Trump Derangement Syndrome

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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Trump Derangement Syndrome

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

Gary Childress wrote: Sun Oct 02, 2022 6:46 pm
Alexis Jacobi wrote: Sun Oct 02, 2022 6:02 pm So instead of knee-jerk I think we'd have to coin a term related to mind-jerk. Certain images invoke or stimulate reactions. Certain ideas invoke or stimulate reactions. This implies psychological content that has been stimulated. But let's examine some facts: it is literally true that *the family* as it had been understood for generations and centuries is certainly under attack. How this has come about can be examined and described. It did not pop out of nowhere. Are you aware of how this came about? Are you aware that it has a purpose?
Why do you say "the family" is "under attack"? And if it is under attack what is the "purpose" of the attack? Who is "attacking" it?
The traditional family, the traditional male-female union, and definitely such a union as a spiritual or religious sacrament (and thus historically a fundamental Occidental institution) has been undermined over a rather long period of time, by different forces (or ideologies) and for a range of purposes. It is tempting, but reductionist, to try to assert a 'conspiracy' and so to answer the question of "who" is problematic. But the purpose is a bit easier to discover.

My own studies led me to Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality:
The Authoritarian Personality is a 1950 sociology book by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley, during and shortly after World War II.

The Authoritarian Personality "invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the 'F scale' (F for fascist)." The personality type Adorno et al. identified can be defined by nine traits that were believed to cluster together as the result of childhood experiences. These traits include conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex.

Though criticized at the time for bias and methodology, the book was highly influential in American social sciences, particularly in the first decade after its publication: "No volume published since the war in the field of social psychology has had a greater impact on the direction of the actual empirical work being carried on in the universities today."
Following this logic, if there is an authoritarian personality, and authoritarianism is defined as pathological, that authority is located in the father-figure. The authority that must be challenged therefore is the father and this opened up to a wide critical posture of the family-structure and paternalism. The foundations of European culture (and certainly of most cultures) is maintained through cultural institutions and the family structure is certainly the central one.

So the argument goes that to produce changes in society (revolutionary, socialistic, etc.) the foundational structures have to be modified. And the way toward modification involves critique. Critique is thus a term with a special meaning related to dialectical processes. To understand this outlined process better one need examine Antonio Gramsci:
Gramsci’s prescription for dismantling the alleged cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie was through dismantling and subordinating the so-called dominant culture. This would come through promotion of alternate cultures to a new hegemony. This would allow the proletariat class revolt to move forward unhindered and bring a communist society. To be successful, this would require attacks on the cultural icons of society and a sustained demeaning of that culture. It would require a change in language and accepted “common sense.” For example, the term “picking yourself up by your bootstraps” would be alleged to be part of the cultural hegemony to keep the proletariat complacent within the hegemonic system. Following the Marxist admonition “the present must control the past,” historical icons must be removed and replaced. This happened in Russia, with the renaming of the iconic city St. Petersburg (temporarily Petrograd during WWI) as “Leningrad” and, in a sense, the elimination of the Tsarist system — and the extended royal family — among many examples.

Like Marx, Gramsci wrote that Christianity was a primary enemy of the communist revolution and the major pillar of the alleged cultural hegemony. The claims of absolute truth and submission to societal authority were a part. In particular, Christian admonitions of the importance of the nuclear family and the role of the father in the family were primary obstacles to the proletariat uprising. Like Marx, Gramsci advocated attacking and demeaning Christianity, the nuclear family and fatherhood (“patriarchy”). Gramsci advocated infiltration of cultural Marxists in the media, entertainment, courts and politics. He referred to this as going through “the robes” of society to dismantle the hegemonic culture.
Gary Childress
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Re: Trump Derangement Syndrome

Post by Gary Childress »

Alexis Jacobi wrote: Sun Oct 02, 2022 7:54 pm
Gary Childress wrote: Sun Oct 02, 2022 6:46 pm
Alexis Jacobi wrote: Sun Oct 02, 2022 6:02 pm So instead of knee-jerk I think we'd have to coin a term related to mind-jerk. Certain images invoke or stimulate reactions. Certain ideas invoke or stimulate reactions. This implies psychological content that has been stimulated. But let's examine some facts: it is literally true that *the family* as it had been understood for generations and centuries is certainly under attack. How this has come about can be examined and described. It did not pop out of nowhere. Are you aware of how this came about? Are you aware that it has a purpose?
Why do you say "the family" is "under attack"? And if it is under attack what is the "purpose" of the attack? Who is "attacking" it?
The traditional family, the traditional male-female union, and definitely such a union as a spiritual or religious sacrament (and thus historically a fundamental Occidental institution) has been undermined over a rather long period of time, by different forces (or ideologies) and for a range of purposes. It is tempting, but reductionist, to try to assert a 'conspiracy' and so to answer the question of "who" is problematic. But the purpose is a bit easier to discover.

My own studies led me to Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality:
The Authoritarian Personality is a 1950 sociology book by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley, during and shortly after World War II.

The Authoritarian Personality "invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the 'F scale' (F for fascist)." The personality type Adorno et al. identified can be defined by nine traits that were believed to cluster together as the result of childhood experiences. These traits include conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex.

Though criticized at the time for bias and methodology, the book was highly influential in American social sciences, particularly in the first decade after its publication: "No volume published since the war in the field of social psychology has had a greater impact on the direction of the actual empirical work being carried on in the universities today."
Following this logic, if there is an authoritarian personality, and authoritarianism is defined as pathological, that authority is located in the father-figure. The authority that must be challenged therefore is the father and this opened up to a wide critical posture of the family-structure and paternalism. The foundations of European culture (and certainly of most cultures) is maintained through cultural institutions and the family structure is certainly the central one.

So the argument goes that to produce changes in society (revolutionary, socialistic, etc.) the foundational structures have to be modified. And the way toward modification involves critique. Critique is thus a term with a special meaning related to dialectical processes. To understand this outlined process better one need examine Antonio Gramsci:
Gramsci’s prescription for dismantling the alleged cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie was through dismantling and subordinating the so-called dominant culture. This would come through promotion of alternate cultures to a new hegemony. This would allow the proletariat class revolt to move forward unhindered and bring a communist society. To be successful, this would require attacks on the cultural icons of society and a sustained demeaning of that culture. It would require a change in language and accepted “common sense.” For example, the term “picking yourself up by your bootstraps” would be alleged to be part of the cultural hegemony to keep the proletariat complacent within the hegemonic system. Following the Marxist admonition “the present must control the past,” historical icons must be removed and replaced. This happened in Russia, with the renaming of the iconic city St. Petersburg (temporarily Petrograd during WWI) as “Leningrad” and, in a sense, the elimination of the Tsarist system — and the extended royal family — among many examples.

Like Marx, Gramsci wrote that Christianity was a primary enemy of the communist revolution and the major pillar of the alleged cultural hegemony. The claims of absolute truth and submission to societal authority were a part. In particular, Christian admonitions of the importance of the nuclear family and the role of the father in the family were primary obstacles to the proletariat uprising. Like Marx, Gramsci advocated attacking and demeaning Christianity, the nuclear family and fatherhood (“patriarchy”). Gramsci advocated infiltration of cultural Marxists in the media, entertainment, courts and politics. He referred to this as going through “the robes” of society to dismantle the hegemonic culture.
Interesting. So it sounds to me like you are crediting socialists/ism with the demise of the family? Is that correct?
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Trump Derangement Syndrome

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

Gary Childress wrote: Sun Oct 02, 2022 8:53 pmInteresting. So it sounds to me like you are crediting socialists/ism with the demise of the family? Is that correct?
I would not myself use quite such a broad reduction. What I can say is that when one studies Marxist-Leninism one discovers a very dedicated and violent animus that sets the undermining of all *bourgeois* structures as its primary object. Since it is a rabid, monomaniacal ideology, it sees its ends as worthy of all means. Its object is a social and economic revolution and 'any means necessary' are recommended.

If you were to ask me if there was one source through which the ideas that I describe as Marxist-Leninist or of the Frankfurt School have entered the cultural stream I am not sure if that could be easily done. I think one would have to examine the infiltration, in a more neutral sense, of ideas that tend toward the radical. They come from many different sources.

If you were to ask me personally about the wide range of undermining ideologies and praxes, I would say that my impression is that many involved in these modes or currents are not fully conscious of what moves them along. Take Critical Theory generally. Or take Queer Theory specifically as a branch of Critical Theory. What has stood in the way of homosexuals has been that their activities, their *life-styles*, have been defined as negative or destructive. This was generally accepted culture-wide. So they have been suppressed. And homosexuality, unless I am wrong, has always been repressed. Though in all cultures there is always a *corner* set aside for people who are of that orientation. But underground or to the side.

But in our culture, and due to the fury of the Culture Wars which accelerated in the Sixties, it became necessary for homosexuals not only to come out of the closet but to come flamingly out into the public view. It became an assertive doctrine. And in a sense what opposes the *homosexual life-style* is heteronormativity. And the chief figures are the resolutely heterosexual male and his resolutely heterosexual mate. And how does one go about undermining such a couple, and thus the 'institution' of heteronormativity? First by rendering them as ridiculous. Uptight, intolerant, 'hung-up', and bound up with the paternalistic order. And your object must be to undermine this classic couple and the classic image of 'the nuclear family. You go after the male figure certainly, but you also must incite division between the woman and the man. And then between the children and the parents. That entire structure has to be described not in healthy, positive terms, but as something oppressive.

(If you are curious why I focus on homosexuality it is because it is one major issue of cultural and social undermining. See James Lindsay who presents a coherent case here).

It would not be hard to show clips from important and influential films, starting in the Postwar, and advancing through the decades thereafter that illustrate how ideology got translated into the filmic image and scene, and through that medium, among numerous media, the entire culture was influenced. The difficult part in pointing to an overall negative trend is in being judicious about it. There is a film (1978) called An Unmarried Woman that struck me as emblematic of ideological ideas entering into filmic performances. The film covers the full gamut. A woman deceived and abandoned by her husband, her struggle to deal with the loss of *identity* as a woman in a marriage, her resort to therapy and, as it is shown in the film, feminist ideology, and finally the emergence of an unattached woman capable of having affairs.

If you were to say "But these social changes were and are part of necessary cultural evolution and they were inevitable and even needed" I am not sure I could disagree. It is easy to try to see things through reduced lenses though isn't it? To reduce complex things to relatively simple assertions. Far harder to simply see things as they really occurred.

But then there is another question or problem: the analysis of the present and the assigning of valuation. So my impression is that just about everything in culture, in society, in social life, that could have been depended on as part of a solid structure that one could believe in -- all of this has been undermined. We are living in an *outcome* of many different streams of activism and of choice. The disssolving influences simply continue what has been set in motion.
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Re: Trump Derangement Syndrome

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"In particular, Christian admonitions of the importance of the nuclear family and the role of the father in the family were primary obstacles to the proletariat uprising."

yes and no but that's a rigged statement. marx and Engels were critical of the bourgeois incentive to pass inheritance through the family and the role women/wives played in the family, subordinate to the husband, an object of property, etc. not to mention the sad state of women's rights at the time of their writing.

okay, but what they were after wasn't the abolishment of the monogamous nuclear family unit per se... they were just examining things about that system's ideological origins... in ancient aristocratic cultures, for example. bourgeoisie property and the corresponding laws of those societies have a long story bro. not saying any of this is unnatural. any and all kinds of property relations must be natural, of course. only that this one, western protestant conservatism/capitalism in particular has a rich and often sketchy and deceptive history.

i doubt marx or engels imagined any other kind of family unit would be more practical and stable than monogamous, two parent/child family units. it's just the religious institution of 'marriage', the traditional roles of women, and the obscene advantage the bourgeois upper class has over the lower classes (in part) due to the inheritance of wealth and property.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Trump Derangement Syndrome

Post by Immanuel Can »

FlashDangerpants wrote: Sat Oct 01, 2022 10:28 pm You were lying about that quote.
Nope.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Trump Derangement Syndrome

Post by Immanuel Can »

tillingborn wrote: Sat Oct 01, 2022 10:34 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: Sat Oct 01, 2022 2:23 pm
tillingborn wrote: Sat Oct 01, 2022 7:12 am ...you owe me proof that:are all disasters, and that the Biden administration is responsible for them.
Heh. That's easy.
Then let us start with the economy, the first thing in your list. Why is that a disaster?
Go to the gas station. When you come back, ask me the question again. Or go to the grocery store, and compare your bill to what is was before. Or go to your investment portfolio. Or go down the street, and try to find that nice little family bakery that used to be there, before the lockdowns...

I'll wait until you return.
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Re: Trump Derangement Syndrome

Post by tillingborn »

Immanuel Can wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 12:40 am
tillingborn wrote: Sat Oct 01, 2022 10:34 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: Sat Oct 01, 2022 2:23 pm
Heh. That's easy.
Then let us start with the economy, the first thing in your list. Why is that a disaster?
Go to the gas station. When you come back, ask me the question again.
£1.60 a litre, down from a peak of nearly £2. I understand the pattern has been much the same in the US.
Immanuel Can wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 12:40 amOr go to the grocery store, and compare your bill to what is was before. Or go to your investment portfolio. Or go down the street, and try to find that nice little family bakery that used to be there, before the lockdowns...
Hang on:
Immanuel Can wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 4:36 amYou get American news. I don't.
But you know about American grocery bills? Presumably the same source of information told you that Biden was the president during the lockdowns.
Immanuel Can wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 12:40 amI'll wait until you return.
And I imagine I might wait until the cows come home before you can explain
tillingborn wrote: Sat Oct 01, 2022 10:34 pmWhat did the Biden administration do to make it so disastrous?
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FlashDangerpants
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Re: Trump Derangement Syndrome

Post by FlashDangerpants »

Immanuel Can wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 12:28 am
FlashDangerpants wrote: Sat Oct 01, 2022 10:28 pm You were lying about that quote.
Nope.
The quote doesn't exist. So the question that remains is whether you are breaking one of the ten commandments just to maintain a petty point of pride and feel like less of an internet loser, or are actually deranged enough to confabulate evidence in support of your conspiracy theories. Probably the latter, but either explanation works.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Trump Derangement Syndrome

Post by Immanuel Can »

FlashDangerpants wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 9:14 am
Immanuel Can wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 12:28 am
FlashDangerpants wrote: Sat Oct 01, 2022 10:28 pm You were lying about that quote.
Nope.
The quote doesn't exist.
Get the book. Or look up the WEF website. You'll have all the quotes you want.
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FlashDangerpants
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Re: Trump Derangement Syndrome

Post by FlashDangerpants »

Immanuel Can wrote: Fri Sep 30, 2022 3:07 pm
commonsense wrote: Fri Sep 30, 2022 12:07 am
Immanuel Can wrote: Thu Sep 29, 2022 10:58 pm
Instead of throwing facile insults, just produce it.

And you'll have all the refutation you'll ever need.
What makes you think I need refutation?
You need to prove that you have the evidence of what you claim...that evidence that's everywhere, and so easy to get, but of which you have none, so far...in order to refute the realization that no such evidence exists, and you've been bluffing.

Isn't that obvious? You can't expect people to believe there are nuclear secrets under the Trump mansion for no reason but "because commonsense says so." You wouldn't take a claim merely "because IC says so," would you?
the quote isn't in the book. it isn't on the website. you lied about it.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Trump Derangement Syndrome

Post by Immanuel Can »

FlashDangerpants wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 6:33 pm the quote isn't in the book. it isn't on the website.
Which one?
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FlashDangerpants
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Re: Trump Derangement Syndrome

Post by FlashDangerpants »

Immanuel Can wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 7:28 pm
FlashDangerpants wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 6:33 pm the quote isn't in the book. it isn't on the website.
Which one?
The quote that unambiguously states that we will have to rent everything from the governments. You referred to that as "their words" twice in one sentence in Jan, so you have the quote.
tillingborn
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Re: Trump Derangement Syndrome

Post by tillingborn »

Immanuel Can wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 7:44 pmYou didn't answer the question at all.
Some people are like that:
tillingborn wrote: Sat Oct 01, 2022 10:34 pmWhat did the Biden administration do to make it (the US economy) so disastrous?
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henry quirk
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Re: Trump Derangement Syndrome

Post by henry quirk »

FlashDangerpants wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 9:46 am
Immanuel Can wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 7:28 pm
FlashDangerpants wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 6:33 pm the quote isn't in the book. it isn't on the website.
Which one?
The quote that unambiguously states that we will have to rent everything from the governments. You referred to that as "their words" twice in one sentence in Jan, so you have the quote.
You're talkin' about the infamous you'll own nothing and be happy quote?
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FlashDangerpants
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Re: Trump Derangement Syndrome

Post by FlashDangerpants »

henry quirk wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 12:21 pm
FlashDangerpants wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 9:46 am
Immanuel Can wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 7:28 pm
Which one?
The quote that unambiguously states that we will have to rent everything from the governments. You referred to that as "their words" twice in one sentence in Jan, so you have the quote.
You're talkin' about the infamous you'll own nothing and be happy quote?
I was promised something that didn't require any reading between lines and that made it explicit that all property henceforth belongs to the state.

Getting from one to the other without a conspiracy theory to fill in the explanatory gap is not possible, but is what Mannie promised.
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