So Freud was looking at it in one direction, but religion had looked at the same issue from the ancient perspective.

Martial arts and warriors had looked at it from the physical perspective, linking to the mind and spirit.

In spite of the fact that schools exist for the sake of education, there is many a school whose pupils show a peculiar “school helplessness”; that is, they are capable of less initiative in connection with their school tasks than they commonly exhibit in the accomplishment of other tasks.

that is a quote from 1909, How to Study and Teaching How to Study (McMurry). The book was much cited prior to 1926, but it seems the “education” academia establishment has abandoned all the scholarship prior to 1930, which seem to synch up with a take over of the “collective” paradigm vice the earlier education of independent citizens.

It’s not really an unexpected problem, it is one of the problems cities present, vice organizing on the township or county level. Cities are collective organizations that by providing so many services reduce the the resident to a mere element of the collective. With the standard abuses that entails.

Freedom of speech and freedom of thought are catchpenny phrases. There is much of the former, but very little of the latter. Speech is generally the result of automatic thought rather than of ratiocination. Independent thought is of all mental processes the most difficult and the most rare; habit, tradition, and reverence for antiquity unite to forbid it, and these combined influences are strengthened by the law of heredity. The tendency to automatic action of the mind is still further promoted by the environment of modern life. The crowding of populations into cities, and the division and subdivision of labor in the factory and the shop, and even in the so-called learned professions, have a tendency to increase the dependence of the individual upon the mass of society. And this interdependence of the units of society renders them more and more imitative, and hence more and more automatic both mentally and physically.—Charles H. Ham, Mind and Hand: manual training, the chief factor in education (1900)

Things have progressed for the worse as state and the Federal government have undertaken tasks best left to local governments, or at least control of the tasks through funding and one-size-fits-all regulation.

But if we Americans were to set about giving to the state governments things to do that had better be done by counties and towns, and giving the federal government things to do that had better be done by the states, it would not take many generations to dull the keen edge of our political capacity. We should lose it as inevitably as the most consummate of pianists will lose his facility if he stops practicing. It is therefore a fact of cardinal importance that in the United States the local governments of township, county, and city are left to administer themselves instead of being administered by a great bureau with its head at the state capital. —Civil Government in the United States (1902), John Fiske

neo-neocon Says:
August 30th, 2014 at 2:17 pm

DNW:

I am not a psychologist.

My mistake. I assumed you were because of your mention of your practice.

… In my graduate program Freud was barely mentioned.

My undergrad knowledge of psych is rusty, and it was mostly experimental psych rather than clinical. Freud was merely discussed for a week or so in a single course, “Personality Development.” So I can’t say if you’re correct in your characterization of his work, but I don’t think you are.

What I am referring to here, is not Freudian ego psychotherapy and as practiced by Freud per se, but to certain core doctrines widely adapted. Such as the unconscious, as opposed to the conscious and rational as the human animal’s real driving force and probably the authentic man.

You might enjoy reviewing this stuff if you have not recently,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_Guattari

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan#Return_to_Freud

or even this:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1966/psychoanalysis.htm

“My vague memory is that he asserted the primacy of guilt in human development, and was not interested in abolishing it, just in reducing the burden of people who were almost paralyzed by it when in fact they hadn’t done anything all that wrong.”

I think you are right that insofar as Freud himself was concerned guilt was a necessary condition for civilization. He even talked of things such as “perversion”, and seemed to believe in ordered and disordered sexuality.

And of course, re “all that wrong”, you like many of us probably asked your professors if it might not have been the case that what Freud was treating and investigating, was not so much universal human phenomena, as a kind of social class generated series of dysfunctions or phenomena more or less peculiar to fin de siecle Europe.

Nonetheless, his supposed core discovery of the unconscious, reconfigured man mentally and morally, much like Darwin did physically. Man, the artifact. Not of a providential creator, but of a processing, or kaleidoscopically pointless monistic materialism, right down to his non-existent core.

“He was, however, as far as I can see, anti-religion.”

I think that “The Future of an Illusion” pretty well demonstrates that.

“The left being fundamentally irreligious goes straight to the esthetic as its sphere of existence, top-to-bottom. Fundamentally, they can conceive of nothing like a struggle for salvation or redemption before an infinite, transcendent judge. So instead they can only seek to make life interesting (for them).

I suppose the pathological obsession with the interesting is rooted in their antipathy to religion, and it is this obsession which leads to what could be called their political expressionism. They see it as a way to redeem life — to make it bearable, in other words — by making it intriguing. “Compelling drama.” So they express every intense urge they have, be it for absolute license or absolute dictatorial rule, and drown themselves (and us) in the chaotic deluge this generates.”

This aesthetic focus you mention, the modern left’s thrust toward “The Interesting”, and its allegiance to a creative expression, which is seen as forming reality post hoc, while simultaneously emanating from what, or a place (man) which is essentially nowhere and nothing, is probably way too often overlooked.

You hit it. “Redemption” through creative activity. Redemption from what? Why, nothing of course. LOL

I cannot at this moment remember whether it was Peter Berger, or Michael Novak, but one of them, in something they published back in the sixties and which I read 20 years later, offered up “art” as a paradigm in order to resolve the persistently perplexing question as to exactly ‘What are moral principles, fundamentally?’.

How are the moral principles grounded, or deduced, or formed? You can substitute “truths” or some other likely term for “principles”, as long as the gist of question asked remains directed at just what kind or reality it is that moral propositions are presumed to have.

With nothing objective to conform to, we make it up as we go along in the most comforting or sublime manner we can imagine … I guess.

But, within that presumptive framework, there is no essential “we” to be discovered either. “We” as individuals are taken to be a process with no enduring center and no objective point of reference.

Thus, all that existential talk of nothingness finally becomes somewhat clearer to people like me; though liberals may have through some psychological affinity understood it intuitively.

Nothingness is not on this take, some kind of super-attenuated hypothetical “out there” beyond the solar system, behind which there is an absence of God the law-giver, but rather, or better also, the complete lack of a formative essence or an objective reference point within the experiencing subject himself, eh?

I guess if one is really convinced of the absolute pointlessness, ultimately, of all events and actions, then it makes no sense to dully ask after the “meaning” or the “sense” of an urge; much less its ordinateness or its conformity to some non-existent principle.

There are under this scheme no reasons, and no destination, just will.

But, as you ask, the will or who, or what?

It’s clear that, as you point out, liberal morality is incoherent – from the standpoint of how we have always understood “morality” – no matter how you frame and re-frame it.

Modern liberals should, if they wish to be honest, come up with a new vocabulary entirely to express their desires. Something in the line of grunts of satisfaction and snorts of disapproval.

Not likely to be too efficacious when it comes to persuasion though.

On one hand, they can rationalize just about anything. But on the other hand, I don’t agree that they have a strongman dictatorial impulse. While Obama employs Weberian charismatic authority, which is characteristic of dictators, the Left’s power is their full-spectrum social cultural/political activist social movement, not the man. Obama is a valuable agent but not necessary for the Left.

That said, if the Left activist movement determined that their interests are best served with Obama or another personality donning the dictator’s cloak, then they would rationalize it – more likely by arguing the alternative, a version of BDS/anti-GOP, is intolerable rather than arguing for the beauty of dictatorship. Put in those terms, they might be uncomfortable, but they would accept it.

One other thing Republicans must consider is that the people who work for the government tend to lean Democrat. The civil service tends to push its own agenda, working with someone like Obama and against a Reagan or Bush. Putting more power in the hands of the executive branch thereby increases the power of Democrat administrations much more then Republican ones.

But Washington was a product of his culture, a culture that valued rule of law. It was a long established English tradition, cemented for good by the 1688 Revolution (but predating it) that you could not be taxed without representation.

Also note, the English Revolution was also an American revolution, so our actual War of Independence was really our second revolution.

Rachelle, not true. It wasn’t offered. Someone suggested it. But it wasn’t gonna happen. Anglo-Saxon culture at the time had a well established rule of law dating back at least to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The American War of Independence was a follow up on that war, fought for similar reasons of rule of law. We were not going to have a king.

I am not a psychologist. I was a psych major, and I have a master’s in MFT, which is quite different (although these terms are very confusing, I admit). In my graduate program Freud was barely mentioned.

My undergrad knowledge of psych is rusty, and it was mostly experimental psych rather than clinical. Freud was merely discussed for a week or so in a single course, “Personality Development.” So I can’t say if you’re correct in your characterization of his work, but I don’t think you are. My vague memory is that he asserted the primacy of guilt in human development, and was not interested in abolishing it, just in reducing the burden of people who were almost paralyzed by it when in fact they hadn’t done anything all that wrong. He was, however, as far as I can see, anti-religion.