The Subject as Subjected: Self vs Identity in Our Social Context
(The style of this OP is quite article-like but it was written specifically as an OP. A one-sentence summary of the main point might be: current ideologies of identity obscure their own function, which is to serve the social at the expense of the self).
[I]An attempt to problematize notions of personal freedom and social progress via a brief analysis of the concepts of identity and self in contemporary society.[/i]
An identity is posited here as similar to a self but without the absoluteness of the physical boundary necessarily applicable to a self in order for it to be distinguishable from other selvesthe absence of which boundary makes it significantly more coherent to speak of shared identities than shared selves. An identity then is conceptualized as a narrative of self, or a narrative of a narrative that hones a greater degree of coherency out of the self narrative such that it goes beyond a mere stable and clear judgement (on a variably coherent but at least self-contained subject) to a more defined role or character among several within a subject that subsist in varying interrelationships.
The limits of identity then are more like the limits of conceptual groups that fit under the broader concept of role/character or sets of roles/characters and so are abstract limits in contrast to the more concrete limits of selves defined ultimately by their respective associated physical bodies. In this sense an identity is a narrative that takes one further step into the abstract than a self and is granted there a more flexible and shared territory within and across individual bodies. This territory is wholly socio-linguistic and so fundamentally social and socially controlled. But it may be more or less recognizably social to the extent we can have both ostensibly personal and social identities, which do not necessarily harmonize.
Our personal identities are concerned more with general psychological character and our social identities more with occupation, career, status etc.not that these dont overlap or arent located on the same spectrum, but that personal identity tends to reflect ideologies of individuality (which in so far as they remain within the social sphere [in so far as we are sane, i.e. recognizably social actors] are just more social narratives) and social identity tends towards ideologies of the collective.
The former personal identity is how we tend to play our social role through difference/isolation and the latter social identity through similarity/cooperation. But again, in so far as we are sane, we do play a socially recognized (individually limited) role and political stances that arise from disparate roles need not be conflictual on anything other than a superficial level. On the contrary, the illusion of fundamental conflict can be a stable breeding ground for the reproduction of the same basic social system because it blinds us to our individual impotence and consequently to paths to overcome it. The self of a free individual whose behavioural choices span a consistently tiny percentage of those theoretically available and, in fact, come largely predefined and narratively packaged is less a threat to, and more a tightly controlled unit in, modern liberal democracies, and as such not unsuited to reproducing an ever more tightly controlled, less behaviourally diverse, system. So can proceed a process from apparent freedom to domination, diversity to uniformity, progress to regression.
Centrally problematic is that the behaviours of "free" individuals tend not to stray far from well-trodden paths, despite the proliferation of such paths, thereby an overall social/ideological stability that subsumes intra-cultural political conflict is maintained, while personal stability is rendered at best incidental. In fact, identity formation in modern free societies allows for and even encourages the creation of conflicting identities that war with themselves in a (self) destructive fashion. And there are practical reasons for but no overwhelming force towards the attainment and perpetuation of an identity that is consistent and encompassing enough to effectively abrogate such inner self conflict. In fact, such an orientation is often actively discouraged under ideologies of "self-exploration" etc. Fundamentally then, modern society facilitates the greater and greater separation of identity from self, or, more specifically, the proliferation of identities that do not tend to reconcile themselves in a stable self but form unstable selves that are defined largely by inner conflict.
The thesis presented here then is that this phenomenon of multiple and fractured identity formation, the creation of self-conflictual selves (subjectively experienced in the long term as unhappy, meaningless and anxious selves, characterized by indecision and irresoluteness, I.e. undeveloped selves misdirected from their means of self-development ) is not a bug but a feature of advanced society and the more advanced the society the more a feature it tends to become.
Here, technological progress, particularly through mass and social media, provides us with the freedom to tie ourselves in ever more convoluted psycho-social knots which present themselves to us as novel experiences or experimental or disposable identities, while having the same fundamentally stultifying character of limiting our ability to narrativize a coherent and unified self in a meaningful social context. The consumption of proliferating identities becomes an endless self-consumption and ultimate limitation rather than emancipation.
This is to suggest that part of the immune system of larger social systems of huge numbers of social units is that those that may present a threat do not play an antagonistic role but remain inert and impotent due to their inner conflicts. They become the waste products of society rather than a cancer upon it, its detritus rather than its mutations. And so meaningful change and progress are effectively resisted while efficiency of exchange, material and ideological, is continuously perfected. A quantitative dominance of material/ideological wealth pervades over qualitative human experience, particularly wherever such experience threatens the rate of economic expansion/technical advance.
This ongoing process may ultimately lead to social disintegration, revolution, the dominance of artificial intelligence or some combination thereof. Its difficult to predict, but we can at least observe that human flourishing, diversity and depth is not its telos. The subject is subjected to the social insofar as it cannot coherently arrange itself in opposition to it, or at least in opposition to its failings, because it has internalized conflicting psychological forces that prevent a coherent response. And a society that systematically protects its failings at the expense of its subjects is antithetical to the notion of meaningful human progress.
The freedom of identity a technically advanced consumer society facilitates (identity commodified / personal paralysis packaged as endless novelty) contains within it the anaesthetic that neutralizes a more valuable freedom, the freedom of resistance against an orientation towards the self that dictates that a self must consume even the self and in as many flavours as possible in order to fully experience itself. And is directed to do so through the conduits of mass media, celebrity culture, and social engineering technologies.
I had written a bit more. But that's enough for now.
Anyhow, is this a problem you recognize? Does the analysis make sense? What, if any, are potential solutions?
[I]An attempt to problematize notions of personal freedom and social progress via a brief analysis of the concepts of identity and self in contemporary society.[/i]
An identity is posited here as similar to a self but without the absoluteness of the physical boundary necessarily applicable to a self in order for it to be distinguishable from other selvesthe absence of which boundary makes it significantly more coherent to speak of shared identities than shared selves. An identity then is conceptualized as a narrative of self, or a narrative of a narrative that hones a greater degree of coherency out of the self narrative such that it goes beyond a mere stable and clear judgement (on a variably coherent but at least self-contained subject) to a more defined role or character among several within a subject that subsist in varying interrelationships.
The limits of identity then are more like the limits of conceptual groups that fit under the broader concept of role/character or sets of roles/characters and so are abstract limits in contrast to the more concrete limits of selves defined ultimately by their respective associated physical bodies. In this sense an identity is a narrative that takes one further step into the abstract than a self and is granted there a more flexible and shared territory within and across individual bodies. This territory is wholly socio-linguistic and so fundamentally social and socially controlled. But it may be more or less recognizably social to the extent we can have both ostensibly personal and social identities, which do not necessarily harmonize.
Our personal identities are concerned more with general psychological character and our social identities more with occupation, career, status etc.not that these dont overlap or arent located on the same spectrum, but that personal identity tends to reflect ideologies of individuality (which in so far as they remain within the social sphere [in so far as we are sane, i.e. recognizably social actors] are just more social narratives) and social identity tends towards ideologies of the collective.
The former personal identity is how we tend to play our social role through difference/isolation and the latter social identity through similarity/cooperation. But again, in so far as we are sane, we do play a socially recognized (individually limited) role and political stances that arise from disparate roles need not be conflictual on anything other than a superficial level. On the contrary, the illusion of fundamental conflict can be a stable breeding ground for the reproduction of the same basic social system because it blinds us to our individual impotence and consequently to paths to overcome it. The self of a free individual whose behavioural choices span a consistently tiny percentage of those theoretically available and, in fact, come largely predefined and narratively packaged is less a threat to, and more a tightly controlled unit in, modern liberal democracies, and as such not unsuited to reproducing an ever more tightly controlled, less behaviourally diverse, system. So can proceed a process from apparent freedom to domination, diversity to uniformity, progress to regression.
Centrally problematic is that the behaviours of "free" individuals tend not to stray far from well-trodden paths, despite the proliferation of such paths, thereby an overall social/ideological stability that subsumes intra-cultural political conflict is maintained, while personal stability is rendered at best incidental. In fact, identity formation in modern free societies allows for and even encourages the creation of conflicting identities that war with themselves in a (self) destructive fashion. And there are practical reasons for but no overwhelming force towards the attainment and perpetuation of an identity that is consistent and encompassing enough to effectively abrogate such inner self conflict. In fact, such an orientation is often actively discouraged under ideologies of "self-exploration" etc. Fundamentally then, modern society facilitates the greater and greater separation of identity from self, or, more specifically, the proliferation of identities that do not tend to reconcile themselves in a stable self but form unstable selves that are defined largely by inner conflict.
The thesis presented here then is that this phenomenon of multiple and fractured identity formation, the creation of self-conflictual selves (subjectively experienced in the long term as unhappy, meaningless and anxious selves, characterized by indecision and irresoluteness, I.e. undeveloped selves misdirected from their means of self-development ) is not a bug but a feature of advanced society and the more advanced the society the more a feature it tends to become.
Here, technological progress, particularly through mass and social media, provides us with the freedom to tie ourselves in ever more convoluted psycho-social knots which present themselves to us as novel experiences or experimental or disposable identities, while having the same fundamentally stultifying character of limiting our ability to narrativize a coherent and unified self in a meaningful social context. The consumption of proliferating identities becomes an endless self-consumption and ultimate limitation rather than emancipation.
This is to suggest that part of the immune system of larger social systems of huge numbers of social units is that those that may present a threat do not play an antagonistic role but remain inert and impotent due to their inner conflicts. They become the waste products of society rather than a cancer upon it, its detritus rather than its mutations. And so meaningful change and progress are effectively resisted while efficiency of exchange, material and ideological, is continuously perfected. A quantitative dominance of material/ideological wealth pervades over qualitative human experience, particularly wherever such experience threatens the rate of economic expansion/technical advance.
This ongoing process may ultimately lead to social disintegration, revolution, the dominance of artificial intelligence or some combination thereof. Its difficult to predict, but we can at least observe that human flourishing, diversity and depth is not its telos. The subject is subjected to the social insofar as it cannot coherently arrange itself in opposition to it, or at least in opposition to its failings, because it has internalized conflicting psychological forces that prevent a coherent response. And a society that systematically protects its failings at the expense of its subjects is antithetical to the notion of meaningful human progress.
The freedom of identity a technically advanced consumer society facilitates (identity commodified / personal paralysis packaged as endless novelty) contains within it the anaesthetic that neutralizes a more valuable freedom, the freedom of resistance against an orientation towards the self that dictates that a self must consume even the self and in as many flavours as possible in order to fully experience itself. And is directed to do so through the conduits of mass media, celebrity culture, and social engineering technologies.
I had written a bit more. But that's enough for now.
Anyhow, is this a problem you recognize? Does the analysis make sense? What, if any, are potential solutions?
Comments (226)
TL;DR: on the Open AI Playground gave
Is that accurate?
Kind of. It's compatible with what I'm saying but it doesn't quite capture my thesis and I gave a better tl:dr in the second sentence. It would have been nice if you'd read that far. :lol:
I mean feel free to skip a few paragraphs but man...
Is this Erich Fromm? And if so, as I read most of the OP, is logotherapy a solution to our purposeless lives that we engender in modern society?
I haven't read Fromm in years so I'm not sure but it's a Frankfurt-School type point, so quite possibly. I'll look into the logotherapy connection. Thanks.
It sounds like you're saying that social fragmentation ends up being reflected in individual psyches.
The thought behind mentioning logotherapy would be for people to develop a healthy identity by finding meaningful jobs and activities in life, thus enabling them to form healthy selves. It's linked to logotherapy by the appeal to purpose.
Is lack of purpose something you were trying to address? Obviously, technology and consumerism tend to debase that metric.
That is one of the things I am definitely saying, yes. I think @unenlightened said something similar in a recent thread that may partly be responsible for me thinking about this.
Quoting Shawn
The proliferation of identities within a self equates to a proliferation of often conflicting purposes that can negate each other. So, yes, effectively.
(I don't remember most of the theoretical background. I'd have to look it up and pretend I did. :smile: But as mentioned there's Frankfurt School there for sure.)
Quoting Baden
Im not convinced that it is in the interest of advanced consumer society to keep personal identity fragmented and internally conflicted. On the contrary, the proliferation of techniques of the self can be argued to produce a creative, adaptively flexible intricate structure of personal identity that is less vulnerable to becoming paralyzed by internal conflict than more traditional forms of identity.
I think Habermas had the right idea, and was able to overcome the pessimism of other Frankfurt school thinkers, via his communicative rationality approach.
Sorry, that was a bit rude. I've been feeding various posts in to see what results, including my own, and found it uncanny.
This makes sense to me as how I am caught up in process and processes where the 'identify' I experience appears. I have no idea how to compare that with experiences of identity that seem to come forward on their own account.
I don't present that as an argument against some kind of completely 'objective' narrative but do feel something has been left out.
If this is a summary, then I needn't read any more, and so I won't. Instead I'll attempt to further summarize your summary as:
The individual is defined by his role in society.
This summary summary clarifies the unexpected result. Individuals are not fully definable autonomous separate units, but are meaningless without reference to the whole.
An example: A transmission gear cannot be identified without reference to the car it is a part of. It can stand alone, but what it is in a world without cars bears no similarity to what it is in a world with cars.
That is, Hanover cannot be described without reference to this forum, as it is here where he was created and given all form and meaning. Blessed be this sacred lair
Maybe I've correctly stated what the OP states, maybe not. Maybe I'm on a different tangent. I'm not sure. There were a lot of other sentences I didn't read.
I am not kidding you: I walked into Walmart tomorrow, and I asked 10 random people if this applies to them, and I handed them a slip of paper with the quote by you, and I read up aloud from my copy the same.
I assure you: not one person agreed with what you wrote about THEM. (Because it's basically about them, the people, right? Not about some over-educated Ph.D. in philosophy who has too much time on his hand.)
I got a few responses:
Person 1: (Giggle)
Person 2: "Get away from me, creep, or I call security!!"
Person 3: "Woof!!!" (Person 3 was a service animal)
Person 4: "Heavy... man, this is deep shit. Which isle does it come from? I wanna get me one. (Mutters:) I hope they have it in my size."
Person 5: "Yee-haw! Whoa Nelly, this ain't got no (unintelligible gurgle) on the derriere of a pregnant cow!"
Person 6: "Not quite. The inverted anachronism of consumer-centred identity thefts are encroaching on the proletariat's main goal, which is to wrangle from the hands of the bourgeois all available rechargeable MiNH battery refuel gizmos. Or gizmoes, I'm not quite sure, actually, about that very point."
Person 7: (Belch.)
Person 8: "Careful, buddy. I work out five days a week and have a seventh-degree black belt."
Person 9: (Was speechless, and froze in an immovable standing positions. When I left the store, he was still in that stunned state.)
Person 10: "Sure, sure, for sure, man. Just put this in your pocket, and hand it back to me when you're outside the store. Trust me."
The important conditional here is "can negate". Is there a critical number of proliferations that must trigger this phenomenon? The statement is overly vague.
Certainly an individual living multiple roles is not necessarily doomed to internal conflicts. Cannot a famous skier be also an effective physicist, while also being an attentive father and husband?
Some people can be successful in multiple capacities, while some can barely handle one. Some, none.
Maybe. But I assure you: it's still more fun than praying on the call of the muezzin seven times a day and prostrating on a prayer mat and submitting your self, mind, and soul to the Islam.
And it's also more fun than not seeing woman for decades, and going every day out into snow desert at forty below, and chopping wood ten hours each day, only to crawl back into your bungalow called "Shtalag 9" and subsist on 800 calories each day as well-earned reward for your hard work, while some other people keep beating you severely for any small infraction and calling your mother names.
This what you described can happen in any society. But Baden is talking about a consumer society. So unless he buys the latest ski equipment every season, spends half his money on Walmart shit, and consumes his children in Aspic sauce, he is not actually a good example of what Baden was saying.
I'll shut up now. Please don't kick me out of this site.
I hope not. "Buy more to be more". The simple anaesthetic in question. But what I described happens more frequently in a "consumer society" where money may flow more freely and opportunities to diversify one's self are more accessible.
The fragmentation of the self is not haphazard. It is directed by the person's needs, which is in turn shaped by his biology, psyche, and socio-economic status, as well as his level of intellect, highest eduation level achieved, marital status, and not in the least the colour of his skin. Other factors play into effect, as well: his height, his looks, his Myers-Briggs learning inventory.
The fragmentation is therefore not random, and not haphazard.
The fragmented society's individuals clump together by their preferences, needs, and fulfilment levels.
Social cohesion, mutual support, even if not said but only implied by approval of similarity by lifestyle, reduces the impact of the inner conflict.
There is a hard-and-fast proof to the notion that people's inner conflicts are not significant: hardly anybody commits suicide. Most people are happy, sort of, while they imagine that they could be happier if some of their needs were better satisfied. This, of course, is a fallacy, and it is perpetuated by the Hollywood-style tabloid journalism.
In all, you may be right, it is hard to tell from here. But even if you are right, it is not a problem of significant proportions, either for society, or for the individual. In other words, people are complacent enough to stay with the status quo. When the status quo is really not good, they rebel. So since there have been no rebellions in a long time in Western consumer societies, this is another indication that the situation is not as dire as you depict.
The fragmentation is apparently adequately handled by the selves. While the society the selves live in promotes inner fragmentation, according to you, still, the same society provides outlets to alleviate the potential suffering of the self: by the clumping of like selves together, and by being diverse and vibrant and constantly changing enough to divert the attention of the self from his inner conflicts (if the inner conflicts due to fragmentation of the self indeed exist at all, of which I am not convinced) so they don't get consumed by thoughts of their inner conflicts generated by a consumer society they are a part of. Because of the distractions. (Mentioned this last bit for the benefit of those who forgot how the sentence started by the time we ended up here.)
I go back to my youth, to age 15-16. I walked into a second-hand bookstore and had a glance at a Stieler map. Stieler was the prominent atlas-producing publishing giant's, Perthes's, in Gotha, Germany, main scribe. Stieler and then many others also in the employ of Justus Perthes, published many editions of a world atlas, starting in the 1820s. The maps I bought then were made in the 1870s. I was stunned by their beauty. I bought a few on the spot, at a really good price, because at the time Hungary was poor, and there was no competition for antiques.
I was a consumer, who diversified and had an experience that he cherished for the rest of his life.
I often go to dollar stores. I look at the displayed merchandise: shiny, clean, appetizing. From lathles to bicycle pumps to socks to Javex bleach. I shop there because that's where my dollar goes the farthest.
Do I feel guilty, or depressed, or remorseful, or do I leave with a bad taste in the mouth, when I exit the store with two full bags? No, I don't.
I figure it's the gathering instinct that makes us go out shopping for sole sake of the joy of shopping. In the old times (back 20 to 200,000 years ago) there were no dollar stores, the poor suckers, but they found the same happiness when they happened upon a nice-looking pebble or a sharp stone, or a colorful mushroom. A flower, a stinking carcass that my forebearers still deemed edible, a cool spring with clean fresh water, a nest of tree slugs, quite a delicacy.
Shopping is not forced upon people. It is people who force stores to sell stuff. Because a consumer society caters to the need of entertainment; the diversification of the self or the identity, and the many hats we have to wear, do not diminish, but enhance the joy of living. We, humans, revel in diversity, and uniform and unchanging life we definitely see as boring. Uniformity and repetition ad infinitum is only done because we are forced to do that. The uniformity of the Islam, the dredging work in factories and behind sewing machines, the repetition of constantly killing people or torturing them to squeeze out a confession (I am talking about executioners' jobs at Quantanimo Bay), takes a toll on people. The horrid workplace is what makes us dream of retirement. Why? Because most of us wear the same one hat at the work place; typically and historically for 9-10 hours a day. We get stressed out and we just want to go home and plutt ourselves in front of the TV until dinner is ready, then we crawl to bed to die until resurrection of us the next morning, to go to work.
I think the separation of the self from the multitudinality of the identities we need to fill in our changing roles in our lives is not a bad thing. It is a good thing.
Somehow, the thought that immediately sprang to mind was Jean Baudrillard and Marshall McLuhan. We are transformed into actors playing roles in the spectacle of modern existence portrayed in the various media and hypermedia and assign ourselves values in accordance with the roles we adopt or are accorded by culture. Also that pecular pomo text I've encountered on the Internet, 'the society of the spectacle' by Debord. Don't know if I'm barking up the wrong tree here.
Possibly. But do you think this is what is happening in practice? Do you think people are becoming deeper, more thoughtful and more in touch with themselves? Do you think modern societies are progressing away from frivolousness, stupidity, and superficiality towards character, intelligence and creativity? Do you think there is less and less evidence of mental conflict evidenced through reduced levels of mental illness, unhappiness, anxiety and drug use? Or are you positing this is as a positive potential in current society that has yet to be realised?
Quoting Joshs
Again, possibly. But can you elaborate on how you think this is playing out in practice?
There's always a danger of projecting our own psychology into our theories, (although in this case the general thrust is not particularly original to me) So, I'm aware of the need to provide more clarity on why I think there is a general problem to those who may not experience or view the situation similarly. I haven't always viewed things this way either. But having experimented with several varying identities myself both for practical and personal reasons, I've developed this view over time and I think the issue is at least worth taking seriously.
Anyhow, what you've said makes perfect sense. The prevailing ideology of identity (as I see it) presents identities as both tools (as you've very well described) and playthings, opportunities to achieve specific goals and to have specific experiences. The phrasing "modalities of being" with "particular grammars" fitting "particular domains" is very apt, only that we remember our modalities of being are psychological states with biological consequences and our grammars are sets of actions that may be reinforcing in a way that presents barriers to change that don't necessarily apply when we're dealing in pure abstracts.
So, the way I view identities is that they take a certain libidinal hold, they "want" to become selves, in that they are naturally reinforcing in so far as they reward us with positive feelings as we employ them. As I said earlier, an identity to me is a narrative. But it's a type of narrative that organizes the thoughts and desires of the self into a specific semi-stable structure that acts as a conduit for libidinal energy and allows for the expression or repression of different drives such that if it has taken hold as an identity and is not simply a whim or a bad attempt at acting, it can't simply be turned on and off at will. It creates a system of thought that tries to keep it in place. The mask becomes us even if we view it as a mere mask. And all the worse for us if we do and it isn't.
For example, we might have a job, which entails an identity we don't like. And we might view taking on this identity simply as a practicality, again a tool to provide us with the means to navigate a society that always wants something from us. We might think we take this identity off at the end of the day and become "ourselves" again. I think this is an illusion. And a necessary one. Or at least one that serves to perpetuate the type of inner conflict that keeps us inert. We try to layer over an undesired identity with a desired one, but the desired identity must be repressed on a continual basis and our energies are not consistently directed outward but are variously redirected and repressed.
This is just one example and obviously doesnt apply to everyone. But it helps make the point that contrary to the idea that identities are tools that can be picked up and disregarded for practical purposes (as their malleability and lack of distinct boundaries compared to selves might suggest), they are psychologically sticky and tend to interfere with each others expression and compete for libidinal energy in a potentially destructive and paralysing way such that yes, they may not be reconciled as you said, or worse, we blind ourselves to what it means to have a reconciled self/identity structure that consistently and productively channels our energies outward because we know nothing other than the circular process of anaesthetising undesired identities with the temporary salve of desired ones.
Oh, not a bother. It took a fairly good shot at it, almost uncomfortably so, especially considering how dense my text was in places. I suppose I should be grateful in that if an AI can get a fairly decent grasp of what I was saying, a human should be able to get there too. :up:
That's interesting. Can you tell me a bit more? Is this to do with identities of work or etc?
Cars are nice. Do you like cars? Have you ever considered driving one off a cliff?
Yes you are, although what followed was so frighteningly realistic, I almost doubt myself.
Quoting Baden
I just watched White Noise last night, and now this. I was struck by the close similarity posed between Hitler and Elvis. The mass adoration. And the obsession with death; the nature of narrative plot as a movement towards inevitable death (ineffectually denied by the 'happy-ever-after' ending). Recommended watch for philosophers and pretenders.
I'm not going to participate here though more than this, as long as I have other stuff on the go. I just want to clarify my own position that identity is always fragmented; it is something one does in thought, to reflect on oneself, that divides one between the identifier and the identified - the reflection and that which sees it - and simultaneously divides one from the world, which becomes 'other'. Death is always the loss of identity. One does this because in learning from those one is dependent on for one's existence, one is instructed to "be good". That is to say, to be what one is not, and thus identity is performance from the beginning, and the necessary negation of oneself for the [M]other.
So I cannot even distinguish between the social and the psyche.
I dont think its so much a matter of a particular number but how identities organize and structure themselves in the self. And there are two aspects to this. One of these aspects is how comfortably the identity sits within the self and another is how identities interrelate. Ideally, our identities sit comfortably within the self and with each other and do not present us with irresolvable mental or behavioural conundrums or structure our energies in self-defeating ways.
So, my argument is not so much that an individual must be doomed to internal conflict if they live multiple roles but that the commodification of identity, the reduction of identity ideologically to a form of fashion, as if we all happily can be anyone simply on the basis of certain physical and mental skills, capabilities and attributes is a dangerously misleadingly orientation that serves and helps reproduce an increasingly consumerist environment at the expense of sustainable and fulfilling self-development.
Of course, there are certain presumptions here. I view societies as analagous to organisms in their tendency to reproduce and I presume the vast majority of individuals from a social point of view to be an expendable means of such reproduction, purveyors of ideologies, primarily. Here, ideologies are social genes and societies are more or less stable groups of ideologies. We are stuck in bodies with drives subjected to constant ideological barrage and required to organize this input in terms of identity and self. There is no reason for society to give us the tools to do that, any more than there is reason for the DNA of an organism to program it to promote the life of cells that have become incidental to its survival and reproduction.
Anyhow, all of the above can and should be questioned. My position is certainly pessimistic in terms of the direction social life is currently flowing while being reasonably optimistic that if we as individuals can recognize the difficulties of our context we can avoid a great degree of unnecessary confusion and stress.
The first one sounds a bit more promising than the second one.
Quoting god must be atheist
I don't, to be fair. I did spend a couple of years primarily as a financial speculator though and that was a mask that I found harder to remove and less compatible with identities I value far more than I would have liked.
Uh, oh...
Quoting god must be atheist
OK, although part of what identities do is create needs and shape psyches.
Quoting god must be atheist
Treating symptoms or curing the disease?
Quoting god must be atheist
I dont accept this. Having significant inner conflicts doesnt necessarily equate to being suicidal not to mention successfully suicidal.
Quoting god must be atheist
But part of my point is that the potential for rebellion is quashed through the creation of people who consider themselves happy enough in a benign way not to rebel but are still too paralysed or weakened by inner conflicts to develop their potentials. It takes imagination, strength, self-confidence, etc to pit yourself against a system that will label you a failure if you dont play the game, regardless of what the game ultimately does to you. And its a process that by its nature occurs over a period of time and doesnt advertise its downsides.
Quoting god must be atheist
In a way youre making my point for me here.
Yes, as I mentioned before, theres always the danger of projecting our own psychologies onto the subject of analysis. I wouldnt blame anyone for ignoring this on the basis that they feel perfectly happy and balanced with the way things are. And I am not condemning all forms of consumption.
Quoting god must be atheist
I think youre making my point for me again here, to be honest.
Quoting god must be atheist
Maybe. Although I would like to think there are better options than spending 9 or 10 hours getting stressed out in an identity thats forced on us for practical reasons, just so we can consume mass media to de-stress enough to do it all again. Maybe youre the pessimist and Im the optimist here. :smile:
I believe that. But to blame the lifestyle of nearly half of the entire globe and the society that supports that structure and lifestyle, because you were in the wrong job?? Yes, people do that. People do condemn Catholicism because of first- or manieth-hand news events of priests abusing children. People also hate minorities, and if something bad happens because of the action of a member of a visible minority group to them, then they will REALLY hate them. People who keep flunking at school or get beaten up by a thug every day in front of the girls' change room, hate school and hate every being that is inside that school.
You hate society because you were forced into making money while you rather would have poed poetry or swam with dolphins. I mean, I am not surprised, but I don't find your reaction all that fair. There are people in this world on whom the investor hat looks good, much like there are people who get robbed by a gang of Puerto Ricans and they will still go on demonstrations which demand to stop police brutality against Puerto Ricans. And most people do enjoy school... high school is cool... well, okay, in the first two weeks of the school year when they get back in September.
Your article was convincing to you, but not to others who do not feel that their personal lot in life is universally similar to everyone else's.
I don't for one moment deny that your sentiments were true. You described your experience, and that was a very insightful description. It is not applicable to all other people, though.
Postmodernists tend to lose themselves in abstraction to the extent they end up writing a kind of convoluted fiction that's very difficult to apply to the realities of life. Baudrillard is on the extreme end of the spectrum here. There's something in what he says and he writes very seductively but in another sense, you'd have to be jacked up on acid to take him seriously. McLuhan and Debord are better. But as I've mentioned, I feel most in tune with Frankfurt school thinkers, e.g. Marcuse, who are fairly down to earth.
No, I've been thinking along these lines since my twenties, far before I had that position. And I'm presenting a critique which I hope amounts to a little more than "hating on society". I don't want to argue with you further along these lines though, especially because the argument is not personal to me. It's not an original pet theory or anything and I fully expect it not to resonate with everyone.
My subterfuge has failed. I thought I might drag you in but I fully understand you have more on your plate and the clarification is appreciated.
Yes, I am sorry this is not a perfect world, too. And the reason they don't reach their inner potential is not their inner turmoil, but a fiercely competitive environment.
Quoting Baden
You're right. With that paragraph I strengthened your position as well as mine. It is a flip-flop switch; some say potato, some say patahto. Is the entertainment bad in a consumer society, because it makes people not entertain themselves in a different way, or is entertainment good, because it is good thing to be entertained.
Quoting Baden
Well... child mortality would be around 80%, famine and pestilence would wipe out a large chunk of the population on a regular basis, Visigoths and Vikings would slaughter the men, enslave their children and make concubines of their women... or else we work 8-9-10 hours a day and put up with that, in order to have good medicine, stability, law and order. And outside entertainment.
Guilt is a pain that forces the dragon to peer into a mirror and see itself. In Gnostic myths, this the gift of Sophia. Before she came, there was murder and insanity, but it all went on in darkness. Sophia split the psyche into actor and audience.
Fair enough.
So, one can find a decent amount of joy in this parable of the subject subjected.
It's an interesting line. Can you elaborate on what you mean a bit? It's might gel with some of my own ideas.
Speaking of Marcuse, from "One Dimensional Man", which I'm currently reading, a salient quote I just came across:
"If mass communications blend together harmoniously and even unnoticeably, art, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator - the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value not truth value counts. On it centres the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to it."
Do you watch commercials?
It seems to me that the fantasy of a child is engendered by society nowadays with RPG games and all those first person games. I think the role of fantasy manifests in the enduring popularity of traditions like Halloween despite the pagan tradition that it is.
I also think that the promise of being rewarded for good deeds in the after life is a source of fantasy for many people.
Just some random thoughts.
No, I don't. How about you?
Only accidentally. I don't have a tv. I don't do Facebook or Twitter. I might be out of touch.
Can relate to that. I've never owned a TV and don't do social media either.
Let me try to relate this (clumsily) to my thesis via some quick thoughts concerning art vs entertainment.
So, its easy to see how the structure of modern society alienates us from art. Art to have value must negate, must probe, attack, bring hidden conflicts into the light, it should not be entirely comfortable because its function cannot simply be to reflect the status quo in a way that maintains it. And if it requires of us some cognitive effort to meet its demands all the better: it's often through this deliberate focusing of energy that its transmission is facilitated. This does not mean that art cannot be entertaining but that that is not its function. Its function is to edify and to open us up, what pleasure or discomfort accompanies that process is not an end in itself but incidental to a more important end.
Pure entertainment, including perhaps that of identity fantasies such as those you mentioned, tends to have the opposite function, not of uncovering, but of covering up, not of challenging, but of reassuring. Not of placing a demand on us, but of removing all demands. Its pleasure is its success and a lack of pleasure is its failure. It is entirely well suited to GMBAs hypothetical worker because it facilitates the processing of stresses that would make their job unbearable if left unchecked. So, its function is simply that nothing changes. It affirms not negates as one would expect an ideological agent of the current system to do.
So, entertainment allows for fantastical identities to be quickly processed and to obscure through simple opposition our identification with our drudgery. But the drudgery and the fantastical identity, or the result of its processing, are just two sides of the same social coin. The fantastical identity presenting as such negates its own reality and affirms the reality of its opposite but does so in such a way as to obscure the process of its own self-destruction. What is presented obviously as fantasy and narrativized as such is narrativized under a more dominant identity that dictates we can never be what we want to be, and as that process is experienced as pleasurable, or at least comparatively so, for this is how our libidinal energies are organized through social submission, it is constantly reinforced.
Another way of putting this is that art should open a space in us for novel identities that are confrontational but not fantastical in a sense that ultimately separates their realization from us. Pure entertainment maintains the separation by feeding us identity narratives that, by their nature, are subservient to a narrative of social submission, and are therefore inherently non-confrontational and unstable but self-reinforcing in so far as their processing is experienced as pleasurable or a distraction from the unpleasant realities of our social domination.
I think you can be more direct and precise by stating the holidays we engage in and religion like Christmas, the new years resolutions we make, and Halloween, or Guy Fawkes Night, as typical examples of subliminal of fantasy in our daily lives and in our calendar years.
The Internet organization called Anonymous is an interesting case in point.
Yes, I understand this too. And I have certainly watched this process with people going to jail who bring out a particular person to survive in there only to find they have been taken over by it forever. I've watched some basically very sweet people become monsters. Cue the inevitable Nietzsche quote. As for myself - I'm not aware of any selves other than one which doesn't swear and one which does... The Polite Company Persona.
Quoting Baden
I think that the Marcusian model , with its reliance on libidinal energy and its notions of social conditioning, is too reductive and monolithic. It forces us to see ourselves as pushed and pulled and shaped by the same abstract encapsulated forces within ourselves and in our cultural environment.
It misses the fact that there is no such thing as consumer society or late capitalism. Not as some singular monolithic entity. There are many subcultures within the larger culture, and many ways in which economic, political and social aspects of culture interaffect each other. We dont all live within the same circumstances of culture because we dont interpret the meanings of our interactions with others in the same way. Our identities arent formed by culture in a one-way manner , they are formed by the way we integrate and interpret culture on the basis of our own history and worldview. The way we adapt our behavior to the different propel in our lives is not a question of putting on an identity but rather of playing a role. To play a role with respect to family , friends and others is to make use of our understanding of how others see us. It is to anticipate how others will react to us on the basis of this understanding. The role we play with others is shaped by our sense of the regard others have for us. The inner conflict you are talking about takes place when others , or ourselves, act in ways that we cant make sense of, that confuses us. In other words, it is when our role construal breaks down and ceases to be an effective guide for understanding our relationships with others that we experience conflict.
In general , people today are more psychologically self-aware than in previous eras. How well they adapt to stress and change is not a function of their exposure to some monolithic label like consumer culture or capitalism but the permeability of their ways of construing themselves and others.
Thanks for the reply. My opinion is that modern consumer society facilitates (encourages) playing multiple roles and thus provides opportunities unthinkable to previous generations. I recall as a child living in rural Alabama seeing farmers trudging behind a mule forcing a plow through the dirt, trapped in their limited worlds. I don't see consumer society as dystopian, but as liberating.
Im not sure how to respond to this. On the one hand I want to defend my thesis (Im pretty sure Im supposed to do that :smile: ). On the other hand it feels odd to try to convince those whose experience of society is positive, and who can put a plausible positive theoretical spin on how it functions, that its actually destructive in fundamental ways. My instinct is more to shake your hand and say, Well done! Whether or not society is basically shit, youre managing to orient yourself in a constructive way towards it and part of that constructive orientation is focusing on the opportunities it presents rather than its limitations. I want to be the guy who spreads joy not misery. I run a chocolate factory ffs. But I must defend my thesis...
Another problem with defending my thesis is its hard to falsify. I can easily work your objections into my position by pointing out that reactions such as yours are exactly what one would expect if the process of ideological identity formation, which obscures itself in favour of social reproduction at the expense of a deeper experience of self, worked. The vast majority of people are supposed to experience some level of happiness with the way things are and not believe in the practical reality or even necessity of alternatives. Otherwise, the system wouldnt be able to efficiently reproduce itself. And so I just highlight the point I made in the OP about the social immune system, et voilà your objections are neutralised.
Convenient, but not very convincing. So, how do we get around that to something more objective that might form the foundation of a more fruitful discussion? E.g. might present opportunities for falsifying the idea that the quality of human experience tends to be eroded by the advancement of consumerist thinking and the increased prevalence of social engineering technologies, particularly in relation to the commodification of identities. One way to start might be if you addressed my former questions. I am curious to know if you think, regardless of your personal experience or theoretical convictions, that modern societies are progressing in a manner conducive to increased human flourishing and what objective metrics you consider relevant in determining that. My questions present some possibilities but feel free to present your own.
There is some truth in this, for sure.
It does have something to do with work. My life in the trades has been an interaction with stuff and learning or not learning how to be better at shaping it. That has happened in the context of production as exchange that you refer to but there is a personal element where the good and bad decisions pile up for me to notice for myself rather than only being a value translatable to a social currency.
On a more general level, there is a way we are stuck with ourselves that is not fully represented by mapping the roles we play. I am not suggesting the opposite approach of viewing experience only as an isolated event. I don't know what sufficient reason addresses the difference. I view the difference to be self-evident.
Quoting Baden
Quoting Baden
A philosopher by the name of George Allan wrote about the self in a similar vein. Here I provide a passage from his essay arguing against the existence of a separate self from what the environment, society, or culture has created. This is his attempt to explain that our understanding of the world, and the continuing shaping and reshaping of this understanding is first, and foremost, "mesocosmic: -- the world as we know it. It is the world that fits our size in all its practical glory. His critique against a metaphysical view of self:
I added bolding on some words for emphasis.
What do you think?
Sub specie aeternitatis.
Ok.
Quoting Caldwell
Thanks for the reference! I agree in that it is only from an analysis of the social that a coherent concept of self can arise. I dont see how we get at any kind of purely metaphysical self. To me the self (socially named as a "person") is a social atom, the most discrete functioning social unit. As long as you are a functioning social unit (e.g. physically discrete and linguistically located) and you can make a stable and clear judgement on who you are in contradistinction to others, you qualify as a self under my conception. So, a self is a set of identities that may work well together or may not, but that can at least coherently locate itself in its social structure (i.e. among other selves).
To further clarify, we can make an analogy between a self and a word, which locates itself within language due to having meaning in that language and as such is a discrete functioning unit within it. Selves, similarly, are discrete physical units that have social meaning and recognize themselves as selves through the lens of the social. Being discrete physically (in a loose sense, e.g. conjoined twins are not fully discrete physically but can qualify as selves) is then a necessary but not sufficient condition of selfhood. We do not qualify as selves when we are born nor when were insane. In the former case, we have yet to be integrated (through language) into the world of selves and in the latter we have disintegrated the self we no longer are a functioning social unit and have no stable or clear judgement on who we are (that does not preclude having an identity just that the identity cannot be stable because it is not reconciled socially the woman who believes she is Joan of Arc has an identity but can never function as that self (in our society) because (our) society rejects her self-judgement).
Note in the previous example, there is no metaphysical basis for deciding whether the woman who believes she is Joan of Arc is a self. The deciding factor is her capacity for functioning as a social unit with a socially reconciled clear and stable self-judgement. In a society whose culture considered it possible for historical figures to reincarnate, for example, our insane woman might no longer be insane, she could be a self, she could be Joan of Arc.
Quoting Baden
There are approaches to psychology which hew to objectively-based conditioning models to explain human motivation, identity formation and cognition. According to these models, humans can be arbitrarily shaped by social reinforcements ( operating on biological mechanisms of libidinal energy , drive reduction, release of endorphins , etc) to accept distorted ideas about themselves or the world, or to believe themselves to be happy. Implicit in this think is that there is an objective reality against which to measure such distortions of belief.
Then there are alternative psychological approaches that reject the idea of an objective reality. For instance , rather than agreeing with cognitive therapists like Beck or Ellis than mood disorders result from an inaccurate or irrational interpretation of reality, they argue that our interpretations of the world are not representations of an external object reality but a pragmatic guide to anticipating events that can be more or less adaptive and useful to us relative to our purposes. We dont construct our understanding of the world in isolation but through intersubjective discourse and action. As a result , many aspects of our thinking, our political ethical and other attitudes , are partially shared within a wider culture. But we never simply co-opt whole -hog any aspect of culture, as if a culture consisted of objective values that could have the identical meaning for any participant in that culture.
Quoting Baden
Is there a way to apply a social engineering technology to convince far-right Trump supporters to become CRT leftists? If one accepts the objective reinforcement model
of human behavior , then one might argue yes.
If one instead believes that one can only be shaped by those aspects of culture that are already consistent with ones personal system of understanding , then social engineering technology is as much a myth as stimulus-response reinforcement. It fails to take into account the autonomous self-consistency of a meaning-making organism. There are absolutely profound differences in ways of understanding every major aspect of the world , from the religious to the ethic to the political to the scientific , between the far right and the left , regardless of the fact that we are all supposed exposed to the same social engineering technologies and consumerist thinking.
Why is this the case? If we believe in the objective reinforcement model we probably will claim that these differences are superficial and are themselves manipulations of social engineering technologies or the indoctrinations of media. If we instead recognize experience as perspectivally subjective, then we will insist that it is never the same social engineering or consumerist thinking that you and I are experiencing.
Quoting Baden
There in no such thing as increased human flourishing, as though there were one objective linear scale of meaurement. For one thing, the understanding of what flourishing entails ,how and why it is important, changes from era to era, culture to culture and person to person.
Not too long ago in many Western cultures duty to others was considered a more important value than individual happiness. If more people today report psychological dysfunction than in earlier times this may be due less to the fact that we are more objectively unhappy than that we are more invested in using medicalizing terminology
We are more depressed than 19th century individuals because they didnt even use that concept to describe their moods. One was not depressed, one had melancholia , which meant something quite different.
If one wants to know how well a person is flourishing , one needs to find out from them what they want from
life in their own terms rather than pretending that some society-wide metric will have any meaning at all. The. one needs to find out if they feel they are achieving their goals relative to their own aims , and respect their answer rather than accusing them of being blindly indoctrinated by social engineering techniques or consumerist thinking.
w
:up:
Before we go further, I want to clear up a few points first as you seem to have gone off on an argument against your own projections or a generalised stereotype of a critical theorist rather than dealing with my central thesis in any kind of nuanced or charitable manner.
1) Human flourishing is not a myth but that does not mean it's easy to measure either. Call it societal health as determined through the well-being of its members if you want and "objective" metrics in determining societal health can include the results of qualitative studies that involve e.g. open-ended individual interviews. Trying to establish a basis for understanding whether our social circumstances are developing in a positive or negative direction through their effects on us doesn't have to equate to the exclusive use of top-down positivistic statistical methods or whatever you have in mind. Unless you can quote me where I've said anything incompatible with the above, you'll have to accept you're attacking a strawman there.
2) Social engineering is not a myth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(political_science). Again, you can call it something else if you want. The nomenclature is not the issue here. And the phrase "social engineering technologies" simply refers to technologies that can be used for social engineering or for mass social influence. Those are not a myth either. And it's rather ridiculous to suggest that a belief in the existence of e.g. Facebook as a social engineering technology equates to a belief that you can apply some magical technological trick to convince a Trump supporter to become a CRT leftist. My point would be more like social media presents us with the opportunity to try on and off a potentially conflicting array of identities rather than encouraging creativity and self-development thus potentially confusing us and weakening our ability for critical thought. Again, you seem to have a strange extremist strawman in your head that you are using my thread to bash. I'd rather you stick to my arguments, understand my thesis, and deal with that.
My thesis centres around concepts of the self and identity and the latter's apparent proliferation and commodification. There is certainly a Frankfurt School influence but that's not all there is. If you only want to attack critical theory or Marcuse or leftists in general or whoever, you are not fully engaging with my arguments but, as I said, largely bashing strawmen.
Do you think societal health is increasing or not? Why or why not?
(Again, there is absolutely no sense in which answering a simple question like this implies a disrespectful belief that everyone is blindly indoctrinated by consumerist thinking/absolutely controlled by social engineering or whatever other extemist view you'd like to accuse your imaginary political opponent of. )
If you asked whether my personal health was increasing or decreasing, I'd provide you my annual health reports and you could compare my blood test results, heart rates, urinalysis results, medications, diagnoses, etc.
That is, we would have objective criteria to compare.
If you want to do the same for society, you have to find objective measures and compare. Which criteria you choose and the respective weights you provide would be where some debate may lie.
But, if you create a societal health index, you will be able to measure year to year changes and could use it to promote certain policies, which I assume has been done.
What we might show is that all objective factors show improvement, but most think it's getting worse, just because we love to talk about the good old days.
For example: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/23/14062168/history-global-conditions-charts-life-span-poverty
It's definitely a difficult and potentially contentious question, but part of my point here is not that there were ever any good old days but that we should at least concern ourselves with the question of whether our quality of being (including material, mental, developmental factors etc.) is being promoted to a greater or lesser degree by our social conditions and what direction we're going in with regard to that. Social evolution under my conception is analagous to human evolution. There is no guarantee of progress even in the most advanced societies. We humans may get stupider over time and our societies may get stupider too. At least we can potentially do something about social stupidities. But only if we become aware of them. Refusing to countenance even the possibility of measuring social progress in any scientific manner is baffling to me.
Quoting Baden
I think theres no such thing as societal health for the same reason that there no such thing as societal belief system. Theres too much diversity in lifestyles, backgrounds and personal perspectives for such a concept to be useful or coherent. Its like those inane polls which supposedly tell us which countries are the happiest.
As I said before, these are not identities , they are roles. And to successfully play a role with respect to others is a very healthy and creative achievement, since it requires that we enrich our understanding of others and thus also ourselves. Taking on new roles with new people is not inherently conflictual but strengthens the flexibility and viability of our overall sense of self, which is essential for critical thought. It is only when we are unable to connect with others via a role( due to our failure to make sense of their motives and actions) that we experience conflict.
This is part of the reason I think you are misunderstanding my position, I originally defined identities in terms of roles in the OP. You talk as if I have missed this aspect completely.
Quoting Baden
What is your justification for making an absolute separation between the concepts of identity and role? i.e. How do you define each so that there is no overlap and what is your justification for such a definition? We better get that out of the way first. Then we can discuss the positives and negatives of taking on and discarding roles/identities, where there is definitely room for debate.
We will just have to let that one go then.
But that was my twofold point: (1) the question cannot be meaningfully answered scientifically unless we identify what we're measuring, and (2) there is a propensity to believe today's miseries are worse than prior ones for a whole host of reasons I'm sure, but one reason is that we only actually experience today's.
I cited to the article that showed that many criteria show socieral improvement over time.
The better analysis for me would be to ask what could society be like if we maximized our resources because that measures how well we're running the show. Whether things are better now than in the dark ages isn't helpful because we had a whole lot less to work with.
It's akin to the tragedy on the personal level where someone lives well below their potential, even though they may be outperforming someone very limited.
My personal opinion is if we've started to go backwards, it's very recently. I don't hold any particularly romantic notions about the dark ages. At the same time technological advance isn't necessarily facilitative of social advance where social advance equates to the well-being (in a broad and inclusive sense) of the individuals in a society. I see it more as a tool of social reproduction with well-being being generally incidental, particularly where such advance involves the proliferation and penetration of media. Anyhow, more on this tomorrow.
But you say here:
Quoting Baden
Which means your desire is for an empiricaly based claim, not just for a general sentiment. I think many believe things have deteriorated, but unless you can offer a before and after comparison, you can't describe what that deterioration is.
And you've got to insert some judgment here on what is worse and what it better.
If the preacher counts empty pews as his criterion for our going backwards, at least he has offered an empirical basis for his claim, even if I think his religious attendance offers no proof of going backward, but I do get what he's saying.
So this now will be me prodding you and annoying you to list your criteria for how we're regressing and then I'll Google your criteria and see if they actually are getting worse.
My sentiment, which I'll express, is that the world is moving in a positive direction. I see areas in need of course, but I see those working to improve it, which gives reason for my sentiment, and is why there is a certain irony in your statement.
It's as if someone complains to me that no one cares for the poor anymore as he helps the poor. His statement contradicts what is revealed before me. So every time you complain about the lack of X in our world and make efforts for others to see that, you move the world in a positive direction, so you defeat your argument by making it.
There is no way out of my positivity trap.
This describes the same thing as what you observed Baden is writing: you THINK many do this or that, but you can't count them or establish a proportion based on empirical studies.
Quoting Hanover
And yet you don't help to move the world towards more empiricism to support unsupported opinions.*
* Sez GMBA in his empirically unsupported opinion.
Briefly, any manner of scientific approach is better than pure assertion but I wouldn't expect that to yield an uncontentious result in a general sense. It may though, help us challenge certain assumptions. The conversation I had with @Josh centred around me trying to get him to at least countenance the idea that social progress isn't a given either in theoretical or practical terms, to help justify to him even the need for a thesis like mine.
He's closed off that road completely, but my thesis doesn't rely on an acceptance that society must be moving backwards, particularly because of subjective factors that come into play in that judgement. I understand that dependent on our values, material or technological progress might e.g. be more or less justificatory of other problems it may cause. And I don't want to get bogged down in a debate with you over particulars that focus on a broader thesis of social progress that overcoats the more specific problem I'm trying to identify here.
I might be willing to pursue that with you somewhat though if you actually have read the OP by now and have any interest at all in what I'm saying rather than a simple urge just to inject your own brand of positivity into the conversation. I have a brand of positivity too. My brand says that there is a wealth of unlocked potential in people, particularly creative potential, and many of our confusions and anxieties aren't due to personal deficits or inevitabilities of social conditions but contingent factors that remain in place due to our inability to believe we can challenge them, due to how they obscure themselves from us. Not necessarily in any conscious or conspiratorial way but largely due to the mechanics of how social reality works and reinforces itself.
Scroll up. I posted to a site supporting my claim.
I watch them like a fucking hawk. Otherwise you end up believing in better, and thinking your worth it, and that your house is full of nasty germs and smells that you can't smell, but everyone else can, and that's why yo have no friends.
Maybe I was mislead by your wording... you said you "thought" this or that. Whereas you KNEW this or that. You'd seen the charts.
No problem, I admit you're right.
I'll concede the point that engrained worldviews impede objective analysis, particularly as it relates to optimistic versus pessimistic outlooks. It's very obvious here how that impacts many posters.
It's the source of the confirmation bias I would expect to creep in if we attempted an empirical analysis of the issue, with our looking at examples of social change over time. To some all would be proof of positivity. Others the opposite. To others all data would conceal inconclusive nuance.
I'll concede too that refusal to consider the possibility we're headed in the wrong direction and insist we can't get things wrong is a foolish approach. As they say, the pessimists came to America, the optimists to the gas chamber.
I do though think we're on the path generally to getting it right, but that doesn't mean I refuse to believe we might have diverted on a terribly wrong path.
This point is why if we wish to turn from philosophical to empirical, long term change must be analyzed. I realize though that the thrust of your thesis isn't what is, but is about a certain type of what you see cas a pervasive personality,
But we need thise people too in our perfectly constructed universe. :wink:
Quoting Baden
Having had a creative burst, you adopted some crazy writing style that couldn't hold my attention, so I waited until you started talking normal before I engaged, and now you chastise me for my well laid plan.
Lackaday..
That's my new resigned expression. Expect to see it often.
Quoting Baden
No question what you say here is true. I see my job as a lawyer as less me having great expertise (which I of course have in spades), but just as stepping forward and articulating their position and refusing to relent. What people accept as their fate due to reluctance to challenge their designated place in society is the source of such abuse. These limitations are engrained in their morality, where they truly believe a life of compliance and submission are righteous.
It's their obedient acceptance of the slave morality by their masters.
Lackaday.
Quoting Baden
I missed your inclusion of the word role in the context of identity. Let me share psychologist George Kellys understanding of role , which is where Im
getting mine.
?We have insisted that the term role be reserved for a course of activity which is played out in the light of ones construction of one or more other persons construct systems. When one plays a role, one behaves according to what one believes another person thinks, not merely according to what the other person appears to approve or disapprove. One plays a role when one views another person as a construer. This, of course, is a restricted definition of the term. It is the definition specifically used in the psychology of personal constructs. The term is used much more broadly elsewhere. The concept of individual suggestibility need not be considered, as it once was, the sole basis for a social psychology.
For Kelly , the difference between identity and role is that persona identity , the self , is the more or less stable sense of ones own values, how one understands oneself in relation to and apart from all those who play a part in ones life. Personality is hierarchically organized. At the subordinate end are peripheral constructs involved in interpreting everyday events. At the superordinate level of the self are core constructs concerning our central beliefs and values.
Core constructs are those which govern a persons maintenance processesthat is, those by which he maintains his identity and existence. In general, a healthy persons mental processes follow core structures which are comprehensive but not too permeable. Since they are comprehensive, a person can use them to see a wide variety of known events as consistent with his own personality.
Emotional turmoil consists of those events ( guilt, anxiety, threat) which throw our core sense of identity into crisis. Not knowing who we are anymore, not knowing what we stand for, is a situation of profound psychologicalcrisis and dysfunction. We can play an indefinite number of roles with other people without destabilizing our core identity. On the contrary, that stable identity ( which is not a static thing or even a narrative but the ability to assimilate a wide range of events in a way that maintains our self-integrity) is what allows us to play so many roles.
Occasionally we have to undergo a major revision of our core identity, which is potentially profoundly traumatic.
This is a common theme in contemporary philosophy. Some articulate it in terms of social power hegemonies which entrap us in their mechanics of thought( Foucault , Critical theory) , and some focus on ingrained personal habits (James). Either way, finding a way to step outside of the frame we are enmeshed in , or. at least to see the frame as a frame, is a necessary pre-condition for envisioning truly new possibilities for oneself.
Arthur Miller: Death of Salesman
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark
Shakespeare: Hamlet
Quoting Hanover
I appreciate your honesty :smile: . So, let me steer this back to what I was saying in the OP and maybe expand on it and (I hope) put it in a more easily digestible form. It might take more words and be less precise and risk labouring the point, but anyhow.
Lets zoom in a little on the mechanisms of what Ive referred to as social engineering technologies whose proliferation and development forms a large part of recent social change (and again the nomenclature is not whats important, just that these are technologies that clearly have important social consequences in terms of how we relate to ourselves and others). Id like to draw a line of reasoning from the economic logic of such platforms through their behavioural and psychological effects and tie this to the conception of identity and self Im putting forward to demonstrate that the overall dynamic may be undesirable in important ways.
So, social media companies, for example, make money in proportion to the effectiveness by which they direct our attention and behaviours. This is not a conspiracy theory but simple economic logic applied to the nature of their business.
The economic model of such technologies centres around engagement. Engagement can be determined through social penetration (number of accounts as a proportion of potential accounts), individual breadth of attention (amount of time spent using the service as a proportion of potential time using the service), and individual depth of attention (amount of time spent engaging with specific economically focused aspects of the service (clicking on ads etc) as a proportion of time spent using the service). The model flows more or less linearly through these categories of engagement seeking to transform awareness of the service into penetration of the service into usage of the service and, ultimately, into engagement with the economically focused aspects of the service in order to achieve profit from such.
As the nature of the service is one whereby its users promote and engage with the identities of themselves and others, engagement is largely engagement with identity. Thats at least to say there is a process of identity creation and experimentation that accompanies engagement with such platforms. (Im aware of Joshs objections here in terms of his conception of roles, which Ill try to deal with in more detail in a separate post).
One consequence of this is that theres a tendency for everyone to become their own propagandist: social validation becomes a game of online identity formation that encourages a view of our identities as a means to attract positive social responses. But theres an inherent problem here: Identities becomes tools to achieve likes or replies, but due to their sticky nature, our commodified identity masks, so flexible and convenient in our online world, run up against obstacles in real-life worlds they werent designed for or due to deeper sets of dispositions and orientations in the self they are not necessarily compatible with.
I dont see this as simple role-playing because the impetus for taking on the role is a real psychological and physiological reward, and this reward, the hit we receive from being socially validated imprints on us the means whereby we achieved such social validation, i.e the actions in the form of engagement activities that caused it, in a self-reinforcing manner. Where behaviours are self-reinforcing, they form patterns, which are interpreted consciously through the lens of identity. We become what we are conditioned to do.
From such self-reinforcing commodification of identity, its a short step to postulating that this process also facilitates a generalised consumer sentiment that further benefits the social engineering system in terms of its potential for profit and therefore further empowers its technological refinement and effectiveness.
This is to present a critique of the notion of free-floating transferable disposable identities (commodified identities) that can become sticky identities formed purely on the basis of social validation that is mediated through technologies for which our personal selves, or makeups, attributes, and dispositions are seen exclusively through the lens of opportunities for processing as profit. And, insofar as they are not so processable, seen as obstacles to be overcome by ever more effective (invasive) refinements of the technology instead of, more appropriately, as resources that are recognized as positive ends in themselves. In other words, the instrumental force of a consumer orientation channelled through technological progress can (maybe) result in mass individual regression if the worth of the individual is measured from the perspective of their depth of self-development rather than simply their degree of participation or even material success in the social system they find themselves in.
But even from the point of view of material resources, can we not sense a problem here? A continuous reward for the proliferation or focus on socially-validated identities divorced from the self-provision of the material necessities of life is hardly conducive to settling the self into producing wealth for itself when such a process is based on short term validation in a free-floating environment divorced in the abstract from notions of real material need and so likely distractive from them.
So, the idea is that social validation in its physiological form conditions behavioural response such that that behavioural response leads towards action that further develops impersonal identities (in terms of their relationship to our unique abilities and dispositions) that may move us further from developing a sustainable level of stability, happiness, self-satisfaction, and even material wealth.
We may or may not agree on that but maybe we can agree at least on the possibility that certain social technological forms simply by their nature and not necessarily through any greater conspiratorial design result, in their most pervasive forms, in a flattening out of our relationships with identity such that identity becomes a means for quick physiological validations rather than something that should have a deeper relationship to the self mediated by the presence of our physical bodies, their particular forms, libidinal organisations, and histories?
As an aside, psychologically, its a fairly well established theory that the gap between an idealised image of the self and the actual reality of the self as experienced day to day is a cause of stress and anxiety proportional to the size of that gap. This may be translatable in terms of its propensity to cause anxiety into the gap between an everyday self and identities that form through social validation in a technological context such that those identities are set apart from the self, but at the same time are stickier than idealised identities of the past which had less potential for immediate social validation due to the absence of the technologically mediated means to do so.
Another issue to touch on is the development of socially validated political positioning that becomes entrenched to the point that any identified political opponents reasoning is rejected on the basis of their politics rather than on a critical analysis of the reasoning itself. Its clear that, in general, politics has become more polarised in many advanced nations and were obliged to examine why this may be the case if we wish to slow or reverse this process. As one of the major changes in the recent past that correlates with such polarisation has been the rapid development of social technologies, there is room to theorise their involvement in such polarisation.
So, my concerns, youve stated you share in at least some sense, centre around making the most of our social/individual resources regardless of whether the arbitrary social organisation finds itself in alignment or in opposition to such a goal. And we can look at the situation both from the point of view of a generalised material progress and also from the point of view of an internal personal progress that are not necessarily in conflict with each other, but that social forces, particularly in the form of ever more pervasive and invasive media technologies, may put in conflict with each other. Its that I would like to oppose, and the further political polarisation that results in the lack of mutual understanding and cooperation on issues of interest to anyone that believes selves can and should be developed in ways that are not always immediately recognizable and valued from a social perspective.
As a caveat, we can make a distinction between different types of social platforms and their methods of validation/identity reinforcement. Validation that requires effortful thought forces an engagement with the self in a more sustainable way than validation that results from merely propagandising ourselves, attaching ourselves to whatever ideas are popular among our social connections, or entertaining others through shitposting etc. I think TPF is an example of such a platform as people generally gain respect through their intellectual efforts. Of course, then theres the Shoutbox. :scream:
Anyhow, effortful cognitive engagement with ones circumstances as they apply towards the experience of the self is also a means by which valuable cultural artefacts are not only appreciated but produced. The recognition of a separation of the self and its social environment, of some inevitable social alienation, is productive in fostering the creation of culturally valuable relations defined in terms of their ability to encourage positive social change through transcending and challenging cultural norms. Insofar as this is facilitated and encouraged, not all implementations of social technology are bad and we neednt throw the baby out with the bathwater. Go, TPF!
So, I hope this is enough that I not be misunderstood as a Luddite or Cassandra or whatever. Rather, I want to say that the intersection of technology, economics, and consumerism may be creating a mode of interaction with the self that is in its most pervasive form diseased and culturally destructive, not because of any one individual, firm, or type of technology but because we have certain vulnerabilities in our process of identity formation that allow us to be put in circular processes of reward that inhibit our ability to create sustainable stable selves, and as our values are socially defined, our particular potentialities may become further divorced from our awareness over time because it may be that is how society has come to function, i.e. as a means to inhibit authentic self-development in favour of instrumental self-relationships focused on the same type of reward mechanisms that make us want to buy Nike trainers or the latest iphone.
In short, relations that are inimical to the development of character, which is not the same thing as identity because it suggests a particular mode of instantiation of identity that is strong and stable. Character is what happens when identities work together in a coherent and sustainable way within selves. Character, if anything, allows for the resistance to identity structures that offer temporary physiological validation. It doesnt have to be good or bad in itself but it is at least a way for us to immunise ourselves against social processes that themselves seek to immunise themselves from the types of social change only characters are strong enough to bring about.
Hope that clears things up a bit.
Quoting Baden
Quoting Baden
Quoting Baden
I want to distinguish my view of validation from a reinforcement approach in which validation takes place via a physiological reward mechanism.
George Kelly writes In some respects validation in personal construct theory takes the place of reinforcement, although it is a construct of quite a different order, Validation is the relationship one senses between anticipation and realization, whereas in conventional theory reinforcement is a value property attributed to an event.
In Kelly's approach, even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture.
Perhaps we can see that it is not so much that the culture has forced conformity upon him as it is that his validational material is cast in terms of the similarities and contrasts offered within and between segments of his culture. (Kelly 1955, p. 93).
It may be difficult to follow this notion of culture as a validational system of events. And it may be even more difficult to reconcile with the idea of cultural control what we have said about man not being the victim of his biography. The cultural control we see is one which is within the client's own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and clients manage it in a tremendous variety of ways.
Social validation for Kelly is not a physiological hit, an imprinting , a conditioning, but the result of a match between our expectations and events. It is only important to fit into a group that we already identify with in some manner , on some basis. What is validated or invalidated for us takes place on the basis of its relevance for our own purposes and goals. Our identity has a functional unity to it based on meaningful relevance, rather than being glued together by jolts of externalized reinforcements
Thanks for the Kelly reference. I'll look into this more and try to come up with a response, probably tomorrow.
This is largely true when everything is as it should be. However I think the OP has a point about how this functional unity can breakdown, and has been breaking down for many recently. Even within Kelly's framework, identity is dependent on external reinforcement so far as that the external social segments provide a person with validation material, rather than alienation.
One example is when social groups are polarized to the point where you are told "pick a side - if you are not with us, you are against us." A person may soon find that groups that shared their identity alienate them, and the opposite polarized group are even worse. Thus leading to a confusion about identity influenced by external sources.
Or to make the same point using Kelly's terminology - it is a problem when the validation material available from the the polarized segments of culture offer more alienation than validation for some people.
Quoting PhilosophyRunner
Yes, but keep in mind that for Kelly its not the events themselves that are validating or invalidating. They only provide the raw substrate of our experience.We are always in motion. That is, our experience is always changing , so there is always validation material for us to make something of. Our challenge is to make sense of the new in ways that are intelligible to us , that are consistent on some level with our identity. Its what we are able to make of events , how we construe them that determines whether they are validating or alienating, not what they supposedly are in themselves, and that varies from person to person within the same consumerist society.
Quoting PhilosophyRunner
Lets say we find that members of our family support a political orientation that puts them in an opposite camp from us. They may feel alienated from us based on this political difference, but that doesnt necessarily mean that we feel alienated from them. Its not the political difference in itself that causes feelings of alienation but the inability to understand why the other person believes what they believe . In other words, our discovery of their outlook disturbs us because the person we thought we knew is now someone we no longer recognize. Our former scheme of understand has been invalidated We feel that we know longer understand them and no longer trust them. But it is possible for us to empathize with their viewpoint from their perspective, without coming over to their side. In this case we can maintain our political difference without feeling alienated from them. Our construal of them has not been invalidated. We get why, given their framework of understanding, they had no choice but to embrace the political position they did.
Quoting Baden
Yet in your OP, you also said:
Quoting Baden
It seems we fail to connect in this train of thought what George Allan was saying. He is pointing out the flaw in our thoughts in our search for one identity conflicting with other identities. The error in thinking is this, which was included in the passage I gave you earlier:
.
(And btw, you write like him)
Putting it all together, it doesn't matter whether you say that the self you're talking about is within the social context, not metaphysical. But the point is, you are talking about the self-conflictual selves -- a self defeating its self, or something. It means you are positing a self that is unique and apart from the other social selves. This is a foundational view of self, social or metaphysical. You are looking for a transcendental self. You want some stable self that transcends all other social changes and complexities.
Is this a correct reading of your thesis?
Absolutely. However there are circumstance where these external circumstances are challenging or contradictory enough that that it becomes difficult for a person to validate their identity with any group. My assertion is that this is happening to a greater extent in today's society than say a couple of decades ago.
Quoting Joshs
True for a family member. But in that case the dominant identity would be of them being family, rather than their political identity. So the alienation is not happening in the dominant identity in that group - for that to happen a person would have to find their goals do not align with their family member being family. This certainly would cause an identity crisis - but it is not the crisis I intended to highlight with my example.
I might have been overly vague in my example as I wanted to generalize and not fixate on any single political or social issue. Here is another, perhaps clearer example:
There are two political parties X and Y. Jack's goals match reasonably well with X and he identifies as an Xer. Happy times.
Now the parties become more polarised. Jack's purpose no longer matches well with either party. Even worse, a lot of Xer now deplore him and his goals. Yet Y still does not align with his goals any better than previously. Jack is now a politically alienated person, who has an identity crisis in a portion of his social groups.
Note that does not mean he has no identity any longer - he may have a number of identities around family, work, etc. But a part of him is no longer fulfilled and he no longer has an identity in that area.
While I used a political party identity in the example above, I don't intend to limit my point to that - I just thought it would be the easiest example. I have seen it happen with work, gender, etc
I think were on the same page. As you pointed out, I stick to the discourse of the social sciences; part of my self-identification places my thought in the realm of sociology and linguistics, so that when I talk about a self that has the ability to resolve and resist conflicts: that has integrated layers of past experiences into a stable structure of character; that is to a large degree immunized against social influences; whose dominant orientation (along the lines of Joshs Kelly reference) is to mould the social interpretively in accordance with its own dispositions rather than be moulded by it in self-conflicting ways, I frame that perspective in terms of an idealized self that must by its nature be in some opposition to the social, but is nevertheless, being a self, still interpretable as a social unit and must be to function socially (to be sane).
Im reminded here of Paul Newmans quote A man with no enemies is a man with no character. We might say A person for whom the social is not (in some sense) an enemy is a person without character. This is a person swallowed up in the social, subject to its whims, whose ego confabulates narratives to obscure its situation, a person, who, though they may consider themselves a multiple role-player, even a skilful one, has no capacity for truly independent action to resist the social, and is not fooling the social through their masks but is being fooled into thinking they are in control of the masks they wear and their effects, i.e. a person who may perceive themselves as lying to the social but are helplessly transparent in the face of it. This dynamic may be interpreted in some philosophical discourses as a failure to acknowledge the existence of a metaphysical or transcendental self and thus close off avenues to its realisation, or in religious discourse as lack of belief in and/or separation from God.
So, while under my conception, we don't reach all the way through the context of the social to a truly metaphysical level of self, the general contextualisation of the self in the face of the social as a self facing both threats and opportunities re its healthy realization, and much of the practical consequences of this situation, remain the same. What would form a true contrast here could be e.g. postmodern notions of identity play whereby the self is flattened out into some kind of dopamine machine around which the pinball of discourse races and the game is to get as many little lights of experience to flash up before the ball drops back into its hole of underlying meaningless. And then do it all again and accept that as all there is.
Is your opening OP concerned with, at least in part, the subtle ways that high-tech industrial societies subvert organized opposition (specifically, opposition to its meta-narratives for GDP productivity), both individual and collective, with incentives for egotistical self-involvement compatible with its baseline goal, promotion of materialistic consumerism. Under this influence, the united front against the tyranny of the elite ruling class is supplanted by being "cool," which means competing for the top spot amongst the property-laden, gadget-crazy, leisure time centered ruling class parading their egos across mass media via movies and music videos?
This is certainly one result of the process I'm describing (part of the immunization of society against internal opposition) which is that the commodification of identity proceeds through creating the need for a self by exploiting and widening the gap between self and identity/ies. This to me is the logical conclusion of the intersecion of invasive social media technologies, the profit motive, and consumerism.
Consumerism advances through the creation of new needs. If you want to sell deodorant, you must create a need for it. One way to do this is to make people feel unhappy with their natural odours, regardless of any reasonable justification for this. Marketers fill the gap here between reason and consumption. This is not particularly controversial or even always bad if looked at from certain perspectives (technological progress, economic growth etc).
But if you want to sell selves in the form of identities in order to promote engagement with social platforms, the process should facilitate making people unhappy with their selves in a more holistic sense. This does seem undesirable and it's not hard to see how keeping up with the Jones's might become destructive in an online environment where as you so well put it:
Quoting ucarr
So, if we accept the need for a stable and strong self is more sustainably and organically met through effortful cognitive engagement with social forces--such that the result is more skewed towards character in its general sense--rather than through quick easy fixes facilitated by the endless roles/characters that media try to sell us then the curent situation is at best well short of what we should be aiming for and at worst a self-fulfilling process that may have very negative consequences for social cohesion.
Again, the extent of this being a problem is definitely debateable. But it's at the same time, imo, worth paying attention to.
Everyone is a salesman Everyone wants us to embrace what theyre offering: religion , political ideology, their art, music, science, toilet paper products. We are bombarded on all sides by those whispering in our ear or shouting at us, taking us by the hand , bribing or threatening us , or even lying to us. And I wouldnt have it any other way. The more the merrier. Human beings are very good at filtering, selecting and interpreting. We already do this at the most basic perceptual level. Every moment we are deluged with sensory stimulation of all kinds begging us to pay attention to them. Imagine how alienated and confused we would become if each stimulus that knocked at the door of consciousness was embraced as a new self-identity. We would be nothing but a series of random and conflicting selves.
But we are pattern-forming creatures, and this means that we either discard or dont even see most of what impinges on us from the sensory world. Only what can be assimilated to pre-existing pattens we have constructed exists for us. So everything that we do take notice of at either a conscious or pre-conscious level is assimilated to a self , enriching, strengthening and diversifying its bounds.
In order for our self-identity to evolve we need to encourage ever more sophisticated forms of social
influence from all quarters , including entreaties to buy, buy, buy from profit-making interests as their pitches evolve along with the rest of culture. I want them to try and convince , cajole , seduce, condition and manipulate me in every way they can think of. To the extent they are successful, it will be for the same reasons that a piece of music or philosophy convinces me to embrace it, because it is assimilated into a meaningful pattern for me and therefore enhances the health of my identity.
By way of clarification, is it your view (based on the literature) that when we embrace a philosophical position, say physicalism - we tend to embrace that which we are 'primed' already to accept on the grounds of pre-existing patterns we have built which are recognizable to us? Is it possible for people to accept completely new ideas - would such ideas even be comprehensible?
Quoting Joshs
Interesting - as a way of encountering the unfamiliar and to enlarge the possibilities?
I'm the reverse - I don't have a TV, have no social media, avoid the news, and only socialize if I have to. I shut out the world - and noise - wherever I can. :wink:
There is a difference of nomenclature and of emphasis, but is there necessarily an unresolvable clash? Kelly seems to conceive of roles similarly to how I conceive of identities. I think this is reinforced by a comment about him here:
some of Kelly's inspiration for the theory of personal constructs came from a close friend of his. Namely, this friend had been an actor in some drama in college, and for two or three weeks he really got into his character and lived it as it was the real him. Kelly, unlike many people who would see this only as a sheer affectation, thought this was the expression of his real self and the behavior was authentic
This seems a good example of effortful cognitive engagement with an identity/role in a healthy way, in this case in the service of art.
And as @PhilosophyRunner pointed out, the description of the process of identity formation you put forward is apt for healthy interactions with society, but both PhilosophyRunner and I see these interactions as becoming increasingly unhealthy particularly as they are mediated through technologies that were not available for Kelly to analyse. Still, even in the absence of those technologies, his description of how social interaction may fail the individual sounds similar to how I would characterise some of the effects of the commodification of identity through e.g. social media.
Also, from the wiki page:
"The fragmentation corollary: "a person may successively employ a variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other."
Disordered constructs are those in which the system of construction is not useful in predicting social events and fails to change to accommodate new information. In many ways, Kelly's theory of psychopathology (or mental disorders) is similar to the elements that define a poor theory. A disordered construct system does not accurately predict events or accommodate new data.
This potenitally equates to me as an eroded self or a self in which the gap between the core and the peripheral has become too large and has destabilized the whole due to inner self conflicts/incompatible identities or roles.
Quoting Joshs
Core constructs that are "comprehensible but not too permeable" are the mark of the healthy self analagous to the developed character I earlier discussed. When they become incomprehensible or too permeable, theres a problem.
Quoting Joshs
Its probably true that we can theoretically play an indefinite number of roles without destabilizing our identity but whats important practically in my conception is that these roles are compatible with our core selves and are developed more or less organically rather than arbitrarily and invasively, the latter which I've hypothesized can lead to the psychologically dysfunctional situation described above.
So, Kelly approaches the issue through a focus on autonomous individuals and their individual interpetative apparatus rather than on social units dominated by social forces. To me (unless I'm missing some further context that would indicate otherwise), you can look at things from either angle and still come out with similar results.
Hmm, I'm not so sure about that. Are you in marketing and advertising yourself by any chance? :lol:
:up: In general, a consumer society is not an Orwellian nightmare. But social media can make it so.
TPF excepted, of course. :smile:
Quoting Tom Storm. Actually, Im pretty similar. I have a tv but only use it to watch old
movies, and completely avoid social media and news except for top headlines. But thats consistentn with what I was saying. I welcome attempts by the world to knock on my door and offer me their wares, and I selectively pick and choose what works within my life and what doesnt.
Absolutely. I am marketing, packaging and advertising my brand of philosophy to you. Will it get under your skin or will it be deemed inconsistent with the identity of your sense-making system?
But we do have a metaphysical conception of self. And I disagree with Allan. The reason why you recognize this discordance within the social context is because you believe in a metaphysical self, too. But somehow, to some, it has become fashionable to discredit this argument.
( :wink: Lol. A true blue Cartesian here).
:up:
Quoting Joshs
Not at all. Judge them by what they do, not what they say! It seems your behaviour towards the types of media I've criticized is almost exaxtly the same as my own. You largely reject it and don't engage with it. So, you have a well developed enough personal immune system not to be taken in by aspects of media that may be damaging or undesirable. If this were the case with everyone, such media would no longer exist and a large part of the problem I identified would be solved! :party:
We certainly differ in terms of theoretical stance and attitude; yours is more ironical and playful than mine. E.g. you frame even philosophical debate in our current context in consumerist terms, which makes a kind of a Frankfurt School type point re cultural degradation: debate reduced to marketing, art reduced to entertainment etc. not because of any inherent deficit but due to the context in which it occurs. But I don't really know where to locate you there.
Anyhow, I like Kelly and intend to read more of him. I'm also reading a book called "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam, which examines, using the concept of social capital, patterns of community breakdown in the U.S. up until the period I'm focusing on. I might try to work some of that in here too as it seems relevant.
Though I will strenuously deny cartesianism if ever accused of it, I will gladly join forces with the cartesians in common ideological combat against social forces that I consider destructive. (This type of thing happens in comic books a lot and they always win, so it's gotta work). :wink:
I think there are now new standards for what it means to be "deep, thoughtful, in touch with oneself". It's not that old-fashioned European ideal anymore.
Let's not forget that the self-help movement has made self-improvement into another commodity, yet another thing to consume. And the ease and flexibility with which matters of self and identity are approached in the self-help movement suggest that old ways of thinking about them just don't apply anymore. At least not in discourse with the proponents of self-improvement.
Quoting Baden
It seems the modern way is to externalize conflict (blaming others, demonizing others), the normalization of hatred and contempt, drug use is for the purpose of pleasure and peak experiences and not as self-medication. There is a strong sense of "everyone is solely responsible for themselves". In short, narcissism and sociopathy are becoming normalized. And with this as the new normal every other standard needs to be recalibrated.
Quoting Baden
According to current models of immunity, our body remembers and then detects and attacks specific contentful markers belonging to foreign particles. The features of invaders it recognizes are assumed to be independent of the nature of the immune system itself. The system mirrors or represents to itself what it looks for as harmful or benign in its environment. The harm or neutrality is in the foreign content that the system internally represents. Harmful entities have different characteristics in themselves than benign ones.
For Kelly, the harm is not in the stimulus , but in the relation between the stimulus and the interpretive structure of the construer. Specifically, one doesnt first recognize a stimulus and then determine it as harmful or benign. Something is only experienced as harmful to the cognitive system to the extent that it is not coherently and intelligibly recognizable. Harmful stimulation can never evade detection. Such a stimulus would simply go unnoticed and have no effect on our thinking or feeling. Something is only felt as harmful to the extent that our attempts to integrate it fails , and it is experienced as confused , chaotic, unpredictable. Harm from a cognitive perspective is a breakdown in effective construing, not a characteristic of a stimulus in itself.
I should add that Kellys constructivist approach runs into a lot of opposition , not just from critical theory but postmodern, post structuralist theory. Not too many today are willing to deny that we can be swayed in one direction or another through influences we are not conscious of. An interesting g difference between poststructuralists and Frankfurt school types is that the former dont believe that power is invested in individuals or groups but circulates among us. The stability of social formations and epistemes works reciprocally with the stability of self-identity, each determining, reinforcing and altering the other. Subjects and identities are temporary nodes or intersections of the circulation of power within the wider community.
I don't see anything in Kelly's theory to suggest this type of influence doesn't obtain at least to some degree (and I don't think any major theorist post WWII suggests this). I understand Kelly as proposing that personal construct systems are formed over time in a manner whereby the integration of new constructs is expected to occur proportionately to their compatibility with the modalities inherent in the system already developed. But this is not fully determinative of their directionality. What determines their directionality is circumscribed by available stimuli. We can easily imagine starting points for construct systems that become self-propelling according to dominant discourses which present themselves as validatory tools. And the fact that the self is negotiated with the social in different ways according to its particular make-up does not preclude it being swayed by social influences in a way it's not conscious of, not least because our interpetative mechanisms naturally confabulate reasons for our behaviour compatible with self-understandings that are by their nature subjective methods of social coping rather than objective truths.
So, conceptualising individuals as naive scientists or more malleable social units does not prescribe results but processes, processes which are dependent on social contexts for their functioning. Social heterogeneity is crucial here and not just in the superficial sense of the proliferation of ideological goods for sale but also in the diversity of available ideological standpoints concerning both individual self-relations and social-self relations. A self that contextualizes itself according to dominant discourses of self and social relations tends to set for itself a direction that reinforces such discourses regardless of whether the process is self-negotiated because the construct system gradually fulfils the logic of the context in which it is constructed.
Central to your theory then is the primacy of "character," which isn't fully defined, but the term means in the vernacular someone who adheres to certain moral standards regardless of external influences, exhibiting a certain integrity to principle. Maybe the Platonic virtues of wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance satisfy your definition.
It should come as no surprise that your position (here on a philosophy forum) is philosophical-centric, even positing the users here as separated from the vacuous masses. The concept of separateness from the mundane is a workable secular definition of the sacred. That is, you are pointing to a higher purpose, which you do describe as a development of the self, which equates to a declaration that a certain tragedy exists in someone not living to their full potential. You point out that the tragedy is typically measurable in terms of the lack of happiness and fulfillment such a person will experience, but I'd go further and suggest the tragedy would exist regardless of whether we could show a measurable negative byproduct of a person not living up to the potential of his creation, but that has to do with my perhaps idiosyncratic and extreme views regarding the sanctity of humans.
Regardless of how I might be projecting well beyond what you meant to convey, I do think we share the same concerns when we look at the Kardashians as too many people's role models, where they believe that standard is perfectly fine and that some sort of fulfillment or happiness can be found emulating that. And so you might ask why some migrate to that modeling and others don't. Is it just a matter of genetics or family upbringing, or, as is often the case, was it formed in struggle? There is a noticeable correlation between those who have suffered and immunity from pettiness, likely arising from a revelation of a secret knowledge of what is truly important and meaningful.
Where we place the credit for those immune isn't clear, but you do place the blame for those afflicted directly on society's shoulders. It is certainly something that is arising from society, but society is reducible to its members, so that question is who are these corrupting entities? It is likely such corrupting entities have always existed, but I suppose your theory is that they were always sufficiently suppressed and controlled, but with the advent of social media, they have risen to power and overwhelmed traditional value systems such that it has run amuck.
Before I read anything you wrote, I threw out an accusation of your harkening back to the good old days, which isn't entirely inaccurate, but what do you offer as a solution? If we buy into the ultimate power of Darwinism, then you would expect those who are buying in to an inferior path to eventually be relegated to the dust bin. That is, if you are correct that you've identified a devolution in societies, then the theory of evolution would demand those losers drop from the radar. The other possibility is that you're not seeing a devolution, but just a distressing evolution, meaning the adherents of Karsahianism will ultimately prevail. I don't think that, which is why I remain optimistic in terms of what you've identified. I cannot believe that the path of accepting societal influence without resistance is the path to success or describes how the future will look.
Sure, and that may be characterized as an elitist attitude, but as long as we maintain any notion of objective values (as you clearly do) such that we consider, e.g. intelligence to be better than stupidity, knowledge better than ignorance, reflection better than mere reaction, and think in terms of potentiality, we can conceive of the danger of a dominant discourse that seeks to monopolize social capital such that stupidity, ignorance and superficiality have real social rewards (both from a short term physiological perspective and through loger term networking of relationships etc) where these social rewards are themselves directed by the profit motive of a technologized social universe for which our potentialities and the values they represent are irrelevant except insofar as they are monetarily exploitable.
The consequences of this attempted monopolization of culture by its lowest common denominator may range from the relatively harmless, e.g. social capital gained from knowing what the Kardashians are wearing this month, to the clearly harmful, e.g. social capital gained from Tik Tok challenges that get people killed. The salient point though is that, from the point of view of social discourses or ideologies, we are only means to ends, i.e. the reproduction of such contexts, rather than ends in ourselves. Insofar, then, as we perceive ourselves as the latter, it makes sense to render explicit the functioning of these forces and critically analyse our relationship to them, not only in the simple guise of Kelly's naive scientists who react bidirectionally on the basis of already internalized dispositions which are inevitably themselves a result of a process of cultural negotiation (but which process, as I've contended above, is not necessarily conscious or self-directed), but also as culturally educated "self-builders" whose orientation to social capital is mediated by an awareness that the accrual of such is not an ideologically neutral enterprise but one suffused in social forces for which self-obscurity may be an interest.
Quoting Hanover
Education, particularly early education. The practicalities of that are difficult. An education that undermines the society it functions in, even if only to improve it, is an almost paradoxical notion.
Edit: Contemporary early education is obsessed with validating students' immersion in dominant discourses and their personal psychologies as circumscribed by these under the guise of sensitivity, understanding, and kindness. But while the "It's fine to be this..." "It's fine to be that..." liberal philosophy of education may build a certain social confidence, it's a confidence that's not directed to true diversity as I see it. True diversity can only be achieved by an encouragement to look for things that are not fine, but that are still presented as such, i.e. in a critical engagement with the social that fosters a desire to change it rather than fit in or be seen to be fitting in to it.
Just a quick note because your point re metaphysics remains interesting, especially in light of some recent reading I've been doing: To some degree my attitude towards metaphysics is a symptom of the issue Im describing which subsists in an ever widening gap between science and art from which we draw our contemporary form of reason and that places these orientations towards truth on opposite poles of an irrational world from which each necessarily denigrates the other by virtue of this placement, with philosophy mediating uneasily from the inner latitudes. In another sense, a certain distance towards metaphysics in so far as it is contemporaneously understood is facilitative of attempts towards bridging such a gap. But either way, there's no denying the transcendent resonances of what I'm arguing.
If you substitute 'psychologists' for 'naive scientists' it becomes apparent that personal construct theory is a meta-theory of psychology. It concerns itself with the terms and dimensions by which the individual understands themself and other people.
The usual tool is called a repertory grid. Imagine a grid of squares; down the side is a list of people you know fairly well: yourself, your ideal self, your partner, your fantasy partner, your child, your ideal child, mother, father, boss, work-mate, uncle, granny, mother-in-law, first lover, best friend, worst enemy, whoever, the more the merrier. So each person has a row in the grid And along the top each column has some feature of personality that has some importance to you. niceness, sociability, religiousness, selfishness, intelligence, honesty, virtue, dominance, aggression, sensitivity, sanity, fidelity, whatever you can think of. And then you fill in for each person a score for each attribute - 0 to 10 maybe.
Then, these scores are subjected to an incredibly tortuous statistical analysis that I did a few times by hand with a mere calculator to help, and have completely forgotten, and you arrive at some interesting information about the number of dimensions that you analyse people under, how extreme your self image is (by your own standards), how close you are to your ideal self, and so on. If you want to try it, https://openrepgrid.org will save you hours of calculations.
Anyway, the takeaway from all this is that one's identity, being represented by the score one gives oneself in relation to significant others, is one aspect of the way one identifies humanity psychologically. The personal construct is the way one constructs both oneself as a person and the other as a person. There is no question here of there being a truth of the matter, as in a right way to understand people, but rather the depth or shallowness of the ways we understand ourselves and each other is itself a significant aspect of such understanding. This is psychology as a way of social being in the world. Is your world full of goodies and baddies like a cowboy film? That's interesting!
Yes, I read this today, which gets as far as the repertory grid concept and then substanitally ends as a useful resource, being followed by a bunch of references and indices.
Quoting unenlightened
Dare I? Probably, yes.
I think you highlight here how the process of commodification neutralises the effectiveness of self-development by appropriating it under its rubric, fostering an instrumental attitude towards it that tends to undermine its proper logic, almost as if partaking in the commercial aspect of the process (buying a book, paying for a course) is the solution and partaking in whatever therapy offered just more work to get through to get our money's worth.
Quoting Baden
Kelly understands the notion of the unconscious in terms of levels of awareness, or the distinction between implicit
and explicit consciousness , rather than in terms of
an unconscious that is completely unavailable to awareness.
We do not use the conscious-unconscious dichotomy, but we do recognize that some of the personal constructs a person seeks to subsume within his system prove to be fleeting or elusive. Sometimes this is because they are loose rather than tight, as in the first phase of the creative cycle. Sometimes it is because they are not bound by the symbolisms of words or other acts. But of this we are sure, if they are important in a person's life it is a mistake to say they are unconscious or that he is unaware of them. Every day he experiences them, often all too poignantly, except he cannot put his finger on them nor tell for sure whether they are at the spot the therapist has probed for them.
Kelly explains that repression is not a useful construct in personal construct theory
Our theoretical position would not lead us to place so much emphasis upon what is presumably repressed'. Our concern is more with the constructs which are being used by the client to structure his world. If certain elements have dropped out of his memory it may be simply that he has ceased to use the structures which imbued these elements with sense. We do not see these abandoned elements as covertly operating stimuli in the client's life.
Quoting Baden
Youre assuming that there is a content inherent in discourse which has the power to dominate. This further presumes that we can separate this discursive content from the personal construct system which is embracing it, as though 10 people with 10 different construct systems are influenced by the same discursive meaning which imposes itself on all of them and propels them in its direction.
But for Kelly we all live in different worlds. It is not the same dominant discourse which 10 people embrace but 10 different interpretations. It is not the discourse which propels the direction of the construct system but the construct system which propels the direction of interpretation of the discourse Put differently , intrinsic qualitative content of meaning plays a very minor role in Kellys approach. The specific content of a discourse serves a barely more than a placemarker. internal valuative content beyond what is necessary to distinguish it from other meanings. Everything that we associate with affectively and cognitively relevant and significant meaning is dependent on process, on how intimately, multidimensionally and assimilatively we embrace new experience, and very little of it on content.
In my dealings with other persons, I would be able to discern a thread of continuity organizing their participation in dialogue with me, dictating the manner and extent to which I can be said to influence their thinking and they mine. My thinking can not properly be seen as `determined' by his response, and his ideas are not simply `shaped' by my contribution to our correspondence. The extent to which I could be said to be embedded within a particular set of cultural practices would be a function of how closely other persons I encounter resonate with my own ongoing experiential process. I can only shape my action to fit socially legitimate goals or permitted institutionalized forms to the extent that those goals or forms are already implicated in my ongoing experiential movement. Even then, what is implicated for me is not `the' social forms, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which are unique to the organizational structure of my construct system; what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already stylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their behavior is guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their community.
In Kellys 1200 page Psychology of Personal Constructs, there is not a single note of concern for the supposed biasing and dominating influence of social
discursive structures on individual behavior. In the contrary, the book can be read as a critique of such thinking. Again. and again, Kelly attacks push and pull psychologies as being beholden to inner and outer demons. ...to allow ourselves to become preoccupied with independent forces, socio-dynamics, psychodynamics, leprechaun theory, demonology, or stimulus-response mechanics, is to lose sight of the essential feature of the whole human enterprise.
His opposite to such thinking is reflected in a central element of his psychotherapeutic approach, his concept of hostility. For Kelly, hostility ( anger, resentment, etc) is our tendency to blame the content of events for our inability to make sense of them. So he views models which assume a construct system whose direction can be reinforced by external influences as forms of blame. We blame the harmful, dominating influence of the discourse on people rather than construing how each person is interpreting the meaning of the discourse in their own way, relative to their own aims.
Quoting unenlightened
Id be careful in relying too much on the rep grid in trying to understand the main thrust of Kellys work. Heres what Kelly had to say to an interviewer.
In 1966 I asked him how he would have changed those two volumes, now that he had the perspective of over a decade later. After indicating that he probably would delete the section on the rep-grid, because it seemed to him that methodologically-oriented researchers had let it obscure the contribution of the theory, he added wistfully
"At the time I was already concerned that it might be too far from the mainstream to be recognized as psychology, but now-yes-I think I would have written it more honestly."
We do live in different individual worlds. Yet we tend to be very similar to each other within our respective discursive worlds (intraculturally), considering the potential for intercultural variation. We both know this is not coincidence. Try behaving like an 18th century Comanche Indian in modern day America and you won't last long. So, you emphasize above individual differences that I don't necessarily deny. I emphasize a power of discourse that is obvious the moment we separate ourselves conceptually from our own culture. And I also point to a life-long process of cultural sedimentation that delimits the terms under which we interact and understand each other. This allows for an enormous amount of variation in how we relate to each other and to the social in general, but it also allows for social trends and mechanisms that may be positive or negative viewed from the perspective of how they utilize human resources.
You are in the majority here in terms of your thinking. I only know of three writers other than Kelly who deconstruct concepts of cultural sedimentation to reveal a more intricate process of meaning-making( Derrida, Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin).
Heres a bit more about Gendlin, whose work shares much with Heidegger, from a paper of mine.
While Gendlin agrees that the experiencing body is inherently an environmental, and thus social interaction, he construes the nature of this intersubjectivity differently. The reciprocally causal temporality underpinning the embodied approaches mentioned in this paper leads necessarily to the idea of intersubjectivity as an interdependent cobbling and co-ordination between personal history and cultural signs in which the joints' of such interactive bodily and social practices are simultaneously within my own subjectivity and common to other participants in my community. Socialization is seen as a direct introjection or conditioning from the cultural environment, leaving personal experience with only a weak pragmatic self-consistency .
This is what Gallagher calls primary intersubjectivity, after Merleau-Ponty's notion of intercorporeality.
By contrast , Gendlin's occurring into implying grounding of temporality produces an implicatory rather than a reciprocally causal account of relation between body and world. This imbues bodily sense making with a pragmatic integrity, intricacy and self-intimacy missing from other accounts of intersubjectivity.
There is a big difference between my view and that of the current philosophers. They say that the body as sensed from inside is meaningful and interactional only through language (which includes concepts, culture, and history). If we find a bodily sense meaningful, they think this can only be what language and culture have trained into our bodies. (Gendlin 2009c)
Gendlin's re-envisioning of the body as radical interaffecting, like Heidegger's Being-with, locates the genesis of meaning-making in a more fundamental process than that of socially distributed joint activity.
Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always exceeds culture, history, and language. It is not the body of perception that is structured by language. Nor is the body's interaction structured by culture and language alone. Rather, it is the body of interactional living in its environment. The body's interaction is always more intricate than language. It is after and with language, always again freshly ongoing and constellating this situation in the present.
To think that we are the creation of culture is not a view one can maintain if one senses ongoing bodily experiencing directly. The intricacy you are now living vastly exceeds what cultural forms have contributed to you. With focusing we discover that we are much more organized from the inside out.
In living, our bodies generate, imply, and enact language and culture; but with and after those, our bodies imply (project, experience, sense, practice, demand . . .) more. What they imply is inherently interactional and social, but it is more precise and implies what has never as yet formed and happened.
Probably impossible to measure but I can only go by my own view which is, of course, subjective and situational. But I think it is better than it was when I was young. I meet a lot of young people through my work and my daughter, who is 25. They appear happier, nicer and more socially engaged than the people I knew when I was that age and even the young of, say, 20 years ago. I see much more meaningful involvement in politics and social change. Less substance abuse. So many more creative ways for self-expression. A banal monolithic mainstream culture no longer rests heavily upon their shoulders - there's a multiplicity of cultural choices and opportunities. I prefer the present era to the 1970's or 1980's. I think it's much easier to go your own way and explore options that even 15 years ago were unavailable.
Of course I can't ignore people from the margins of society, or in countries where opportunities are denied them for a range of economic and religiopolitical reasons. That said, I had lunch with an Aboriginal Australian community worker yesterday and his take was that the present era for his mob is demonstrably healthier and happier now than it was in 1970, when his parents were young. Doesn't mean that there aren't still tragedies on a daily basis, but the clouds are lifting.
Yes indeed. the statistical complexity lends a comforting air of scientism to what is a fundamentally philosophical, social-democratic, and conceptual approach. Nevertheless, I think the grid is an interesting way of self- exploration, and that exploration gives a more visceral insight into the concepts of personal construct theory. It's interesting to hear that quote though. Back in the day, people like R.D.Laing were definitely not on the syllabus, whereas Kelly was, in a slightly isolated from everything else way. He definitely got credibility from being really advanced in the statistical analysis,* without which he would almost certainly been banned for heresy.
*Those were the days when computers took up a whole building and there was one in the university and mere undergraduates were not allowed in.
Oops, suddenly I feel like Im on the wrong side of the argument. Here I am defending the status quo while you oppose it. I thought it was supposed to be the other way around. :lol:
Anyhow, I could go as far as conceiving the body as a route to intercultural commonalities of experience in the realm of nature and art, for example. But all experiences are ultimately conceptualised and interpreted socio-linguistically (which seems to be acknowledged in your post). Maybe this is only to point to the fragility of the mystical but not to deny it. I wonder though what the practical consequences of such a view are? Where can we locate its traces in our contemporary context? It seems very Zen, but of course my idea of Zen is polluted by self-help industry conceptions Ive criticized above, so what would I know?
Quoting unenlightened
Or is it??? Here's an amusing anecdote from Kelly complaining about various interpretations of his theory (from the same source I quoted above):
I have been so puzzled over the early labeling of personal construct theory as cognitive that sev- eral years ago I set out to write another short book to make it clear that I wanted no part of cogni- tive theory. The manuscript was about a third completed when I gave a lecture at Harvard Univer- sity with the title, Personal Construct Theory as a Line of Inference. Following the lecture, Pro- fessor Gordon Allport explained to the students that my theory was not a cognitive theory but an emotional theory. Later the same afternoon, Dr. Henry Murray called me aside and said, You know, don't you, that you are really an existentialist. Since that time I stepped into almost all the open manholes that psychological theorists can possibly fall into. For example, in Warsaw, where I thought my lecture on personal construct theory would be an open challenge to dialectical materialism, the Poles, who had been conducting some seminars on personal construct theory be- fore my arrival, explained to me that personal construct theory was just exactly what dialectical materialism stood for. Along the way also I have found myself classified in a volume on personal- ity theories as one of the learning theorists, a classification that seems to me so patently ridicu- lous that I have gotten no end of amusement out of it.
A few years ago an orthodox psychoanalyst insisted, after hearing me talk about psychotherapy, that, regardless of what I might say about Freud, and regardless even of my failure to fall in the apostolic succession to which a personal psychoanalysis entitled one, I was really a psychoana- lyst. This charge was repeated by a couple of psychoanalytically sophisticated psychiatrists in Lon- don last fall, and nothing I could say would shake their conviction. I have, of course, been called a Zen Buddhist, and last fall one of our former students, now a distinguished psychologist, who was invited back to give a lecture, spent an hour and a half in a seminar corrupting my students with the idea that I was really a behaviorist.
Note here how its commonalities of discourses that defined the orientation under which the theory was interpreted and integrated into personal contructs. The directionality of travel had already been established by the prevailing (sub)cultural context in a way the various groups of intellectuals were clearly not aware of; otherwise, they would have had the means to challenge their assumptions!
Social 1: Individual 0
Like I said, it's a meta-theory. It describes how psychological thinking goes on, and so each psychologist thinks it describes his own theory - quite rightly.
Quoting Baden
Arent we talking here about the relation between freedom and determinism, the fact that the freedom of our ideas is constrained by the limits of our construct system?
man can enslave himself with his own ideas and then win his freedom again by reconstruing his life. This is, in a measure, the theme upon which this book is based.
Ultimately a man sets the measure of his own freedom and his own bondage by the level at which he chooses to establish his convictions. The man who orders his life in terms of many special and inflexible convictions about temporary matters makes himself the victim of circumstances. Each little prior conviction that is not
open to review is a hostage he gives to fortune; it determines whether the events of tomorrow will bring happiness or misery. The man whose prior convictions encompass a broad perspective, and are cast in terms of principles rather than rules, has a much better chance of discovering those alternatives which will lead eventually to his emancipation.
Cant it be the case that we are aware of the framework though which we are interpreting events, but that awareness is not by itself enough to allow us or require us to dump that framework in favor of another? After all, reconstruing is hard and frightening work, and our current framework may be working perfectly well for us.
I would argue that we always know implicitly what that overarching framework is that guides our motives and understandings, even if not at a level we can verbalize. Think about how the construct is organized in a hierarchical manner. If we want to subsume someone elses system we can start by finding out the contrast poles to key core constructs. For instance, loyalty will have a unique contrary pole that may differ significantly from what the term means for us. In this way every construct is linked to every other such that the superordinate level defines and constrains the subordinate. We mustnt confuse our inability to articulate in words the contrast poles of our core constructs with their being invisible or unconscious to us.
Telling someone their most cherished values are imports from their culture is not seeing how they USE these constructs, and that their defense of the importance and logic of these constructs must be taken on its own terms. This logic is not parasitic on some social discursive logic external to them but is primary.
@Baden
You stress out our freedom to adopt and reconstruct that overarching framework that guides our motives and understandings. Yet, this account implies a particular conceptualization of what is being invisible or unconscious to us. In principle, it is assumed that it can become visible and articulable. And this premise misses what Benjamin and Adorno have in common with postmodernist thinkers. They agree that we are impacted by the sublime that has always remained unthought and unrepresentable.
This time without diachrony where the present is the past and where the past is always
presence (but these terms are obviously inappropriate), is the time of the unconscious affect. Ungraspable by consciousness, this time threatens it. It threatens it permanently. And permanence is the name for what happens in the lexicon of the consciousness of time. The decision to analyze, to write, to historicize is made according to different stakes, to be sure, but it is taken, in each case, against this formless mass, and in order to lend it form, a place in space, a moment in temporal succession, a quality in the spectrum of qualifications, representation on the scene of the various imaginaries and sentences. (Lyotard, Heidegger and the Jews p 17).
Since for Kelly, time doesnt double back on itself , and therefore no event repeats itself, even the most predictably intelligible experience introduces an absolutely new aspect. We never fully own what we know; otherness and alterity belongs to temporalization.
And yet, as Heidegger argues, events always mater to us, are relevant and significant. This is because a pre-understanding operates to make the world familiar to us at some level. This pre-understanding is that frame , that totality of relevance, that makes the world
recognizable to us even as it contributes a foreign element each moment.
That would be the case if the goal would be individuality as it was conceived in let's call that "old-fashioned" culture. It now seems that consuming self-help/self-improvement materials is itself the goal, is what individuality is now all about. It's not anymore about "building character" the way early self-help of the Benjamin Franklin type would have us do (where they had definitive ideas about what "having character" means and there was wide agreement what "being a person of character" means). Per modern self-help, "building character" is still important, it's just that "being a person of character" can mean all kinds of things. It seems to me that modern self-help is, essentially, meta. And yet the people who do it that way seem to be happy, satisfied, productive, self-confident.
Since several posters said they don't watch television or follow social media (or only minimally), I'm not sure how much reference material or examples from the self-help movement are needed for illustration. For those who are not familiar with the phenomenon, it would probably take quite a bit.
Undoubtedly, Heidegger's philosophy of time significantly supports your affirmation of an individual's capacities to maintain autonomy and adaptability. I would argue that phenomenology cannot provide
a relevant framework for understanding our current conditions. According to Heidegger, the Being of entities can only be grasped in the present through the awareness that something appearing 'here and now' has the temporal structure of a 'making present' of something. So, it is only through temporality the meaning of Being can become articulated. Yet, in our current environment, the totality of pre-calculated and pre-programmed situations precisely targets the moment of 'here and now'.
What is attacked would be space and time as forms of the given of what happens. The retreat of the given causes the phenomenological pre-understanding temporal structures not to operate 'here and now' anymore. Therefore, we no longer have a dominant temporal horizon for the event, framing and shaping our 'here and now'. There is no more future; it has already arrived as an overwhelming aggregate of pre-formed retentions. There is no past because it is separated from individual memory and "settled" in the collective digitalized network. Only the present remains, that is, the continuing time of perception, in which the perceiver cannot distinguish himself from the perceived.
Quoting Baden
This distinction exists just on the fabulation level. It allows one to register the event, translate it into results, accumulate its consequences, and conceive strategies of extensive use of time. Yet, it does not allow us to construct a critical ontology of ourselves. Because on a more fundamental, grounding level, our personal and social identities are penetrated and constituted by the forces of the entire field of intensive operations. They incessantly contract and determine our present.
Or else: It's unthinkable to them that what they make could be mere assumptions (and as such subject to revision); but rather, they believe that what they claim about another person is the ultimate truth about that person.
It's not about having the means to challenge one's assumptions; it's about allowing for the possibility that what one has might in fact be merely assumptions.
Quoting Number2018
Is this from Baudrillard? Doesnt sound like Deleuze. You seem to read Deleuze through a critical theory lens. Are you familiar with Todd May?
This image of time ensues from Benjamin and Foucault's perspectives on Baudelaire's attitude to modernity.
For Foucault, Baudelaire aspires to overcome "the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent' character of modernity and recapture 'something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it.' The task compels him to produce himself in a particular aesthetic mode. On the other hand, Benjamin's Baudelaire reveals
that the era he called modernity (modernité) expresses itself in various figures of shock. The inevitable contact of the poet with the crowd and the new content of sensual cause the anesthesia effects. Therefore, the shock becomes a remedy and a condition for the possibility of perception as such. You can't be modern without being shocked. Foucault and Benjamin agree on a necessarily aesthetic mode of our existence in the present. It is the time of perception in which the perceiver does not distinguish himself from the perceived. At the heart of the present strikes an instant of the intensive novelty. The newest replaces the new so that the endless repetition re-establishes the ongoing eternity.
This is Nietzsches eternal return of the same, which Heidegger depicted thusly:
The "momentary" character of creation is the essence of actual, actuating eternity, which achieves its greatest breadth and keenest edge as the moment of eternity in the return of the same. The recoining of what becomes into being-will to power in its supreme configuration-is in its most profound essence something that occurs in the "glance of an eye" as eternal recurrence of the same. The will to power, as constitution of being, is as it is solely on the basis of the way to be which Nietzsche projects for being as a whole: Will to power, in its essence and according to its inner possibility, is eternal recurrence of the same.
I read the OP but not this whole thread. Your OP is one where misinterpreting a few words seems like it'd cause problems but I did my best to understand it.
I understand that this OP is to be the result of concerns specific to the cultural and political environment in the US. As the conclusions tended to lead towards explaining cultural and political conflict and seemed to continually come back to concepts like freedom or change. I might be wrong on that, yet I don't want to talk about it at all but instead offer some different emphasis.
Quoting Baden
Need to reiterate the quite reasonable risk that I've missed something, but anyway. What continually popped into my mind while reading your OP was the handful of documentaries I've watched about Facebook and Facebook addiction. In one case Mums in their 30s to 40s, would post pictures about their holidays, children, and pets. What they'd eat, and do for the day, and the excitement that came with a like of their picture or a nice comment. Presenting all the good parts of their lives, while leaving out the bad. Some treated it like it were a full-time job.
In a separate case, there was a documentary on how multi-level marketing schemes would attract mothers who perhaps had had their children leave home. To sell accessories, cosmetics or clothes, and to present this image of themselves on social media as living a great life. As things would start to go poorly, they couldn't face the shame of admitting their failures online and so felt forced to maintain the lie. They preferred to continue their losing strategy than embarrass themselves to friends and family.
Social media has taken away the barrier between the personal and social, all spaces are social spaces. It creates a state of being constantly on display, which creates constant social pressure. That social persona, however, is personalised and individualistic and exists on a page for one's exclusive use, presenting intimate details of one's life and thoughts. Social media has created an environment where so many are either addicted or forced to constantly present the image of themselves they want others to see online.
So, I guess my question is, doesn't this create the condition where social identities are deeply individualistic?
I don't really see this "proliferation of identities" that conflict with each other, perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you mean. What I see is that the enormous social pressure has created an environment in which you're not really free to "explore" different identities at all. In fact, if you mention the wrong political idea online, the worry is the grave social implications it will have. And people would rather lie about doing well than admit there's a problem because they're focused on the social image they're cultivating.
In consumer culture, a teenager will follow social influencers and conform to what's happening on social media to fit in and cultivate an image. If there's any intent to cultivate an identity, it's because it's trending and there's a need to follow to fit in. However, for adults, it's probably more likely to see the goal of presenting success to others, a happy family and marriage, etc.
Political and cultural topics have been subsumed into the social sphere, where I'm not sure the ideas themselves are taken that seriously at all. There's a need to have the right opinion, it's so common to hear about friendships being ended because of something someone said about Trump or something like that.
I think the online social element is being criminally underplayed in your OP.
Perhaps the OP might have better been about the context of social media, rather than commercial environment. Then I would agree with it.
What a read. :up:
Quoting Baden
:smile: Indeed, there are destructive social forces, as have already been proven through studies and experiments.
The OP comes at things from a generalised theoretical standpoint. I deal specifically with social media later in this post and elsewhere. Social media is the main focus of the technological angle because it's the dominant market for social capitalespecially in highly consumerised and technologically advanced societies, such as the U.S.and social capital is what we manipulate our identities to accumulate.
Quoting Judaka
Yes, FB and other social media platforms offer a form of social capital instantiated in likes and comments in return for monetizable member engagement, i.e. the product they sell to advertisers. Members pay for social capital with attention, a portion of which is coverted into their online personas, and a portion of which, through ad revenue, is converted into the respective platform's profits. So, members compete with each other for likes and comments through the creation and use of online identities and the platforms inject advertising into the process. These platforms then compete, both against each other and more generally against real-life forms of social capital, to be providers in the social capital market.
Because such accrual of engagement involves the competitive utilization of quite malleable forms of identity (as it's easy to misrepresent yourself online), these platforms nudge us towards more marketable/commodified identities-to which we take an increasingly instrumental orientation. Our identities become a means to acquire easily processable social capital in the form of the rewards you describe. We move away from being ends in ourselves, which more organically accrue such capital through a form of self-realization that leads us to be valued by others because we value ourselves, towards means-to-ends, self-manipulated selves for whom identity, at the extreme, becomes little more than a means to satisfy an addiction to the physiological rewards offered by likes and comments.
So, the mechanism described is a means to process identities into superficial forms of social capital, the byproduct of which processing is profits for the social media company and advertisers. Another way to say this is our identities, our relationships with ourselves, are transformed into the mechanism of consumption for profit, and because the process both alienates us from opportunities to develop stronger selves and strengthens the commercial entities that profit from such alienation, it tends to be self-fulfilling.
Quoting Judaka
Nice example. Here, the investment in social capital, which should, in a healthy dynamic, be facilitative of increased opportunities to accumulate real capital, becomes diseased and the process reverses.
Quoting Judaka
There's a proliferation of identities when identity becomes unmoored in this way from the self because when identity becomes commodified, integrity no longer matters. But that doesn't imply a true diversity of identity. There are a million way to sell yourself to your fellow FB, instagram, Twitter etc. members, but there are common threads that tend to work. So, the differences may be quite superficial.
Should reiterate that the fact that this process plays out differently depending on the person involved (as pointed out by others above) doesn't necessarily obviate its general social destructiveness*
Edit: (The upshot of this is that social media with its progressive technologising of the market for social capital and aim of monopolizing this resource in a way that generally fails to fulfil its evolutionary logic (i.e. productive reciprocity) is simultaneously destructive both to positive self and social development.)
:up: :clap:
The hyperlinked comment addressed this topic in the exact way that I thought had been lacking, as did this recent post to me. I entirely agree with what you've written, and you've done a great job at laying out these issues, much better than I could have.
People do misrepresent themselves online, but in a conformist way, and yet also competitive, in a way that resembles how we usually think of high school. That's the only thing that I missed in your laying out of the issue. The literal social element of social media and the aspects of peer pressure and herd mentality, competition within social groups, and all of these normal aspects of social behaviour are magnified with social media.
I guess when it comes back to your OP, I don't understand this focus on an inner struggle and I want the emphasis to be on an external pressure caused almost entirely by social media. The psychological and social pressures are being produced on this massive scale, which is how we got to where we are. But I got the feeling from your OP that you were talking about something along the lines of inner turmoil or confusion or "personal paralysis"
Why is the emphasis not on peer pressure and social anxieties and the desire for validation being magnified in a toxic way by social media? The coercion and self-censorship it produces? Surely you see the political tribalism? That's not being caused by inner conflict.
Although I don't want to quote your OP piece by piece and say the same thing, I feel that what's lacking in your takes is any mention of the basic ideas of peer pressure that social media is exacerbating.
Quoting Baden
The other part of this which I want to challenge is the characterisation of political disorganization and powerlessness. US society doesn't seem filled with indecision and irresoluteness... Isn't it the complete opposite? To me, it appears fanatical, social media facilitates this kind of peer pressure and herd mentality which drives users into a frenzy. The political mobilisation through social media is unlike anything ever before seen, simple hashtags can organise massive movements so quickly.
I feel like I must be misunderstanding something...
Anyway, for doing something about social media, I think it related to the issue of consumer choice, and whether consumers should be allowed to decide what's good for themselves. It's kind of like portion sizes at fast food places, I think they should be limited because the consumer can't be trusted to make responsible decisions. We've already shown we can't, now we need to declare ourselves the loser and ask for help. Social media should be looked at for causing addiction and certain practices should be banned. Otherwise, not sure what can be done about it.
That was a bit dense, read it twice and only have a vague idea of what you may be talking about - you certainly put a lot of thought behind it, that I can't deny. So I'll try to take something out of it, that I find useful, maybe even in a form of a question:
I think you are correct that how our current socio-economic society is structured fosters a sense of isolation while at the same time fomenting an image of "individuality", in which we falsely or misleadingly only show those aspects of ourselves we want to show - and then feel like shit in real life, when we cannot live up to the standards of the fiction(s) we have created for ourselves.
I think it would help to give a simple example of what you take an identity to be. Are you talking about what it means to be a modern woman or a father figure or what? If we want to create a sphere which we call "identity" and try to separate from it other aspects, work, for instance, then we need a more clear idea of what an identity is.
What I do see is a kind of mini-crisis in the topic of gender-identity, which is somewhat curious, in the sense that this out of all things is the topic of discussion, instead of something else.
Potential solutions? They say that genuine human connection helps with such things - in so far as these connections are truly genuine and not fulling in some box of things that one needs to do, which don't advance anything.
But why is identity specifically a problem? I agree it is, but it's curious that it's what's the cause of so many discussions. Clearing up what an identity is even more, could help I suspect.
As I said above, I come at the issue from a generalised theoretical standpoint first and then go into some of the mechanisms. Social media is a big focus (I haven't talked about other media in detail yet) because the process is so clearly aimed at selling social capital, which is social validation, and which is competed for through the creation and utilization of socially desirable identities. Also, a lot of the points you mention are implied, e.g. I haven't mentioned the phrase "peer pressure" but it's implicit in an understanding of social capital.
Quoting Judaka
This is a good point.
Quoting Baden
Firstly, I'm talking about long-term results. If we immediately felt the dissonance of self-conflict on using social media, we would be conditioned not to use it. I see this as an illness that develops over time, similar to the effects of drug use. In the long term, drug users tend to become unhappy, anxious etc, but those effects may not be visible at all in the short to medium term; the opposite is more likely to be the case, which is the reason people use drugs in the first place.
Another point is that what appears to be a very resolute individual online may be an anxious mess offline. The former can act as compensation for the latter. Especially if our online activist finds themselves constantly having to repress their political instincts for practical purposes when they find themselves in environments where social capital is distributed on much different grounds.
So social media is a very artificial environment where we have a misleadingly powerful level of control over social capital rewards. All we need to do is find groups of peers that share our interests and please them in ways that are usually quite obvious. The "real world" is not so simple, especially for adults. Most people have jobs where they not only lack control over their identities, they cannot fully express certain identities they have fostered to accrue social capital without actually losing social capital by doing so.
The more powerful the online conditioning, the more resolute and actively engaged we are with extremes of identities (again, online experiences tend to push us to the extremes because of competition for social capital) but also the more potential for inner conflict in less homogenous social capital environments. Paradoxically then, the very resoluteness of one identity can lead to a more generalised irresoluteness of the self.
Where my explanation would lose force would be in situations where online and offline social capital environments are very similar, in which case, the dynamic is much more sustainable. If you are, e.g. extremely "woke" and almost everyone you come across online and offline shares these views, it's much easier for them to sediment into a coherent self. Although, even in this case, because social media tends to push us to extremes; because regular media exposes us to a wide variety of conflicting ideologies; and because social capital does not in itself pay the bills, it's not necessarily the healthiest dynamic for sustainable personal development.
Not sure if you've read the whole thread. A lot of context is added later. But here's another shot at a definition with some simplified examples.
Identities are socially recognizable narratives that have some libidinal hold over us such that realizing them offers physiological rewards and punishments and is integral to the mechanism for accruing social capital (validation).
To break this down:
Identities are socially recognizable narratives:
An identity is an evaluative or descriptive story we can tell about ourselves in a way that makes sense to other people. Being a mother is a (descriptive) identity. Being a good mother is an (evaluative) identity. Being a Selena Gomez fan is an identity. Being a Democrat or Republican are identities. These identities may overlap or nestle within each other and they may also interact with each other in different and more or less compatible ways.
Identities have some libidinal hold over us due to the physiological reward and punishments associated with their functioning:
We are invested in our identities and not in a purely abstract way. If a social narrative has no physiological hold over us whatsoever, it doesnt form part of our identity (from our point of view). To say that we identify as this or that is to say we consider it part of our self, and our selves include our physical bodies which react to physical and abstract opportunities and threats in similar ways.
So, if one of our identities is a good mother and someone threatens that evaluative narrative by proposing a counter narrative (suggesting we are actually a bad mother), we are likely to experience a physiological response (analagous to that towards a physcial threat) in proportion to the degree we feel our narrative is threatened.
"Identities are tools for accruing social capital":
Returning to the example above: being a good mother is a form of social capital. It is a positive social judgement. Society values good mothers and so being a good mother has value. To the extent that someone can convince our social sphere that we are otherwise, we lose social capital. We are wired to seek value and defend our identities because this is also to defend our social capital.
Taking the above, we can see how problems may arise with 1) identities that conflict or where 2) there is a gap between our identity and a socially imposed identity. Our physiology may become programmed both to reward and punish us at the same time for the same action.
1) Identities that conflict
E.g. Two of my identities are as follows:
I am a good mother.
I am a strong adherent of belief system A/ I am an A
My child has just won an award at school for an essay that analyzes and points out some devastating ethical flaws in belief system A. My identity reward system is now in conflict with itself. As a good mother it should reward me for congratulating his academic success. But as an A, he has attacked my identity. The reward and punishment systems of the identities good mother and A are put in conflict but I only have one actual physiological system to deal with this.
2) A gap between our identity and a socially imposed identity:
E.g. I run a successful business that, due to adverse economic circumstances, fails. In order to make ends meet I am forced to take a job delivering pizzas. My identity as a successful businessman may disappear overnight in an abstract sense but, concretely, I am still programmed physiologically to expect validation of such through a form of respect and control that I can no longer command or exert in my new social position. So, my identity persists, but under constant assault.
We can see how mechanisms like social media may exacerbate the above problems. In scenario 1, the strong believer in A may belong to a social circle that constantly validates both her belief in A and her belief she is a good mother exacerbating the problem of these being put in conflict with each other. In scenario 2, the successful businessman may have a social circle that constantly validates material success. This was fine when he was materially successful but again exacerbates the problems he faces on losing such material success.
Holes can probably be picked in the above examples, but I hope they at least serve to illustrate in a practical way what I mean by identity.
Previously on this thread, I contrasted your analysis of the relation between the self, identity and social conditioning with writers such as George Kelly. That may have muddled the point I was trying to get at rather than clarifying it. Kellys terminology can lend itself to an interpretation of his approach as wedded to the idea of a solipsistic Cartesian subject immune from social influence and conditioning, which feeds into your thesis that ideologies of identity , as Kellys might appear to be, obscure their own function, which is to serve the social at the expense of the self. In other words, Kellys seeming self-creating subject is an unwitting tool of dominating social forces.
Because I chose Kelly to make my point, I think my reservations about your thesis were obscured.
Im going to try and restate those reservations. It seems to me that the philosophical resources you draw from (post-Marxist Frankfurt school critical theory, among others) to form your concepts of self, identity, the social and their interconnections, remain too attached to the concept of the bounded subject even as they critique metaphysical notions of the self. Your aim is to rescue a notion of subjective unity from its dispersion and fragmentation by social forces. Personal development depends on finding a way to resist the irresoluteness of online identities.
I think the philosophical approaches that offer the most effective and direct critique of this way of thinking fall into the postmodern camp of poststructuralism ( Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze). The social constructionist work of Ken Gergen also belongs to this larger thinking.
While there is significant overlap between the postmodern and the critical theoretic vantages concerning the importance of social practices in shaping individual thought and feeling, for writers like Gergen subjectivity is an effect of discursive interchange. He conceives the relationship between two or more persons not in terms of "interacting" individuals, but of elements of an inseparable system in which the relationship precedes the individual psychologies. The I through-and -through is a socially created construct. The social can no longer be thought of in opposition to the individual. This means that forces of domination are not possessed by individuals , groups , institutions , corporations, governments, media centers. They flow through, within and between subjectivities , in this way constantly creating and recreating individuals and groups through dialogical interchange.
Gergen writes Successful bonding calls for a transformation in narrative. The I as the center of the story must gradually be replaced by the we.
You write that technology-fueled cultural trends encourage multiple and fractured identity formation, the creation of self-conflictual selves, which limits our ability to narrativize a coherent and unified self in a meaningful social context.
For Gergen the goal is not to carve out a self-narrative that distinguishes the individual in some way from the social context it interacts with, but to coordinate our actions within the common scenarios of our culture.
In other words, the relational bond is a dance co-created by a we, not an interaction between internally unified selves. Loneliness and isolation would be symptoms of a dance whose shared unfolding is uncoordinated , not the failure to produce coherent selves participating in the dance.
No, it is not.
Quoting Joshs
Heidegger asserts the rollback of Nietzsche's thought to metaphysics. He misrepresents the doctrine of the will to power and identifies Nietzsche as an ally of Descartes.
"Recurrence" thinks the permanentizing of what becomes, thinks it to the point where the becoming of what becomes is secured in the duration of its becoming. The "eternal" thinks the permanentizing of such constancy in the direction of its circling back into itself and forward toward itself. What becomes is the same itself, and that means the one and selfsame (the identical) that in each case is within the difference of the other. The presence of the one identical element, a presence that comes to be, is thought in the same. Nietzsche's thought thinks the constant permanentizing of the becoming of whatever becomes into the only kind of presence there is-the self-recapitulation of the identical. (Heidegger, Lectures on Nietzsche, p165)
Heideggers account of Nietzsches eternal return is entirely different from Foucault and Deleuzes interpretations.
What will to power brought to light? A reality that has being freed from (immutable, eternal, true) being: becoming. And the knowledge that unveils it does not unveil being (Foucault, Lectures on the will to know, p319)
For Foucault, there is no returning of the identity of the same.
Mark the singularity of events. . . . Grasp their return. . . . Define their lacuna point, the moment they did not take place. (Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History)
So, what is returning is the singularity of events, the difference itself. The eternal operates in the lacuna points, where the perceiver does not distinguish himself from the perceived. Through the figure of Baudelaire, Foucault re-affirms the reality of the Nietzsches Dionysian aesthetic existence, the construction of a singular subjectivity. The processes of selfaffirmation, the resistant self-positioning cannot be merely achieved by applying psychological, cognitive, or informational methods and paradigms. One must traverse the unnamable lacuna points of the rupture with dominant social realities.
No, I read your OP and skimmed a bit from others, but little - I prefer to go in "new", as it were. Now you've added plenty of context and renders the notion more clearly, so thanks for that it is useful.
The issue here isn't to poke holes into an account - that can be done in almost any post concerning issues as large and complex as human relations and psychology, what we can do is provide some tools that help clarify some of the problems at hand.
We only have a data set of one here, ours, and the way its changed over time. So the question of the inevitability of such dilemmas necessarily arising need not follow. Given the results you point out, one can even question if this society should be deemed "advanced".
It's correct to point out how social media plays an important role in the identity crisis we currently face. Though this is merely a new phase of an old playbook, going back to the early 20th century, with the advent of PR and how companies realized how easy it was to manipulate people into consumers.
So we've had a consumer identity forced onto people that carry with them certain patterns of behavior that signal what makes for a proper "man" or "woman" and what a typical person of each gender should aspire to in each respective subfield.
Again, what strikes me is the degree of specificity in which gender has become an object of obsession. I don't quite understand why this topic is of such importance to many young people.
Quoting Number2018
Quoting Number2018
So then it is the eternal return of the same.
Quoting Number2018
Im aware of that. I think Heideggers thinking goes beyond Foucaults , Deleuzes and Nietzsches. Since Foucault and Deleuze remain in close proximity to Nietzsche they misread Heideggers critique of Nietzsche. But rather than pursuing what I think separates Heidegger from Foucault and Deleuze ( which I would be happy to do in another thread) , I want to understand better how you are reading Deleuze. There are a wide variety of often incompatible interpretations of his work. I cant tell which interpretation you align with merely from your quotes of him and your adoption of his jargon.
I would like to know how you are using his jargon, and to do that I think we will need to expand the conversation to include other disciplines.
I want to begin with a hypothesis and see what your reaction is. I hypothesize that , of the many readings of Deleuze , you resonate with those that I find in writers like Massumi , Protevi and Delanda. I want to focus on Protevi in particular, who I think reads Deleuze from a vantage close to the modernism of critical theory writers like Adorno.
Protevi crosses disciplines , moving between philosophy, anthropology, psychology and evolutionary biology. Im hoping you can follow him into these areas so I can get a better sense of where you actually stand on Deleuze, on which Deleuze is your Deleuze.
Protevi writes:
What Deleuze brings to the table is a wide-ranging materialist ontology, so that we can use the same basic concepts of self-organizing systems in both natural and social registers. This enables me to couple the politic to the body, to connect the social and the somatic. Basically, Deleuze lets us go above and below the subject; above to politics, and below to biology.
Cognitive science, even the 4EA schools, is still beholden to two unexamined presuppositions: first, that the unit of analysis is an abstract subject, "the" subject, one that is supposedly not marked in its development by social practices, such as gendering, that influence affective cognition, and second, that culture is a repository of positive, problem-solving aids that enable "the" subject.
To summarize Protevis position, he believes subjectivities are influences from above by invasions from the social sphere and below by affect programs:
"Zahavi (2005) and Gallagher (2005), among others, distinguish agency and ownership of bodily actions. Ownership is the sense that my body is doing the action, while agency is the sense that I am in control of the action, that the action is willed. Both are aspects of subjectivity, though they may well be a matter of pre-reflective self-awareness rather than full-fledged objectifying self-consciousness . But alongside subjectivity we need also to notice emergent assemblages that skip subjectivity and directly conjoin larger groups and the somatic. To follow this line of thought, let us accept that, in addition to non-subjective body control by reflexes, we can treat basic emotions as
modular affect programs (Griffiths 1997) that run the bodys hardware in the absence of conscious control. As with reflexes, ownership and agency are only retrospectively felt, at least in severe cases of rage in which the person wakes up to see the results of the destruction committed while he or she was in the grips of the rage. In this way we see two elements we need to take into account besides the notion of subjective agency: (1) that there is another sense of agent as nonsubjective controller of bodily action, either reflex or basic emotion, and (2) that in some cases the military unit and non-subjective reflexes and basic emotions are intertwined in such a way as to bypass the soldiers subjectivity qua controlled intentional action. In these cases the practical agent of the act of killing is not the individual person or subject, but the emergent assemblage of military unit and non-subjective reflex or equally non-subjective affect program.
A little more detail on the notion of a rage agent might be helpful at this point. Extreme cases of rage produce a modular agent or affect program that replaces the subject. Affect programs are emotional responses that are complex, coordinated, and automated unfold[ing] in this coordinated fashion without the need for conscious direction (Griffiths 1997: 77). They are more than reflexes, but they are triggered well before any cortical processing can take place (though later cortical appraisals can dampen or accelerate the affect program).
In the berserker rage, the subject is overwhelmed by a chemical flood that triggers an evolutionarily primitive module which functions as an agent which runs the bodys hardware in its place."The vast majority of soldiers cannot kill in cold blood and need to kill in a desubjectified state, e.g., in reflexes, rages and panics.
In the same way that Protevi treats bodily-affective aspects of behavior in terms of the nonintentional, unconscious influence of near-reflexive internal modular programs on a conscious subject , he models social influence via classical and operant forms of conditioning impinging upon the subject from above the level of the subjects normative aims. .operant conditioning .triggers an unconscious, automatic read and react mode in which soldiers fire individually on whatever human-shaped targets appear in their range of vision. Not a berserker rage, but a conditioned reflex. Here, the subject is bypassed by direct access of the military machine to reflexes embedded in the spinal cord of the soldier as clear an instance of political physiology as one could imagine.(Protevi 2004)
"Soldiers are acculturated to dehumanize the enemy by a series of racial slurs. This acculturation is especially powerful when accomplished through rhythmic chanting while running, for such entrainment weakens personal identity to produce a group subject". "Desensitization is merely an enabling factor for the role of classical and operant conditioning in modern training.
In addition to the affective aspect of heightened desensitization, simulation training constitutes a new cognitive group subject. The instant decision of shoot / no shoot is solicited by the presence or absence of key traits in the gestalt of the situation. Such instant decisions are more than reflexes, but operate at the very edge of the conscious awareness of the soldiers and involve complex subpersonal processes of threat perception (Correll et al 2006). In addition to this attenuation of individual agency, cutting-edge communication technology now allows soldiers to network together in real time. With this networking we see an extended / distributed cognition culminating in topsight for a commander who often doesnt command in the sense of micro-manage but who observes and intervenes at critical points (Arquilla and Rondfeldt 2000: 22). In other words, contemporary team-building applications through real-time networking are a cybernetic application of video games that goes above the level of the subject (Fletcher 1999). In affective entrainment, instant decision-making, and cognitive topsight the soldiers produced by rhythmic chanting and intensive simulation training are nodes within a cybernetic organism, the fighting group, which maintains its functional integrity and tactical effectiveness by real-time communication technology. Its the emergent group with the distributed decisions of the soldiers that is the cyborg here, operating at the thresholds of the individual subjectivities of the soldiers
Do you agree with Protevi that this analysis of the above into the political and the below into the biological is compatible with Deleuze?
That was a good read, Baden. Thanks for sharing it.
You're welcome. :smile:
It's a bit hard for me to comment on the irresoluteness of people who are resolute online... Even guessing how frequently that is the case would be beyond me. However, much of what you've described again doesn't seem like an inner conflict. If I know my co-workers are Trump supporters and I hate Trump, I may keep my mouth shut to avoid conflict, but that's not inner conflict, right? Instead, to avoid direct conflict, I'll make a post on my social media and mock them online.
Isn't such duplicity just standard in social interaction? We can wear masks when needed, without losing sight of what's a mask and what's real. It's almost as though your argument hinges upon that not being the case.
In the real world... We can choose our friends and partners, including our friends at work. We'll gravitate towards people who share our values, and away from those who don't. Some may experience that their job is very different from their online experience, but I think the opposite is more common. If you're a liberal truck driver or a conservative university lecturer, I suppose things might be quite hard for you, but for the majority, you'll be around like-minded people.
Managing multiple identities has always been part of social life, and we've got many tools for dealing with the problems presented there. Many of them aren't productive, and some aren't so bad. But the modern era isn't exacerbating the problem of conflicting identities, it's allowing people to demonize and ignore conflicting perspectives.
We can hear the news from the source we want, be part of the circles we want, and present the image of ourselves we want. So how does that produce an environment of many identities that conflict? Don't we have an unprecedented ability to manufacture our environment both online and offline to suit our needs?
Quoting Baden
What are these sprawling, numerous, conflicting identities that paralyse people? Is the modern US characterised by group paralysis or mobilisation?
Social media has created new forms of political pressure, where small numbers of people who very actively condemn something can cast a glaring spotlight on something, which causes huge businesses or governments to react in ways they'd never have done for a small physical protest.
Either our social state is of increasing radicalisation and tribalism, or of "personal paralysis" and inner confusion. What sounds more typical for you? A conservative who listens to conservative news sources, uses conservative websites, has conservative friends, has a job with predominately conservative co-workers, lives in a town that's predominately conservative, or just some odd mismatch of random belief systems all over the place?
Facebook is a personalised page with intimate details of your personal life and thoughts. Twitter allows you to follow people and see content from those you like and/or think like you, it forms echo chambers. They're not suited for pivoting from one identity to the next, they entrench users.
Is social media exacerbating conformity, herd mentality and radicalisation, or the proliferation of endless conflicting identities? Are they not mutually exclusive? Or am I missing the point in taking things in this direction?
Your questions suggest some shared understanding/assessment about what constitutes "becoming deeper, more thoughtful and more in touch with themselves" or "character, intelligence and creativity" or "unhappiness". As well as a share understanding of the verifiability of trends correlating certain social factors (e.g. "commodification" of identities) with "mental illness, unhappiness, anxiety and drug use". Both suggestions would require further elaboration to become more rationally challenging.
Anyways, there are some other questions your questions suggest in turn: should we let people explore their identities even if this turns out to be bad for them or should we teach people about their identities even this turns out to be bad for them? If letting anybody explore identities implies costs and risks, should we let people explore their identities at their own expense/risk or share the expense/risk collectively as much as possible? I think that what you consider commodification of identities answers both questions in a certain way. And that the notion of "commodification of identities" is also supposed to frame them in a negative light, because it suggests exploitation (some self-interested social agents sell a variety of goods/services designed for identity seekers despite their potential side effects and make money out of it), while the issue that we must deal with prior to discussing exploitation is the desirable balance between freedom and safety in satisfying individual needs within a community. Indeed, even self-interest, money, or power can themselves constitute identities to be consumed by those who possess them.
We are always, to a degree, warring factions of drives, desires, dispositions, histories, narratives etc. (Ive emphasised this several times in other discussions). We never get to a fully unified self. But we can be more or less unified: resoluteness tends to be proportionate to unity and the realisation of positive potentialities proportionate to resoluteness. My goal here is to point to some social obstacles to the realisation of positive potentialities. E.g. Socio-technological mechanisms that empower themselves at our expense through the commodification of our relationship to ourselves.
But I dont want to get pigeon-holed theoretically. Yes, for my purposes, it suits me to present a theory that tries to walk a middle line between metaphysical notions of an ultimately true self and postmodern notions of decentred subjects in a flux of necessarily competitive agencies: I need some comprehensible notion of self to make my case and I also want to stay grounded in a solid social scientific context. So, my aim is to put forward a coherent grounds for making an argument, not to take theoretical sides for the sake of a theoretical discussion. There either is a problem or there isnt. If there is, the job is to put forward a theory that explains it in a self-consistent manner. That doesnt preclude it being done otherwise.
Sherry Turkle, for example, can make just your theoretical criticism in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet:
[quote=Turkle; https://www.studocu.com/en-us/document/studocu-university/studocu-summary-library-en/life-on-the-screen-identity-in-the-age-of-the-internet-sherry-turkle/1040753]
...the unitary self maintains its oneness by repressing all that does not fit. Thus censored, the illegitimate parts of the self are not accessible.... [But our postmodern selves] do not feel compelled to rank or judge the elements of our multiplicity. We do not feel compelled to exclude what does not fit.
[/quote]
To put it another way, very similarly to how you have:
[quote=Slavoj Zizek, "On Belief"]
Sherry Turkle [advocates] the notion that cyberspace-phenomena render palpable in our everyday experience the deconstructionist decentered subject. According to these theorists, one should endorse the dissemination of the unique self into a multiplicity of competing agents into a plurality of self-images without a global coordinating centre, that is operative in cyberspace.
[/quote]
But in Alone Together:
[quote=Wikipedia; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherry_Turkle]
Turkle explores how technology is changing the way we communicate. In particular, Turkle raises concerns about the way in which genuine, organic social interactions become degraded through constant exposure to illusory meaningful exchanges with artificial intelligence. Underlying Turkle's central argument is the fact that the technological developments which have most contributed to the rise of inter-connectivity have at the same time bolstered a sense of alienation between people. The alienation involves links between social networks favouring those of proper conversations.
[/quote]
It seems like she agrees with both of us. And to a large extent, so do I. There are opportunities in online interactions, which I've acknowledged (we are engaging in one now), but there are also pitfalls. So, wheres the beef?
If we accept some concept of social capital; if we accept the reality of shame/pride/humiliation; If we accept we have bodies (or, maybe, they have us); if we accept basic physiological mechanisms of reward and punishment that can make undesirable behaviours addictive; If we accept we do not actually subsist in a purely abstract virtuality though it subsists in usand allows us our unique position in the sentient world; If we accept big tech's profit motive and knowledge advantage; If we accept that much, do we not have a basis for accepting there might be a problem, regardless of differences in theoretical stance?
Quoting Joshs
Sure, this is a way of looking at selves through the lens of the social, from which perspective we are social atoms in a discursive flux. We are grounded in physical bodies too though. So, theres always a spectrum from individuality to social. And, yes, we may conceptualise meaningful individuality in social terms because our relationship to our physical selves is sedimented socially over time, but, again, thats just to recompose the notion of individuality for theoretical purposes.
Quoting Joshs
The issue imo dissolves when you accept there is a spectrum from individuality to sociality, which can be conceptualised in different ways. Regardless of where you draw the line (or whether you choose to draw one at all), the spectrum still has two ends, one in a physical world that defines our ultimate separation from each other and one in a socio-linguistic world that defines our ultimate bonding and mutual dependency. So of course the opposition between the individual and the social disappears when you define the individual out of existence (you decide not to draw the line), but we still experience ourselves as individuals and power structures are still understood as nodes and concentrations, so its easier to elucidate things in these terms.
Quoting Joshs
Theres value in doing that, but his project is different from mine. And again you can conceptualise resoluteness, integrity, personal fulfilment etc either as the successful moulding of a more coherent unified sense of self or as byproducts of a more coordinated shared dance of elements of the social. Understood in terms of the latter, lets say the danger is that social media glorifies bad dancing. Competitive discourses. Anyhow, if it turns out I'm using the equivalent of classical mechanics to your general relativity, thats OK considering my intentions.
This seems to show that Kelly is fundamentally wrong, if you've made an accurate representation. The most formative period in a person's life is before the person knows what's going on. In a sense, the adults are taking advantage of the children by feeding them stimulus which directs them without them knowing that they are being directed. And some semblance of this persists through an individual's life. We are sometimes directed by others toward ends which we are unaware of, and we are even unaware of being directed. This is what allows for the reality of deception, along with milder forms, like subliminal advertising.
But at that early time, in a child's life, which I would argue is the most formative time, the child has no choice in the matter, and one's basic modes of thinking and feeling are being intentionally manipulated by "educators", and whatever stimulus the "educators" let in. By the time the child recognizes that there is purpose to what the adults are doing, such that the child might resist, or move to choose one's own influences, it is already too late to change what has been instilled.
The basic principle here is that the person must learn how to detect influencing stimulus prior to being able to choose which stimuli to accept. And this is such an extremely difficult task that even the most highly trained philosophers do not develop an enviable capacity.
What seems interesting is that as our society becomes more and more conscious and aware of the presence and potential harmfulness of influencing stimuli, the priority in teaching the children will be increasingly directed toward detection and judgement. This will create a base level problem, as it is directly adverse to the nature of teaching, the fundamental hypocrisy of teaching one not to be able to be taught, like teaching skepticism. The result as Baden implies, may be good, may be bad, who knows.
Quoting Judaka
Yes, in the sense that imo the ideology of interchangeable, disposable identities is a means to obscure the reality of how identity actually functions. If it were the case that we could (generally) flit among ostensibly contradictory identities with no negative consequences, my argument would fail. But I think even some of the examples you put forward above support the idea that things are not so simple. Still, we might need to explore further the idea of what it means to lose "sight of what's a mask and what's real".
Insofar as we function in a socially recognizable state, we are always wearing a mask (manifesting an identity). We may swap more or less comfortable masks for each other or superimpose them on each other in more or less comfortable ways. And some masks are more fundamental to us than others. But, crucially, our masks are constants and are our tools for accruing social capital. They are that which gives us access to this market and as such associate themselves with our physiological reward systems.
So, of course, we can lie to try to separate one mask from another, but the experience of being in an environment, such as work, that we would not voluntarily put ourselves in but need to be in for practical reasons is generally not like that. The lie migrates from the interpersonal to the intrapersonal. When we are forced to wear a mask, we tend to confabulate personal agency into a process of being dominated. We become the mask in the process of imagining ourselves separate from it. The inner lie, the gap we create between our personal narrative and our true social position allows the mask to remain and operate. And the more effective the lie, the better it may operate.
Zizek makes a similar point here:
Therein resides the truth of the charming story like Alexandre Dumas The Man Behind the Iron Mask: what if we should turn around the topic according to which, in our social interactions, we wear masks covering our hidden true face? What if, on the contrary, in order for us to interact in public with our true face, we have to have a mask somewhere hidden"
What we confabulate as the lie of one mask (the unwanted identity) is a means to avoid the truth of this maskthat we acutally are (or are becoming) what we dont want to be, i.e. in a state of (partial) domination, which is facilitated rather than contradicted by another mask (a desired identity) that allows us enough (partial) freedom to continue such confabulations.
In concrete terms, our strategies for accruing social capital come into conflict (as I've illustrated before) and in the long term this may cause us psychological problems. That this process is experienced very differently among individuals doesnt alter its fundamental nature. We are all wired differently physiologically and relate to ourselves differently psychologically but we are still programmed to seek resources, material and social, and that programming manifests real biological consequences in social interactions. Also, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves about such interactions are part of an overall strategy to negotiate the social and should be examined critically.
Quoting Baden
This view seems to rely on agency as knowledge. But this misses the pragmatic nature of interpersonal relations, which have to do primarily not with epistemological knowing but with partially shared discursive practices. My agency is expressed and defined in terms of how, through social interchange, I continually establish and re-establish what is at stake and at issue for me in partially shared
circumstances of interchange with others. Personal
agency can never be determined apart from the social embedded practices which form it, but neither can agency disappear into or simply be dominated by social discursive structures, since practices are never completely shared. Each participant subtly redefines what is at issue in the dominant performances of the group.
There is no such thing as a stimulus in some
objective sense, as if there were packets of generic meaning floating around the universe just waiting to invade our psyches like a virus. What constitutes a stimulus for you is different than what constitutes one for me, even if we are in the same room at the same time. We are not passive Lockean blank slates being impressed upon by the external Givens, as Skinner had it, but active construers and interpreters while still in the womb.
Maybe another example might help to forge some common ground. And @Josh maybe you can contextualize your theoretical objections using the below.
Lets say, similarly to your example, I work in an office. I am a woke PC type but my boss is a Trumpy conservative. During work hours, I act like a model employee. I do what my boss wants, speak politely to him and even go along with his (from my point of view) stupid ideas when I find myself in social situations with him. All the while of course, I see myself as just wearing a mask; I hate him and mock him at every opportunity when with my online friends.
But who is the true me here?
Is this as simple a case as the online me is the true me and I can without complications view my work role as a mask, so that the true me positively resists domination by a boss that I despise personally just by lying to him and pretending to be a model employee?
Or is it more the case that I am effectively dominated by my boss and I am a model employee, that this identity is true? I do what he wants and even humour his stupidities against my own wishes because I have to (or feel I have to) in order to keep my job. But because admitting this is painful, I create the mask narrative to obscure the actual nature of the relationship.
Of course, if this is the case, the narrative, such that it allows me to continue to stand working under such conditions extends my domination as does the psychological release through my online identity. As Zizek might put it, my hidden mask (desired online identity) allows for the effective functioning of my public mask (undesired work identity).
We can, of course, reject subjective notions of "true" and "false" identities here and simply look at the likely effects of such a dynamic on me:
My online interactions embed my woke/PC identity as I am rewarded physiologically for expressing it (because I accrue social capital in the process). My work context, though, represses it. For what I am rewarded for expressing online, I feel I would be punished for expressing at work. Regardless of how resolute I may be in my political opinions, their expression is complicated by the opposing social capital markets I must constantly traverse and the conflicting conditioning involved in doing so. I am dominated to the extent that I am forced by my social context (or feel I am) for practical reasons to navigate such conflicting markets.
This is a rather idealized (if not entirely unrealistic) example, but the idea can be leveraged into less obvious contexts, I think. Do you agree? Or do you think I'm overstating / misinterpreting the situation?
I would describe your true identity to be a pragmatic progressive liberal who pretends to be a conservative in order for reward. In the case described, your reward was to keep your job, implicating the economy. Another case might be to pretend your wife's burnt muffins taste good. What you're not is an ideologue, damning the torpedoes for the sake of an idealized self. That you are a nuanced self means you live in the real world, but it doesn't mean you are a suppressed self.
Do social influences define the self? Obviously. That type of swimmer I am is defined by the waters I swim in.
But I think your question is whether the current tides are making us worse swimmers, the type none of us want to be, tearing away at our souls, crushing our swimmer spirits. As in, we all just want to swim freely in the open sea, but the current influences are making it worse on us, and even making us think we're better for these influences. This is just so much angst against the current condition isn't it?
You've asked a few posters if they agreed that the current conditions are worsening our ability to express our true selves, and you've gotten mixed results. My question is whether the bulk of those who have bought into current days' society's rewards eventually die feeling duped or whether they feel themselves to have lived fulfilled lives. If it's the latter, then the irony is that it's you where the angst lies, not those you attempted to save from angst. You have all these kids running off the side of the cliff, tumbling, falling, busting themselves up, yet they are all convinced they are having the time of their lives, and you, the catcher in the rye, screaming for them to stop because you have a better understanding of the cliff, are the only one upset.
But it seems to me that not only what the dimensions, magnitude and form of the problem are , but whether there is seen to be a problem at all, is determined by the theoretical framework we embrace. In other words, the theory comes first, not after a problem has been identified. For instance, Zizek believes the modern world is sick, due to the hegemonic dominance of Capitalism. In this thinking he is joined by most of the members of the Frankfurt school. The sickness they see in the world is inseparable from their reliance on the notion of alienated subjectivity.
I think Habermas was among the first to break away from this pessimistic stance. His communicative action theory, although retaining the notion of subjectivity, saw discourse as motivated in the direction of rational agreement rather than domination and deception.
From the vantage of poststructuralist thinking, which deconstructs subjectivity, the problem of the alienated capitalist subject vanishes and in its place emerges a pluralism of strategies for ensuring that new openings or lines of flight are created within discursive structures (economic, social, technological).
Quoting Baden
When it comes to the biological body, things have changed since Marcuses Freudian-influenced concept of libido. Within enactivist approach in psychology, which share features with poststructuralism, the relation between individual and social is less a spectrum than an inseparable, reciprocal interaction. Body, mind and world form one system. There is a functional autonomy to the self of the organism , but not in Freuds sense of an interior psychodynamic structure. When you read today about the psyche being embodied and embedded , this indicates that , as Shaun Gallagher writes objective (social and cultural) factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world, even in the immediacy of our embodied and instrumental copings with the environment.
I don't experience identifying these kinds of issues as angst but as interesting opportunities for thought. Kind of like how you experience them as fun opportunities to talk about your experiences in the kitchen or at the seaside.
So societal influences degrade the self, so you think about those things for intellectual development, which would arguably help you develop your self, which makes the destructive forces of the masses your constructive force.
I kind of like this. If I could spend my life in intellectual amusement observing the folly of the underclass, I would have a benefit otherwise unrealized if it weren't for that helpful amusing folly.
This is good.
It's like how I should be thankful for the poor for giving me the satisfaction of having someone to feed.
Yeah, I know you've not bought into all this, but I was just running with the idea of gaining value from interesting opportunities for thought even when what I was thinking about was how someone else was fucking up.
Thank you, your post has been an interesting opportunity for thought.
I think this is very simply wrong. There are conditions under which all people will either be happy or unhappy. No one wants to be a slave, for example,
I doubt anyone is really happy when being exploited by others, or for that matter, when exploiting others. There is undoubtedly a basellne human nature which gets moulded by cultural influences, but cannot be negated by them.
I disagree with the generality of this statement. It is very clear, that many things will stimulate numerous people. So many things constitute stimuli for many people. And, since your claim was that stimuli could "simply go unnoticed and have no effect on our thinking or feeling", you have no premise for such a statement.
You want to use "stimulus" in two different ways. Your prior use was such that a stimulus could have no affect on a person whatsoever. But now when I called you on that, you want to say that this does not qualify as "stimulus" for the person.
How do you account for that type of "stimulus" which appears to have no affect on a person, but really does? And when I say "appears to have no affect", I mean it appears this way to everyone involved, both observers and the individual involved. Once you accept the reality, that stimulus can affect a person, and have a real affect on one's thinking or feeling, without that person even noticing oneself to be affected, then you'll understand what I am talking about.
Which consequences are worth lying to avoid? What rewards are worth lying to get? And who decides?
Humans are capable of - and perhaps masters of - calculation, and recognising when lying is preferable to telling the truth. Perhaps it's for self-gain, perhaps it's to cultivate an image or maybe it's just to cheer up a friend. "Domination" is a narrow lens to look at this, and it's controversial, I could go down the road of challenging this description but I don't think it would lead anywhere. The particulars of this situation have a clear power dynamic, but it's not like the powerful have no use for lying or masks, instead, masks have utility in basically every and any social circumstance.
Secondly, there is no "mask narrative". The deception here is intentional and calculated. It's like you're analysing the situation as someone who doesn't know any better. You know that the PC office worker is being intentionally and purposefully deceptive, to appear as a model employee is the purpose of this deception. The deception is the mask, if there was no deception, and the PC office worker from the start openly expressed how foolish the boss was, then there would be no mask or deception to talk about. It's by design, and the continuation of this deception requires continuous intent.
We use masks for all kinds of reasons, but it's always calculated. For example, the PC office worker may present as apolitical until probing the situation to see whether being truthful will lead to conflict or kinship. Is it courageous to say whatever you think with no regard for consequences? Or foolish?
Humans are so fucking good at lying, we do it seamlessly, effortlessly, instinctively. To characterise us as having our psyches shattered (exaggerating) by telling some lies to our boss just seems very unnatural to me.
It's also odd to say this is worse today than before. In the Soviet Union, for example, society was founded upon telling lies. You'd lie about how much work you did, you'd lie about your beliefs, you'd lie about where you came from, lie about anything you needed to in order to survive. Most societies didn't have freedom of speech, few rights even existed, and those higher up the hierarchy could act with greater severity and quite arbitrarily. The boss can fire you or harass you, which sucks, but in the past, you could be killed, which seems significantly worse.
Maybe no one wants to be a slave, and the concept of slavery is today universally condemned as morally wrong, but that is a recent development. For most of human history slavery was common and accepted , and I wager that if you were to ask slaves in periods of history when slavery was widely present if they believed that there were situations under which they themselves would be morally just in owning a slave they would say yes.
Many slave owners sincerely believed slavery was not only just but benefitted the slave. So the idea that slavery is immoral and abusive exploitation that prevents overall
human flourishing is not a universal of history or human nature, but a contingent product of modern culture. I agree that humans have always desired flourishing but this is like saying we want what we want.
What flourishing or exploitation means is relative to a value system, and value systems change. I think what evolves is our ability to relate to the ways of others different from ourselves and this allows flourishing to be shared more widely among different segments of culture.
I believe this is the issue of "authenticity", which Heidegger dealt with to a considerable extent. You might think that the individual can look at oneself, and answer this question quite simply, who is the true me. The traditional sense of "authenticity" would have one looking for one's true identity or self. However, I believe that according to Heidegger we are fundamentally inauthentic. So this presents a sort of paradox, to find the true self is to find inauthenticity, and this is probably why we are prone to multiple identities. We cannot say that one or another is the true identity, because it's like asking what are you doing with your life, when the person is involved in many projects.
I believe that Heidegger holds that a human person has the capacity to be authentic, but this requires an understanding of one's temporal existence. We look to the future as possibilities for projection. We look at the past as having been thrown. So at the present we are in a sort of condition of falling, but not free-fall, because the reality of future possibilities. And when we look at the past as thrownness, what has put us in the present condition of falling, we must apprehend it as an intentional projection. From this we grasp the reality of past mistakes.
That a social relationship or arrangement might be acceptable to people on account of the fact that they have 'bought the narrative" does not preclude its harmfulness. If the narrative was bought it was bought because of people being conditioned by overarching ideologies, finding themselves lacking the resources to critique.
So, that some slaves may have thought slavery was part of the natural or divine order of things, does not entail that the slaves (or the masters) were happy about it. If slavery were a good, an aid to human flourishing, then why would it ever be abolished? .
Quoting Joshs
Perhaps some slave owners did sincerely (although how would we know?) believe that slavery benefited the slave, but if true that would have been a rationalization that ignored the reality of the conditions of slavery, and as such it has no bearing on the question as to what, in the most general sense, contributes to human flourishing and what detracts from it.
Today we still have slavery, albeit of a different kind, endorsed by modern popular culture; consumerism is a form of slavery, wage slavery its sibling.
Quoting Joshs
I don't think that what flourishing or exploitation consist in is merely relative to a value system. Have you ever seen mistreated animals living in appalling conditions of cruelty and neglect? We can see that they are miserable, that they are not flourishing, so I don't buy this idea of relativity. It is compassion or its lack that determines whether one can see whether others are flourishing or not.
You are a moral realist. What remains to be determined is whether your universalism concerning this aspect of human nature grounds itself on an evolutionarily adaptive instinct or a metaphysical a priori. If the former , do you agree with psychologists like Jonathan Haidt that there are a number of innate moral foundations? He specifies at least 5:
Care/harm
Fairness/cheating
Loyalty/betrayal
Authority/subversion
Sanctity/degradation.
But the catch is that while each of us has all of these , we have them in differing concentrations. The result is a relativism and political polarization over values.
I have encountered the Frankfurt School only later in life. It is pessimistic - I do wonder how many potentially productive lives were derailed by One Dimensional Man - but I still think that elements of their critique are spot on. I'm particularly thinking of the way that 'the establishment' (online and other entertainment media, advertising, social commentary, mass economics) overtly or covertly encourages ways of being that benefit capitalism by the stimulation of desire (New! Sensational! Don't miss out!)
Saying that I also recognise that liberal culture provide far more opportunity for dissent and non-conformity than did any of the forms of Marxist culture that we have seen so far, so I take any form of Leftist critique with the appropriate grain of salt. But I still think they represent a perspective that needs to be heard. (I wonder whatever became of the critics of 'corporatism'?)
I don't consider myself to be a moral realist. I think of morality as a sense, and as you note people have this sense, with its accompanying "moral foundations" that you listed there, in "different concentrations" which I take you mean in different degrees, but also in different combinations.
I don't think these differences result in "a relativism" though, since care, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity are arguably generally admired, while harm, cheating, betrayal, subversion and degradation are generally deprecated, in most if not all human societies, for very pragmatic, but I think also aesthetic, and even compassionate, reasons.
Authority and sanctity are the principles which I think allow of the greatest range of interpretations and thus of some relativism.
I don't see human morality as inherently different to the kinds of normative behaviors that can be observed in social animal communities.
No, it is not. The figures of Nietzsches Dionisius, Foucaults Baudelaire, and Deleuzes Proust and Kafka have not returned the identity of the same. On the contrary, their subject of return has been becoming. The author himself, a figure of a character, literary, conceptual, and aesthetic components of the work compose a singular multiplicity. The work and the producer have simultaneously become and effaced; they have acquired the temporary, fragile, self-sufficient modus of existence. Eternal return affects only the new, what is produced under the condition of default and by intermediary of metamorphosis. However, it causes neither condition nor agent to return on the contrary it repudiates these and expels them with all its centrifugal force. It constitutes the autonomy of the product. It is repetition by excess which leaves nothing of the becoming-equal. (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p 90).
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
I used to read Massumis books. He is interested in the problem of our autonomy and subjectivity that we deal with in this thread. But, as far as I know, he has not solved it yet. The call to go beyond ideology is a call to attend to the novelty of the situation, and to find ways of conceptualizing the current mode of operation of the capitalist process, and the new kinds of spin-off effects it produces, that can grasp its novelty and complexity. How can a relational approach give us a new understanding of capitalism as a self-proliferating What are the new figures of that relation? Is the figuring still a question of personification? If so, is identification still at the basis of the figures of capital? What does it mean to personify a derivative? A credit default swap? (Massumi, Politics of affect, p 90)
Regarding DeLanda, I think that Ian Buchanans critique of his assemblage theory is entirely appropriate.
Also, I looked through Protevis book. His themes, style, and vocabulary are very close to Deleuze and Guattaris. Yet, it seems that he cannot grasp the singularity of our current situation. He analyzes limited domains and cuts off a few essential dimensions of the Deleuzian conceptual framework. I will clarify my position by applying Deleuze and Guattaris perspectives on writing. Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted, write at n -1 dimensions, in the middle of things A system of this kind can be called a rhizome There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). One cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside. (Deleuze and Guattari, A thousand plateaus, p 23). Thus, Protevi does not write at n 1 dimensions. To add one more dimension of the unique, higher principle of writing means to follow a pre-given, pre-calculated hermeneutic, interpretative, scientific or transcendental method or paradigm. It results in the return of the same, of the identity of the supreme instance. Indeed, D& Gs view on writing ensues from Deleuzes interpretation of internal return. For them, to write means to deconstruct themselves to achieve the production of the new.
Deconstruction of subjectivity as a way of existence and the production of the new was inherited by Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida from Nietzcshe. I discussed one of its modes in my previous post. Are these strategies still in effect? Have the leading postmodernist thinkers' conceptual frameworks and practices remained relevant in our situation? Today, it looks like the problem of the construction of an autonomous selfaffirming subjectivity, the resistant self-positioning existence, has not been rigorously articulated and resolved yet. As Deleuze put it in 'Postscript on the societies of control': "Many young people strangely boast of being 'motivated,' they re-request apprenticeship and permanent training. It is up to them to discover what they are being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill."
This is an important point of disagreement. Yes, lying/deception can be intentional, beneficial, calculated etc. But what I've presented relates to the operation of a more generalised context where lying is proposed as a defence against the domination inherent in being on the wrong side of an asymmetric power relation that establishes itself as a mode of life. Ive specified in the example that the liar acts as a model employee. So analysing the power dynamics (i.e. whats relevant to the argument concerning domination) how do we differentiate between the boss / model employee relationship where model employee A conceptualises themselves as model vs. where model employee B conceptualises themselves as a "liar"?
From the point of view of the boss, there is no difference. A model employee is an employee who, within the bounds of company culture (defining the respective responsibilities / duties / powers of management and staff), has submitted to the full limits of control by the boss, i.e. who the boss has maximum power/dominance over. Logically analagous, the micro-social (work) context dictates the operation of the power dynamic plays out the same way. Whatever limit of domination is defined by company culture is reached in the model employee. This is the limit of the (social) identity of the "model employee", a tool of the machinery of their workplace.
We have introduced the complication of personal differences between the boss and the employee, such that the boss is an ideological opponent of the employee. Such personal differences may threaten the smooth operation of a company as they complicate the submission of one individual to another for an ostensibly pure material gain by introducing a social capital dynamic that runs in an opposing direction. The employee submits to the boss because they are paid to do so. In the general social capital landscape of modern society, this is the norm. But to submit to an ideological opponent threatens humiliation (loss of social capital), just as to dominate one offers esteem (gain of social capital). This dynamic is entrenched by the employees online life as it involves a social capital market that offers rewards for dominating ideological opponents (through mocking them, beating them in debates, deriding them etc.) which come with concomitant punishments for being dominated by them.
Taking the perspective of the boss / company / workplace machinery, the perfect solution to the potential conflict created by such personal differences as weve injected into the above scenario is that they should be dissolved in such a way that the employee maintains his/herself as model / tool / cog with minimum company resources invested. And this is exactly how the employee's deception narrative / mask functions. The employee does all the work and keeps intact the power dynamic whereby he / she is dominated. It functions so well, in fact, that it becomes as youve suggested effortless and instinctive, further abrogating any danger to the system.
Quoting Judaka
Note the contradiction btw between this and:
Quoting Judaka
What is instinctive is just what is not calculated. And I think this is a problem for your conception of how long-term lying in the form of taking on an unwanted social identity for material gain functions (especially one that involves some from of ideological conflict). Under any objective analysis, such instinctive lying in the form of the effortless cooperative behaviour it fosters functions to the benefit of the boss and the company machinery. Your conception of this being otherwiseand the paradoxes that view engendersdemonstrates imo just how the interpersonal lie can become intrapersonal.
This can be applied to all sorts of contexts, of course. Zizek puts it succinctly:
[quote=Zizek; https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2738992-violence-six-sideways-reflections]
The experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie the truth lies outside, in what we do.[/quote]
Now you may retort that the subjective experience of the employee differs in some important quality depending on the orientation they take towards their boss, and we can discuss that too (I don't think it btw just "shatters" the employee psychologically--it's a process of denigration, not a dramatic event). But what you cant deny is how the effort at deception functions socially, its impotence, and its even facilitative role in a power dynamic that maintains the employee as a tool of the boss and the company machinery in which they are embedded.
Quoting Baden
I disagree, humans are instinctively calculative, Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in the Everyday Life is a book I could recommend on this topic.
To be politically calculative is ingrained into our human nature and operates consciously and subconsciously. The primary benefit of this subconscious element is the importance of appearing non-calculative. You can only trust a calculative person to act in their best interests, and that doesn't inspire trust, and we're instinctively aware of that. The book I recommended does go into it, but even just observationally, there's incongruence between what people say and do that's only explained this way.
There's a learned element as well, of course, we learn quickly as very young children the need for social calculation. To play by the rules, to share, and to do things that help cultivate friendships and make us likeable. We're punished for unacceptable social behaviour by authority and the by social repercussions. I'm autistic, so I'm actually pretty awful at this, and I have to do a lot of this calculation consciously because it doesn't happen as automatically. Autism has potential value as a way to look at for contrast from what's normal. The complexity people normally navigate with such ease is taken for granted and becomes invisible, but when someone can't do it well, it stands out.
Quoting Baden
I've already said this, but deception works in the exact same way without the power dynamic. The power dynamic is incidental. The boss definitely also wears masks and is likely just as deceptive and calculative as PC worker.
I struggle to see any merit in challenging your interpretations, because I don't see how any of these points relate back to any greater argument or your OP. Western capitalism is less tyrannical than what preceded it or what exists elsewhere, and western democracies are less tyrannical than alternatives.
Quoting Baden
Considering how "the truth" can change so much based on who gets to describe it, I'm unsure of what you're trying to say.
Quoting Baden
I'm struggling to understand how the various arguments you've made recently are connected. Are they?
Sure. They connect to the concept of the social immune system and how it relates to identity as mentioned in the OP.
Quoting Judaka
I'm not suggesting liberal democracies are worse places to live than theocracies, dictatorships or other tyrannies. But there's a sense in which you know where you are with a tyranny, whereas the control exerted over our behaviour and place in the system in a liberal democracy is more subtle. I think that has real effects re realizing our potentialities. And I think the idea we can think our way out of being controlled through deception where such deception primarily functions to make us more comfortable being controlled is contradictory. Imo, we would want to live in a liberal democracy (with no better alternative) but understand as well as possible how we relate to it in order to best realize our creative potentials therein. That may involve recognizing the obscured compatibility of apparently polarised political identities in embedding us in inert personal conditions.
Quoting Judaka
That's interesting. And I think, yes, it may have potential value in maintaining a more conscious and effective separation from damaging social influences. It's a line of thought worth pursuing.
I come at the concept of agency from a sociological perspective whereby it involves habituated dispositions that sustain current identities, the capacity to imagine and realize future identities, and the socially facilitated space to make practical judgements that direct and mould the process of identity formation. In the case where our circumstances are obscured from us, the latter two aspects of agency may be inhibited.
Quoting Joshs
I've never committed to a binary logic of domination/freedom, agency/absence of agency. We both agree that personal agency can't be determined distinct from the social embedded practices / socially facilitated spaces that contextualize it. So we should agree it's a process of negotiation within social limits, which define certain modes of its functioning and potential for self-realization and can be more or less facilitative of such. Unless, your purpose of translating my sociolological language into your poststructuralist language is to insist on some free-floating absolute equality of identities / potentialities such that the value of modern existence lies in novelty for novelty's sake with no concept of quality admissible, I don't see the substance of your objections.
My meta-theoretic orientation is pragmatist. I have an interest in understanding and contextualizing social reality through theorizing as an explanatory, predictive, and suggestive tool. So, it's not such a one-way street for me. Theories are not like football teams where I feel the need to support one over the other because it's currently winning the Premier League.
Quoting Joshs
Alienation doesn't vanish nor do the mechanisms that contribute to it though you can conceptualise such mechanisms in different ways. I think your view that the problem disappears is due to a reading that's overly simplistic, determinative, and binary. I've already given the example of Sherry Turkle to demonstrate how the opportunities that social technologies open up (in just the way you've described) do not fully preclude the dangers they present.
Quoting Joshs
So? How is some level of inter-theoretic identity excluded here in the context of my project? Why is this banal observation objective (social and cultural) factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world, even in the immediacy of our embodied and instrumental copings with the environment. germane?
I agree with the thrust of this though the notion of satisfying needs is problematic. Needs are wrapped up in the social dynamic I'm criticising. Anyhow, I've suggested earlier that education re social technologies etc is a desirable way to approach the problem. There's a degree to which this is happening already and certain social media platforms are losing their lustre due to the their modes of operation becoming more transparent (although the narrative of "privacy" is more dominant than that of manipulation). So, yes, I cast things in a negative light because I'm focusing on the problems inherent in the way we interact with these technologies but I don't want to be seen to be ignoring the opportunities.
There are compatibilities with Heideggerian notions of authenticity but I don't need to invoke Heidegger to make the point that people have a range of potentialities, the pursuance or not of which may open or close spaces for different types of being, some of which utilize more or less these personal potentialities, some of which inhere more or less quality.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sure, but we can have an overarching self-narrative that more or less coherently (both in an abstract and practical sense) encompasses our identities and the energies and drives that lie behind their formation.
Quoting Baden
No... but I thought your OP was targeting liberal democracies and the modern US. No society has ever lacked the need for people to take on unwanted identities, where people could say or do whatever they wanted. Living without freedom should create a greater need for repressing and acting in contradiction to one's thoughts and feelings, surely?
Quoting Baden
Well, you've done your best to manufacture a scenario complete with the specific interpretations, characterisations, focus and narrowness necessary to lead you to that conclusion.
Quoting Baden
My answer to this question is that you are the sum your relationships to society. To understand social capitalism, I think it is useful to look at the bankrupts. If 'influencers' are the social capital millionaires, then the bankrupts are the sufferers from all the new psychological illnesses - gender dysphoria, anorexia, bulimia, depression. One might say, looking at the physical relations of these illnesses, that the virtual world is exploiting the body in the same way that modern society has been exploiting the environment. And the losers are suffering from lethal mental waste being dumped on them.
The focus on authenticity is just another turn of the screw in this context: it is like enlightenment or 'cool' - to be concerned with one's authenticity is inauthentic + authenticity is the only important thing to be. Get out of that without moving!
Our notions of freedom aren't entirely unproblematic. But identifying problems in how liberal democracies function doesn't in any way imply that tyrannies are a solution.
Quoting Judaka
More or less. It's a starting point, for arguments' sake, rather than a destination.
Quoting Baden
I almost made exactly the same point to @Metaphysician Undercover when he brought up Heidegger. Authenticity narratives are corrupted with the kind of individuality narratives that I've criticized previously.
Quoting unenlightened
:up:
The problem is that "potential" is a very difficult concept, and it's meaning will vary greatly depending on its ontological context. So, the way that one understands "that people have a range of potentialities" is greatly dependent on one's metaphysical perspective.
However, if we assign priority to inauthenticity, we deny true identity, and in doing this we deny the applicability of "types of being". So we approach the problem without this assumption (types of being), assuming only what appears to be infinite possibility (potential) for action. There is no authentic representation of "what I am", producible through reference to types of being.
Quoting Baden
This is highly doubtful, due to the result of what I explained to Josh earlier. There is much that affects us without us apprehending that it affects us,. So any self-narrative that one produces will be extremely defective, missing many key elements. I believe this is why Plato argued strongly against the use of "narrative" in general. If one believes the narrative, it will inevitably mislead due to the deficiencies of narrative in general.
Quoting Baden
This is why assigning priority to inauthenticity is beneficial. The person's real, or "true" identity is neither identity A nor identity B. And if we move to propose a distinct identity which encompasses the two, an overarching narrative, we will not be able to encompass everything about the person, and this will end up being opposed to some other identity which the person displays, and we will need to account for this other identity as well.
I believe this principle is a manifestation of Hegelian dialectics, he gives priority to the active "becoming", which sublates the passive logical states of being and not being, and these lend themselves to "identity". In an Aristotelian interpretation we might say that neither/nor is the true identity, violating the law of excluded middle, but Hegel would want us to say that both are the true identity, violating the law of non-contradiction. Whichever you choose has metaphysical implications.
The principal point being that when we make "being" active (instead of the passive what is), and especially in the case of assigning agency to a being, then the principle of identity and therefore the three fundamental rules of good logical practise are no longer applicable. Then we need to seek principles other than identity to ground the activities of being (more appropriately stated as "becoming"). This other base, or grounding was proposed by Plato as "the good", and you apprehend it from a perspective of pragmaticism.
Quoting Baden
This, I think is a bit of a misunderstanding, because Heidegger gives priority to inauthenticity. So from this perspective there is no authentic narrative, only inauthentic narratives. Therefore authenticity narratives are fundamentally misguided. Authenticity however, is something we can strive for, but this requires an understanding of one's temporal existence, including an apprehension of potentialities, referred to above. The deficiency of a "narrative" is that it does not capture the reality of potential.
So when Heidegger describes one's being at the present, as falling, we must look at this as a position created by having been thrown. And the being thrown is purposefully directed, a projection. One's past therefore consists of purposeful directing, and the intention involved in this is not adequately represented in the narrative.
Hilary Putnam makes the argument that if the basis of our valuative, ethical judgements is an evolutionary adaptation shared by other animals then it is as though we are computers programmed by a fool ( selection pressure) operating subject to the constraints imposed by a moron ( nature). Those theorists, like Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Prinz, who believe that the basis of our ethical values is biological and therefore relative, find a way out of this problem by distinguishing between biological and rational faculties.
According to Prinz, even though moral values are dependent on subjectively relative emotional dispositions, it is possible to determine one moral position as being objectively better than another on the basis of non-moral meta-empirical values such as consistency, universalizability and effects on well-being. Prinz's dualist split between empirical objectivism and moral-emotive relativism thereby upholds ethical correctness as the identification of breakdowns of rational objectivity that take the form of cognitive biases , distortions and errors of judgement. For instance, Prinz(2011) suggests that Hitler's actions were partially based on false beliefs, rather than values.
This is what I meant by a metaphysical a priori basis of ethical judgement, as opposed to a subjective, biologically-based grounding. Putnam says One cannot discover laws of nature unless one brings to nature a set of a priori prejudices which is not hopelessly wrong. And those prejudices cannot themselves be a product of blind evolution.
He concludes Without the cognitive values of coherence, simplicity, and instrumental efficacy we have no world and no facts, not even facts about what relative to what. And these cognitive values, I claim, are simply a part of our holistic conception of human flourishing. Bereft of the old realist idea of truth as "correspondence" and of the positivist idea of justification as fixed by public "criteria," we are left with the necessity of seeing our search for better conceptions of rationality as an intentional activity which, like every activity that rises above the mere following of inclination or obsession, is guided by our idea of the good.
If coherence and simplicity are values, and if we cannot deny with out falling into total self-refuting subjectivism that they are objective (notwithstanding their "softness," the lack of well-defined "criteria," and so forth), then the classic argument against the objectivity of ethical values is totally undercut.
It should be clear from what Ive written that I agree with much of this, but, again, lets not fall foul of binary thinking: Narratives are defective by nature; therefore, avoid narratives First of all, we cant. Not under my definitions of identity and self at least. Second of all, the production of a self-narrative can be opposed to experimenting with identities as it tends to be a more organic process of organizing our identities over time. It answers the more holistic question: "What kind of person am I?" rather than "Whats my job?", "What political party do I follow?", "What nationality am I?" etc. When we e.g. have major decisions to make about the course of our lives, being able to answer that first question may be very important. And to the extent our answer is more coherent, it makes such decision-making easier. It also relates to our general self-esteem and how we contextualize our interactions with other. What do we expect from them? What do we think they expect from us? etc. These forces make self-narratives socially necessary. And the danger from my perspective is not in their inherent defectiveness but in their degree of defectiveness.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I stipulated in the scenario an additional hypothesized employee for reasons of contrast. They are two separate persons not separate identities in one person.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I wasnt referring directly to Heidegger there but to the (mis)appropriation of the concept of authenticity in popular culture. See uns comment here for context.
I have nothing against introducing a Heideggerian (or any other) angle here (as long as relevance can be established, I'll respond). But continuing my pragmatist bent my main focus is a more grounded filling out of my argument. If I can achieve the modest task of convincing readers there might be something to look at and there might be productive ways to look at it they haven't thought of before, I'll be more than satisfied. Recalling my brief convo with @Hanover, I'm less in the pessimism/angst producing business than the art of encouraging critical thought and engagement.
Subliminal advertising is a technique that has been explored by marketers from time to time. Some image or text ( or audio stimulus) is displayed on a screen too
quickly for the viewer to be consciously aware of. The idea is that they wil nevertheless be influenced by this information that bypasses consciousness. Almost all the research shows that it doesnt work. Why not? Because how likely we are to remember and be affected by a stimulus is a function of its relevance and meaningfulness to us. This is the principle behind memory enhancement techniques like the pegword method. We normally have a hard time remembering a random list of words ( like grocery items). But when we associate each word with an image which is already of significance to us we will recall it more easily. The more emotionally salient that image is(bizarre, humorous , erotic, etc). the better. Better yet is linking the list of arbitrary items together in a relevant and meaningful way , such as by associating each item with an object that one sees along a familiar route to work or around the house. We are bombarded with sensations all the time knocking at the door of consciousness, and yet we dont notice the vast majority of this stimulation. It has to make itself relevant to our current concerns in order for us to pay attention to it. If it is not salient enough for us to care about it , then it will not be able to significantly affect our behavior, beliefs, attitudes.
Salience and expectations drive what we pay attention to and what we make of what we pay attention to, and the more conscious these are, the more they will have an effect on our thinking.
You mentioned Heidegger earlier. As you know , he argues that we always have a pre-understanding of the world that we project forward into new experience. We dont see simply stimuli but meaningful perceptions.
Initially" we never hear noises and complexes of sound, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the crackling fire. It requires a very artificial and complicated attitude in order to "hear" a "pure noise." The fact that we initially hear motorcycles and wagons is, however, the phenomenal proof that Da-sein, as being-in-the world, always already maintains itself together with innerworldly things at hand and initially not at all with "sensations" whose chaos would first have to be formed to provide the springboard from which the subject jumps off finally to land in a "world." Essentially understanding, Dasein is initially together with what is understood.( Being and Time)
Heres a neuroscientific way of thinking about this:
Evan Thompson explains:
traditional neuroscience has tried to map brain organization onto a hierarchical, input-output processing model in which the sensory end is taken as the starting point. Perception is described as proceeding through a series of feedforward or bottom-up processing stages, and top-down influences are equated with back-projections or feedback from higher to lower areas. Freeman aptly describes this view as the "passivist-cognitivist view" of the brain. From an enactive viewpoint, things look rather different. Brain processes are recursive, reentrant, and self-activating, and do not start or stop anywhere. Instead of treating perception as a later stage of sensation and taking the sensory receptors as the starting point for analysis, the enactive approach treats perception and emotion as dependent aspects of intentional action, and takes the brain's self-generated, endogenous activity as the starting point for neurobiological analysis. This activity arises far from the sensorsin the frontal lobes, limbic system, or temporal and associative corticesand reflects the organism's overall protentional setits states of expectancy, preparation, affective tone, attention, and so on. These states are necessarily active at the same time as the sensory inflow.
Whereas a passivist-cognitivist view would describe such states as acting in a top-down manner on sensory processing, from an enactive perspective top down and bottom up are heuristic terms for what in reality is a large-scale network that integrates incoming and endogenous activities on the basis of its own internally established reference points. Hence, from an enactive viewpoint, we need to look to this large-scale dynamic network in order to understand how emotion and intentional action emerge through self-organizing neural activity.
The characterizations of evolution as a fool and nature as a moron are foolish and moronic in my view.
Quoting Joshs
The idea of a "blind evolution" is tendentious and a presumptive artefact of mechanistic thinking.
Quoting Joshs
Since the world is a collective representation, I don't see why we should be "bereft of the old realist idea of truth as "correspondence" and of the positivist idea of justification as fixed by public "criteria,". Of course these ideas are relative to our collectively represented world, not some "absolute" world that stands "behind" that.
What seems to be most difficult to understand is that the real (not the collective representation we know as world) is not represented by our conceptions; our conceptions only find their sense in relation to the inter-subjectively constructed world we think about, refer to and understand in dualistic terms.
I call the noumenal, that of which we cannot speak, the real whereas Kant refers to it as the transcendental ideal. For me this is kind of arse-about because it is the empirical which consists in ideas, while the transcendental real transcends all our ideas. Experientially, it is that which is closest to us even though we cannot subject that experience in its "livingness" it to our conceptions.
Rationality simply consists in self-consistently thinking in dualistic or binary terms; black and white, yes and no, true and false, is and is not, exists and does not exist and so on. It is part and parcel, built into the very foundations, of the empirical world of objects and entities and their properties and relations.
.
Yes, but...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
...I think this involves a misunderstanding of how I'm using the term "identity" or an equivocation that muddles the issue. Or at least you haven't clearly established relevance imo. Again, I've no problem with working Hegel into this but I'll need a bit more convincing here.
(Have you read my OP btw? Some of what you've written suggests to me you haven't, particularly as I define how I'm using the concept of "identity" there quite directly.)
I was just flicking through the Logic. This bit then, right?
S187
"The more precise meaning and expression which being and nothing receive, now that they are moments, is to be ascertained from the consideration of determinate being as the unity in which they are preserved. Being is being, and nothing is nothing, only in their contradistinction from each other; but in their truth, in their unity, they have vanished as these determinations and are now something else. Being and nothing are the same; but just because they are the same they are no longer being and nothing, but now have a different significance. In becoming they were coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be; in determinate being, a differently determined unity, they are again differently determined moments. This unity now remains their base from which they do not again emerge in the abstract significance of being and nothing."
This makes you an unrealistic optimist, which hopefully causes you angst, in which case I'll be satisfied.
This is difficult, and I am trying to understand exactly what is meant here. The last line suggests a clear division between belief and values, as if a value is somehow other than a type of belief. But I can\t see how you get to this position.
It appears as if you are driving a wedge between objectivity, being associated with empirically verified beliefs which are considered to be true, and emotional features, "values" , which are subjective. But after making this division you want to say that it is possible that values may be objective, if grounded in something like "well-being". However, my well-being does not necessitate your well-being, and the reality of competition often results in the opposite situation.
So it really doesn't look to me like Prinz offers a very good understanding of the relation between beliefs and values. The whole separation between objective beliefs and subjective values seems completely artificial and imaginary to me, contrived for the sake of proposing that something like "well-being" could be used to introduce objectivity into the realm of subjective values.
Quoting Baden
Yes, I've read the OP a couple times, I'll go back and make it three now. The problem I have is that your description of a person's identities, and the relationship that the identities have to the self, is not really consistent with my personal experience. I can follow your description of that, but then when you get to the point of relating the self, along with its identities to the social environment which gives context to the self, I cannot follow, because the way that you've described self and identities is unreal to me.
So to begin with, I don't see that people create identities for oneself. We create identities for others, and narratives concerning others, and sometimes I might include myself in such a narrative, but the narrative is essentially about the other, not about myself. As "myself", I have an identity which is completely different from the narrative I have of others,, being based in my wants, desires, needs, and intentions. The narratives which I assign to others, giving them their identities, is based on their past actions, yet the identity I give to myself is based in what I want for the future. If I look back, and get overly concerned about how others have viewed me in the past, and I try to produce some sort of narrative from this, I will lose my bearing on the future, and lose track of myself.
Therefore I see what you call a person's identities, the identities which a person makes for oneself, as nothing other than the manifestation of the variety of goals which a person has for oneself. And, these goals often involve relations with others. So if I present myself to you in one way, to get what I want from you, and I present myself to another person in another way, to get what I want from that person, I see this not as giving myself a multiplicity of identities, but as having various distinct goals. However, an outside observer might look at my various different forms of behaviour, and conclude that I have different identities.
This is the principal difference then. I look at myself as one coherent self, with one identity, being myself. The differences within me which make it appear to others like I have a multitude of identities, is simply the result of me having many widely varying goals. And the behavioural features which you describe as different identities are simply the result of differing goals. Furthermore, it is very often that a person does not well define and prioritize one's own goals, such that it is common for one to have conflicting goals within creating the appearance of conflicting identities.
I see the issue then as a matter of understanding and prioritizing goals. I will behave differently around one group of people from how I behave around another, and this makes me not want them all in the same room together. And if I ask why I behave differently, it's because I have different expectations of them. To use Joshs' terms above, these are conflicting subjective values which I myself hold. To straighten out this conflict within myself, I must confer with something independent, a separate scale which would somehow give me objective principles for how I ought to behave consistently.
To get to the part of the OP where you talk about the "advanced" society, what I see is a society which offers, and even induces through advertising and all sorts of social media, a wide range of goals for a person. You call this "freedom", but it's not really freedom, just a wide range of offers, more like a multitude of suggestions. As producing conflicted selves with unsettled goals, we might say that this is a bad society. But being in this unsettled condition is also what inclines one toward understanding and prioritizing goals, and understanding the need for the objective scale, so in this sense it would be good. .
Quoting Baden
Alright... Let's address your starting point then.
I have so many things to address and I'm really not sure that it's helpful to address them all at once. I don't expect you to address all these points, and I'll be satisfied if your response is to simply restate your position in a way that indirectly or directly deals with my concerns. Your call.
1) Agency
I find how you've robbed PC worker of his agency with your characterisations problematic. The absurdities I can argue for if I'm allowed to do this are unlimited. You've set yourself up with no way to fail or know you're wrong. You know PC worker is being intentionally deceptive, you know why he thinks he's doing it, you know he thinks he's not trying to deceive himself, you don't care what PC worker does outside of this situation, you don't care if PC worker lies in other cases. You've emphasised the power dynamic and robbed PC worker of any ability to define his own actions.
What limitations for narrative are there under these conditions? What would you do if I took your agency away like this? "You wrote this thread because you're bitter and angry at society, and I don't care what you say, what you think, what you do, or anything else. You wrote this thread, therefore you're just angry at society, and that's final". What could you do but laugh? That's how I feel right now.
2) The Outside "Truth"
Narratives exist for the outside truth just as they do for any narratives we tell ourselves. You will emphasise your points, interpret them how you will, characterise them, sequence them, and create a narrative and I'll do the same. I'll choose my version and you'll choose yours. It doesn't need to be the case that either of us said anything untrue, unreasonable or invalid. You've set up a false dichotomy between what's inside and outside. I won't assume your intent, but you've clearly used this dichotomy to impose your subjectivity over someone else. You're discounting the subjective experience of PC worker and ignoring whatever thoughts he has, and you don't know how to be wrong here.
The ability for me to weave any narrative I want for you using this technique is nearly limitless.
3) Identity, Self & Narrative
If you'd resign yourself to allowing PC worker to define his own circumstances, then this problem of contradiction is easily resolved. Especially in this case, because of the intentional deception, to simply understand himself and his actions through the lens of his intent. It's actually impossible not to do this as simply justifying his intent would accomplish it. There is no contradiction between deceiving others and putting on a mask, and his own personal beliefs or views.
Robbing PC worker of his agency seems necessary for your argument as from his perspective, his actions are in total harmony. He has his political opinions, but he doesn't feel compelled to start an argument with everyone he meets who thinks differently, and he's fine with lying to get what he wants. His self-image here is entirely coherent, and we need to resort to some bullshit tactics to undermine that.
4) I don't understand the specifics of your thesis
In your OP you said that one impact of the phenomenon you were describing was political inactivity. I mentioned that we're in an age of unprecedented political mobility and political tribalism. Why was this not a bigger problem for you? You simply say it was a good point. Then you say that this phenomenon will cause "long-term suffering", what is that? Who would be most susceptible to this suffering and how do we know it's there? I could ask the same about self-conflict. Which countries are less susceptible to this problem than others? How do you tell apart the success or failure of your idea?
I explained that social media entrenches our identities, which are not disposable and are just as real or important, if not often more so, than what exists in real life. And hiding your true feelings to avoid punishment is as old as humans, and the kind of freedom PC worker lacks is trivial compared to what has what freedoms he has relative to what has existed for most of human history. Is the phenomenon you describe new? Is it a unique characteristic of the West? What are these disposable, interchangeable identities in the first place?
I've made points that I thought would be addressed due to how they'd be problematic for your assertions, but you didn't treat them that way. You've made so many claims, which is fine by itself, but I'm unsure which claims are crucial for you and which you don't care about, and like I said earlier, how those claims are verified or disproven is also a mystery to me.
5) The Nuances of Masks
People wear masks, and people employ deception to get what they want. The kinds of masks and deception employed are dependent upon the context, and there are differences between what builds social capital on say, social media or in the workplace. Hopefully, you also agree that masks are not just tools to build social capital, but are important psychologically for a variety of reasons, and can be used socially for many reasons, even if they won't build social capital. They may also exist for a variety of negative reasons, such as social anxiety, fear of repercussions, repression, etc.
I agree that masks & deception can have intrapersonal significance, in fact, I think masks & deception can exist purely for one's psychological needs, even if it hurts their ability to attain social capital. Such as putting on a tough guy persona as a self-defence mechanism, or hiding your true feelings to avoid criticism.
There are so many different reasons to use masks, one could easily write books on the subject, it's such a complicated and nuanced area. In some cases, people aren't aware, in some they are, and it's complicated.
6) Which option is Pragmatic
Your scenario is one very highly specific case, which I still disagree with but I think it's possible to construct a scenario where I could agree with you. That PC worker did create a mask to hide what's really going on, and that's a very human thing that we definitely employ. The stereotypical example of a loner who convinces themselves that they never wanted companionship or perhaps of someone painting themselves as a victim despite being responsible for their outcome.
Just as these kinds of masks are varied, whether their use is good or bad is varied too. I think it's desirable in many cases. I'm a pragmatist who only really cares about results, if PC worker can't do anything about his situation, and was forced to lie and had no choice but to lie, this lie you've chosen for him seems perfectly fine to me. Why is it better to be a jaded cynic who laments their position as an expendable and powerless cog in the machine? There's no solution to the problem you've set up that's within PC worker's ability to enact, is there?
How do you hold up PC worker's realisation of his powerlessness and sad subjugated state as a goal to attain, while arguing that his positive self-description as a sneaky but pragmatic liar is something which will cause him long-term suffering?
Okay, I wrote a lot and I still could write like three times as much as this but it's already so long, time to stop.
Ill deal with your objections to the PC worker scenario first. Tbh, its hard not to conclude that youre confused about how thought experiments / hypothesized scenarios are supposed to work or be engaged with. PC worker is stipulated as an idealized (but not unrealistic) subject of a hypothesized scenario and as such is not a real person. You talk as if not only they are a real person but that they are someone that you know personally and even intimately such that you are upset at my treatment of them. Youve described an inner world for them that Im using bullshit tactics to undermine.
But in doing this, youve done exactly what you accused me of doing by making presumptions about their feelings and motives, their inner subjective experiences, something that was not at all my focus in that post. As Ive told you, Ive created a scenario for the sake of argument that focuses on the effects of masks on the power dynamics of a not untypical work context. Ive focused on PC workers actions and their effect. Here, I've not robbed them of their agency. They choose to act as they do. But I have problematised the effects of their actions in the larger context. And Ive also specifically held out to you the opportunity to discuss what the inner experiences of such a person might reasonably be. (That would be the next stage of the argument as I've already pointed out).
Quoting Baden
So, I havent set up a scenario thats impossible to crtique or falsify. Its just that you havent been able to do so because your focus is wrong. There are lots of ways to invalidate such hypothesised scenarios. You can question: logical connections (is there a necessary contradiction between aspects of the scenario?); theoretical underpinnings (does it rely on a misunderstanding of theories of e.g. power dynamics?); or elements of realism (is such a scenario even physically or socially possible?).
But you cannot invalidate the scenario by adding arbitrary presumptions of your own. You cannot say Im wrong because you know that PC worker is actually doing things for this or that reason and feels totally fine about it. First of all, because being at only the first stage of the argument, PC workers inner feelings about what theyre doing are irrelevant and, second of all, because my hypothesized PC worker is not a real individual whose inner world only you have special access to.
The proper way to address the next stage of the argument would be for us to respectively put forward hypotheses on plausible short-term and long-term subjective effects on such a person, using theoretical or empirical evidence (qualitative or quantitative). You seem to have jumped ahead due to some emotional investment in the imaginary PC worker.
Quoting Judaka
But if you can agree with the idea that lying to make a situation more comfortable to ourselves could potentially function to keep us in a situation that is not good for us in the long term, most of your objections will simply disappear. So the contention of the scenario so far focuses on the idea that the stories we tell about ourselves to ourselves dont always work to our benefit. Sometimes they serve others in ways that are not immediately obvious. It's hard to see why this is so emotive for you when we have hardly broached any controversial ground yet.
Theres no necessary contradiction between an identity being a narrative and being the manifestation of the variety of goals we have for ourselves. The identity is a means whereby those goals are organized / conceptualised / made coherent. Part of the identity of mother is bound up with goals that are largely defined in terms of responsibilities and duties which have sociobiological roots. These can be organised under the general idea of what it means to be a mother. Of course, individual mothers will not all agree on what this is but their narratives will have a common core which organizes their dispositions as mothers and which is their mother identity. This is not (generally) a consciously calculative process but the outcome of the human need to meaningfully interact. It is that need, that overarching goal that organizes our other disparate goals into manageable narratives that we can set against each other in order to more efficiently and less resource-intensively make decisions. E.g. If we prioritize certain narratives about ourselves, it makes it easier to choose between conflicting desires / goals. Our goals are given an extra layer of meaningful contextualization. And this is just what makes human social life possible. General social identities (your narratives of the other) become internalized in specific but not unrelated ways (my narratives of the self) so that we may relate coherently to others.
:nerd:
If it is part of your well-being to speak meaningfully, then this clause is a performative contradiction. 'The chap's died', implies you are talking to thin air. Therefore: -
[quote=John Donne]
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.[/quote]
Yeah, I have no idea why I misread your scenario so badly but I re-read it and I can't remember why I read it so differently the first time but you didn't do anything like what I just accused you of, my bad...
No worries. You made some other good points I'm going to get on to anyway.
I think there is a very clear difficulty here. A "narrative" is a description of events occurring in a chronological order. We can produce a narrative describing observed past events, or potential future events, and even fictional events. The difficulty is that a proper narrative does not include the goals or intentions of the agents, these are only seen to be implied. And since there is not a necessary relation between a goal and an action,(free will), the implication is not valid. This means that if a goal is included into the narrative, it is not a valid part of the narrative.
For example, "he reached for his car keys because he wanted to drive his car". The first part is a valid descriptive narrative. The second is not. That phrase, "he wanted to drive his car", is not part of chronological occurrence of events, so it is fiction added by the author. It is not an observed part of the event, the observer does not truly know this, and it is implied only by invalid logic, as he might have grabbed his car keys for some other reason.
From the perspective of the first person though, I can say "I reached for my car keys because I wanted to drive my car", and this appears like a valid narrative. However, it is still not a valid narrative, for basically the same reason. It is not a part of the order of events itself, and the important thing is that the author does not necessarily have a handle on one's own intentions. And this is very evident in habitual actions. So you ask me, why did you reach for your car keys, and without thinking I reply "because I wanted to drive my car". However, in reality I was leaving to go to work, and my habit is to grab the car keys as I go out the door. My goal or intention was to get to work, driving is the means to that end, and so I was grabbing the car keys. As Aristotle displayed, ends when questioned become means to further ends, and true intention is hard to isolate.
Therefore, I think that for reasons such as those described above, the narrative must be kept separate from the goals in the basic description of a self, and one's identity. I could produce a personal identity based solely on a description of my past activities (narrative), or based solely on my goals for the future (intentions), but when I try to relate these two, to represent my presence, I have extreme difficulty. I believe this is what Heidegger points to as inauthenticity. My understanding of my self, being present at the current moment in time, is fundamentally inauthentic because I cannot establish any necessity in the relationship between my describable activities of the past, and my goals for the future.
Quoting Baden
Relating my identity strictly to my goals for the future would be extremely problematic. The reality of freedom allows that I may alter my goals at any moment in time. This is extremely important in a person's capacity to adapt to risk factors. If an individual is involved in a dangerous activity and the occurrence of events strays form the plan, the person must be capable of altering goals at any moment.
So I do not think that "identity" provides a good principle for establishing a hierarchy of goals. This principle is more directed toward the narrative of past events, and any proposed "identity" gains its strength from an extended temporality. That is to say that an identity is something derived from a long period of time. The structuring of goals on the other hand must be extremely adaptable, such that even goals which we have held on to for a very long duration must be capable of being dropped at a moments notice, due to the occurrence of unforeseen circumstances.
Quoting Baden
This is an example of the use of "types" which I said previously is deficient for describing a person as an active agent. The point being that one's goals must be strongly individualized, due to the role of 'the present circumstances' and the need to adapt,, as outlined above. An individual might refer to a "type" as guidance in producing goals, but ultimately the urgency of the current situation will necessitate that the rules of the type must be broken. Then if the person is trained only in the ways of choosing according to type, that person would be lost in some situations.
Quoting Baden
What you appear to be doing here is placing the need for social interaction as the highest priority in ones goals. Then the other goals will be shaped and prioritized around this. I see the opposite situation. Social interaction is inevitable, absolutely unavoidable, as portrayed in unenlighten's post. Goals are prioritized according to what is wanted or needed, and this constitutes privation. Therefore social interaction is at the opposite end of the scale from where goals are. Goals relate to freedom of choice, possibilities, while social relations related to necessities, what is impossible to be otherwise.
So it appears to me, like the difference between starting from a narrative, and starting from goals or intentions, produces a huge gap between the way that you and I understand these things. It's not a huge difference, because the understanding is quite similar, but it's a huge gap, like flip sides of the same coin. We both understand both sides, but disagree as to which side is up.
Quoting unenlightened
But "speak meaningfully" does not exclude deception. So I can speak meaningfully in a way designed to support my own well-being, which will also undermine your well-being.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Maybe you are taking the concept of narrative too literally. But even from a literal point of view a narrative is not just "a description of events occuring in a chronological order". A text of the form "At 9am I got up. Then at 9.05 I washed my teeth. Then at 9.15 I ate my breakfast. Then ... etc.," is not a narrative text. It's more like a recount (see e.g. here, p8-9). A narrative, like a story, establishes some significant connection between its elements that gives it the power to subsist as an organizing emotive force for those elements. Narratives have emotional power.
In the case of identity narratives, which are obviously not literally texts we store in our head, but stories about who we are that may be expressed in different ways, the personal significance of e.g. a "mother" narrative lies in the responsibilities, duties, activities, goals etc. it implies as appropriate, and those can only be properly constituted in the context of the general social narrative of "mother".
Also, the idea that a proper narrative "does not include the goals or intentions of the agents" and that "if a goal is included into a narrative, it is not a valid part of the narrative" is utterly baffling to me. I have no idea where you got that from but I would challenge you to support it as it would preclude probably most of the great stories of humankind as being narratives.
Edit: You have supported this in the rest of your post. I'll try to find a way to respond to that. Our thinking is very far apart here.
I didnt say that actually. In the line we were discussing, I used the word inaction. However, I understand how that might be misinterpreted, so I put some context on it in our previous conversation. And now, Ive also edited the sentence to make it clearer that I dont mean social media stops people doing things in a very general sense or stops people being politically active. Just the opposite is often the case, which is why elsewhere I talked of political polarisation as a problem, likely due to mechanisms such as this:
[quote=source; https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10796-018-9848-5]First, social media introduces more negative affect into social networks. Social media use tends to diversify communication within social networks by making people aware of what others think and feel about political and social issues (Kwon et al., 2014). They also provide ample opportunities for the self-disclosure of social cues (Walther, 1992, 2011), and people use these cues to form impressions about others in their social networks. Thus, social media enhance the perception of difference, and interpersonal contacts in these environments are typically rated less positively than interpersonal contacts in face-to-face communication[/quote]
Quoting Judaka
I made the analogy with drug use. And Im not the only one to do that.
[quote=source; https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/14/3/311]users experience symptoms and consequences traditionally associated with substance-related addictions (i.e., salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, relapse, and conflict) may be addicted to using SNSs[/quote]
[quote=source; https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40429-015-0056-9]Although not formally recognized as a diagnosis, SNS addiction shares many similarities with those of other addictions, including tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, salience, relapse, and mood modification Theoretical and empirical models suggest that SNS addiction is molded by several factors; including dispositional, sociocultural, and behavioral reinforcement. Also, empirical findings generally unveil that SNS addiction is related to impaired health and well-being[/quote]
Some of the consequences, which are consistent with my description of social media as
Quoting Baden
[quote=source; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1016/j.adolescence.2016.05.008] Adolescents who used social media more both overall and at night and those who were more emotionally invested in social media experienced poorer sleep quality, lower self-esteem and higher levels of anxiety and depression[/quote]
[quote=source; https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751] After a week of baseline monitoring, 143 undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania were randomly assigned to either limit Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat use to 10 minutes, per platform, per day, or to use social media as usual for three weeks.
The limited use group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks compared to the control group. Both groups showed significant decreases in anxiety and fear of missing out over baseline, suggesting a benefit of increased self-monitoring
Our findings strongly suggest that limiting social media use lead to significant improvement in well-being.[/quote]
[quote=source; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2167702617723376] In two nationally representative surveys of U.S. adolescents in grades 8 through 12 (N = 506,820) and national statistics on suicide deaths for those ages 13 to 18, adolescents depressive symptoms, suicide-related outcomes, and suicide rates increased between 2010 and 2015, especially among females. Adolescents who spent more time on new media (including social media and electronic devices such as smartphones) were more likely to report mental health issues, and adolescents who spent more time on nonscreen activities (in-person social interaction, sports/exercise, homework, print media, and attending religious services) were less likely.[/quote]
Quoting Judaka
Good questions. I dont think were at the point empirically where that can be determined. E.g. re social media addiction:
[quote=source; https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/14/3/311] there are sociodemographic differences in SNS addiction. The lack of consistent findings regarding a relationship with gender may be due to different sampling techniques and various assessment instruments used, as well as the presence of extraneous variables that may contribute to the relationships found. All of these factors highlight possible methodological problems of current SNS addiction research (e.g., lack of cross-comparisons due to differences in sampling and classification, lack of control of confounding variables), which need to be addressed in future empirical research.[/quote]
There is evidence that those with low self-esteem are at particular risk. Which makes sense as their search for offline social capital is likely to be more problematic and the focus on online social capital may become more critical for them.
[quote=source; https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/cyber.2018.0701]Regression analysis with Process macro for SPSS evidence the impact of likes on problematic use and the moderating role of self-esteem, serving as a protective factor, so that the impact of likes increase on problematic use is lower in participants with higher self-esteem compared to those with lower self-esteem.[/quote]
Quoting Judaka
Social media identities are relatively disposable and interchangeable due to their form and mode of creation, i.e. their high plasticity. Your original examples in the thread show that social media identities can often become detached from other identities and that this can be very problematic. So, what is most salient in terms of intrapersonal conflict is how well these identities work with other identities that form our selves. Regardless of how entrenched they become, they may not be sustainable / their maintenance may lead to stress and anxiety as youve noted yourself.
Quoting Judaka
Quoting Judaka
I know I haven't covered all of your concerns here, but I wanted to provide some evidence for my positioning anyway and I'll flesh out some more of my reasoning later.
I do pretty much agree with this. There's a lot to untangle and it is complicated. To reiterate, the specific dynamic I'm criticising is where masks become in themselves a focus of our appetites, commodified such that their variety of expression tends to lead to exercises of purely formal freedom. This is why I emphasised earlier that it is not social-technologies in themselves that are problematic but their intersection with consumer culture whereby the manipulation of our instinctive desires for social validation is the logical outcome of the profit motive embedded therein, serving formal freedom (more opportunities to satisfy appetites) at the expense of freedom proper (in what I've described as effortful cognitive engagement).
A hierarchy is just one mode of organization and not how I imagine goals being organizaed in an identity, at least not in the strict sense,
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Identities gain strength over time precisely insofar as they provide coherent frameworks for the activity of our desires as defined both through our conceptualised goals and immediate needs for gratification. Identities may be directed by goals and direct goals. Theres no contradiction here.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There is no deficiency excepting the imposition of a level of determinism applied to the idea of how identity functions which not only have I never implied but that runs counter to the core of my argument. The logic of my posing the problem of self-conflicting selves contains within it the notion that breaking the rules of an identity is both something that happens and that is problematic. So, yes people get lost in some situations because a goal or desire conflicts with one or more of their identities. Thats part of the point Ive been making.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, humans are inherently social. It's our ultimate contextualization; a recognizably human consciousness absent of all social interaction is incoherent. But we're social in a specifically human way that doesnt preclude the prioritization of goals other than the immediately social. E.g. Our relationship to ourselves is mediated through the social phenomenon of language, which not only doesnt restrict the variety of goals available to us but largely enables it. So, to speak of an overarching social goal that organizes our other sets of goals is just to admit that insofar as we are human we can't separate ourselves and our goals fully from our particular social context and the ideological hold it has over us.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Social relations define the field in which notions of freedom of choice become coherent. We dont operate in a social vacuum and sociality is not a factor we can fully externalise either re our conceptualisation of goals or our decision-making processes as to how they may be achieved.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
To me, its as if you are trying to understand art by starting from one category of elements in different paintings as if they had such significance outside their individual framings they made such framings irrelevant. Its a narrow perspective in two senses. Firstly, it elides the importance of dispositions, histories, capacities (analagous to other elements in the paintings), which are necessary for the realisation of goals. Secondly, it conceptualises the frame overly simplistically as a pure limitation. But just as It's the frame that allows for art to function as art, it's identities and the ideologies that underly their formation that allow the social to function as social. To imagine a world where the individual pursuance of goals absent of ideological framings occurs under simple social limitations is hardly coherent. The social finds its form not in a bunch of obstacles we as individuals need to navigate but as the very field of possibilities which allows us to define ourselves as the kinds of beings [I]who[/i] navigate.
Quoting Baden
As you have pointed out, there is much research pointing to a positive association between depression , loneliness and other emotional difficulties, and the amount of time spent on social media. The explanations I have seen , including yours, rely on one form or another of the idea that human beings are vulnerable to being conditioned to behave against our long-term interests due to the way our motivational system is structured. The typical mechanism offered is a drive-reinforcement process whereby genuine reality-testing is short-circuited by the salience and intensity of the immediate reward. This dovetails with addiction models which show that additive behaviors are self-perpetuating because the rewards are immediately felt whereas the disincentives are delayed.
I am wondering what we gain by adding to this picture an internal conflict between identities. Do we really need a Freudian-style psychodynamics to understand why social media makes many people feel isolated, depressed and anxious when more direct models would seem to do the job?
Turning my own commitment to pragmatism against me. I like it. :up: I don't know is the short answer. But it's a potentially useful avenue of approach and has the advantage of emphasising that what's under threat is our relationship to ourselves, which idea appeals to a potentially more salient existential discourse vs a medical one and that may feed into a more generalised critical orientation. "Social media is making me depressed >>no biggie, I'll take a pill". "Social media functions to process my social capital needs into profits at the expense of my personal development >> ?"
The problem though, is that it is only a possibility, that I am trying to deceive you. And you state a conditional, "if you are trying to deceive us..." So you need to make that judgement whether or not I am trying to deceive you, which you cannot accurately do without engaging me in some way.
Quoting Baden
This is exactly why I have been arguing that narrative is improper as a formula for a true identity. The connections between events, which you refer to, that give the narrative emotive force, often consist of invalid implications as I described. A "true" story would consist only of a description of observed events, what your referenced page calls a "recount". Notice that this is described as the method of science. But a "narrative" as you use the word, adds something to the true story, it adds "significant connection" between the events. And as I explained in the last post, these added aspects often consist of invalid implications, and false representations of goals and intentions.
And it is these unsound aspects of the narrative, the proposed relations which are often invalid, or simply incorrect, which give it its emotive force. Therefore to have a proper and true understanding, we must remove these aspects from the narrative (or if that's essential to "narrative", remove narrative altogether), to give us a simple "recount". This is for the purpose of separating the true from the fictitious. Then relative to a person's identity as a temporal being, the person's past is represented truly, by removing that emotional force.
To get a proper understanding of the causal relations between events, intention, we can now turn to the future aspect, which consists of how we view goals and possibilities. Separating these two aspects, the past and the future is necessary for a proper analysis. Imagine if the person who gave the recount of a science experiment added statements about why such and such events occurred, without properly validating these claimed causal connections. Of course this would give the recount emotive force, but this is undesirable when describing events scientifically. So this would not be acceptable science. Likewise, the element which give "emotive force" to the narrative is undesirable.
This I believe is the Heideggerian principle. The tendency to look at oneself in terms of narrative (how we look at others) gives an inauthentic identity. We cannot see the goals and intentions of others, so we add those elements as we see fit, and these are unsound features of the narrative which give it emotive force. Then, when I turn inward, and look at myself in this way I employ the same technique, as is the habit of narrative. The problem though, is that since it is myself that I am making a narrative of, rather than another, I tend to simply assume, and believe, that I have real access to these causal elements, as my goals and intentions, therefore I think that I am making a true narrative here. But all I've done is deceived myself. If I look more deeply in introspection, I realize that I really do not properly understand my intentions and goals, and how they influence my behaviour
The reality is, as Heidegger indicates, that there is a real separation between the past (observable events) and the future (possibilities), and this separation constitutes being at the present. We cannot understand being at the present until we move to represent this separation. Unifying these two in a narrative is a false representation. Only after the separation is properly understood can I produce a true representation of my identity at the present. And, because each of those past events, when it occurred, was an instance of existence of this separation, i.e. being at the present, it needs to be represented separately. So we separate the recount of events which may obtain scientific truth, from the proposed goals and intentions which are supposed to be causal, but with far less certainty than the recount. Then we no longer have a narrative but two separate stories.
So the point is that the narrative gives a combination of described events, and a view of goals. I argue that this is a false or unsound combination because it combines the verifiable with the unverifiable. in reality the agent living and acting at the present, behaves as a separation between past events and future possibilities. What would constitutes a true or authentic representation of my identity would be to completely separate my past from my future. This would allow me to make true, unbiased decisions.
Quoting Baden
What I mean is that a "narrative" as such is not a true or sound recounting of events.
Quoting Baden
There's no necessary contradiction, that's for sure, but when a person's goal is to better oneself, then there is a problem. Identity does not suffice, because exactly what is desired is to cease being what you have been to be something better. It brings to mind a line from the Elton John movie, "Rocket Man": "You gotta kill the person you were born to be to become the person you want to be." So Elton takes this to the extreme, killing the old person, and becoming a new person (a new identity), with each new album.
To truly represent how we deal with our goals and desires, we need to understand this aspect of temporal discontinuity, this way that we separate ourselves form our past, to be a person in the future completely different, 'new and improved', from the past person. We recognize our sins as sins, and move to become the new person who is free from them The real separation between multiple identities is temporal like this, we cease having one identity to take up another. Yet there is overlap.
Quoting Baden
Based on what I just said, I would argue that we do not only break the rules of this or that identity, but we break the rule of what it means to have an identity. The temporal extension of having this identity or that identity over a temporal duration, is what we continually strive to resist. That is what freedom is, to become a new person at each passing moment through striving to better oneself, and not being constrained by any such identity which has been the "me" of the past.
Quoting Baden
This is where things get quite difficult, the social context. But I think that you and I have some agreement here. How we each get here though, is quite different. The reason I say that freedom of choice, goals, intention, and desires, are tied to "social context", is because most of our natural inclinations involve others. If our goals and desires did not involve others we could produce a separation, but they do, so that would be unrealistic.
Quoting Baden
I don't understand what you mean by "framings" here.
Quoting Baden
As I said, most goals involve others, therefore the social aspect is necessary to the realisation of goals.
Quoting Baden
Again, you'd need to elucidate on what you mean by "framing" here. I don't consider framing to be a necessary aspect of art. To me art consists of content and form, and framing may enter into the form. Depending on how you look at it, the entire form might simply be a framing of the content. So yes, social ideologies are a necessary aspect of personal desires and goals, just like art is not pure content, it must have a form, that's just a statement about the nature of personal goals and intentions. However, the social does not provide the "field of possibilities", I think that's a false representation. The individual's imagination provides the true field of possibilities, while the social aspect limits that, just like the artist's mind provides the field of possibilities, and the medium used by the artist restricts the possibilities.
In lieu of diving into this for now, while we both espouse a form of freedom as a goal, my impression is that your route primarily involves normative claims about potential modes of self-conceptualization whereas mine primarily involves descriptive claims thereof to further a normative claim re the action of social institutions. Would you agree?
No, you've been found out.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting unenlightened
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So you escape from contradiction into falsehood. And in so doing, you undermine your own being, because it is now clear that you are not worth talking to.
I think it's a huge problem that you don't know how your own thesis is proven right or wrong. Many of us know social media produces addiction and suffering, but that's got really nothing to do with your thesis until you can prove that it does. There are more intuitive and specific reasons why social media causes the problems it does and they're more specific to the unique environment social media produces.
Quoting Baden
Why does it matter whether people have the ability to exchange one mask with another? Why is that better or worse than being stuck with the same masks?
Some masks are good, and some are extremely bad, and social media produces bad masks because users are encouraged to tell lies for immediate gratification and validation. There's no substance to the pleasure, and over time, no long-term satisfaction and never a feeling of "winning". There are people getting way more likes and comments, and everyone else seems to be living happy perfect lives on their social media. The user in spending their time here haven't spent that time, or focus on bettering themselves, building real relationships or engaging in fulfilling activities.
However, that's not new, and we could apply many criticisms of the "American dream" to social media and have it applied extraordinarily well. When one set unrealistic standards, and then fails to meet them, but is surrounded by friends and family who seem to be doing very well, feelings of shame motivate the lying, which leads to nothing positive.
It's kind of unacceptable to put things like peer pressure and building great relationships into "social capital" and make no effort to distinguish between motivations. The examples where social capital is toxic, useless and harmful are the ones that create negative outcomes.
I'm still left unsure as to where "inner conflict" or really anything related to your OP about would come in. You don't know how to prove it exists, and you don't know under what environments it would be worse. Do you want me to dislike the capitalist power structure? Done. Do you want me to be with you on social media producing mental illnesses? Easy. I was there before I got here, but why should my problem with these things be that they cause "inner conflict" or "fractured identities"? It's totally normal to have conflicting identities, and it's not unique to these environments, so I don't associate any of the problems in social media with what's described by your OP.
You need look no further than your own first post for an example of how inner confllct would come in..
Quoting Judaka
We can't prove the contents of others' inner worlds but unless we're solipsists, we can often reasonably infer something about them. But, yes, if it's not a reasonable inference that such a dynamic could result in inner conflict that would be very problematic for my theory.
Yes, I'd agree to that. I think we adequately understand each other.
I'll tell you what I think is the principal point of difference between my perspective and yours, and you tell me if you agree. But first, bare in mine that I believe we are fundamentally animalistic, so many of our base instincts involve putting up a deceptive shell or façade to create an appearance for others, which hides one's true feelings, emotions, ambitions and motivations. My description of this feature is what @unenlightened is concerned about, but the feature is very real, and may comprise a large part of a person's inner motive force, whether the person properly apprehends oneself to be behaving in this deceptive way, or not. Animals have been interacting with each other for millions of years, and their interactions are generally not friendly, they are filled with destructive behaviour and fear of one another. So, this propensity to deceive may be very strong, and must be duly respected in any understanding of oneself.
Our social environment, our upbringing and training, inclines us to see others as having an identity. That is how we see differences and we are taught to respect others despite these differences which constitute the other's identity. Though we are aware that another may present us with false features (deception), we learn to understand and respect others through respect for identity. And, through thousands and thousands of years of moral training, we learn to suppress some of these animalistic tendencies toward creating false fronts and deception, but these inclinations still exert a strong force through instinct.
Now, the issue we are concerned with arises with introspection, looking at oneself, and introspection is something very human, probably not practised by other animals at all, as an aspect of self-consciousness. So we are not guided by instinct here, and we must be guided by principles we develop. Introspection reveals immediately to us, that the idea that a person has "an identity" is faulty. So you move to resolve this issue by assuming that a person has multiple identities. My introspection reveals to me that the whole concept of "identity" is faulty here, and it cannot suffice as an adequate tool for understanding oneself.
That is how I see our difference. We both recognize that the idea of having "an identity", is an inadequate approach to understanding oneself. So you propose that a multiplicity of "identities" is what Is required. I think that the whole idea of "identity" is not suited towards a proper understanding of a self, and we ought to move to something else.
Quoting unenlightened
It appears like I have adequately demonstrated my point then. Attempting to deceive is a very real part of the social interaction of human beings. Whether the person is "found out", as I was, (and consequently my own being has been undermined by being found out), or the deception is successful, (and the being of the other is undermined), is irrelevant. The point is that attempts to deceive and successful deception are very real, and constitute a very significant portion of social interaction in general, regardless of whether you personally want to face reality and talk about it, or not.
I don't think it needs futher explantion but to really spell it out to avoid running in circles again. From your own example:
1: "Social Persona"/Online identity: = Image woman is "forced to present". A "lie" that needs to be maintained.
2: Offline identity = Failed businesswoman. A truth that needs to be hidden.
Those personas/identities are obviously in conflict. They are both in one person. = Inner conflict.
EDIT: If your objection boils down to something like MU was saying, let me know. It might make more sense.
The concepts are quite slippery but I'm clearer about your objection to how I'm using them now at least. I'll read over your posts again and come back to this.
Is lying, deceiving, creating a false front animalistic, a base instinct? Its true that animals and plants have evolved various strategies of deception, but this would seem to be quite different from human strategies. The difference as I see it is that our strategies are consciously planned, rather than evolutionary mechanisms concealed from our own awareness. We deceive for many specific reasons: to avoid hurting someone we care about (this relates to the moral training you mentioned), to protect our own ego from the feeling of shame and failure, to defend ourselves from enemies. What all these forms of planned deception have in common is that they depend on a gap in mutual understanding. We only feel the need to lie in circumstances where the truth will not be understood by the other the way we understand it.
The closer our friendship with another, the more we can avoid the necessity of lying about the core aspects of ourselves, because we know that other supports, trusts and understands us in ways that approach our own self-understanding. In sum, human deception belongs to the complex and sophisticated skills of social comprehension only humans are capable of. We can lie because we can do things other animals cant: 1)we can abstractly represent the meaning of a situation (its truth) and our felt response to it.
2) we can deliberately manipulate this conceptual representation into a non-truth specifically and relevant tailored to how we want to influence the other.
Quoting Baden
As I mentioned to MU, we lie to each other in situations where there is a lack of trust, intimacy and mutual understanding and often the lie is an attempt to prevent an even greater breakdown in being understood by others (being unfairly judged) . In the scenario of the women participating in online marketing schemes, there may be multiple motivations for lying. They are running a business, and showing signs of incompetence is not good from a sales standpoint. This is just good corporate strategizing.
Your argument is most relevant in regards to those social ties we believe we have more invested in emotionally.
We have to care about an other in a more intimate way than just as a sales client in order for our truth-telling or lies to play more than a superficial role with regard to our sense of identity. The fact that we can lie so easily and freely with our social media friends is an indication that we know we have less at stake emotionally with them than we do with our closest companions.
Its not so much that lies put up barriers between ourselves and those we lie to , but that the fact we feel we have to lie to them in the first place is a symptom of a gap in mutual understanding. We lie most easily in relationships that are dispensable.
But what about those who have not developed the skills to form deep , intimate connections with anyone, and are thus attracted to the superficial environment of social media? The argument can certainly be made that the social validation they receive keeps them tethered to an environment that makes establishing deep connections very difficult.
But what does the superficiality of the social media environment, and its consequent encouraging of deception, have to do with the inner conflict of identity?
Lying to people one is only cursorily invested in emotionally is not likely to cause any such internal strife. It would seem only self-deception is capable of that.
But self-deception may be a misnomer. I think such situations are more a matter of an inconsistent sense of self-identity rather than well-constituted identities fighting with each other. So here may be a bridge between your model of conflictual selves produced by technologies of consumer culture and what Ive been saying about the superficiality of social media. Those individuals who are most vulnerable to suffering from prolonged exposure to social media are those who never developed a consistent sense of self-identity. They are the ones most susceptible to social media addiction, which runs the danger of preventing them from creating a core sense of personal integrity. Each encounter online introduces a different dynamic of interpersonal connection from the previous, and no one encounter allows one to establish a pattern of stable trust and shared deep concerns.
As to the connection between capitalist aims and a weakly integrated self-concept, I would suggest that social media technologies lend themselves more easily to the monetization of fragmented and superficial engagements than to deep and intimate relationships. Emotional pathology is an unintended consequence of this, just as the obesity epidemic is an unintended consequence of the food industrys profit goals, and ruined lives are the unintended consequence of the gambling industrys goals.
I don't think inner conflict as you describe it exists in a meaningful way. What I was saying was that social media isn't producing mental illness due to "inner conflict" or creating conflicting identities or contradictions. There are much better explanations for the problems, which relate to the types of masks and social interactions and behaviours that are taking place on social media. Social validation is literally displayed as likes and comments, and you're constantly on display and being judged, and you're surrounded by the apparent success of others and develop feelings of inadequacy. And well, there's a lot to talk about, some of which you've already talked about yourself, so, I know you understand it.
You keep bringing up the failed businesswoman example, but I was never trying to present it as though the businesswoman's problem was her conflicting identities. Her problem was that she was working for a multilevel marketing scheme and she needed to quit but she didn't quit because she was afraid of being judged as a failure by her friends and family. Her problem was the poverty and hardship created by her toxic job in an MLM.
What if instead, she was making a crapton of money but didn't want to alienate her friends by showing off, and thus kept it to herself? She's making so much money but presenting herself as though she wasn't so well off to gain a feeling of camaraderie with her friends and family or was just afraid that they'd treat her in a weird way. Well, she'd probably be doing absolutely fine in that case.
I didn't read everything MU said but for his last post, I do agree with it and I think I've already made similar points to it. Humans are instinctively deceptive and live in a constant state of deception, including deceiving themselves. For me, humans are masters at navigating deception and contradiction, and it's unthinkable that anyone isn't consistently deceiving others and/or struggles to cope with being deceptive or contradictory.
I've egregiously misunderstood you a few times, and I need to work on my ability to ensure that I'm understanding others correctly. I did try my best to understand you, more than I usually try because I was pretty sure I wasn't getting it. Clearly without much success regardless.
But his comments about identity... make me wonder how I managed to read your OP three or four times and miss how you defined identity. I've probably wasted a lot of your time and my own by failing to read this part of your OP properly. I'll take this as a learning lesson, showing that I really have a hard think about how to avoid this problem in the future. I think I just read the parts I thought were interesting, and impatiently skimmed over what seemed unimportant, I have ADHD, so maybe that's a factor...
Identity is an identifier that is negotiated between oneself and others, there is only one self, which I'd call the "ego". We may feel that how we're publically identified is very different to how we feel inside, perhaps most extremely depicted by someone experiencing gender dysphoria. Due to that negotiation, there's a need to qualify for identities, and people may be driven by the pursuit to be seen in a specific way.
Identities need to be communicated, and there are many parts of ourselves that either can't easily be communicated or that we don't want to communicate. Identities need to be qualified for, although there's something distinctly modern about giving yourself an identity without qualifying for it. Identities demand treatment of a specific social kind, which is what giving yourself an identity might be aimed at acquiring. Going back to the gender dysphoria example, you'd want to be identified as the gender you feel you are, not because you necessarily care to seek outward validation, but because you want to be entitled to the treatment associated with being identified as belonging to the gender you feel you are.
Identities are themselves shallow, such as someone being conservative or liberal, which is definitely not a sophisticated, nuanced take. A conservative as an identity needs to incorporate so many variables, and include so many different types of thoughts, ideas and opinions, that it's necessarily generic. All identities are generic, they have to be so that large numbers of people can qualify. Identities offer others an easy, simple way to understand you, but are completely insufficient to be used to understand oneself.
I focused on the parts of your writing which were interesting to me, and I figured identities would be defined in a boring way and so I guess I skipped over it. I think this is a pretty good example of a situation where I'd prefer to just lie and put the blame on you somehow and slink out of the thread without admitting to my fuck up. Anyway, I now understand why your examples and conclusions were connected, and what I was missing to think that they couldn't be.
I'm strongly against trying to define oneself with identities, because those identities exist to serve a social purpose, and are not designed in any way to be helpful ways of conceptualizing yourself. But it is fine to feel your identity is very important as they play such a significant social role, and desiring to be identified in a specific way is something anyone should be able to understand.
It's easy to understand why contradictory identities are a problem, as they can't perform their function that way. It's this kind of nuance that's precisely lacking in identities because they can't contain that nuance, but the nuance is necessary to understand a person. We can be both smart and stupid, kind and cruel, selfish and self-sacrificing, and so on. Partly because we're inherently inconsistent, due to our fluctuating emotions, mental states, physical states and so on. Context changes, our thought processes aren't consistent, our biases aren't consistent, and the concepts we work with aren't consistent either.
Identity is binary, it fits or it doesn't, you belong or you don't, you're identified that way, or you're not. There's no room for contradiction because you're supposed to be responded to based on your identity. If there's an identity that you can simultaneously both be and not be, that'd be terribly confusing. This is why identity as an area can be quite prejudicial. superficial, and resistant to change. For example, someone being mixed race or non-Asian and living in Japan or China all their life, but no stranger actually identifies you as being Japanese or Chinese. It's not automatically identified so there's a need to "prove" that you qualify. And even then it might be resisted. Identities need to simplify, and can't work with complex situations well, it's a necessary part of their functionality.
Someone will be identified by their occupation, say a lawyer, but without any knowledge of what kind of cases this person works, where they work, what their experiences are, how much money they make or anything more than just being a lawyer, or perhaps at least including the area of law they practice. Someone can certainly feel that "being a lawyer" is part of their identity, but why would you consider yourself to be just a "lawyer" as your self-narrative when you have an intimate understanding which is so much more nuanced and detailed than that? You'd only ever call yourself just a lawyer because people don't have time for your life story and it's not necessary to hear for them to get a very basic sense of who you are and how to treat you.
You can define identity differently if you want, but so long as it's being used in this social sense, that's irreconcilable with being a comprehensive tool for understanding oneself. I can understand why someone wouldn't bother to understand another except for a few identifiers they can spot, as that's the bare minimum they're due. But never why someone would understand themselves that way or actually view their identities as a kind of self.
Compared to the past, when society was far more tyrannical, and the ability to self-describe was oppressed, nowadays, there is a freedom of expression that hasn't ever existed before. Social media is actually a terrible example then because it's been largely responsible for tearing down the sanctity of identity as it may have once been. People through anonymity and the internet feel free to express their opinions and refuse the simple confines of their character identity offers.
As let's say, an oppressed woman in a particularly misogynistic place, you're actually being oppressed by those simplifications of identity. The inability to express yourself as more than just a woman is the oppression, that's... probably the best way to sum it up. Society restricts you to that one simple role and confines you there and refuses to see your potential to be anything else. Liberation would be the ability to adopt seemingly contradictory identities, all the things women aren't "supposed" to be, you'd be able to become.
Although I shouldn't have reacted as I did about the PC worker, it's primarily the restrictive and authoritarian way of asserting a reductive identity through the "outside truth" that bothered me. What we define as contradictory is very subjective to begin with, and even then contradictory ideas can exist - probably should exist - within a coherent self-narrative or self-understanding.
No worries. Appreciate your honesty.
The way I see it is that there is in human beings, a base animal instinct toward false fronts. It may be derived from competitive factors, fear, or whatever, we cannot adequately make conclusions here as to "why". Being at a very base level, you might not be inclined to call this "deception", because you might not see it as a conscious, intentional thing. However, the subconscious interplays with the conscious greatly, continually, and it affects the conscious in ways that a person practising introspection cannot perceive, or apprehend. I can apprehend through introspection that there are subconscious causes involved in my actions, but I cannot grasp the specifics.
Further, I believe that at the conscious level we are taught through moral training, that the best approach to subconscious influences is to confront them all, and filter them. So for instance, when a subconscious emotive force inclines me toward action, I ought to arrest that motivating force and assess the action which it is inclining me toward, as to whether it is bad or good, before proceeding. If I fail in this conscious 'arrest and assess', I may fly off into a fit of passion.
From these two factors, the base inclination to deceive, and the need to 'arrest and assess' the base inclinations, we can conclude that if one's moral training in the 'arrest and assess' feature is not completely adequate, the person may develop habitual actions of consciously deceiving others.
Quoting Joshs
As I mentioned above, and this seems to be a critical point in my discussion with you, I strongly believe that we cannot properly apprehend the subconscious motivations to our actions. Because of this, we cannot say what are the specific reasons why we are inclined to deceive. And the inclination to act is prior in time to the conscious willing of an act, so the conscious will cannot go back on the inclination to act, and arrest it, prior to it inclining the act. So the only power that the conscious will has is to arrest the inclination to act, prior to acting, allowing deliberation and assessment of the act which it is inclined toward.
The critical 'gap in understanding' which results in the immoral act of deception, is not a gap in understanding between people, but a gap in understanding within the person performing the deceptive act. This is the gap between the act which one is about to carry out, and the motivations for that act. As described above, we cannot apprehend, grasp, understand, or know, the motivating factors, in any reasonable sense of these words. This is because the conscious mind has at it's disposal, a grasp of the act which it is inclined toward, but a very minimal grasp of the motivating factors, being derived from the subconscious.
Quoting Joshs
This I believe is a failure of the ability of our moral training to keep abreast with the technological advancements which provide for many new possible forms of communion. The application of the 'arrest and assess' method has not kept up with all the different new forms of technology. So for example, I being old-school, living prior to the advancement of computers, find it somewhat easier to be freer to withhold information from the other, or even use misleading speech, over the telephone, than I do face-to-face. I believe I developed a face-to-face attitude of strict 'arrest and assess' producing a very restricted freedom when speaking to my parents and family, but later, when I picked up the phone, there was no such training on how to use the phone, and I found myself with more freedom to speak.
Quoting Joshs
I believe the real issue here is the true nature of freedom. To be free to act in any way requires that one not be acting at all. So the "free will" is empowered by "will power", which is central to 'arrest and assess'. When technology offers us vast quantities of possibilities, it is easy to jump on board, and go with the flow of this new found "freedom". But human behaviour is naturally habitualized, so a specific type of new possibility rapidly becomes 'the only choice'. Therefore without learning to completely apply 'arrest and assess' in a consistent manner, the appearance of freedom evapourates. The idea that one is exercising one's freedom when playing the same electronic game for hours everyday, is just a manifestation of the misunderstanding caused by the gap I referred to above.
Quoting Judaka
Baden's use of "identity" is very difficult, I had to read the OP numerous times myself. It's fundamentally counter-intuitive to think that a person could have many identities. It makes you think of a spy or something, but that would be the way that one presents oneself to others. Baden is asking us to represent oneself, to oneself, as having multiple identities, and that is quite difficult. I believe he validates this request by uniting the multiple identities under one "self". But this just kind of defers the problem because we now have a multitude of different identities united as a self, instead of a multitude of different actions united as an identity, and we are left with no principles as to how "the self" could produce such a unity.
Much appreciate the clarification on where we agree and disagree. It's been very helpful in terms of scrutininsing my own intuitions. I guess we agree this is happening and problematic:
"The thought process that went into building [social media] applications, Facebook being the first of them was all about: How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?
That means that we needed to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever Its a social validation feedback loop Youre exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology The inventors, creators its me, its Mark [Zuckerberg], its Kevin Systrom on Instagram, its all of these people understood this consciously."
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/11/14/facebooks-ex-president-we-exploited-vulnerability-in-human-psychology/
But I would need to establish a much more systematic and detailed justification of why I conceive identity(ies) operating as I've described, either here or potentially as a new OP in order to do justice to the points you've all raised.
The best way to consume as much of a person's time as possible is to encourage them to "poke" as many people as they feel comfortable poking, and to poke them over and over again as much as possible. Encouraging people to poke each other will surely exploit their vulnerabilities.
:lol: Pokes Metaphysician Undercover.
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Well, there's DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) if anyond would like to know. One must continually modulate who one is with the circumstances. Everyone does this except that on occasion the mind actually splits into psychologically distinct individuals - some kinda quarantine/isolation of each individual/personality prevents them from knowing each other i.e. these various persons don't communicate with each other in any meaningful way. Even their memories don't, as per some reports, overlap. It all boils down to acting then - I have roles as a police officer, as a brother, as a neighbor, etc. and I fuflill them as best as I can. Like Kantian conflict of duties, sometimes our roles clash - what do I do if I find out my brother is a heroin dealer? I'm a cop, but he's my brother. :chin:
Social identities, though there may be many (vide rough sketch above), are collectively applicable i.e. it's not an either x or y deal, it's both. I have to be a brotherly policeman. :rofl:
Why'd you poke me buddy? I'm trying to get some work done here. Hey, wanna go for a beer?
You shouldn't go giving some people ideas. :smile: