OFFLINE:Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

[thompnickson2]

Dear Steve, 

 

I would not be surprised if you did, indeed, know  him.  Somehow, he worked his way into being something of a water commissioner up there, mediating the most difficult issue I can imagine… as a stranger?  The whole thing seemed incredible to me, but a credit, in any case, to the vibes he gives off. 

 

I won’t tell on FRIAM entire story of how our last meeting went.  I also befriended the then owner of Ohori’s, a very sweet and generous human, also with LOTS of life experience, who can easily flip into right wing asshole or left wing asshole, depending of what is needed to call attention to himself and create tension in the room.  So I am sitting talking to our tall friend and Larry comes up to the table and says, “Can I join you?”  I want to say no, but Larry does, after all, own  the place, so my Liberal anybody-can-talk-to-any-body-else thing kicks in, and we’re off.  Larry flips into right-wing asshole, I try to modulate, and Our Friend stays for a suitably polite interval and then makes his excuses and leaves.  As he goes out the door, Larry turns to me and says, “Did I say something?” (Larry is not a complete idiot; he just plays one on TV) 

 

It goes down as one of the most humiliating moments of my life.  But I am not sure you can repair it.  I guess you could say, if he remembers me, that the bald, lame, crow-watcher thinks fondly of him, would love to know how the water thing worked out, and looks forward to running into him again as soon as I can start going to coffee houses again.  I think his name is James.

 

I am glad to know he is alive, and presumably well.

 

As to you second story, it is terribly familiar.  Both my father and my older brother could, when not sober, talk about “Jews”.  It just seemed to come out of nowhere.  I will reserve my further comment for a FRIAM post which I will make in a moment.   

 

Thanks, Steve,

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Saturday, September 5, 2020 1:27 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

 

Nick -

I think I may well know the man of whom you speak... he is in my "second order circle" so I only see him while visiting certain friends or at events we all share or the occasional criss-cross in a public venue.   I will try to remember to ask him if he remembers YOU...   question is which stereotype might I appeal to to describe you to him?   I won't speculate on what forms that might take as I explore my own stereotypes, or worse yet, my projections of what *his* stereotypes of you might be.     If we are talking about the same person I doubt he would have "avoided you"... he has been fairly politely blunt with me a few times and then resumed the jovial conversations we were having.   He seemed very practiced at navigating (not so) hidden judgements and assumptions about him.

My own mother had a modest amount of self-awareness, growing up in KY fairly proud of being a "Yankee" in the sense of north of the Mason-Dixon and from a subculture that was too poor to have ever risked owning a slave or having a close relative who did.  She lived with her aunt in the city of Frankfort during the school year in the depression for lots of reasons.   She was therefore raised as an only child, her cousins having recently grown and moved out of the family home.   She tells an anecdote of having developed a friendship with a girl who lived *somewhere* between *her school* and her aunt's house... she would pause to play with her every day after school until it got to where she started being noticeably late home... when she told her aunt why she was late, she said "why don't you just invite your friend home next time and you can play here!"...  she asked her friend who resisted for about a week and then finally came home (her aunt married a Scottish Doctor, so their home was very meticulous and in a nicer neighborhood, but they lived crazy-frugal anyway) and after the first day, her aunt very politely told her not to invite the friend back, and in fact, was forbidden to play with her anymore.   The little girl was apparently the first black person she had ever met and it was years later that she guessed that that was what it was all about...   her aunt was too "polite" to make a deal about it and too "authoritarian" to be questioned.    Later her mother gave her a family heirloom which was referred to colloquially as a "tar baby" which her mother explained to her had been a type of doll that young girls were given to "play with" in the style and memory of how their ancestors had been allowed to "play with" the slave babies.   Her mother explained how wrong *all* of it was, from the slavery to the treating even the babies as property, to replacing them post-emancipation with effigies, etc.   I learned this when she was unpacking from one of our moves and it showed up in a cardboard barrel amongst her mother's (our aunt's) china that we never used...  my sister saw it and was intrigued and "wanted to play with it" whereupon my mother tried to explain all of this to us and then declaring that "the best thing I can do is get rid of it, it is just a reflection of a bad piece of history".   I don't know if it went in the burn barrel with our other trash or if she figured out some more respectful disposal method... I would like to think she knew of a historian or similar for whom such an artifact could be made meaningful.   This and other similar instances made me think that my parents were the least prejudiced people I knew, until at 19 my sister who had a small group of friends from college, one of who was African American...  my parents liked him a lot, he was a very sociable and interesting person (his father was career military and his mother had died when he was young and he and two sisters were raised by "help").   But at some point, the friendship drifted into the boyfriend zone and they very sternly, albeit embarrassingly disabused me of the thought that they were not prejudiced.   I don't remember the exact conversations but it was clear that they were very much against the relationship, even if they didn't quite try to forbid their (adult) daughter from continuing.   I think they even enlisted one of their (more openly) racist friends to have a conversation with her.  It did not sit well at all with me.  But made me realize how hidden some of these judgements, stereotypes, opinions, etc can be.   I'm sure I'm laced with junk like that.

- Steve

Dear fellow congregants,

 

One of the things we talk about is our bemusement at Trump supporters.  One expression you often hear these supporters say is that they admire him because “He tells it like it is!”  They can say this while acknowledging  that almost everything he says is false.  So, if he is lying most of the time, what is he telling the truth about?

 

I think I know.  As I keep insisting, I am not a boomer.  I am from the Silent Generation, the Lonely Crowd.  My mother’s life hero was Eleanor Roosevelt.  It was I, aged seven, who brought the news of the President’s death to my parents, and I was startled to seem my mother burst into tears.  Crying was not her thing.  My folks were publishers. We had black, Jewish, gay, lesbian, working class, authors visiting the house.  But – and here is the point – when they visited, they visited as such.  Not that I was told as a child explicitly, but it was conveyed to me as a child, somehow, that these folks belonged to a different category.  And my education, in Massachusetts, in the 40’s, was devoid of any explicit contact with anybody in any of these categories.

 

Ok, fast forward 70 years to Santa Fe.  I befriend at Ohoris an extremely tall black man, grizzled, slow moving, thoughtful, with an intricate, international biography full of remarkable connections and coincidences.  He fits in every conceivable way my childhood stereotype of the “old wise black man”.  I sit in rapt attention to his stories. I look up to him, which, given his height, is my only choice. But, as we continue to meet, a tension begins to rise between us that is coming largely from me, but I cannot control.  He becomes aware that I am seeing him through the stereotype of  the old wise black man.  Because I cannot admit to it, he is imprisoned by it.  Our conversations are based on a lie.  He disappears from Ohoris and I never see him again.  He would rather eschew good coffee, than live in my lie. 

 

This is what Donald Trump is truthful about.  He tells the truth about his own stereotypes.  He is truthful about himself.  That what he believes is FALSE is irrelevant to his base.  He admits to thoughts which they know many others find distasteful.  It is hard to live in a world which has moved on from one’s childhood, a world in which others find one’s basic categorizations distasteful – in fact, a world in which one finds one’s own basic categorizations distasteful. 

 

To break Trump we need to come to a new understanding and acknowledgement of type-isms.  There are always going to be type-isms.  We human beings do that sort of thing.  Raised in a particular way, at a particular time I see a tall grizzled black man as wise, and everything he says and does is read through that lens.  That’s abduction.  This person wears a dress, this person is a woman, this person is gentle, that ‘s abduction.  (Well, it’s abduction-deduction, but let that go.)  Human beings naturally form identity groups that trap ourselves and others in false abductions.  So we need to design our society to counter these. (Libertarians beware.  Here come Nick’s white vans, again)  In this case the white van takes the form of aggressive  taxation of the rich and aggressive education of the poor, and of institutions that promote the random mixing of our citizens (like public universities and armies – or conservation corps).  

 

Could my friendship with the tall black guy have been rescued?  Could we have laughed about my stereotypes?  Perhaps I should have said, early on, “Look, I’m sorry, I keep seeing you  as Uncle Remus.  I am sure, as I get to know you better, I will get over it.  Please be patient with me, and please call me out whenever you feel confined by it. ” 

 

A Liberalism that does not free me is not worth the name.

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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[Steve Smith]

James is the man...  I didn't want to name him speculatively on-list.   I don't know the Ohori's owner, only the original founder Susan Ohori... I guess she cashed out some time back?  It hasn't felt like her touch for some time.   James would have been avoiding Larry, not you, even though you might have been vaguely implicated in it.  He might even remember you as "Nick" and "from New England" and "wild eyebrows"...   the current circumstances don't have me "running into him" as likely as in the past, but the discussion is in the queue for if ever we do!

Dear Steve, 

 

I would not be surprised if you did, indeed, know  him.  Somehow, he worked his way into being something of a water commissioner up there, mediating the most difficult issue I can imagine… as a stranger?  The whole thing seemed incredible to me, but a credit, in any case, to the vibes he gives off. 

 

I won’t tell on FRIAM entire story of how our last meeting went.  I also befriended the then owner of Ohori’s, a very sweet and generous human, also with LOTS of life experience, who can easily flip into right wing asshole or left wing asshole, depending of what is needed to call attention to himself and create tension in the room.  So I am sitting talking to our tall friend and Larry comes up to the table and says, “Can I join you?”  I want to say no, but Larry does, after all, own  the place, so my Liberal anybody-can-talk-to-any-body-else thing kicks in, and we’re off.  Larry flips into right-wing asshole, I try to modulate, and Our Friend stays for a suitably polite interval and then makes his excuses and leaves.  As he goes out the door, Larry turns to me and says, “Did I say something?” (Larry is not a complete idiot; he just plays one on TV) 

 

It goes down as one of the most humiliating moments of my life.  But I am not sure you can repair it.  I guess you could say, if he remembers me, that the bald, lame, crow-watcher thinks fondly of him, would love to know how the water thing worked out, and looks forward to running into him again as soon as I can start going to coffee houses again.  I think his name is James.

 

I am glad to know he is alive, and presumably well.

 

As to you second story, it is terribly familiar.  Both my father and my older brother could, when not sober, talk about “Jews”.  It just seemed to come out of nowhere.  I will reserve my further comment for a FRIAM post which I will make in a moment.   

 

Thanks, Steve,

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Saturday, September 5, 2020 1:27 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

 

Nick -

I think I may well know the man of whom you speak... he is in my "second order circle" so I only see him while visiting certain friends or at events we all share or the occasional criss-cross in a public venue.   I will try to remember to ask him if he remembers YOU...   question is which stereotype might I appeal to to describe you to him?   I won't speculate on what forms that might take as I explore my own stereotypes, or worse yet, my projections of what *his* stereotypes of you might be.     If we are talking about the same person I doubt he would have "avoided you"... he has been fairly politely blunt with me a few times and then resumed the jovial conversations we were having.   He seemed very practiced at navigating (not so) hidden judgements and assumptions about him.

My own mother had a modest amount of self-awareness, growing up in KY fairly proud of being a "Yankee" in the sense of north of the Mason-Dixon and from a subculture that was too poor to have ever risked owning a slave or having a close relative who did.  She lived with her aunt in the city of Frankfort during the school year in the depression for lots of reasons.   She was therefore raised as an only child, her cousins having recently grown and moved out of the family home.   She tells an anecdote of having developed a friendship with a girl who lived *somewhere* between *her school* and her aunt's house... she would pause to play with her every day after school until it got to where she started being noticeably late home... when she told her aunt why she was late, she said "why don't you just invite your friend home next time and you can play here!"...  she asked her friend who resisted for about a week and then finally came home (her aunt married a Scottish Doctor, so their home was very meticulous and in a nicer neighborhood, but they lived crazy-frugal anyway) and after the first day, her aunt very politely told her not to invite the friend back, and in fact, was forbidden to play with her anymore.   The little girl was apparently the first black person she had ever met and it was years later that she guessed that that was what it was all about...   her aunt was too "polite" to make a deal about it and too "authoritarian" to be questioned.    Later her mother gave her a family heirloom which was referred to colloquially as a "tar baby" which her mother explained to her had been a type of doll that young girls were given to "play with" in the style and memory of how their ancestors had been allowed to "play with" the slave babies.   Her mother explained how wrong *all* of it was, from the slavery to the treating even the babies as property, to replacing them post-emancipation with effigies, etc.   I learned this when she was unpacking from one of our moves and it showed up in a cardboard barrel amongst her mother's (our aunt's) china that we never used...  my sister saw it and was intrigued and "wanted to play with it" whereupon my mother tried to explain all of this to us and then declaring that "the best thing I can do is get rid of it, it is just a reflection of a bad piece of history".   I don't know if it went in the burn barrel with our other trash or if she figured out some more respectful disposal method... I would like to think she knew of a historian or similar for whom such an artifact could be made meaningful.   This and other similar instances made me think that my parents were the least prejudiced people I knew, until at 19 my sister who had a small group of friends from college, one of who was African American...  my parents liked him a lot, he was a very sociable and interesting person (his father was career military and his mother had died when he was young and he and two sisters were raised by "help").   But at some point, the friendship drifted into the boyfriend zone and they very sternly, albeit embarrassingly disabused me of the thought that they were not prejudiced.   I don't remember the exact conversations but it was clear that they were very much against the relationship, even if they didn't quite try to forbid their (adult) daughter from continuing.   I think they even enlisted one of their (more openly) racist friends to have a conversation with her.  It did not sit well at all with me.  But made me realize how hidden some of these judgements, stereotypes, opinions, etc can be.   I'm sure I'm laced with junk like that.

- Steve

Dear fellow congregants,

 

One of the things we talk about is our bemusement at Trump supporters.  One expression you often hear these supporters say is that they admire him because “He tells it like it is!”  They can say this while acknowledging  that almost everything he says is false.  So, if he is lying most of the time, what is he telling the truth about?

 

I think I know.  As I keep insisting, I am not a boomer.  I am from the Silent Generation, the Lonely Crowd.  My mother’s life hero was Eleanor Roosevelt.  It was I, aged seven, who brought the news of the President’s death to my parents, and I was startled to seem my mother burst into tears.  Crying was not her thing.  My folks were publishers. We had black, Jewish, gay, lesbian, working class, authors visiting the house.  But – and here is the point – when they visited, they visited as such.  Not that I was told as a child explicitly, but it was conveyed to me as a child, somehow, that these folks belonged to a different category.  And my education, in Massachusetts, in the 40’s, was devoid of any explicit contact with anybody in any of these categories.

 

Ok, fast forward 70 years to Santa Fe.  I befriend at Ohoris an extremely tall black man, grizzled, slow moving, thoughtful, with an intricate, international biography full of remarkable connections and coincidences.  He fits in every conceivable way my childhood stereotype of the “old wise black man”.  I sit in rapt attention to his stories. I look up to him, which, given his height, is my only choice. But, as we continue to meet, a tension begins to rise between us that is coming largely from me, but I cannot control.  He becomes aware that I am seeing him through the stereotype of  the old wise black man.  Because I cannot admit to it, he is imprisoned by it.  Our conversations are based on a lie.  He disappears from Ohoris and I never see him again.  He would rather eschew good coffee, than live in my lie. 

 

This is what Donald Trump is truthful about.  He tells the truth about his own stereotypes.  He is truthful about himself.  That what he believes is FALSE is irrelevant to his base.  He admits to thoughts which they know many others find distasteful.  It is hard to live in a world which has moved on from one’s childhood, a world in which others find one’s basic categorizations distasteful – in fact, a world in which one finds one’s own basic categorizations distasteful. 

 

To break Trump we need to come to a new understanding and acknowledgement of type-isms.  There are always going to be type-isms.  We human beings do that sort of thing.  Raised in a particular way, at a particular time I see a tall grizzled black man as wise, and everything he says and does is read through that lens.  That’s abduction.  This person wears a dress, this person is a woman, this person is gentle, that ‘s abduction.  (Well, it’s abduction-deduction, but let that go.)  Human beings naturally form identity groups that trap ourselves and others in false abductions.  So we need to design our society to counter these. (Libertarians beware.  Here come Nick’s white vans, again)  In this case the white van takes the form of aggressive  taxation of the rich and aggressive education of the poor, and of institutions that promote the random mixing of our citizens (like public universities and armies – or conservation corps).  

 

Could my friendship with the tall black guy have been rescued?  Could we have laughed about my stereotypes?  Perhaps I should have said, early on, “Look, I’m sorry, I keep seeing you  as Uncle Remus.  I am sure, as I get to know you better, I will get over it.  Please be patient with me, and please call me out whenever you feel confined by it. ” 

 

A Liberalism that does not free me is not worth the name.

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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[thompnickson2]

Again, people.  Could we just forget the whole anecdote?  Please? 

 

I wish we could focus not on the particulars of the anecdote, but on that fact that Trump’s charm comes from the fact that he tells the truth about his basest impulses, while lying about everything else.  And that trait ingratiates with those amongst us who have base impulses for which we fear we might be shamed.

 

Speaking of shame!  Whew!

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Saturday, September 5, 2020 5:41 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] OFFLINE:Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

 

James is the man...  I didn't want to name him speculatively on-list.   I don't know the Ohori's owner, only the original founder Susan Ohori... I guess she cashed out some time back?  It hasn't felt like her touch for some time.   James would have been avoiding Larry, not you, even though you might have been vaguely implicated in it.  He might even remember you as "Nick" and "from New England" and "wild eyebrows"...   the current circumstances don't have me "running into him" as likely as in the past, but the discussion is in the queue for if ever we do!

Dear Steve, 

 

I would not be surprised if you did, indeed, know  him.  Somehow, he worked his way into being something of a water commissioner up there, mediating the most difficult issue I can imagine… as a stranger?  The whole thing seemed incredible to me, but a credit, in any case, to the vibes he gives off. 

 

I won’t tell on FRIAM entire story of how our last meeting went.  I also befriended the then owner of Ohori’s, a very sweet and generous human, also with LOTS of life experience, who can easily flip into right wing asshole or left wing asshole, depending of what is needed to call attention to himself and create tension in the room.  So I am sitting talking to our tall friend and Larry comes up to the table and says, “Can I join you?”  I want to say no, but Larry does, after all, own  the place, so my Liberal anybody-can-talk-to-any-body-else thing kicks in, and we’re off.  Larry flips into right-wing asshole, I try to modulate, and Our Friend stays for a suitably polite interval and then makes his excuses and leaves.  As he goes out the door, Larry turns to me and says, “Did I say something?” (Larry is not a complete idiot; he just plays one on TV) 

 

It goes down as one of the most humiliating moments of my life.  But I am not sure you can repair it.  I guess you could say, if he remembers me, that the bald, lame, crow-watcher thinks fondly of him, would love to know how the water thing worked out, and looks forward to running into him again as soon as I can start going to coffee houses again.  I think his name is James.

 

I am glad to know he is alive, and presumably well.

 

As to you second story, it is terribly familiar.  Both my father and my older brother could, when not sober, talk about “Jews”.  It just seemed to come out of nowhere.  I will reserve my further comment for a FRIAM post which I will make in a moment.   

 

Thanks, Steve,

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Saturday, September 5, 2020 1:27 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

 

Nick -

I think I may well know the man of whom you speak... he is in my "second order circle" so I only see him while visiting certain friends or at events we all share or the occasional criss-cross in a public venue.   I will try to remember to ask him if he remembers YOU...   question is which stereotype might I appeal to to describe you to him?   I won't speculate on what forms that might take as I explore my own stereotypes, or worse yet, my projections of what *his* stereotypes of you might be.     If we are talking about the same person I doubt he would have "avoided you"... he has been fairly politely blunt with me a few times and then resumed the jovial conversations we were having.   He seemed very practiced at navigating (not so) hidden judgements and assumptions about him.

My own mother had a modest amount of self-awareness, growing up in KY fairly proud of being a "Yankee" in the sense of north of the Mason-Dixon and from a subculture that was too poor to have ever risked owning a slave or having a close relative who did.  She lived with her aunt in the city of Frankfort during the school year in the depression for lots of reasons.   She was therefore raised as an only child, her cousins having recently grown and moved out of the family home.   She tells an anecdote of having developed a friendship with a girl who lived *somewhere* between *her school* and her aunt's house... she would pause to play with her every day after school until it got to where she started being noticeably late home... when she told her aunt why she was late, she said "why don't you just invite your friend home next time and you can play here!"...  she asked her friend who resisted for about a week and then finally came home (her aunt married a Scottish Doctor, so their home was very meticulous and in a nicer neighborhood, but they lived crazy-frugal anyway) and after the first day, her aunt very politely told her not to invite the friend back, and in fact, was forbidden to play with her anymore.   The little girl was apparently the first black person she had ever met and it was years later that she guessed that that was what it was all about...   her aunt was too "polite" to make a deal about it and too "authoritarian" to be questioned.    Later her mother gave her a family heirloom which was referred to colloquially as a "tar baby" which her mother explained to her had been a type of doll that young girls were given to "play with" in the style and memory of how their ancestors had been allowed to "play with" the slave babies.   Her mother explained how wrong *all* of it was, from the slavery to the treating even the babies as property, to replacing them post-emancipation with effigies, etc.   I learned this when she was unpacking from one of our moves and it showed up in a cardboard barrel amongst her mother's (our aunt's) china that we never used...  my sister saw it and was intrigued and "wanted to play with it" whereupon my mother tried to explain all of this to us and then declaring that "the best thing I can do is get rid of it, it is just a reflection of a bad piece of history".   I don't know if it went in the burn barrel with our other trash or if she figured out some more respectful disposal method... I would like to think she knew of a historian or similar for whom such an artifact could be made meaningful.   This and other similar instances made me think that my parents were the least prejudiced people I knew, until at 19 my sister who had a small group of friends from college, one of who was African American...  my parents liked him a lot, he was a very sociable and interesting person (his father was career military and his mother had died when he was young and he and two sisters were raised by "help").   But at some point, the friendship drifted into the boyfriend zone and they very sternly, albeit embarrassingly disabused me of the thought that they were not prejudiced.   I don't remember the exact conversations but it was clear that they were very much against the relationship, even if they didn't quite try to forbid their (adult) daughter from continuing.   I think they even enlisted one of their (more openly) racist friends to have a conversation with her.  It did not sit well at all with me.  But made me realize how hidden some of these judgements, stereotypes, opinions, etc can be.   I'm sure I'm laced with junk like that.

- Steve

Dear fellow congregants,

 

One of the things we talk about is our bemusement at Trump supporters.  One expression you often hear these supporters say is that they admire him because “He tells it like it is!”  They can say this while acknowledging  that almost everything he says is false.  So, if he is lying most of the time, what is he telling the truth about?

 

I think I know.  As I keep insisting, I am not a boomer.  I am from the Silent Generation, the Lonely Crowd.  My mother’s life hero was Eleanor Roosevelt.  It was I, aged seven, who brought the news of the President’s death to my parents, and I was startled to seem my mother burst into tears.  Crying was not her thing.  My folks were publishers. We had black, Jewish, gay, lesbian, working class, authors visiting the house.  But – and here is the point – when they visited, they visited as such.  Not that I was told as a child explicitly, but it was conveyed to me as a child, somehow, that these folks belonged to a different category.  And my education, in Massachusetts, in the 40’s, was devoid of any explicit contact with anybody in any of these categories.

 

Ok, fast forward 70 years to Santa Fe.  I befriend at Ohoris an extremely tall black man, grizzled, slow moving, thoughtful, with an intricate, international biography full of remarkable connections and coincidences.  He fits in every conceivable way my childhood stereotype of the “old wise black man”.  I sit in rapt attention to his stories. I look up to him, which, given his height, is my only choice. But, as we continue to meet, a tension begins to rise between us that is coming largely from me, but I cannot control.  He becomes aware that I am seeing him through the stereotype of  the old wise black man.  Because I cannot admit to it, he is imprisoned by it.  Our conversations are based on a lie.  He disappears from Ohoris and I never see him again.  He would rather eschew good coffee, than live in my lie. 

 

This is what Donald Trump is truthful about.  He tells the truth about his own stereotypes.  He is truthful about himself.  That what he believes is FALSE is irrelevant to his base.  He admits to thoughts which they know many others find distasteful.  It is hard to live in a world which has moved on from one’s childhood, a world in which others find one’s basic categorizations distasteful – in fact, a world in which one finds one’s own basic categorizations distasteful. 

 

To break Trump we need to come to a new understanding and acknowledgement of type-isms.  There are always going to be type-isms.  We human beings do that sort of thing.  Raised in a particular way, at a particular time I see a tall grizzled black man as wise, and everything he says and does is read through that lens.  That’s abduction.  This person wears a dress, this person is a woman, this person is gentle, that ‘s abduction.  (Well, it’s abduction-deduction, but let that go.)  Human beings naturally form identity groups that trap ourselves and others in false abductions.  So we need to design our society to counter these. (Libertarians beware.  Here come Nick’s white vans, again)  In this case the white van takes the form of aggressive  taxation of the rich and aggressive education of the poor, and of institutions that promote the random mixing of our citizens (like public universities and armies – or conservation corps).  

 

Could my friendship with the tall black guy have been rescued?  Could we have laughed about my stereotypes?  Perhaps I should have said, early on, “Look, I’m sorry, I keep seeing you  as Uncle Remus.  I am sure, as I get to know you better, I will get over it.  Please be patient with me, and please call me out whenever you feel confined by it. ” 

 

A Liberalism that does not free me is not worth the name.

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

  And that trait ingratiates with those amongst us who have base impulses for which we fear we might be shamed.

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 5:51 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Again, people.  Could we just forget the whole anecdote?  Please? 

 

I wish we could focus not on the particulars of the anecdote, but on that fact that Trump’s charm comes from the fact that he tells the truth about his basest impulses, while lying about everything else.  And that trait ingratiates with those amongst us who have base impulses for which we fear we might be shamed.

 

Speaking of shame!  Whew!

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Saturday, September 5, 2020 5:41 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] OFFLINE:Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

 

James is the man...  I didn't want to name him speculatively on-list.   I don't know the Ohori's owner, only the original founder Susan Ohori... I guess she cashed out some time back?  It hasn't felt like her touch for some time.   James would have been avoiding Larry, not you, even though you might have been vaguely implicated in it.  He might even remember you as "Nick" and "from New England" and "wild eyebrows"...   the current circumstances don't have me "running into him" as likely as in the past, but the discussion is in the queue for if ever we do!

Dear Steve, 

 

I would not be surprised if you did, indeed, know  him.  Somehow, he worked his way into being something of a water commissioner up there, mediating the most difficult issue I can imagine… as a stranger?  The whole thing seemed incredible to me, but a credit, in any case, to the vibes he gives off. 

 

I won’t tell on FRIAM entire story of how our last meeting went.  I also befriended the then owner of Ohori’s, a very sweet and generous human, also with LOTS of life experience, who can easily flip into right wing asshole or left wing asshole, depending of what is needed to call attention to himself and create tension in the room.  So I am sitting talking to our tall friend and Larry comes up to the table and says, “Can I join you?”  I want to say no, but Larry does, after all, own  the place, so my Liberal anybody-can-talk-to-any-body-else thing kicks in, and we’re off.  Larry flips into right-wing asshole, I try to modulate, and Our Friend stays for a suitably polite interval and then makes his excuses and leaves.  As he goes out the door, Larry turns to me and says, “Did I say something?” (Larry is not a complete idiot; he just plays one on TV) 

 

It goes down as one of the most humiliating moments of my life.  But I am not sure you can repair it.  I guess you could say, if he remembers me, that the bald, lame, crow-watcher thinks fondly of him, would love to know how the water thing worked out, and looks forward to running into him again as soon as I can start going to coffee houses again.  I think his name is James.

 

I am glad to know he is alive, and presumably well.

 

As to you second story, it is terribly familiar.  Both my father and my older brother could, when not sober, talk about “Jews”.  It just seemed to come out of nowhere.  I will reserve my further comment for a FRIAM post which I will make in a moment.   

 

Thanks, Steve,

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Saturday, September 5, 2020 1:27 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

 

Nick -

I think I may well know the man of whom you speak... he is in my "second order circle" so I only see him while visiting certain friends or at events we all share or the occasional criss-cross in a public venue.   I will try to remember to ask him if he remembers YOU...   question is which stereotype might I appeal to to describe you to him?   I won't speculate on what forms that might take as I explore my own stereotypes, or worse yet, my projections of what *his* stereotypes of you might be.     If we are talking about the same person I doubt he would have "avoided you"... he has been fairly politely blunt with me a few times and then resumed the jovial conversations we were having.   He seemed very practiced at navigating (not so) hidden judgements and assumptions about him.

My own mother had a modest amount of self-awareness, growing up in KY fairly proud of being a "Yankee" in the sense of north of the Mason-Dixon and from a subculture that was too poor to have ever risked owning a slave or having a close relative who did.  She lived with her aunt in the city of Frankfort during the school year in the depression for lots of reasons.   She was therefore raised as an only child, her cousins having recently grown and moved out of the family home.   She tells an anecdote of having developed a friendship with a girl who lived *somewhere* between *her school* and her aunt's house... she would pause to play with her every day after school until it got to where she started being noticeably late home... when she told her aunt why she was late, she said "why don't you just invite your friend home next time and you can play here!"...  she asked her friend who resisted for about a week and then finally came home (her aunt married a Scottish Doctor, so their home was very meticulous and in a nicer neighborhood, but they lived crazy-frugal anyway) and after the first day, her aunt very politely told her not to invite the friend back, and in fact, was forbidden to play with her anymore.   The little girl was apparently the first black person she had ever met and it was years later that she guessed that that was what it was all about...   her aunt was too "polite" to make a deal about it and too "authoritarian" to be questioned.    Later her mother gave her a family heirloom which was referred to colloquially as a "tar baby" which her mother explained to her had been a type of doll that young girls were given to "play with" in the style and memory of how their ancestors had been allowed to "play with" the slave babies.   Her mother explained how wrong *all* of it was, from the slavery to the treating even the babies as property, to replacing them post-emancipation with effigies, etc.   I learned this when she was unpacking from one of our moves and it showed up in a cardboard barrel amongst her mother's (our aunt's) china that we never used...  my sister saw it and was intrigued and "wanted to play with it" whereupon my mother tried to explain all of this to us and then declaring that "the best thing I can do is get rid of it, it is just a reflection of a bad piece of history".   I don't know if it went in the burn barrel with our other trash or if she figured out some more respectful disposal method... I would like to think she knew of a historian or similar for whom such an artifact could be made meaningful.   This and other similar instances made me think that my parents were the least prejudiced people I knew, until at 19 my sister who had a small group of friends from college, one of who was African American...  my parents liked him a lot, he was a very sociable and interesting person (his father was career military and his mother had died when he was young and he and two sisters were raised by "help").   But at some point, the friendship drifted into the boyfriend zone and they very sternly, albeit embarrassingly disabused me of the thought that they were not prejudiced.   I don't remember the exact conversations but it was clear that they were very much against the relationship, even if they didn't quite try to forbid their (adult) daughter from continuing.   I think they even enlisted one of their (more openly) racist friends to have a conversation with her.  It did not sit well at all with me.  But made me realize how hidden some of these judgements, stereotypes, opinions, etc can be.   I'm sure I'm laced with junk like that.

- Steve

Dear fellow congregants,

 

One of the things we talk about is our bemusement at Trump supporters.  One expression you often hear these supporters say is that they admire him because “He tells it like it is!”  They can say this while acknowledging  that almost everything he says is false.  So, if he is lying most of the time, what is he telling the truth about?

 

I think I know.  As I keep insisting, I am not a boomer.  I am from the Silent Generation, the Lonely Crowd.  My mother’s life hero was Eleanor Roosevelt.  It was I, aged seven, who brought the news of the President’s death to my parents, and I was startled to seem my mother burst into tears.  Crying was not her thing.  My folks were publishers. We had black, Jewish, gay, lesbian, working class, authors visiting the house.  But – and here is the point – when they visited, they visited as such.  Not that I was told as a child explicitly, but it was conveyed to me as a child, somehow, that these folks belonged to a different category.  And my education, in Massachusetts, in the 40’s, was devoid of any explicit contact with anybody in any of these categories.

 

Ok, fast forward 70 years to Santa Fe.  I befriend at Ohoris an extremely tall black man, grizzled, slow moving, thoughtful, with an intricate, international biography full of remarkable connections and coincidences.  He fits in every conceivable way my childhood stereotype of the “old wise black man”.  I sit in rapt attention to his stories. I look up to him, which, given his height, is my only choice. But, as we continue to meet, a tension begins to rise between us that is coming largely from me, but I cannot control.  He becomes aware that I am seeing him through the stereotype of  the old wise black man.  Because I cannot admit to it, he is imprisoned by it.  Our conversations are based on a lie.  He disappears from Ohoris and I never see him again.  He would rather eschew good coffee, than live in my lie. 

 

This is what Donald Trump is truthful about.  He tells the truth about his own stereotypes.  He is truthful about himself.  That what he believes is FALSE is irrelevant to his base.  He admits to thoughts which they know many others find distasteful.  It is hard to live in a world which has moved on from one’s childhood, a world in which others find one’s basic categorizations distasteful – in fact, a world in which one finds one’s own basic categorizations distasteful. 

 

To break Trump we need to come to a new understanding and acknowledgement of type-isms.  There are always going to be type-isms.  We human beings do that sort of thing.  Raised in a particular way, at a particular time I see a tall grizzled black man as wise, and everything he says and does is read through that lens.  That’s abduction.  This person wears a dress, this person is a woman, this person is gentle, that ‘s abduction.  (Well, it’s abduction-deduction, but let that go.)  Human beings naturally form identity groups that trap ourselves and others in false abductions.  So we need to design our society to counter these. (Libertarians beware.  Here come Nick’s white vans, again)  In this case the white van takes the form of aggressive  taxation of the rich and aggressive education of the poor, and of institutions that promote the random mixing of our citizens (like public universities and armies – or conservation corps).  

 

Could my friendship with the tall black guy have been rescued?  Could we have laughed about my stereotypes?  Perhaps I should have said, early on, “Look, I’m sorry, I keep seeing you  as Uncle Remus.  I am sure, as I get to know you better, I will get over it.  Please be patient with me, and please call me out whenever you feel confined by it. ” 

 

A Liberalism that does not free me is not worth the name.

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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[Russ Abbott]

Trump’s charm comes from the fact that he tells the truth about his basest impulses 

I like your theory. Somehow I doubt it would work for everyone. Why does it work for Trump? 

Part of it may be that Trump goes one step beyond affirming his basest impulses. He assumes them and then glories in what he paints as the positive consequences. Cheering on right-wing thugs means that he can claim that the implied violence they represent will back him when he needs it. Transactionalism means that he is always "winning" and always doing things that will make him richer. Sexism means that he always has a supply of women at his call. Continually repeating his lies means that he always has a crowd of people who believe him. Constant bullying and name-calling means that he puts himself in a position to judge and demean others and can always portray himself as better than everyone else. 

All-in-all he portrays himself as living the life everyone else envies. And it works. He (presumably) has quite a bit of money and has made himself into the most powerful person in the world. That's quite an attraction for lots of people--especially for those who value the ends over the means--another of the base impulses from which he has reaped significant rewards.

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 4:51 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Again, people.  Could we just forget the whole anecdote?  Please? 

 

I wish we could focus not on the particulars of the anecdote, but on that fact that Trump’s charm comes from the fact that he tells the truth about his basest impulses, while lying about everything else.  And that trait ingratiates with those amongst us who have base impulses for which we fear we might be shamed.

 

Speaking of shame!  Whew!

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Saturday, September 5, 2020 5:41 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] OFFLINE:Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

 

James is the man...  I didn't want to name him speculatively on-list.   I don't know the Ohori's owner, only the original founder Susan Ohori... I guess she cashed out some time back?  It hasn't felt like her touch for some time.   James would have been avoiding Larry, not you, even though you might have been vaguely implicated in it.  He might even remember you as "Nick" and "from New England" and "wild eyebrows"...   the current circumstances don't have me "running into him" as likely as in the past, but the discussion is in the queue for if ever we do!

Dear Steve, 

 

I would not be surprised if you did, indeed, know  him.  Somehow, he worked his way into being something of a water commissioner up there, mediating the most difficult issue I can imagine… as a stranger?  The whole thing seemed incredible to me, but a credit, in any case, to the vibes he gives off. 

 

I won’t tell on FRIAM entire story of how our last meeting went.  I also befriended the then owner of Ohori’s, a very sweet and generous human, also with LOTS of life experience, who can easily flip into right wing asshole or left wing asshole, depending of what is needed to call attention to himself and create tension in the room.  So I am sitting talking to our tall friend and Larry comes up to the table and says, “Can I join you?”  I want to say no, but Larry does, after all, own  the place, so my Liberal anybody-can-talk-to-any-body-else thing kicks in, and we’re off.  Larry flips into right-wing asshole, I try to modulate, and Our Friend stays for a suitably polite interval and then makes his excuses and leaves.  As he goes out the door, Larry turns to me and says, “Did I say something?” (Larry is not a complete idiot; he just plays one on TV) 

 

It goes down as one of the most humiliating moments of my life.  But I am not sure you can repair it.  I guess you could say, if he remembers me, that the bald, lame, crow-watcher thinks fondly of him, would love to know how the water thing worked out, and looks forward to running into him again as soon as I can start going to coffee houses again.  I think his name is James.

 

I am glad to know he is alive, and presumably well.

 

As to you second story, it is terribly familiar.  Both my father and my older brother could, when not sober, talk about “Jews”.  It just seemed to come out of nowhere.  I will reserve my further comment for a FRIAM post which I will make in a moment.   

 

Thanks, Steve,

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Saturday, September 5, 2020 1:27 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

 

Nick -

I think I may well know the man of whom you speak... he is in my "second order circle" so I only see him while visiting certain friends or at events we all share or the occasional criss-cross in a public venue.   I will try to remember to ask him if he remembers YOU...   question is which stereotype might I appeal to to describe you to him?   I won't speculate on what forms that might take as I explore my own stereotypes, or worse yet, my projections of what *his* stereotypes of you might be.     If we are talking about the same person I doubt he would have "avoided you"... he has been fairly politely blunt with me a few times and then resumed the jovial conversations we were having.   He seemed very practiced at navigating (not so) hidden judgements and assumptions about him.

My own mother had a modest amount of self-awareness, growing up in KY fairly proud of being a "Yankee" in the sense of north of the Mason-Dixon and from a subculture that was too poor to have ever risked owning a slave or having a close relative who did.  She lived with her aunt in the city of Frankfort during the school year in the depression for lots of reasons.   She was therefore raised as an only child, her cousins having recently grown and moved out of the family home.   She tells an anecdote of having developed a friendship with a girl who lived *somewhere* between *her school* and her aunt's house... she would pause to play with her every day after school until it got to where she started being noticeably late home... when she told her aunt why she was late, she said "why don't you just invite your friend home next time and you can play here!"...  she asked her friend who resisted for about a week and then finally came home (her aunt married a Scottish Doctor, so their home was very meticulous and in a nicer neighborhood, but they lived crazy-frugal anyway) and after the first day, her aunt very politely told her not to invite the friend back, and in fact, was forbidden to play with her anymore.   The little girl was apparently the first black person she had ever met and it was years later that she guessed that that was what it was all about...   her aunt was too "polite" to make a deal about it and too "authoritarian" to be questioned.    Later her mother gave her a family heirloom which was referred to colloquially as a "tar baby" which her mother explained to her had been a type of doll that young girls were given to "play with" in the style and memory of how their ancestors had been allowed to "play with" the slave babies.   Her mother explained how wrong *all* of it was, from the slavery to the treating even the babies as property, to replacing them post-emancipation with effigies, etc.   I learned this when she was unpacking from one of our moves and it showed up in a cardboard barrel amongst her mother's (our aunt's) china that we never used...  my sister saw it and was intrigued and "wanted to play with it" whereupon my mother tried to explain all of this to us and then declaring that "the best thing I can do is get rid of it, it is just a reflection of a bad piece of history".   I don't know if it went in the burn barrel with our other trash or if she figured out some more respectful disposal method... I would like to think she knew of a historian or similar for whom such an artifact could be made meaningful.   This and other similar instances made me think that my parents were the least prejudiced people I knew, until at 19 my sister who had a small group of friends from college, one of who was African American...  my parents liked him a lot, he was a very sociable and interesting person (his father was career military and his mother had died when he was young and he and two sisters were raised by "help").   But at some point, the friendship drifted into the boyfriend zone and they very sternly, albeit embarrassingly disabused me of the thought that they were not prejudiced.   I don't remember the exact conversations but it was clear that they were very much against the relationship, even if they didn't quite try to forbid their (adult) daughter from continuing.   I think they even enlisted one of their (more openly) racist friends to have a conversation with her.  It did not sit well at all with me.  But made me realize how hidden some of these judgements, stereotypes, opinions, etc can be.   I'm sure I'm laced with junk like that.

- Steve

Dear fellow congregants,

 

One of the things we talk about is our bemusement at Trump supporters.  One expression you often hear these supporters say is that they admire him because “He tells it like it is!”  They can say this while acknowledging  that almost everything he says is false.  So, if he is lying most of the time, what is he telling the truth about?

 

I think I know.  As I keep insisting, I am not a boomer.  I am from the Silent Generation, the Lonely Crowd.  My mother’s life hero was Eleanor Roosevelt.  It was I, aged seven, who brought the news of the President’s death to my parents, and I was startled to seem my mother burst into tears.  Crying was not her thing.  My folks were publishers. We had black, Jewish, gay, lesbian, working class, authors visiting the house.  But – and here is the point – when they visited, they visited as such.  Not that I was told as a child explicitly, but it was conveyed to me as a child, somehow, that these folks belonged to a different category.  And my education, in Massachusetts, in the 40’s, was devoid of any explicit contact with anybody in any of these categories.

 

Ok, fast forward 70 years to Santa Fe.  I befriend at Ohoris an extremely tall black man, grizzled, slow moving, thoughtful, with an intricate, international biography full of remarkable connections and coincidences.  He fits in every conceivable way my childhood stereotype of the “old wise black man”.  I sit in rapt attention to his stories. I look up to him, which, given his height, is my only choice. But, as we continue to meet, a tension begins to rise between us that is coming largely from me, but I cannot control.  He becomes aware that I am seeing him through the stereotype of  the old wise black man.  Because I cannot admit to it, he is imprisoned by it.  Our conversations are based on a lie.  He disappears from Ohoris and I never see him again.  He would rather eschew good coffee, than live in my lie. 

 

This is what Donald Trump is truthful about.  He tells the truth about his own stereotypes.  He is truthful about himself.  That what he believes is FALSE is irrelevant to his base.  He admits to thoughts which they know many others find distasteful.  It is hard to live in a world which has moved on from one’s childhood, a world in which others find one’s basic categorizations distasteful – in fact, a world in which one finds one’s own basic categorizations distasteful. 

 

To break Trump we need to come to a new understanding and acknowledgement of type-isms.  There are always going to be type-isms.  We human beings do that sort of thing.  Raised in a particular way, at a particular time I see a tall grizzled black man as wise, and everything he says and does is read through that lens.  That’s abduction.  This person wears a dress, this person is a woman, this person is gentle, that ‘s abduction.  (Well, it’s abduction-deduction, but let that go.)  Human beings naturally form identity groups that trap ourselves and others in false abductions.  So we need to design our society to counter these. (Libertarians beware.  Here come Nick’s white vans, again)  In this case the white van takes the form of aggressive  taxation of the rich and aggressive education of the poor, and of institutions that promote the random mixing of our citizens (like public universities and armies – or conservation corps).  

 

Could my friendship with the tall black guy have been rescued?  Could we have laughed about my stereotypes?  Perhaps I should have said, early on, “Look, I’m sorry, I keep seeing you  as Uncle Remus.  I am sure, as I get to know you better, I will get over it.  Please be patient with me, and please call me out whenever you feel confined by it. ” 

 

A Liberalism that does not free me is not worth the name.

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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[Steve Smith]

Frank -

  And that trait ingratiates with those amongst us who have base impulses for which we fear we might be shamed.

Ah, but HIS is a SuperDuperEgo... just ask him, he'll tell ya!

I don't know what your stake (or dog in the fight or ... pick a metaphor) is regarding collective consciousness/awareness/intelligence/wisdom/action in the abstract but it seems your background would support having an opinion or more to the point a thought-through-thought or two on the topic.

If there are suitable parallels between individual consciousness and collective versions of it, what would be the superego of a culture, people, nation-state, etc.?

- Steve

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Well, you could say that the Constitution is a kind of superego.  It's interesting that Trump resents the ways in which it constrains him.  He tries to get around it with surprising success thanks to sycophants like Barr et al.

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 7:04 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank -

  And that trait ingratiates with those amongst us who have base impulses for which we fear we might be shamed.

Ah, but HIS is a SuperDuperEgo... just ask him, he'll tell ya!

I don't know what your stake (or dog in the fight or ... pick a metaphor) is regarding collective consciousness/awareness/intelligence/wisdom/action in the abstract but it seems your background would support having an opinion or more to the point a thought-through-thought or two on the topic.

If there are suitable parallels between individual consciousness and collective versions of it, what would be the superego of a culture, people, nation-state, etc.?

- Steve

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

p.s.  do a Google search of "superego", Steve.

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 7:12 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Well, you could say that the Constitution is a kind of superego.  It's interesting that Trump resents the ways in which it constrains him.  He tries to get around it with surprising success thanks to sycophants like Barr et al.

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 7:04 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank -

  And that trait ingratiates with those amongst us who have base impulses for which we fear we might be shamed.

Ah, but HIS is a SuperDuperEgo... just ask him, he'll tell ya!

I don't know what your stake (or dog in the fight or ... pick a metaphor) is regarding collective consciousness/awareness/intelligence/wisdom/action in the abstract but it seems your background would support having an opinion or more to the point a thought-through-thought or two on the topic.

If there are suitable parallels between individual consciousness and collective versions of it, what would be the superego of a culture, people, nation-state, etc.?

- Steve

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[Steve Smith]

On 9/5/20 6:41 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:

Trump’s charm comes from the fact that he tells the truth about his basest impulses 

I like your theory. Somehow I doubt it would work for everyone. Why does it work for Trump? 

Part of it may be that Trump goes one step beyond affirming his basest impulses. He assumes them and then glories in what he paints as the positive consequences. Cheering on right-wing thugs means that he can claim that the implied violence they represent will back him when he needs it. Transactionalism means that he is always "winning" and always doing things that will make him richer. Sexism means that he always has a supply of women at his call. Continually repeating his lies means that he always has a crowd of people who believe him. Constant bullying and name-calling means that he puts himself in a position to judge and demean others and can always portray himself as better than everyone else. 

All-in-all he portrays himself as living the life everyone else envies. And it works. He (presumably) has quite a bit of money and has made himself into the most powerful person in the world. That's quite an attraction for lots of people--especially for those who value the ends over the means--another of the base impulses from which he has reaped significant rewards.

And I have this recurring dream of January 19th (or whatever the inauguration day) 2021 when his Secret Service detail perp-walks him out the door to the lawn and hands him over to the Marine1 crew to fly down to Maralago which has been pre-emptively turned into a 100 acre gilded-cage holding cell for him while he faces a never ending stream of indictments ranging from petty P*ssy Grabbing to War Crimes.

Biden has been forming his "transition team" and I'm wanting to believe he's tapped Carter, Bill Clinton, GW Bush, and Obama to enlist their Secret Service details (I don't think Biden as former VP has a detail, right?) to chat up via backchannels and personal relations, the Service teams in place and make sure they are ready to *force* an orderly transition of power on the 11th hour if it doesn't happen organically.     I have a HS friend who was SS working on Gore's detail.  Unfortunately she retired early and moved to Idaho where she could be more fully in touch with her inner-Trump, maybe exercise her hoarded stash of (previously legal/permitted?) automatic weapons without nosy neighbors or invasive critical law-enforcement?   Otherwise I'd ask her the chances of her "brothers and sisters" stepping up to the threat of a Trump whose "hell no, I won't go" from the sixties has been bumped up a couple of levels?

mumble,

 - Steve

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 4:51 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Again, people.  Could we just forget the whole anecdote?  Please? 

 

I wish we could focus not on the particulars of the anecdote, but on that fact that Trump’s charm comes from the fact that he tells the truth about his basest impulses, while lying about everything else.  And that trait ingratiates with those amongst us who have base impulses for which we fear we might be shamed.

 

Speaking of shame!  Whew!

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Saturday, September 5, 2020 5:41 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] OFFLINE:Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

 

James is the man...  I didn't want to name him speculatively on-list.   I don't know the Ohori's owner, only the original founder Susan Ohori... I guess she cashed out some time back?  It hasn't felt like her touch for some time.   James would have been avoiding Larry, not you, even though you might have been vaguely implicated in it.  He might even remember you as "Nick" and "from New England" and "wild eyebrows"...   the current circumstances don't have me "running into him" as likely as in the past, but the discussion is in the queue for if ever we do!

Dear Steve, 

 

I would not be surprised if you did, indeed, know  him.  Somehow, he worked his way into being something of a water commissioner up there, mediating the most difficult issue I can imagine… as a stranger?  The whole thing seemed incredible to me, but a credit, in any case, to the vibes he gives off. 

 

I won’t tell on FRIAM entire story of how our last meeting went.  I also befriended the then owner of Ohori’s, a very sweet and generous human, also with LOTS of life experience, who can easily flip into right wing asshole or left wing asshole, depending of what is needed to call attention to himself and create tension in the room.  So I am sitting talking to our tall friend and Larry comes up to the table and says, “Can I join you?”  I want to say no, but Larry does, after all, own  the place, so my Liberal anybody-can-talk-to-any-body-else thing kicks in, and we’re off.  Larry flips into right-wing asshole, I try to modulate, and Our Friend stays for a suitably polite interval and then makes his excuses and leaves.  As he goes out the door, Larry turns to me and says, “Did I say something?” (Larry is not a complete idiot; he just plays one on TV) 

 

It goes down as one of the most humiliating moments of my life.  But I am not sure you can repair it.  I guess you could say, if he remembers me, that the bald, lame, crow-watcher thinks fondly of him, would love to know how the water thing worked out, and looks forward to running into him again as soon as I can start going to coffee houses again.  I think his name is James.

 

I am glad to know he is alive, and presumably well.

 

As to you second story, it is terribly familiar.  Both my father and my older brother could, when not sober, talk about “Jews”.  It just seemed to come out of nowhere.  I will reserve my further comment for a FRIAM post which I will make in a moment.   

 

Thanks, Steve,

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Saturday, September 5, 2020 1:27 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

 

Nick -

I think I may well know the man of whom you speak... he is in my "second order circle" so I only see him while visiting certain friends or at events we all share or the occasional criss-cross in a public venue.   I will try to remember to ask him if he remembers YOU...   question is which stereotype might I appeal to to describe you to him?   I won't speculate on what forms that might take as I explore my own stereotypes, or worse yet, my projections of what *his* stereotypes of you might be.     If we are talking about the same person I doubt he would have "avoided you"... he has been fairly politely blunt with me a few times and then resumed the jovial conversations we were having.   He seemed very practiced at navigating (not so) hidden judgements and assumptions about him.

My own mother had a modest amount of self-awareness, growing up in KY fairly proud of being a "Yankee" in the sense of north of the Mason-Dixon and from a subculture that was too poor to have ever risked owning a slave or having a close relative who did.  She lived with her aunt in the city of Frankfort during the school year in the depression for lots of reasons.   She was therefore raised as an only child, her cousins having recently grown and moved out of the family home.   She tells an anecdote of having developed a friendship with a girl who lived *somewhere* between *her school* and her aunt's house... she would pause to play with her every day after school until it got to where she started being noticeably late home... when she told her aunt why she was late, she said "why don't you just invite your friend home next time and you can play here!"...  she asked her friend who resisted for about a week and then finally came home (her aunt married a Scottish Doctor, so their home was very meticulous and in a nicer neighborhood, but they lived crazy-frugal anyway) and after the first day, her aunt very politely told her not to invite the friend back, and in fact, was forbidden to play with her anymore.   The little girl was apparently the first black person she had ever met and it was years later that she guessed that that was what it was all about...   her aunt was too "polite" to make a deal about it and too "authoritarian" to be questioned.    Later her mother gave her a family heirloom which was referred to colloquially as a "tar baby" which her mother explained to her had been a type of doll that young girls were given to "play with" in the style and memory of how their ancestors had been allowed to "play with" the slave babies.   Her mother explained how wrong *all* of it was, from the slavery to the treating even the babies as property, to replacing them post-emancipation with effigies, etc.   I learned this when she was unpacking from one of our moves and it showed up in a cardboard barrel amongst her mother's (our aunt's) china that we never used...  my sister saw it and was intrigued and "wanted to play with it" whereupon my mother tried to explain all of this to us and then declaring that "the best thing I can do is get rid of it, it is just a reflection of a bad piece of history".   I don't know if it went in the burn barrel with our other trash or if she figured out some more respectful disposal method... I would like to think she knew of a historian or similar for whom such an artifact could be made meaningful.   This and other similar instances made me think that my parents were the least prejudiced people I knew, until at 19 my sister who had a small group of friends from college, one of who was African American...  my parents liked him a lot, he was a very sociable and interesting person (his father was career military and his mother had died when he was young and he and two sisters were raised by "help").   But at some point, the friendship drifted into the boyfriend zone and they very sternly, albeit embarrassingly disabused me of the thought that they were not prejudiced.   I don't remember the exact conversations but it was clear that they were very much against the relationship, even if they didn't quite try to forbid their (adult) daughter from continuing.   I think they even enlisted one of their (more openly) racist friends to have a conversation with her.  It did not sit well at all with me.  But made me realize how hidden some of these judgements, stereotypes, opinions, etc can be.   I'm sure I'm laced with junk like that.

- Steve

Dear fellow congregants,

 

One of the things we talk about is our bemusement at Trump supporters.  One expression you often hear these supporters say is that they admire him because “He tells it like it is!”  They can say this while acknowledging  that almost everything he says is false.  So, if he is lying most of the time, what is he telling the truth about?

 

I think I know.  As I keep insisting, I am not a boomer.  I am from the Silent Generation, the Lonely Crowd.  My mother’s life hero was Eleanor Roosevelt.  It was I, aged seven, who brought the news of the President’s death to my parents, and I was startled to seem my mother burst into tears.  Crying was not her thing.  My folks were publishers. We had black, Jewish, gay, lesbian, working class, authors visiting the house.  But – and here is the point – when they visited, they visited as such.  Not that I was told as a child explicitly, but it was conveyed to me as a child, somehow, that these folks belonged to a different category.  And my education, in Massachusetts, in the 40’s, was devoid of any explicit contact with anybody in any of these categories.

 

Ok, fast forward 70 years to Santa Fe.  I befriend at Ohoris an extremely tall black man, grizzled, slow moving, thoughtful, with an intricate, international biography full of remarkable connections and coincidences.  He fits in every conceivable way my childhood stereotype of the “old wise black man”.  I sit in rapt attention to his stories. I look up to him, which, given his height, is my only choice. But, as we continue to meet, a tension begins to rise between us that is coming largely from me, but I cannot control.  He becomes aware that I am seeing him through the stereotype of  the old wise black man.  Because I cannot admit to it, he is imprisoned by it.  Our conversations are based on a lie.  He disappears from Ohoris and I never see him again.  He would rather eschew good coffee, than live in my lie. 

 

This is what Donald Trump is truthful about.  He tells the truth about his own stereotypes.  He is truthful about himself.  That what he believes is FALSE is irrelevant to his base.  He admits to thoughts which they know many others find distasteful.  It is hard to live in a world which has moved on from one’s childhood, a world in which others find one’s basic categorizations distasteful – in fact, a world in which one finds one’s own basic categorizations distasteful. 

 

To break Trump we need to come to a new understanding and acknowledgement of type-isms.  There are always going to be type-isms.  We human beings do that sort of thing.  Raised in a particular way, at a particular time I see a tall grizzled black man as wise, and everything he says and does is read through that lens.  That’s abduction.  This person wears a dress, this person is a woman, this person is gentle, that ‘s abduction.  (Well, it’s abduction-deduction, but let that go.)  Human beings naturally form identity groups that trap ourselves and others in false abductions.  So we need to design our society to counter these. (Libertarians beware.  Here come Nick’s white vans, again)  In this case the white van takes the form of aggressive  taxation of the rich and aggressive education of the poor, and of institutions that promote the random mixing of our citizens (like public universities and armies – or conservation corps).  

 

Could my friendship with the tall black guy have been rescued?  Could we have laughed about my stereotypes?  Perhaps I should have said, early on, “Look, I’m sorry, I keep seeing you  as Uncle Remus.  I am sure, as I get to know you better, I will get over it.  Please be patient with me, and please call me out whenever you feel confined by it. ” 

 

A Liberalism that does not free me is not worth the name.

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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[Steve Smith]

Frank -

I see your case for the Constitution-as-superego.   I guess I was thinking more in the social-cultural sense than the political.   When we were a predominantly religious (e.g. Christian) culture, perhaps it was the various "Good Books" and the church leadership(s)...  Priests/Pastors/Rabbis/Imams and such?

In spite of *many* giving lip service both to Constitution and Good Books and 10point Tablets, and Golden Rules, it feels like the true operating principles are at least similarly NeoDarwinism (of which I think Stephen and Dave have both spoken against) and NeoLIberalism (which many speak against, notably Glen here I think)  and .  

But these are more like abstractions and institutions rather than dynamic-coherence-maintaining processes which is how I apprehend the id, ego, superego to be?  While the Constitution is nominally a "living document" (with amendments allowed)... the Good Book(s) are generally not allowed to be revised (albeit continued revelations seem to be common such as via Joseph Smith, David Karesh, a multitude of Yogis, etc.)   I suppose that in some sense these artifacts encode/reflect the superego, I'm maybe looking for something more "organic".   Any current existing *governing body* would seem to be a somewhat more mutable super-ego, and the pop-culture "equivalent" might be what?

- Steve

p.s.  do a Google search of "superego", Steve.

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 7:12 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Well, you could say that the Constitution is a kind of superego.  It's interesting that Trump resents the ways in which it constrains him.  He tries to get around it with surprising success thanks to sycophants like Barr et al.

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 7:04 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank -

  And that trait ingratiates with those amongst us who have base impulses for which we fear we might be shamed.

Ah, but HIS is a SuperDuperEgo... just ask him, he'll tell ya!

I don't know what your stake (or dog in the fight or ... pick a metaphor) is regarding collective consciousness/awareness/intelligence/wisdom/action in the abstract but it seems your background would support having an opinion or more to the point a thought-through-thought or two on the topic.

If there are suitable parallels between individual consciousness and collective versions of it, what would be the superego of a culture, people, nation-state, etc.?

- Steve

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Yes, you could say that government in general and especially lawmakers are our superego.  The best common word synonym for superego is conscience.  Since a lot of people have lacunae of their own superego we need laws and law enforcers.
 

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 7:48 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank -

I see your case for the Constitution-as-superego.   I guess I was thinking more in the social-cultural sense than the political.   When we were a predominantly religious (e.g. Christian) culture, perhaps it was the various "Good Books" and the church leadership(s)...  Priests/Pastors/Rabbis/Imams and such?

In spite of *many* giving lip service both to Constitution and Good Books and 10point Tablets, and Golden Rules, it feels like the true operating principles are at least similarly NeoDarwinism (of which I think Stephen and Dave have both spoken against) and NeoLIberalism (which many speak against, notably Glen here I think)  and .  

But these are more like abstractions and institutions rather than dynamic-coherence-maintaining processes which is how I apprehend the id, ego, superego to be?  While the Constitution is nominally a "living document" (with amendments allowed)... the Good Book(s) are generally not allowed to be revised (albeit continued revelations seem to be common such as via Joseph Smith, David Karesh, a multitude of Yogis, etc.)   I suppose that in some sense these artifacts encode/reflect the superego, I'm maybe looking for something more "organic".   Any current existing *governing body* would seem to be a somewhat more mutable super-ego, and the pop-culture "equivalent" might be what?

- Steve

p.s.  do a Google search of "superego", Steve.

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 7:12 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Well, you could say that the Constitution is a kind of superego.  It's interesting that Trump resents the ways in which it constrains him.  He tries to get around it with surprising success thanks to sycophants like Barr et al.

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 7:04 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank -

  And that trait ingratiates with those amongst us who have base impulses for which we fear we might be shamed.

Ah, but HIS is a SuperDuperEgo... just ask him, he'll tell ya!

I don't know what your stake (or dog in the fight or ... pick a metaphor) is regarding collective consciousness/awareness/intelligence/wisdom/action in the abstract but it seems your background would support having an opinion or more to the point a thought-through-thought or two on the topic.

If there are suitable parallels between individual consciousness and collective versions of it, what would be the superego of a culture, people, nation-state, etc.?

- Steve

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[Steve Smith]

> Yes, you could say that government in general and especially lawmakers
> are our superego.  The best common word synonym for superego is
> conscience.  Since a lot of people have lacunae of their own superego
> we need laws and law enforcers.

So right now we are in the midst of a collective id/ego/superego that is
experiencing a dissociative episode, both governmental and social?

to the extent the analogy holds, what is an exit/recovery strategy?

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

My solution is to elect Biden and to use Trump as an example of the kind of person to never elect again.  But that's just me.

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 8:15 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Yes, you could say that government in general and especially lawmakers
> are our superego.  The best common word synonym for superego is
> conscience.  Since a lot of people have lacunae of their own superego
> we need laws and law enforcers.

So right now we are in the midst of a collective id/ego/superego that is
experiencing a dissociative episode, both governmental and social?

to the extent the analogy holds, what is an exit/recovery strategy?

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
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[Steve Smith]

My solution is to elect Biden and to use Trump as an example of the kind of person to never elect again.  But that's just me.

Sounds like a partial lobotomy.   I'm game for this... but not sure it is more than "a good start", which of course is, in fact, a good start.

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 8:15 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Yes, you could say that government in general and especially lawmakers
> are our superego.  The best common word synonym for superego is
> conscience.  Since a lot of people have lacunae of their own superego
> we need laws and law enforcers.

So right now we are in the midst of a collective id/ego/superego that is
experiencing a dissociative episode, both governmental and social?

to the extent the analogy holds, what is an exit/recovery strategy?

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
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[Eric Charles-2]

"Perhaps I should have said, early on, “Look, I’m sorry, I keep seeing you  as Uncle Remus.  I am sure, as I get to know you better, I will get over it.  Please be patient with me, and please call me out whenever you feel confined by it. ” 

 

A Liberalism that does not free me is not worth the name."

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 11:19 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

My solution is to elect Biden and to use Trump as an example of the kind of person to never elect again.  But that's just me.

Sounds like a partial lobotomy.   I'm game for this... but not sure it is more than "a good start", which of course is, in fact, a good start.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 8:15 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Yes, you could say that government in general and especially lawmakers
> are our superego.  The best common word synonym for superego is
> conscience.  Since a lot of people have lacunae of their own superego
> we need laws and law enforcers.

So right now we are in the midst of a collective id/ego/superego that is
experiencing a dissociative episode, both governmental and social?

to the extent the analogy holds, what is an exit/recovery strategy?

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
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[thompnickson2]

Eric,

 

The truth he tells is that he sees elephants.  There are no elephants.  But there are a lot of people who see elephants, and they are weary unto death of pretending that they don’t see them.   When Trump speaks, they get to say, “Oh, you see elephants, too!  I am not the only one!”

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, September 5, 2020 11:01 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] OFFLINE:Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

 

"Perhaps I should have said, early on, “Look, I’m sorry, I keep seeing you  as Uncle Remus.  I am sure, as I get to know you better, I will get over it.  Please be patient with me, and please call me out whenever you feel confined by it. ” 

 

A Liberalism that does not free me is not worth the name."

 

It will probably not surprise you to know that I find this narration baffling. You definitely could say that to him, at any time. There is nothing "liberal" about feeling trapped to not discuss something like that. If you felt trapped for a bit, not saying anything seems wise. However, at some point, you just say it, or give up on the idea that you actually have a problem with it. Personally, I'd stay away from an Uncle Remus reference, but the whole point here is that the two of you are old, so it might make sense in your world. At any rate, the worst case result will be that you have been honest with him, and he never spoke to you again. Which is, IMHO, a better outcome than your not being honest with him, and he never spoke to you again, which seems to be where you are now. Sometimes, certainly not always, but sometimes, when I make moves like that in a conversation, you later express admiration and/or envy. 

 

I think this relates to the larger question of what some people see in Trump. They see him as constantly pointing out what they (his fans) see as the "elephant in the room." Sure, he says a boat load of other things, and lots of those things are not true, but those aren't the important things. "Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?" is a great example of a perceived elephant. "There are good people on both sides" is another, as is the recent dust-up about "anti-racist" workshops. When Trump gets hammered for saying such things, they take away 1) See I was right not to risk saying that myself, because my supposedly friendly, supposedly open-minded neighbors would have attacked me just for saying it, and maybe even tried to get me fired, because apparently they think my kids should go hungry if I think something they don't like. 2) Thank God someone had the guts to ask the question! 3) What kind of crazy country do these libs want to turn us into, with all these elephants wandering all around the room, and it's not even enough to not say anything, because now you gotta be worried about getting fired if they think you might even have looked at one? 4) If I could be me, but also have the guts to talk about the elephants, I would be A Better Person. He talks about the elephants, so he is A Better Person. 

 

Did that comparison hold together? It felt like it did.

 

 

 

 

P.S. Add on top of that that a huge chunk of the "lies" are puffery, which amounts to telling his supporters that it is ok to feel good about themselves and good about their country. This started in earnest with the claims about inauguration attendance and continues, for example, with any suggestion that we might be doing anything half-decent with our Covid response. When Trump gets hammered for saying such things, they take away 1) I guess the libs really do want us to feel bad about our country. 2) They really think it would be horrible if I felt good about myself for even a minute. 3) They are ok judging me when they know nothing about me. 

 

 

 

 

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 11:19 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

My solution is to elect Biden and to use Trump as an example of the kind of person to never elect again.  But that's just me.

Sounds like a partial lobotomy.   I'm game for this... but not sure it is more than "a good start", which of course is, in fact, a good start.

 

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 8:15 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Yes, you could say that government in general and especially lawmakers
> are our superego.  The best common word synonym for superego is
> conscience.  Since a lot of people have lacunae of their own superego
> we need laws and law enforcers.

So right now we are in the midst of a collective id/ego/superego that is
experiencing a dissociative episode, both governmental and social?

to the extent the analogy holds, what is an exit/recovery strategy?

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
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[Eric Charles-2]

"The truth he tells is that he sees elephants.  There are no elephants.  But there are a lot of people who see elephants, and they are weary unto death of pretending that they don’t see them. " 

On Sun, Sep 6, 2020 at 1:25 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

 

The truth he tells is that he sees elephants.  There are no elephants.  But there are a lot of people who see elephants, and they are weary unto death of pretending that they don’t see them.   When Trump speaks, they get to say, “Oh, you see elephants, too!  I am not the only one!”

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, September 5, 2020 11:01 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] OFFLINE:Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

 

"Perhaps I should have said, early on, “Look, I’m sorry, I keep seeing you  as Uncle Remus.  I am sure, as I get to know you better, I will get over it.  Please be patient with me, and please call me out whenever you feel confined by it. ” 

 

A Liberalism that does not free me is not worth the name."

 

It will probably not surprise you to know that I find this narration baffling. You definitely could say that to him, at any time. There is nothing "liberal" about feeling trapped to not discuss something like that. If you felt trapped for a bit, not saying anything seems wise. However, at some point, you just say it, or give up on the idea that you actually have a problem with it. Personally, I'd stay away from an Uncle Remus reference, but the whole point here is that the two of you are old, so it might make sense in your world. At any rate, the worst case result will be that you have been honest with him, and he never spoke to you again. Which is, IMHO, a better outcome than your not being honest with him, and he never spoke to you again, which seems to be where you are now. Sometimes, certainly not always, but sometimes, when I make moves like that in a conversation, you later express admiration and/or envy. 

 

I think this relates to the larger question of what some people see in Trump. They see him as constantly pointing out what they (his fans) see as the "elephant in the room." Sure, he says a boat load of other things, and lots of those things are not true, but those aren't the important things. "Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?" is a great example of a perceived elephant. "There are good people on both sides" is another, as is the recent dust-up about "anti-racist" workshops. When Trump gets hammered for saying such things, they take away 1) See I was right not to risk saying that myself, because my supposedly friendly, supposedly open-minded neighbors would have attacked me just for saying it, and maybe even tried to get me fired, because apparently they think my kids should go hungry if I think something they don't like. 2) Thank God someone had the guts to ask the question! 3) What kind of crazy country do these libs want to turn us into, with all these elephants wandering all around the room, and it's not even enough to not say anything, because now you gotta be worried about getting fired if they think you might even have looked at one? 4) If I could be me, but also have the guts to talk about the elephants, I would be A Better Person. He talks about the elephants, so he is A Better Person. 

 

Did that comparison hold together? It felt like it did.

 

 

 

 

P.S. Add on top of that that a huge chunk of the "lies" are puffery, which amounts to telling his supporters that it is ok to feel good about themselves and good about their country. This started in earnest with the claims about inauguration attendance and continues, for example, with any suggestion that we might be doing anything half-decent with our Covid response. When Trump gets hammered for saying such things, they take away 1) I guess the libs really do want us to feel bad about our country. 2) They really think it would be horrible if I felt good about myself for even a minute. 3) They are ok judging me when they know nothing about me. 

 

 

 

 

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 11:19 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

My solution is to elect Biden and to use Trump as an example of the kind of person to never elect again.  But that's just me.

Sounds like a partial lobotomy.   I'm game for this... but not sure it is more than "a good start", which of course is, in fact, a good start.

 

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 8:15 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Yes, you could say that government in general and especially lawmakers
> are our superego.  The best common word synonym for superego is
> conscience.  Since a lot of people have lacunae of their own superego
> we need laws and law enforcers.

So right now we are in the midst of a collective id/ego/superego that is
experiencing a dissociative episode, both governmental and social?

to the extent the analogy holds, what is an exit/recovery strategy?

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[thompnickson2]

Eric (in your capacity as the one who inspired me to write) and others,

 

You can write about “Nick” just so long as you are writing about the Transcendental Nick, not the actual one.  Is that clear?  Glen, and I are having a discussion on this very point, off line.  Just who is it that we are writing to when we write to a list? 

 

Look, everything you say is true about elephants.  And you are right, I don’t get to declaim that there are no elephants, as long a single person is behaving as if he sees one.  But remember I was writing about Trump and trying to get my head around somebody who forgives Trump for being a liar by asserting that “He tells it like it is!”  What could that possibly mean? 

 

When Trump stands by a Vietnam-era soldier’s grave, in the presence of that soldier’s father, and says, “I don’t get it; what did they get out of it?”  something in me responds, that I have a hard time talking about.   I cannot imagine sending my grandchildren to war, particularly not any of the wars we have fought in my lifetime.  So, odious as Trump’s expression was, in the context in which it occurred, it speaks for a part of me.  Trump tells the truth about these nether impulses that some of us harbor.   He speaks truthfully of my inner redneck.  He tells it like it is. 

 

Nick

 

 

 

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Monday, September 7, 2020 12:30 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] OFFLINE:Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

 

"The truth he tells is that he sees elephants.  There are no elephants.  But there are a lot of people who see elephants, and they are weary unto death of pretending that they don’t see them. " 

 

Nope, nope, nope. Anyone else on this list gets to say that, and maybe I would even agree with it coming from anyone else, but Nick Thompson does not get to say that. Nick must concede that there is something those people are responding to, and does not get to assert "there are no elephants." Nick must concede, both as a New Realist and as the type of New England Liberal he strives to be, that there is a point of view from which there are elephants in the room, and that he has some obligation to meet the people at the place where that view is, especially if he wants to try to talk those people into moving somewhere else. And he can't do that while also making a blanket declaration of the non-existence of the elephants. 

 

Nick could be fully consistent with what I have said above while also believing that the elephant-seeing point of view is (developmentally speaking) some sort of unstable equilibrium, and that those people would change when exposed to additional aspects of the world -- whereas Nick's own non-elephant-seeing point of view is (developmentally speaking) a much more stable equilibrium, robust to the effects of wider-world exposure.* The problem comes when Nick wants to assert that in a mythic future, when the dust of investigation settles, and everyone has experienced all there is to experience about the world, the elephant-seeing view will be gone, and only the non-elephant-seeing view will remain. (With that being what we are shaking our stick at with claims regarding "truth" and "real".) But if psychology works like the other sciences, that is not what will happen. Rather, in that mythic future, we will have mapped out the conditions under which elephant-seeing occurs and the situations in which it does not.** This is just as the chemist maps out situations in which a given chemical reaction occurs and situations in which it does not, and just as a mathematician maps out the postulates combinations that lead to certain mathematical phenomena. In the end, when the dust of investigation settles, we will understand the conditions under which elephant-seeing occurs and the situations under which it does not. And when we find ourselves in a world that meets elephant-seeing conditions (among the concaphone of conditions present at any given time), we must admit that there is a place to stand from which elephants will be seen!

 

 

 

*  That is, of course, an empirical assertion, and as Nick tries to share aspects of the world with them, those other people will no doubt try to share with him, and the robustness of both sides will be tested.

 

** I hope it is clear that "situation" is being used in the broadest sense of the word, to include the developmental history of those involved, among other factors.  

 

P.S. I know Nick doesn't like it when messages over the FRIAM list get overly personal, but I hope you will all indulge me on occasion, as the issues seem pertinent to several past and present discussions on the list. 

 

 

On Sun, Sep 6, 2020 at 1:25 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

 

The truth he tells is that he sees elephants.  There are no elephants.  But there are a lot of people who see elephants, and they are weary unto death of pretending that they don’t see them.   When Trump speaks, they get to say, “Oh, you see elephants, too!  I am not the only one!”

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, September 5, 2020 11:01 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] OFFLINE:Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

 

"Perhaps I should have said, early on, “Look, I’m sorry, I keep seeing you  as Uncle Remus.  I am sure, as I get to know you better, I will get over it.  Please be patient with me, and please call me out whenever you feel confined by it. ” 

 

A Liberalism that does not free me is not worth the name."

 

It will probably not surprise you to know that I find this narration baffling. You definitely could say that to him, at any time. There is nothing "liberal" about feeling trapped to not discuss something like that. If you felt trapped for a bit, not saying anything seems wise. However, at some point, you just say it, or give up on the idea that you actually have a problem with it. Personally, I'd stay away from an Uncle Remus reference, but the whole point here is that the two of you are old, so it might make sense in your world. At any rate, the worst case result will be that you have been honest with him, and he never spoke to you again. Which is, IMHO, a better outcome than your not being honest with him, and he never spoke to you again, which seems to be where you are now. Sometimes, certainly not always, but sometimes, when I make moves like that in a conversation, you later express admiration and/or envy. 

 

I think this relates to the larger question of what some people see in Trump. They see him as constantly pointing out what they (his fans) see as the "elephant in the room." Sure, he says a boat load of other things, and lots of those things are not true, but those aren't the important things. "Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?" is a great example of a perceived elephant. "There are good people on both sides" is another, as is the recent dust-up about "anti-racist" workshops. When Trump gets hammered for saying such things, they take away 1) See I was right not to risk saying that myself, because my supposedly friendly, supposedly open-minded neighbors would have attacked me just for saying it, and maybe even tried to get me fired, because apparently they think my kids should go hungry if I think something they don't like. 2) Thank God someone had the guts to ask the question! 3) What kind of crazy country do these libs want to turn us into, with all these elephants wandering all around the room, and it's not even enough to not say anything, because now you gotta be worried about getting fired if they think you might even have looked at one? 4) If I could be me, but also have the guts to talk about the elephants, I would be A Better Person. He talks about the elephants, so he is A Better Person. 

 

Did that comparison hold together? It felt like it did.

 

 

 

 

P.S. Add on top of that that a huge chunk of the "lies" are puffery, which amounts to telling his supporters that it is ok to feel good about themselves and good about their country. This started in earnest with the claims about inauguration attendance and continues, for example, with any suggestion that we might be doing anything half-decent with our Covid response. When Trump gets hammered for saying such things, they take away 1) I guess the libs really do want us to feel bad about our country. 2) They really think it would be horrible if I felt good about myself for even a minute. 3) They are ok judging me when they know nothing about me. 

 

 

 

 

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 11:19 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

My solution is to elect Biden and to use Trump as an example of the kind of person to never elect again.  But that's just me.

Sounds like a partial lobotomy.   I'm game for this... but not sure it is more than "a good start", which of course is, in fact, a good start.

 

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 8:15 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Yes, you could say that government in general and especially lawmakers
> are our superego.  The best common word synonym for superego is
> conscience.  Since a lot of people have lacunae of their own superego
> we need laws and law enforcers.

So right now we are in the midst of a collective id/ego/superego that is
experiencing a dissociative episode, both governmental and social?

to the extent the analogy holds, what is an exit/recovery strategy?

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[David Eric Smith]

It’s interesting you should have ended your email with that term, Nick.

I just (in a different medium) learned the meaning of it a few weeks ago.  But a more complete source is

https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2015/05/20/is-west-virginia-s-coal-history-a-goldmine-mine-wars/

It complicates the sense of what you should be concerned about responding to.

Eric

On Sep 7, 2020, at 4:43 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric (in your capacity as the one who inspired me to write) and others,

 

You can write about “Nick” just so long as you are writing about the Transcendental Nick, not the actual one.  Is that clear?  Glen, and I are having a discussion on this very point, off line.  Just who is it that we are writing to when we write to a list?  

 

Look, everything you say is true about elephants.  And you are right, I don’t get to declaim that there are no elephants, as long a single person is behaving as if he sees one.  But remember I was writing about Trump and trying to get my head around somebody who forgives Trump for being a liar by asserting that “He tells it like it is!”  What could that possibly mean?  

 

When Trump stands by a Vietnam-era soldier’s grave, in the presence of that soldier’s father, and says, “I don’t get it; what did they get out of it?”  something in me responds, that I have a hard time talking about.   I cannot imagine sending my grandchildren to war, particularly not any of the wars we have fought in my lifetime.  So, odious as Trump’s expression was, in the context in which it occurred, it speaks for a part of me.  Trump tells the truth about these nether impulses that some of us harbor.   He speaks truthfully of my inner redneck.  He tells it like it is.  

 

Nick 

 

 

 

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Monday, September 7, 2020 12:30 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] OFFLINE:Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

 

"The truth he tells is that he sees elephants.  There are no elephants.  But there are a lot of people who see elephants, and they are weary unto death of pretending that they don’t see them. " 

 

Nope, nope, nope. Anyone else on this list gets to say that, and maybe I would even agree with it coming from anyone else, but Nick Thompson does not get to say that. Nick must concede that there is something those people are responding to, and does not get to assert "there are no elephants." Nick must concede, both as a New Realist and as the type of New England Liberal he strives to be, that there is a point of view from which there are elephants in the room, and that he has some obligation to meet the people at the place where that view is, especially if he wants to try to talk those people into moving somewhere else. And he can't do that while also making a blanket declaration of the non-existence of the elephants. 

 

Nick could be fully consistent with what I have said above while also believing that the elephant-seeing point of view is (developmentally speaking) some sort of unstable equilibrium, and that those people would change when exposed to additional aspects of the world -- whereas Nick's own non-elephant-seeing point of view is (developmentally speaking) a much more stable equilibrium, robust to the effects of wider-world exposure.* The problem comes when Nick wants to assert that in a mythic future, when the dust of investigation settles, and everyone has experienced all there is to experience about the world, the elephant-seeing view will be gone, and only the non-elephant-seeing view will remain. (With that being what we are shaking our stick at with claims regarding "truth" and "real".) But if psychology works like the other sciences, that is not what will happen. Rather, in that mythic future, we will have mapped out the conditions under which elephant-seeing occurs and the situations in which it does not.** This is just as the chemist maps out situations in which a given chemical reaction occurs and situations in which it does not, and just as a mathematician maps out the postulates combinations that lead to certain mathematical phenomena. In the end, when the dust of investigation settles, we will understand the conditions under which elephant-seeing occurs and the situations under which it does not. And when we find ourselves in a world that meets elephant-seeing conditions (among the concaphone of conditions present at any given time), we must admit that there is a place to stand from which elephants will be seen!

 

 

 

*  That is, of course, an empirical assertion, and as Nick tries to share aspects of the world with them, those other people will no doubt try to share with him, and the robustness of both sides will be tested.

 

** I hope it is clear that "situation" is being used in the broadest sense of the word, to include the developmental history of those involved, among other factors.  

 

P.S. I know Nick doesn't like it when messages over the FRIAM list get overly personal, but I hope you will all indulge me on occasion, as the issues seem pertinent to several past and present discussions on the list. 

 

 

On Sun, Sep 6, 2020 at 1:25 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

 

The truth he tells is that he sees elephants.  There are no elephants.  But there are a lot of people who see elephants, and they are weary unto death of pretending that they don’t see them.   When Trump speaks, they get to say, “Oh, you see elephants, too!  I am not the only one!” 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, September 5, 2020 11:01 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] OFFLINE:Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening

 

"Perhaps I should have said, early on, “Look, I’m sorry, I keep seeing you  as Uncle Remus.  I am sure, as I get to know you better, I will get over it.  Please be patient with me, and please call me out whenever you feel confined by it. ” 

 

A Liberalism that does not free me is not worth the name."

 

It will probably not surprise you to know that I find this narration baffling. You definitely could say that to him, at any time. There is nothing "liberal" about feeling trapped to not discuss something like that. If you felt trapped for a bit, not saying anything seems wise. However, at some point, you just say it, or give up on the idea that you actually have a problem with it. Personally, I'd stay away from an Uncle Remus reference, but the whole point here is that the two of you are old, so it might make sense in your world. At any rate, the worst case result will be that you have been honest with him, and he never spoke to you again. Which is, IMHO, a better outcome than your not being honest with him, and he never spoke to you again, which seems to be where you are now. Sometimes, certainly not always, but sometimes, when I make moves like that in a conversation, you later express admiration and/or envy. 

 

I think this relates to the larger question of what some people see in Trump. They see him as constantly pointing out what they (his fans) see as the "elephant in the room." Sure, he says a boat load of other things, and lots of those things are not true, but those aren't the important things. "Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?" is a great example of a perceived elephant. "There are good people on both sides" is another, as is the recent dust-up about "anti-racist" workshops. When Trump gets hammered for saying such things, they take away 1) See I was right not to risk saying that myself, because my supposedly friendly, supposedly open-minded neighbors would have attacked me just for saying it, and maybe even tried to get me fired, because apparently they think my kids should go hungry if I think something they don't like. 2) Thank God someone had the guts to ask the question! 3) What kind of crazy country do these libs want to turn us into, with all these elephants wandering all around the room, and it's not even enough to not say anything, because now you gotta be worried about getting fired if they think you might even have looked at one? 4) If I could be me, but also have the guts to talk about the elephants, I would be A Better Person. He talks about the elephants, so he is A Better Person. 

 

Did that comparison hold together? It felt like it did.

 

 

 

 

P.S. Add on top of that that a huge chunk of the "lies" are puffery, which amounts to telling his supporters that it is ok to feel good about themselves and good about their country. This started in earnest with the claims about inauguration attendance and continues, for example, with any suggestion that we might be doing anything half-decent with our Covid response. When Trump gets hammered for saying such things, they take away 1) I guess the libs really do want us to feel bad about our country. 2) They really think it would be horrible if I felt good about myself for even a minute. 3) They are ok judging me when they know nothing about me. 

 

 

 

 

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 11:19 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

My solution is to elect Biden and to use Trump as an example of the kind of person to never elect again.  But that's just me.

Sounds like a partial lobotomy.   I'm game for this... but not sure it is more than "a good start", which of course is, in fact, a good start.

 

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 8:15 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Yes, you could say that government in general and especially lawmakers
> are our superego.  The best common word synonym for superego is
> conscience.  Since a lot of people have lacunae of their own superego
> we need laws and law enforcers.

So right now we are in the midst of a collective id/ego/superego that is
experiencing a dissociative episode, both governmental and social?

to the extent the analogy holds, what is an exit/recovery strategy?

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