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.

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.

One of my favorite Randy Newman songs:

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.

distinctions only matter when the difference recognized makes a difference. Chomsky has described this in saying that a fact worth discussing must be both true *and* important. an unimportant truth needn’t be engaged.

so what’s the difference? what makes a distinction important?

Chomsky again provides the model, in explaining why awareness of the failings of one’s own country is more important than awareness the failings of someone else’s, both failings being equally true. In short, the failings of one’s own country are, politically speaking, within one’s realm of influence. Here, if we borrow from Stephen Covey, we might formulate a general rule: important facts (i.e. distinctions) are those that lie within one’s realm of influence, as a distinct subset of one’s encompassing realm of concern.

All relevant distinctions are thus a product of this more fundamental distinction between influence and concern. Making this distinction is the first step to being something other than an underling, both personally and politically. It is, in fact, a recurrent principle. As progress on all levels occurs in steps, the distinctions that matter are exactly those that pertain to the step you are facing.

so, for example, the distinction between Confucious and Buddha is true in any case, but only matters – is, in other words, only a distinction worth making – to those who might be, for example, in the position to use one or the other of them as an exemplar. otherwise, the point is entirely academic. to put it generally: fruitful distinctions are driven by some basic need. hence THEY say “need facilitates fulfillment,” because need creates the foundation for making important distinctions, and important distinctions fuel the step by step process which alone fulfills.

“The loftiest teaching cannot escape its own shadow.”

-R.H. Tawney

[from a dkos comment...]

the primary problem with conspiracy theory, insofar as a site like this goes, is that it undercuts the fundamental premise of election-focused activism. conspiracy theories place the real fulcrum of power outside the agreed upon political system. once you stop believing that the agreed upon system is in fact the system in power – or put another way, that the agreed upon system is operating in the agreed upon ways – then the purpose in organizing politically to articulate a vision and win elections is profoundly compromised. to acknowledge conspiracy is to acknowledge that the system is being critically gamed by people acting in a criminal manner. that the system, in other words, is being run by secret means, responding to private directives and not the public will. so, even though conspiracy is the historically demonstrated norm of those in power, it remains an outrageous claim relative to our own country.

why is this? we have no problem seeing the conspiratorial character of aggressive, imperial, governments historically and worldwide. we have no problem accepting it as a fictional description of events in our own country. why not take the reasonable step of suspecting that the historical norm applies to America?

it’s another instance where rationality is trumped by faith in American exceptionalism. though of course, as is normal, rationality is prevented from knowing that it’s been trumped by a sense of emotional outrage implicitly certain of its justification. an emotional sense, that is, that the premise being asserted or suggested is outrageous. This, incidentally, is why charging Glenn Beck with being motivated by racism is an apt counter to the news that Van Jones signed on to a petition questioning the integrity of the official 9/11 Report. By fighting outrage with outrage we might avoid violating our own sacred premises while still protecting Obama’s appointment.

political reality, ultimately, is not determined by facts, but by emotional adherence to a particular story of national identity. it is because of this that Chomsky only gets on television outside of America. not because he’s not rational, informed and insightful – which he abundantly and obviously is – but because he articulates a worldview that denies American exceptionalism… including the exceptionally non-conspiratorial nature of American political power.

if this were actually a reality based community, the concept of American exceptionalism, in all its forms, would be rationally disassembled as yet another imperial myth. but this isn’t science, it’s politics; and in the political world, reality is determined by strategy, not by facts. facts are everywhere fixed around policies driven by cryptic reasons. driven within government by conspiracies of special interests acting in secret and veiling their activities by a sham public process of representative democracy; and driven within the public mind by unconscious processes of personal and collective narcissism.

as Reinhold Niebuhr remarked, “perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.”

but, again, people who have widely lost faith in the process are bound to exclude themselves from the process. so, it is essential, from a political perspective, to preserve your party’s sense of faith in itself and the process – and thus, to enforce a sense of disdain toward enervating conspiracy theory. theory, that is, that undercuts the potential value, and so the strategic possibilities, of the process.

the rejection of ‘conspiracy theory’ is part of the more general protection of faith in American exceptionalism – whether that exceptionalism is viewed as an historical reality or an historical opportunity to change (at last!) the dismal norms of history. reflexively labelling it, to put it kindly, crazy is just another instance of a characteristic emotionally self-protective behavior of social groups. by using emotional abuse to defend sacred premises those premises are kept free from rational examination and the survival and self-image of the group is preserved. just as GWB had a vested interest in declaring that we must never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories, so too does the Daily Kos community. conspiracy theory threatens the whole edifice of motivational identity. we cannot be the people we’ve been waiting for if the system is a farce covering for a criminal syndicate. in order to believe that we are them, we have to believe that the system is either essentially representative or that we are in a position to make it so by the commonly accepted means of ‘more and better Democrats.’ theories of government by criminal conspiracy undercut either form of this necessary faith.

of course in this sense the conspiracy theorist has already reached the complete cynicism as regards government that is likely near a majority opinion in this country. the conspiracy theorists, however challenged by fact, have been emotionally prescient in their complete disbelief.

and herein lies the root of the secondary problem with conspiracy theory: thinking conspiratorially can really drive you crazy. it is psychologically perilous for an individual to entirely lose faith in the dominant narrative of his or her society. to be alienated from this worldview brings a crisis in sanity. one becomes open, then, to truth – to actual reality as opposed to the storybook strategic realities of politics – but also to all manner of crackpot anxieties. even Hamlet, among history’s wisest minds, was driven near to madness by the awful truth communicated by his father’s ghost.

i’m having a hard time shaking the desire to respond to Ben’s idea (such as i construe it) that i ought (if i were, you know, to actually do something) to create some sort of public blog to facillitate a grassroots effort to map effective models for productive activism. as i’ve sarcastically expressed before, the fundamental flaw in this program is that it’s not mine. i’m not the one frustrated with liberals getting upset about the way our society operates but not being able to do shit about it. yeah, it sucks… but

a. that’s not my particular frustration, and
b. it seems to me that there are plenty of liberal blogs out there wrestling day in and out with the issue of effective action, and
c. i have no sense of how to moderate such a community, or even establish it in some way that it doesn’t become another political blog of the well-established form.

my frustration – which is something other than Ben’s frustration with me and other liberals who feel outrage but can’t effectively act on it – is with the general level of understanding, the worldview, within which politics is commonly framed. i want to find a middle way between raving conspiracy theory and the semi-conscious credulousness of the political mainstream online.

now, you can regard that as a sort of Ender’s Game fantasy of accomplishment. i think that’s an ill-informed read. while my particular writing may never be of consequence beyond the few people who come here, there are plenty of bloggers who influence our society simply by blogging. mass blogs are not the only way. and anyway, popular success does not conclusively measure the worth of activity.

which gets to the problem of being diagnosed by someone who has a portion of truth that they can’t separate from their own presumptions and hang-ups. point being: my problem is not that i’m not endeavoring to set up a mass blog (or donating money to someone else’s mass blog) but that i’m not diligent in the work that i’m already doing. yes, the format of Androids in Love isn’t focused enough. it’s a sandbox. the developed version of it simply isn’t a mass blog… necessarily.

truth is, i haven’t entirely ruled it out. i just don’t see how it relates to doing the work i feel needs doing. not the work that ‘the world’ needs, but the work i feel as if i’m slacking from. i’ve no idea how any of it translates into historical action. i’m not out to write propaganda but to formulate a worldview.

No, that’s not a comment on O’s supposed communism. Just something I’ve been thinking of since I came across this opening to Lenin’s State and Revolution (an apt critique of this work can be found here):

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

In this case, though, the great revolutionary figure is MLK, and Obama, his blunted expression.

[here's a diary i wrote today over at daily kos... minus the poll. visit the diary to view poll results and comments. the diary continues developing some themes i've been considering lately, and will serve as a point of departure for a couple other explorations - one mentioned in closing below, and another being the development of emotional dissimulation in particular cultures.]

Politically active people aligned with a particular party live in a sort of self-created bubble. We engage daily, weekly, monthly, yearly in this ongoing process of making sense of the discrepency between our political ideals and our political representatives. Much as people complain about the complainers, it is always the fixers that win in the end. Not because they have the real answers, but because the outcome is written into the premises of the discussion. No matter how much the Democrats suck ass, this is a Democratic blog, and therefore it will always generate rationalizations to preserve some thread, however twisted, of faith in the party and its politicians.

And that makes us different from regular people, who don’t submit themselves to such relentless maintenance of their political faith. These regular people just get angry, and if they stay angry long enough, they slide on into apathy, hopelessness and utter cynicism. They lose their religion, while we program ourselves to keep the faith.

George Lakoff was wrong. Or rather, in his recent diary, George Lakoff glossed over the elephant in the room. Of course he expertly described the weakness of PolicySpeak, but his answer to the question of why the Obama administration has suddenly lapsed into PolicySpeak, after running the most brilliant campaign narrative in history, was insubstantial. His answer, that highly-educated liberals have been indoctrinated into an incorrect classical philosophy of cognition, is a general truth not applicable to the specific example under consideration.

The Obama people have already demonstrated a mastery of framing. While a refresher course is good general medicine, it doesn’t address the specific illness. The reason, in other words, behind the Obama admin’s sudden stumbling at something they characteristically excelled at during the campaign.

To regular people who aren’t so fortified with political wisdom, the answer is simple: campaigns are framed for the benefit of the people while laws are framed for the benefit of the dominant class. Being simple folk, they might just call them the rich.

The only thing keeping people from making this obvious observation, after such long and painful popular experience, is their faith in the moral character of the politicians they elect. This, of course, was the foundational narrative element of Obama, his basic frame. His touchstone: He’s different. He’s ethical. He’ll negotiate publicly with the big drug companies; He’ll end the unjust war; He’ll stop the surveillance and detentions. He will, in short, be an ethical human acting in the public interest and not another instrument of the ruling elite.

It’s really just a matter of faith. Because without that faith, as clear promises made openly devolve into murky policies crafted in secret, the bedrock cynicism as regards the United States government, both domestically and internationally, is revealed as certain truth. Regular people don’t subject themselves to the Daily Programming that maintains faith by easing the collision of promise and reality. They need the narrative.

And as Lakoff knows, the Obama people are well-able to provide it. They know how, and the story line is no mystery. The question, again, is why don’t they?

The more politically educated, or those of us who have access to the more politically educated through these blogs, understand, for example, that President Obama couldn’t, technically, propose his own healthcare plan – the one we heard so much about during the primary and campaign – and that the real plan that comes up for vote in the House and Senate will come out of committees. That’s the political reality. Problem is, the rhetorical reality of the campaign completely distorted this fact. We were consciously led to believe we were choosing between *plans*, as if the choice mattered. In the domain of common experience, that’s a bait and switch.

So, we’re left in the awkward place of having a set of natural emotional reactions that we must constantly find ways to disbelieve in… for our own good. That, i think, is one of the primary functions of Daily Kos: to talk people out of states of rage, despair and utter cynicism.

In my next diary, I’ll explore one hypothesis of how this function is accomplished, both here and in politics generally, by stimulation of the brain’s dopamine-based system of desire.