And you thought I was joking about those "CRAZY CONSERVATIVES", huh?

[Gimpy]

Well guess what--I WASN"T---the PROOF is below!!!

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Those crazy conservatives
Their reaction to a new study confirms it

BY CLIFF BOSTOCK

Are conservatives inherently deranged?

A storm has been brewing the last few months over a study about political conservatism published in the May issue of the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin. The study, which identified a handful of psychological traits that conservatives tend to have in common, has outraged everyone from Ann Coulter to George Will.

The study -- actually a meta-analysis of 50 years of research literature on the psychology of conservatism -- identifies two core traits of conservatives: resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality. Among the associated psychological factors of conservatism, the study cites fear and aggression, dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, uncertainty avoidance, need for cognitive closure and terror management.

Although the authors of the study insist they are not pathologizing conservatism, it's hard not to be sympathetic with critics since they do also cite "lowered self-esteem ... pessimism, disgust and contempt." At the same time, it doesn't take an effete intellectual to conclude that the study considers ideology on a scale affected by characteristics we all share. Obviously, Mussolini and Hitler were more tolerant of inequality than Rush Limbaugh and Ronald Reagan, but the fundamental tendency to devalue diversity is consistent among them. And it is more present than it is in people characterized as liberal.

The authors explain that they elected to study conservatism instead of liberalism because there simply are not enough psychological studies of liberal movements to perform a meaningful meta-analysis. Most of the damaging movements of the last 50 to 100 years have been right-wing, they say.

The reaction of conservatives, unfortunately, has done nothing but reinforce the study's observations. One of my favorite examples is the National Review's indignant response to the comparison of Mussolini and Reagan. Sharing the same Web page carrying Byron York's pissed-off column is an ad that compares Hillary Clinton to Saddam Hussein.

Besides the obvious irony, the ad illustrates the bad logic of another argument used to attack the study: Left-wing ideologues, such as Stalin, Krushchev and Castro, demonstrate most of the same characteristics that the study attributes to far-right conservatives, critics say. Obviously, though, once those men came to power, they became staunch conservatives, devoting all their energies to maintaining the status quo. Thus, Stalin the communist can be typed a conservative in the same way right-wingers can call Hillary a leftist but identify her, as an authoritarian presence, with Saddam, who's as far right as you can get.

If there is a form of mental illness associated with conservative thought, its poster child is Ann Coulter. She is the shining example of intolerance of ambiguity, otherwise expressed as the need to think in pure terms of good and evil. She is so loony that even the National Review fired her when she wrote that America should invade the Islamic nations, kill their leaders and convert their populations to Christianity. In her new book, Treason, she canonizes notorious Commie-hunter Joseph McCarthy as a saint and, acting just like him, calls all liberals traitors.

In Coulter's world, there is no middle ground. The radical division of the world into good (conservative) and evil (liberal) requires a willful self-blindness since, of course, life often paints itself in gray tones instead of solid black or white. The most obnoxious example is Coulter's inability to recognize that her personal experience differs from her rhetoric. If, as she complains, the media is run by such a radical cult of information-manipulating leftists, why is it impossible to open a magazine or turn on the television and radio without encountering her? Why did Crown, well known for its roster of liberal authors, pick her up after HarperCollins, well known for its conservative writers, dropped her?

Conservative columnist George Will raised the inevitable question about the study by asking if conservatism is even an appropriate subject of study for psychologists. "The professors have ideas; the rest of us have emanations of our psychological needs and neuroses," he writes sarcastically, actually misreading the study, which said nothing about neurosis. Nonetheless, his comment communicates his disdain for psychology's meddling in the question of ideology's formation at all, as if belief were unaffected by psychological states.

Actually, it's long past time for psychology to more aggressively break out of the consulting room to ask how our lives are affected by the greater culture, instead of focusing so intently on family dynamics. It would be virtually impossible, for example, to explain in personalistic terms why Americans have so willingly swallowed the Bush administration's lies about its tax cuts and the Iraq invasion. This study, however, goes a long way in explaining how an intolerance for ambiguity and the urgent need for closure can cause us to reach premature conclusions -- especially when we are terrified by events like Sept. 11. Thus right-wing populism gains its greatest foothold when our terror and need for security are amplified -- either by reality or the voice of demagogues.

Conservatism is, of course, not a mental illness. But its adherents can become sheep -- terrified but contemptuous followers of tyrants -- when life doesn't satisfy their need for black-and-white solutions.

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There you have it. Course, I knew it all along!

[MORTARDUDE]

http://sageplace.com/soulwork.htm
Cliff Bostock on "Soulwork"

Cliff Bostock, MA, is a doctoral student in depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and a practitioner of soulwork, a post-Jungian modality of personal growth which is based on the archetypal psychology of James Hillman. His work has been featured in Common Boundary Magazine. He lives in Atlanta where he also authors a weekly dining column and a psychology column. For more information about him consult his website, Soulwork.

Tammie: "How do you describe "Soulwork?"

Cliff: It's a facilitated process of learning to live from a place of deep imagination, in a fully embodied way. It is an aesthetic psychology in which images are treated as autonomous expressions of soul. To follow the image, to use the phrase employed by James Hillman, is to discover the "telos," direction of the soul's path, its destiny. This telos is also clearly illuminated in the body, which is also a metaphorical field.

Tammie: What led you to soulwork?

Cliff: My destiny, basically. As a kid I couldn't decide whether to be a writer or a doctor. I chose to be a writer, an artist. Then, during my recovery from addictions, I became very interested in transpersonal psychology. I went back to school and got an MA in psychology and trained at the nation's only residential center for transpersonal treatment. Thus, I began to move toward the coalescence of my two childhood impulses --as writer and healer. After a few years of supervised practice as a psychotherapist, I began to feel completely disenchanted with transpersonal and humanistic psychology. They either spiritualized all issues or reduced them to family systems outcomes. I then discovered the soul-based archetypal psychology of James Hillman. My effort since then has been to develop a praxis based on his work but one that includes more attention to body and spirit.

Tammie: You maintain that inhibitions and blocks to personal growth are more than personal symptoms but are symptoms of the world in which we live. Will you elaborate on that?

Cliff: I mean that what we call pathology is a global or community disorder borne by the individual. Hillman uses the example of eating disorders, I think. They are really "food" disorders. We live in a world in which food is distributed inequitably, in which people are needlessly starving. So-called "eating disorders" to my mind are expressions of that. If you send a compulsive overeater as part of his treatment to do volunteer work in a soup kitchen, the person makes a radical transformation....The apparent increase of violence among children is, I think, an expression of the way children are hated in this culture. Isn't it bizarre that members of the middle class fill therapy offices to work on the "inner child" while child abuse rages? If you want to work on your "inner child," go do some work with real children. The idealization of the inner child is a kind of reaction formation to anger about the reality of childhood -- which is NOT a state of innocence, which is NOT a time when we usually get what we need....Another example: ADD is an expression of the mania culture requires to sustain capitalism. Also: Borderline disorder, where the self is completely projected outward, is a symptom of the profound relatavizing of postmodern culture.

Tammie: What is deep imagination?

Cliff: This is really an expression of depth psychology -- penetration of the psyche's depths to the archetypal field. In the depths of the psyche images live autonomously, awaiting personification. When they remain unconscious, they tend to make themselves known as symptoms. The gods are archetypal processes of the imagination in its depths. When they were banished, as Jung said, they became diseases, or symptoms, what we call pathology.

Tammie: You've bravely shared (and received a great deal of angry protests from therapists) that you're disenchanted with psychotherapy. Why is that?

Cliff: This would take a book. Modern psychotherapy -- the praxis developed 100 years ago -- contained two conflicting impulses. One was scientific and the other was aesthetic. Freud was a scientist (as was Jung) but he regarded the narratives of his patients as "healing fictions". Freud recognized the symbolizing and metaphorizing character of the psyche and Jung extended this even further as his career proceeded.

In the time since then, psychology as a healing practice, has fallen increasingly under the influence of science, medicine. Thus, what was recognized by Freud and Jung as metaphorical -- such as unlikely tales of satanic cult abuse, etc. -- has become increasingly literalized in modern practice. "The reality of the psyche is lived in the death of the literal," said Gaston Bachelard. Conversely, the more symptoms are treated as literal, the more soul, psyche, is driven into materialism and compulsion (and the more it has to be medicated). The tragedy of modern psychological praxis is this loss of imagination, the understanding that the psyche by its nature fictionalizes through the exercise of the fantasy we call memory.

My experience with clients and AS a client has been that psychotherapy reduces symptoms to predictable causes. This is in the "air," so to speak, no matter how much you try to avoid it. Clients come in with their own diagnoses -- from ADD to PTSD and "low self esteem" to "sexual addiction." I am sure that these diagnoses and their prescribed treatment have some merit but quite honestly I just haven't seen people who tell themselves the narratives of these disorders making much progress.

When I began working with people in my Greeting the Muse workshops for blocked writers and artists, I saw them making rapid progress through the active engagement of the imagination. In these, pathology is viewed as the natural expression of the soul -- the way into the soul. There is no "healing" in the traditional sense, just deepening of awareness, experience, appreciation. The best metaphor is probably alchemy -- where a "conjunction" of opposites is sought, not a displacement of the symptom with something. Jung spoke of the transcendent function, where two opposites are held and transcended. There is no sacrifice of the original quality of the "wound," but its transcendence holds it differently.

I made a personal decision to stop calling myself a psychotherapist because of this experience. On the other hand, I have learned that my work is NOT for everyone. People with dissociative disorders, for example, do not do well in work that uses a lot of active imagination. Nor do I mean to suggest in the least that medications aren't of value for many people. But I do MY best work outside the paradigm of medical science. I even regard medication as alchemy.

Tammie: What does "growing down" into life mean to you?

Cliff: It means the rooting of soul in the "underworld." We live in an over-spiritualized culture. Although I value the spiritual, our problem is learning the way our symptoms and our pathology, our shadow motivations, reveal our destiny. The spiritual has become one of our time's greatest means of repression.

Tammie: How does the spiritual repress?

Cliff: Of course, I don't mean that the spiritual inherently represses. It's just my experience that in many forms of religiosity, especially so-called New Age spirituality, problems become spiritualized and not dealt with. The classic example of course is the way anger is demonized as everything from sin to "toxicity" when in practice, as you know, its expression is a necessary step toward forgiveness, resolution of grief and any other problem in which the client feels disempowered. Another problem is the way people develop a "things are as they should be" kind of thinking which sabotages activism. Fundamentalism, which has become a political movement the world over, is another example of subsuming authoritarian, controlling agendas in religious dogma.

I hasten to say that in my view this is a misdirection of the religious impulse -- a repression, not a bonafide expression of it. Were the spiritual allowed authentic expression in all areas of life, the world would certainly be very different.

Tammie: What would your definition of wholeness be?

Cliff: It would probably be pretty consistent with Jung's idea of individuation -- the shadow brought into consciousness. In all honesty, though, "wholeness" is one of those words that suggests something false to me. My whole point here is that our soul, our nature, is revealed in our wound. I think this is why the "freak" has held such fascination and created such awe in every culture throughout time. I asked a client once who she wanted to be marooned with on a dessert island -- Doris Day or Bergman. The tormented" personality is the one who offers us the most richness and stimulation ---opportunity for soulmaking -- in life.

Tammie: Do you believe that pain is a valuable teacher and if so, what has your own pain taught you?

Cliff: I have done Buddhist meditation practices for years, and I think I mainly follow Buddhism's lead. I do not think there is any INHERENT value in suffering. On the other hand, as the Buddha said, life IS suffering. So one is left wanting to avoid needless suffering but knowing that a lot of suffering is inevitable. So, you have the choice of how you imagine your suffering. You can call it a teacher but you don't have to call it inherently a good thing. I am thinking of Viktor Frankl. He might say his experience in the death camps taught him something but he'd never say the Holocaust was of inherent value. I think this distinction is really important. Something of value can be (but isn't always) constellated in your relationship to suffering, but it doesn't make suffering a good thing.

And yet, ultimately and crazily, you can end up in the curious place of thanking the gods for your suffering. -- if you transcend it (and I REALLY want to make the point that some suffering simply cannot be transcended). This idea was unimaginable to me even five years ago. My childhood was very unhappy and lonely. I dealt with it by retreating into my imagination and this fed the part of me that later became a successful writer. I would NEVER tell a parent that to encourage his child's artistic talent he reject and isolate the kid. But I do know this fed my own creativity. It could have severely damaged someone else -- and perhaps had I not had the opportunities I did, it might have damaged me more.

I think it's dangerous, to say nothing of hubris-filled, to ever tell anyone they should appreciate their suffering. One can only hold the space for that possibility. It is not everyone's fate.

Tammie: If your life is your message, then what message do you see your life being?

Cliff: I spent a great deal of my life's energies worried about being an outsider, being unconventional. If my life illuminates anything for people, I hope it's that -- as I said earlier -- these wounds and symptoms, these things we call pathologies that make us different, really are the marks of our character and our soul's path."

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.soulworks.net/writings/essays/site_059.html


Deiknymena:

Erotic revelations in cyberspace

by Cliff Bostock

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Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination.
--Gaston Bachelard (1994, p. xxxvi)


During the last few years I have noticed parallels between the American fascination with cults and the proliferation of cyberspace. In this paper I wish to make a few observations in that respect, particularly in consideration of images with erotic meaning and their resonance with some elements of early mystery cults.
I should say from the start that in using the word "erotic," I mean to denote something of the Platonic sense of an eros that starts with lust but also includes the appetite for abstracted knowledge.


Generally, the ancient mystery cults concerned themselves deeply with the erotic. In the Dionysos cults, a pivotal moment of the ceremony, apparently, was the revelation of an image of an erect phallus in the liknon. The Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii is painted with erotic imagery that includes flagellation. Even the Eleusis cult, with fertility and rape as central themes, was drenched in erotic rites and imagery by some accounts. The phallus sometimes was used as the object of meditation, in the same way a stalk of grain was.(Otto).
Despite Livy's account of the Bacchanalia (1987) as a ritual of pure sexual debauchery, we have Aristotle's earlier commentary that the mystery cults provided a transcendental experience. The rituals, revelations and signs were only designed to help create a mood for the personal encounter, in a collective situation, with the numinous, Aristotle argued. This is congruent with Plato's idea of the erotic.

There was, thus, in the ritual a kind of movement from the body's knowing to the abstracted or "disembodied" knowing. This was no less true in the gnostic Christian cults where the body's suffering -- identification with the passion of Christ - was the first step toward transcendence. (At the same time, there is some reason to believe that the early Christian practice of self-flagellation, called a means of identification with Christ's suffering, was highly charged with erotic energy. We do know, according to Will and Gloria Brame (1994), that the church outlawed flagellation among common Christians, so addicted to it had they become. Instead, it was reserved only for celibate monks.)

But the real means of transformation through the mystery cult is expressed in its root metaphor. The word "mystery," according to Meyer (p.4-5), derives ultimately from the Greek very myein, which signifies closing of the lips and eyes. Thus, he concludes, the mystery's meaning is revealed through the opening of the eyes to light and images. The highest stage of initiation at Eleusis is that of the epoptes, the beholder.

So, we might conclude that the power of the mysteries was somehow linked to beholding the image of the erotic. There is a sense of experiencing the erotic in body, kinesthetically, then stepping back to view it as image. Something is apprehended beyond the sexual through this abstraction. This is quite similar to Robert Romanyshyn's (1989) thesis about the development of linear perspective in painting. The movement from the tactile to the visual reveals the abstract. As Aristotle seems to note, this must have been a profound recognition for those in the Hellenistic World.


David Ulansey [an adjunct professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute] theorizes that the rise of mystery cults was a reaction to the loss of the ubiquity of Greek culture when Alexander the Great's conquests brought multiple cultures into contact with one another. I speculate that the loss of the polis (and its pantheon) as the foundation of identity created an impetus for the individual pursuit of spiritual meaning. This of course has its ultimate expression in the Christian cult, where the soul is given individual personality. Although the cults offered the companionship of like-minded people, the members were bound by belief, not by nationality or culture. The concern of the Christian was the fate of the individual soul, not of the collective.

I find the parallels to the proliferation of cyberspace striking. But I also note some significant differences:
The most obvious similarity is the secrecy with which people conduct themselves in cyberspace. People assume fictitious identities and names, even creating characters. Even after "real-life" identities are disclosed there is an assumption that everyone safeguards one another's identity. Identity is an open secret in the cyber world.

Similarly, the cyber environment, like the Hellenistic one, is a world at once shrunken and enlarged. People who would earlier have had no contact meet one another in cyberspace - it shrinks real space - but the very exposure to new material enlarges the realm of one's experience and imagining.

Cyberspace, like the mystery cults, is permeated with erotic imagery. In fact, most Americans associate the internet with pornography. Millions of people have posted erotic, even pornographic, self-images in cyberspace. So-called virtual reality is mainly regarded as a sexual venue (as in the popular movie "Lawnmower Man").

But cybersex, like the erotic rituals of the mystery cults, serves a purpose other than the conventional procreative or hedonistic ones. It also reforms (or "morphs") identity. In cyberspace one may assume a body of choice in fantasy. But it is in any case fundamentally a techno-body that occupies cyberspace. It is imagination embodied by machine technology. (Its apotheosis is the erotic cyborg.)

Without attaching particular values to this, one can certainly remark that the cyber body and the "mystery body" both are expressions of the immense upheavals of their times. The body of the mystes presaged the creation of the individual - even foreshadowing the shift from the earth-centric Ptolemaic to the Copernican heliocentric view. The cyber body presages man's fusion with technology in a time when the planet is in immense ecological crisis, when the cyborg may really be the future and salvation of man.

The revelations of cyberspace are, like those of the mystery cults, a beholding of imagery. The popular image of cyberspace's entry point is the black monitor screen. In lighting the monitor, we open our eyes to a work of images, of deiknymena. In the mystery temples, these images - according to the little we know - caused a transformation of experience by "seeing through." We cannot assume that an "absolute" was apprehended. At most we can presume there was an individual penetration of archetypal images, in the way James Hillman describes the healing properties of images.

Exactly the same thing occurs in cyberspace - with a very important and unsettling difference. In cyberspace, the image morphs through the use of hyperlinks. One "clicks" on an image and it leads to another and another. In one sense, this is no different from an individual associative process. We can imagine individually what associations might arise in our own psyche if we meditate on the revealed phallus in a Bacchanlia. Although we can't say how figures of the imagination really arise in such a reverie, we can say they are constellated between the personal psyche and the other, the image of the phallus.

But who is imagining in cyberspace?As we surf the Web an apparent random series of images begins to arise that at some level has coherence to the psyche (if we can presume some kind of coherence is necessary to maintain our attention). Any web surfer can verify that this "dialog" can go on for hours. The lived experience is not of incoherence and disassociation. It is instead of fascination and learning. One feels in contact?but with what?

This too is similar to accounts of the mystery cults. One is taken over by the experience - specifically by the "god" in the experience at the center of the cult. Despite the balkanization, the fragmentation into various cults with different contents, the shared experience in all of them is of being overtaken. The same is true in cyberspace. To put it in Marshall McLuhan's terms: We are re-tribalized (into newsgroups and chat rooms), but the particular content of the tribe doesn't matter so much. Why? Because the medium itself is the message.
But, again, what is the fundamental quality of the medium - or, as the Greeks might put it, what is the god in the medium? Perhaps, as Ulansey seems to suggest, it is the collective psyche or anima mundi - the "megasynthesis" of matter and thought into a self-reflective colelctive envisioned by Teilhard de Chardin (1959).

Finally, it seems worth mentioning that if a planetary psyche is attempting expression in cyberspace, it will - like all psyche - have a shadow expression. The clearest demonstration of that to be has been the cyber cult Heaven's Gate, whose members participated in a group suicide last year at the Rancho Santa Fe home.

Members of that community practiced very much like a mystery cult, but in a negative reversal of one. They used cyberspace to shed sexuality, assuming in the imaginal field and in real life androgynous identity (as often happened in the Dionysos cults). In this case, though, it was for the purpose of expelling sexual feeling. (The leader had attempted a "cure" of homosexuality several times. Failing that, he had himself castrated and advocated amputation of breasts and testicles as a puritanical value.)

If the collective mind at work in cyberspace calls us to the possibility of matter's (including technology's) self-reflective ensoulment, a world re-enchanted by eros, then its shadow might demand not only sacrifice of the genitals but complete sacrifice of the self, like the Christian martyrs. Could it be, as I've argued before, that the eeriest proof of cyberspace's'self-reflective character so far has been its shadow expression? The Heaven's Gate cult, after all, openly announced its planned suicide on its web site weeks before it occurred. It is a complete reversal, like any other shadow expression of the unconscious: a suicide note left for reading before the act had occurred. Perhaps nobody heeded it because it really was in the unconscious of a new psychological organism.

[Note: The Littleton shootings, which were described in advance in cyberspace, also demonstrate this last point.]

References


Bachelard (1994). Trans. Maria Jolas. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.

Brame, Will and Gloria (1994). A Different Loving.

Livy (1987). "History of Rome: Book 39.8-19." The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook, Marvin W. Meyer, ed. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

Otto, Walter F. (1955). "The Meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries." The Mysteries: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, Joseph Campbell, ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Romanyshyn, Robert (1989). Technology as Symptom and Dream. London and New York:



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[Gimpy]

So--whats your "point"??

This guy Bostick didn't DO the study---he just commented on it. It was published by the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin. And, "The study -- actually a meta-analysis of 50 years of research literature on the psychology of conservatism -- identifies two core traits of conservatives: resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality. Among the associated psychological factors of conservatism, the study cites fear and aggression, dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, uncertainty avoidance, need for cognitive closure and terror management."

:cd: :cd: :cd: :cd:

[MORTARDUDE]

please ...Gimpy..please ...please....spare me...

"conservative" and "liberal" and all the other "poltical names" are "tags" for "political philosophies" that change every 20 years. Case in point...did "liberal" and "conservative" mean the same thing in 2003 that they meant in 1960 ? Of course not. What were the similar philosphies in 1860, 1900, 1932... ? See my point...?? This fellow and the study are seriously flawed. Politics and psychology do not mix like this...

This reminds me of all the stories that pop up in USA Today every week like... coffee will cause cancer, no..coffee is OK, but eggs are bad..wait eggs are OK... just eat one a week..and on and on...on...Pop psychology...

Bottom line : A person's psychological and emotional make-up is incredibly complex. It is shaped by their parents, their siblings, schoolmates, their genetics, all of their life experiences, illnesses, accidents, physical handicaps, race, traumatic experiences, their religious beliefs, the part of the country or world they have lived in, and yes..their political beliefs, as well as a host of other factors...Hopefully you don't really believe this drivel... ??


I posted the other stuff to show where he is coming from...He is from the Jungian school apparently....For God Sakes Gimpy !!! How many different ways can you say that ANYONE who disagrees with you about anything is a moronic, fascist, Nazi, sleazeball, intolerant, uncaring, troglodyte, sumbitch ????

But I still love you Gimpy !!

Larry