Re: Positive psychology and emotional management in the USA

[Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jo,

You make such interesting comments...

> Very true. Which makes me wonder about the left propensity for gloom.
> The only radicals that speak of hope these days are the Zapatistas.
> Wonder why?

This is a very big topic. I think from personal experience it has to do
with, among other things, the following two factors:

- clinging to an orthodoxy which fails to specify the essentials of what is
really going on (orthodoxy involves inter alia sticking to the letter of
what someone else has said, not because it makes sense of the situation, but
because someone else said it, period, and this results in (1) arguments from
authority rather than subjecting ideas to practical/empirical confirmation,
verification, and validation (2) fear of innovation, lest we contradict the
premises given to us by the "authoritative" people in the field, (3)
inability to reconcile what one really thinks, with what the authoritative
people say. Usually this involves the overextension of theory to the point
where it uncannily begins to resemble certain types of religion, in the
sense of providing a theory which explains life, the universe and everything
(such a theory is necessarily metaphysical, since a scientific theory always
specifies limits of application). This has numerous consequences, but one of
them is that it requires extraordinary effort to be "politically correct" as
such, because we are no longer proceeding from the active subject, but from
what amounts to a reification, i.e. orthodoxy is displaced from a genuine
practical integrity to a search for principled intellectual coherence, and
in the process we might end up saying "if this is the answer, what is the
question" (no reference to the ANSWER coalition, which I support, is
intended by this sentence). In a society structured by social classes, in
which it is ultimately impossible to reconcile the micro-level and the
macro-level consistently, and moral theory is violated in practice, this
leads to serious distortions of consciousness.

- spending too much time trying to work out and express the negative things
the other guys are doing, rather than utilising what the other guys are
doing wrong, to get ahead with our own culture, lifestyle, politics and so
on, for example with a theory about the ""war against terror". In other
words, failure to convert a negative into a positive, to practice
reversibility, to pierce through reifications. Psychological science has, I
think, proved beyond any doubt, not that human beings are basically "good"
but rather than they act out of positive intentions, and that the brain has
to construct a behavioural strategy positively, even if it appears negative
or has a negative effect, i.e. even if we think about "what not to do", the
brain has to construct "what to do" in order "not to do it". This means that
the only truly convincing politics are framed positively in terms of
competing alternatives. Thus, for example, a "there is no alternative"
ideology is really saying, there IS an alternative already, but we want to
DENY that it is an alternative, its existence as alternative, its validity
and so on. People who are oppressed, exploited, denied, and so forth, are,
in important parts of their lives, forced into negative thinking, which
imposes limits on behaviour by specifying what cannot happen, what is
impossible, why other people are bad, and so on. If that wasn't the case,
then they would not be oppressed, and recommending the "power of positive
thinking" to them in their oppressive situation may not achieve very much,
unless it very specifically builds from their specific mental states and
specific circumstances of life. Revolutionary psychology starts off with the
categorical imperative "to make the impossible possible", and this finds
expression in the 1968 slogan "tout est possible", i.e. everything which we
thought we could not achieve, we can achieve, at least in principle, purely
because of a change of mind or change in life or change in behaviour. Of
course, it is not true, that everything is possible in a given time-space
continuum, De Gaulle might beat the shit out of you, but the idea that it
could be, is already a very big help, simply by expanding the realm of
possibilities.

But like I say, this is a very big topic, I cannot write a lot on it just
now.

J.