The Error of Not Thinking and the Banality of Lies

 La Chatte ne dorm pas

The words: "reflecting on unified self-hood over time" would I believe evince negative reactions in the ranks of the heathen. It's that whole business of "Where was I on February 7th 1958?" A narrative that bridges sameness and self. The argument for such a narrative is a tension between things that change (self) and things that don't change (sameness).

This tension between self and sameness, like everything else we people have to struggle with hour by endless hour on a daily basis, produces a life that can be thought of as a bunch of organs and tissues wholly devoted to an organism comprised of a series of choices made by a continuous, unified self. These choices can be judged and recorded, and compared to the choices of other unfortunates who enter the public square, which used to be where you went to get groceries, get your pork chops, they had a stocks for village miscreants, you could get beer, share opinions, layout your choices and so on.

In the good old days we just had memory, then came writing and the awfulness that is record keeping. Nowadays we have digital devices that spend a lot of time recording our choices so that we can be turned into milkable data. And! Our "unified self hood over time" now has to contend with an expanded public space that includes the Tar Pits of Facebook, unless you too are lucky enough to have been banned, tweeting which under the new owner is called something else and a wealth of Bobby's other friends and relatives, far too numerous to mention or even begin to understand, like Substack which seductively describes itself as "a new economic engine for culture," a coyness that makes a person inclined to invest in wrist slitting razor blades. 

The narrative, or tension, in us people that bridges sameness and self, which for so long had found a cohesion in the judge and jury of the face to face of a public square, now includes invisible spaces where the self can be be anything it wants as long as it maintains a sameness by getting enough praise and adoration through likes, algorithmic caresses or clicks or whatever.

This all produces an increased confidence in a way of viewing humanity Hannah Arendt promoted. We can add the Banality of Lies to the error of thoughtlessness Arendt suggested our collective psyche is prone to making.  Thoughtlessness, in this context, means "Not using thought to think." 

The Best we got is a Reality that "Kicks Back"

Supper

That's right! A stainless steel spoon and a modest portion of major nut-eater fare in an artisanal bowl, balanced precariously on a Sibley's Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America to protect a well-traveled Zanzibar Chest from possible dribblage. It's an identity crisis.

Praxis, means action as opposed to theory. Lexis, means the total stock of words available as opposed to grammar or syntax which is how words work when they are properly strung together on a washing line. For Hannah Arendt, one of our heroes, Praxis and Lexis, or Action and Words are how we people reveal ourselves for who we are.

But first we all just have to accept Nietzsche's comment in one of his notebooks which boldly stated: "there are no facts only interpretations." The rest of his life he spent coming to terms with this observation by trying to explain what he meant. Hence, in shorthand, Nietzsche's many books, in greater or lessor detail described the world of people as follows, and to save the washing line we're going to use colons:

A mobile army of metaphors, symbols, and anthropomorphisms: A social contract where people agree to use the same terms to avoid being misled by one another: This agreement allows society and communication to function and is a necessary life-promoting error rather than a perfect mirror of reality: This man-made fiction would have remained a fiction but for the intervention of belief.

My own crisis with truth at the moment isn't the nature of reality, it's tonight's supper. I'd prefer a ham-hock in soup, followed by a pork chop on a stick, an egg and bacon sandwich, accompanied by a fifty gallon barrel of real beer, a crate of Mount Gay, a dozen cartons of cigarettes and the Ghost of Tina Turner singing "we don't need another hero."

The Management Studies Anathema

Beech

CBT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, to my way of thinking, is yet another manifestation of corporate mumbo-jumbo. It even sounds like something that might have emerged from Abraham Maslow just prior to his telling his disciples that Irony was a perversion that would have to be criminalized before any of us had a chance to achieve happiness by Self-Actualizing, otherwise known as working yourself into an early grave so that you can have more stuff than anyone else when you die jogging.

And yes I can be a horrible person, bound for eternal damnation who loathes the academics who chose management studies as a discipline but the fact is the Buddha makes infinitely more sense to humanity than Maslow's Psychology. Either way my fondness for the words retard and nit-wit is actualized mightily by Maslow, behaviorists in general and cognitive behaviorists in particular.  

What does Self-Actualization mean? If you cast your mind deep into the bowels of liberty as defined by post enlightenment thinking, go back to 1981, to expressions like Personal Growth, Self Esteem, you'll find a little ditty attached to visuals of girls and boys, some wearing glasses and looking very weedy, along with the lyrics: "Be all that you be, join the US Army."

Twenty years later, in 2001, The US Army wanted a change, something more in keeping with the servitude to a holism that produced Me, Me and Me to match the prevailing ethos of those sterile years. The new slogan was "Army of One." For fans of "Be all you can be," in 2023, that crap-ass, inconceivably absurd "Army of One" was disappeared and our self actualizing favorite "Be all that you can be" was returned to its rightful, possibly ironic, place in the recruiting office.

It must have been something they were eating in the 1950's, could have been sliced bread, that turned them bouncy. It was when this whole be all you can be, Chamber of Commerce in the now, gestalt therapy type vibe took on the glow of a personal responsibility with workshops, lecturers wearing tee shirts, revival meetings, homework and must read self help books. The point is I don't actually see authentic in a self-actualized individual. I don't see them as true to themselves and I'm not in the least impressed with the claim that these shin-guards who have climbed to the top of the actualization pyramid are less influenced by what others think. If anything they are more influenced.

No wonder Cognitive Behavioral Therapy took a death grip on the throat of Maslow's zoo keepers paradise of maladapted humanity. You can almost see the smile on the face of a Cognitive Therapist as he or she puts the principle tool of the Cognitive Therapy trade to work by identifying and then calmly and cooperatively reinterpreting a patient's cognitive distortions and reduces them to lightly carbonated decaffeinated fizzy drinks. "There's nothing under the bed sweetheart, a bacon and egg sandwich won't stop you from being all that you can be!" 

The Why and How

Shag-Bark Hickory

Baxter and Ivan have been quarreling about circus lion tamers and the role such a lion tamer might play in the process of drilling discipline into the ranks of the emotions. I'd wanted to talk about struggle as a lion tamer's dilemma. Too much and you got an angry, bitter lion. Too little and you got a big kitty cat that occasionally runs off with a toddler from the audience. Instead I'm going to use today as a chance to address Viktor Frankl's version of Will To as an access to the role of Myth in our Process of Becoming. Nietzsche had his Will to Power, Sigmund Freud had his Will to Pleasure and Viktor Frankl had his Will to Meaning.

'Nuff said really, but as a pompous old fart I'm obliged to go all dog's biscuit and a picture on these pages otherwise it wouldn't be a blog. Viktor Frankl was 92 when he died in 1997. Generally the word precocious was designed around chaps like Viktor, by the time he was 20 years old he'd done more than most people. He was writing to Sigmund Freud, criticizing the assumptions Freud had based his  psychoanalysis on, he was already on the verge of being expelled from the Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology Students Circle, he was getting himself ready to find fault with Jung's early ideas, and he was the Leader of the Social Democratic Party of Austria's Youth Movement. Social Democrats in Europe lean to the political left. In the 1930's Social Democrats and Communists were crushed by anti-democratic, authoritarian, corporatist, fascist inspired regime called the Christian Social Party similar to elements in the 2025 frightened white, slightly retarded people or nit-wit side of the current US Republican Party.

Alfred Adler, the organizing mind behind Individual Psychology died in 1937 at the age of 67. Adler Individual understanding of us people may have been grouped under the title Will to Belong. He was trained as a doctor became interested by how in the human body when one part of it went awry other parts developed to compensate. He decided that the same dynamic could be applied to an individual personality. For example a person who felt himself to be inferior to others, he or she would compensate for this sense of inferiority by producing behaviors the individual chose to believe would better adhere him to this or that social group. For Alfred Adler a Malignant Narcissist, or power hungry megalomaniac, would be described as a dangerous manifestation of an intense Inferiority Complex compensating through an  unchecked Striving for Personal Superiority.

Frankl's understandings of how Psychotherapy might be pursued, his Will to Meaning, are much informed by Nietzsche's off hand comment: "He who has a why to live for can endure almost any how." Frankl lost his mother, father, two siblings and his first wife to the Holocaust. Over a period of three years he survived four different Concentration Camps. In his understandings of us people he wasn't a reductionist, he didn't like the idea of dehumanizing us by interpreting us as the sum of our parts. We are complicated, ever changing and difficult, we struggle with meaninglessness, emptiness and aimless wandering. Frankl's Logotherapy which addresses our ability to know and his existential analysis which address our ability to make meaning, explored the individual in a slightly more creative and sensuous manner than other explorers of a Phenomena that's the why and how of Human Experience.