I've been posting here and on my blog about the work of Murray Bowman, who saw emotional growth and what he called "differentiation" as in effect anti-insanity. As a creed, true Liberalism--I have in mind here Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and 1975 Norman Lear (not present day Norman Lear, unfortunately)--requires MATURITY. Individuati…
I've been posting here and on my blog about the work of Murray Bowman, who saw emotional growth and what he called "differentiation" as in effect anti-insanity. As a creed, true Liberalism--I have in mind here Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and 1975 Norman Lear (not present day Norman Lear, unfortunately)--requires MATURITY. Individuation.
As Bowen described it, differentiated people are able to undertake creative tasks independently without coddling, but retain the capacity not just for health social activity, but deep and lasting friendship, and the capacity not just to tolerate but embrace and benefit from meaningful ideational and behavioral diversity.
And it's worth noting that his real work was studying clinical schizophrenia. He undertook the unusual and interesting task of asking the FAMILES of psychotic mental patients to live IN THE ASYLUM. They had their own apartments of course, but were asked to participate in group sessions several times a week, where family dynamics were observed.
It has become, I think, received wisdom that both schizophrenia and alcoholism are transmitted intergenerationally. One plausible explanation is that both are genetic. But his argument was that pathologies are transmitted intergenerationally also SOCIALLY.
Each family will have a least individuated/mature child. And since people tend to marry people of roughly their own developmental level, that least mature child will marry a least mature child from another family. That family in turn will have a least mature child, who will repeat this process. Across 3-4 generations the immaturity turns into clinical psychosis.
And here is the point he was much too conservative to make: that psychosis amounts to immaturity simply taken to the next level. Schizophrenia, on my reading of his work, is simply the emotional level of a 2 year old in a physiologically mature body. Their thinking is disordered because they are two year olds.
And he lays the groundwork for the claim that SOCIETIES can in effect become schizophrenic. Their reality testing can become distorted through unmanaged anxiety to the point they loose their ability to distinguish what is real from what is imaginary. I would argue the claim that "Trump is literally Hitler" DEFINITELY falls in this category. Dislike or distrust the man all you like: he is not freaking Hitler. Period. This is not a discussion grown ass adults should have to have with anyone over the age of 5.
But in sum, the overall differentiation of our society is declining. He talked about that too, and pointed out that adult solutions to real problems cannot be expected from immature, childish people. What can expected are patchwork solutions that feel good at the moment, and which have no real thought or plan behind them, and which reliably fail in the long term. And that in fact is what we are seeing everywhere.
I don't know what the solutions are. I have some ideas. But for now I am contenting myself to little things like this. Describing the problem accurately is a start at least. Speaking truth is always intrinsically valuable, or so I choose to believe.
The American poet Robert Bly wrote THE SIBLING SOCIETY now, almost a half century ago. Bly and those of us in the men's movement, coast to coast, recognized the emergence of the perpetual half adult, the Peter Pan- 'Puer aeternus'- forever child of fairy land. Many of us, despite the anti-human, life butchering sterility of the toxic femininity denouncing us, were able to seize and expand upon a meaningful, inner world reality, based on stewardship and responsible personal agency, that provided a transcendent, and a connection, to the living dimensionality of the universe we all inhabit. Many on the quest were there because of the damage wrought by the feminist/bureaucratic war on fatherhood and the family. Today, conveniently, the word mother is verboten by those same mercenary monsters so willingly swilling at the trough of totalitarian finance.
Those interested in what happens when mercenary ideological sycophancy and totalitarian finance join hands to destroy a people need look no further than the TikTok video's of a young woman displaying her uterus in a glass jar or the young woman, butchered and abandoned, clutching a basket of pills, pleading to other young people not to make the mistake she had. Or, simple mindfulness of the 10,000 manufactured psyop cuts slow bleeding, distorting and stealing American lives every day of the week.
Other refresher course's in what happens when totalitarian finance employs ideological sycophant's to destroy a nation can be found in the blood letting horror of the French revolution. More recently, the involvement of the Wall Street/ international financial cabal that ultimately brought Stalin to power who then, as in 2008 U.S.A,. looted the Russian treasury. Pay no attention, those farmers in Holland losing their homes and livelihoods to criminal finance are far far away. (So were those on the train to Auschwitz.)
Oh look--"..it's the Teeth Mother naked at last.."
I will never forget CNN hosting the laughable Drs. Bandy X Li and Allen Frances; my jaw dropping as the latter intoned that Trump had killed more people than Hitler, Stalin and Mao, combined, as Li and the witless dolt (Stelter) hosting the charade nodded along somberly. Taking such people seriously - let alone giving them a national forum - is not the mark of a serious, mature or sustainable nation.
Bruce: I agree with your politics, but your comment puts up a bit of a straw man: Brian Stelter on CNN with unserious guests should not be deemed to represent a “nation.” And CNN, with its shrunken ratings, isn’t much of a national forum; it has a niche audience at most.
Maybe. But CNN is but a part of the media complex. I'm sure the same nonsense was spouted on MSNBC, owned by the very corporate NBC and run by putative "adults." And what of the "entertainment" we watch? All part of the infantile corporate culture that has elevated true nitwits and scoundrels to power and immense wealth, while they produce garbage products and have taken the dignity of work away from their employees.
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
... At first, when a new form arises, it has subversive effects on the old order, before it has additive effects that lead to a new order. Bad actors may prove initially more adept than good actors at using a new form — e.g., ancient warlords, medieval pirates and smugglers, and today’s information-age terrorists being examples that correspond to the +I, +M, and +N transitions, respectively. As each form takes hold, energizing a distinct set of values and norms for actors operating in that form, it generates a new realm of activity — for example, the state, the market. As a new realm gains legitimacy and expands the space it occupies within a social system, it puts new limits on the scope of existing realms. At the same time, through feedback and other interactions, the rise of a new form/realm also modifies the nature of the existing ones.
... Societies that can elevate the bright over the dark side of each form and achieve a new combination become more powerful and capable of complex tasks than societies that do not. Societies that first succeed at making a new combination gain advantages over competitors and attain a paramount influence over the nature of international conflict and cooperation. If a major power finds itself stymied by the effort to achieve a new combination, it risks being superseded.
... A people’s adaptability to the rise of a new form appears to depend largely on the local nature of the tribal form. It may have profound effects on what happens as the later forms get added. For example, the tribal form has unfolded differently in China and in America. Whereas the former has long revolved around extended family ties, clans, and dynasties, the latter has relied on the nuclear family, heavy immigration, and a fabric of fraternal organizations that provide quasi-kinship ties (e.g., from the open Rotary Club to the closed Ku Klux Klan). These differences at the tribal level have given unique shapes to each nation’s institutional and market forms, to their ideas about progress, and, now, to their adaptability to the rise of networked NGOs.
I've been posting here and on my blog about the work of Murray Bowman, who saw emotional growth and what he called "differentiation" as in effect anti-insanity. As a creed, true Liberalism--I have in mind here Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and 1975 Norman Lear (not present day Norman Lear, unfortunately)--requires MATURITY. Individuation.
As Bowen described it, differentiated people are able to undertake creative tasks independently without coddling, but retain the capacity not just for health social activity, but deep and lasting friendship, and the capacity not just to tolerate but embrace and benefit from meaningful ideational and behavioral diversity.
And it's worth noting that his real work was studying clinical schizophrenia. He undertook the unusual and interesting task of asking the FAMILES of psychotic mental patients to live IN THE ASYLUM. They had their own apartments of course, but were asked to participate in group sessions several times a week, where family dynamics were observed.
It has become, I think, received wisdom that both schizophrenia and alcoholism are transmitted intergenerationally. One plausible explanation is that both are genetic. But his argument was that pathologies are transmitted intergenerationally also SOCIALLY.
Each family will have a least individuated/mature child. And since people tend to marry people of roughly their own developmental level, that least mature child will marry a least mature child from another family. That family in turn will have a least mature child, who will repeat this process. Across 3-4 generations the immaturity turns into clinical psychosis.
And here is the point he was much too conservative to make: that psychosis amounts to immaturity simply taken to the next level. Schizophrenia, on my reading of his work, is simply the emotional level of a 2 year old in a physiologically mature body. Their thinking is disordered because they are two year olds.
And he lays the groundwork for the claim that SOCIETIES can in effect become schizophrenic. Their reality testing can become distorted through unmanaged anxiety to the point they loose their ability to distinguish what is real from what is imaginary. I would argue the claim that "Trump is literally Hitler" DEFINITELY falls in this category. Dislike or distrust the man all you like: he is not freaking Hitler. Period. This is not a discussion grown ass adults should have to have with anyone over the age of 5.
But in sum, the overall differentiation of our society is declining. He talked about that too, and pointed out that adult solutions to real problems cannot be expected from immature, childish people. What can expected are patchwork solutions that feel good at the moment, and which have no real thought or plan behind them, and which reliably fail in the long term. And that in fact is what we are seeing everywhere.
I don't know what the solutions are. I have some ideas. But for now I am contenting myself to little things like this. Describing the problem accurately is a start at least. Speaking truth is always intrinsically valuable, or so I choose to believe.
Developmental/evolutionary psychology is a large field, but you might find Robert Kegan's work on "stages of development" interesting.
This is inspired by Kegan's work:
https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history
The American poet Robert Bly wrote THE SIBLING SOCIETY now, almost a half century ago. Bly and those of us in the men's movement, coast to coast, recognized the emergence of the perpetual half adult, the Peter Pan- 'Puer aeternus'- forever child of fairy land. Many of us, despite the anti-human, life butchering sterility of the toxic femininity denouncing us, were able to seize and expand upon a meaningful, inner world reality, based on stewardship and responsible personal agency, that provided a transcendent, and a connection, to the living dimensionality of the universe we all inhabit. Many on the quest were there because of the damage wrought by the feminist/bureaucratic war on fatherhood and the family. Today, conveniently, the word mother is verboten by those same mercenary monsters so willingly swilling at the trough of totalitarian finance.
Those interested in what happens when mercenary ideological sycophancy and totalitarian finance join hands to destroy a people need look no further than the TikTok video's of a young woman displaying her uterus in a glass jar or the young woman, butchered and abandoned, clutching a basket of pills, pleading to other young people not to make the mistake she had. Or, simple mindfulness of the 10,000 manufactured psyop cuts slow bleeding, distorting and stealing American lives every day of the week.
Other refresher course's in what happens when totalitarian finance employs ideological sycophant's to destroy a nation can be found in the blood letting horror of the French revolution. More recently, the involvement of the Wall Street/ international financial cabal that ultimately brought Stalin to power who then, as in 2008 U.S.A,. looted the Russian treasury. Pay no attention, those farmers in Holland losing their homes and livelihoods to criminal finance are far far away. (So were those on the train to Auschwitz.)
Oh look--"..it's the Teeth Mother naked at last.."
This real life example pretty much contains all that stuff:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers
Super interesting theory! It makes a lot of sense.
I will never forget CNN hosting the laughable Drs. Bandy X Li and Allen Frances; my jaw dropping as the latter intoned that Trump had killed more people than Hitler, Stalin and Mao, combined, as Li and the witless dolt (Stelter) hosting the charade nodded along somberly. Taking such people seriously - let alone giving them a national forum - is not the mark of a serious, mature or sustainable nation.
Bruce: I agree with your politics, but your comment puts up a bit of a straw man: Brian Stelter on CNN with unserious guests should not be deemed to represent a “nation.” And CNN, with its shrunken ratings, isn’t much of a national forum; it has a niche audience at most.
Maybe. But CNN is but a part of the media complex. I'm sure the same nonsense was spouted on MSNBC, owned by the very corporate NBC and run by putative "adults." And what of the "entertainment" we watch? All part of the infantile corporate culture that has elevated true nitwits and scoundrels to power and immense wealth, while they produce garbage products and have taken the dignity of work away from their employees.
https://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/78-78/45197-im-convinced-that-the-whole-national-review-is-a-cia-operation-murray-rothbard
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
Because the legacy sense-making system, hierarchies of curated expertise, are not anti-fragile to disruption.
You probably aren't actually looking for answers that contradict your (unspoken) ideology, but here is one:
re: David Ronfeldt's TIMN model of social change
disruption -> disintegration -> regression to ideological tribalism -> reintegration at a higher level / social form
https://twotheories.blogspot.com/2009/02/overview-of-social-evolution-past.html
---excerpts---
... At first, when a new form arises, it has subversive effects on the old order, before it has additive effects that lead to a new order. Bad actors may prove initially more adept than good actors at using a new form — e.g., ancient warlords, medieval pirates and smugglers, and today’s information-age terrorists being examples that correspond to the +I, +M, and +N transitions, respectively. As each form takes hold, energizing a distinct set of values and norms for actors operating in that form, it generates a new realm of activity — for example, the state, the market. As a new realm gains legitimacy and expands the space it occupies within a social system, it puts new limits on the scope of existing realms. At the same time, through feedback and other interactions, the rise of a new form/realm also modifies the nature of the existing ones.
... Societies that can elevate the bright over the dark side of each form and achieve a new combination become more powerful and capable of complex tasks than societies that do not. Societies that first succeed at making a new combination gain advantages over competitors and attain a paramount influence over the nature of international conflict and cooperation. If a major power finds itself stymied by the effort to achieve a new combination, it risks being superseded.
... A people’s adaptability to the rise of a new form appears to depend largely on the local nature of the tribal form. It may have profound effects on what happens as the later forms get added. For example, the tribal form has unfolded differently in China and in America. Whereas the former has long revolved around extended family ties, clans, and dynasties, the latter has relied on the nuclear family, heavy immigration, and a fabric of fraternal organizations that provide quasi-kinship ties (e.g., from the open Rotary Club to the closed Ku Klux Klan). These differences at the tribal level have given unique shapes to each nation’s institutional and market forms, to their ideas about progress, and, now, to their adaptability to the rise of networked NGOs.
...
---end excerpts---
Yep.
That's a very interesting set of ideas. Thanks.