[PEN-L:32630] Re: Re: Re: Bush, moron? ref # 32618

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
Michael Perelman writes,
If this article is correct, psychopathology may be associated positively
with what markets call ability, not disability.

Babiak, P. 1995. "When Psychopaths Go to Work." International Journal of
Applied Psycholology, 44: pp. 171-188.

Of course, I am way over my head here with virtually no knowledge of the
subject.

Doyle
I can understand how you might write what you wrote here (i.e. pathology and
ability in the markets).  But what does Psychopathology mean?  One of the
reasons I find Fisher's book quite interesting is that he allows us to
revisit the history of how we understand emotions in people going back
thousands of years, and also looking at what we have historically been
accustomed to in wide spread understanding of how emotions ought to work
since the French Revolution.

Most of what we are referring to as psychopathology is really not pathology
(structural dysfunction in the sense really existing cancer might be
labeled), but what individuals in an enormously destructive system adjust
their thinking to (reflecting your remark above).   Thus a theory of emotion
management (which is what Fisher was writing about to describe Kant's
concepts) indicates how people might structure their feelings in a class
structure to reflect the realities of everyday life.  The horrible phrase
from Kant, Sich Demutigen, poignantly depicts what it takes emotionally to
accept capitalist society in Kant's view.  Feel nothing or grovel like a
slave.  Which in my view is like your statement in some ways.  But keeping
in mind a disability rights perspective, if someone is disabled is that what
capitalism was created from?  In other words capitalism creates a distorted
unhealthy society, but if individuals are hungry in what sense does hunger
make capitalism?  If someone is mentally disabled, is a system in which they
are embedded likely to utilize them in particular ways, and in another
system, socialism, likely to live out their lives in those socialistic
terms?

I would not look at Bush's pathology in terms of pathology (medicalize
society, Mann's thesis in "The Magic Mountain"), rather I would look at how
the Information Technology communicates emotions and what that might mean in
terms of the brain work labor process.   In order to do work people
generally have to 'feel' in certain sorts of parameters to do work.  If your
system depends upon networked communication structures which in turn rely
upon human cognitive structures the material meaning of emotional structures
comes to the foreground.  Feelings are about the literal here and now,
geared to respond to crisis in the moment, as communications technology more
and more develops toward real time communication structures, the need to
materially reflect how emotions work in the communications process grows
ever more urgent in a scientific sense.

I'll be literal about this, I don't care (it is ok for Stalin to be crazy in
my view, it is how the system works that matters) what Bush's psychological
problems are, what concerns me is that how I feel reflects political power.
That the tools of expression (the media) provide me with my emotional needs
has to come from how I do my work good bad or indifferent.   Most people
really want that sense of 'feeling' right about their job and their life
politically over the details of political rhetoric I could generate to
explain what everything means.   A major achievement of socialist has always
been to reach working class people with a sense of emotional solidarity to
their needs and goals.

One final thing Michael, thank you for providing a forum in which I can
seriously raise these issues.   Whenever disability words come up they
immediately raise concerns on my part about how we are to consider what they
mean.  There are few places to put this debate forward in a way that could
build a view of things that fully incorporates disabled people into the
movement for social change.  This is one of the most challenging areas to
make sense of.  The whole arena of 'sectarian' activity is riddled with
questions (people constantly attack sects on the grounds of disability
issues they perceive) about cognitive disability and what a system for
social change really would be like.
In solidarity.
Doyle Saylor