ShrinkWrapped

In His Own Words

One of the under-reported stories from the 1960's is a fundamental change that took place at that time in the male rite of passage.  Ever since the first humans began the arduous trek from primitive tribal societies to civilized society, the male adolescent's progression to adulthood included some rite which demarcated childhood from manhood.  Most of the time this rite of passage was explicitly designed to evince the young prospective man's physical prowess and courage.  There is a clear line of communication from the young tribesman who was expected to kill a lion or bring down a buffalo by himself and the British aristocrat training at Sandhurst.  There were always those who did not take part in such rites, but for the culture's elites, evidence of courage were considered a sine qua non to entry into adulthood.

The mass mobilizations of the last centuries allowed everyman to take part in this rite of passage.  The Bands of Brothers of WWII, in the retrospective popular imagination, were the apotheosis of courage under fire, solidarity, and steadfastness.

During the Vietnam War the children of the elites, to a much greater extent than in previous wars, avoided serving.  This was especially prominent in the children of the liberal elites.  As with any complicated and conflictual behavior, all sorts of psychological reactions ensured.  Via the beauty of the reaction formation, the covert anxiety felt by many was transmuted into its opposite.  The moral of the Vietnam War struggle, for the counter-culture,l was that the truly brave fought against the unjust, imperialistic war.  However, beneath the defensive bravado, the anxiety persisted.  Mark Rudd documents this in his Washington Post op-ed over the weekend:  [HT: Trevor Loudon]

An ex-Weather Underground radical on the Tucson shootings and political violence

In 1970, when I was 22 years old - the same age as Jared Loughner - I was a founder of the Weather Underground, an offshoot of the antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society. That spring, a small contingent of the Weathermen, as we were known, planned to plant three pipe bombs at a noncommissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix, N.J. Our intention was to remind our fellow Americans that our country was dropping napalm and other explosives on Vietnam, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. I wasn't among the bombmakers, but I knew what was in the offing, and to my eternal shame, I didn't try to stop it.

I considered myself an agent of necessity in a political revolution. I'm not sure if Loughner, who seems to suffer from mental illness, can be considered an agent of anything. But I'm sure that if, as alleged, he pulled the trigger, he had convinced himself that he was doing what needed to be done.

At his age, I had thought myself into a similar corner. My willingness to endorse and engage in violence had something to do with an exaggerated sense of my own importance. I wanted to prove myself as a man - a motive exploited by all armies and terrorist groups. [Emphasis mine-SW] I wanted to be a true revolutionary like my guerrilla hero, Ernesto "Che" Guevara. I wanted the chant we used at demonstrations defending the Black Panthers to be more than just words: "The revolution has come/Time to pick up the gun!"

Mark Rudd's use of his own experience to somehow illuminate any aspect of the Tuscon shootings is curious at best.  What is more interesting is that he cannot yet question his own politics:

On March 6, 1970, the Weather Underground's bombs, assembled in a New York townhouse, exploded prematurely. Ted Gold, Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins - three brilliant and passionate young people who had decided that they must become terrorists - were killed. Only by their deaths was the greater tragedy we were plotting avoided. Emotionally shattered, I dropped out of the Weather Underground but remained a fugitive until 1977.

After I turned myself in, I spent the next 25 years trying to figure out why I had made so many disastrous decisions as a young man. One of my conclusions was to pursue only nonviolent action - righteous action still, but without anger or brutality.

It was never Mark Rudd's goals that were problematic, only his means, yet once the Left determines that its goals no longer justifies its means, it is no longer a revolutionary force, but an emasculated one.  If you are fighting oppressors who are tormenting the innocent and helpless, every means must be used; after all, true heroes will risk all to protect the innocent.  The young Leftist must either question his assumptions or condemn himself as a coward. 

Some in the modern Left believe they can attain their goals by stealth; the election of 2010 has made that problematic.  At this point the Left is being repudiated throughout the Civilized world.  As Walter Russell Meade has pointed out, the Social Welfare model of the last half of the 20th century has failed and we have not yet found a  new model.  The great problem for the Left is that they have failed spectacularly.  The Soviet Union is now a kleptocracy surviving off oil; China is a State run Corporation; Cuba can barely feed itself and its much vaunted healthcare system is a shambles for all  but the well connected who can obtain western (Capitalist) medical care; Venezuela is going off a cliff despite its oil; everywhere Socialism has been tried it has failed to do anything but terrorize and consign its people to perdition.

For the new generation of Mark Rudds, who have not yet surrendered their Utopian ideology, there are few options for exhibiting their courage.  They can engage in mindless violence with the anarchists; they can support the oppressed by joining the murderers fashioned in the image of those most lovely of sociopathic killers, "Che" or Yasser; or they can attempt through subterfuge to achieve an impossible dream which has already been repudiated.

The true heroes, men and women of courage, are those few willing to stand up against barbarism in defense of our way of life.  This is an intolerable state of affairs. 

Mark Rudd has the self awareness to recognize that he desperately needed to prove he was not a coward even as his ideology precluded the possibility of doing so; a generation of 60's radicals are still trying to prove their courage and importance; it would be sad if they weren't still dangerous.

From Holden Caulfield to Jihad Jane

Holden Caulfield was the literary embodiment of adolescent existential angst.  He was familiar to all of us who grew up privileged in America.  We were blessed with freedom and amazing wealth compared to every prior generation, but suffered from a paucity of meaning.  The baby boomers grew up in an era where God and country were slowly becoming less important and central than the aggrandizement of the Self.  The 1960s were a time where John F. Kennedy's stirring Inaugural speech on January 20th, 1961:

"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."

Morphed into Grace Slick singing, in 1967's After Bathing at Baxter's:

Rejoyce

Steven won't give his arm
to no gold star mother's farm;
War's good business so give your son
and I'd rather have my country die for me. [Emphasis mine-SW]

The processes that fed the anomie that led to the large scale "rebellion" of youth in the 1960s have not gone away.  As the Western elites have become more and more secular and entitlements and the entitlement mentality have grown (with Europe far in advance of America in their dissolution) hedonism has replaced selfless devotion as a major core dynamic.  "Just do it" is far easier to follow as a commandment than the original Ten Commandments.  Yet, the turn away form traditional religion means that for a significant cohort there is no replacement for the meaning derived form religion.  This is not to suggest that it is impossible to live a life imbued with meaning without believing in God or organized religion; it is to imply that living a life filled with meaning is more difficult without a Deity; the Existentialists have done us no favors by devaluing a structure that has worked for several thousand years.  As a result, once the joys of the hedonistic life have paled, there is often a turn toward spirituality to fill the void.

"Jihobbyists" No More: English-Speaking Western Jihadists Coming of Age

Perhaps the most ironic aspect of all the media attention in the latest criminal allegations against "Jihad Jane" is that Colleen LaRose of Pennsylvania is only the latest example of this odd emerging trend in homegrown terrorism. Indeed, LaRose is hardly alone in this category, whether we speak of London resident Samina Malik, an active user on jihadi social networking forums who busied herself with transcribing Al-Qaida training manuals into English during spare time at her job working in secure areas of Heathrow Airport--or Canadian citizen Beverly Giesbrecht (a.k.a. Khadija Abdul Qahhar), who was taken hostage by the Taliban during rather suspicious travels through North Waziristan. Both men and women who were once written off as hapless wannabes and mere "jihobbyists" are unexpectedly rising to the occasion, in often quite desperate bids to prove their total commitment to the cause.

These individuals are, more frequently than not, English-speaking with only a cursory knowledge of Arabic or the Middle East. Their pedigree is less than elite, and they lack the traditional connections back to Al-Qaida's central leadership. Yet, even Al-Qaida's senior echelon now openly recognizes the critical value of these potential "lone wolf" operatives. In several prominent publications--including both the latest video from American Al-Qaida spokesman Adam Gadahn and the most recent official magazine from Al-Qaida in Yemen--the terror group has openly broadcast its pleasure and interest in the actions of such independent actors as Ft. Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan and Jordanian webmaster and CIA bomber Humam al-Balawi (a.k.a. Abu Dujanah al-Khorasani).

Without meaning in one's life, without the sense that there is a purpose to our existence that transcends our petty appetites, one can develop a terribly skewed view of the world.  If  the world is merely a result of chance and we are only born into comfort or deprivation because of random luck, guilt and rage are to be expected.  Instead of appreciating the bounty with which we are blessed, the anxious and uncertain young person views the unfairness around him and, in the absence of an overarching schema, invents one or adopts one.  At that point, since there is no Satan to supply the evil, it can only be a derivative of man's behavior.  From there, it is a short step to externalizing all one's discontents.  Scapegoating depends upon such Psychological processes.  If you see successful people and a vibrant society, where you do not feel you fit in anywhere, resentment and an exaggerated sense of grievance flow naturally from one's personal psychology to a(n imagined) societal induced anomie. 

Toady our young people, and those who have become fixated or regressed to more infantile positions, can find meaning in such attractive alternatives as the struggle for social justice or for the environment (both offspring of Communism/Socialism, ie collectivism) while others may find meaning in a return to traditional religion or to a new iteration of traditional religion; still others may seek out less restrictive religions (how many Catholics reject Catholicism because of its attitudes toward sex and procreation?) or find solace in a religion which is self confident (at least superficially, though it hides a deep seated sense of insecurity under its violet and aggressive bravado)  and growing in strength while filled with an absolute certainty, ie Islam.  By submitting to Islam, all the difficult questions and problems in life are resolved. 

Islamism offers a framework, an external structure, that supports the externalization of one's problems, and supplies a ready response to difficulties in one's internal and external life. 

John Robb reports on testimony before Congress that supports this as one of the predisposing factors in home grown terrorism:

Scott Atran, Terrorists, and Global Guerrillas

Last year, open source warfare received some exciting validation in the form of a scientific study that reached the cover of Nature Magazine (although the theory reached the pinnacle of scientific validation, nobody in the DoD noticed -- wow, seriously, is there anybody with a working brain still working there?).   Now Scott Atran, a sharp anthropologist that has been studying terrorism scientifically (although from his narrow area of specialization), has noticed some shifts in terrorist behavior  that align more closely to Global Guerrillas using open source warfare than traditional Jihadis.  Here's a summary from some Congressional testimony he recently gave.

...

Entry into the jihadi brotherhood is from the bottom up: from alienated and marginalized youth seeking out companionship, esteem, and meaning, but also the thrill of action, sense of empowerment, and glory in fighting the world's most powerful nation and army.

...

Although lack of economic opportunity often reliably leads to criminality, it turns out that some criminal youth really don't want to be criminals after all. Given half a chance to take up a moral cause, they can be even more altruistically prone than others to give up their lives for their comrades and cause.

Read the whole thing; this relates to the alienated foreign born terrorists as well as the Western born.  While you are at it, check out Jim Hoft's posts on an American born al Qaeda who has not been conspicuous in the MSM:

Stunner. Al-Qaeda Killer Who Shot His Way Out of Hospital Is Former Dem Operative

Breaking: Al-Qaeda Killer & Dem Operative Worked at New Jersey Nuclear Plant

All societies have their marginalized individuals.  Such people have traditionally borne their failures and their inner despair by themselves.  By offering a way out of a life of failure and/or meaninglessness (since even materially successful people can suffer from inner  emptiness) radical Islam solves their internal and external, Psychological and social, problems.  Once invested in Islamism, one's life is suffused with meaning and nobility; such a Siren call has a powerful allure.

Avatar, "the Glenn Beck Problem", and Ted Kaczynski: Part II

Avatar, "the Glenn Beck Problem", and Ted Kaczynski: Part I

Avatar is a deeply religious movie and is nothing so much as a visual statement of Pantheism and Gaiaism.  In the movie, the biosphere is all connected, communicating through the trees.  Spirits/souls live on independent of the flesh and as a result there appears to be no gratuitous violence, warfare, or all the other ills fallible humans have been prone to.  In a paean to the idealized American Indian of contemporary myth, hunters apologize to their prey and thank them for their contribution to the people.  It is a lovely vision of a Godless religion, one that can be imagined to have evolved without benefit of a Deity.  It is scientific and decidedly amoral, in that morality requires choice and when one is always part of the greater collective, there is no necessity for moral choice.  One is defined by the collective mind, follows those who are closer to the biosphere's "mind" (apparently made up, in part, of the spirits of those who came before) and an individual ethic is unnecessary.  At least, within the confines of the movie, the only people forced to make moral choices are the humans from planet Earth.  That their moral choices are so obvious and overt is a tribute to the limitations of the filmmaker's imagination as opposed to any potential reality of the situation, but that is immaterial here.

Returning to the Ted Kaczynski saga in the Atlantic, what is striking is the implicit splitting in the stance of the Harvard professors, those paragons of complexity, in their approach to the Gen Ed curriculum's attempts to inculcate an appreciation for the Judeo-Christian ethic.  From Part I of The Roots of the Unabomber

The committee's report, General Education in a Free Society (1945), was known, for the color of its cover, as the Redbook. The solution that the Redbook committee offered was a program of instruction that, in the words of the education historian Frederick Rudolph, called for "a submersion in tradition and heritage and some sense of common bond strong enough to bring unbridled ego and ambition under control." The Redbook's program of reform caught the imagination of educators across the country. By the mid-1950s more than half the colleges in America were offering programs of general education modeled along the same lines.

Although at Harvard the name caught on, the philosophy behind it did not. Gen Ed was doomed from the start.

By 1950 the Harvard faculty was divided between those who, chastened by their experience in World War II and especially by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saw science and technology as a threat to Western values and even human survival and those -- a majority -- who saw science as a liberator from superstition and an avenue to progress. Both these views found their way into the Gen Ed curriculum. The dominant faction had little sympathy for the Redbook's resolve to inculcate Judeo-Christian ethics. Because of the majority's resistance, many Redbook-committee recommendations were never fully implemented. And those recommendations that were incorporated into the curriculum were quickly subverted by many of the people expected to teach it. These professors in fact emphasized the opposite of the lesson Conant intended. Rather than inculcate traditional values, they sought to undermine them. Soon "Thou shalt not utter a value judgment" became the mantra for Harvard freshmen, in dorm bull sessions as well as in term papers. Positivism triumphed. [Emphasis mine-SW]

Superficially, the positivist message appeared to be an optimistic one, concerning the perfectibility of science and the inevitability of progress. It taught that reason was a liberating force and faith mere superstition; the advance of science would eventually produce a complete understanding of nature. But positivism also taught that all the accumulated nonscientific knowledge of the past, including the great religions and philosophies, had been at best merely an expression of "cultural mores" and at worst nonsense; life had no purpose and morality no justification.

Even as positivism preached progress, therefore, it subliminally carried -- quite in contradiction to the intent of Gen Ed's framers -- a more disturbing implication: that absolute reason leads to absolute despair. G. K. Chesterton wrote, "Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad ... mathematicians go mad." Hence Gen Ed delivered to those of us who were undergraduates during this time a double whammy of pessimism. From the humanists we learned that science threatens civilization. From the scientists we learned that science cannot be stopped. Taken together, they implied that there was no hope. Gen Ed had created at Harvard a culture of despair. This culture of despair was not, of course, confined to Harvard -- it was part of a more generalized phenomenon among intellectuals all over the Western world. But it existed at Harvard in a particularly concentrated form, and Harvard was the place where Kaczynski and I found ourselves.

To very briefly review and summarize: among the cognoscenti, religion and religious belief became synonymous with primitivism.  G-d was not only unnecessary but in fact his influence was invidious.  Our predecessors, because of their belief in such primitive nonsense, had little to offer sophisticated modern, post Nietzschean ("God is dead") man.  The modern philosophical edifice threw out several thousand years worth of human struggle with the questions that reside at the core of morality and ethics.  For the modern sophisticate, moral judgements are unnecessary and delusional.  Modern man is far too sophisticated to accept such morally loaded terms as "right" or "wrong".  As well as throwing out the foundations of morality and ethics, the modern existentialist atheism managed to toss out meaning as well, leaving a vast hole in the soul (for want of a more appropriate, less archaic term) that people remain eager to fill:

Spirit Quest

I recently met a young woman who was just back from a monthlong Costa Rican vacation. She said that she had gone in part to connect with her spiritual self, to shed the moral strictures of her youth and to find her place of peace as an adult. In her mind at least, it had been a successful trip. She was a new woman, spiritually awakened.

She told me that she had gone from religious to nonbeliever, and then to spiritual. Putting aside the fact that most young people probably couldn’t afford to take a monthlong vacation in a foreign country, and the fact that her spiritual awakening was admittedly spiked with copious amounts of Costa Rican rum, her story struck me as increasingly normative rather than anomalous. Many young adults seem to be moving away from organized religion while simultaneously trying desperately to connect with their spirituality.

.

A report entitled “Religion Among the Millennials” produced by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life and released this week found that one in four people 18 to 29 years old are unaffiliated with a religion. But that by no means makes them all atheists or agnostics. While there are always religious people among the unaffiliated, the numbers are significantly higher among the younger unaffiliated crowd. While they are less likely than those unaffiliated and older than them to believe in God, they are more likely to believe in life after death, heaven and hell, and miracles.

Glenn Reynolds had the best comment on the new spirituality:

YOUNG VOTERS WANT SPIRITUALITY, BUT NOT NECESSARILY RELIGION. Well, that’s because religion often tells you to do things you don’t want to do, or to refrain from doing things you want to do, while spirituality is usually more . . . flexible.

Religious belief has been systematically devalued by the liberal elites since the early days of the last century.  Pure reason has been insufficient to temper our inherent desires to control others and destroy opponents.  Rationality led to the worst excesses of the 20th century.  national Socialism imagined itself to be based on rationality; Communism offered a "scientific" approach to social problems.   Both led to unfathomable destruction.

The newest iteration of a purely rational, scientific approach to understanding can be found in the eco-religion of AGW.  If the Warmists had their way, billions of people would be consigned to extreme poverty, technological progress would be aborted, and millions would die, all to satisfy their unacknowledged religious devotion to Mother Earth.

[Ed Morrissey documents the religious devotion of our liberal MSM in relation to AGW; they literally cannot talk about heretical data: Another American media failure.]

We desperately need some humility.  Homo sapiens is not yet ready to replace G-d.  For those who reject belief in G-d, I would suggest a new version of Pascal's wager.  The most rational, non-religious view is that G-d is an idealized projection of our collective Superegos.  In this case,  it has survival value for the human race to believe in a Deity; no other source of moral authority would ever be sufficient to control our basest desires and our extraordinary ability to rationalize those desires.  Perhaps, 100 years after his death, one could argue we need G-d more than ever.

Avatar, "the Glenn Beck Problem", and Ted Kaczynski: Part I

Over the weekend I finally saw Avatar (on IMAX 3D) and it struck me, on the most superficial level, that we are one step closer to fully immersive virtual reality.  The movie was, as so many have commented, visually stunning in its depiction of a new planet with a complex biology (although the biology, for all its complexity, seemed rather animal-species poor and the waters appeared to be uninhabited.)  On the other hand, the story was simple and simple minded.  James Cameron is a brilliant film maker but the movie suggests he knows next to nothing about the complexities of business or military affairs, religion, biology, or a host of other disciplines, which is why his humans and aliens are so one dimensional. 

Coincidentally, Clare Spark posted on The Glenn Beck Problem on Saturday:

This blog is about the danger of allowing media personalities to do our thinking for us. As my long-time friend political scientist Stephen Eric Bronner wrote in one of his first books (this on German Expressionism), making a passionate work of art or viewing it, though valuable in itself, cannot substitute for the thoughtful study, investigating, organizing and other activity that resists illegitimate authority. [Emphasis mine-SW] Professor Bronner wrote enthusiastically about Rosa Luxemburg too, as well as other radical social democrats who were associated with the Second International. These activists were called left-wing social democrats, because they meant to educate the masses in the most advanced industrialized societies and through majority acquiescence (as opposed to bureaucratic centralism) make the transition from capitalism to socialism. Luxemburg herself was an anti-Bolshevik and argued with Lenin about issues that are still red-hot today, such as supporting anti-colonial social movements that were antidemocratic and backward. (I am updating the debate between Luxemburg and Lenin, originally about the nature of imperialism, and about self-determination in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, not about Third World dictatorships of today. (Thanks to Steve Bronner for the correction. But as Robert Brenner and Perry Anderson taught the debate in a session I audited, the issue concerned  left-wing alliances with antidemocratic entities, so I extrapolated to the present, when the hard Left does ally itself with dubious entities.) 

[I have been reading Clare Spark's blog for quite some time and can't figure out her politics, beyond a baseline Libertarianism, which is either an indictment of my powers of discernment, an indictment of her writing, or a tribute to her thinking, which is my preference.]

Now, consider these comments about Ted Kaczynski from a June, 2000 profile in The Atlantic: [HT: CBDenver, in a comment to my post Friday on Terror and Terrorism.]

Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber

It was at Harvard that Kaczynski first encountered the ideas about the evils of society that would provide a justification for and a focus to an anger he had felt since junior high school. It was at Harvard that he began to develop these ideas into his anti-technology ideology of revolution. It was at Harvard that Kaczynski began to have fantasies of revenge, began to dream of escaping into wilderness. And it was at Harvard, as far as can be determined, that he fixed on dualistic ideas of good and evil, and on a mathematical cognitive style that led him to think he could find absolute truth through the application of his own reason. [Emphasis mine-SW]  Was the Unabomber -- "the most intellectual serial killer the nation has ever produced," as one criminologist has called him -- born at Harvard?

By this time you might reasonably be wondering what common thread I could have possibly found between Avatar/James Cameron, Glenn Beck, and Ted Kaczynski/Harvard?

Splitting is the quintessential mental function which becomes the quintessential primitive defense mechanism.  It is based on the earliest operation of the differentiating mind as the infant begins to recognize the difference between himself and an external world filled with other minds.  As the child matures, his sense of those who fit into the primary categories of "self/like-self" and "other/like-other" becomes more sophisticated and nuanced.  A fully mature adult appreciates that there are many people who live in his tribe(s).  "Like-self" begins with the family and then over time enlarges to include his friends, his classmates, his communities (social, religious, business, professional, political, sports, etc), his state, his country.  All through development, the core organization of self/not-self persists, overlain by more mature mental organizations, but always existing in potential for expression during periods of stress induced regression. 

The tendency to resort to splitting into "all good" and "all bad" objects and their derivatives is ubiquitous.  In an immature person, who lacks the leavening afforded by an appreciation of the complexity of people and the world, or who needs to simplify his experience in order to mitigate anxiety, the basic defensive splitting can overwhelm intellectual knowledge and lead to extreme views.

Anyone who is engaged politically must struggle with their own tendency toward splitting.  Confirmation bias is an aspect of splitting that is recognized and manageable when done in moderation but can become the source of significant problems when unrecognized or unmodified.  (We see the edifice of AGW crumbling primarily because the proponents became so convinced of their correctness in the absence of adequate significant data that they systematically elided inconvenient data and eventually began to invent data in the service of their "greater truth.")  Political partisans will almost always have an initially positive reaction to proposals from their "side" and negative reactions to proposals from their opponents.  It takes mental and psychological effort to consider the actual proposals themselves; it is easier and requires far less energy to accept or dismiss an idea because of it's provenance.

The Atlantic story on Ted Kaczynski (which I came to for the first time this weekend) is a classic story of a young person following the logic of his beliefs, unaware that his immaturity led him to rely on his perception of the world filtered through a prism of splitting.  The author, Alston Chase, believes that Kaczynski was started on his intellectual road to despair and animus (which reinforced his emotional bleakness) by the Gen Ed program at Harvard, meant to inculcate the Judeo-Christian ethic but used by the sophisticated Harvard profs to teach the opposite, that there is nothing more than a relativistic morality; from Part II:

According to a study of Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates that included Kaczynski's class of 1962, conducted by William G. Perry Jr., the director of the university's Bureau of Study Counsel, the undergraduate curriculum had a profound impact on the emotions, the attitudes, and even the health of some students.

According to Perry, intellectual development for Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates typically encompassed a progression from a simplistic, "dualistic" view of reality to an increasingly relativistic and "contingent" one. Entering freshmen tend to favor simple over complex solutions and to divide the world into truth and falsehood, good and bad, friend and foe. Yet in most of their college courses, especially in the social sciences and the humanities, they are taught that truth is relative. Most accept this, but a number cannot. They react against relativism by clinging more fiercely to an absolute view of the world. To some of these students, in Perry's words, "science and mathematics still seem to offer hope."

Nevertheless, Perry wrote, "regression into dualism" is not a happy development, for it "calls for an enemy." Dualists in a relativistic environment tend to see themselves as surrounded; they become increasingly lonely and alienated. This attitude "requires an equally absolutistic rejection of any 'establishment'" and "can call forth in its defense hate, projection, and denial of all distinctions but one," Perry wrote. "The tendency ... is toward paranoia."

As is evident in his writings, Kaczynski rejected the complexity and relativism he found in the humanities and the social sciences. He embraced both the dualistic cognitive style of mathematics and Gen Ed's anti-technology message. And perhaps most important, he absorbed the message of positivism, which demanded value-neutral reasoning and preached that (as Kaczynski would later express it in his journal) "there was no logical justification for morality."

It is not a surprise but worth reinforcing that the distinction between the soft sciences and hard sciences represents a basic (and illusory) split in our mental apparatus between emotion and reason.  It requires mental work to struggle against the easy splitting and maintain complexity; few consistently succeed and the lies people tell themselves to celebrate their embrace of a complexity they fail to grasp are telling.  The idea, for example, that morality must be all-or-none is itself a result of splitting.  Morality can neither be wholly relativistic (which can easily lead to anarchic social organization) nor can it be puritanically inflexible (which can lead to the Talibanization of society.) 

This is already long enough and has only scratched the surface of the problem of duality/splitting and the development of a functional morality; further, both the story of Ted Kaczynski and Avatar, in their own ways, share a failing that is worth its own post: both fail to appreciate the need for Integration and Synthesis. 

To be continued...

Drugs, Sex, and Rock & Roll ... and Suicidality

The baby boomer generation which is now firmly into their late middle age, were famous for aspiring to a life spent dedicated to Drugs, Sex, and Rock & Roll.  As with all generalizations, this is an oversimplification, but there is enough of a germ of truth to the characterization to offer some perspective on the current status of the age cohort.  This article is from the Psychiatric Times, reported by  Richard A. Sherer:

Drug Abuse Hitting Middle-aged More Than Gen-Xers

America appears to be winning its war on substance abuse. However, some critics are concerned that we may be losing—or not even recognizing—a broader front in the war. Drug abusers today are more likely to be in their mid-30s to mid-50s or 60s. The consequences include increased drugrelated deaths and increased crime rates and arrests in the adult population.

The article goes on to document the changing demographics of drug use, drug related crime, and drug related medical issues, with a clear skew toward the baby boomers.  Why should this age group be more involved in drug use?  Drug use has always tended to be a young person's vice; old addicts were always unusual.  Most drug addicts either stopped using by their mid-30's or ended up incarcerated or dead, so addiction has always tended to be more common in the young.

Among the post-war generation, several factors came into play that tended to enhance the narcissistic vulnerability and pathology of many who grew up at that time.  Drug use became an integral part of their experience of themselves and has remained a source of gratification for many.

There are two primary ways for parents to enhance the narcissistic pathology of their children.