"Those Negroes and white men will be disalienated who refuse to let themselves be sealed away in the materialized Tower of the Past. For many other Negroes, in other ways, disalienation will come into being through their refusal to accept the present as definitive. I am a man, and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am not responsible solely for the revolt in Santo Domingo. Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way should I derive my basic purpose from the past of the peoples of color. In no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly unrecognized Negro civilization. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to exalt the past at the expense of my present and of my future. It is not because the Indo-Chinese has discovered a culture of his own that he is in revolt. It is because “quite simply” it was, in more than one way, becoming impossible for him to breathe''.

FF

"As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen- fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process—by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute—the machine did raise the living standards of the average humand being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance''. 

Orwell

Segall

"In obedience to Whitehead’s call for philosophy to reverse the abstractive tendency of the special sciences by exhibiting “the fusion of analysis with actuality,”3 this chapter seeks to understand the technical innovations of Whitehead’s organic doctrine while remaining in close contact with 1 Process and Reality, xiii. 2 James Bradley, “‘The Critique of Pure Feeling’: Bradley, Whitehead, and the Anglo-Saxon Metaphysical Tradition.” Process Studies 14 (2), 1985, 253. 3 Whitehead, “Mathematics and the Good,” in Essays in Science and Philosophy, 113. 2 the concrete historical context granting his inquiry its human significance. The early 20th century brought the decline of British Idealism alongside the rise of new methods of logical analysis. But more was at play in idealism’s wane than just a superior method. While he borrows from both the idealist and analytic schools, Whitehead’s radically novel understanding of relations distinguishes his speculative organicism both from F. H. Bradley’s mystical monism and from Bertrand Russell’s logical atomism. Whitehead processual account of relations is designed to avoid philosophical shipwreck by successfully navigating between the all-consuming whirlpool of the Bradleyan Absolute and the shattering rock shoal of Russellian analysis: All relatedness has its foundation in the relatedness of actualities; and such relatedness is wholly concerned with the appropriation of the dead by the living—that is to say, with ‘objective immortality’ whereby what is divested of its own living immediacy becomes a real component in other living immediacies of becoming. This is the doctrine that the creative advance of the world is the becoming, the perishing, and the objective immortalities of those things which jointly constitute the world. 4 The further explication of Whitehead’s new doctrine of organic relations is enhanced by the historical treatment to follow. A review of the largely political reasons for the eclipse of idealism and speculative philosophy more generally clears the air for a renewed examination of Whitehead’s accomplishment. What Whitehead offers is not a return to naïve realism or preKantian dogmatism, but a participatory descendental ontology initiated into the materialism melting intuitions of Absolute Idealism but unwilling to forego concern for the individually creative and yet relationally intimate appropriation of the dead by the living. “Descendental” is my neologism signaling the inverse of Kant’s transcendental idealist approach. Descendental realism inquires after the necessary and universal conditions of actual rather than merely possible experience.5 It continues the effort toward what Whitehead called a “critique of pure 4 Process and Reality, xiii-xiv. 5 See my Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (Revelore, 2023). See also Daniel W. Smith, “The Conditions of the New,” in Deleuze and Guatarri Studies, Vol 1, No. 1 (2007), 3ff. 3 feeling”6 that, as I argue below, evades Kantian epistemological antinomies by an appeal to a process-relational ontology. F. H. Bradley was not wrong to discern that a world of actually existing rather than merely apparent finite centers of experience would entail an endless flux wherein experients pass perpetually beyond themselves and into one another.7 Whitehead’s organic realism turns idealism inside out precisely by affirming this relational process, thus hurling Bradley’s timeless monistic Universe into a self-differentiating creative advance, wherein “each creative act is the universe incarnating itself as one, and there is nothing above it by way of final condition.” 8 In short, Whitehead’s doctrine of the actual occasion as “the whole universe in process of attainment of a particular satisfaction” is simply a realistic inversion of the Bradleyan Absolute.9 The chapter to follow is divided into five parts. Part I introduces Whitehead’s philosophy of history before recounting the sociological reasons for idealism’s decline in the Anglophone world. Part II revisits Whitehead’s work with Russell on the logical foundations of mathematics in an attempt to elucidate the relationship between abstract pattern and concrete process. Part III introduces Whitehead’s metaphysical generalization of the function of propositions in the actual world. Part IV details Whitehead’s creative repurposing of the concept of feeling found in F. H. Bradley’s idealism. Part V concludes with a brief final interpretation emphasizing Whitehead’s process theological amendments to the Bradleyan Absolute. I: History “You will sometimes hear people say they have no metaphysics. Well, they are lying. Their metaphysics are implicit in what they take for granted about the world. Only they prefer to call it ‘common sense’… When we study consciousness historically, contrasting perhaps what men perceive and think now with what they perceived and thought at some period in the past, when we study long-term changes in consciousness, we are studying changes in the world itself, and not simply changes in the human brain. We are not studying some so-called ‘inner’ world, 6 Process and Reality, 113. 7 J. E. Barnhart, “Bradley’s Monism and Whitehead’s Neo-Pluralism.” Southern Journal of Philosophy (Winter, 1969), 398. 8 Process and Reality, 245. 9 Process and Reality, 200. 4 divided off by a skin or a skull, from a so-called ‘outer’ world; we are trying to study the world itself from its inner aspect. Consciousness is not a tiny bit of the world stuck on the rest of it. It is the inside of the whole world.” –Owen Barfield, “History, Guilt, and Habit”10 “Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized.” –Alfred North Whitehead, “Harvard Lectures, Vol. 2”11 Shortly after the above rather Whiteheadian affirmation that consciousness has truck with the totality of things12 , Barfield cites “the Cambridge Realists” Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore as examples of those who sought to obsolesce metaphysical speculation by chaining human knowledge to the sober methods of propositional logic and empirical science. Barfield’s criticism warrants qualification. Though they would distinguish themselves by becoming the school’s sharpest critics, both Russell and Moore began their philosophical careers as students of idealism. And even after they had emptied their quivers into the heart of the idealist worldview, both remained convicted Platonists in their affirmation of universals (Russell at least for the truths of logic and mathematics, and Moore for ethical ideals). Their assault on idealism came in the form of a new analytic mode of thought that equipped them to make explicitly metaphysical arguments concerning the supposed implausibility of the doctrine of internal relations, especially the sort alleged to form the mystical core of F. H. Bradley’s monism. Of course, as any halfway sympathetic reader of Bradley will know, he was hardly a defender of the notion of relations, whether internal or external. As J. Mander explains, his analytically minded critics “simply misunderstood Bradley’s meaning [by accusing him] of thinking all relations are internal, when it is in fact his view that there are no relations at all.” 13 Regardless of Russell or Moore’s incomprehension of F. H. Bradley’s dialectical method of presentation, it is not the case that the Cambridge Realists claimed to have no metaphysics. Russell recounts his historic break from idealism in his memoir, noting that he and Moore’s 10 A Barfield Reader: Selections from the Writings of Owen Barfield (Wesleyan University Press, 1999), 131-132. 11 The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, Vol. 2, 1925–1927: General Metaphysical Problems of Science, ed. by Brian G. Henning, Joseph Petek, and George R. Lucas (University of Edinburgh Press, 2021), 375. 12 Process and Reality, 15. 13 Mander, British Idealism: A History (Oxford University Press, 2011), 108. 5 rebellion centered upon “the doctrine that fact is in general independent of experience.”14 That is, the truth (or falsehood) of a proposition remains an objective fact regardless of whether a mind apprehends it. In Moore’s terms, they were rejecting as self-contradictory the idealist thesis that “whatever is, is experienced,” 15 whether by a conscious human being or by Absolute Spirit. Russell’s doctrine of external relations and the logical atomism which followed from it were an attempt to secure the knowledge of physics, but also to eliminate vagueness and confusion resulting from our commonsense ways of speaking about the world disclosed to sense awareness: “Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract.” 16 In this sense, Barfield is correct that the so-called Cambridge Realists sought, by means of the methods of logical analysis and a strict adherence to isolated sense data, to supplant any need at least for speculative metaphysics. His criticism stands, that by seeking a more perfect vantage upon the merely external structure of the universe, they abstracted consciousness from its worldly niche, forgetting “that what we perceive is structurally inseparable from what we think.”17 It is because of this inseparability between observation and interpretation that Whitehead’s process-relational reinauguration of metaphysics could only begin by challenging not only established theories but also received notions as to fact.18 Whitehead must also be counted among the Cambridge Realists, but his “organic realism”19 diverges in crucial respects from the analytic school, if not always in method than at least in attitude and results. While Whitehead shared enough with his student-turned-collaborator to spend nearly a decade working to establish the logicist thesis motivating Principia Mathematica (published in three colossal volumes between 1910-1913), it is clear that he and Russell differed significantly regarding the project’s proper philosophical interpretation and implications. In short, while Russell pursued certainty and deductive proof, Whitehead sought coherence, 14 My Philosophical Development (London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), 54. 15 Moore, G. E. “The Refutation of Idealism,” in Mind, New Series, Vol. 12, No. 48 (Oct., 1903), 437. 16 Russell, The Scientific Outlook (London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton, 1931), 82. 17 Barfield, A Barfield Reader, 131. See also Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom (1894/1918), a key influence on Barfield’s conception of the evolution of consciousness and whose early exegeses of Goethe’s scientific method is strikingly similar to Whitehead’s philosophy of science (see “Goethe and Whitehead: Steps to a Science of Organism” in Holistic Science Journal, Vol. 2, October 2022). 18 Process and Reality, 9. 19 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 309. 6 analogical connection, and the unification of diverse branches of mathematics. 20 Russell’s own account is again instructive: The conceptions of the universe of Pythagoras and Plato were informed by mathematics, and I followed them eagerly. Whitehead was the serpent in this paradise of Mediterranean clarity. He once said to me, “You think the world is what it appears to be at noon when it’s sunny; I think it’s what it appears to be at dawn when one awakens from deep sleep.” I found his remark horrifying but couldn’t see how to prove that my way of seeing was better than his. Finally, he showed me how to apply the technique of mathematical logic to his world in a way that wouldn't shock the mathematician, by dressing it up in Sunday best.21 Contrary to Russell and Moore, Whitehead could not accept the independence of fact from experience. “If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience,” says Whitehead, “we must ask a stone to record its autobiography. Every scientific memoir in its record of the ‘facts’ is shot through and through with interpretation.” 22 Nor was he willing to deny the relevance of the everyday use of words to philosophical investigation (thus bringing him somewhat closer at least to Moore than to Russell): …the understanding of the immediate brute fact requires its metaphysical interpretation as an item in a world with some systematic relation to it. When thought comes upon the scene, it finds the interpretations as matters of practice. Philosophy does not initiate interpretations. Its search for a rationalist scheme is the search for more adequate criticism, and for more adequate justification, of the interpretations which we perforce employ. 23 20 See Desmet, Ronny (2010). “Principia Mathematica Centenary.” Process Studies 39 (2): 237-238. See also Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead, The Man and His Work: Volume 1, 1861-1910 (Johns Hopkins University, 1985), 265. 21 Portraits from Memory (George Allen and Unwin, London, 1956), 39. 22 Process and Reality, 15. 23 Process and Reality, 14-15. 7 Like Barfield, Whitehead conceives of languages as “storehouses of human experience.”24 Also like Barfield, he understood his own philosophical language to be composed of “metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.”25 For Barfield, the act of logical predication itself, considered analytically apart from imaginative participation in perceptual experience, becomes nonsensical, either false or tautologous.26 “Hence the attempts we are now witnessing,” Barfield wrote in the mid-1950s, to replace the traditional logic based on predication by a new logic, in which symbols of algebraic precision refer to ‘atomic’ facts and events have no vestige of connection with the symbols and no hierarchical relation to each other.27''

M Segall

Matter of fact is an abstraction arrived at by confining thought to purely formal relations which then masquerade as the final reality, this is why science, in its perfection, relapses into the study of differential equations. The concrete world has slipped through the meshes of the scientific net, consider for example the scientific notion of measurement, can we elucidate the turmoil of Europe by weighing its dictators its prime ministers and its editors of newspapers?

ANW

All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.

Orwell

"Man feels inferior precisely when he lacks ‘true inner values in the personality,’ when he is merely a reflex of something next to him and has no steadying inner gyroscope, no centering in himself. And in order to get such centering man has to look beyond the ‘thou,’ beyond the consolations of others and of the things of this world. Man is a ‘theological being,’ concludes Rank, and not a biological one.''

Becker

Andrew Solomon

"When I met with Senator Domenici, joint sponsor of the Mental Health Parity Act, I laid out for him the anecdotal and statistical information I had collated, and then I proposed fully documenting the tendencies that seemed so obviously implied by these stories. “Suppose,” I said, “that we could put together incontrovertible data, and that the questions of bias, inadequate information, and partisanship could all be fully resolved. Suppose we could say that sound mental health treatment for the severely depressed indigent population served the advantage of the U.S. economy, of the bureau of Veterans Affairs, of the social good—of the taxpayers who now pay cripplingly high prices for the consequences of untreated depression, and of the recipients of that investment, who live at the brink of despair. What, then, would be the path to reform?”

“If you’re asking whether we can expect much change simply because that change would serve everyone’s advantage in both economic and human terms,” said Domenici, “I regret to tell you that the answer is no.” Four factors block the development of federal programs to achieve care for the indigent. The first, and perhaps the most formidable, is simply the structure of the national budget. “We are now niched with programs and program costs,” Domenici said. “The question we must confront is whether the program you’re describing is going to grow and require new funds, not whether there’ll be some overall savings for the Treasury of the United States.” You can’t immediately reduce other costs: you can’t in one year take the money out of the prison system and out of welfare to pay for a new mental health outreach service, because the economic advantages of that service are slow to accrue. “Our evaluation of medical delivery systems is simply not outcome-oriented,” Domenici confirmed. Second is that the Republican leadership of the U.S. Congress does not like to give directives to the health care industry. “It would be a mandate,” Domenici said. “There are people who would support this kind of legislation at every level but who are ideologically opposed to mandating states, mandating insurance companies, mandating anyone.” Federal law, the McCarran-Ferguson Act, makes the administration of health insurance a states’ issue. Third is that it is difficult to get people elected for limited terms to focus on long-range improvement of the social infrastructure rather than on the quick spectacle of immediately visible effects on the lives of voters. And fourth is that, in the sad and ironic words of Senator Wellstone, “This is a representative democracy we’re living in. People defend the causes their voters care about. Indigent, depressed people are at home in bed on Election Day with the covers over their heads—and that means they don’t have much representation up here. The indigent depressed are not what you’d call an empowered group.”

Andrew Solomon

"Depression is not a rational disease category; like cough, it is a symptom with symptoms. If we didn’t know about the range of illnesses that cause coughs, we would have no basis for understanding the “refractory cough” and we would come up with all kinds of explanations for why some cough seems to resist treatment. We do not at this time have a clear system for sorting out the different types of depression and their different implications. It is unlikely that such an illness has a single explanation. If it occurs for a whole catalog of reasons, one must use multiple systems for examining it. There is something inherently sloppy about the current modes, which take a pinch of psychoanalytic thinking and a little bit of biology and a few external circumstances and throw them together into a crazy salad. We need to disentangle depression and grief and personality and illness before we can make real sense of depressed mental states.

The most basic animal response is sensation. The experience of hunger is unpleasant and the feeling of satiety is pleasant for all living creatures, which is why we make the effort to feed ourselves. If hunger were not a disagreeable sensation, we would starve. We have instincts that lead us to food, and when those instincts are foiled—by the unavailability of food, for example—we experience extreme hunger, a condition we will do almost anything to alleviate. Sensations tend to trigger emotions: when I am unhappy about being hungry, I am having an emotional response to a sensation. It appears that insects and many invertebrates have sensation and response to sensation, and it is difficult to say where in the animal hierarchy emotion begins. Emotion is not a characteristic exclusively of the highest mammals; but it is also not an appropriate word to use in describing the behavior of an amoeba. We are afflicted with the pathetic fallacy and have an anthropomorphic tendency to say, for example, that an underwatered plant is unhappy when it droops—or, indeed, that the car is being grumpy when it keeps stalling. It is not easy to distinguish between such projections and true emotion. Is a swarm of bees angry? Is a salmon going upstream resolute? The highly regarded biologist Charles Sherrington wrote in the late forties, when he looked through a microscope at a flea biting, that “the act whether reflex or not, seemed charged with the most violent emotion. Its Lilliput scale aside, the scene compared with that of the prowling lion in Salambo. It was a glimpse suggesting a vast ocean of ‘affect’ pervading the insect world.” What Sherrington describes is how action appears to the human eye to reflect emotion.

If emotion is a more sophisticated matter than sensation, mood is a yet more sophisticated idea. The evolutionary biologist C. M. Smith describes emotion as weather (whether it’s raining out right now) and mood as climate (whether it’s a damp, rainy part of the world). Mood is a sustained emotional state that colors responses to sensation. It is made up of emotion that has acquired a life of its own quite outside of its immediate precipitants. One can be unhappy because of hunger and get into an irritable mood that will not necessarily be alleviated by eating something. Mood exists across species; in general, the more developed the species, the more powerfully mood occurs independent of immediate external circumstance. This is most true in people. Even those who do not suffer from depression have blue moods sometimes, when little things seem to be full of reminders of mortality, when those who are gone or those times that are gone are missed suddenly and profoundly, when the simple fact that we exist in a transient world seems paralyzingly sad. Sometimes people are sad for no apparent reason at all. And even those who are frequently depressed sometimes experience high moods when the sun seems extra bright and everything tastes delicious and the world is explosively full of possibilities, when the past seems like just a little overture to the splendor of the present and the future. Why this should be so is both a biochemical and an evolutionary puzzle. The selective advantages of emotion are much easier to see than the species’ need for mood.

Is depression a derangement, like cancer, or can it be defensive, like nausea? Evolutionists argue that it occurs much too often to be a simple dysfunction. It seems likely that the capacity for depression entails mechanisms that at some stage served a reproductive advantage. Four possibilities can be adduced from this. Each is at least partially true. The first is that depression served a purpose in evolution’s prehuman times that it no longer serves. The second is that the stresses of modern life are incompatible with the brains we have evolved, and that depression is the consequence of our doing what we did not evolve to do. The third is that depression serves a useful function unto itself in human societies, that it’s sometimes a good thing for people to be depressed. The last is that the genes and consequent biological structures that are implicated in depression are also implicated in other, more useful behaviors or feelings—that depression is a secondary result of a useful variant in brain physiology.

The idea that depression at one time served a useful function that it no longer serves—that it is in effect a relic—is borne out by our many vestigial emotional responses. As the psychologist Jack Kahn has pointed out, “People do not have a natural fear of real dangers like cars and light sockets, but waste their time and energy being afraid of harmless spiders and snakes”—animals it would have been useful to fear in a different time at a different stage of our development as a species. Following this pattern, depression often clusters around what seem to be utterly unimportant matters. Anthony Stevens and John Price have proposed that some form of depression is necessary for the formation of primitive rank societies. Though lower organisms and some higher mammals, such as the orangutan, are loners, most advanced animals form social groupings, which furnish better defense against predators, better access to resources, greater and more accessible reproductive opportunities, and the prospect of cooperative hunting. There is no doubt that natural selection has favored collectivity. The impulse toward collectivity is extremely strong in human beings. We inhabit societies and most of us rely heavily on the sense of belonging. Being well liked is one of life’s great pleasures; being excluded, ignored, or in some other way unpopular is one of the worst experiences we can have.

If a lower-ranking animal challenges the leader and doesn’t get discouraged, he will keep challenging the leader and there will be no peace and the group will not be able to function as a group. If, upon losing, such an animal stops being self-assertive and withdraws into a somewhat depressed state (one characterized more by passivity than by existential crisis), he thereby acknowledges the winner’s triumph, and he accepts perforce the dominance structure. This subdominant figure, by yielding to authority, frees the winner from the obligation to kill him or to expel him from the group. So through the appropriate occurrence of mild to moderate depression, social consonance can be achieved in a rank-based society. That those who have suffered depression frequently relapse may indicate that those who have fought and lost ought to avoid fighting again, so minimizing damage to themselves. The evolutionist J. Birtchnell has said that brain centers are constantly monitoring one’s status in relation to others, and that we all function according to internalized notions of rank. The result of a fight will determine how most animals rank themselves; depression can be useful in preventing such animals from challenging their rank when they have no real chance of improvement. Often, even if not engaged in improving social position, people suffer the criticism and attack of others. Depression pulls them out of the territory in which they are subject to such criticism; they disengage so that they do not get put down (this theory seems to me to have a bit of a sledgehammer-to-mosquito problem). The anxiety element of depression is then tied to the fear of being the object of such vigorous attack as to be excluded from the group, a development that in animal societies and in human hunter-gatherer times would have had fatal consequences.

This particular argument for the evolutionary structures of depression is not highly relevant to depression as we now experience it in societies that have enormous numbers of external structuring principles. In pack-animal societies, group structure is determined by physical strength expressed through fights in which one party triumphs over the other by diminishing or defeating it. Russell Gardner, for many years the head of the Across-Species Comparisons and Psychopathology (ASCAP) Society, has looked at how human depression is linked to animal models. He proposes that, in humans, success is less contingent on putting down others than on doing things oneself. People are not successful solely on the basis of their preventing anyone else from being a success; they succeed because of their own achievements. This is not to say that one is entirely free of the business of competition and of doing injury to others, but the competition that characterizes most human social systems is more constructive than destructive. In animal societies, the essential subject of success is “I’m stronger than you,” while in human societies it is to a greater degree “I’m fantastically good.”

Gardner proposes that while actual testable strength determines the animal social order, with those who are weak developing depression like states, in human societies, public opinion determines the social order. So while a baboon might act depressed because each of the other baboons can (and does) beat him up, a human being might become depressed because nobody thinks well of him. Still, the basic rank hypothesis is borne out by contemporary experience—people who lose rank do become depressed, and that can sometimes make them more accepting of a lower rank in society. It should be noted, nonetheless, that even those who refuse to accept lower rank are not usually thrown out of contemporary societies—some of them, indeed, become respectable revolutionaries.

Depression is an agitated cousin of hibernation, a silence and withdrawal that conserves energy, a slowing down of all systems—which seems to support the idea that depression is a relic. That depressed people long for their own bed and don’t want to leave the house evokes hibernation: an animal should hibernate not in the middle of a field but in the relative safety of its cozy den. According to one hypothesis, depression is a natural form of withdrawal that must take place in a secure context. “It may be that depression is associated with sleep,” Thomas Wehr, the sleep man at the NIMH, has suggested, “because it’s really associated with a place where sleep occurs, with being at home.” Depression may also be accompanied by altered levels of prolactin, the hormone that causes birds to sit for weeks on end on their eggs. That’s also a form of withdrawal and quiescence. Of milder depression, Wehr says, “The members of the species who were too anxious to deal with crowds, didn’t go to high places, didn’t enter tunnels, didn’t single themselves out, shied away from strangers, went home when they sensed danger—they probably lived long and had lots of babies.”

It is important to bear in mind evolution’s putative singularity of purpose. Natural selection does not wipe out disorders or move toward perfection. Natural selection favors the expression of certain genes over other genes. Our brains evolve less rapidly than our way of life. McGuire and Troisi call this the “genome-lag hypothesis.” There is no question that modern life carries burdens incompatible with the brains we have evolved. Depression may, then, well be a consequence of our doing what we did not evolve to do. “I think, in a species that’s designed to live in groups of fifty to seventy,” says Randolph Nesse, a leader in evolutionary psychology, “living in a group of several billion is just hard on everyone. But who knows? Maybe it’s diet, maybe exercise rates, maybe changes in family structure, maybe changes in mating patterns and sexual access, maybe sleep, maybe having to confront death itself as a conscious idea, maybe none of these.” James Ballenger of the Medical University of South Carolina adds, “The stimuli for anxiety just weren’t there in the past. You stayed within easy distance of home, and most people can learn to deal with one place. Modern society is anxiety-provoking.” Evolution invented a paradigm in which a particular response was useful in particular circumstances; modern life provokes that response, that constellation of symptoms, under many circumstances in which they are not useful. Rates of depression tend to be low in hunter-gatherer or purely agricultural societies; higher in industrial societies; and highest in societies in transition. This supports McGuire and Troisi’s hypothesis. There are a thousand difficulties in modern societies that more traditional societies did not have to face. Adjusting to them without having time to learn coping strategies is nearly impossible. Of these difficulties, the worst is probably chronic stress. In the wild, animals tend to have a momentary awful situation and then to resolve it by surviving or dying. Except for persistent hunger, there is no chronic stress. Wild animals do not take on jobs that they regret; do not force themselves to interact calmly, year after year, with those they dislike; do not have child custody battles.

Perhaps the primary source of the extremely high level of stress in our society is not these evident afflictions but the freedom offered us in the form of an overwhelming number of uninformed choices. The Dutch psychologist J. H. van den Berg, who published his The Changing Nature of Manin 1961, argues that different societies have different systems of motivation and that each era requires a new round of theory—so that what Freud wrote may well have been true of human beings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Vienna and London, but was no longer necessarily true of human beings in the mid–twentieth century, nor was it ever strictly true of people in Peking. Van den Berg suggests that there is no such thing as informed choice about way of life in modern culture. He speaks of the invisibility of the professions, whose continuing diversification has resulted in an array of possibilities that is beyond comprehension. In preindustrial societies, a child could walk through his village and see the adults at work. He tended to choose (where choice was operative at all) his own job on the basis of a fairly thorough understanding of what each of the available options entailed—what it was to be a blacksmith, a miller, or a baker. Perhaps the details of the life of the priest were unclear, but the way of life of the priest was fully visible. This is simply not true in postindustrial society. Few people have understood since childhood what exactly a hedge-fund manager or a health-care administrator or an associate professor actually does, or what it is like for him to do it.

The realm of the personal is the same. Up until the nineteenth century, one’s social options were limited. With the exception of a few adventurers and heretics, people grew up and died in the same place. They were held in rigid class structures. A tenant farmer in Shropshire had few options about whom to marry: he chose among the women who were of the right age and class in his locale. Perhaps the one he truly loved proved unavailable and he had to settle for someone else, but at least he’d reviewed the options, knew what he might have done, and knew what he was doing. Members of the upper classes occupied a world that was somewhat less geographically constricted but was numerically small. They too tended to know all the people whom they might have the opportunity to marry and to be aware of the full range of their options. This is not to say that cross-class marriages did not take place, or that people did not move from one spot to another, but such gestures were infrequent and reflected a conscious disavowal of convention. Highly structured societies that do not present unlimited opportunity may engender acceptance of one’s lot in life, at least in a relatively large percentage of the population—though of course a full acceptance of one’s situation achieved through introspection is rare in any society in any time. With the development of better transportation, the growth of cities, and the advent of class mobility, the range of possible mates suddenly swelled to immeasurable proportions. The people who in the mid–eighteenth century could say that they had reviewed all available members of the opposite sex and chosen the fairest have been forced in more recent times to settle for the less comforting assurance that they have chosen the best of those with whom they happen to have come in contact so far. Most of us will meet thousands of other people in our lifetimes. So loss of the basic assurance—of feeling one knows whether one had chosen the right profession and of feeling that one knows whether one had chosen the right spouse—has left us bereft. We cannot accept that we simply don’t know what to do; we cling to the idea that one should make choices on the basis of knowledge.

In political terms, freedom is often burdensome, which is why transitions out of dictatorship often cause depression. In personal terms, slavery and excessive freedom are both oppressive realities, and while some part of the world is paralyzed by the narrow despair of inescapable poverty, the more developed nations are paralyzed by the very mobility of their populations, by the twenty-first-century nomadism of constantly pulling up roots and resettling to accommodate jobs and relationships and even fancy. A writer addressing this problem tells the story of a boy whose family had moved five times in a short period, who hanged himself from an oak in the backyard, leaving a note pinned to the tree that said, “This is the only thing around here that has any roots.” The feeling of perpetual disruption holds for the jetting executive who visits thirty countries in an average year, and the middle-class city dweller whose job keeps getting redescribed as his company is bought out time and again and who does not know from year to year who will work for him or for whom he will work, or for the person who lives alone and encounters different checkout staff every time he goes grocery shopping. In 1957, an average American supermarket had sixty-five items in the produce section: shoppers knew what all the fruits and vegetables were and had had each of them before. In 1997, an average American supermarket had over three hundred items in the produce section, with many markets pushing a thousand. You are in the realm of uncertainty even when you select your own dinner. This kind of escalation of choices is not convenient; it is dizzying. When similar choices present themselves in every area—where you live, what you do, what you buy, whom you marry—the result is a collective uneasiness that explains much, in my view, about the rising rates of depression in the industrialized world.

Further, we live in an era of dazzling, bewildering technologies, and we have no concrete grasp of how most of the things around us work. How does a microwave function? What is a silicon chip? How do you genetically engineer corn? How does my voice travel when I use a cell phone as opposed to a regular phone? Is it real money that a bank machine in Kuwait deducts from my account in New York? One can research any of these particular questions, but to learn the answers to all the small science questions of our lives is an overwhelming task. Even for someone who understands how the motor of a car works and where electricity comes from, the actual mechanics of daily life have become increasingly obscure.

There are many specific stresses for which we are ill prepared. The breakdown of the family is certainly one, and the advent of the solitary life is another. The loss of contact, and sometimes intimacy, between working mothers and their children is another. Living a working life that entails no physical movement or exercise is another. Living in artificial light is another. Loss of the comforts of religion is yet another. Incorporating the explosion of information in our age is yet another. The list can be expanded almost indefinitely. How could our brains be prepared to process and tolerate all this? Why wouldn’t it be a strain for them?

Many scientists have subscribed to the idea that depression serves a useful function in our society as it exists today. Evolutionists would want to see that the presence of depression favors the reproduction of certain genes—but if one looks at the reproductive rates of depressives, one finds that depression in fact decreases reproduction. Like physical pain, depression is intended to warn us off certain dangerous activities or behaviors by making them too unpleasant to tolerate so it is the capacityfor depression that is most obviously useful. Paul J. Watson and Paul Andrews, evolutionary psychiatrists, have proposed that depression is actually a means of communication and have modeled evolutionary scenarios according to which depression is a social disease, one that exists for its interpersonal role. Mild depression, in their view, causes intense introspection and self-examination, on the basis of which it is possible to make sophisticated decisions about how to effect changes in one’s life so that it better suits one’s character. Such depression can be and often is kept secret, and its function is private. Anxiety—distress in advance of an event—is often a component of depression and can be useful in preventing trouble. Mild depression—low mood that has taken on a life separate from the triggering circumstance—can motivate a return to what had been foolishly cast off, valued only after its loss. It can cause one to regret true mistakes, and to avoid making them again. Life decisions often follow the old rule of investments: high-risk decisions may bring high rewards, but at a cost that is potentially too high for most people. A situation in which a person cannot disengage from a truly hopeless goal may be resolved through depression, which forces disengagement. People who pursue their goals with excessive tenacity and cannot relinquish attachments that are evidently unwise are especially subject to depression. “They’re trying to do something interpersonally that’s not going to succeed, but they can’t give up because they are so emotionally overinvested,” Randolph Nesse says. Low mood serves to delimit persistence.

Depression can certainly interdict behaviors that have negative effects we might otherwise tolerate. Excessive levels of stress, for example, cause depression, and the depression may cause us to avoid the stress. Too little sleep may lead to depression, and depression can throw us back to more sleep. Among the primary functions of depression is changing nonproductive behaviors. Depression is often a sign that resources are being poorly invested and need to be refocused. Practical examples of this abound in modern life. I heard of a woman who had been trying to make her way in the world as a professional violinist, despite the discouragements of her teachers and colleagues, and who suffered from an acute depression that was only minimally responsive to medication and other therapies. When she gave up music and switched her energies to an area to which her abilities were better suited, her depression lifted. Paralyzing though it feels, depression can be a motivator.

More serious depression may arouse the attention and support of others. Watson and Andrews suggest that pretending one needs help from others does not necessarily secure that help: others are too smart to be deluded by phony neediness. Depression is a convenient mechanism because it supplies the convincing reality: if you’re depressed, then you really are helpless, and if you really are helpless, you may be able to extort assistance from others. Depression is a costly form of communication, but it is all the more compelling because it is so costly. It is the sincere horror of it that gets others motivated, so say Watson and Andrews; the dysfunction caused by the onset of depression may serve a useful function in that it is “a device for the elicitation of altruism.” It may also convince those who are responsible for causing you difficulties to leave you alone.

My depression brought out all kinds of helping behaviors in my family and friends. I received a much higher level of attention than I might otherwise have expected, and those around me took measures to relieve certain burdens—financial, emotional, and behavioral. I was freed of all kinds of obligations to friends because I was simply too sick to come through for them. I stopped working: I had no choice about that. I even used my illness to get permission to delay payment of my bills, and various pesky folk were obliged to stop bothering me. Indeed, when I had my third depressive episode, I took an extension on the completion of this book and did so with absolute certainty; fragile though I may have felt, I was able to state categorically that no, I could not just go on working anyway, and that my situation would have to be accommodated.

The evolutionary psychologist Edward Hagen sees depression as a power play: it involves the withdrawal of one’s services to others until they accommodate one’s needs. I disagree. The depressed make lots of demands on people around them, but then—if they weren’t depressed, they wouldn’t need to make all those demands. The chances of those demands being fully met are relatively slender. Depression can be a useful blackmail, but it is generally too unpleasant for the blackmailer and too inconsistent in its results to be a well-selected way of achieving specific ends. Though it can be gratifying to get support when you are feeling dreadful, can indeed help to build a depth of love that would otherwise be unimaginable, it is much better not to feel so dreadful and not to need so much support. No—I believe that low mood serves the function of physical pain in causing one to avoid certain behaviors because of unpleasant consequences, but the voguish idea that depression is a means to accomplish social goals makes little sense to me. If major depression is nature’s strategy for making independent beings seek help, it’s a risky strategy at best. The fact is that most people are appalled by depression. Though some respond to a display of depression with increased sympathy and altruism, more respond with revulsion and disgust. It is not unusual to discover in a depression that people you had believed were reliable are actually unreliable—a valuable piece of information you might have preferred not to have. My depressions have sorted the wheat from the chaff among my friends, but at how high a cost? And is it worth forsaking other relationships that give me pleasure simply because they were not reliable in a terrible time? What kind of a friend should I be to such people? How much of friendship is about being reliable anyway? How does being reliable in a crisis relate to being kind or generous or good?

The idea that depression is the misfiring of mechanisms that also serve useful functions is perhaps the most convincing of all the evolutionary theories. Depression most frequently stems from, and represents an aberrant form of, grief. It is not possible to understand melancholia apart from mourning: the basic pattern of depression exists in sorrow. Depression may be a useful mechanism that gets stuck. We have a range of heart rates to allow us to function in varying circumstances and climates. Real depression is, like a heart that doesn’t pump blood to the fingers and toes, an extreme in which there is virtually no inherent advantage.

Grief is profoundly important to the human condition. I believe that its most important function is in the formation of attachment. If we did not suffer enough loss to fear it, we could not love intensely. The experience of love incorporates sadness into its intensity and range. One’s wish not to injure those whom one loves—indeed, to help them—also serves the preservation of the species. Love keeps us alive when we recognize the difficulties of the world. If we had developed self-consciousness and not developed love as well, we would not long tolerate the slings and arrows of life. I’ve never seen a controlled study, but I believe that people with the greatest capacity to love are more likely to cleave to life, to remain alive, than those without it; they are more likely also to be loved, and that too keeps them alive. “A lot of people would see heaven as a place where there would be infinite intensity and variety,” Kay Jamison has said. “Not a place that is trouble-free. You would want to eliminate some extremes, but not to cut the spectrum in half. There’s a very fine line between saying that you want people to suffer and saying you don’t want people to be denied emotional range.” To love is to be vulnerable; to reject or decry vulnerability is to refuse love.

Crucially, love prevents us from abandoning our attachments too readily. We are made to agonize if we walk out on the people whom we truly love. Perhaps the anticipation of grief is critical to the formation of emotional attachments. It is the contemplation of loss that makes one hold tight to what one has. If there were no despair after the loss of someone, one would spend time and emotional energy on that person only as long as it was pleasurable to do so, and not one minute longer. “Evolutionary theory,” says Nesse, “is generally thought to be a cynical practice. Evolutionary biologists interpret all the complexity of moral behavior as though it were simply a system for the selfish benefit of one’s own genes. Of course much of one’s behavior is explicitly for that purpose. But often one’s actions lie outside of these parameters.” Nesse’s field of study is commitment. “Animals cannot make complex contingent promises about the future to one another. They cannot bargain and say, ‘If you will do this for me in the future, then I will do this for you.’ A commitment is a promise in the present to do something in the future that may not be in your best interests at that time. Most of us live by such commitments. Hobbes saw this. He understood that our capacity for such commitments is what makes us human.”

The capacity to make commitments is to the evolutionary advantage of one’s genes; it is the basis of the stable family unit that provides the ideal environment for the young. But once we have that capacity, which serves an evolutionary advantage, we can use it in any way we choose; and in these choices lies the moral compass of the human animal. “People’s reductive notions of science have caused us to see relationships mostly as mutual manipulations and mutual exploitations,” says Nesse, “but in fact feelings of love and hate often extend to the impractical. They don’t fit with our rationalistic system at all. The capacity for love may serve an evolutionary advantage, but how we act in the face of love is a process of our own. The superego pushes us to do things that give benefit to others at the cost of our own pleasure.” It invites us into the realm of moral alternatives, a realm that loses its meaning if we try to eliminate grief and its milder sad cousin, regret. Some insects are born from untended egg sacs with a lifetime food supply intact; they need sexual impulse, but not love. The precursors of attachment, however, exist even in the world of reptiles and birds. The instinct to sit on an egg and keep it warm—in contrast to laying an egg and then sauntering off and leaving it to get cold, be crushed, or be devoured by passing animals—clearly enhances reproductivity. In most postreptilian species, mothers who feed their young, as good birds do, have more young who survive, and this enhances their success in producing little chicks who will grow into big birds and procreate. The first emotion, and one for which selection would most significantly occur, is a version of what we call love between a mother and her young. It seems likely that love emerged among the first mammals and that it motivated these creatures to care for the relatively helpless young born without an eggshell into the threatening world.''

Andrew Solomon

Andrew Solomon

"If community health programs could keep everyone quiet, they would, by the standards of much of the world, be doing their job. Their inadequacies in protecting the healthy from the ill win them excoriation in the press. The question of whether they are serving the interest of the well is often examined; whether they are helping their target community seldom comes up. “Huge numbers of federal tax dollars are going to these programs,” Representative Roukema said, “and there is strong evidence that the money is being diverted into all kinds of irrelevant local projects.”

Andrew Solomon

“Civil libertarians who take extreme views on this matter are both incompetent and inconsequential,” Roukema said. “Under the guise of civil liberties, they’re inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on people despite the fact that society has science that can make a better way. It’s cruelty; if we were doing that to animals, the ASPCA would be after us”. 

Andrew Solomon

“I wish I’d gained my understanding of this subject solely through research and ethical inquiry. But for many people, the problems of mental illness are still utterly abstract, and their urgency becomes apparent only through intense involuntary immersion in them. We need an education initiative to pave the way for a legislative one.”

Andrew Solomon

 

 https://chris-horst.com/2017/12/01/the-scandal-of-calipers-and-nursery-rhymes/

"Belgian rule reinforced an ethnic divide between the Tutsi and Hutu, and they supported Tutsis political power. Due to the eugenics movement in Europe and the United States, the colonial government became concerned with the differences between Hutu and Tutsi. Scientists arrived to measure skull—and thus, they believed, brain—size. Tutsi's skulls were bigger, they were taller, and their skin was lighter. As a result of this, Europeans came to believe that Tutsis had Caucasian ancestry, and were thus "superior" to Hutus. Each citizen was issued a racial identification card, which defined one as legally Hutu or Tutsi. The Belgians gave the majority of political control to the Tutsis. Tutsis began to believe the myth of their superior racial status, and exploited their power over the Hutu majority. In the 1920s, Belgian ethnologists analysed (measured skulls, etc.) thousands of Rwandans on analogous racial criteria. These measurements were however not used during the implementation of the identity card. In 1931, the ethnic identity was officially mandated and administrative documents systematically detailed each person's "ethnicity,". Rwandans had to apply for their identity card. During their application they were asked basic information such as their name, age and ethnicity. They could choose between Hutu, Tutsi or Twa. Most Rwandans were Hutu and answered as such, although when people started to suspect being Tutsi came with special privileges some lied and stated their ethnicity as Tutsi. When they applications were over however, the ethnic identity was fixed, as it was inherited patrilinealy. 84% of Rwandans were assigned Hutu, 14% Tutsi and around 1% Twa. Each Rwandan had an ethnic identity card.[19][20][21]

A history of Rwanda that justified the existence of these racial distinctions was written. No historical, archaeological, or above all linguistic traces have been found to date that confirm this official history. The observed differences between the Tutsis and the Hutus are about the same as those evident between the different British social classes in the 1950s. The way people nourished themselves explains a large part of the differences: the Tutsis, since they raised cattle, traditionally drank more milk than the Hutu, who were farmers.

The fragmenting of Hutu lands angered Mwami Yuhi IV, who had hoped to further centralize his power enough to get rid of the Belgians. In 1931 Tutsi plots against the Belgian administration resulted in the Belgians' deposing the Tutsi Mwami Yuhi. The Tutsis took up arms against the Belgians, but feared the Belgians' military superiority and did not openly revolt.[22] Yuhi was replaced by Mutara III, his son. In 1943, he became the first Mwami to convert to Catholicism.[23]

From 1935 on, "Tutsi", "Hutu" and "Twa" were indicated on identity cards. However, because of the existence of many wealthy Hutu who shared the financial (if not physical) stature of the Tutsi, the Belgians used an expedient method of classification based on the number of cattle a person owned. Anyone with ten or more cattle was considered a member of the Tutsi class. The Roman Catholic Church, the primary educators in the country, subscribed to and reinforced the differences between Hutu and Tutsi. They developed separate educational systems for each,[citation needed] although throughout the 1940s and 1950s the vast majority of students were Tutsi''.[citation needed]

Wiki

 

 

 Much of Gibson's work on perception derives from his time spent in the U.S. Army Air Force. Here, he delved into thoughts on how imperative perception is on daily functions.^[9] His work may be the first to show a distinct difference between types of perception. Form perception, on one hand, is a display of two static displays, whereas object perception, involves one of the displays to be in motion.^[9] Gibson laid down the base for empirical perception research throughout his lifetime. He did work on adaptation and inspection of curved lines, which became a precursor for perceptual research later.^[10] His basic work rejected the perspective that perception in and of itself is meaningless, he instead argued meaning is independent of the perceiver. He claimed that the environment decides perception, and that meaning is in what the environment "affords" the observer.^[12]

Wiki

 Locke defended the right of revolution in Two Treatises of Government in this way:

Whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge, which God hath provided for all Men, against Force and Violence. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society; and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power, the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty.

Wiki 

 

 AI on Kant

• Experience

  Kant believed that experience is a representation of the spatiotemporal world that is based on two types of experience-forms: human sensibility and conceptual forms. 
• Synthesis

  Kant believed that the mind's creative function of judgment is responsible for subsuming experiences into general concepts. 
• Imagination

  Kant believed that the imagination is a necessary but blind function of the soul that provides schemata for perception. 
• Reflective judgment

  Kant believed that reflective judgment is responsible for scientific inquiry, and for sorting and classifying objects into a hierarchical taxonomy. 

"Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, declared himself to be a “transcendental idealist and an empirical realist.” Any proper reading of Kant must come to terms with what he means by this, and indeed this phrase has given rise to an immense scholarly literature.

The gist of what he means is that from a “transcendental” perspective—- a perspective that is oriented around the question of the condition of possibility of experience and knowledge—- the things we experience and know are mind-dependent, but that this very “mind-dependence” does not argue against the objective validity of our knowledge, but speaks for it: what the subjective conditions of knowledge and experience explain is the very possibility of objective knowledge and experience.

So basically: the things we experience really exist, and yet the very fact that they exist can only be understood rigorously if we regard them not as noumenal, not as things in themselves —-existing completely independent of the subject—-, but as phenomenal, as things existing for us, in relation to us.

To give a paradoxical spin to it: in themselves they only exist for us, but for us they exist in themselves''.

Curtis Adler

Chomsky

"The Church of Latin America had undertaken “the preferential option for the poor.” They committed the crime of going back to the Gospels. The contents of the Gospels are mostly suppressed (in the U.S.); they are a radical pacifist collection of documents. It was turned into the religion of the rich by the Emperor Constantine, who eviscerated its content. If anyone dares to go back to the Gospels, they become the enemy, which is what liberation theology was doing. So it’s a mixed story. However in the U.S., the more extremist, by comparative standards, religious movements did become mobilized into a political force for the first time in history really and that’s pretty much less than 25 years. It’s striking that this is one of the worst periods of economic history for the majority of the population, for whom real wages and incomes have stagnated while work hours increased and benefits declined, and inequality grew to staggering proportions, a dramatic difference from the previous 25 years of very high and egalitarian economic growth and improvement in other measures of human development. There is a correlation, common in other parts of the world as well. When life is not offering expected benefits, people commonly turn to some means of support from religion. Furthermore, there is a lot of cynicism. It was recognized by party managers of both parties (Republicans and Democrats) that if they can throw some red meat to religious fundamentalist constituencies, like say we are against gay rights, they can pick up votes. In fact, maybe a third of the electorate – if you cater to elements of the religious right in ways that the business world, the real constituency, doesn’t care that much about''.

"During that period, plenty of church people were killed. Hundreds of thousands of peasants and poor people also died, as usual, but one of the main targets was the Catholic Church. Why? Well, the Catholic Church had committed a grievous sin in Latin America. For hundreds of years, it had been the church of the rich. That was fine. But in the 1960s, the Latin American bishops adopted what they called a ‘preferential option for the poor.’ At that point they became like this mass-based political party in Indonesia, which was a party of the poor and the peasants and naturally it had to be wiped out. So the Catholic Church had to be smashed.

Coming back to the beginning, just where is the clash of civilizations? I mean, there is a clash alright. There is a clash with those who are adopting the preferential option for the poor no matter who they are. They can be Catholics, they can be Communists, they can be anything else. They can be white, black, green, anything. Western terror is totally ecumenical. It’s not really racist – they’ll kill anybody who takes the wrong stand on the major issues.

But if you’re an intellectual, you can’t say that. Because it’s too obviously true. And you can’t let people understand what is obviously true. You have to create deep theories, that can be understood only if you have a PhD from Harvard or something. So we have a clash of civilizations, and we’re supposed to worship that. But it makes absolutely no sense''.

Chomsky

"We bankers hate taking your home! First we need to pay the dogs to rip you out of your home, then we need to assess how much we've scored, then we need to actually SELL your home...can you believe that? We would much rather you just continued to pay us normally so we could have stolen from you without all the extra headache.''


"The economy is like a badly designed game of Monopoly. Winner take all, and they keep it. 1910 all over again, 10 guys own 90% of everything. Nobody wants to play that game (but we have to). The govt needs to start breaking up massive corps (again). There needs to be a UBI (min wage) and a MAXIMUM wage. Say, everything over 5M$ per year the govt keeps. Assets over 100M$, the govt takes. Mr Billionaire, congrats you win! Now give it all back and see if you can do it again. Just like Monopoly (which is a fun game, the rules work)''.

"The fundamental answer to why so many humans are now getting sick from previously rare illnesses is that many of the body's features were adapted in environments from which we evolved, but have become maladapted in the modern environments we have now created. This idea, known as the mismatch hypothesis.''

Lieberman

Becker

 “The neurotic isolates himself from others, cannot engage freely in their partialization of the world, and so cannot live by their deceptions about the human condition. He lifts himself out of the ‘natural therapy’ of everyday life, the active, self-forgetful engagement in it; and so the illusions that others share seem unreal to him. This is forced. Neither can he, like the artist, create new illusions. As Anaïs Nin put it...‘The caricature aspect of life appears whenever the drunkenness of illusion wears off.’ And don’t some people drink to head off the despair of reality as they sense it truly is? Man must always imagine and believe in a ‘second’ reality or a better world than the one that is given him by nature. In this sense, the neurotic symptom is a communication about truth: that the illusion that one is invulnerable is a lie.”

Ernest Becker