PHILOSOPHY WORKS !

In the contemporary world (USA version) I wonder if the name

Søren Kierkegaard

is known by anyone any more, except by a few philosophy professors. And from what I hear of the state of American higher education these days, I think that even those professors may no longer be allowed to teach Kierkegaard’s work to anyone but philosophy graduate students.

But college was different 40 years ago, and difficult old philosophers were thought then to be worth undergraduates’ time, so I walked into the third meeting of my Existentialism class in the early spring of 1968 absolutely ignorant of philosophy and ripe to be snared by the mere first paragraph by Mr. K’s great book The Sickness Unto Death.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a philosopher with a twist–a pioneering analyst of despair whose description of the many varieties of that state later became, I believe, the source of one of the most familiar truisms of our present place and time:

Be yourself!

aka

High self esteem is good for you.

We didn’t know about “self-esteem” back in 1968. And if I had ever made enough progress in the first reading assignment for that class in  to discover the original progenitor of that self esteem concept lurking in The Sickness Unto Death I wouldn’t have understood it anyway. Mr. K’s description of the various kinds of sorrow that can come to one who does not accept himself* would have fallen on deaf ears for me then for one very simple reason—I couldn’t stand myself.

I had no self-esteem at all. In its place I had grandiosity. After a lifetime of abuse of various sorts, I saw myself as simply a kind of unwanted and inchoate mess….

…”but that’s OK”, I always thought back then, when I was forced to take notice of what an unsavory creature I seemed to be, “because I’m going TO DO GREAT THINGS SOMEDAY…”

…”because I’m SO SMART!”

Could there be any kind of person in the world better prepared to be stopped dead by the following gaudily incomprehensible  introductory sentence of The Sickness Unto Death?

A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation relating itself to itself in the relation.

Nope. Someone with vast intellectual pretensions constructed on a foundation of nothing, like I was then, was maybe never going to get past that sentence.

And I never did. I was the guy, after all, who was so smart that I could understand anything if I only put my mind to it! I exhausted myself pondering the meaning of K’s impenetrable introductory sentence and a few very abstract pages following it, and never read further into the book to discover the much more accessible, and very insightful, dissection of spiritual despair in all its varieties that was to be found there.

Too bad! Because it was information that I could have used, and at that time in fact desperately needed. I might even say that if I had absorbed what Kierkegaard had to say and realized how much it applied to me then, the experience might have changed the rest of  my life for the better.

So don’t  you be the same as I was! And don’t be the opposite kind of person, who yells “BORING!” and runs away in panic when confronted with anything “hard”, either!  Instead, take a look at this brief appreciation of Søren Kierkegaard:

http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/kierkegaard-on-the-couch/?em

As for me, 25 years after that first abortive encounter I got out my old copy of The Sickness Unto Death and skipped the hard first part and read the perfectly accessible remainder.  The experience was instrumental in making me what I am now — very odd, and OK with that.

The desire to be some other self than one’s own sweet, inescapable one-and-only self wears many disguises, and Mr. K. describes them all. Some of them you wouldn’t guess in a million years.

Who knows? You might be wearing one of  those right now. Buy the book and see.

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*Kierkegaard wasn’t writing a self-help book. He was proselytizing. His purpose was to show that a human self, being partially a spiritual being, had to be “grounded” in God to avoid falling into despair. Without that connection, the self would be unstable, and would be forever pursuing things to complete it that could not complete it. Anyone who watches the antics of the powerful people of the earth for a while, as they display this “seeking” behavior in various forms on a huge scale, would have to agree. See, most recently, American investment bankers.

JUNK FOOD TURNS RATS INTO ADDICTS!

This has truly rocked my world:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/48605/title/Junk_food_turns_rats_into_addicts

 

Cordially,

Nightman1 (major junk food addict in my youth)

SCREWED BY THE RECESSION? HERE’S WHY.

Knowledge is when you have ideas.

Ideology is when ideas have you.

At the url below you can see a history of a period in the late 1990s when one lady in Washington tried to go against the prevailing economic ideology of the last 30 years — which we later saw crash and burn so spectacularly in October of 2008.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/#morelink

MAD CAPITALISM

A couple of decades ago, certain wealthy interests began buying up radio stations, stripping their staffs down to the absolute minimum needed to function, removing local programming from them, and then borrowing money against them to buy still more stations to add to their collections — and so on, ad nauseum. The cashflow from the stations was very nice for those rich folk, and no-one much cared about all the laid-off employees to whom much of that money had once gone to in the form of salaries.

The radio broadcasting version of the story of American business over the last 40 years, in short.

Later, after this consolidation had gone on for a long time, radio began losing listeners because only a few broadcasting formats were allowed by the amalgamation masters, and younger people were bored with them. For God’s sake, even I, a crusty old bably boomer, don’t want to hear songs from the past over and over and over again, daily and forever.

Now one of those eaters of stations, Citadel Communicatons, seems to be headed toward bankruptcy. Here is an interesting discussion of how the company’s immediate future is likely to play out, from a commentator on the radio business who has been prescient on the future of radio under the amalgamators for years:

http://insidemusicmedia.blogspot.com/2009/10/pre-packaged-bankruptcy-for-citadel.html

NOT ALL NOSTALGIA IS LAME

I am 61.

I recently ran into a woman I went to high school with whom I hadn’t seen in 40 years. She wasn’t an old girlfriend, or one of the people who were my really close friends, but I always liked her. Back when I was in high school, though, I also looked down on her, for some reason I can’t now define. I liked her, but I didn’t value her as much as she deserved for her sweetness of temperament, which even I could perceive even back then, and which she still has. That was a bad  mistake, since that is one of the greatest virtues a person can have — and I could  really have used a wife like that over the last 40 years!

I’m becoming one of the uncountable multitudes of folks who have begun to grow old and upon doing so have noticed that they had really poor judgment about lots of things for most of their lives.

Still, it’s an interesting and pleasant process. Many a stubborn person must have had this experience before me and also said, “Hey, the world’s way bigger than I thought!”

Some of you boomers may remember the song “Clouds” by Judy Collins, which was popular around 1968. It ended with the refrain:

“I’ve looked at life from both sides now, from win and lose, and still somehow
It’s life’s illusions I recall. I really don’t know life at all.”

Now I understand that song.

WE HAVE ENOUGH OF THESE ALREADY!

It’s rare to read a story about something that I consider not only deplorable in every present detail, but also bad in all of its implications for the future, and positively frightening in some of them.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8287740.stm

We seem to be a species whose instincts and most basic cultural tendencies still fit the sparsely settled, tribal world in which homo sapiens evolved. Unfortunately that ancient world is as far in condition from the present one as it’s possible to get.

Thank you Mr. Malthus for raising the alarm on this whole matter some time ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthus

BEWILDERED WORKERS

When I was a little boy growing up in a poor family WAY back in the early 1960, I was really into learning things. My stern mom always gave me a smile when she signed my report card.

Later I became a teenager and began to wonder just why we were so poor and others in town so clearly weren’t. What did they know or have that we didn’t, that condemned us to be perpetually one mortgage payment away from the streets? I became then and remain to this day furious at that disparity, well expressed for me in 1966 by the Doors in these two lines:

Some are born to sweet delight,

And some are born to the endless night.

Still later I went to college and some of this mystery was dispelled…but that’s not what this post is about.

No, this post is about how I’ve always been able to see over the past two decades why Rush Limbaugh et al. appeal so strongly  to poor people — poor white people in the South particularly –, even though the fundamental program of the Right has always tended to work to the advantage of the rich, not the poor.

This lady (commenting on an article in the New York Times that I’ll cite later) expresses my understanding of this strangely self-contradictory phenomenon perfectly:

“I don’t know whether to call it nostalgia or anachronism, but this idea that there is some “working class” or “blue collar class” in this country does not fit the times. Outside of the wealthy we have a remnant of what used to be the true middle class. At this point, these are mostly sales people who can manage $100k plus along with a few remaining professionals, technical workers and some managers. If you don’t fall into one of those two categories, you’re just poor.

The poor are the people with the $10 hour jobs, if they have jobs. No benefits — no paid vacation, no paid days off, no paid sick time, no health insurance. If you show up and work, you get paid. If you don’t show up, you hope you don’t lose the job. If you’re part of a family and live in a home together, probably most people living in the house have one or more such jobs. You’re never sure you can get enough money to pay the rent, electric, gas, water, sewer, garbage collection, medical bills, credit cards, etc., etc. You feel under siege most days.

The poor generally do not have the thinking ability afforded by a good education. In a country with a failed basic education system, they may be high school graduates, but they cannot read well enough to clearly understand meanings in things like newspapers and magazines. They are large consumers of “free” media — broadcast television and radio. Without critical thinking ability they are the rabble being roused by hucksters with nothing but their own self interest at heart. Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly, and Rupert Murdoch care only about possessing power and the money that comes with it.

Consuming that media, the poor are angry because they see themselves as being left out. Every show, fictional or otherwise shows people they believe are like them as being far better off than they are. The TV characters have better cars, nice houses, and they have no real worries outside of the scripted drama that is resolved so easily in the denouement. In the morning, the poor have to get up early, hope their 12-year-old car will start and make it to work if they can afford to put gas in it. This is a harsh and bitter reality that is almost a cognitive dissonance in contrast to the way they believe life is for most other people.

When they drive too fast on the way to work, police give them a ticket for speeding and the fine amount rivals their weekly take-home pay. Meanwhile they see politicians accused of crimes, and years later nothing has been done about it. They see police officers shoot apparently innocent people, and they get away with it. They hear about corporate executives being released from their responsibilities (fired) and given $25 million to take home with them. And when the poor don’t have the money to pay their speeding ticket a warrant is issued for their arrest. That leads to the loss of the car and the job and perhaps everything else they thought they had worked for.

These poor people are angry. They have a right to be angry. They were told in school they were being prepared for the “American dream.” Life was going to be the pursuit of more happiness today than yesterday. But they didn’t understand that their education was woefully inadequate to comprehend the current world. They weren’t told that corporations care about profit and nothing else, least of all them and their lives. They can’t accept that what they see and hear in the media they consume is a fantasy meant to take advantage of them in a hundred different ways. I could compare them to lost children wandering aimlessly around huge shopping malls angrily screaming at people in the food court who somehow have enough to eat.

We adults who have figured out how to get some food are at a loss to understand these people at their rallies saying the president is a monster. And calling them the working class or blue collar makes no more sense than labeling them “conservatives” or “patriots” or loose cannon for that matter.

They are simply poor. They are without hope. And they cannot understand what’s going on when they look at the Mercedes next to them at the stoplight and a black woman is in the driver seat. So they turn up the radio and Glenn Beck tells them Obama is causing it all. It has nothing to do with either work or class.”

— Tracy

If I had stayed in East Texas and  stayed uneducated, and there had been a Rush Limbaugh or Glen Beck on the radio then, I would have believed everything he said!

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The comment quoted above was to this article:

http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/working-class-zero/

WHAT DOES DEPRESSION FEEL LIKE?

If it’s the disease “major depression” it feels just like THIS:

http://anothernobody.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/more-badd-rantings-anti-depressants