumerable lives, careers, and reputations.

The world into which Christianity inserted itself was every bit as violent as the one inhabited by contemporary terrorists: after the fall of Rome, "Habits of violence, lack of foresight and the ingrained pleasure of leading an unregulated life meant that betrayal and murder were commonplace in the ruling families of the new kingdoms" (Siedentop). But ever so slowly, "Christian insistence on the equality of souls" began to nurture "a new image of reality."

Interestingly -- and this goes to the question asked in the second paragraph of this post -- it took quite a while for a more abstract understanding of Christianity to emerge from the concrete. This is a critically important idea, because this "entry" into a more abstract world is a stage in human psychological development. Nowadays we take it for granted, but for most of human history man has been more like a child in the concrete operational stage of cognitive development.

I look at it from a slightly different theoretical perspective than Piaget. I've discussed in the past the difference between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, the latter being more mature than the former. Back to the news of the day, what happens if a Muslim person in the paranoid-schizoid (PS) position is confronted with a cartoon that offends him?

First, let's discuss some of the characteristics of the PS position, courtesy psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden. These ideas are quite relevant to the Invention of the Individual; for example, chapter three is called The Depressive Position and the Birth of the Historical Subject.

In short, it seems to me that Ogden is discussing on a personal/individual basis what once occurred on a historical/collective basis. Without a change in the culture, there would have been no network of developmental support -- no matrix -- for the development of the individual. This is an idea I have been unable to eliminate from my head for at least 25 years, but for some reason no one else puts these two together, i.e., the individual and the historical.

Some of this is a little technical, but consider the following: PS "is a phase of development wherein the self exists primarily as object." Such a person is concretely "lived by his experience" in such a way that "thoughts and feelings happen" rather than "being thought or felt."

It's a subtle difference, and no one is entirely free from PS thinking. Rather, in the healthy person there is a dialectic between PS and D, through which we are able to reflect on the content of experience and distance ourselves from it, and thus live in a "freer" space -- free, for example, of simply acting on our impulses or emotions without insight or reflection.

A key point in living this way (in PS) is that it creates historical discontinuity. Or, to be more precise, the attainment of historical continuity is a developmental achievement that is impossible in PS. It is impossible because there is no autonomous "self" (or a very weak one) above the impulses and emotions. What we are really talking about is two different ways of organizing the content of experience, one more passive (which goes to modern victimology as well), the other more active and volitional.

I recall that Theodore Dalyrmple describes the identical pattern in his Life at the Bottom. For the developmentally stunted people he encountered in prisons, experience simply happened to them. It is as if they are bystanders to their own lives, like "I don't know what happened, Doc. The gun just went off and then she had a hole in her chest."

Likewise, Ogden writes of how, in the PS state of being, "things simply happen." Which, when you think about it, goes directly to Muslim theology, doesn't it? For occasionalism is a theory whereby Allah is the direct and unmediated cause of everything, to which we are simply passive witnesses. Which is why Islam means surrender. Might as well, since you have no choice anyway.

And as to why someone would commit murder over a cartoon, consider the following: "In the PS position, the predominant mode of symbolization is one in which the symbol and symbolized are emotionally indistinguishable since there is no interpreting self to mediate between symbol and symbolized. There is no sense that one attributes meaning to one's perception; events are what they are, and interpretation and perception are treated as identical processes."

In such a situation, a person who experiences rage upon exposure to a cartoon is unable to distinguish the rage from the object or its author. And this experience will be equated with "truth." Then, "the present is projected backward and forward, thus creating a static, eternal, nonreflective present." Which might go to why the Islamic world has been in a kind of static and unevolving present for the past 800 years or so. Which only makes them angrier.

O <--> (k) Boomer

I'd like to wrap up our discussion of Thomistic Psychology so we can move on to the next subject, whatever it is. Much of this material isn't new per se. In fact, it's straight out of the Raccoon playbook, except I arrived at it in a circuitous and nonlinear manner, just scratching my intuitchin' and following my whimful thinking wherever it loiters. Given our very different approaches, it's rather striking that we somehow ended up in the same place, more or less.

The intellect of man has nothing to start with, yet it is potentially a whole creation. It reaches out and conquers the world by the process of becoming the world (Brennan).

Turns out that knowing and being are very much linked; in fact, if they're not, then there's nothing to talk about but our own neuropsychology. One could express the relation of knowledge to being with a very simple formula: O <--> (k).

The philosophistry of materialism makes no sense, because it cannot make sense; it is literally the denial of intelligibility, of intelligence, and of any real relation between them:

the singular does not resist understanding because it is singular, but because it is material, since nothing is understood except immaterially (emphasis mine).

A single tree, for example, isn't understood as a tree, because doing so requires the abstract concept of treeness. "The essences of corporeal things are opaque rather than translucent, so far as our ability to understand them is concerned."

In fact, it is impossible for us to imagine such a world of absolute singularities, because we would be reduced -- literally -- to psychosis. The psychotic person lives in a world of terrifying novelty, with every object in each moment de-linked, so to speak, from the others; one exits meaningful history and enters a catastrophic collidescope from which there's no escape from the constant collisions.

Ogden describes it well: "symbol and symbolized are emotionally indistinguishable since there is no interpreting self to mediate between" them. "Thoughts and feelings" become "palpable objects and forces that appear, disappear, contaminate, transform, destroy, rescue, etc." Such a person

may shake his head to get rid of tormenting feelings, may literally put his thoughts into a letter and send the letter to the person who should hold these thoughts, or may request x-rays in order to be able to see the things inside of him that are driving him crazy.

Or, he may put his disturbing thoughts and feelings into President Trump, which solves one problem only to create another: the unenending torment of Orange Man Bad! Not only is this story as old as politics, but the raison d'etre of vulgar politics. The founders saw and recognized this, and hoped to create a system that would neutralize it.

But right away political philosophy devolved into faction, and here we are. Beneath the conviction that politics can solve one's problems is the fantasy that politics is responsible for one's problems. So, hating President Trump is every bit as sensible as putting one's sins into an animal and killing it. It even works. For awhile, at which point a new sacrifice is necessary. This is why the News Cycle was invented by the Aztec. See Bailie for details.

Note that the process is "psychotic," even though we don't label it as such. But clearly, a different sort of logic is at play when we enact such an unconscious political phantasy. Come to think of it, The Symmetry of God explains the basis of the process in both health and illness.

For there is a healthy basis for such confusion of symbol and symbolized, for example, in the experience of art. In appreciating drama, one must "lose one's mind" and give oneself over to the imaginary world. This constitutes the healthy use of a power that becomes unhinged and autonomous in various states of pathology.

For example, what is a conspiracy theory but an imaginary drama into which one projects oneself? I've been binge-watching The Man in the High Castle, but its alternative world is no more bizarre than Rachel Maddow's long-running soap opera, The Russian Operative in the White House, which I occasionally cringe-watch.

Back to Brennan (Robert, not John). Like the materialist, we begin with material objects. However, we don't end there (in truth, neither does the materialist, except he has no principle to explain how he gets from first base -- sensation -- to second -- abstraction). An angelic intelligence requires no object, but can proceed straight to the essence. But we aren't angels, although some people come close. Not for nothing is Aquinas called the "angelic doctor." Schuon too seems to fly in that gossamer plane, right at the threshold between the local and nonlocal.

But for the restavus earthbound dirtclods, our knowledge "is not central but radial knowledge. It proceeds inward from without, and reaches the center only by starting from the periphery. It apprehends the essences of sensible things, not in themselves, but in the symbols which these essences manifest to the senses."

In fact, I think this might constitute a fork in the road between Thomas and Frithjof, because, if I am not mistaken, Schuon believes the True Metaphysician has access to the principial world of a priori truth. There are permanent truths we can know directly and infallibly, and indeed, we have a right to these truths (along with an obligation to know and live from them). Let me see if I can dig up a suitable passage.

It is indispensable to know at the outset that there are truths inherent in the human spirit that are as if buried in the "depths of the heart," which means that they are contained as potentialities or virtualities in the pure Intellect: these are the principial and archetypal truths, those which prefigure and determine all the others (Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism).

I suppose I'm partial to the Schuonian view, while also maintaining a healthy respect for the Gnostic temptation: the Tower of Babel, the Promethean usurpation of divinity, the idea that we can build our own stairway to heaven. That always ends badly, although it can be lucrative while it lasts. Humility is the thing. If it doesn't vary directly with knowledge, then you're doing it wrong. Certain truths have moral and characterological prerequisites, which is why we don't toss our pearls before trolls or give what is holy to the Dems.

For Schuon, not all knowledge is from the periphery to the center. I will speak only for myself, and say that it must be a two way street, or better, an inspirling circularity between God's descent and our ascent, bearing in mind that the latter is strictly impossible in the absence of the former. It is in this context that I would understand the following passage:

if there were no pure Intellect -- the intuitive and infallible faculty of the immanent Spirit -- neither would there be reason, for the miracle of reasoning can be explained and justified only by the miracle of intellection. Animals can have no reason because they are incapable of conceiving the Absolute; in other words, if man possesses reason, together with language, it is because he has access in principle to the suprarational vision of the Real and consequently to metaphysical certitude.

So, the intelligence of man is potentially total, "and this totality is explained only by a transcendent reality to which the intelligence is proportioned."

Boom.

O <--> (k) boomer.