i’m headed out of town for a few days. would like to get back to this discussion when i return. some food for thought:

Also, a very interesting article from The New York Review of Books: The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment.

The non-conscious nature of partisan thought, apparent to anyone who follows it sufficiently, was demonstrated a few years ago in a lab and reported in the New York Times:

Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain’s pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.

In light of this, being reality-based as regards politics takes on a perverse meaning. Whereas ideally, according to the Enlightenment values mentioned in the famous passage of Ron Suskind’s article that brought the phrase “reality based community” into public awareness, attachment to reality is maintained by a skeptical, rational, common sense. Knowing the irrationality of partisan thought, the politically realistic person behaves rationally by disguising emotionally determined positions as rational ones. In politics, only a fool says what they really mean on controversial topics and expects a rational discussion to follow.

To attempt to publicly distinguish between rational principle and emotional value is to, as the I Ching terms it, tread upon the tail of a tiger.

Which brings us to Rand Paul’s appearance on the Rachel Maddow show to discuss his comments regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964:

more to come on this when i have a little more time…

while on the way to a diagram and explanation, which i still mean to offer, i happened on an analogy which might simply convey the distinction i’m considering. it goes like this:

the Great Mass of People subsist on The American Diet. the diet amounts to a set of definitions of what food is and what health is. the diet produces a host of illnesses which are accepted as normal and addressed medically. some people have what we might call extreme allergic reactions to this diet which prove chronic and medically unmanageable. for these people, the only way to health is a new diet, amounting to a redefinition of food and health.

it is this redefinition of ‘food’ and ‘health’ (or in Phildickian terms, ‘real’ and ‘human’) that i’m calling ‘radical difference’ between ‘normal’ and ’shamanic’ empathy. the fundamental terms (hence ‘radical) have been redefined. the chronically ill person isn’t seeking a return to the normal diet with its definition of food and health. in terms of our discussion: the normal person dining on the Great American Diet isn’t seeking universal empathy, even if they define their diet as such.

that definition of the norm as the universal is a myth (is, in fact, what Campbell referred to as the Great Bronze Age Myth of social norms as forms orienting toward the transcendent Absolute). the clearest example of this conflation of the normal for the absolute, to my mind, is Jefferson’s statement in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. An absolute value, though in actual fact, in Jefferson’s world, not all men were men.

this radical change in diet (that is, in the fundamental ideas of ‘food’ and ‘health’, or ‘real’ and ‘human’) can be seen in the phenomenon of religious revivals (and also political revolutions). the revivalist (or shaman) seeks to make conventional values real. even though the revivalist and the conventional congregationalist point toward the same ideals (the Gospel stories, for example), the revivalist attempts to embody those values in an immediate way that the conventional congregationalist does not.

to return to the diet metaphor, both the society of the Great American Diet and the Health Food Nut agree on the importance of proper nutrition and health, their definitions of these are radically different. So that is sum is what i’ve been trying to point out: the depth of empathy you’re aiming at is not the norm, even if both are described as ‘empathy.’

i have some faith that i’ll continue to improve at articulating this distinction, so if it still hasn’t come across, it might at some point in the future.

last week i flew cross country on a plane and wrote a long post with a similar title. i still plan to return to that post – to post that post. this is something of an introduction and tangent. an introductory tangent.

first, i’d like to remove politics from this blog and over to Hamlet’s Nation, and that way to separate out that particular species from the genera of discussion here, leaving Androids in Love as a place to discuss love, narcissism and the phenomenon of coming alive. a phenomenon intimately connected with the so-called God’s Eye View, henceforth GEV.

ToCome Alive (CA) is to participate in the GEV. In traditional terms – and by Tradition i am referring to the tradition of thought and feeling inherent to civilization – to participate in the GEV is to be ensouled; and it is possession of a divine soul – a soul which participates in the GEV – that characterizes a human being.

Bringing this thread to the front so as to better respond…

I’m about to disagree with your basic premise. I hope I can do so skillfully enough so as to communicate without offense. Not sure of the best way to proceed. I have things to say in response to much of what you wrote, but I’m going to focus in on one bit as representative of what seems to me the important point. (emphasis that follows is mine)

I’m speaking from the idea in the NPD literature that, so long as someone categorizes people along a hierarchy of worth, their “love” for someone else is always therefore dependent on that person fulfilling whatever narcissistic conditions the NPD uses to sort people into categories.

this suggests that hierarchies of worth are necessarily narcissistic, which to my mind expands the category of NPD to encompass just about everyone and recreates another instance of the loser/messiah dynamic. either one has perfect equanimity (is, in other words, a saint or messiah) or else they’re a narcissist with no love beyond their own self-fulfillment.

in reality, most everyone operates from some hierarchy of worth. mothers, for example, normally value their children over other people. lovers value each other. people of one nation value their fellow citizens. we could multiply examples pretty much endlessly. so it seems to me that something completely ordinary is being defined as pathological, resulting in an idealism of moral perfection that requires you to be either a saint or a sociopath.

This message picks up from the prior comment thread:

It seems to me we’re not that far off, so I’ll spell out what I think we agree on and where I think we differ.

Little Phil Dick (LPD) was abused by his mom both physically and psychologically and this left him with a feeling he had no essential value except insofar as he could realize the ability his mother admired, but failed at herself. In LPD’s case, this meant becoming a writer. The career and personal life LPD built reflected this unstable foundation. Though he was prodigiously productive, his productivity was increasingly fueled by drugs, inconsistent in quality and barely successful enough to support him. His relationships followed a similar course. Though he had grown into PKD, inside he was still LPD, unconsciously seeking to satisfy a a fundamentally dysfunctional emotional script which held out the possibility of basic self-acceptance as a reward for accomplishment. Eventually this script grew so exaggerated (to Biblical proportions) that in order to satisfy it, PKD drove himself to a psychotic episode and in the ultimate vain attempt at self-worth, came to fashion himself as a prophet, though he agonized over this compensatory identification for the rest of his life.

Do we agree to that point?

I’m going to suppose that we do and move on to the matter in disagreement, which I’d describe as the nature of PKD’s agony. What stands out for me as distinct from what we might call ‘mere oscillation’ between hyper-inflation and complete deflation is the degree of objectivity and humor that PKD brought to consideration of the two states.

When I write that you seem to me fixated on the ‘analytic phase’ (and by ‘fixated’ i mean mistaking that aspect for the whole) I mean that you notice the fact of the analytic agony but not the degree to which PKD was actually able to reconcile the either/or split. I take this impression from your use of two quotes from VALIS, as if those prove PKD was stuck in either/or thinking, when the book as a whole testifies to how adept and flexible he became – through his obvious struggles – at bringing those opposites into relationship.

I don’t think Phil fully resolved the split, or in the language of taoist alchemy, transformed false yin and false yang (which are antithetical) into true yin and true yang (which are complementary). But as i see it, Phil’s art testifies to an at least intellectual motion along that path. As Bi11 commented:

This isn’t just both sides of AN issue, but both sides of something existentially central.

Finally, in searching for an image of PKD for this post I came across this interview with Tessa that you might find interesting. Here’s a bit on Phil’s 3-2-7 experience from Tessa’s perspective:

Q: As a skeptic I have a really hard time believing that 2-3-74 was ‘real’, but I know it was real to Philip – and what’s more I do ‘feel’ a lot of truth in the experience. What can you tell me about those experiences that might help me wrap my brain around all of this?

A: The experience of 3/2/74 (it was March 2, not Feb. 3; the confusion arose from the difference between European and American date notations). was very real. The question is, what was it? Was Phil suffering minor strokes? Hallucinating due to drugs or mental illness? Or seeing reality?

I submit that the evidence points toward something very real. There was the night when our radio would not stop playing, even when it was unplugged. There was the Xerox letter, which I held in my hands and read. There were strange cars stopping in the alley behind our apartment at all hours of the day and night. There was the yellow van that parked out front. Two men in workmen’s coveralls got out of the van and carried about a dozen cardboard boxes into the vacant apartment next door.

One strong possibility is that the electronic equipment in the vacant apartment next door was affecting both our radio and Phil’s mind. I know that I also had some very strange dreams during that time.

Phil wrote that he had wisdom teeth extracted, which is ridiculous. He no longer had any wisdom teeth. He had two broken molars. He also mangled his description of our son’s hernia when he wrote about it, but he got it right when he jumped up from one of his frequent naps and told me about it. Something very strange was going on, and although the general anaesthesia for the oral surgery might have had some effect on Phil’s mind, there was much more to it.

still watching this…

“The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.”

– Samuel Johnson

what they’re incentivized to see.

Wishful thinking pays… sometimes.

an excerpt from an email i just wrote, posted here to preserve the thought so that i might remind me:

i was on campus last night attending an interesting panel discussion of the recent citizens united supreme court case… a fact i mention because i had that very experience of pleasure at having my mind sufficiently occupied without much self-management on my part. i only had to put myself into the proper place.

hmmm. i presume you’re familiar with what we might call the existential ideal, according to which the ’spring of contentment’ emerges within. in the absence of such perfect self-sufficiency, fortunate are those who find help from without… whose food is medicine.

takes a significant amount of self-management just to get to that point.