Yesterday Iran launched dozens of drones and missiles at the Jewish state that didn’t kill anyone (though 31 people were injured) because the weapons were slow and cheap and 99% of them were shot down.
Iran apparently provided 72-hours advanced notice to its neighbors and to the US and hence to Israel.
The attack looks more like a public relations exercise than a killing exercise.
Most of us want to contribute. If I didn’t think I had something to add to this story, I would do other things with my time. While I see nothing I can add on the moral dimension of this conflict, I do think I have some insights into the realpolitik.
Millions of Israelis sought shelter during the attack so Iran demonstrated its ability to disrupt the lives of its enemies. This was a warning more than an attack. If Iranian-backed Hezbollah unleashes its full missile arsenal on Israel, thousands of people would die and large parts of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa would be flattened.
Simultaneous with the attack on Saturday, Iran publicly announced that this was the end of its retaliation for Israel’s bombing of a building next to Iran’s embassy in Damascus on April 1st that killed a leading Iranian general.
Even if Israel hit Iran’s embassy, while a violation of international law, it was not attacking Iran proper. An embassy is not sovereign territory. Iran, on the other hand, has attacked Israel proper, and not just military targets, but also population centers such as Jerusalem.
If Israel fights back in an obvious way, the world may regard Israel as the provocateur.
An example of a country not fighting back after terrorism is India after the 2008 Mumbai attacks by Pakistanis. India rightly judged it was better served by not directly retaliating against its nuclear-armed neighbor.
On the other hand, what Israel experienced Saturday is different from the Mumbai attacks. Israel received a broad-based missile and drone attack, much of it aimed at its capital city — Jerusalem. Which countries would not publicly, explicitly and directly retaliate after such an assault? Would the US or France or Japan or Australia sit back and absorb such a drone and missile barrage, even if none of their citizens were killed? I doubt it. The only countries that would not explicitly fight back in these circumstances would be weak countries. Israel is not a weak country. Israel has the most formidable military in the Middle East. I can’t imagine any country with a formidable military not fighting back after such a strike. If I am wrong, please name that country.
Why should Israel be held to a different standard than other countries in similar circumstances with similar capability?
Why has Iran engaged in this blatant signaling exercise? On the face of it, Iran’s attack seems no more effective at achieving its aim of hurting Israel than wearing a mask while driving alone minimizes one’s chances of catching Covid.
We all signal because signaling works. Life signals. Animals signal. Dogs and cats and snakes and people constantly send signals. We often signal without knowing we’re signaling. It’s a basic instinct.
The accusation of virtue signalling is typically understood as a serious charge. Those accused usually respond (if not by an admission of fault) by attempting to show that they are doing no such thing. In this paper, I argue that we ought to embrace the charge, rather than angrily reject it. I argue that this response can draw support from cognitive science, on the one hand, and from social epistemology on the other. I claim that we may appropriately concede that what we are doing is (inter alia) virtue signalling, because virtue signalling is morally appropriate. It neither expresses vices, nor is hypocritical, nor does it degrade the quality of public moral discourse. Signalling our commitment to norms is a central and justifiable function of moral discourse, and the same signals provide (higher-order) evidence that is appropriately taken into account in forming moral beliefs…
Animals use signals for a variety of purposes. For instance, gazelles famously signal their fitness by stotting (jumping up and down on the spot) in front of predators (FitzGibbon and Fanshawe 1988). Peacocks even more famously signal their fitness with their spectacular tails (Zahavi and Zahavi 1999). Good signals are hard to fake signals: if a signal is cheap, then defectors will co-opt it and it will rapidly lose its value. Stotting is a hard to fake signal because it is costly. The gazelle who can afford to waste energy it might have saved for fleeing is probably not worth chasing. The peacock’s tail is an even more reliable signal, because the more spectacular the tail the more resources have been devoted to it and the better the health of the bird. A good signal of trustworthiness, too, will be hard to fake.
In human beings, hard to fake signals take a variety of forms. Some are costly, like the peacock’s tail. Many cognitive scientists argue that costly signalling is at the root of a variety of religious practises (Irons 2001; Sosis and Alcorta 2003; Sosis and Bressler 2003). Regular attendance at religious services is costly, insofar as it requires forgoing more immediately rewarding activities. More directly, tithing is costly and religious rituals often involve some kind of privation. Fasting is a common signal of religious commitment (Lent, Ramadan and Yom Kippur all involve fasting, of course), and particularly devout individuals may take vows of celibacy, of poverty or even enter small cells for life as anchorites. Some signals are not costly, but nevertheless are credibility enhancing (Henrich 2009). Crossing a bridge may not be costly for the person who crosses (she may benefit from doing so) but it is a reliable signal that she believes the bridge is safe.
We live in a world in which we cannot easily rely on others’ moral record, as conveyed by gossip, to identify those we can trust. Our societies are too large for reputation-tracking to be reliable: gossip may not reach us, and agents move relatively freely from community to community. Formal systems of regulation may help, but their effective development and enforcement depends on a sufficient level of trust to avoid systematic corruption. Costly and credibility enhancing signalling help fill the gap between reputation tracking and formal regulation. For example, because religious observance involves hard to fake signals of trustworthiness, co-religionists may seek one another out as business partners. The role of Quakers in the early years of British industry is, for instance, well-known (Prior et al. 2006). Moreover, trust is not limited to co-religionists. Religious and non-religious people express more trust in religious people, regardless of their religion, than in atheists (Gervais et al. 2011, 2017).
Credibility enhancing displays and costly signals of religious commitment are moral signals (at least for those individuals who belong to the High Gods religions (Norenzayan 2013), with their moralized gods, which have a near monopoly on the faithful today). They are signals of willingness to abide by certain, publicly proclaimed, norms. They are ways of signalling our virtue. Displays of religiosity continue to play this signalling function today, especially in highly religious societies like the United States.
But as societies secularise, such signals no longer have the same power. Small wonder we have turned to more secular virtue signalling.
I first went to public school in tenth grade in September of 1981. Because I wasn’t known at Placer High School in Auburn, CA, I was often mistaken for a freshman and people tried to haze me. One day a group of kids in my grade started bullying me, and I lost my temper, went up to one of them, and right in his face, I took a big bite of my apple. I don’t know why I did this, but I guess I was signaling.
It wasn’t such a great move. The kids then followed me up the campus mocking me but at least they didn’t beat me up. Nobody did.
A year later, I collaborated with the guy I crunched my apple at when he complained that football players got preferential treatment when compared to other athletes such as himself who rode bicycles. It was the article that put me on the map in my high school. Various football players got in my face afterward and one squeezed my neck and another, Jim Otto Jr (now a pastor) threw me in trash can. I was running on adrenaline for weeks. I saw myself as a brave truthteller.
I never discussed the bullying I received with the people who bullied me, nor did I talk to my best friend at Placer High School why he turned against me after my article came out on preferential treatment for football players (months prior to the publication, we collaborated on ways to do the article when we both worked on the school newspaper, but at crunch time my friend was no longer on the newspaper and he identified more strongly with his fellow athletes). We’re still friends and we’ve never discussed this, nor talked about the various ridiculous things I’ve said and done.
When I first got into Judaism circa 1992, I started cutting off people from my life who were not sufficiently righteous and deep in my estimation (it was one of my many maladaptive 1990s interpretations of Judaism’s and Dennis Prager’s teachings). Luckily, I didn’t do this to my high school friend, but for years afterward, I would distance myself from those who indicated they watched a lot of TV, even those who were only baiting me by saying they watched eight hours of TV a day.
Signaling is good, but like anything good, it can go awry.
Iran has yet to directly attack Americans on American or European soil. It certainly has that capability, but it has held back because it does not want to directly go to war with America (as opposed to war through proxies, which Iran has waged for decades against Israel and the US).
It is not clear yet whether this attack is better for Iran or for Israel. If Israel abstains from escalating with Iran, this might be a win for Israel.
My biggest disagreement with the latest news coverage is the idea that Israel does not want to escalate. Israel has many incentives to escalate, in large part because of American security guarantees. Israel would love to get American cooperation to bomb the hell out of Iranian nuclear facilities, which, ironically, would massively increase Iran’s incentives to build nuclear weapons.
When you subsidize something, you get more of it. America subsidizes Israel’s military, and backstops it with security guarantees, and this creates incentives for Israel to engage in risky behavior.
If an investor has a guaranteed limit to its losses, he is likely to make risky bets. If the bets pay off, the investor wins. If the bets fail, his losses are limited.
A common critique of American banking is that the losses are socialized while the profits are held in private hands.
Israel’s losses are similarly socialized — not in terms of lives, but in terms of arms. Israel’s gains, on the other hand, largely accrue to Israel, and not to American interests. A greater Israel, for example, freed from the presence of Palestinians, may well be in Israel’s best interests but not necessarily in America’s.
Mearsheimer: ‘Israelis wouldn’t mind a general conflagration because that would facilitate ethnic cleansing.’
Different groups have different interests. When you believe your enemy threatens your existence, as Israelis believe about Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, no cards are taken off the table.
What people are happy with the existence of enemies within them and beside them? I’m talking “enemy” in the Schmittian sense of one who is seeking your destruction.
The normal reaction of any living thing is to create an environment around it most conducive to its thriving.
John J. Mearsheimer says 45 minutes in: “The United States does not want escalation in the Middle East. The United States would like to see Israel win in Gaza, whatever that means, and end that war so that we have a stable Middle East. The Israelis are a different matter. I believe the Israelis wouldn’t mind a general conflagration because that would facilitate ethnic cleansing.”
If I lived in Gaza, I’d want to leave. If people I cared about lived in Gaza, I’d want them to leave. Gazans are suffering horribly. Given that Israel is not willing to live with Hamas dominating Gaza, I don’t see life improving in Gaza any time soon.
Ethnic cleansing is horrible, but there are degrees of awfulness in ethnic cleansing. Moving a people ten miles to a country with their same religion and language (which is what would happen if the residents of Gaza and the West Bank left for a neighboring Arab country) and adequate financial support (the Arabs have the money to take care of their Palestinian brothers) is not the same as moving people hundreds of miles through hostile territory to a place where they are alone and have few resources.
Most people would prefer to be ethnically cleansed to a place ten miles away rather than be murdered. Right now relations between Palestinians and Israelis are so bad, that many people on both sides want ethnic cleansing as the least of two evils.
John Mearsheimer: “I think the Israelis are interested in cleansing not only Gaza, but also the West Bank. A general conflagration would make it easier for them to do it. The other reason [Israelis] want escalation is that they have a huge problem on their northern border. About 200,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes… How do they move those people back to northern Israel until the conflict with Hezbollah is settled and Hezbollah stops firing rockets into northern Israel. As long as the war in Gaza goes on, I believe Hezbollah will continue to target northern Israel. The Israelis want to escalate because they think they have escalation dominance here. They’d like to inflict massive punishment on Hezbollah and Lebanon and reach some kind of modus vivendi with Hezbollah that allows them to move those 100,000 Israelis back into northern Israel.”
I usually prefer talking to realists rather than moralists. With realists I can learn from them even if we have different hero systems, while with moralists, if I don’t share their foundations, I rarely learn anything. I can talk to somebody who hates Israel and it makes no difference to me, an Israel lover, as long as we are talking solely in terms of power and group interests.
Is Iran conducting a smart foreign policy? That depends on how other groups react to it. Sometimes it is smart to punch your enemy in the nose and other times it is smarter to ignore him. Yesterday Iran launched cheap missiles and thousand dollar drones at Israel that required expensive million-dollar weapons to shot down. This met several objectives simultaneously: Iran depletes the reserves of its enemies (America and Israel), and appeals to its own nationalists and to the Arab street, making it harder for Arab nations to have normal relations with Israel. Iran also makes American involvement in the Middle East increasingly expensive and dangerous. This latest escalation exemplifies the dangers of Biden’s foreign policy of over-extension into places such as Israel and Ukraine that don’t matter to vital US interests.
On the other hand, Sam Vaknin argued early Sunday morning that Iran miscalculated.
Vaknin:
Israel bombed a structure that served the Iranian consulate in Damascus. Though not strictly within the compound of the Embassy, it was widely known as an outpost of Iranian diplomacy in Syria.
The language of articles 21-25 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) is clear: embassies and consulates are not sovereign territory and not extraterritorial. They just enjoy certain legal exemptions, that’s all.
So, why did Iran choose to escalate and retaliate by attacking Israel with a barrage of 300 UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or drones) as well as cruise missiles and ballistic missiles?
Because of the growing threat to its out-of-control proxies everywhere: Hamas, the Houthis, and Hizballah, first and foremost. Iran needed to reassert its authority over these terrorist organizations by being seen to fearlessly conflict directly with the “Little Devil”, Israel.
But the attack misfired in every conceivable way.
More than 97% of the weapons launched were intercepted long before they had reached the borders of Israel, exposing the inefficacy of drones and even missiles as decisive factors in modern warfare, set as they are against hi-tech defenses.
The onslaught on Israel diverted attention at least momentarily from the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza and the much heralded Israeli invasion of Rafah. It is a distractive window of opportunity that Israel might use to push on with its offensive.
The United States, France, the United Kingdom and even Jordan sided with Israel against Iran. It is a reminder that Suni countries are actually quite elated with the damage that Israel is inflicting on Shia Iran and its proxies, both Suni and Shia.
Countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt regard Israel as a handy and welcome buffer against Iran’s expansionist dreams and in the face of the Iran-sponsored death cults that cloak themselves in Muslim Brotherhood religious-political ideology.
Finally, Iran’s buffoonish retribution is humiliating. It exposes the incompetence and corruption of the theocracy. Coupled with a tanking economy, it will lead to civil unrest within Iran and perhaps to the rise of a more reformist streak of political Islam.
All these positive outcomes depend on Israel’s next move.
Biden’s sage advice to Netanyahu was to “take the win” and gloat over Iran’s debacle. But far-right forces within Israel have been spoiling for a regional war with the arch-enemy Iran for many years now. Netanyahu himself may provoke a regional kerfuffle in order to divert attention from his legal woes and force the USA to commit to his agenda.
Such a course of action would amount to an unmitigated disaster for the Jewish state.
Israel cannot defeat Iran, especially when it is already fighting a war on multiple other fronts. The USA will not be dragged into Israeli adventurism. It will rather abandon Israel to its fate. Should it choose to confront Iran now, Israel will have completed its transformation into the second North Korea, a pariah state.
When you overstate your case, you lose credibility. A classic example of this is Donald Trump’s trajectory over the past year. Fourteen months ago, Trump appeared irrelevant. Then there were a plethora of Democrat-led criminal charges against him, and now Trump appears likely to be the next president of the United States.
When Trump was elected in 2016, his opponents did a better job of organizing than did his supporters, and Trump’s four years in office saw limited progress towards his goals. Trump consistently mobilized more opposition than support and voters turned against him in 2018 and 2020 (in particular, there was a 2% swing against him in the suburbs).
When you’re at war, you need to mobilize more support than opposition. This usually requires one to keep your instincts in check and to continually asks what will do good as opposed to what will feel good.
I’m sure that Iran’s attack on Israel felt good to Iran, and that Democrat-led criminal prosecutions of Trump over the past year felt good to Democrats. Did either of these attacks succeed in their purposes? I don’t think so, but situations change, and what looks like a bad decision today may well be vindicated by tomorrow.
Anglo countries such as the United States, Australia and England tend to be the most individualist in the world. In some cases, individualist strategies work well. Anglo countries have enjoyed more than their share of success, wealth and power. On the other hand, in some circumstances such as dealing with terrorism, corporate strategies may work better.
There are reports that in this latest battle with Hamas, Israel has skipped the opportunities to take out Hamas leaders individually and instead chosen to take them out with their families.
John J. Mearsheimer: “The article made it manifestly clear that the Israelis were inflicting massive punishment on the civilian population on purpose… What I found most shocking was… that the Israelis instead of killing someone in Hamas when that fighter is by himself or with other Hamas fighters, waits until the person goes home and is with his family so that they can kill not only him but also kill the family. This is horrible.”
If a corporate strategy of taking out terrorists with their families is more effective at discouraging terror than just taking out terrorists on their own, that’s important. Few questions are more important than — what works?
The world is not as individualist, in general, as Anglo norms. Individualist ideals sound beautiful, but how does the world work? Even in individualist countries such as the United States, when a person has repeated negative interactions with an out-group, that causes the person to take on increasingly negative views of not just that out-group, but of all individuals in that out-group that the person does not know well.
To economize on decision making, most people, even in individualist countries, are likely to have some general reactions to groups such as gays, Armenians, Jews, whites, blacks, Mexicans and the like. We are wired to be tribal and to have some negative feelings about out-groups. Negative experiences with members of out-groups exacerbate out negative feelings. When acted on with discretion, these reactions may be adaptive, but in a multi-cultural setting, explicitly betraying your feelings about out-groups usually won’t serve you. People in big cities, for example, know that it is usually a bad idea to share out loud your racial and religious stereotypes. Assuming that somebody named “Ahmed” or “Shaniqua” is in a low status position may serve you if you keep your assumption to yourself, but this might hurt you if you sat it out loud.
Israeli Professor’s ‘Rape as Terror Deterrent’ Statement Draws Ire
‘The only thing that deters a suicide bomber is the knowledge that if he pulls the trigger or blows himself up, his sister will be raped,’ says Bar-Ilan University professor.
“The only thing that can deter terrorists, like those who kidnapped the children and killed them, is the knowledge that their sister or their mother will be raped.” This assertion was made by Middle East scholar Dr. Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University about three weeks ago on an Israel Radio program. “It sounds very bad, but that’s the Middle East,”…
Suicide Bombers ‘Only Deterred By Threat Of Rape Of Sisters And Wives’, Israeli Academic Says
An Israeli academic has been defended by his university after he implied would-be suicide bombers could only be stopped if their female relatives were threatened with rape.
Dr Mordechai Kedar said he was not suggesting such a tactic, but added “the knowledge that their sister of their mother will be raped” was “the only thing” that would stop terrorists from attacking Israel…
“We can’t take such steps, of course,” Kedar told the programme. “I’m not talking about what we should or shouldn’t do. I’m talking about the facts. The only thing that deters a suicide bomber is the knowledge that if he pulls the trigger or blows himself up, his sister will be raped. That’s all. That’s the only thing that will bring him back home, in order to preserve his sister’s honour.”
This week the university faced calls from feminist groups for Kedar to resign from his post, but Bar-Ilan defended the comments, saying Kedar did not intend be taken literally…
Kedar originally made the comments on July 1, after three Israeli teens – Gilad Shaar, Naftali Fraenkel and Eyal Yifrah – were kidnapped and found murdered in the West Bank, before Israel’s offensive, which has killed 630 Palestinians and 29 Israelis so far, began on July 8.
Dr Kedar has also served as chairman of the Israel Academia Monitor organization, which is involved in “exposing extremist Israeli academics who exploit academic freedom in order to take steps to deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state,” according to Haaretz.
Every rabbi I’ve asked about this said the type of retaliation Kedar described would be forbidden by Jewish law.
Legal systems describe how the world should work, but how does the world actually work?
When you rip off serious criminals, they may not only hurt you but they may also go after your family and everyone you love. Why? Because this tactic works to deter people from messing with you.
People often tell me that I have “good energy.” What does that mean?
I think it means that I love keeping it real.
“Someone else shaming you for being wrong almost definitely has way more about them than about you,” notes Youtuber Heidi Priebe.
I am often wrong about things, and inept at things, and good at things. I know there are situations where I will shine and other situations where I will sink. For example, when I am running late, I am not a nice person. When people don’t trust me, I become stiff and guarded. When I am humiliated, I lash out. When I am attacked, I will fight, freeze, fawn or flee.
If I am honest with myself, then I see when others are acting in ways that don’t make sense, and I can guard myself against their lies.
Manipulation is the opposite of good energy.
People rarely feel like they need to pretend around me. Instead, they often confide in me. And in this open exchange, there’s relief and good energy.
Pretending is hard work. If I don’t pretend, I operate with less strain. I’m lower maintenance, and that helps you to relax.
Nothing good happens between us as long as you are on guard.
People who berate themselves don’t exhibit good energy. If you are harsh to yourself, you won’t fill others with joy. There are many worthy programs to embrace from the religious to the physical, but how you do things is usually more important than what you do. Do you hector and belittle yourself or are you a good friend to yourself?
My therapist said to me from 1998 onwards that I should be a good friend to myself but it wasn’t until I was halfway through my three-year Alexander Technique program in the Spring of 2010 that I became comfortable with being kind to myself. Another year of training later and I went to my first 12-step meeting.
As I was gradually able to release my maladaptive resistance to reality, good things flowed.
When I keep it real, it is easier to get on the same page with me as we build a rhythm, and release emotional energy.
My father said that I changed my mind more than anybody he knew. Because I don’t usually put undue stock in my opinions and abilities, it’s easy for me to accept a new way of looking at things.
As I let go of my body armoring of unnecessary muscular tension through the practice of the Alexander Technique, I feel less need to defend myself.
Nobody wants to get close to somebody stuck in a defensive crouch.
Nobody wants to get close to somebody stuck in a fight or flight reaction.
I suspect the vibe I put out and the amount of unnecessary muscular tension I display correlate with the quality of my self-talk, which in turn reflects how I feel about myself.
Sorry to go all Californian on you, but there’s no more important relationship than the one you have with yourself.
We all give off a vibe. We all exert a moral force field. We all affect each other. We’re all like wifi. We power each other. We turn each other on and off. What you do with the energy I pour into you comes back to me. When I touch you or talk to you or just occupy space near you, I’m connecting my central nervous system to yours. No man is an island. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. Never ask for whom the energy bell tolls. It tolls for you. Just as you can’t walk into a room without leaving identifying DNA behind, you can’t talk to someone without affecting them. My voice and my hands act as jumper cables. If I am tense, I send that tension into you, while when I am at ease, my touch, my presence, and my voice help you release your unnecessary armoring against reality. When we release needless holding patterns of undue muscular tension, we become buoyant and flow up.
If I tell myself that you should not act the way you act, but I must not lose my temper over how wrong you are, that’s a losing approach. As long as I deny reality, I am tense.
We can never say anything but what we are. The ostensible topic might be interest rates or systematic theology, but we’re always broadcasting. Words aren’t the biggest component of our communication.
From a 12-step perspective, we’re always transmitting — either God or the disease.
When we’re in active addiction, our world of possibilities has narrowed down to getting our next fix. That narrowing has a psychological, physiological, cognitive and social component. Stiff people tend to be stiff in their thinking while flexible people tend to be flexible.
When you tighten your body, your mind and emotions tighten. You have fewer options. There are reduced opportunities for flow. You are painting with a reduced palette. You’re becoming less of a man and more of a caricature.
That stiff bloke over there? He looks like a statute!
Would you rather be around someone who’s flexible or stiff?
A free man is good to find.
On the other hand, there are situations in life where you need a hard man. And that, I’m told, is good to find.
My first love relationship was a beautiful and exciting sexual experience. However, I never experienced an orgasm. My lover was very skilled and I often felt close to coming through but it never happened…Then one time it happened. My partner had done nothing different. But I had. I had taken Alexander lessons…
As my pelvis became freed in the Alexander lessons, I moved more freely in sexual activity… My pelvis fell into good alignment, and allowed the stream of sexuality to flow unhindered to completion.
Have you experienced the presence of somebody who exhibits radical amounts of self-acceptance? I find these interactions incredibly freeing. I once had a girlfriend who was so present that I never had to explain myself. She just got it when I was speaking literally or figuratively or ironically. In fact, much of the time, she just got me without my needing to say anything. She could just tell where I was at and sometimes that was angry or ashamed or sad or frightened.
She spoiled me for other lovers.
I don’t last long in relationships where I have to explain myself. I don’t want to work that hard.
In March of 1995, I was living out of my car in West LA. One Friday night at the Westwood Chabad, I met an Israeli guy, Shimon, who said that I had good energy. He invited me to stay with him. That friendship lasted 15 months until he went back to Israel.
The opposite of good energy is transmitting that you have too much to do and not enough time to do it in. Or if you are telling yourself that you have to be perfect. Those two mindsets are the primary causes of unnecessary body tension. (David Gorman)
For some people, this message will be energizing but for others, they’ll either tense up or give up.
As I was getting Network Spinal Analysis one day in 2015, the practicioner Ellis Kooby told me, “Time is your best friend.” It was just what I needed to hear, because I often walk around thinking that time is my enemy and I don’t have enough, and that causes unnecessary muscular tension. When I walk down the street thinking, “Time is my best friend,” I feel happier as I expand into life and overflow with good energy.
I was about nine months into my Alexander Technique teacher training in 2009 when my girlfriend noticed that when I walked, I tend to be ball up my hands into fists.
Many people have these tics. They squint, furrow their brows, scratch their face, play with their hair, and distract themselves from the angst inside.
Sixty four minutes into this video, Alexander teacher Rebecca Tuffey tells a singer with a nervous tic: “You might find that is something you can change once your body is more quiet. If the house is on fire, can you do nuanced things? Are you singing Mozart? No, you’re trying to deal with the emergency. It’s like that in our nervous systems.”
When you take the low road in life, you don’t radiate good energy. Daniel Siegel wrote in his book Parenting from the Inside Out:
Our instinctual survival responses to fight, flee, freeze, or even collapse may become activated on the low road and dominate our behavior. The body’s response may reveal these old instinctual reflexes in automatic patterns of response, such as tightened muscles in anger, an impulse to run away in fear, or a sense of being numb and immobilized. Becoming aware of our bodily sensations is a first step to understanding the experiences of the low road. Making a conscious effort to alter our bodily reactions on the low road can help to free us from the prison of these ingrained reflexes. The brain looks to the body to know how it feels and to assess the meaning of things; thus, becoming aware of our bodily reactions can be a direct and effective means to deal with low-road immersion.
I never cease to be amazed at how intrusive and clueless people can be. If you want to help people, and not just intrude on people, you first need to join with them before you “help.”
You have to have a deep level of rapport with somebody before you can ask her an intense question like, “What gives you the greatest pleasure?” That’s not the first thing you can say to somebody. You have to earn the right to ask such questions.
I notice many people prefer to say and do whatever it is they want to say and do without taking into account the well-being of others.
A great way to tune in to those around you is to be as free and alert as you need to be to catch a tennis ball. When you play catch, you get out of your mental and emotional and physical ruts. You join the world around you. You pay attention to different possibilities. You drop your habitual slumping habits and move up in your body and as you do this, your mind becomes calm and you sense your own possibilities for movement and you take into account those around you and you start living in the moment rather than getting stuck in the past or dreaming about the future. You’re associated instead of disassociated.
* Charismatic leaders get people focused. They turn their attention onto the same thing. They set in motion positive feedback loops: people in the group build up a shared emotion; the stronger the emotion, the more they feel themselves in tune with each other, and the more tightly they focus together. And the more tightly they focus, the more their shared emotion pumps each other up.
* At the time when people are feeling it, collective effervescence is so overwhelming that you feel nothing can stop us. But the adrenaline fades out in half an hour or less, and the psychological afterglow fades over a period of days or at most weeks. That is why high enthusiasm for something depends on repeating the experience. It is why religions invented regular church ceremonies– once a week appears to be a good approximation to the time-dosage needed to keep up a continuing commitment. This would be an average commitment. Really high commitment– on the level like Steve Jobs– are kept going by much more frequent jolts of collective effervescence, repeatedly during the day, every day.
* Two people coming together always have the possibility of becoming mutually focused, and building a shared emotion to a high level of rhythmic entrainment. This is what people mean when they say they “click” with someone, or not.
Crucial point: People with high EE go through more successful, energy-building encounters, and fewer EE-draining encounters.
* The feedback cycle: building rhythmic entrainment. Once the encounter is launched, build up shared rhythm. Feel your own rhythm; anticipate other people’s rhythm. Let them blend together. If this can be achieved, initial emotions get transformed. The initial emotion can be fear of an enemy or worry about a problem. It can be anger. And of course, it could be happiness. The key process, however, is to take the initiating emotion and transform it into collective effervescence: sheer bouncing off of each other into a chorus of shared emotion. And that generates emotions on another level: solidarity– the feeling of the bond of the group; and Emotional Energy, that makes individuals feel strong.
* Low attunement drains emotional energy.
Not all encounters succeed. A lot of them are mediocre, neither bringing you down nor pumping you up, just getting along with people, keeping up the routine. Nothing wrong with that; it is how most personal relationships are maintained, and how most organizations operate on a daily basis. But it is not how great organizations work, nor how top careers are made. Steve Jobs hated this kind of routine.
Some encounters are worse than this. They poison personal relationships and send an organization on a downward slope. The causes are in the ingredients.
No mutual focus. People don’t focus on the same thing when they are together. They don’t pay attention to each other. It’s easy to spot. Someone comes into your office, but tunes out what you are saying and looks impatient to head for the door. An audience that checks their email while someone is speaking. A party where the person you are talking to keeps looking around. Research on speed-dating has found that asking a lot of questions is a sign that people aren’t clicking. Good conversations may start with asking a question (what kind of work do you do?) but it quickly leads to a series of back-and-forths because you are focused on something that interests you both.
There are several different reasons why people don’t focus on each other. Among other things, they may not want to. Whatever the reason, if they can’t focus together, the encounter won’t get to the point where it generates any EE for them. The longer it goes on at a low level of focus, the more it becomes a downer.
No shared emotion. Sometimes people are really out of mood with each other. The guy who wants to be casual and jokey, the woman who wants to gush, are not going to get along with someone concentrating on something serious.
* Even worse than forced rituals are phony rituals. These are where you make a real effort to be up-beat; you talk enthusiastically, laugh at people’s jokes, try and get in the swing of things. It’s hard work when nothing ever turns into a spontaneous rhythm. After a day of such encounters, you end up with what is called “interaction fatigue.” This is fairly common in going through a series of job interviews. The organizational pep talk is a loser if all it does is bore the audience.
* Someone like Napoleon becomes an energy star. He is the core of feedback loops that repeat many times a day. He comes in, energized from what has gone before, and gives each new meeting trajectory and focus. He is a good listener, hearing bad news attentively, taking good suggestions forward. He coordinates everyone’s efforts, summing up key points and problems and what to do next. He keeps people in rhythm. The meeting is a success, both practically and emotionally; they move their project forward, and leave the place pumped up with renewed energy. The leader of a well-focused team is the most energized of all, because the energy star is the center of all the circuits.
* “Every dog will have its day” is more accurately “every day will have its dog.” Incidents shape their incumbents, however momentary they may be; encounters make their encountees. It is games that make sports heroes, politics that makes politicians into charismatic leaders, although the entire weight of record-keeping, news-story-writing, award-giving, speech-making, and advertising hype goes against understanding how this comes about. To see the common realities of everyday life sociologically requires a gestalt shift, a reversal of perspectives.
* Energy and action are always local, always processes of real human beings doing something in a situation.
* The central mechanism of interaction ritual theory is that occasions that combine a high degree of mutual focus of attention, that is, a high degree of intersubjectivity, together with a high degree of emotional entrainment—through bodily synchronization, mutual stimulation / arousal of participants’ nervous systems—result in feelings of membership that are attached to cognitive symbols; and result also in the emotional energy of individual participants, giving them feelings of confidence, enthusiasm, and desire for action in what they consider a morally proper path. These moments of high degree of ritual intensity are high points of experience. They are high points of collective experience, the key moments of history, the times when significant things happen.
* This socially derived emotional energy, as Durkheim says, is a feeling of confidence, courage to take action, boldness in taking initiative. It is a morally suffused energy; it makes the individual feel not only good, but exalted, with the sense of doing what is most important and most valuable. Durkheim goes on to note that groups hold periodic assemblies to revivify this feeling, drawing again on his point that sentiments fade out over a period of time if they are not resuscitated by another experience of collective effervescence. I would add that this feeling of emotional energy has a powerful motivating effect upon the individual; whoever has experienced this kind of moment wants to repeat it.
A final item in the list of ritual effects is morality. The individual feels moral when he or she is acting with the energy derived from the heightened experience of the group.
* Intense moments of interaction ritual are high points not only for groups but also for individual lives. These are the events that we remember, that give meaning to our personal biographies, and sometimes to obsessive attempts to repeat them: whether participating in some great collective event such as a big political demonstration; or as spectator at some storied moment of popular entertainment or sports; or a personal encounter ranging from a sexual experience, to a strongly bonding friendly exchange, to a humiliating insult; the social atmosphere of an alcohol binge, a drug high, or a gambling victory; a bitter argument or an occasion of violence. Where these moments have a high degree of focused awareness and a peak of shared emotion, these personal experiences, too, can be crystalized in personal symbols, and kept alive in symbolic replays for greater or lesser expanses of one’s life.
* Intellectual life is an exciting adventure when we try to push it as far as we can. There is surely more emotional energy in exploration than in conservatively standing pat…
* There are four main outcomes of interaction rituals.
1. group solidarity, a feeling of membership;
2. emotional energy [EE] in the individual: a feeling of confidence, elation, strength, enthusiasm, and initiative in taking action;
3. symbols that represent the group: emblems or other representations (visual icons, words, gestures) that members feel are associated with themselves collectively; these are Durkheim’s “sacred objects.” Persons pumped up with feelings of group solidarity treat symbols with great respect and defend them against the disrespect of outsiders, and even more, of renegade insiders.
4. feelings of morality: the sense of rightness in adhering to the group, respecting its symbols, and defending both against transgressors. Along with this goes the sense of moral evil or impropriety in violating the group’s solidarity and its symbolic representations.
* Individuals are attracted to the most intense ritual charges they can get, indifferent to lesser rituals, and repelled by others…
* After a particularly exciting or up-lifting moment of vicarious participation, one wants to seek out someone else to tell about it. Thus, if one had been alone watching a game, a political election, or other engrossing public event, one wants to find someone else to share one’s excitement with. If the excitement is strong enough, it isn’t sufficient merely to tell the news, even in a loud, enthusiastic, repetitive voice. At peak moments of victory, or suspense followed by dramatic success, the excited viewer reaches out to touch, hug, or kiss someone.
The same pattern is visible in sports celebrations and in other victory celebrations, as depicted in the famous photos of kissing and hugging on the street at the announcement of victory in World War II. Sports victory celebrations are events of predictable intensity, since there is a regular schedule leading up to championship games. At peak moments, built up emotionally in proportion to the amount of tension through the series of previous contests, there takes place an informal ritual in which the players touch each other repeatedly while repeating a few simple words or cries of victory. The bigger the victory and the more the suspense, the more body contact, and the more prolonged contact: the range goes from slapping hands, to body hugs, to piling onto a heap of bodies at the playing field.
* What motivates people to witness games is primarily the experience of being at a highly successful ritual: successful because it has been contrived so that the ritual ingredients will all be present to a very high degree, especially the occurrence of strong emotion in a setting where it can be amplified by bodily interaction within the crowd focusing attention on the action of the game. The leisure time of modern societies—since the mid-nineteenth century when a sufficiently large group of spectators became available, free from the constraints of household and work—has become dominated by this species of deliberately invented ritual, designed to provide moments of ritual solidarity that previously would have been provided by religion, warfare, or political ceremony.
* Bodily presence makes it easier for human beings to monitor each other’s signals and bodily expressions; to get into shared rhythm, caught up in each other’s motions and emotions; and to signal and confirm a common focus of attention and thus a state of intersubjectivity. The key is that human nervous systems become mutually attuned…
* A good micro-conversational example of the buildup of collective effervescence in natural rituals is shared laughter. The sounds of laughter are bodily produced by a rhythmic repetition of breaths caught and forcefully expelled; at the height of hilarity, this happens involuntarily. Most laughter (and its strongest intensity and pleasure) is collectively produced. Once laughter begins, it can feed upon itself.
* In a successful conversation, the gap between one person ending their turn and the next person starting is typically less than 0.1 second… successful talk has no gaps and no overlaps; no embarrassing pauses between speakers or within utterances, and a minimal amount of struggle over who gets the floor to speak at any one moment. What we mean by successful talk here is that it is socially successful, a conversational ritual generating solidarity among the speakers.
* Persons who join religious cults typically are not to any great extent acquainted with, nor committed to, the beliefs of the cult before they join it. They are initially attracted to the cult because they are brought by friends, relatives, and acquaintances. Their belief grows as they take part in the cult activities. In mainstream churches as well, those who have the strongest adherence to its doctrines are those who have the most personal friends who are also members; social ties brings ritual participation, and this brings belief. And those without close ties in a cult or church tend to drop out, and their belief fades away.
Priebe, an attachment expert, says: “Perfectionist tendencies create a self-fulfilling prophecy where you tell yourself the story that people will only accept me or like me or want to be close to me if I am showing up perfectly.”
In other words, people who are in touch with reality are more likely to give off good energy. When you know and accept your own strengths and weaknesses, you more likely accept the strengths and weaknesses of others and you accept the reality of your situation and this makes spending time with you easier.
Sometimes, for example, your strengths combined with a particular situation mean that you should lead. At other times, your abilities combined with the situation mean that you should follow directions as closely as possible.
Someone who’s good at math and earning millions of dollars a year in an upstanding fashion does not need to play down his good qualities to emit good energy. This same person might take his Mercedes to a trusted mechanic and trust that man’s judgment that he needs a new car. When he gets home to his wife and kids after a hard day, he might disappear into his man cave for an hour to decompress. On other days, he might put his work on hold for a few hours to take his kids to the batting cage. On a Sunday, however, he might need to put his family commitments on hold to deal with a work emergency.
As he deals effectively with the different situations that come up, he builds confidence and self-respect, and other people sense that he feels good about himself, and that emits good energy.
We don’t warm to people who constantly belittle themselves because we know that they will soon turn that cruel gaze on us.
When we live in the reality of the situation and of our own and others’ fallibility, “we end up not just perceiving reality more accurately. We actually end up living in a different reality than we did before.” (David Gorman)
When we talk to each other and touch each other, we connect jumper cables to each other’s psyches. Whatever is going on with me will transmit to you and vice versa. Tense people will make us tense, and happy people will make us happier. Good people make us feel good and bad people make us feel bad.
Forced happiness disconnected from reality, such as what you often get from people in cults, won’t inspire us. It’s odd. Weirdness is disturbing. It increases the cost of interaction. People who don’t read social cues are exhausting. When I meet a woman who’s worse at reading social cues than me, I keep my distance. Women are supposed to be better than men at coloring within the lines because they’ve survived for thousands of years dealing with creatures (men) who are bigger and stronger than them.
A couple of times I tried to date a diva. That didn’t last long. When she’d walk through groups of people paying no mind to the disturbance she caused, and when she expected me, after our first make-out, to shovel out the crap in her life that disturbed her, that was too much work for me.
Heidi: “Leaky feelings [are] what happens when we go into social situations and where we are feeling one thing and we are unable to contain that feeling, and we don’t want to be explicit about it, so we go in claiming that we are feeling or experiencing one thing while our true state is evident to everyone around us based on the way we are acting, our posture, our tone, and this is one of the things that causes other people to distrust us the most. If it seems that what we are saying and doing are not in alignment with how we are being.”
“As much as possible, we want to match our inner state with our outer one because the more in alignment we are with ourselves, the more confident and relaxed we feel. The more relaxed we feel, the more it signals to other people [that] I am OK and you are OK, that secure way of relating.
“The term ‘weird energy’ floats around in pop culture. We all know what it feels like to be around someone who gives off a strange uncomfortable vibe. Often this is a result of incongruence — what they’re signaling with their body language is different from what they’re doing. Congruence is alignment between our sensation, our awareness, and our behavior and words.”
“The more incongruence we experience, the less confidence we experience. Confidence tends to come from being aligned with who we are on the inside and who we are on the outside. So when we walk into rooms, we give off the energy that I am OK with myself. I am not full self-judgment and self-hatred. I am not at war with my inner state. Ergo, I don’t need you do any of that fighting on my behalf… It puts people at ease.”
Wikipedia notes for “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans”: “Acclaimed writer Truman Capote ruins his friendships with the Swans, a socialite group of New York City high society, by writing a thinly veiled fictionalized account of their scandalous and hedonistic lives in his (ultimately unfinished) novel, Answered Prayers. When Esquire publishes the chapter “La Côte Basque 1965″, after the restaurant of the same name frequented by the Swans,[3][4] several vow to ruin his life in revenge.”
Her personal, unconventional style was enormously influential. A photograph of Paley with a scarf tied to her handbag, for example, created a trendy tidal wave that millions of women emulated. She often mixed extravagant jewelry by Fulco di Verdura and Jean Schlumberger with costume pieces and embraced letting her hair go gray instead of using dye.
Paley’s distinctive style earned her a place on the best-dressed list a remarkable fourteen times before her induction into the Fashion Hall of Fame in 1958. Her ability to command attention, with her impeccable hair, makeup, and overall crispness, was legendary. As fashion designer Bill Blass once remarked, ‘I never saw her fail to capture anyone’s attention. You noticed Babe and nothing else.'”
Retrospectives have suggested that Barbara neglected her children while pursuing social status and relied on her husbands’ wealth to support her extravagant lifestyle. Her daughter Amanda has acknowledged that their relationship was “virtually nonexistent” and that the distance “was her choice, not mine”.
According to several biographers, Barbara experienced loneliness and frustration as William Paley engaged in extramarital affairs. This emotional toll affected her and her family. Moreover, she faced public and media scrutiny, expected to maintain an unrealistic standard of beauty and social grace.
Barbara was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1974, attributed to her heavy smoking. Preparing for her impending death, she meticulously planned her own funeral, including the selection of food and wine to be served at the funeral luncheon. She allocated her jewelry collection and personal belongings to friends and family, wrapping them in colorful paper and creating a comprehensive file system with instructions for their distribution after her death.
Feud portrays Paley as so dedicated to perfection in her life that she’s unable to connect normally with other people, including her own children.
Heidi Priebe: “When we are relaxed, we give off an easeful and congruent energy because we are not freaking out and trying to hide ourselves. We are going into a situation wanting to be seen. We show up with presence and dignity and we are naturally giving off an energy that makes others comfortable because we are communicating to others that we are ok, you don’t have to worry about me or provide me with self-esteem, I’m not trying to get anything from you, I’ll just be me and you will be you, and that puts others at ease. When people are at ease, they respond favorably.”
“When we show up with incongruent energy, people pick up on that. When we have that incongruent mismatched energy, it tends to make people uncomfortable in our presence. When people are uncomfortable in our presence, it is harder to connect with them because when we are being inauthentic, it is hard to authentically connect with someone else. That can reinforce the belief that I have to be perfect to be accepted by others.”
“People are not attracted to other people’s perfection. If people are attracted to other people’s perfection, it is because they are wounded and they believe that they need to be perfect and to be with other people who are perfect. People with more secure patterning understand that all humans are imperfect. People who can display their vulnerabilities and the things they’re struggling with and can signal where they need help as well as can stand strong where they do have natural aptitudes, that combination of traits is attractive because it signals that I am human and so I am not going to expect you to not be human and we can co-regulate around our strengths and weaknesses.”
“When we are attuned to our ideal, we are not attuned to reality, to where we actually are in life, what skills we have, what opportunities are available to us now within the life we are living, we are not taking the realistic chances for growth and development available to us at the level we are currently at. It is the art of being attuned to our environment and realistic in our self appraisal and figuring out which skills we can build based on where we are starting from that lay the groundwork for excellence later on.”
Have you ever had one (or more) of those moments when you feel totally whole and totally free? When everything seems to be doing itself with utmost ease? When you are totally present and at one with the moment? When amazing skill and coordination is just flowing out of you?
Recall those moments and you’ll note that most or all of the following things are happening, and they are happening all together all at once:
— You experience a wholeness and unity such that you have no parts;
— You experience ease and freedom such that there is no effort and everything seems to do itself;
— Your performance is high quality and your ability to express your skill is up there with the best you have done
— You are present in the moment, so much so that often things seem brighter, more colourful, more 3D;
— You experience an expansion out into the space around you, an openness to, and a oneness with, your environment, the others on stage, indeed, the world; and…
— You feel joy and delight, a sort of yummy appreciation that this is really good stuff…
It is a challenge, for sure, in the face of the habit, in the face of your feelings, in the face of what you’ve been taught, but it is possible to inhibit your reaction to the moment and follow the means-whereby which your very own highly-evolved system keeps showing you — which is to open up to the present moment, to your wholeness, and to give your system a little bit of faith that it seems to know what it is doing, and that it can do it really well without your “help”.
You feel the meaning you’ve made; you feel your understanding. Responses tell you about your interpretation of the world, not about the world. Another person’s response to something tells you about how she interprets the experience. It tells you about her life, her way of seeing, her perspective, her point of view, her values. Her feeling is true for her. Her current construct is true for her, even if it isn’t true for you. Responses/feelings are part of an internal compass designed to help each individual navigate their own particular life.
Sometimes the meaning made at a particular time of life is no longer useful. It might have been perfect to survive a particular situation. But, now the interpretation is no longer accurate and is getting in the way of living life.
One of the individuals in the book was discoursing on the ‘virtues’ that form the moral foundation to a good person and a good society — patience, honesty, courage, temperance, humility, and so on. She was suggesting, in no uncertain terms, that most of society’s ills were to be accounted for by the sad lack of these virtues in most people. Their baser natures tempted them into vices or sent them into blind loss of control. But (she said), if any right-thinking person took the time and the trouble to practise these virtues, well… he or she would be a better person and the world would be a better place….
Just what are these virtues that we can have them or be lacking them? And if we don’t naturally have them, just what sort of practice does one do to get them? Are they some sort of skilled activity we learn, like golfing or playing a violin, through practice and study? Or perhaps it is more a repetitive kind of practice, like tying our shoelaces, that will turn the virtues into automatically incorporated habits by doing them often enough?
…this standard was reachable through some direct process, though it seems that not many succeed.
Which, of course, raises the further question, if these virtues are so ‘good’, why do so few manage to achieve them?
…If we were patient all the time, would we be aware of being virtuous? Would we even be aware of being patient? Probably not.
…the virtues seem most obvious when we are not being virtuous. In other words, they appear to be most noticeable by their absence.
… So if patience is the absence of impatience, perhaps we need to look more at the nature of impatience than the nature of patience. What is it about impatience that seems so hard to get out of?
…when we have an expectation of the speed at which things should be happening (but they are not), is it not our impatience that spurs us on to try to hurry things up and make them happen as fast as we want? …all this hurrying up results in a lot of struggling and pushing ourselves to do things faster, creating a lot of stress and tensing up which results in further mounting ‘feelings’ of impatience.
…We often get impatient because we have not fully appreciated what is involved in the process and all the steps necessary to complete the task. …the wake – up call of impatience alerts us to an essential level of knowledge — knowing what we don’t know. This acknowledgement of our lack of knowledge invites us to open ourselves up willingly to a learning process to gain that knowledge.
…it makes no sense to practise patience, if by patience we mean trying not to be impatient or trying to slow down and calm down.
…After we have learned and our expectations are more in accord with reality, will we end up experiencing something we would call patience ? Or will we simply be living our lives better — without impatience?
As a result of this learning we end up not just perceiving reality more accurately. We actually end up living in a different reality than we did before — one that includes a changed understanding of the meaning of the experience of impatience and how to use it to learn. With this changed understanding we can then take a completely different pathway than we would have before.
Normally we would take the experience of impatience to be the vice and try to change it to the virtue of patience. Now we can see that there is indeed something wrong, but it is not the impatience. It is the underlying concept of how long things take which is wrong. The fact is that the experience of impatience appears naturally at just the moment when the information of how long things really take is available to correct our ideas. Does this not suggest strongly that we have a wonderful kind of learning ability built right into our very nature?
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You might visit this website because you know things you are not supposed to know and you feel things you are not supposed to feel.
If so, welcome!
Attachment expert Heidi Priebe says in this April 6, 2024 video titled “Good/Beautiful/True: Healing Your Self-Esteem As The Family Scapegoat”: “If you could be responsible for someone’s misery, you have the power to make someone perfectly happy… You are not a god who has the power to fix other people’s dysfunction, trauma and misery.”
A nation is an extended family and Priebe’s dissection of the personal also applies to the social.
Most people don’t care about out-groups. Americans, for example, primarily care about Americans and the Japanese care primarily about Japanese and Australians care primarily about Australians, but if you say publicly what you honestly feel in your heart — that you don’t care about the suffering of out-groups — you will be hurt.
Golden State Warriors distance themselves from team investor who said: ‘Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs’
The Golden State Warriors have distanced themselves from comments made by Chamath Palihapitiya, a part owner who said that “nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs.”
Palihapitiya made the comment on the “All-in Podcast” on Saturday, after co-host Jason Calacanis brought up US President Joe Biden’s “very strong” stance on the alleged human rights abuses faced by the Uyghur minority in China.
“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay? You bring it up because you really care, and I think it’s nice that you care, the rest of us don’t care,” Palihapitiya said, while Calacanis reacted in surprise.
“I’m just telling you…a very hard, ugly truth. Of all the things I care about, yes, it is below my line.”
Co-host David Sacks said the average person would care when the topic is presented to them, but Palihapitiya continued: “I care about the fact that our economy could turn on a dime if China invades Taiwan … I care about climate change … I care about America’s crippling and decrepit health care infrastructure.
“But if you’re asking me: ‘Do I care about a segment of a class of people in another country?’ Not until we can take care of ourselves, will I prioritize them over us.”
The 45-year-old billionaire investor also said that the concept of sustaining human rights globally is a “luxury belief.”
“We don’t do enough domestically to actually express that view in real, tangible ways,” he said. “So until we actually clean up our own house, the idea that we step outside of our borders … about somebody else’s human rights track record, is deplorable.”
In a statement to CNN on Monday, the Warriors distanced themselves from Palihapitiya’s comments: “As a limited investor who has no day-to-day operating functions with the Warriors, Mr. Palihapitiya does not speak on behalf of our franchise, and his views certainly don’t reflect those of our organization.”
People with high in-group loyalty definitionally have intense feelings about the victimization of their in-group and consequently will have negative feelings about out-groups. Many blacks and gays, for example, will want to primarily associate only with those who empathize with their history of persecution.
On the other hand, white male American Christians might feel social pressure to apologize for their history and to give up resources to heal the dysfunction, trauma and miseryof less successful groups. That’s never going to happen. No group has the power to fix the dysfunction, trauma and misery of other groups.
Unfortunately, while individuals and groups have the power to destroy other individuals and groups, they don’t have the power to repair them. Parents can ruin certain kids with abuse but they don’t have the power to fix them.
Priebe’s video focuses on “anyone growing up in a dysfunctional family system.” That’s us. We all grow up in families that have dysfunction (patterns of reacting to stimuli that are maladaptive) and then we go into the wider world that also has dysfunctions (for example, since the end of the Cold War, America has tried to impose liberalism on countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq). So what happens when we tell inconvenient truths? We pay a price. America’s leading International Relations expert John Mearsheimer is effectively shut out of the mainstream media and the halls of power.
All communities penalize people for saying things that violate their hero systems (see the examples of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange). No hardcore religious community will be at ease with its members questioning its foundational principles. Christians are not going to be down with their fellow Christians questioning the divinity of Jesus, Orthodox Jews won’t enjoy hearing from other Orthodox Jews that the Torah is a post-Mosaic composite work, and Muslims will not appreciate other Muslims noting the Quoran is a flawed human work.
Powerful people in the foreign policy establishment of the United States and the United Kingdom believe that our present policies supporting Ukraine and Israel are a disaster but they fear speaking up.
London commentator and former barrister Alexander Mercouris said March 16, 2024 on his Youtube show: “None of these people are prepared to come forward. It is a failure of imagination and of courage.”
Guest John Mearsheimer agreed. “It’s hard to disagree. Let’s move away from the governments of these various countries in Europe and the United States, if you look at the public discourse about Russia, Ukraine, the Middle East, the West’s foreign policy, there is unanimity among the commentators… In the run up to the Iraq war [in 2003], there was huge opposition for good reason. There’s this groupthink present today at the elite level inside governments and inside the mainstream media and in the foreign policy establishments that is stunning. Anybody who talks about changing anything gets tarred and feather.”
Norwegian political scientist Glenn Diesen: “The problem goes beyond governments. The public discourse has changed. All the language today is expressed in morality. All policies are framed in terms of the good fight and if you don’t agree, you have bad intentions… As long as we [opponents of Western foreign policy] are all evil, there’s no moderation.”
John Mearsheimer: “As the situation deteriorates, you jack up the rhetoric because you are desperate to keep people on board.”
That sounds to me like a dysfunctional family trying to keep up appearances while heading in a self-destructive direction.
Heidi Priebe said: “Particularly those who are more in touch with the truth of what is happening inside of that system. You know things you are not supposed to know, meaning that you know things that you know would get you in trouble or reprimanded for knowing.”
Haven’t we all been part of families and communities where you know things you are not supposed to know (such as affairs, deception, and false appearances)?
* Conservatives have thus become the hated Other of liberalism, despised as uniquely parochial, exclusionary, thoughtless, fantasy-prone, and mean-spirited. They are modern-day scapegoats, convenient repositories for liberals’ own sins, the one stubborn obstacle standing in the way of the liberal utopia that their final defeat would usher.
* Conservatives are the new socially sanctioned scapegoats, foils upon which liberals project every social ill and externalize every psychic conflict, rationalizing their projections with an aura of moral high-mindedness to sugarcoat their visceral animus.
* “Religion must be kept under wraps,” observes [Michael] McConnell. The exclusion is the predictable consequence of liberals’ ingrained contempt for religious traditionalists, the new pariahs and scapegoats.
* If earlier dispensations succeeded in projecting vice and sinfulness onto blacks, Jews, women, Gypsies, and assorted infidels, then the new regime of liberalism has merely seized upon conservatism and conservatives as the new target. This is not how liberals see themselves, of course. But their “science,” “reason,” and “progress” are merely ideological stratagems with which to legitimate this new “enlightened” scapegoating.
* [John] Jost’s assessments have become the conventional wisdom of “educated people,” who can now disguise their conservaphobia as “theoretical and empirical considerations.” The Jost study and others like it are merely high-tech scapegoating rituals supervised by the high priests of liberalism, the liberal elites, who are charged with keeping conservatives down.
* The white male, writes Goldberg, is “the Jew of liberal fascism.”37The white male is not being led to the gas chambers, of course. But attacking him affords liberals with the same psychological satisfactions that anti-Semitism afforded Nazis. Just like the Jew, the white male is excoriated as the scourge of all that is good, true, and beautiful, the bearer of illegitimate privileges, someone whose all-pervasive social, political, and cultural influence must be exposed and curtailed for the public good—precisely the mission adopted by liberals.
* The vice of conservatives is scapegoating, but the vice of liberals is reverse-scapegoating. If conservatives single out certain groups to saddle with responsibility for society’s ills, then liberals single out certain groups as repositories of special moral capital. In doing so, they create scapegoats-by-default, which is anyone who opposes these judgments.
“On knowing what you are not supposed to know and feeling what you are not supposed to feel” is a chapter in psychiatrist John Bowlby‘s book A Secure Base. Its wisdom not only applies to attachment theory, it also fits the experiences of dissidents.
Conservatives, for example, generally see the transgendered as mentally ill. That’s a point of view that is largely banned on the biggest social media platforms. If conservatives say these things at work, they can be fired. Conservatives generally view the troubles within minority communities as primarily the responsibility of those minority communities. This can get them tarred as racist.
[C]onservatives take a greater social risk (or perceive that they do) when engaging in public political discussion than moderates or progressives… The experience of being perceived as racist loomed large in the minds of conservative fans… What makes accusations of racism so upsetting for respondents is that racism is socially stigmatized, but also that they feel powerless to defend themselves once the specter is raised.
What if you know things, such as that different groups have different gifts, that you can’t say out loud? Are you supposed to publicly buy into the egalitarian thesis that everybody is born with the same capability? What if you believe things that are not socially acceptable? What if you are mad that your group suffered horribly at the hands of another group? What if you know that your group has incompatible interests with other groups?
What if you know that salvation is only through faith in Jesus Christ? How are you going to feel about those who don’t have that faith? What if you know that marriage is only between a man and a woman? How are you supposed to feel about same-sex marriage? What if you know that the military is a heterosexual institution? How are you supposed to feel about gay inclusion?
What if you know that your religion is true? How are you supposed to feel about other religions?
Heidi: “If we are disconnected from truth, it is going to be challenging to fulfill our purpose. If we are not fulfilling our purpose, we are not going to be showing up as whole beings. And if we are not showing up from a state of wholeness, it is going to be hard to attract others towards us in a way that is authentic. Those who played the role of the family scapegoat internalized something not true about themselves, that the core of their identity is that they are a bad person, and that they are wholly to blame for the pain and suffering of the people around them. When they go out into the world to try to self-actualize and grow into their adult identity based on that core belief that I am broken and bad and I ruin people’s lives without understanding how, they might be drawn toward situations that are not healthy because they believe they are defective. The way we show up in the world, the way we present ourselves to others, the way we speak, the way we hold ourselves, is all contingent upon who we believe ourselves to be at the core. For the family scapegoat, having internalized all of those negative beliefs about the self bleeds into all of the actions they take later in life and the way they present themselves to the world until they realize that some of the things they have internalized about themselves is fundamentally not true. That’s where the healing process starts.”
Does not this psychological analysis also apply to people with unpopular beliefs about reality?
Priebe: “If you grew up in the family scapegoat role, you may have grown up believing that many or all of my feelings are crazy and have no basis in reality and/or are indicative of me being a bad person. Any time that I want something, I am selfish, or any time that I feel anger it is proof that I am bad. There is something inherently wrong that I experience certain feelings even if I don’t express them.”
What if you experience feelings that various civil rights law squash your humanity and your desire to favor your in-group over out-groups? For example, a grandma may want to only rent out a spare room to somebody in a certain group, or a start-up may only want to hire a certain demographic to promote group cohesion.
Priebe: “You might start feeling that your pain is not real and that any time you experience pain or express pain, you are being over-dramatic.”
I don’t doubt that Palestinians and their supporters feel genuine pain about their group’s suffering.
Priebe: “You might believe that any time something goes wrong in a relationship, it is your fault. It must be your fault if somebody else is upset with you.”
I suspect that many gays growing up in a heteronormative society felt that there was something wrong with them.
Priebe: “You might have internalized the belief that the truth always hurts people. Growing up in a dysfunctional family unit, you probably learned that if I tell other people how dysfunctional my family is, it’s going to deeply hurt my family.”
Priebe: “You may have internalized this belief that love means keeping other people’s secrets including secrets about how they are behaving towards you.”
“The energy of desire, wanting something that we don’t have, is not inherently selfish. There are more pro-social and anti-social ways of pursuing our desires.”
“All feelings we experience are true by virtue that they are happening. When we put judgment terms on top of emotions, we get into murky territory.”
“You get closer to the truth when you give all of feelings the appropriate name [by] looking at our feelings as raw sensations rather than as judgments. The second step is also to give our coping mechanisms the accurate name.”
The high crime rate in certain black communities in desirable real estate such as central Los Angeles might function to keep out white gentrifiers. Other oppressed minorities might become adept at cheating the system when they feel the system is cheating them. These are coping mechanisms. When they are understood, they can be changed when the situation changes because an adaptive strategy in one situation becomes maladaptive in another situation.
As a child, I became adept at lying to avoid physical punishment. Unfortunately, I carried on the habit in new situations where my reflexive deceit did not serve me.
Priebe: “Instead of looking at our lives as I developed this addiction or I behaved this way in romantic relationships or I chose this path considered dishonorable, we want to look at these things as compensative mechanisms for healthy functioning. When we are not in touch with the truth and when the goodness in us is not nurtured, we become chronically dysregulated. If we are chronically told by the people whose care we are in that there is something wrong with us and that we are morally bad people, we are going to need to go to extremes to comfort ourselves.”
This helps to explain outrage at oppression. Many people believe that most of their country’s institutions are in the hands of those who despise them. Many blacks, women, Christians and conservatives feel this way.
* The gay rights movement seeks not to uproot prejudices but to mold sensibilities. It promotes not freedom of conscience for all but mind control by some. Limbaugh charges that gay activists want “to systematically normalize the homosexual culture and demonize any who obstruct such efforts.”
* Disney World decided to discontinue its “twenty-eight-year tradition of making on-site religious services available to Christian guests” at the same time as it “went out of its way to solicit the homosexual community, even having an annual ‘Gay Day’ event every year.” Where liberals see the arbitrary juxtaposition of two unrelated developments each of which can be assessed independently of the other, the claimants see varied manifestations of the same basic phenomenon, the supplanting of their moral traditionalism by ultra-liberalism, whose support for gays is inextricably bound up with its hostility toward Christians.
* Given that their anti-gay stances cannot be disentangled from their religion and that their religion cannot be disentangled from their identities, the claimants believe that both homosexuality and opposition to homosexuality are entitled to equal respect. For opposition to Christianity is just as intrinsic to homosexuality as opposition to homosexuality is intrinsic to Christianity. Both can devolve into bare antipathy and should be condemned in those instances. But neither is as such intrinsically more hateful than the other. Since the heartfelt defense of any worldview always risks devolving into personal animus toward the opponents of that worldview, the charge of widespread homophobia is itself a form of animus, a kind of conservaphobia, because the objective is to specifically associate religious conservatives with what is a regrettable human universal.
* Justice Scalia observes: “When the Court takes sides in the culture wars, it tends to be with the knights rather than the villains – and more specifically with the Templars, reflecting the views and values of the lawyer class from which the Court’s Members are drawn. How that class feels about homosexuality will be evident to anyone who wishes to interview job applicants at virtually any of the Nation’s law schools. The interviewer may refuse to offer a job because the applicant is a Republican; because he is an adulterer; because he went to the wrong prep school or belongs to the wrong country club; because he eats snails; because he is a womanizer; because she wears real-animal fur; or even because he hates the Chicago Cubs. But if the interviewer should wish not to be an associate or partner of an applicant because he disapproves of the applicant’s homosexuality, then he will have violated the pledge which the Association of American Law Schools requires all its member-schools to exact from job interviewers: “assurance of the employer’s willingness” to hire homosexuals…..This law-school view of what “prejudices” must be stamped out may be contrasted with the more plebeian attitudes that apparently still prevail in the United States Congress, which has been unresponsive to repeated attempts to extend to homosexuals the protections of federal civil rights laws…”
* The Templars routinely avail themselves of the right to base their employment decisions on “irrational” factors like appearance, demeanor, or personality. These are not directly germane to job performance narrowly construed but are highly relevant to maintaining a workplace environment that reflects the Templars’ sensibilities and self-image. Yet this is a privilege they reserve for themselves alone. They believe themselves more tolerant than the villains, but Justice Scalia was arguing that the Templars’ support for gay causes is an easy outlet for moral preening, not an expression of principled cosmopolitanism. For the cosmopolitanism is nowhere to be found where it would conflict with the Templars’ own prejudices.
* Liberalism is always pushed through indeterminate abstractions like equality, but the equality’s concrete implementation must always engender new forms of inequality.
Imagine secular, skeptical, or leftist faculty and students confronted by a religious harassment code that prohibited “denigration” of evangelical or Catholic beliefs, or that made the classroom or campus a space where evangelical or Catholic students must be protected against feeling “intimidated,” offended,” or, by their own subjective experience, victims of a “hostile environment. Imagine a university of patriotic “loyalty oaths” where leftists were deemed responsible for the tens of millions of victims of communism, and where free minds were prohibited from creating a hostile environment for patriots, or from offending that “minority” of individuals who are descended from Korean or Vietnam War veterans. Imagine, as well, that for every “case” that became public, there were scores or hundreds of cases in which the “offender” or “victimizer,” desperate to preserve a job or gain a degree, accepted a confidential plea bargain that included a semester’s or a year’s reeducation in “religious sensitivity” or “patriotic sensitivity” seminars run by the university’s “Evangelical Center, “Patriotic Center,” or “Office of Religious and Patriotic Compliance.
Priebe: “There is an idea that truth is harmful. There are better and worse ways of communicating truth so that it actually gets through to people and makes the right impact, but truth is completely neutral. Everything is the way it is and there’s nothing bad about seeing how things are and saying how things are. Now saying how things are might lead to specific consequences. If as a child you spoke to outsiders about how the family treated you, you might have been removed from the family or you would have been severely punished by people inside the family or the narrative that you are crazy might have been doubled down on. There might be a fear response that comes up from people who experienced early scapegoating around the truth. They might have internalized that the kind and pro-social thing to do, the way to get by in the world is to lie through your teeth.”
“With more secure families, you see them being more open about things going wrong inside the family and the things each person is struggling with.”
“You know things you are not supposed to know and you feel things you are not supposed to feel. Getting back in touch with the truth as we heal from family scapegoating is convincing ourselves that there is nothing we ought not to know and there is nothing we ought not to feel. We can control what we do with the things we know and feel but we cannot control the knowing and feeling. Realigning ourselves with reality means accepting that there is nothing inherently bad about truth which is likely the opposite of what you originally internalized.”
* Yet evidence that parents sometimes press their children to shut off from further, conscious processing information the children already have about events that the parents wish they had never observed comes from several sources.
* …pathogenic situations of two types, namely situations in which intense guilt is likely to be engendered (not discussed here) and situations in which communications between parent and child are gravely distorted.
* About one quarter of the children studied had personally witnessed some aspect of the parent’s death and had subsequently been subjected to pressure from the surviving parent to believe that they were mistaken in what they had seen or heard, and that the death had not been due to suicide but to some illness or accident.
[Many dissidents think they are witnessing the death of their race or nation or religion but they feel pressure to say nothing.]
* When a child described what he had seen, the surviving parent had sought to discredit it either by ridicule or by insisting that he was confused by what he had seen on television or by some bad dream he had had.
* Their problems included chronic distrust of other people, inhibition of their curiosity, distrust of their own senses, and a tendency to find everything unreal.
* Clearly the purpose of these pressures by parents is to ensure that their children develop and maintain a wholly favourable picture of them.
* There could be little doubt that during their discussion of the pictures some of the parents were, consciously or unconsciously, avoiding reference to the content of the pictures. It was a reasonable inference also that their children’s failure to describe the sexual theme on the first showing was in some way influenced by the ‘climate’ they had experienced in their homes. What the experiment could not show, of course, was whether these children had truly failed to perceive the scene depicted or whether they had perceived it but had failed to report what they saw. Since pre – adolescent children tend to be slow and often uncertain in their perceptions, my guess would be that at least some of the children in the experiment had truly failed to register the nature of what was happening. Others may have known intuitively that the scene was one they were not supposed to know about and so avoided seeing it.
At first sight the notion that information of a certain meaning can be shut off, or selectively excluded from perception, appears paradoxical. How, it is asked, can a person selectively exclude from processing a particular stimulus unless he first perceives the stimulus which he wishes to exclude? This stumbling block disappears, however, once perception is conceived as a multistage process as nowadays it is. Indeed experimental work on human information processing undertaken during the past decade or so enables us to have a much better idea of the nature of the shutting – off processes we have been discussing than was possible when Freud and others in the psychodynamic tradition were first formulating the theories of defence that have been so very influential ever since.
* Studies of human perception (Erdelyi, 1974; Norman, 1976) have shown that, before a person is aware of seeing something or hearing something, the sensory inflow coming through his eyes or ears, has already passed through many stages of selection, interpretation, and appraisal, during the course of which a large proportion of the original inflow has been excluded. The reason for this extensive exclusion is that the channels responsible for the most advanced processing are of limited capacity and must therefore be protected from overload. To ensure that what is most relevant gets through and that only the less relevant is excluded, selection of inflow is under central, or we might say ego, control. Although this processing is done at extraordinary speeds and almost all of it outside awareness, much of the inflow has nonetheless been carried to a very advanced stage of processing before being excluded.
* So long as current modes of perceiving and construing situations, and the feelings and actions that ensue therefrom, are determined by emotionally significant events and experiences that have become shut away from further conscious processing, the personality will be prone to cognition, affect, and behaviour maladapted to the current situation. When yearning for love and care is shut away, it will continue to be inaccessible. When there is anger, it will continue to be directed at inappropriate targets. Similarly anxiety will continue to be aroused by inappropriate situations and hostile behaviour be expected from inappropriate sources. The therapeutic task is therefore to help the patient discover what these events and experiences may have been so that the thoughts, feelings, and behaviour that the situations arouse, and that continue to be so troublesome, can be linked again to the situations that aroused them. Then the true targets of his yearning and anger and the true sources of his anxiety and fear will become plain. Not only will such discoveries show that his modes of cognition, feeling, and behaviour are far more intelligible, given the circumstances in which they originated, than they had seemed before but, once the patient has grasped how and why he is responding as he is, he will be in a position to reappraise his responses and, should he wish, to undertake their radical restructuring. Since such reappraisal and re – structuring can be achieved only by the patient himself, the emphasis in this formulation of the therapist’s task is on helping the patient first to discover for himself what the relevant scenes and experiences probably were and secondly to spend time pondering on how they have continued to influence him. Only then will he be in a position to undertake the reorganization of his modes of construing the world, thinking about it, and acting in it which are called for.
Popular historian Yuval Noah Harari said he wants to help “people focus on the most important challenges facing humankind and bring clarity. One of my main messages in all the books is that our minds are like factories that constantly produces stories and fictions that then come between us and the world and we often spend our lives interacting with fictions that we or other people created completely losing touch with reality. My job and the job of historians generally is to show us a way out.”
Is that really the job of historians?
Harari: “Much of what we take to be real is fiction. We control the planet because we can cooperate much better than any other animal. We can do that because we can create and believe in fictional stories. Every large scale human cooperation whether religion or nations or corporations is based on mythologies. Money is also a fiction. Corporations are also a fiction. They exist only in our minds. The danger is we lose touch with reality and we are manipulated by all these fictions. Stories are not bad. They are tools. As long as we use them to cooperate and to help each other, that’s wonderful.”
“Most wars in history are about stories, fictions. People think that humans fight over the same things that wolves and chimpanzees fight about [such as] territory and food). Most wars in history were not about territory or food. There is enough land, for instance, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean to build houses and schools and hospitals for everybody and there is certainly enough food but people have different stories in their minds and they can’t find a common story. This is at the root of most human conflicts. Being able to tell the difference between a fiction and a reality is a crucial skill. We are not getting better at finding this difference as time goes on.”
Are stories at the root of most human conflicts or are stories manifestations of real conflicts of interest? I suspect the latter.
There are similarities in the causes of conflict among humans and animals and there are differences. Making a list of similarities between the actions of people and chimpanzees does not mean you can’t make another list of the differences between the two groups.
I suspect that most wars are not about fictions, but about blood. Different groups have different interests and when those interests collide in particularly intense ways, you get conflict.
The more genetically related people are, the more likely they are to cooperate. On the other hand, most people don’t like strangers.
You don’t find multiple sub-species living together in harmony in nature because one sub-species inevitably tends to destroy its competitors.
Water is frequently a scarce resource that living things compete over. California eucalptus, for example, are invasive species that often out-compete native species for water.
Biologists now count invasive species as a major threat to biological diversity second only to direct habitat loss and fragmentation. Why do they worry when new species enter an ecosystem? More than 90 percent of introduced plants in California have overcome barriers to survival and reproduction in their new home without harming native species. But a fraction display invasive traits, displacing native species and reshaping the ecological landscape.
Tasmanian blue gum eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus), a symbol of California for some, never knew California soil until the 1850s, when seeds from Australia were planted, first as ornamentals, then mostly for timber and fuel. The California Invasive Plant Council (CAL-IPC) classifies blue gum eucalyptus as a “moderate” invasive because the trees need certain conditions to thrive. For the most part, they’re not a problem in the drier regions of Southern California or the Central Valley. But along the coast, where summer fog brings buckets of moisture, it’s a different story.
Blue gum invades neighboring plant communities if adequate moisture is available for propagation, state resource ecologist David Boyd noted in a report for CAL-IPC. Once established, the trees can alter local soil moisture, light availability, fire patterns, nitrogen mineralization rates and soil chemistry.
Introduced species can disrupt ecological relationships among species that co-evolved over millennia, which is why many groups work to remove eucalyptus and restore coast live oaks.
To live effectively, most people are better off believing in the reality of money and corporations and nations and religion. When you get down to brass tacks, money and nations, for example, are as real as the wind and the sea.
Guldmann writes:
* Given that the symbolic realism is invariably intertwined with the biological functioning of a symbolic animal, liberalism’s efforts to mark off a sphere of “real” harm-tracking morality from the realm of airy cultural grievances is necessarily parochial, the product of an ethnocentrism that cannot recognize how liberals and conservatives partake of a shared humanity one side of which liberalism discounts. Overcoming this ethnocentrism means recognizing that the reflexive innerness that liberals believe sets them apart from conservatives is not the transcendence of identity, but an identity in its own right, the product of how one particular culture cultivates one part of our evolutionary heritage to the detriment of another. If liberals cannot recognize these costs, this is because doing so isn’t merely a cognitive act, but an expansion of consciousness and broadening of identity. This is what conservative claims of cultural oppression demand and what liberalism taken to its logical conclusion ultimately requires.
* [S]ocial reality…gives our biological substratum a structure that nature alone does not provide.
* Human agency is necessarily extended over a field of social meanings because it is only by means of this that what lies “inside” our skins becomes ordered and integrated. Seen in this light, hero-systems are not idle “symbolic” luxuries, intangible “cultural” concerns, but rather a biological necessity.
Being authentic to who you are may separate you from those around you. A new academic paper says:
Intelligence is correlated with a range of left-wing and liberal political beliefs. This may suggest intelligence directly alters our political views. Alternatively, the association may be confounded or mediated by socioeconomic and environmental factors. We studied the effect of intelligence within a sample of over 300 biological and adoptive families, using both measured IQ and polygenic scores for cognitive performance and educational attainment. We found both IQ and polygenic scores significantly predicted all six of our political scales. Polygenic scores predicted social liberalism and lower authoritarianism, within-families. Intelligence was able to significantly predict social liberalism and lower authoritarianism, within families, even after controlling for socioeconomic variables. Our findings may provide the strongest causal inference to date of intelligence directly affecting political beliefs.
One way of dealing with the pain of knowing things you are not supposed to know and feelings things that you are not supposed to feel is by confiding in others. One problem with this is that others betray us as we betray them. The Amazon summary of the book Betrayals: The Unpredictability of Human Relations by Gabriella Turnaturi notes:
Eventually we all encounter this universal experience of human interaction, but despite its ubiquity, being betrayed can turn our lives upside down and leave us feeling suddenly frail and alone. Betrayal only arises out of sharing something of yourself with another, and its impact speaks to the great tragedy of human relations: at bottom, other people are unknowable.
Posted inAmerica, Amy Wax, Charles Murray, Nathan Cofnas|Comments Off on ‘On knowing what you are not supposed to know and feeling what you are not supposed to feel’
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