Category: psychology

Authentic Authenticity

Posted in identity, perception, philosophy, psychologyTagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Although I have written about authenticity in the past, I’ve been wanting to delve deeper for a while. I’ve been engaged in a discussion thread, which has motivated me to accelerate. This acceleration has forced some trade-offs, but I feel I can present a cogent position nonetheless. This segment will be more editorialising than academic, and I expect to short-shrift the historical perspective. Perhaps I’ll expand on these aspects in future.

I expect this graphic to serve as a visual reference to abbreviate some typing. Below, I reference the captions of the cards in order.

Self-Oriented Authenticity

Let’s commence with some definition and exposition.

Self

This is the unadulterated core of a person’s existence. The religious might term this as a soul. For those who favour reincarnation, this is the bit that travels from time to time, body to body.

Identity

Identity is a shell formed around the Self based on environmental inputs such as social cues. It’s about perception. Essentially, the goal would be to mimic the Self. There are several challenges to this notion. I’ll return to this, but one of these is identity composition.

Identity Composition

The notion of identity is that it is a composite of various dimensions, each of which is a social reflection if not actively socially generated. Combined, these dimensions constitute identity. Does one self-identify as athletic, intelligent, witty, gregarious, quick-tempered, altruistic, and on and on. Does one have a certain gender identity? What about sexual orientation? Occupational identity? Identities around affiliations of religion or philosophy? Identities related to personae—a worker, an entrepreneur, a day-trader? Mother, father, sibling, coworker, student…

In the end, the picture illustrates that identity is a bundle of particular identities. Presumably, these identities can shift or reprioritise by time or place. You may choose to hide your Furry identity from your mum and coworkers—or your preference to identify as a CIS male with a sexual orientation toward women and yet prefer to wear dresses.

This brings us to authenticity.

Authenticity

Facile authenticity might be thought of as how well aligned your behaviours are with your identity and your Self. According to the mythos, the perfect trifecta is that these are all in perfect alignment—like Babushkas, Russian stacking dolls, neatly nested. This notion has some practical problems already hinted at.

Authenticity Composition

The first challenge is an extension of the identity composition problem. As Identity is multidimensional, so must authenticity be. If one dimensionalises identity into some array from 0 to 6, then in a perfect arrangement, each of the expressions of these particular identities needs to have a corresponding authenticity pairing. Yet this is unlikely.

Performance

In practice, we need to look at how a person performs and compare that to their self-identity. This creates a challenge. How another person identifies a person may not align with their self-identity. We may have no insights into how a person sees themself. This is the reaction we have when someone we ‘know’ commits suicide. S/he seems so happy. S/he had everything. We see smiling depression.

Assuming we have some magic identity lens, we are left with a self-alignment challenge. A person has no access to their own Self, and others have less access still. This is where psychoanalysis fails practically and succeeds economically. They get paid to divine the Self, but that pseudoscience is for another day.

Regarding the illustration, we see a derangement of performances. This is in a lesser state of disarray because the Self is sublimated, but we notice that dimensions 1 and 3 are aligned, whatever they might be. Dimension 0 is off centre, but it somehow remains within the bounds of identity. But dimensions 2, 4, and 6 are ostensibly inauthentic. This person claims to be a vegan, yet is eating Wagyu beef in a teppanyaki house.

And dimension 5 is absent. This person identifies, say, as a musician, and yet plays no instrument efficiently. Whether s/he claims to be a musician or just feels that s/he is a musician seems beside the point. There is no performance. There is no expression.

Summary

Not even a summary. This was a concise download of my current perspective. I hope that it at least provides something to react to. If you have any perspective to lend, feel free to comment below.

Should the Criminal Justice System Be Abolished?

Posted in morality, nature, philosophy, politics, power, psychology, religionTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Much of jurisprudence is based on logic founded on faulty premises of regurgitated theological concepts shrouded in naturalistic theory and pseudoscience. This is not about the defund the police social trend of 2020. This is to say that the justice system is smoke and mirrors writ large. It’s ostensibly built on anachronistic concepts such as volition, evil, soul, blame, and forgiveness that should be tossed into the dustbin of history along with phrenology, humours, and will.

The titleof this post is taken from Robert Spapolsky’s proposed chapter concept for Behave, published in 2017, where until now, it’s languished on my Want to Read list, having entered via the vector of my interest in behavioural economics. Chapter 16 was eventually published with the title of Biology, the Criminal Justice System, and (Oh, Why Not?) Free Will.

I’ve been writing for years about the nonesensical attachment to these notions, so it gives me comfort in solidarity to discover others who share, at least to some degree my perspective, knowing, of course, that this doesn’t make this perspective any more correct.

To be fair, I’ve held a low opinion of so-called justice (and government) systems pretty much since I was taught about them almost 50 years ago. In the US, much teaching is really propagandising about how fair these systems are and how peers and reasonable persons concepts make is superior. In my mind, those were the being failings. Later, when I hopped onto my language insufficiency bandwagon, it only fell apart more. Kafka’s The Trial represents the internal workings of most justice systems than the logic and reason of propogated but proponants.

Stopping here. Much to do. I recommend reading Behave. If you’ve read it, I’d love to see what you thought about it.

Free Will?

Posted in identity, perception, philosophy, psychologyTagged , , , , 1 Comment

As I wrote earlier, free will is a vestige of bygone days—an anachronism. Even though though I’ve got a very low opinion of psychology as a discipline, if we introduce behaviourism into the equation, we can see how little agency a person really has.

Mary’s parents have fed her porridge for breakfast her entire life. She loves porridge.

When Mary is away, she freely chooses porridge.

Even as she ages, she chooses porridge.

One day, she is dating someone who she knows prefers fruit to porridge, so Mary chooses fruit instead.

Is this free will? At first, Mary is conditioned to eat porridge, and she develops a preference for it. Given choice, she chooses porridge. But is this a choice? Yes, she can break the cycle and choose something else. Still is that her choiced, or an act of rebellion against her upbringing?

When dating, she chooses fruit—perhaps even going against her own preference, her preference to make a good impression taking priority.

If we rewind we can see that her parents fed her porridge because that’s what they chose.

Another more charged choice is religion. Most people with a religion share the same religion as their parents. In some cases, they choose a different religion or no religion, but these are minority cases. And some of these instances are to differentiate from their parents, to assert their individuality. But is this a choice, or is this pathology? How can you determine the difference?

Thisis not meant to serve as some exaustive treatment. I am merely jotting down thoughts as I continue to distract myself from higher-value outpout. 😉

Compatible with Compatibilism?

Posted in identity, language, morality, philosophy, politics, power, psychology, religionTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Full Disclosure: I consider myself to be a determinist. I looked for something like Dawkins’ spectrum of theistic probability to evaluate where one might be oriented on a scale of free will to determinism to fatalism whilst also considering compatibilism.

Dawkins’ spectrum of theistic probability

Let’s lay some groundwork by establishing some definitions from most constrained to least:

  • Fatalism : a doctrine that events are fixed in advance so that human beings are powerless to change them
  • Compatibilism : a doctrine that maintains that determinism is compatible with free will
  • Determinism : a theory or doctrine that acts of the will, occurrences in nature, or social or psychological phenomena are causally determined by preceding events or natural laws
  • Freewill : freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention

It seems that freewill and fatalism are bookends with compatibilism attempting to moderate or synthesise freewill and deteminism. But it also seems that one’s selection may be contexual. Ultimately, this argument is fraught with semantic challenges insomuch as some underlying concepts are yet unresolved.

Crash Course Philosophy does provides a nice summary of the challenges in defending even compatibilist positions away from detemininism and even fatalism.

As this video notes, our choices may appear to be free, but it doesn’t take much effort to perform a 5-whys investigation to remove anything but homoeopathic amounts of agency.

Taking a short example, let’s look at the cases of the trial judges mentioned by Sapolsky (Behave) and Kahneman (Noise). Given all of the factors entering into sentences, prior offences, sex or gender of either the defendant or the judge, education, income, and so on, but far the largest factor in determining the length or severity of a sentence was the time between the sentencing and the judge’s last meal—effectively their blood glucose levels.

Some may argue that this is a short interval, but behaviourists would argue that a person now is a culmination of all of their experiences to date. That the decision of the so-called criminal to rob the liquor store (going for the stereotype here) was not the result of low blood sugar. This may be true, but there is still an unbroken chain of confluent events that brought them to that place.

From a culpabilty perspective, even absent true agency, the offender should still be incarcerated or whatever to prevent this behaviour from repeating. Of course, if you believe in rehabilitation, you are necessarily a behaviourist in soem shape or form: the idea is to effectively repattern experience impressions. The other problem is one of probability. That you did X once, are you lilkey to do it again? If not, then there is no further risk to society, as it were. Given the probability of recitivism—and some argue that mass incarceration increases the probability or attempting criminal actions post-release—, is this even an effective deterence? It’s time to get out of the rabbit hole.

From my position, it is impossible to reconcile experience and freewill. The best you can argue is that one is free in the moment—like some strange improv exercise, where you are shown a film that stops abrutly, and you are instructed to act out the remainder of the scene. Is this free, or is this extrapolating on your experience.

Skipping to fatalism, how probable is it that absolutely everything is determined. Reality is just a film we are both in and observing or experiencing, but all of it is already laid down. We are just unawares. Every strange plot twist and early exit was not only already scripted, but it’s already been captured. There is no room for improvisation or flubbed lines. There is no opportunity to go off-script. Even these words are predestined. Even unpublished thoughts were not meant to be published.

There is no way to test this sort of system from inside the system, and there is no way to get a vantage above it, so here we are.

The notion of determinism affords humans some modicum of agency, perhaps akin to one part in a trillion trillions. Practically, we are taking credit for a butterfly effect—and punishing for this degree of freedom. As Sapolsky has noted, most instances of perceived agency are trivial. We can ‘instruct’ finger movement with our brain. Ostensibly, we think: move finger; bend; point; stop. And even so, what was the cause of the thought to move the finger? Was there truly a non-causal event?

Cognotive dissonance ensures that we can’t allow ourselves to be NPCs or automotons. We have to omuch hubris for that. We must have some free will. Some religions say we not only have agency here in this life but that we chose the life to begin with. Even so, we’ve not seen the script in advance; we’ve merely chosen which lessons we want learnt.

So what about compatibilism? Sort of, who cares? Whilst I can define some interstitial state between free will and determinism, it seems that it would not be even tempered or would otherwise skew heavily toward determinism.

What keeps me from being a hard determinist is that I hold out hope for statistics, chaos, and stochasticism. One might argue in return, that these, too, are determined; we just don’t see the underlying connection. And that’s my cognitive cross to bear.

To be fair, it seems that the notion of free will or even compatibilism are secondary, let’s say, reactions to the need for culpability, for moral responsibility. Societies are built upon these notions, as are legal systems. Necessary ingredients to invent are:

  • ‘Individual’
  • Agency and Volition
  • Choice, Motivation, and Intent
  • Responsibilty and Blame

None of these actually exist, so they need to be invented and constructed in order to associate self-control to actions. In fact, we have insanity escape clauses to recognise that there are cases where control is lost, whether temporarily or permanently, or never had in the first place for any number of ‘reasons’. At core, these attributes are necessary to exert power in a society. The next goal is to convince the actors or subjects that these things are ‘real enough’— as the saying goes, ‘good enough for the government’.

Even if we accept these things at face value, the interpretation and processing of these are different animals still. The notion of Will itself is likely speceous or another fabricated notion. Perhaps, I’ll address Will on another day. Probably not, as all of this is distracting me from my language insufficiency work.

When I think about free will, it is foisted on humanity in the same manner as gods and religion. With gods, we have been defending against theism for millennia. The gods fetish and free will are inextricably linked. As with the chicken and egg connundrum, the question is whach came first. Is God a reaction to fee will, or is it the other way around. Did we create free will to allow for responsibility and then fabricate Supreme busy bodies to act as ultimate judges? Or did we create the gods and build out the myth of free will to accommodate punishment of deviant behaviour. Or are these just parallel constructions? Enquiring minds want to know.

The futility of words

Posted in language, philosophy, psychologyTagged , , , , Leave a comment

“Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.”

— Carl Jung

My research into the insufficiency of language yields some nice results. Thank you Google. 

To Gustav Schmaltz
30 May 1957
Dear Schmaltz:

I understand your wish very well, but I must tell you at once that it does not fit in my with my situation. I am not getting on at 82 and feel not only the weight of my years and the tiredness this brings, but even more strongly, the need to live in harmony with the inner demands of my old age. Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words. I have got my marching orders and only look back when there is nothing else to do. The journey is a great adventure in itself, but not one that can be talked about at great length. What you think of as a few days of spiritual communion would be unendurable for me with anyone, even my closest friends. The rest is silence! This realization comes clearer every day, as the need to communicate dwindles.

Naturally, I would be glad to see you for one afternoon for about two hours, preferably in Kusnacht, my door to the world. Around August 5 would suit me best, as I shall be home at then in any case. Meanwhile, with best greetings,

Yours ever,
Jung.

I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words

Carl Jung

Clearly, the main theme here is solitute and slience, but I keyed in on the futility quote.

Language Primacy: Cognition or Communication

Posted in language, nature, perception, philosophy, psychologyTagged , , , Leave a comment

As I am busy researching, this will likely be short. It would be even shorter without this preamble.

In researching the literature for my insufficiciency of language hypothesis, I am reading Fodor and Reboul to try to better grasp the evolutionary function of language. Both rely on the Theory of Mind. It seems that the more accepted theory is the language primarily evolved for communication as a survival mechanism. However, Fodor defends that cognition was the primary function and communicated was exapted. Carruthers contributes to the Language of Thought domain.

As I’ve presented here in dribs and drabs, my insufficiency theory of language argues that language is ill-suited for the communication of abstract concepts. It is fine for expression; communication of situational objects, inventions, and motion, description; and argumentation. But imagined concepts such as fairness, justive, and freedom don’t hold water. As I’ve discussed this hertofore in detail, I’ll not repeat myself.

Confirmation bias notwithstanding, the primacy of cognition better explains why abstract conceptual communication so often fails. Language has been stretched beyond its boundary constraints, and the air is thin past that.

I’m not sure I am willing to choose a side quite yet. Rather, I’ll note the different perspectives and move on. The underlying mechanism is less important to me than the empirical deductions that follow.

Gender Constructs

Posted in equality, identity, language, morality, nature, philosophy, psychology, sexualityTagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve been following Philosophy Tube since Abigail was Ollie. Always top-notch material. Their content has gotten longer over time, so I’ve found myself skipping over in favour of shorter presentations. I am so glad to have decided to watch this one.

As anyone who follows me knows, I am a big advocate of social construct theory, yet I learned so much in this vid, which is proper well-cited AF. Lot’s of new content to add to my backlog, so I’ve got more than enough reading material for my next few incarnations at least.

The biggest takeaway for me is the notion that not only is gender a social construct, but so is sex itself. Previously, I have defended the sex-gender distinction, but in fact, scientific taxonomies are still social constructs—only in the scientific community rather than the greater community at large.

Abigail’s platypus drives home the point. Not that it’s some big reveal. Another less poignient analogy is fruit and vegetable classification. Tomatoes are fruits. Mellons—watermellons, pumpkins, and so on—are fruits. Say it ain’t so.

Give it a viewing and like or comment here and/or there.

Counting on Grammatical Gender

Posted in language, philosophy, psychologyTagged , , , 3 Comments

This wall of words was posted in a Facebook that the AI thought I would be interested in. I’m not, save for the rhetorical and grammatical structure. I am not interested in the veracity of the claim or the sentiment it is meant to provoke.

May be an image of text

The author purportedly had a conversation with a former student, who identified as being a member of another race—black, I suppose; African-American in the current vogue; negro and coloured in bygone days.

Notice the head-fake. A conversation with an individual person quickly morphs into a generalisation. This individual, in the mind of the author—or at least the conveyance—was now the representative mouthpiece for this so-called race. But that’s not what I question.

They and them are now considered to be acceptible singular forms if a person identifies as such. I’m not sure I am equiped to comment on identification to a grammatical element, so I’ll side-step that and focus on the outcome.

Perusing this or something similar, there is a sense of undeserved weight—an inclusion from the perspective of a single person. Some people actively promote themselves as spokespeople for a group, whether race or something else. But this person did not necessarily claim to speak for anyone beyond him or herself—perhaps some small, immediate group of collegues who shared this perspective.

I am wondering how this will play out as a device to intentionally deceive the reader.

Another thing…

I was in Philadelphia yesterday, and a black associate of mine was commenting on what he deemed to be 150 neo-Nazi skinheads parading in the rain, a point eliciting more pleasure than perhaps it deserved. His assessment is that race was not a problem, that he held no illwill toward any race. His contention was with ‘motherfucking racists’. Unfortunately, there is no scientific racist litmus. There are only actions and perceptions. This is where Popper’s paradox of tolerance pops into mind. And so it goes…

Projected Reality

Posted in perception, psychologyTagged , , , Leave a comment

This article suggests an interesting twist on the notion of peception and facts. In this instance, the human sensory organs don’t capture what’s there like a camera. It takes cues from the environs and fills in details heuristically. This mirror an effect I recall reading in a book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain*, where most people can’t draw what they see because their heuristic perception kicks in. This is essentially Kahneman and Tversky’s System I outlined in Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.

This may come with a heavy dose of confirmation bias, but it fits my belief that reality is generally unaccessible with huamn sensory perception organs. it adds another layer or dimention to consider.

* I am aware that the simplistic right and left side distinction is an oversimplification, but this is the way of categorisation.

Bonjourno, Adorno

Posted in philosophy, politics, psychologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I’ve recently read Adorno’s publication, The Authoritarian Personality, and I share my perspective and thoughts.

This study was performed post-World War 2 and published in 1950. It was meant to determine if a relationship existed between anti-semitism, ethnocentrism, and fascism (cum authoritarianism) and compared several psychometric tests to determine the correlation between cohort groups. The new test was called the F Scale test, a pale attempt to hide the purpose of the Fascism Test.

What’s interesting to me, is how these map to the épistémè of the day, but perhaps that’s more a reflection on how ripe some populations were for fascism. In many ways, it’s dated,and many have questioned the approach and methodology. Moreover, some have noted that the correlation with fascism may simply be a correlation with authoritarianism more generally.

Before I get to the main content, I admit that I don’t agree with the psychoanalytical vantage. In fact, I equate psychoanalysis with astrology and tarot cards. To this end, I ignore the etiological aspects. I also feel that the fixation on anti-semitism is overspecified, so the effects would map to any targeted out-group. Finally, I feel that the chosen categories are not mutually exclusive, so there are unnecessary covariances. I discuss these in turn. Adorno created 9 categories. The first is conventionalism.

Conventionalism:
Adherence to conventional values

By conventional, Adorno means traditional — people who find solace in the familiar. In my experience, most people are conventional and to a large degree. When I  consider conventionalism, it’s about how people present themselves when they think they are being observed. I’m not sure that I’d differentiate closet rebels from people who are simply conventional to the bone. Many people will tell their closest confidantes how rebellious and unconventional they are…but only behind closed doors because they fear being judged and reprisals. In practice, they will even call out and chastise a person who has been caught being unconventional.  This extends to beliefs, sexuality, and other propensities, such as recreational drug use.

Authoritarian Submission:
Towards ingroup authority figures

Authoritarian submission also over-indexes across the board. Ostensibly, this is about obedience and deference. Even if one disagrees with an authority figure, they are unlikely to voice the disagreement and will quickly cave any defence when push comes to shove. 

Note the in-group qualifier. In the United States, when George W Bush was president, the authoritarians railed on about how important it was to support whoever was president — until Obama became president. When Trump became president, it was important to fall into line behind the new leader, leaving differences in the past — until Biden became president. In practice, some of these people couch the ousted leader as the better or legitimate leader. Historically, this has led to fractures that have taken down nations. This is also the story behind the Sunni-Shia conflict of Islam.

Authoritarian Aggression:
Against people who violate conventional values

Authoritarian aggression is a natural extension of conventionalism and submission. I submit, and so should you — if only performatively, I will call you out. We can witness this when closet gay legislators not only pass laws against their own beliefs and activities, but they do so vocally, aggressively. The best defence is a strong offence. And better to be the accuser than the accused.

Anti-Intraception:
Opposition to subjectivity and imagination

Anti-Intraception is a fancy way of saying that one is an objectivist. Anti-intraception is a characteristic of the authoritarian personality which results in a low tolerance for creative thinking and emotion-importance; people who are anti-intraceptive (i.e. are not particularly self-aware) reject subjective thinking in favour of more concrete thinking (e.g. placing high importance on clearly observable facts instead of thoughts and feelings). There is no room for subjectivity or relativity. This is one god, one truth, and whatever the prevailing position of the day, with no room for perspective or interpretation. Other sources equate prescriptive optimism to be an effect of an anti-inceptive disposition.

Superstition and Stereotypy:
Belief in individual fate; thinking in rigid categories

I would have distinguished between superstition and stereotypy, but perhaps there is a strong correlation between the two. Stereotypy is where we get the need for strong categories and things like binary sex and no distinction between sex and gender. Superstition is obviously belief in improbable metaphysical forces and entities. This is where gods enter the equation. With superstition comes fatalism. Things are not within their control. Things just happen to them. They feel powerless, and so seek to align with the powerful, being somewhat subsumed by the bully. This is a perfect segue to the next characteristic.

Power and Toughness:
Concerned with submission and domination; assertion of strength

Power and toughness are where militarism and domination come into frame — Nietzsche 101. This is also projected and reflected onto leaders and representatives. Brawn is privileged over brains. Affiliated bullies are copacetic. It also manifests in ethnocentrism, jingoism, nationalism, and patriotism. We’re number one. We’ve got the best this and that, whether country, state, school, sports team, or Girl Scout Troop. It doesn’t matter. Everything is a competition, and I need to come out on top — if even only by association.

Destructiveness and Cynicism:
hostility against human nature

Excerpting from the text, this is about ‘the inability to identify with humanity [that] takes the political form of nationalism and cynicism about world government and permanent peace. It takes other forms, all based on ideas concerning the intrinsic evil (aggressiveness, laziness, power-seeking, etc.) of human nature; the idea that this evil is unchangeable is rationalized by pseudoscientific hereditarian theories of human nature. The evil, since it is unchangeable, must be attacked, stamped out, or segregated wherever it is found, lest it contaminate the good. The democratic alternative — humanitarianism — is not a vague and abstract “love for everybody” but the ability to like and dislike, to value and oppose, individuals on the basis of concrete specific experience; it necessarily involves the elimination of the stereotypical ingroup-outgroup distinction and all that goes with it‘.

As one can notice, this fits into the religious mindset. It’s also a prime motivation for genocide.

Projectivity:
Perception of the world as dangerous; tendency to project unconscious impulses

Projectivity takes us to the Leviathan of Hobbes’ ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short‘ natural existence. It’s also takes the most blatant psychoanalytical aspect: projection. Enough said.

Sex:
Overly concerned with modern sexual practices

Sex and sexuality ties back nicely to conformity and conventionalism as well as stereotypy. It manifests as repression, to borrow from psychoanalytical nomenclature. By and large, the reason these people want privacy in the bedroom is because of modesty. Make no mistake, these people practise plenty of deviances and excuse themselves in typical attribution bias fashion. When caught in the act, they make excuses for their deviance rather than to defend their personal rights. Some of these deviances are not actually deviance from practice. Rather, the deviation is versus belief.

Whilst I agree with the sentiment of sexuality, this feels like it’s already been captured as a special case of conventionalism and is a quaint throwback to the Freudian obsession.

Closure

Speaking for myself, I’m not certain that a post-modern can be a fascist. First, what post-modern is a conventionalist or traditionalist. The only recognised authority is the underside of a power relationship. Without a recognised authority, there is nothing to react against. A key element of postmodernism is subjectivity over objectivity, which helps to explain why authoritarians like Jordan Peterson so vehemently oppose even the notion of postmodernism. Postmoderns eschew categories or make them so expansive as to not provide much gravity for stereotypes. I can’t speak for other postmoderns, but I am a pacifist and conscientious objector. I’ve got no tolerance for power plays, alpha males, and machismo. I am a bit of a cynic, but it’s not from some sense of evil caricatures. I don’t even believe in the notion of good or evil. I don’t believe in nature, let alone human nature. These are just facile categories to contain stereotypes. Where have I seen that before? Do I project my unconscious as my perception of the world? The shadow knows. And then there’s sex. My sex life and my insouciance of others’ sex lives are not necessarily in sync. I’m no pansexual, but neither do I care if someone is. Not my monkeys. Not my circus. I am not overly fixated on sex — especially what everyone else is or isn’t doing.

I’ve avoided reading much Adorno over the years, primarily because I was put off by his work on media and culture. And in general, I am put off by people holding onto teleological propositions. I’m amazed that I hadn’t tripped over his work on authoritarianism. 

I’ve always questioned authority, and authoritarians and even mainstream people have painted me as being oppositional to authority because of my upbringing, taking a psychoanalytic approach. Being suspicious of psychoanalysis and its tendency towards conformitivism, I received similar criticism. In the 1980s, Robert Altemeyer renamed the authoritarian personality Right-Wing Authoritarianism, as this was in step with the times and in recognition that there other authoritarian constructs outside of the Right and Fascism.

I’m not sure I ever needed permission to question authority and confirmation, but somehow Adorno does just that. The blind faith Adorno attributes to Fascism, has always rubbed me like a priest. For all intents and purposes, I ignored the Semitic and psychoanalytic aetiology, focusing instead on the attributes. 

All of this said, it is easy to create a stereotypical heuristic strawman, if you will, and live in fear for the many people who seem to fit this bill. Meantime, I’ll occupy my time elsewhere.