Sunday, August 31, 2014

'Change your thoughts': On the law of attraction

When I entered college in the late '90s, I came across some old theological books in the library, and I wrote down these passages about willingness to change one's mind. At the time, I didn't yet have the context to understand that they were part of the so-called "Law of Attraction," under which people are assumed to control all their situations and outcomes simply by changing their attitude, nor did I predict how that belief would be used in 21st-century USAmerican fascism.

Anyhow, at the time, I took notes.

Norman Vincent Peale said, "Change your thoughts and you change your world," while George Bernard Shaw said, "Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything." Taken together, the option is stark: Either we can change our entire personal worlds or we can change nothing at all.

A few people are able to communicate their shift in thinking and, in so doing, influence the worldviews of the entire culture. Alfred North Whitehead wrote: "In its turn every philosophy will suffer a deposition...Philosophy never reverts to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher."

Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality. (Originally 1929.) Part 1, Chap. 1, Sect. 6. New York: Harper, 1960. pp. 9, 14.



Relatedly:

For a college class c. 2000, we were assigned to read:

From Salvation to Self-Realizationn: Advertising and the therapeutic roots of the consumer culture, 1880-1930 by T. J. Jackson Lears. Printed in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980. Ed. by Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears. (New York: Pantheon, 1983.

For some reason — whether for a class assignment or for personal reasons — I wrote this summary and just came across it.


Also, this book criticized the self-help industry in part for "push[ing] people away from proven medical treatments by persuading them that they can cure themselves through sheer application of will."

Also, Jared Yates Sexton has this book about how certain American myths/illusions/inspirational metaphors have become cultish.


Before the 20th century, USAmericans believed that spiritual salvation came through self-denial, hard work, and temperance. But as the industrial and communications revolutions changed their world, they increasingly felt that the fragmented, impersonal capitalist society was "unreal," and they sought salvation through "reality" and "real life." This value shift rang truer to their experience. It manifested itself through religion — but advertisements also reflected it.

Lears calls the new value structure the "therapeutic ethos." People felt dissolved in masses of humanity. They felt stifled, shriveled, as if they had no self at all. Hence the popularity of an ethos that made the healing of the self its top priority. The cultivation of a healthy personality was every person's highest goal. If one lacked vitality, one wasn't enjoying "real life." The self could be healed by following an exercise regimen, eating proper foods, permitting oneself hedonistic self-expression, and buying the right products.

Advertisers seized upon the belief that fulfillment of deep yearnings was just around the corner. The public accepted the explanation that they bore the responsibility for their own depression, exhaustion, and demoralization because they had failed to buy the correct combination of elixirs. They were willing to take more consumer advice and to act on it.

Advertisers didn't merely respond to customer demands but also shaped those demands. They attributed the customer's vague unhappiness to specific consumer complaints which they could remedy. Consumers adopted those claims and used them to shape their own wishes.

Before the 20th century, the dominant Western worldview instructed each person to consider themselves a creature of pure reason and unfettered freewill. Of course, every person has a sense of emptiness, but according to this worldview, it was an obstacle in one's ability to redefine oneself — so if you admit to feeling any emptiness, you admit to a character flaw. Freud's late-19th-century theory of the subconscious allowed each man to relinquish some of that responsibility for his psychological and physical weaknesses. Advertisers happily took on the responsibility for the solution.

The Industrial Revolution was a stressful time in human history, and USAmericans expressed their sense of spiritual emptiness by buying products advertised to them. Dissatisfaction and depression appear in every age, but this explanation and proposed solution was unique to this period, as was the economic ability of the United States to produce and consume enough so that people could live out this "therapeutic ethos." The maxim was economic as well as spiritual.


In the 2023 indictment in the election-related charges:

“As we’re learning more about how...Trump plans to defend himself,” noted SE Cupp, it seems the former president is reaching for the so-called “Seinfeld defense,” George Costanza’s infamous adage, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” — Opinion: Trump’s indictment hat trick takes America to the brink, Jane Greenway Carr, CNN, August 6, 2023

If other people are using the law of attraction to gain power to hurt you, believing that they have the power to do so may just aid their tactic. Try believing that you have the power to change the outcome — and take some action.

"If Trump has a political superpower, it’s that other people believe he has political superpowers. They believe that any effort to hold him accountable will backfire. They believe that he will always ride a wave of backlash to victory. They believe that challenging him on anything other than his terms will leave him stronger than ever.

Most of this is false. But to the extent that it is true, it has less to do with the missed shots — to borrow an aphorism from professional sports — than it does with the ones not taken in the first place."

If Trump Is Not an Insurrectionist, What Is He? Jamelle Bouie, New York Times, Jan. 5, 2024

Photo by Quick PS on Unsplash

You would think that the "law of attraction" people would support gender transition, since it's a way of becoming what you wish. But many of them only support law of attraction for themselves, to magnify their own power, not to let others empower themselves.

"There is a form of social and political control implemented by medicine, a way to sever an unpopular minority [trans people] from their own bodies and then sell back limited access to their bodies if they will submit to a set of trials to prove they can be good people, or at least made better. The people opposed to that kind of medicalization simply think that trans people enjoy no right to their bodies at all, under any circumstances."

Detransition is a Mythology, Jules Gill-Peterson, Sad Brown Girl (Substack), Feb 6, 2024


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Friday, August 22, 2014

When conflicting perspectives are opportunities to learn about oneself and others

Multiple worldviews can be a source of conflict, but they can also be a path to peace.

One approach is to reconcile some of the gaps within oneself. Gish Jen wrote in Tiger Writing:
It is clearer from the book [Philip Kasinitz's Inheriting the City] than from this quote that life in a structural hole [a term coined by sociologist Ron Burt for the location between two cultures] is not an advantage in the way that, say, private school education is an advantage. Still, the larger picture this term describes, including both the ‘structural hole’ in which children of immigrants like myself grow up and the ‘creative selective assimilation’ that results, seems to me on the mark.
People who grow up in multicultural families or neighborhoods may be especially attuned to certain areas of discrepancy in worldviews or mores, but they are not the only ones who experience this potential source of anxiety and this opportunity for growth and insight. Everyone is exposed to uncertainties and "structural gaps" where they are taught contradictory or incompletely explained ideas.

After acknowledging the gaps within oneself, another approach is to reconcile with others. Richard Kearney wrote in Anatheism:
I like to think that the eventual formulation of the Good Friday Peace Agreement in March 1998 — permitting Irish citizens to be “British or Irish or both” — was greatly facilitated by the interconfessional and intercultural hospitality practiced by some of Ireland’s finest artists.
Here, a grassroots culture of acceptance and successful intercultural exchange is identified as being developed prior to a formalized political breakthrough. This is inspiration for self-empowerment; change can begin from the bottom-up.

Apparent contradictions can disguise significant opportunities for growth.

Sources:
Gish Jen. Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. p. 111.
Richard Kearney. Anatheism: Returning to God After God. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. (Kindle edition.)

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Sunday, August 3, 2014

Unreadable and mysterious written language: A look at ancient languages that still haven't been deciphered

Some scripts have not been deciphered. Some are so mysterious, it isn't even known what language they were used to transcribe. Originally posted to Helium Network on Aug. 27, 2010.

Among the greatest puzzles in the world are the undeciphered scripts - ancient systems of writing that no one has yet been able to learn to read. In many cases, it is not even known what language is represented by such strange symbols. They are like secret codes that no human or computer has yet been able to crack. We can only wonder what mysteries of ancient life are locked behind them.
Here is a brief overview of a few randomly selected undeciphered scripts, organized from oldest to newest.

Vinca

This was a pictogram system used in southeastern Europe from 6000-4500 B.C.E. Short inscriptions have been found on burial sites.

Indus

Used in the region of present-day Pakistan between 2600-1900 B.C.E. Although there are thousands of examples of this script, no one has cracked it. It may have represented a Dravidian or Indo-Iranian language. About 500 distinct symbols are known, yet the longest surviving example strings only seventeen of them together.

Linear A

Used in Greece around 1800 B.C.E., it is related to hieroglyphics and uses relatively few symbols. (Linear B was once also a mystery but it proved to be a Cretan form of Greek.)

Tujia

Today the Tujia are a Chinese ethnic minority who trace their heritage back to the Ba kingdom (600-316 BCE). Their spoken language is in the Tibeto-Burman family. They were long believed never to have had a written language, but several ancient books discovered in Youyang County in 2008 use a script that resembles Chinese characters and may be Tujia.

Etruscan

The Etruscans lived in Italy around 600 BCE. Scholars are able to pronounce Etruscan words, and the "bi-texts" combining Etruscan with Latin or Greek have enabled guesses about its meaning. According to one writer, "Etruscan, as scholars know it, cannot simply be classified as belonging to the Caucasian, the Anatolian, or Indo-European languages such as Greek and Latin, from which it seems to differ markedly in structure." It has no surviving descendant languages. While Etruscan texts can be read for general meaning, the precise connotations of their words and grammar remains a mystery.

Zapotec

This system was used in southern Mexico from 500 B.C.E.-1000 C.E. Most inscriptions are less than 10 symbols and, although modern forms of Zapotec are still spoken today, the ancient language has been lost.

Meroitic

Dating to 300 BCE in the Sudan, Meroitic is the second-oldest writing system in Africa. One Meroitic script is an adaptation of Egypt's hieroglyphics (which is the oldest African writing system), while another is a 23-symbol alphabet including vowel sounds and a sign to divide words. The existence of this script was unknown in Europe until the 19th century. Today, these inscriptions can be decoded, but it is unknown what language they represent.

Runes

The Runic alphabet, often called "futhark," was used throughout Europe for magical inscriptions as early as the 1st century CE and especially during medieval times. Some people believe that it was created artificially rather than having evolved on its own. It may have been modeled on the Roman or Etruscan alphabet. The word "rune" means something akin to "text" in Old Norse and "mystery" in Old Germanic.

Isthmian

Also known as Mojarra or Epi-Olmec, it was used in Central America from about 500 BCE-500 CE. The glyphs are elaborate boxes and crosses. The language is unknown.

Pictish

The Picts lived in present-day Scotland in the 4th-9th centuries C.E. They inscribed symbols on stones, and no one knows whether this may have been a form of writing rather than art.

Khazar

This extinct language was used in Khazaria - the present-day region of Caucas, Armenia, northeastern Turkey and part of Russia - whose kingdom that lasted from 652-1016 C.E. It was related to other Caucas languages and used a slightly different alphabet.

Nahuatl

Modern Nahuatl dialects are spoken by two million indigenous Mexicans, but Classical Nahuatl, spoken by the Aztecs when the Spaniards arrived in the 16th century C.E., is now extinct and its glyphs have not been decoded.

"Voynich"

There is only one existing example from Central Europe, c. 1600 C.E. The hauntingly illustrated Voynich manuscript, named after the collector who acquired it in 1912, has never been deciphered. Many people believe the manuscript was created as a hoax.

Image of the Voynich manuscript by: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University ([1]). © public domain Wikimedia Commons

Rongorongo

Used on Easter Island, c. 1800 C.E. This script probably represented the Polynesian language Rapa Nui, but no one remembers how to read it.

These are just a few of the mysteries of ancient writing. Some of them may be solved one day. Others may rest in permanent darkness.

Computers may be able to crack the codes. A 2019 update: Jiaming Luo and Regina Barzilay from MIT and Yuan Cao from Google’s AI lab in Mountain View, Calif. developed a computer system that correctly translated two-thirds of Linear B cognates into Greek. Linear B was a test case because humans had already deciphered it. Given that the computer can correctly decipher Linear B, it may be able to crack the code of other scripts.

Alphabet Politics (paywalled). What prompted the development of systems of writing? Josephine Quinn. New York Review of Books. January 19, 2023 issue.


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