Chaos breeds Conflict

To revisit 'The Silence of Animals' (2013),  is to renew respect for Gray's approach to the big dilemmas.    But what does he say about 'mind',  you may ask? " The myth that human beings can use their minds to lift themselves out of the natural world...has been renewed (from Socratic and Platonic mystical philosophy) in a garbled version of the language of evolution." Gray cites myth and illusion as metaphors for the human condition - the second section of the book quotes Freud acknowledging that his theories were grounded in "our mythological theory of instincts", and that the death instinct (the internal force that seeks to undermine individual achievement and health, and that finally defeats every life) may be a myth. He also offers a version of dualism, echoing Freud's inner conflict and Eros/Thanatos models to decry the possibility of any real improvement in how humanity interacts with the natural world.  Why impossible ?   Because human...

Following on from the last post, some thoughts about non-thinking or anti-thinking. The danger is to ascribe this, non-thinking, to Trump alone. In line with this blog, we are trying to understand how what seems like a regressive state of being is actually a group phenomenon. Hans Thorner, one of the early commentators on the work of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, wrote: "...side by side with the desire for knowledge, there is the resistance to knowledge. Getting to know inevitably brings the individual into contact with objects that arouse displeasure. Hence tolerance to pain and displeasure is a precondition for the ability to think." So the problem here in group terms is to define what are the objects that provoke to the extent that there is a retreat from knowledge.

We have thought about Trump and talked endlessly about the Trump phenomenon. What does it mean?  We are well aware of the links to Le Pen and Farage and no doubt others who represent a somewhat extreme right wing position. In many of our conversations we have struggled to make sense of the politics of these demagogues. We found the following useful: http://www.vox.com/2016/9/29/12930730/mark-lilla-revolution-donald-trump-radical-islam-europe Also this. The title says it all, 'Trump's Theater of Cruelty': https://itself.wordpress.com/2016/10/10/trumps-theater-of-cruelty/ And yet, something is missing. There is something 'cruelly' solipsistic' about these individuals, notwithstanding their appeal to a certain electorate. So the issue is how to relate this solipsism to the group. There are two rather different referents to the meaning of enlightenment. It can denote a move to individualism, and all that that signifies, such as the sovereignty of the consumer. It ca...